In the twinkling of an eye we were surrounded by a surging throng of dirty yokels. For Hongo is a mere mountain hamlet and its inhabitants do not practice all the virtues for which their fellow countrymen are noted. To stay where we were was to court annihilation by the stampeding multitude. I struggled to my feet determined to press on. The spy screamed weakly and the villagers swept in upon us and imprisoned me within the shop. A long conference ensued. Then the spy, leaning on two men, hobbled up the street, while another band, promising by gestures to find me lodging, dragged me along with them, the mob howling at our heels.
The fourth or fifth booth beyond proved to be an inn, a most un-Japanese house, for it was squalid and dirty. The frightened keeper bade us enter and set a half-dozen slatternly females to preparing supper. The entire village population had gathered in the street to watch my every movement with straining eyes. I sat down on a stool and it smashed to bits under me. A clawing, screaming mob swept forward to roar at my discomfiture. A half hundred of the boldest pushed into the shop in spite of the keeper’s protest and drove me further and further towards the back of the building, until I was forced to beat them off to save myself being pushed through the rear wall. A woman brought me rice. The boors fought with each other for the privilege of being the first to thrust their fingers into it. Another servant poured out tea. The villagers snatched the cup from my fingers before I had drunk half the contents, and passed it from hand to hand. A third domestic appeared with a saucer of baked minnows. Each of a half-dozen of my persecutors picked up a fish in his fingers and attempted to thrust it into my mouth. They had no notion that such conduct was annoying. It was merely their way of showing hospitality.
The throng at the doorway surged slowly but steadily nearer. I caught up several clogs from the floor and threw them at the front rank of the rabble. The multitude fell back into the street, but my immediate entourage continued to snatch cups from my fingers and to poke me in the face with baked minnows. Vocal protest was useless. I picked up the bowl of rice and flung the contents into their faces. This time the affectionate fellows understood. When the dish was filled again they granted me elbow-room sufficient to continue my meal.
A Japanese lady
A saner man might have profited by experience and taken care not to re-arouse the waning curiosity. In a thoughtless moment I filled my pipe. Before it was lighted I suddenly recalled that “bulldog” pipes have not been introduced into Japan. But it was too late. A hoarse murmur sounded in the street, like the rumble of far-off thunder at first, then swelling louder and louder; and with a deafening roar the astonished multitude surged pellmell into the shop, shrieking, scratching, tearing kimonas, trampling pottery under their clogs, bowling over the guardian shopkeeper, sweeping me off my feet, and landing me high and dry on a chest against the rear wall. It required a quarter-hour of fighting to drive them out again into the night and nothing short of grapeshot could have cleared the street before the building as long as there remained a possibility of once more catching sight of that giant pipe.
I took good care to keep it out of sight thereafter; but the multitude had not visibly diminished when, towards midnight, I signed to the proprietor that I was ready to retire. The inn boasted only one sleeping-chamber, a raised platform in one corner of the room carpeted with grass mats and partitioned off with dirty curtains suspended from the ceiling. This foul-smelling apartment I was forced to share with a dozen men and boys, odoriferous and ragged, who chattered like excited apes for an hour after I had lain down. All night long I was on exhibition. For when my companions were not striking matches to study my physical and sartorial make-up, the proprietor outside was raising a corner of the curtain to display me to a group of gabbling rustics.
Profiting by experience, the police authorities did not set one man the task of following me all the next day. The first of a relay of spies overtook me at the outskirts of the village. He was long and lean, and for ten miles he stalked along several yards behind me, making no attempt to cultivate my acquaintance. At the first large village he was relieved by a stocky youth of more sociable disposition, who walked at my side and offered to “set ’em up” in a roadside saki shop at least once in every mile. As often I halted to watch some native craftsman. In one tiny hamlet a dozen women and girls, all naked above the waist line, were weaving reed mats in an open hovel. Far from objecting to my curiosity, they invited us to enter and placed ragged cushions for our accommodation. Before we were seated the head of the establishment began to chatter. She was well past middle age and of the form of a well-stuffed grain sack,—just the type of human that can talk for an unlimited period without anything to talk about. The Japanese word for “yes” along the shores of the Inland Sea is “ha.” It was the only reply which my companion found opportunity to interject into the conversation, and for a full half-hour he sat crosslegged on his cushion, observing at regular intervals and with funereal countenance:—“ha!—ha! ha! ha!—ha! ha!—ha!”
A few miles beyond he retired in favor of a much older man whose penchant was to be taciturn and stealthy in the discharge of his duty. Anxiously he strove to impress upon me that he was traveling in my direction by merest chance. If I halted, he marched past me with an expression of total self-absorption and slipped into some hiding-place a few yards down the highway until I went on. There was relief from the monotony of tramping in concocting schemes to shake him off, but every such attempt failed. If I slipped into a shop to run out the back door, the howling of the pursuing multitude betrayed me; if I dashed suddenly off into a wayside forest, I succeeded in rousing the spy to feminine shrieks of dismay, but before I could cover a mile he was again at my heels. In the afternoon I abandoned the road and darted away up a mountain path. At the summit I came upon a temple and a deep blue lake framed in tangled forests. This time, apparently, I had outwitted my shadower. I threw off my clothes and plunged in for a swim. When I regained the bank, the spy, panting and dripping with perspiration, lay on his back in a shady thicket beside my garments.
It was nearly sunset and the fourth lap in the police relay when a man pushed his way through a village mob that surrounded me and greeted me in a jargon that bore some resemblance to my native tongue. I sat down by a shop door to rest, and for a half-hour the fellow plied me with questions in near-English, with a sullen scowl and an arrogant manner that said as plainly as words that he had a decidedly low opinion of white men. His comprehension of my remarks was by no means complete; his interpretation of them to the gaping throng was probably even less lucid. About all he seemed to gather was that I was traveling on foot, from which he concluded that I was penniless.