| [2] | In that I was wrong. Viscountess Aoki, the accomplished wife of the Japanese minister to the Courts of St. James’s and Berlin, is also European. |
CHAPTER XXV
TOM STREET
I had been in Yokohama about half an hour when he opened our sitting-room door and informed me in charmingly broken English that he was my jinrickshaw coolie that my husband had engaged him, and that he was ready to start as soon as I was. As it was about ten o’clock at night, as it was dark, as I was very hungry, and our dinner was just coming in, I entreated him to defer until the morning the appointment my husband had been kind enough to make.
“You did not lose much time in getting me a ’rickshaw here,” I said to my comrade as we were dining.
“No;” was the answer; “a fellow waylaid me on the verandah. He seemed amazingly ambitious to go, and as you are more ambitious to go than any other person I ever met, I thought him just the steed for you, and hired him.”
I was up early the next morning—very early indeed for me. I stole out, meaning to take a solitary ramble, but my “pull man” jumped at me and intercepted me with a clean, cozy ’rickshaw.
In all Yokohama there was not such another ’rickshaw coolie, I am sure. He taught me half that I know about Japan, and I am confident that what he taught me was true—he taught it so inadvertently. He insisted that his name was “Tom Street.” He never would own to having any other or more Japanese appellation. When I saw that he really wished to be known, only as Tom Street, I could not, of course, question him further. I had a theory that he was a Japanese nobleman in disguise, but the theory did not merit serious investigation. In the first place he had no disguise; in the second place, I fancy that the police is the most plebeian body ever joined by a high-born Japanese.
The Japanese are very romantic; they are sensational; they are emotional to a degree. They reminded me in many ways of the French. They have more self-control than the French, but are not without a French touch of hysteria. The spirit of mad romance, of almost affected chivalry which led the rônins of old Japan to deeds of extreme, elaborate, and artistic valour, is still rife in Japan, and spurs her jeunesse dorée to strike strange attitudes in strange places. The Japanese would sometimes be ridiculous were they not so invariably graceful. As a matter of fact, they are never ridiculous; their grace is so great that it amounts to national dignity. We find a Japanese gentleman standing on civil guard at the street corner. He calls us a ’rickshaw, tells us the time, and is the angel of general information that a well-regulated policeman should be. We think Japanese situations amusing sometimes, but they never approach burlesque.