Talking of newspaper enterprise, many years later, when the Emperor Alexander III died, the editor of a well-known London evening paper, a great friend of mine, told me in confidence of a journalistic "scoop" he was meditating. Alexander III had died at Livadia in the Crimea, and his body was to make a sort of triumphal progress through Russia. The editor (he is no longer with us, but when I term him "Harry" I shall be revealing his identity to the few) was sending out a Frenchman as special correspondent, armed with a goodly store of roubles, and instructions to get himself engaged as temporary assistant to the undertaker in charge of the Emperor's funeral. This cost, I believe, a considerable sum, but the Frenchman, having entered on his gruesome duties, was enabled to furnish the London evening paper with the fullest details of all the funeral ceremonies.
The reason the younger diplomats foregathered so in Petrograd was that, as I said before, Petrograd was to all intents and purposes extra-European. Apart from its charming society, the town, qua town, offered but few resources. The younger Continental diplomats felt the entire absence of cafés, of music-halls, and of places of light entertainment very acutely; so they were thrown on each other's society. In Far Eastern posts such as Pekin or Tokyo, the diplomats live entirely amongst themselves. For a European, there are practically no resources whatever in Tokyo. No one could possibly wish to frequent a Japanese theatre, or a Japanese restaurant, when once the novelty had worn off, and even Geisha entertainments are deadly dull to one who cannot understand a word of the language. Let us imagine a party of Europeans arriving at some fashionable Japanese restaurant for a Geisha entertainment. They will, of course, remove their shoes before proceeding upstairs. I was always unfortunate enough to find on these occasions one or more holes in my socks gaping blatantly. In time one learns in Japan to subject one's socks to a close scrutiny in order to make sure that they are intact, for everyone must be prepared to remove his shoes at all hours of the day. We will follow the Europeans up to a room on the upper floor, tastefully arranged in Japanese fashion, and spotlessly neat and clean. The temperature in this room in the winter months would be Arctic, with three or four "fire-pots" containing a few specks of mildly-glowing charcoal waging a futile contest against the penetrating cold.
The room is apparently empty, but from behind the sliding-panels giggles and titters begin, gradually increasing in volume until the panels slide back, and a number of self-conscious overdressed children step into the room, one taking her place beside each guest. These are "Micos"; little girls being trained as professional Geishas. The European conception of a Geisha is a totally wrong one. They are simply entertainers; trained singers, dancers, and story-tellers. The guests seat themselves clumsily and uncomfortably on the floor and the dinner begins. Japanese dishes are meant to please the eye, which is fortunate, for they certainly do not appeal to the palate. I invariably drew one of the big pots of flowers which always decorate these places close up to me, and consigned to its kindly keeping all the delicacies of the Japanese cuisine which were beyond my assimilative powers, such as slices of raw fish sprinkled with sugar, and seasoned with salted ginger. The tiresome little Micos kept up an incessant chatter. Their stories were doubtless extraordinarily humorous to anyone understanding Japanese, but were apt to lose their point for those ignorant of the language. The abortive attempts of the Europeans to eat with chopsticks afforded endless amusement to these bedizened children; they shook with laughter at seeing all the food slide away from these unaccustomed table implements. Not till the dinner was over did the Geishas proper make their appearance. In Japan the amount of bright colour in a woman's dress varies in inverse ratio to her moral rectitude. As our Geishas were all habited in sober mouse-colour, or dull neutral-blue, I can only infer that they were ladies of the very highest respectability. They were certainly wonderfully attractive little people. They were not pretty according to our standards, but there was a vivacity and a sort of air of dainty grace about them that were very captivating. Their singing is frankly awful. I have heard four-footed musicians on the London tiles produce sweeter sounds, but their dancing is graceful to a degree. Unfortunately, one of the favourite amusements of these charming and vivacious little people is to play "Musical Chairs"—without any chairs! They made all the European men follow them round and round the room whilst two Geishas thrummed on a sort of guitar. As soon as the music stopped everyone was expected to sit down with a bang on the floor, To these little Japs five feet high, the process was easy, and may have seemed good fun; to a middle-aged gentleman, "vir pietate gravis," these violent shocks were more than painful, and I failed to derive the smallest amusement from them. No Japanese dinner would be complete without copious miniature cups of sake. This rice-spirit is always drunken hot; it is not disagreeable to the taste, being like warm sherry with a dash of methylated spirit thrown in, but the little sake bottles and cups are a joy to the eye. This innately artistic people delight to lavish loving care in fashioning minute objects; many English drawing-rooms contain sake bottles in enamel or porcelain ranged in cabinets as works of art. Their form would be more familiar to most people than their use. Japanese always seem to look on a love of colour as showing rather vulgar tastes. The more refined the individual, the more will he adhere to sober black and white and neutral tints in his house and personal belongings. The Emperor's palace in Kyoto is decorated entirely in black and white, with unpainted, unlacquered woodwork, and no colour anywhere. The Kyoto palace of the great Tokugawa family, on the other hand, a place of astounding beauty, blazes with gilding, enamels, and lacquer, as do all the tombs and temples erected by this dynasty. The Tokugawas usurped power as Shoguns in 1603, reducing the Mikado to a mere figure-head