When We Were Strolling Players in the East

by Louise Jordan Miln

Tom knew all the choice shops and the crazy bazaar byways where genuine curios were to be picked up, if one had industry, perseverance, enthusiasm, and discrimination. He took a keen interest in my purchases, and would often ask the amah to show him the contents of a bundle. He laughed with delight at my soft heaps of rainbow crêpe. He actually tried to buy from me a piece of bronze that I had picked up in Tokio. He knew something of bronzes did Tom; for a Yokohama curio dealer offered me just twenty-five times what I gave for my bronze vase, if I would sell it. Tom told me bluntly that I had paid too much for a piece of Satsuma; but he was in an ecstasy over a rather unusual water-colour I got in Yokohama.

Tom was a very well dressed ’rickshaw coolie. He wore strong, whole shoes, long, neat stockings, and a coat or shirt, and short trousers of strong, dark-blue stuff. He was crowned with a white straw sailor hat; it had a clean white ribbon on it, and in the ribbon Tom often stuck a rose. He was a handsome fellow, splendidly strong; and, for a Japanese, very large. He was very anxious to come to Europe, and begged us to bring him. He would do any work we liked, and would work for two years for nothing. He was intensely curious about the West. He never questioned me; but often, when he was waiting for me, he would creep near the verandah steps and ask my husband, “You do this in New York?” “You have that in London?” “One strong man earn plenty in England?” He read English rather fairly and was anxious to write it. My husband wrote his name for him in a blank book. Tom was enchanted. Almost every day he would bring the book to show how he had improved.

There were a great many Americans in Yokohama, and they were all delightful people. We had a man-of-war in the harbour, and the charming fellows who officered it came ashore continually. Admiral Belknap very kindly loaned us his band, and by doing so rescued us from an orchestral condition that was dire.

What happy days and nights we spent in the home of the American gentleman who is the editor of a breezy Yokohama paper! His wife and I had common friends in San Francisco, and when I sat in her charming home and watched her graceful ways, and her pretty children, I almost felt that I was home once more. I should have quite thought it but for the strange flowers in the vases and the kimonoed servants. I have everywhere found newspaper people a most delightful part of the community. In Yokohama, in Shanghai, in Hong-Kong, in Singapore, in Calcutta, and in a score of other Eastern places I remember with very great pleasure our journalistic friends. Soldiers and sailors and their wives are a little nicer than other people, I think, and next to them I have found the ink-stained fraternity companionable, interesting, and likeable.

“What about actors?” some one asks. They are my brothers and sisters; I am proud of them and I love them. But it will be more becoming of me, perhaps, to let some other pen praise them. Then, too, we met very few actors in the East, save our own little contingent.

Two charming Boston women used to send me white roses from their pretty garden. What a place of delight and of restful refinement their house was! I love to think of it, and of them. In all Yokohama we did not meet one obnoxious American. There is no society more delightful than the nicest American society, and in Yokohama there was great social wealth,—American and English.

We were out in our ’rickshaw, my boy and I, on the thirtieth of May. Tom pulled aside to let a little procession pass, and my heart gave a great thump. The man-of-war’s men came marching slowly on. They carried the United States flag at their head, and the band was playing, “Hail Columbia.” It was Decoration Day, and the Americans in Yokohama had been through the scorching sun to lay roses on the graves of the American sailors who had died in Japan and been buried in the Yokohama European Cemetery.

Night falls upon Japan a starlit blessing. I used in Yokohama to go, between the acts, on to the landing of the theatre outer steps. They were the steps that led to the “stage door” and were nowhere near the parts of the house to which the public had egress. How strange it used to seem to me! The steps led down to a fantastic garden. The flowers were hidden beneath the gray shadows of the big-leafed trees. The band—the kindly-loaned band of our flag-ship—was playing, “Way down upon the Swannee Ribber.” Then they changed into, “Massa’s in the cold, cold Ground.” As the sweet darky melody sobbed into silence, the pathetic music of the blind shampooer’s cry came from the city, and the most plaintive song of Japan mingled with the most plaintive song of America.

I know nothing more characteristic of Japanese good taste and of Japanese kindliness than the place of profitable industry that Japan has found for her blind. In Japan massage is only a less perfect luxury, less perfectly a fine art, than it is in Hindoostan. And what could be more fit, what could speak more trumpet-mouthed of their national delicacy, than that to the blind of that nation has been given the monopoly of massage?

They walk about the streets alone—do the blind shampooers of Japan. They are as fearless as they are safe. The sad note of their whistle is an appeal to the kindness and the protection of their people. It is an appeal that is answered with universal and invariable generosity and chivalry. I remember, in Japan, many a night that was absolutely silent save for the sorrowful sound of these poor sightless givers of rest and of sleep. I recall no night through which I did not hear their one drear note.