"This," said he, "is not in order. I do not see how you can go on at all."To add artificial impossibility to natural, was too much. Yejiro answered that he had better come to the inn; which he accordingly did. Poor man! I pitied him. For, in the first place, he was still jaundiced; and, in the second, although conscious of guilt as I was, I was much the less disturbed of the two. I was getting used to being a self-smuggler; while he, as the Japanese say, was "taihen komarimasu" (exceedingly "know not what to do"), a phrase which is a national complaint. In this instance he had cause. What to do with so hardened a sinner was a problem passing his powers. Here was a law-breaker who by rights should at once be bundled back to Tokyo under police surveillance. But he could not go himself, he had no one to send, and furthermore the delinquent seemed only too willing to escort himself there, free of government expense, as speedily as possible. All I had to do was to whet his perception that the sooner boatmen were got the sooner I should be on the right side of the law again. After some conflict with himself he went in search of men.
I was left to study the carp-pond, with its gold and silver fish, the pivot of attention of the pretty little garden court which stood handy to the kitchen. This juxtaposition was no accident; for such ponds are landscape and larder in one. Between meals the fish are scenery; at the approach of the dinner hour they turn into game.
The inn guest having sufficiently enjoyed the gambols of future repasts, picks out his dish to suit his taste or capacity, and the fish is instantly netted and translated to the gridiron. The survivors, none the wiser, continue to steamboat about, intent on their own dinners, flashing their colors as they turn their armored sides in and out of the light. Eccentric nature has fitted these prototypes of navigation with all the modern improvements. Double and even triple sets of screws are common things in tails, and sometimes the fins, too, are duplex. As for me, I had neither the heart nor the stomach to help depopulate the pond. But I took much mechanical delight in their motions; so I fed them instead of they me.
I had my choice between doing this and watching the late boatmen at their dinner in the distance. No doubt moods have an aesthetic conscience of their own,--they demand appropriate setting; for I was annoyed at the hilarity of these men over their midday meal. I bore them no malice, but I own I should have preferred not to have seen them thus making free with time they had declared themselves unable to sell to me.
Thanks in part to my quality of outlaw, and in part to four hours'
propitiation of the gods of delay, the jaundiced policeman finally succeeded in beating up a crew. There were four conscripts in all, kerchiefed, not to say petticoated, in the native nautical costume;a costume not due to being fresh-water sailors, since their salt-water cousins are given to a like disguise of sex. These mariners made us wait while they finished their preparations. It meant a long voyage to them,--a facilis descensus Averni; sed revocare gradum,--a very long pull. Then the bow was poled off, the current took us in its arms and swung us out into the stream, and the crowd on the shingle dropped perspectively astern.
While I was still standing gazing at lessening Tokimata, I heard a cry from behind me, and, turning, ducked just in time to escape being unceremoniously somersaulted into the water by a hawser stretched from bank to bank at a level singularly suited to such a trick.
The rope was the stationary half of a ferry to which I had neglected to make timely obeisance. It marked, indeed, an incipient stage in the art of suspension bridges, the ferryboat itself supporting a part of the weight, while the ferryman pulled it and himself across.
We met several more in the course of the next few minutes, before which we all bowed down into the bottom of the boat, while the hawser scraped, grumbling impotently, overhead.
Our boat was of adaptive build. It was forty-five feet long, not quite four feet wide, and somewhat over two feet deep. These proportions and the character of the wood made it exceeding lithe, so that it bent like a willow before necessity. In the stern stood the head man, wielding for rudder an oar half as long again as those the others used. There was very little rowing done, nor was there need;the current itself took us along at racing speed.