as spiritual Ruler, and the Shoguns ruled Japan absolutely until 1868, when they were overthrown, and Shogun and Mikado were merged into one under the title of Emperor. I fancy that the Japanese look upon the polychrome splendour of all the buildings erected by the Tokugawas as proof that they were very inferior to the ancient dynasty, who contented themselves with plain buildings severely decorated in black and white. The lack of colour in Japan is very noticeable on arriving from untidy, picturesque China. The beautiful neatness and cleanliness of Japan are very refreshing after slovenly China, but the endless rows of little brown, unpainted, tidy houses, looking like so many rabbit hutches, are depressing to a degree. The perpetual earthquakes are responsible for the low elevation of these houses and also for their being invariably built of wood, as is indeed everything else in the country. I was immensely disappointed at the sight of the first temples I visited in Japan. The forms were beautiful enough, but they were all of unpainted wood, without any colour whatever, and looked horribly neutral-tinted. All the famous temples of Kyoto are of plain, unpainted, unvarnished wood. The splendid group of temples at Nikko are the last word in Japanese art. They glow with colour; with scarlet and black lacquer, gilding, enamels, and bronzes, every detail finished like jewellers' work with exquisite craftmanship, and they are amongst the most beautiful things in the world; but they were all erected by the Tokugawa dynasty, as were the equally superb temples in the Shiba Park at Tokyo. This family seemed determined to leave Japan less colourless than they found it; in their great love for scarlet lacquer they must have been the first people who thought of painting a town red.
The same lack of colour is found in the gardens. I had pictured a Japanese garden as a dream of beauty, so when I was shewn a heap of stones interspersed with little green shrubs and dwarf trees, without one single flower, I was naturally disappointed, nor had I sufficient imagination to picture a streak of whitewash daubed down a rock as a quivering cascade of foaming water. "Our gardens, sir," said my host, "are not intended to inspire hilarit .. ee, but rather to create a gentle melanchol .. ee." As regards myself, his certainly succeeded in its object.
A friend of mine, whose gardens, not a hundred miles from London, are justly famous, takes immense pride in her Japanese garden, as she fondly imagines it to be. At the time of King George's Coronation she invited the special Japanese Envoys to luncheon, for the express purpose of showing them her gardens afterwards. She kept the Japanese garden to the last as a bonne-bouche, half-expecting these children of the Land of the Rising Sun to burst into happy tears at this reminder of their distant island home. The special Envoys thanked her with true Japanese politeness, and loudly expressed their delight at seeing a real English garden. They added that they had never even imagined anything like this in Japan, and begged for a design of it, in order that they might create a real English garden in their native land on their return home.
As I have said, no Japanese woman can wear bright colours without sacrificing her moral reputation, but little girls may wear all the colours of the rainbow until they are eight years old or so. These little girls, with their hair cut straight across their forehead, are very attractive-looking creatures, whereas a Japanese boy, with his cropped head, round face, and projecting teeth, is the most comically hideous little object imaginable. These children's appearance is spoilt by an objectionable superstition which decrees it unlucky to use a pocket-handkerchief on a child until he, or she, is nine years old. The result is unspeakably deplorable.
The interior of our Embassy at Tokyo was rather a surprise. Owing to the constant earthquakes in Tokyo and Yokohama, all the buildings have to be of wood. The British Embassy was built in London (I believe by a very well-known firm in Tottenham Court Road), and was shipped out to Japan complete down to its last detail. The architect who designed it unhappily took a glorified suburban villa as his model. So the Tokyo Embassy house is an enlarged "Belmont," or "The Cedars," or "Tokyo Towers." Every familiar detail is there; the tiled hall, the glazed door into the garden, and the heavy mahogany chimneypieces and overmantels. In the library with its mahogany book-cases, green morocco chairs, and green plush curtains, it was difficult to realise that one was not in Hampstead or Upper Tooting. I always felt that I was quite out of the picture unless I sallied forth at 9 a.m. with a little black bag in my hand, and returned at 6 p.m. with some fish in a bass-basket. In spite of being common-place, the house was undeniably comfortable. Everything Japanese was rigidly excluded from it. That in far-off lands is very natural. People do not care to be reminded perpetually of the distance they are away from home. In Calcutta the Maidan, the local Hyde Park, has nothing Eastern about it. Except in the Eden Gardens in one corner of it, where there is a splendid tangle of tropical vegetation, there is not one single palm tree on the Maidan. The broad sweeps of turf, clumps of trees, and winding roads make an excellent imitation of Hyde Park transferred to the banks of the Hooghly, and this is intentional. There is one spot in particular, where the tall Gothic spire of St. Paul's Cathedral rises out of a clump of trees beyond a great tank (it may be pointed out that "tank" in India does not refer to a clumsy, mobile engine of destruction, but is the word used for a pool or pond), which might be in Kensington Gardens but for the temperature. The average Briton likes to be reminded of his home, and generally manages to carry it about with him somehow. The Russian Embassy at Tokyo had been built in the same way in Paris and sent out, and was a perfect reproduction of a French Louis XV house. The garden of the British Embassy had one striking feature which I have seen nowhere else; hedges of clipped camellias, four feet high. When these blossomed in the spring, they looked like solid walls of pink, crimson, or white flowers, a really beautiful sight!
