East of Siam: Ramblings in the Five Divisions of French Indo-China
9781465510709
418 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
One of my jaunts up-country in Kwangtung Province dragged, and I missed the French liner at Hong Kong. Luckily the Panama Maru, bound on one of the trips around the world that bring her back to her home berth in Kobe every seven months, also made Saïgon her next stop. We sailed early in the afternoon of one of those brilliant days that double the blue intensity of Hong Kong harbor. The Japanese freighter served no free wine with her meals and had none of that interior ornateness that suggests the Paris Opéra gone to sea. But perhaps for that very reason she was more successfully mopped and dusted; and the Nipponese atmosphere aboard was more interesting than the cosmopolitan scent of the fortnightly Messageries steamer to Marseilles. True, she made barely ten knots an hour. But the French could hardly have served better food; the two “boys” were unspoiled, and Captain Ichikawa was a friendly little soul, even inviting me to make free of the chart-room. The quiet, all but noiseless, efficiency of his crew was a startling contrast to the incessantly shrieking chaos of Chinese craft. The three or four first-class cabins opened abruptly upon the dining-room rather than upon the deck; yet even the baby in one of them was Japanese, like everything and everybody on board except myself, and seemed never to cry. A lone Japanese would certainly not have been more courteously treated on an American boat than was the sole non-Nipponese being on this. It is often said that the Japanese are not individualistic in personality. There were certainly as many types as passengers, however, gathered about our table. The energetic son of Tokyo, now in business in Saïgon, who shared my cabin, was tall and handsome, as agreeable a companion in cramped quarters as any American man of commerce, and he spoke both French and English perfectly. On the other hand the peanut-headed undersized youth across the table looked and acted like the “nut” his cranium suggested. Then there was a medical graduate going out, with the assistance of the mikado’s government, to practise upon the Japanese laborers on the coffee plantations of São Paulo—who one evening managed to tell me in near-English that he had read, both in my tongue and his own, all the published plays of Eugene O’Neill. He would give much to see them played, he added, but had never seen a Western drama on the stage. The two women who sometimes graced our board were as different as were the quiet brown and gorgeous-figured red kimonos they respectively wore on such occasions. Even the half-dozen officers rounding out the tri-daily gathering were divided by as distinct lines of demarcation as are their colleagues of any nationality. Gently we rolled southward, with a drift to the west, over a densely blue tropical sea. It grew too warm, first in our open-on-the-dining-room cabins, then on the deck itself. Summer curtains and awnings appeared; electric fans took up their duties once more, and in one cabin at least spun all the night through. The third morning brought one of those lazy perfect days when loafing in a deck-chair seems the nearest tangible approach to heaven. We sighted the coast of Annam that afternoon, hazy, almost mountainous, apparently as treeless as China itself, and had it always in sight thereafter, a lighthouse winking at us all through the evening. If possible the weather was even more peerless on the fourth day; the sea, flat as a floor, blue as if saturated with indigo, was covered with light ripples that made it look like a vast piece of watered silk. Unfortunately it had not turned tropical quickly enough to save one of our fellow-passengers. A youngster who had taken pneumonia during the crossing from Japan to the coast of China died during the third night. Another child had gone the same way, two days out of Nagasaki, and many in the general quarters below the main-deck still had heavy colds.
