CHAPTER XV
A FACE IN THE CROWD
They rode to the parade-ground—Barbara and Patricia with the Ambassador, behind his pair of Kentucky grays—along wide streets grown festive overnight and buzzing with rick'sha and pedestrians. Every gateway held crossed flags bearing the blood-red rising-sun, and colored paper lanterns were swung in festoons along the gaudy blocks of shops, as wide open as tiers of cut honeycomb.
In their swift flight the city appeared a living sea of undulations, of immense green wastes alternating with humming sections of trade, of abrupt, cliff-like hills, of small parks that were masses of cherry-bloom and landscapes of weird Japanese beauty. Patricia quoted one of Haru's quaint sayings: "So-o-o many small village got such a lonesomeness an' come more closer together. Tha's the way Tokyo born." Occasionally the Ambassador pointed out the stately palace of some influential noble, or the amorphous, depressing front of the foreign-style stucco residence of some statesman, built in that different period when the empire took first steps in the path of world-powers, with its low, graceful Japanese portion beside it.
Everywhere Barbara was conscious of the flutter of children—of little girls whose dress and hair showed a pervasive sense of care and adornment; of faces neither gay nor sad looking from latticed windows that hung above open gutters of sluggish ooze; of frail balconies adorned with growing flowers or miniature gardens set in earthen trays; of doorways hung with soft-fringed, rice-straw ropes and dotted with paper charms—the talismanic o-fuda seen on every hand in Japan. In Yokohama what had struck her most had been the curious composite, the jumbled dissonance of East and West. Here was a new impression; this was real Japan, but a Japan that, if it had taken on western hues, had everywhere qualified them by subtle variations, themselves oriental. Past the carriage whirled landaus bearing Japanese grandes dames in native dress, with pomade-stiff coiffures against which their rice-powdered faces made a ghastly contrast; between the rear springs of each vehicle was fixed a round flat pommel on which a runner stood, balancing himself to the swift movement. A Japanese military officer in khaki, with a row of decorations on his breast, rode by on a horse too big for him, at a jingling trot. Two soldiers passing afoot, faced sidewise and their heavy cowhide heels came together with a thud, as they saluted. Their arms had the jerky precision of a mechanical toy.
Through all there seemed to Barbara to strike a sense of the tenacity of the old, of the stubborn persistence of type, as though eyes behind a mask looked grimly at the mirror's reflection of some outlandish and but half-accustomed masquerade. It was the shadow of the old Japan of castes and spies and censors, of homage and hara-kiri, of punctilio and porcelain. Trolley cars rumbled past; skeins of telegraph wire spun across the vision. Yet when stone wall gaped or green hedge opened, it was to reveal the curving tops of Buddhist torii in quaint vistas of straight-boled trees, gliding Tartar contours of roof between clumps of palm, or bamboo thickets with shadows as black as ink; while from the lazy scum of the wide, moat-like, stone gutters, open to the all-putrefying sun, rose thick, marshy odors suggesting the vast languor of a land more ancient than Egypt and Nineveh.
The carriage stopped abruptly at a cross street. A Shinto funeral cortège was passing. Twelve bearers, six on each side, clad in mourning houri of pure white, bore on their shoulders the hearse, like a shrine, built of clean unpainted wood, beautifully grained, and with carven roof and curtains of green and gold brocade. Priests in yellow robes, with curved gauze caps and stoles of scarlet and black, walked at the head, fanning themselves now and then with little fans drawn from their girdles. Coolies, dressed in white like the hearse bearers, carried stiff, conical bouquets, six feet long, made of flowers of staring colors, and clumps of lotos made of papier maché covered with gold and silver leaf. The chief mourner, a woman, rode smiling in a rick'sha. She wore a silver-gray kimono and a tall canopied cap of white brocade with wide floating strings like an old-fashioned bonnet.
"Well, of all things!" said Patricia, in an awe-struck whisper. "What do you think of that?" For the file of rick'sha following her carried a curious assemblage of mourners. In each sat a dog, some large, some small, with great bows of black or white crepe tied to their collars. Taka, the driver, turned his head and spoke:
"Dog-doctor die," he said. "All dog very sorry."
"It's the 'vet.,' father," Patricia cried. "He is dead, then—and all his old patients are attending the funeral! See, Barbara! They are lined up according to diplomatic precedence. That French poodle in front belongs to the Japanese senior prince. The Aberdeen is the British Ambassador's. And there's the Italian Embassy bull-terrier and the Spanish Chargé's 'chin.' The foreigners' dogs have black bows and the others white. Why is that, I wonder?"