They had reached a very narrow street, where raffish beer-shops were doing a roaring trade. They caught a glimpse of dirty tablecloths and powdered waitresses wearing skirts, ap.r.o.ns and lumpy shoes--all very _haikara_. On the right hand they pa.s.sed a little temple from whose exiguous courtyard two stone foxes grinned maliciously, the temple of the G.o.d Inari, who brings rich lovers to the girls who pray to him.

They pa.s.sed through iron gates, like the gates of a park, where two policemen were posted to regulate the traffic. Beyond was a single line of cherry-trees in full bloom, a single wave of pinkish spray, a hanging curtain of vapourous beauty, the subject of a thousand poems, of a thousand allusions, licentious, delicate and trite,--the cherry-blossoms of the Yoshiwara.

At a street corner stood a high white building plastered with golden letters in j.a.panese and English--"Asahi Beer Hall."

"That is the place," said Yae, "let us get out of this crowd."

They found refuge among more dirty tablecloths, Europeanised _mousmes_, and gaping guests. When Yae spoke to the girls in j.a.panese, there was much bowing and hissing of the breath; and they were invited upstairs on to the first floor where was another beer-hall, slightly more exclusive-looking than the downstair Gambrinus. Here a table and chairs were set for them in the embrasure of a bow-window, which, protruding over the cross-roads, commanded an admirable view of the converging streets.

"The procession won't be here for two hours more," said Yae, pouting her displeasure.

"One always has to wait in j.a.pan," said Reggie. "n.o.body ever knows exactly when anything is going to happen; and so the j.a.panese just wait and wait. They seem to like it rather. Anyhow they don't get impatient. Life is so uneventful here that I think they must like prolonging an incident as much as possible, like sucking a sweet slowly."

Meanwhile there was plenty to look at. Asako could not get over her shock at the sea of wicked faces which surged below.

"What cla.s.s of people are these?" Geoffrey asked.

"Oh, shop-people, I think, most of them," said Yae, "and people who work in factories."

"Good cla.s.s j.a.panese don't come here, then?" Geoffrey asked again.

"Oh no, only low cla.s.s people and students. j.a.panese people say it is a shameful thing to go to the Yoshiwara. And, if they go, they go very secretly."

"Do you know any one who goes?" asked Reggie, with a directness which shocked his friend's sense of Good Form.

"Oh, my brothers," said Yae, "but they go everywhere; or they say they do."

It certainly was an ill-favoured crowd. The j.a.panese are not an ugly race. The young aristocrat who has grown up with fresh air and healthy exercise is often good-looking, and sometimes distinguished and refined. But the lower cla.s.ses, those who keep company with poverty, dirt and p.a.w.nshops, with the pleasures of the _sake_ barrel and the Yoshiwara, are the ugliest beings that were ever created in the image of their misshapen G.o.ds. Their small stature and ape-like att.i.tudes, the colour and discolour of their skin, the flat Mongolian nose, their gaping mouths and bad teeth, the coa.r.s.e fibre of their l.u.s.treless black hair, give them an elvish and a goblin look, as though this country were a nursery for fairy changelings, a land of the Nibelungen, where bad thoughts have found their incarnation. Yet the faces have not got that character for good and evil as we find them among the Aryan peoples, the deep lines and the firm profiles.

"It is the absence of something rather than its presence which appals and depresses us," Reggie Forsyth observed, "an absence of happiness perhaps, or of a promise of happiness."

The crowd which filled the four roads with its slow grey tide was peaceable enough; and it was strangely silent. The drag and clatter of the clogs made more sound than the human voices. The great majority were men, though there were women among them, quiet and demure. If ever a voice was lifted, one could see by the rolling walk and the fatuous smile that its owner had been drinking. Such a person would be removed out of sight by his friends. The j.a.panese generally go sight-seeing and merry-making in friendships and companies; and the _Verein_, which in j.a.pan is called the _Kwai_, flourishes here as in Germany.

Two coolies started quarreling under the Barringtons' window. They too had been drinking. They did not hit out at each other like Englishmen, but started an interchange of abuse in gruff monosyllables and indistinguishable grunts and snorts.

"_Baka! Chikushome! Kuso_! (Fool! Beast! Dung!)"

These amenities exasperating their ill humour, they began to pull at each other's coats and to jostle each other like quarrelsome curs.

This was a sign that affairs were growing serious; and the police intervened. Again each combatant was pushed away by his companions into opposite byways.

With these exceptions, all tramplings, squeezings, pushings and pokings were received with conventional grins or apathetic staring.

Yet in the paper next day it was said that so great had been the crowd that six deaths had occurred, and numerous persons had fainted.

"But where is the Yoshiwara?" Geoffrey asked at last. "Where are these wretched women kept?"

Reggie waved his hand in the direction of the three roads facing them.

"Inside the iron gates, that is all the Yoshiwara, and those high houses and the low ones too. That is where the girls are. There are two or three thousand of them within sight, as it were, from here.

But, of course, the night time is the time to see them."

"I suppose so," said Geoffrey vaguely.

"They sit in shop windows, one might say," Reggie went on, "only with bars in front like cages in the Zoo. And they wear gorgeous kimonos, red and gold and blue, and embroidered with flowers and dragons. It is like nothing I can think of, except aviaries full of wonderful parrakeets and humming-birds."

"Are they pretty?" Asako asked.

"No, I can't say they are pretty; and they all seem very much alike to the mere Westerner. I can't imagine any body picking out one of them and saying, 'I love her'--'she is the loveliest.' There is a fat, impa.s.sive type like Buddha. There is a foxy animated type which exchanges _badinage_ with the young nuts through the bars of her cage; and there is a merely ugly lumpy type, a kind of cloddish country-girl who exists in all countries. But the more exclusive houses don't display their women. One can only see a row of photographs. No doubt they are very flattering to their originals."

