Recollections of full years

by Helen Herron Taft

HELEN TAFT IN JAPANESE COSTUME

By that time the wind was tearing down through what seemed to be a very deep, and what certainly was a very dark, canyon, and it was raining steadily. My coolies lagged behind and the first thing I knew I found myself entirely alone. The others had gone so far ahead that I couldn’t even hear the sound of their ’ricksha wheels, though the ’ricksha of those days was a very noisy little vehicle. I had been nearly two months in Japan, had had plenty of experience with ’ricksha coolies and I knew them to be the most inoffensive little men in the world, but the darkness and the wind-driven rain and the discomfort generally, must have got on my nerves because I began to be perfectly sure that my two men were nothing less than brigands and that the separation from my party was a prearranged plan for murder and robbery. I didn’t know how wide the road was, but I knew that on one side there was a very deep chasm because I could hear the roar of a mountain torrent far down and directly below me. Then the coolies chattered and grunted incessantly, as Japanese coolies always do, and I was convinced that they were arguing about which should take the initiative in violence. But I sat tight and said nothing, which was the only thing I could do, of course—except to soothe Charlie who was crying with discomfort and fright—and after awhile—ages it seemed to me—I came upon the rest of my party where they had halted in the road to give their men a breathing spell. I couldn’t see them; I couldn’t even make out the outlines of a ’ricksha, but I could hear Helen sobbing and stammering something about having lost her mother for good and all.

The coolies were chattering at each other at a terrific rate and I judged, from their tones, that they liked the night no better than we. While we were standing close together in the road, all talking at once and trying to tell each other what horrible experiences we had had, we saw a faint glimmer away in the distance, growing more and more distinct as it came up the long hill. It was the dauntless Maria with a light. We fell upon her with the warmest welcome she probably ever received in her life, and everybody at once cheered up. Even the coolies got happier and seemed to chatter less angrily in the lantern’s dim but comforting yellow glow. Nor did we separate again. Everybody wanted to keep close to that light. It revealed to us the reassuring fact that the road was, at least, wide enough for safety, and so we rolled soggily along, with no other sound but the rattle of many wheels and the splash of mud, until we arrived at the Fujiya Hotel, sometime after ten o’clock, in a state of utter exhaustion.

I am not going to describe Miyanoshita because it has been very well done by scores of writers, but I will say that the Fujiya Hotel, away up in the mountains, at the head of a glorious canyon, is one of the most splendidly situated, finely managed and wholly delightful places I ever saw.

And there are plenty of things to do. We were carried in chairs over a high mountain pass to Lake Hakone, which, still and bright as a plate-glass mirror, lies right at the base of Fujiyama and reflects that startlingly beautiful mountain in perfect colour and form.

Then there are temples and wayside shrines, and tea-houses—tea-houses everywhere. We were coming back from a tramp one day and stopped at a tea-house not far from our hotel where we encountered an Englishwoman who gave us our first conception of what the terrible Boxer Insurrection was like. She entered into talk with us at once and told us a most tragic story. She was a missionary from the interior of China and had been forced to flee before the Boxers and make her way out of the country in hourly peril and through scenes of the utmost horror. Her husband had elected to remain at his post and she didn’t then know but that he might already have died under the worst imaginable torture. She made our blood run cold and we were tremendously sorry for her, though she did tell her harrowing story calmly enough. It seems she had with her a young Chinese refugee who was a convert to Christianity and, because of that fact, in even more danger in China than she.

We expressed our sympathy and good wishes and continued on our way. But we hadn’t gone far when we heard a frantic shouting behind us:

“Have you seen my Chinaman! Have you seen my Chinaman anywhere on the way!”

It was the missionary, distracted and running violently after us; and, we had not seen her Chinaman. She rushed past and up into the woods faster than one would have thought she could run, and all the time she kept calling, “Joseph! Joseph!” at the top of her voice. We decided that Joseph was the Chinaman’s new Christian name since we had heard that they all get Biblical names at baptism. We hastened along, thinking she might have gone suddenly mad and we wondered what in the world we should do. But as we came around a bend in the road we saw her coming toward us with a grinning little queued heathen marching meekly before her. She was looking very much relieved and stopped to explain her rather extraordinary conduct.