Geoffrey went out to look for Tanaka. In a quarter of an hour he came back, triumphant.
"I went out of the front door and there was Master Tanaka, telling the rickshaw-men the latest gossip about us. I said to him, 'Tanaka, are you married?' 'Yes, Lordship,' he answered, 'I am widower.' 'Any children?' I asked again. 'I have two progenies,' he said; 'they are soldiers of His Majesty the Emperor.' 'Why, how old are you?' I asked. 'Forty-three years,' he answered. 'You are very well preserved for a man of your age,' I said, and I have come back for my kisses."
After this monstrous deception Geoffrey had declared that he would dismiss Tanaka.
"A man who goes about like that," he said, "is a living lie."
Two days later, early in the morning, they left Kyoto by the great metal high road of Japan, which has replaced the famous way known as the _Tokaido_, sacred in history, legend and art. Every stone has its message for Japanese eyes, every tree its association with poetry or romance. Even among Western connoisseurs of Japanese wood engraving, its fifty-two resting places are as familiar as the Stations of the Cross. Such is the _Tokaido_, the road between the two capitals of Kyoto and Tokyo, still haunted by the ghosts of the Emperor's ox-drawn wagons, the _Shoguns'_ lacquered palanquins, by feudal warriors in their death-like armour, and by the swinging strides of the _samurai_.
There was a movement in the observation-car, where Geoffrey and his wife were watching the unfolding of their new country. The sea was away to the right beyond the tea-fields and the pine-woods. To the left was the base of a mountain. Its summit was wrapped in cloud. From the fragment visible, it was possible to appreciate the architecture of the whole--_ex pede Herculem_. It took the train quite one hour to travel over that arc of the circuit of Fuji, which it must pass on its way to Tokyo. During this time, the curtained presence of the great mountain dominated the landscape. Everything seemed to lead up to that mantle of cloud. The terraced rice fields rose towards it, the trees slanted towards it, the moorland seemed to be pulled upwards, and the skin of the earth was stretched taut over some giant limb which had pushed itself up from below, the calm sea was waiting for its reflection, and even the microscopic train seemed to swing in its orbit round the mountain like an unwilling satellite.