A well-balanced consideration for the rights of one’s brothers is intended for normal times. Now that a guide had offered himself to us out of the darkness we purposed to keep him, although for a few minutes he seemed a rather useless discovery. Hori managed at length to pry the man’s eyes open with wet fingers and, then with fair words sought to persuade him that if we were not ghosts we obviously needed his help, but that if we were, then any sense left in him should tell him that it would be far better to listen to our request to guide us to an inn and to leave us there than to risk our trailing him to his own home. He grasped Hori’s point. We followed after our guide and, as we had suspected, the distance to the village was only a few steps. At the threshold of the inn our guide bolted. If he had been cherishing a grudge he should have waited to see our reception. It was not pleasing to us.
Hori advanced into the courtyard to engage in Homeric debate. The fog sweeping in struggled with the lights of the lanterns and candles. The picture was a theatrical composition. There were the three rain-soaked, laden intruders facing the maid-servants. The maids’ kimono sleeves were pinned back to their shoulders and their skirts were gathered up through their girdles. Their faces and limbs gleamed in the coppery light. The door to the steaming kitchen opened on to the courtyard and within its shadows the pots and kettles hanging on the walls caught the glowing flame of the charcoal. I suppose there was not a more honest inn in all the land but the wild, picaresque picture suggested an imagining by Don Quixote painted by Rembrandt or Hogarth or Goya. It was a point of immediate reality, however, which concerned us, and that point was that we were so far in the inn but no farther, and no farther did we get.
They gave a reason. They said that the inn was full. It seemed so ridiculous to have had such trouble in finding an inn and then to lose it that O-Owre-san and I began laughing. We laughed inordinately, but our barbarous merriment brought our listeners no nearer to changing their conviction that the inn was full. There was another inn farther down the street, they said, and we borrowed a lantern and a coolie from them and started. The coolie ran ahead and when we arrived at the second inn the mistress and all her maid-servants were at the door. From the length of Hori’s argument I became suspicious that we again were not considered desirable, but after a time he turned and said: “It’s all right.”
As soon as we were in our room, hurriedly getting ready for the bath, I tried to find out from Hori what the long debate was about, but English is evidently much more laconic than Japanese. He summed it all up by saying that they feared the inn was unworthy of foreigners. Admirable bushido! What inn in the wide world could have been worthy of such bedraggled wanderers? However, once we were allowed within the walls and recognized as guests the spirit of hospitality welled solicitously.
Listen, O dogmatists! The joy of the finding is not always less than the joy of the pursuit. If there are doubters let them seek the Nakescendo trail and find the second inn of Agematsu, there to learn that no dinner that they have ever imagined can equal the realization they will discover inside the lacquer bowls and porcelain dishes which will be brought to them.
The maid who had been assigned to administer to our comfort accepted her duty as a trust. She was unbelievably short, but was very sturdy. Her broad face and the strength of her round, unshaped limbs proclaimed the hardy bloom of the peasantry. The physical, mental, and emotional unity which comes as the heritage of such unmixed rustic blood is in itself a prepossessing charm. Our daughter of Mother Earth was as maternal as she was diminutive. She might think of a thousand services, her bare feet might start of an instant across the mats to respond to any requests, but never did she surrender one iota of her instinctive belief that we, merely being men, were only luxurious accessories for the world to possess. She was so primordially feminine that she inspired a terrifying thought of the possibility of society being sometime modelled after the queendom of the bees.
She had never seen a foreigner but she had heard much gossip of our strange customs. Her inquiring mind was intent upon verifying this gossip as far as possible. She was also very curious about our possessions. She taught us how to hold our chopsticks and how to drink our soup. She told us that we drank too silently. A little more noise from our lips, she said, would show that we were appreciating the flavour. She did acknowledge in us some aptitude to learn, implying that if a more advanced state of culture had existed in the feminine family group of our homes over the seas we might have been mothered into some respectability. So saying, she arose sturdily to her full height and bore away the dinner tables. Then she returned to make the beds, struggling with the mattresses as might an ant dragging oak leaves.
When the beds were finally laid she brought a fresh brewing of tea and replenished the charcoal in the [hibachi]. She lighted our after dinner cigarettes for us by pressing them against the embers. She sat waiting until we had dropped the last stub into the ashes. Then guardian midget rolled back the quilts, ordered us to bed, tucked us in carefully, giving to each impartially a good-night pat. Her day’s work finished, assuredly her efforts entitled her to a quiet enjoyment of one of the cigarettes! She sat down on the foot of my bed and deeply drawing in the smoke, blew it into the air with a sigh of contentment.
“I have been told,” she said, “that foreigners marry for love. Can that be true?”