On our last evening in Honolulu, after a morning of sightseeing, a luncheon, an hour in the buffeting surf, and a large tea-party, we were given a particularly elaborate “poi dinner” where we all sat on the floor and at which all the guests appeared in native costume with “leis” around their necks and in their hair. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Mott Smith, sent the Hawaiian Band, whose leader came out from old Emperor William to King Kalakaua, and they serenaded us with most wonderful Hawaiian music, interspersed, for their own pride’s sake, with well rendered selections from the finest operas. The girls came in flaming bright “Mother-Hubbard” dresses, crowned and covered with “leis,” to dance for us the curious folk-lore dances of the old-time. It was a delightful whirl of music and lights and colour—added to fish and poi and a cramped position—but I was tired enough not to be sorry when the time came for the singing of “Aloha Oe” and our departure for the ship which lay out in the harbour ready to up-anchor at daybreak and start on its way to Japan.
On the evening of the tenth of May we reached the estuary near the head of which is Yokohama and further on is Tokyo. For at least two hours we steamed past a low-lying shore line before we came in sight of the sweep of steep cliff to the southward which forms the great outer harbour.
NIKKO. AN ANCIENT CRYPTOMERIA AVENUE AND A GLIMPSE OF THE FAMOUS TEMPLES
There was just one thing that we could really look at; one insistent, dominant point in the landscape which caught us and held us fascinated,—Fujiyama. I had seen Fujiyama on screens and fans and porcelains all my life, but I had no conception of it. For one half hour this “Queen of Mountains”—rightly called—rising thirteen thousand feet out of sheer sea-level, perfect in form, snow-capped, majestic, blazed for us against the western sky. Then a cloud curtain fell,—and the sun went down.
As we steamed up close to the breakwater in the grey light of late evening we could see nothing but the dark outlines of many ships and a long row of substantial looking buildings, under high arc lights, stretching along a wide, water-front street which I was afterward to know as The Bund.
We wanted to go ashore, but it was not possible. We had to lie outside the breakwater and wait for the doctors to come aboard. “Wait for the doctors to come aboard;” how familiar that proceeding becomes to the traveller among the ports of the East, and especially, of Japan. You arrive at Yokohama and are examined there; you go just around the bend of the coast line and arrive at Kobe and you are examined there; you go on through the Inland Sea to Nagasaki and again you are examined. Wherever you arrive in this land of much caution you must “wait for the doctors to come aboard.”
But our doctors didn’t keep us waiting long. About eight o’clock half a dozen of them, important little men with much gold lace, came smiling up the gangway. We worried, rather, about the plague we had braved,—and we did hope none of our crew would develop symptoms,—but, having faith in the Japanese Vice-Consul in Honolulu, we hoped for special leniency. We were not disappointed. They examined the ship’s company with great care, but our examination was a mere formality, a sort of apologetic enumeration as a matter of fact, and after giving us a clean bill of health the doctors bowed themselves most courteously away. But we had a narrow escape. Charlie’s nurse developed a suspicious sore throat the very next afternoon and gave us many days of anxiety for the baby and the other children. And, as I shall make plain further on, our anxiety was not without cause.
In reading over my own and my husband’s letters, written on that trip to various members of the family, I find that Charlie was very much in evidence at all times. I suppose he was spoiled because, certainly, everybody took a hand in his misguidance, but the spoiling process at least kept him in high good humour, unless it happened to take the form of secret indulgence in prohibited sweets; then I had to meet the consequences. I find my husband writing to his brother Charles: “Charlie continues to be as full of spirits and as determined to have his own way as ever. We call him ‘the tornado’; he creates such a sensation when he lands in the midst of the children on board the ship. He is very badly in need of discipline and I long for the time to come when he will be better able to appreciate it. Maria has become quite as much a slave to him as Nellie and you may tell his Aunt Annie that I am still the only hope the boy has of moral training.” This sounds so much like the average father that I thought I ought to quote it.
When Bessie, Charlie’s nurse, was taken away from him and quarantined we got for him a Japanese “amah” who filled him at first with indignation, not unmixed with fear. But she was so patient, and followed him around so much like a faithful watchdog, that he grew to be exceedingly fond of her and straightway proceeded to exchange his small English vocabulary for, to him, more useful Japanese words.