The Polyglots Read Free Page A

the first.
    ‘Say, how’s the armistice doing? Guess our boys over there are right glad. Ah, our American boys are fine lads. Have you seen General Pershing?’
    Then one morning I raised the window-blind and saw the Union Jack flying over the station building. We were in Canada.

3
    AND NOW, TO THEIR MUTUAL ASTONISHMENT, BOTH the American citizen and the Japanese gentleman, who had followed us all the way to Yokohama, had donned uniforms. It transpired accordingly that one was Colonel Ishibaiashi, of the Imperial General Staff, while the other was Lieut. Philip Brown, of the U.S. Naval Intelligence Service, who, with the perennial secrecy of Secret Service men, had hitherto thought it incumbent on himself to masquerade in mufti, but seeing his erewhile enemy in the glamour of his uniform, probably felt he could hold out no longer. He was standing now, a little away from us, whistling through his teeth: ‘Johnnie, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun; go and kill the Hun, kill the Hun, kill the Hun.’ Then, coming up to the Colonel, he slapped him on the shoulder cheerily. ‘Hello, Colonel, glad to see you looking so smart. I thought all along you were a blooming spy, don’t you know!’
    Colonel Ishibaiashi showed his teeth and drew his breath in. ‘—Zzz—Ha!’ he said; ‘ha!’ And once again, ‘Ha!’
    The reconciliation was complete.
    ‘We are going alongside,’ said my companion. And indeed wewere moving at last. Now we were going alongside. All eyes turned shoreward. On the quay—a red-banded brass hat, some assistant to the British military attaché maybe. A score of red-capped Nippons with tin swords. Now we are going alongside. The dark space of water between us and the pier grew narrower and narrower. Gangway. Coils of rope fly over on to the quay. Gangway! At long last we move: all move to the gangway. The feel of the bars on the gangway as you hang on to them by the heels—it would be merely absurd to slip at this stage—and you’re on firm ground once more. What matter if that ground be Japan?
    At first we drove by the side of the quay, then through queer, narrow, evil-smelling Yokohama streets. To sit with hat and stick in the spidery rickshaw, and sniff at the atmosphere of a strange place—oh, what a rare, what an exquisite pleasure! ‘This is Japan,’ I said to myself. And it was. Now if I had been brought up in Japan, schooled there and lived there these twenty-one years, it would be about as interesting to me now as Manchester. The dream is more real than the substance. And thus when I travel in a strange land I get out at the station, sniff at the ‘atmosphere’—and get back into the train. It is enough. So now immediately I felt that I had ‘got’ the atmosphere. Besides, there was one. Leaning back in the rickshaw, first I had a feeling that I was too heavy for these delicate toys, as I watched the little man, who was half my size, run before me, his shirt gradually betraying signs of perspiration as he covered mile after mile in a steady trot. I soon got used to it. Once or twice we lost our way, and when we made enquiries in English some Japanese invariably replied to all our questions, ‘Ha!…’ and showed his teeth and sucked his breath in, and bowed politely, and walked away.
    ‘Hi!’ cried my companion.
    ‘I always understood that the Japanese spoke English,’ I observed.
    ‘And if they do they are the only ones to understand it,’ he rejoined sardonically.
    No, my companion did not like Japan. He called it a tin-kettlenation. He had been annoyed, and with his delicate digestion he could ill-afford to be annoyed in the heat. He tried to ring up Tokyo on the telephone, and was interrupted by an absurd ‘
Mashi, mashi
?’ which he did not understand, and so shouted ‘Damn!’ into the receiver.
    But already we were bound for Tokyo. The train raced on through green fields and pastures that might have been England or anything else. And, behold! a kimonoed