Following the Sun-Flag: A Vain Pursuit Through Manchuria

An amphitheatre of feathery clouds ran half around the horizon and close to the water's edge; midway and toward Russia rose a great dark shadow through which the sun shone faintly. Such was the celestial setting for the entrance of a certain ship some ten days since at sunset into the harbor of Yokohama and the Land of the Rising Sun; but no man was to guess from the strange pictures, strange people, and jumbled mass of new ideas and impressions waiting to make his brain dizzy on shore, that the big cloud aloft was the symbol of actual war. No sign was to come, by night or by day, from the tiled roofs, latticed windows, paper houses, the foreign architectural monstrosities of wood and stone; the lights, lanterns, shops--tiny and brilliantly lit; the innumerable rickshas, the swift play under them of muscular bare brown legs which bore thin-chested men who run open-mouthed and smoke cigarettes while waiting a fare; the musical chorus of getas clicking on stone, mounted by men bareheaded or in billycock hats; little women in kimonos; ponies with big bellies, apex rumps, bushy forelocks and mean eyes; rows of painted dolls caged behind barred windows and under the glare of electric lights--expectant, waiting, patient--hour by hour, night after night, no suggestion save perhaps in their idle patience; coolies with push carts, staggering under heavy loads, "cargadores" in straw hats and rain coats of rushes, looking for all the world like walking little haycocks--no sign except in flags, the red sunbursts of Japan, along now and then with the Stars and Stripes--flags which, for all else one could know, might have been hung out for a holiday.

For more than a month I had been on the trail of the Saxon, the westward trail on which he set his feet more than a hundred years ago, when he cut the apron-strings of Mother England, turned his back on her, and, without knowing it, started back toward her the other way round the world, to clasp hands, perhaps, again across the Far East. Where he started, I started, too, from the top of the Cumberland over which he first saw the Star of Empire beckoning westward only. I went through a black tunnel straight under the trail his moccasined feet wore over Cumberland Gap, and stopped, for a moment, in a sleeper on the spot where he pitched his sunset camp for the night; and the blood of his footprints still was there.

"This is a hell of a town," said the conductor cheerfully.

I waited for an explanation. It came.

"Why, I went to a nigger-minstrel show here the other night. A mountaineer in the gallery shot a nigger and a white man dead in the aisle, but the band struck up 'Dixie,' and the show never stopped. But one man left the house and that was Bones. They found him at the hotel, but he refused to go back. 'I can't be funny in that place,' he said."

Now the curious thing is that each one of those three, the slayer and the slain--the Saxon through the arrogance of race, the African through the imitative faculty that has given him something of that same arrogance toward the people of other lands--felt himself the superior of any Oriental with a yellow skin. And now when I think of the exquisite courtesy and ceremony and gentle politeness in this land, I smile; then I think of the bearing of the man toward the woman of this land, and the bearing of the man--even the mountaineer--toward the woman in our own land, and the place the woman holds in each--and the smile passes.

Along that old wilderness trail I went across the Ohio, through prairie lands, across the rich fields of Iowa, the plains of Nebraska, over the Rockies, and down into the great deserts that stretch to the Sierras. Along went others who were concerned in that trail: three Japanese students hurrying home from England, France, and Germany, bits of that network of eager investigation that Japan has spread over the globe--quiet, unobtrusive little fellows who rushed for papers at every station to see news of the war; three Americans on the way to the Philippines for the Government; an English Major of Infantry and an English Captain of Cavalry and a pretty English girl; and two who in that trail had no interest--two newspaper men from France. I have been told that the only two seven-masted vessels in the world collided one night in mid-ocean. Well, these sons of France--the only ones on their mission, perhaps, in broad America--collided not only on the same train, the same sleeper, and the same section, I was told, but both were gazetted for the same lower berth. Each asserted his claim with a politeness that became gesticulatory and vociferous. Conductor, brakeman, and porter came to the scene of action. Nobody could settle the dispute, so the correspondents exchanged cards, claimed Gallic satisfaction mutually, and requested the conductor to stop the train and let them get off and fight. The conductor explained that, much as he personally would like to see the scrap, the law of the land and the speed of the Overland Limited made tarrying impossible. Without rapiers I have often wondered how those two gentlemen of France would have drawn each other's blood. Each still refused to take the upper berth, but next day they were friends, and came over sea practically arm and arm on shipboard, and arm and arm they practically are in Japan to-day.

Through the stamping grounds of Wister's "Virginian" and other men of fact and fiction in the West, the trail led--through barren wastes with nothing alive in sight except an occasional flock of gray, starved sheep with a lonely herder and his sheep-dog watching us pass, while a blue-eyed frontiersman gave me more reasons for race arrogance with his tales of Western ethics in the old days: How men trusted each other and were not deceived in friendship and in trade; how they sacrificed themselves for each other without regret, and no wish for reward, and honored and protected women always.

