THE ROAD TO NIKKO

The singer stopped singing and began to whistle. Then he broke out into prose.

"Damn boots! I'll be lame in another mile. Why can't we be content with sandals like our 'brithers' the Japs!"

"Dinna damn boots, but their makers," replied his companion, a sandy Scot of fifty or more, dressed in broadcloth and a bowler, a figure at once a blot upon the lonely road and a blasphemy against Japan—a blot whose name was M'Gourley. "I vara well remember when I was in Gleska—"

"Oh, don't!" said the poet of the Nikko road, Dick Leslie by name, a young man, or rather a man still young, very tall, straight, dark, and good-looking, and a gentleman from the crown of his close-clipped, curly black head to the soles of the boots that were torturing him. "Don't haul up your factory chimneys, your smoke and whisky bottles in this place of places. I believe if a Scot ever gets into heaven he'll start his first conversation with his first angel by making some reference to Gleska: Look there!"

"Whaur?"

"There!" cried Leslie, turning from the direction of Fubasami and the beginning of the great Nikko valley before them, and pointing backwards away towards Kureise over an expanse of distant country where the clouds were drawing soft shadows across the rice fields and the sinuous hills; over little woods of fir and cryptomeria trees, lakes where the lotus flowers spread in summer, and the king-fisher flashed like a jewel; over occasional fields of flowers, flowers that grew by the million and the million.

Many of these details were absorbed and dulled by distance, yet still lent their spirit to the scene, producing a landscape most strange and quaint.

Nearly every other country seems flung together by nature, but Japan seems to have been imagined by some great artist of the ancient days—imagined and constructed.

"Look there," said Leslie, "saw you ever anything better than that in Clackmannan?"

"Ay, have I," replied M'Gourley, contemplating the view before him, "many's the time. What sort of country do you call that? Man! I'd as soon live on a tea-tray if I had ma choice."

"Well, you've lived in Japan long enough to be used to it. It's always the way; put a man in a paradise like this where there are all sorts of flowers and jolly things around him, and he starts grumbling and growling and pining after rain, and misery, and cold, and sleet, and peat smoke—if he's a Scotchman. How long have you been in Japan, Mac, did you say?"

"Near ever since the Samurai took off their swords and turned policemen."

"What kept you in the East so long if you don't like it?"

"Trade, like the wind, blaweth where it listeth, and a man must e'en follow his trade," said M'Gourley; and they resumed their road.

They were walking to Nikko together, this strangely assorted pair, strangely assorted though they were both Scotchmen. They were approaching the place, not by that splendid avenue of cryptomeria trees that leads from Utso-no-Miya, but by the wild hill road, which runs from Kureise, or rather by the higher hill road, for there are two, and they had taken the loneliest and the longest by mistake (M'Gourley's fault, though he swore that he knew the country like the palm of his hand).

They had come twenty or twenty-five miles of the way by riksha, and were now hoofing the remainder, their luggage having been sent on to Nikko by train.

"And talking of trade," said M'Gourley, "let's go back to the matter we were on a moment ago; there's money in it, and I know the beesiness. I ken it fine; never a man knows better the Jap Rubbish trade."

"You were talking of starting at Nagasaki."

"Ay, Nagasaki's best."

"Well, I'll plank the money," said Leslie. "I'll put up a thousand against a thousand of yours."

M'Gourley stopped and held out a hand sheathed in a mournful-looking black dogskin glove.

"Is't a bargain?" said he.

"It's a bargain. Funny that we should have only met the other day in Tokyo, and that you should have come along to Nikko to show me the sights. I believe all the time you were bent on trepanning me into this business."

"I was that," said M'Gourley, with charming frankness; "for your own good. A man without a beesiness is a man astray, and when you told me in the hotel in Tokyo you were a boddie with money, and nothing to do with it, I said: 'Here's my chance.'"

"If I had met you two months ago," said Leslie bitterly, "I wouldn't have been much use, for my father would not have been dead, and I would not have come into his money. Do you know what I have been?—I have been a remittance man."

"I've met vera much worse people than some of them," said Mac, who if his newly found partner had declared himself a demon out of Hades would perhaps have made the same glossatory remark—the capital being assured.

"I'm hanged if I have," said Leslie bitterly. "Give me a Sydney Larrikin, a Dago, a Chinee, before your remittance man. I know what I'm talking about for I have been one—see?"

"What, may I ask—" began M'Gourley, then he paused.

"You mean what was the reason of my being flung off by my father? Youthful indiscretions. Let's sit down; I want to take my boot off."

The road just here took a bend, and became wilder and more lovely, a stream gushed from the bank on which they took their seats, and before them lay a little valley, a valley hedged on either side by cypress trees, and thronged with crimson azaleas.