Some former British Minister had planted the public roads round the Embassy with avenues of the pink-flowering cherry, as a present to the city of Tokyo. The Japanese affect to look down on the pink cherry, when compared to their adored white cherry-blossom, I suppose because there is colour in it. Certainly the acres of white cherry-blossom in the Uyeno Park at Tokyo are one of the sights of Japan. In no other country in the world would the railways run special trains to enable the country-people to see the cherries in full bloom in this Uyeno Park. The blossom is only supposed to be at its best for three days. In no other country either would people flock by hundreds to a temple, as they did at Kyoto, to look at a locally-famed contrast of red plum-blossom against dark-brown maple leaves. I liked these Japanese country-people. The scrupulously neat old peasant women, with their grey hair combed carefully back, and their rosy faces, were quite attractive. Their intense ceremonious politeness to each other always amused me. Whole family parties would continue bowing to each other for ten minutes on end at railway stations, sucking their breath, and rubbing their knees. When they had finished, someone would recommence, and the whole process would have to be gone through again, the children sucking their breath louder even than their elders. Anybody who has lived in a warm climate must be familiar with the curious sound of thousands of frogs croaking at once in a pond or marsh at night-time. The sound of hundreds of Japanese wooden clogs clattering against the tiles of a railway platform is exactly like that. In the big Shimbashi station at Tokyo, as the clogs pattered over the tiles, by shutting my eyes I could imagine that I was listening to a frogs' orchestra in some large marsh.
Excessive politeness brings at times its own penalty. At the beginning of these reminiscences I have related how I went with a Special Embassy to Rome in my extreme youth. The day before our departure from Rome, King Humbert gave a farewell luncheon party at the Quirinal to the Special British Ambassador and his suite, including of course myself. At this luncheon a somewhat comical incident occurred.
When we took our leave, Queen Margherita, then still radiantly beautiful, offered her hand first to the Special British Ambassador. He, a courtly and gallant gentleman of the old school, at once dropped on one knee, in spite of his age, and kissed the Queen's hand "in the grand manner." The permanent British Ambassador, the late Sir Augustus Paget, most courteous and genial of men, followed his temporary colleague's example, and also dropped on one knee. The Italian Ministers present could not do less than follow the lead of the foreigners, or show themselves less courteous than the forestieri, so they too had perforce to drop on one knee whilst kissing the Queen's hand. A hugely obese Minister, buttoned into the tightest of frockcoats, approached the Queen. With immense difficulty he lowered himself on to one knee, and kissed the Royal hand; but no power on earth seemed equal to raising him to his feet again. The corpulent Minister grew purple in the face; the most ominous sounds of the rending of cloth and linen re-echoed through the room; but still he could not manage to rise. The Queen held out her hand to assist her husband's adipose adviser to regain his feet, but he was too dignified, or too polite, to accept it. The rending of the statesman's most intimate garments became more audible than ever; the portly Minister seemed on the verge of an attack of apoplexy. It must be understood that the Queen was standing alone before the throne, with this unfortunate dignitary kneeling before her; the remainder of the guests were standing in a semi-circle some twenty feet away. The Queen's mouth began to twitch ominously, until, in spite of her self-control, after a few preliminary splutters of involuntary merriment, she broke down, and absolutely shook with laughter. Sir Augustus Paget and a Roman Prince came up and saved the situation by raising, with infinite difficulty, the unfortunate Italian statesman to his feet. As he resumed a standing position, a perfect Niagara of oddments of apparel, of tags and scraps of his most private under-garments, rained upon the floor, and we all experienced a feeling of intense relief when this capable, if corpulent, Cabinet Minister was enabled to regain the background with all his clothing outwardly intact.