Then forty miles of snowsheds over the Sierras, and the trail dropped sheer into the dewy green of flowers, gardens, and fruit-tree blossoms, where the grass was lush, cattle and sheep were fat, and the fields looked like rich orchards--to end in the last camp of the Saxon, San Francisco--where the heathen Chinee walks the streets, where Robert Louis Stevenson's bronze galley has motionless sails set to the winds that blow through a little park, where Bret Harte's memory is soon to be honored in a similar way, and where a man claimed that the civilization of the trail had leaped in one bound from Chicago to the Pacific Coast. And I wondered what the intermediate Saxons, over whose heads that leap was made, would have to say in answer.

He had sailed one wide ocean--this Saxon--the other and wider one was by comparison a child's play on a mill-pond with a boat of his own making, and over it I followed him on.

On the dock two days later I saw my first crowd of Japanese, in Saxon clothes, waving flags, and giving Saxon yells to their countrymen who were going home to fight. After that, but for an occasional march of those same countrymen on the steerage deck to the measure of a war-song, no more tidings, or rumors or suggestions of war.

Seven days later, long, slowly rising slopes of mountains veiled in mist came in view, and we saw waves of many colors washing the feet of newest America, where the Saxon has pitched his latest but not his most Eastern--as I must say now--camp; and where he is patching a human crazy quilt of skins from China, Japan, Portugal, America, England, Africa. The patching of it goes swiftly, but there will be one hole in the quilt that will never be filled again on this earth, for the Hawaiian is going--as he himself says, he is "pau," which in English means finished, done for, doomed. Now girls who are three-quarters Saxon dance the hula-hula for tourists, and but for a movement of their feet, it is the dance of the East wretchedly and vulgarly done, and the spectator would wipe away, if he could, every memory but the wailing song of the woman with the guitar--a song which to my ear had no more connection with the dance than a cradle song could have with a bacchanalian orgy.

At a big white hotel that night hundreds of people sat in a brilliantly lighted open-air garden with a stone floor and stone balustrade, and heard an Hawaiian band of many nationalities play the tunes of all nations, and two women give vent to that adaptation of the Methodist hymn that passes for an Hawaiian song.

Every possible human mixture of blood I had seen that day, I fancied, but of the morals that caused the mixture I will not speak, for the looseness of them is climatic and easily explained. I am told that after five or six years the molecules even in the granite of the New England character begin to get restless. Still there seems to be hope on the horizon.

At midnight a bibulous gentleman descended from a hack in front of the hotel.

"Roderick Random," he said to his Portuguese driver, "this is a bum-m town," spelling the word out thickly. Roderick smiled with polite acquiescence. The bibulous gentleman spoke likewise to the watchman at the door.

"Quite right, sir," said the watchman.

The elevator got the same blighting criticism from the visitor, whose good-night to the clerk at the desk still was:

"This is a bum-m town."

The clerk, too, agreed, and the man turned away in disgust.

"I can't get an argument out of anybody on that point," he said--all of which would seem to cast some doubt on the public late-at-night flaunting of vice in Honolulu.

Two pictures only I carried away of the many I hoped to see--the Hawaiian swimmers, bronzed and perfect as statues, who floated out to meet us and dive for coins, and a crowd of little yellow fellows, each on the swaying branch of the monkey-pod tree, black hair shaking in the wind, white teeth flashing, faces merry, and mouths stretched wide with song.

Thence eleven long, long days to that sunset entrance into the Land of the Rising Sun--where Perry came to throw open to the world the long-shut sea portals of Japan.

The Japanese way of revealing heart-beats is not the way of the Occidental world, and seeing no signs of war, this correspondent, at least, straightway forgot the mission on which he had come, and straightway was turned into an eager student of a people and a land which since childhood he had yearned to see.

On a certain bluff sits a certain tea-house--you can see it from the deck of the ship. It is the tea-house of One Hundred and One Steps, and the mistress of it is O-kin-san, daughter of the man who was mayor when Perry opened the sea portals at the mouth of the cannon, whose guest Perry was, and whose friend.

O-kin-san's people lost their money once, and she opened the tea-house, as the American girl under similar circumstances would have taken to the typewriter and the stenographer's pen. The house has a year of life for almost every one of the steps that mount to it, which is ancient life for Japan, where fires make an infant life of three years for the average Japanese home. The tea-girls are O-kin-san's own kin. Everything under her roof is blameless, and the women of any home in any land can be taken there fearlessly.