He eventually descended the gang-plank stairs, down into the seething, joyous, jabbering, gesticulating mob, in through the long, shadowed dock-house, out into a circular front yard where bowler-hatted rickshaw men sat on the shafts of their vehicles and waited for fares, beckoning and honking now frantically.
Nathan stored his bags in one vehicle and stepped up into another. The lean, sweating, diminutive draysters received instructions; shafts were raised; the high-wheeled, rubber-tired little carriages crunched away over powdered trap-rock, out into a hard gravel street, fresh sprinkled, off toward the hotel in the cool of that wonderful afternoon.
Japan! Spotless streets flanked by high stucco walls or buildings with shuttered windows—a bit of old London, somehow—a group of boys in gingham playing ball—half a dozen in “bathing suits” riding bicycles, despite clumsy wooden sandals—rickshaws trotting noiselessly in groups of two or three, the sinking sun glinting on bright steel-wire wheel spokes—a street corner with a far vista of tiny dragon-scrolled shops—three nude men washing after their day’s labors at a public horse trough.
Southward along The Bund the rickshaws rolled along the side of quiet Tokio Bay, in the sunset; then came the long, low, red front and cool porticos of The Grand Hotel—much confusion about procuring Japanese money to pay the kuruma men. The sea trip was ended.
Nathan looked around the big lobby. Any one might suddenly turn out to be his father. But he saw no Johnathan.
Nathan followed the Japanese boy upstairs to his room,—a great airy chamber facing the east and—home!
He forgot his father temporarily in the ensuing irritations of Chinese tradesmen continually knocking at his door,—pongee suit-makers, boot-makers, guides for the city in the day and week following. He liked Japan.
III
Wiley was strolling about the lobby when Nathan came down for dinner. Wiley was the Y. man who had shared Nat’s cabin. They dined together. Afterward they explored Yokohama in the warm summer evening.
Through dank, clean-smelling side streets their silent kuruma, or rickshaw men, trotted them,—in and out of moonlight and shadow, past tradesmen’s shops where the tradesman’s family sprawled on shining-matted rooms in the rear, a single electric droplight hanging from the low, polished ceiling, across a canal, northwestward where lights glowed and music played, and Theater Street reveled in illumination and bunting and laughter.