Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/63

Rh denly slipped out of the modern rush of new Japan into something we shall probably find at the other end of time when man arrives. Tremendous tubs, eight feet in diameter, lay about the yards, wheel after wheel of them. Omar's request that we turn down "an empty glass" was here but half complied with: these were empty, but on their sides, waiting to be turned up again. One man picked up a single bucket of water and strolled across the scene as it is said men did in Rachel's days. And the bamboo pole see-sawed its way between heaven and the dark depths of the well, awaking visions of Eastern life now hardly Oriental.

From this outer yard the doors stood wide into the dungeon-like saké cellars; we were in a saké-brewing establishment. Here the tremendous tubs stood upright, six and seven feet high. The sweet-scented saké bubbled with ferment, and in and about the tubs moved the men, overgrown dwarfs of a raised underworld.

It seemed for a moment that our coming had broken the charm, and they would not sing again. For the first time necessity seemed to me a spiritual parent instead of an earthly one. They had to stir their tubs, and habit was too closely allied to birth and seclusion to be interrupted long by a mere visitation of strange foreigners. Slowly they reverted to song and labours. As they stood on the rims of the monstrous tubs, their staffs sunk into the thick, white foaming rice brew, they seemed living monuments of contentment stirring the cups of forgetfulness for the world.

Then one led off, and his voice rang out clear in that darkened vault—clear as the thin rays of light which entered through the cracks in the paper windows. The other three men took up the strains, and then they followed each other in perfect rhythm to which they kept time by beating with their staff-mixers on the bottoms. The hands holding the staff shot out full length and came down on the bottom with a gentle thud, were drawn in and raised again,—one after the other, not a fraction of a second out of time. The song needed no words of explanation. The paper apertures threw little light on any details. Songs without words, and atmosphere without trifles—and for a moment, a world without progress. Simple folk whose hearts are free from affectation can make their untrained voices the envy of great singers, and their wooden tools the peer of instruments. It was as though all that is lovely in human aspiration were being held firm to reality by the thud of a staff.