I regretted to O-Owre-san the having within me so much of that very sophistication that I had begun immediately to moralize upon such a sheerly beautiful vision. He, who had been saying nothing, replied with an end-all to the subject. “Your mild regret,” said he, “that dispassionate analysis has displaced passionate creativeness is the penalty you pay for the pleasure of studying your own sadness.”
The Greeks, I believe, had for one of their two axioms by which they covered the conduct of wise living, “No excess in anything.” I had very fearlessly compared the young girl to a Greek relief, but when we were out of the hills and were in the meaner villages of the plains I began to feel the truth of that Greek dictum that people can mix too much practice into a theory, especially when it comes to an overwhelming surrender to naturalness. I lost my enthusiasm for my so shortly before uttered panegyric of a world naturally and unconsciously nude. I began to understand a new meaning in the artist’s cry of “Give me Naples and her rags!” Especially the rags! Upon some occasions art and sensibility need the rags far more than does morality.
All this argument was with myself as O-Owre-san’s dismissal of my tentative first offering on the subject had not been encouraging to further communication. I then proceeded to a further step in my private debate and queried whether in the selection of clothes, to be truly practical, man would not be served better by trusting to comfort rather than to either art or morality; and then I came upon the thought that comfort has no strength to resist convention when they collide, and as convention, with the guile of the serpent, always makes much pretension of riding in the same omnibus with virtue, perhaps after all the true wisdom of life is to stay close to convention and thus one will be pretty sure to reach Journey’s End in good shape. I mentioned my change of heart to O-Owre-san as we were sitting down in the shade of a ramune shop, where unabashed nudity had gathered in a circle to regard the foreigners. He did not seem to be moved to interest by my reformation. I heaped a malediction on his head. Surely if I were willing to rearrange my opinions seven times daily at some one stage he might agree.
It was during this rest that I came upon the happiest adventure that the mouth of man may hope to experience in this imperfect world. I had been thirsty from that first day in the East when I had begun breathing in Manchurian dust. In Peking I had tried to cool my throat by every variety of drink offered through the mingling of Occidental and Oriental civilizations. In Korea, a certain twenty-four hours of wandering alone and lost among the baked and arid mountains had further augmented the parching of my tongue—an increasement which I had believed to be impossible. Along the Tokaido we were free to drink as much chemical lemonade as our purse could buy and, despite the warnings of all red-bound guide books, we drank the water. But never, since the beginning of my thirst, had I found a liquid worth one word’s praise as a quencher, neither water nor wine, neither ramune nor tea. I have irreverently forgotten the name of the village of the discovery.
As we sat resting in the ramune shop I looked about and saw some champagne cider bottles of unusually large size. The quantity rather than the flavour of that particular chemical combination was the appeal. I asked for two of the bottles, making the request to a maid who was hoisting a flag over the door. The flag had a single Chinese character printed on it. It was a sign which I later learned to distinguish from incredible distances. After flinging out the flag, she took down two bottles from the shelf but instead of opening them she smiled with a beaming which came from the secure faith that she was bearing good news.
“Kori wa ikago desu?” she asked.
The concluding three words are among the first to be learned from the phrase book and mean “Do you wish?” The word kori I remembered from its having been one of the extras of our first night. It means “ice.” We said yes, that we would like ice, but in our ignorance we spoke with no marked ebulliency. She smiled again and sat down, folding her arms in her kimono sleeves, an equivalent of that expression of contented virtue shown when our own housewives peacefully wrap their hands in their aprons.
THE KORI (ICE) FLAG OF THE “ADVENTURER”
That the flag above the door had some definite meaning for the villagers began to be most evident. The shop was filling. Mob expectancy is contagious and we found ourselves waiting tensely with no clear idea what we were waiting for. The shop was now quite full and all eyes were turned to the street. We heard shouts from the outside that were almost banzais, and a coolie came running in. His face was aflame from the happy look of completed service. He was carrying a dripping block of ice in many wrappings of brown hemp cloth. I do not know how far he had come with the ice. Perhaps he had been to some station of the distant railroad. The maid took her hands from her kimono sleeves and seized the ice. She pulled off the wrappings. Next she took a saw and cut off an end from the cake. Another maid re-wrapped the precious remainder in the hemp cloth and buried it in a pit dug in the floor. A third maid had been standing by with a board which had a sharp knife edge set into it. The first maid scraped the end of the ice cake over this inverted plane and shavings of sparkling snow fell into her hand. She packed this whiteness into two large, flat, glass dishes. She poured into the snow the effervescing champagne cider and brought us the “adventure.”