Asako was staring at the buildings now, at the high square prison houses, and at the low native roofs. These had each its little platform, its _monohoshi_, where much white washing was drying in the sun.

At the farther end of one street a large stucco building, with a Grecian portico, stood athwart the thoroughfare.

"What is that?" said Asako; "it looks like a church."

"That is the hospital," answered Reggie.

"But why is there a hospital here?" she asked again.

Yae Smith smiled ever so little at her new friend's ignorance of the wages of sin. But n.o.body answered the question.

There was a movement in the crowd, a pushing back from some unseen locality, like the jolting of railway trucks. At the same time there was a craning of necks and a murmur of interest.

In the street opposite, the crowd was opening down the centre. The police, who had sprung up everywhere like the crop of the dragons'

teeth, were dividing the people. And then, down the path so formed, came the strangest procession which Geoffrey Barrington had ever seen on or off the stage.

High above the heads of the crowd appeared what seemed to be a life-size automaton, a moving waxwork magnificently garbed in white brocade with red and gold embroidery of phenixes, and a huge red sash tied in a bow in front. The hem of the skirt, turned up with red and thickly wadded, revealed a series of these garments fitting beneath each other, like the leaves of an artichoke. Under a monumental edifice of hair, bristling like a hedgehog with amber-coloured pins and with silver spangles and rosettes, a blank, impa.s.sive little face was staring straight in front of it, utterly expressionless, utterly unnatural, hidden beneath the glaze of enamel--the china face of a doll.

It parted the grey mult.i.tude like a pillar of light. It tottered forward slowly, for it was lifted above the crowd on a pair of black-lacquered clogs as high as stilts, dangerous and difficult to manipulate. On each side were two little figures, similarly painted, similarly bedizened, similarly expressionless, children of nine or ten years only, the _komuro_, the little waiting-women. They served to support the reigning beauty and at the same time to display her long embroidered sleeves, outstretched on either side like wings.

The brilliant figure and her two attendants moved forward under the shade of a huge ceremonial umbrella of yellow oiled paper, which looked like a membrane or like old vellum, and upon which were written in Chinese characters the personal name of the lady chosen for the honour and the name of the house in which she was an inmate. The shaft of this umbrella, some eight or nine feet long, was carried by a sinister being, clothed in the blue livery of the j.a.panese artisan, a kind of tabard with close-fitting trousers. He kept twisting the umbrella-shaft all the time with a gyrating movement to and fro, which imparted to the disc of the umbrella the hesitation of a wave. He followed the Queen with a strange slow stride. For long seconds he would pause with one foot held aloft in the att.i.tude of a high-stepping horse, which distorted his dwarfish body into a diabolic convulsion, like Durer's angel of horror. He seemed a familiar spirit, a mocking devil, the wicked _Spielmann_ of the "Miracle" play, whose harsh laughter echoes through the empty room when the last cup is emptied, the last shilling gone, and the dreamer awakes from his dream.

Behind him followed five or six men carrying large oval lanterns, also inscribed with the name of the house; and after them came a representative collection of the officials of the proud establishment, a few foxy old women and a crowd of swaggering men, spotty and vicious-looking. The _Orian_ (Chief Courtesan) reached the cross-roads. There, as if moved by machinery or magnetism, she slowly turned to the left. She made her way towards one of a row of small, old-fashioned native houses, on the road down which the Barringtons had come. Here the umbrella was lowered. The beauty bowed her monumental head to pa.s.s under the low doorway, and settled herself on a pile of cushions prepared to receive her.

Almost at once the popular interest was diverted to the appearance of another procession, precisely similar, which was debouching from the opposite road. The new _Orian_ garbed in blue, with a sash of gold and a design of cherry-blossom, supported by her two little attendants, wobbled towards another of the little houses. On her disappearing a third procession came into sight.

"Ah!" sighed Asako, "what lovely kimonos! Where do they get them from?"

"I don't know," said Yae, "some of them are quite old. They come out fresh year after year for a different girl."

Yae, with her distorted little soul, was thinking that it must be worth the years of slavery and the humiliation of disease to have that one day of complete triumph, to be the representative of Beauty upon earth, to feel the admiration and the desire of that vast concourse of men rising round one's body like a warm flood.

Geoffrey stared fascinated, wondering to see the fact of prost.i.tution advertised so unblushingly as a public spectacle, his hatred and contempt breaking over the heads of the swine-faced men who followed the harlot, and picked their livelihood out of her shame.

Reggie was wondering what might be the thoughts of those little creatures m.u.f.fled in such splendour that their personality, like that of infant queens, was entirely hidden by the significance of what they symbolized. Not a smile, not a glance of recognition pa.s.sed over the unnatural whiteness of their faces. Yet they could not be, as they appeared to be, sleep-walkers. Were they proud to wear such finery?

Were they happy to be so acclaimed? Did their heart beat for one man, or did their vanity drink in the homage of all? Did their mind turn back to the mortgaged farm and the work in the paddy-fields, to the thriftless shop and the chatter of the little town, to the _sake_-sodden father who had sold them in the days of their innocence, to the first numbing shock of that new life? Perhaps; or perhaps they were too taken up with maintaining their equilibrium on their high shoes, or perhaps they thought of nothing at all. Reggie, who had a poor opinion of the intellectual brightness of uneducated j.a.panese women, thought that the last alternative was highly probable.