There are Oriental cities in which the stranger would hesitate to wander after nightfall; in this well-ordered land he feels instinctively that he is running less risk of disagreeable encounter than in any metropolis of our own country. Class and mass mingle in the multitude; evil and brutal faces pass here and there; the European is sometimes subjected to the annoyance of unseemly curiosity, he may even be roughly jostled now and then; for the politeness of the Jap is individual, never collective. But rarely does the sound of brawling rise above the peaceful falsetto of scraping clogs.
I returned to the hotel fancying I was doomed to sleep on the polished floor; but the matron, apprised of my arrival, glided in and inquired, by the cosmopolitan pantomime of resting her cocked head in the palm of her hand, if I was ready to retire. I nodded, and at her signal a servant appeared with a quilt of great thickness, which she spread in the center of the floor. To an uncritical wanderer this seemed of itself a soft enough resting place, but not until six pudding-like counterpanes had been piled one on top of the other was the landlady content. Over this couch, that had taken on the form of a huge layer-cake, the pair spread a coverlet—there were no sheets—and backed out of the room. I rose to disrobe, but before I had touched a button they were back again, this time dragging behind them a great net, stout enough in texture to have held Paul’s draught of fishes. Disentangled, the thing proved to be canopy-shaped. While the matron attached the four corners of the top to hooks in the ceiling, the maid tucked the edges in under the stack of quilts.
I was not averse to retiring at once, but at that moment there arrived a cotton-clad youth who announced himself as a police interpreter. Official Hiroshima was anxious to know more of the Americajín whose arrival had been reported by the station guards. The youth drew forth a legal form and read, in a sing-song voice, questions covering every period of my existence since squalling infancy. Between each the pause was long, for the interpreter must repeat each answer to the open-mouthed females kneeling beside us and set it down in the muscular native script. I passed a yawning half-hour before he was finished, and another before he ended a smoke-choked oration on the joy which my coming had awakened in the hearts of his fellow officers. Ere he departed he found opportunity to inquire into my plans for the future. I announced my intention of continuing eastward in the morning.
“You must go so fastly?” he queried, with grief-stricken countenance. “Then you shall go on the ten o’clock train; there is no other but very late.”
I had no notion of leaving Hiroshima on any train, but, considering my plans no affair of his, I held my peace. He departed at last and a moment later I was sorry I could not call him back long enough to interpret my orders to the matron and her maid. The pair refused to leave the room. When I pointed at the door they waved their hands towards the bed in a gesture that said I was at liberty to disrobe and turn in. But neither rose from her knees. I tried more energetic pantomime. The matron certainly understood, for she dismissed the servant; but refused herself to withdraw. I began to unbutton my jacket, hoping the suggestion would prove effective. She sighed audibly and settled down on her heels. I sat down on my cushion and lighted a cigarette, determined to smoke her out. She drew out a tobacco pouch and a pipe, picked the cigarette out of my fingers to light the first filling, and blew clouds of smoke at the ceiling.
Perhaps she was waiting to tuck me in when once I was abed. The notion seemed ludicrous; yet that was exactly for what she was waiting. With much shouting I prevailed upon her at last—not to leave the room, but to turn her back to me. Slipping off my outer garments, I crawled under the net and drew the coverlet over me. The matron rose gravely to her feet and marched twice round my couch, tucking in a quilt corner here, fastening a fold of the kaya there. Then, closing the panels on every side, she picked up the lamp and departed.
The room soon grew stuffy. I crawled out to push back one of the panels opening on the veranda. Barely had I regained my couch, however, when a trembling of the floor announced approaching footsteps and that irrepressible female appeared on the balcony, silhouetted against the starlit sky. Calling out something I did not understand—fortunately perhaps—she pushed the panel shut again. I am accustomed to sleep with wide open windows; but it was useless to contend against fate. My guardian angel of the embonpoint knew that the only safe sleeping chamber was a tightly-closed room; and in such I spent the night.
Rarely have I experienced a stranger sensation than at the moment of awakening in that hotel of Hiroshima. It was broad daylight. The sun was streaming in across the balcony, and the incessant scraping of clogs sounded from the street below. But the room in which I had gone to bed had entirely disappeared! I sat up with bulging eyes. Under me was the stack of quilts, but all else was changed. The net was gone and I sat alone and deserted in the center of a hall as large as a dancing pavilion, the front of which for its entire length opened on the public street. The transformation was no magician’s trick, though it was several moments before I had sufficiently recovered to admit it. The servant girls had merely pushed together the panels.
For all the sinuosities of her streets and my ignorance of the Japanese tongue I had no great difficulty in picking up the highway out of Hiroshima. A half-century ago it would have been more dangerous to wander unarmed through rural Japan than in China. To-day the pedestrian runs no more risk than in England. There is a suggestion of the British Isles, too, in the open country of the Island Kingdom. Just such splendidly constructed highways stretch away between bright green hedge rows. Populous villages appear in rapid succession; the intervening territory, thickly settled and fertile, shows the hand of the industrious husbandman. But old England herself cannot rival this sea-girdled kingdom in her clear, exhilarating air of summer, in her picturesque landscapes of checkerboard rice fields, certainly not in the scenic charm of the Inland Sea.
The roadway, dropping down from the plateau of Hiroshima, soon brought to view this sapphire-blue arm of old Ocean, and wound in and out along the coast. Here and there a ripple caught the glint of the sun; in the middle distance and beyond tiny wooded isles rose from the placid surface; now and again an ocean liner, awakening memories of far-off lands, glided by almost within hailing distance. In shallow coves unclad fishermen, exempt from sunburn, disentangled their nets and heaped high their catches in wicker baskets.