Jules Verne · a new plain-English translation from the original language
The Carnatic, having left Hong Kong on November 7 at half past six in the evening, was steaming at full speed toward the lands of Japan. She carried a full load of goods and passengers. Two cabins aft remained unoccupied. They were the ones that had been reserved on behalf of Mr. Phileas Fogg.
The next morning, the men forward could see, not without some surprise, a passenger, his eye half-dazed, his gait unsteady, his hair tousled, who came out of the second-class hatch and staggered over to sit down on a spare spar.
This passenger was Passepartout in person. Here is what had happened.
A few moments after Fix had left the smoking-house, two attendants had carried off Passepartout, deep asleep, and laid him on the bed set aside for the smokers. But three hours later, Passepartout, pursued even into his nightmares by one fixed idea, woke and struggled against the stupefying action of the narcotic. The thought of his unfulfilled duty shook him from his torpor. He left that bed of drunkards, and, stumbling, propping himself against the walls, falling and getting up again, but always and irresistibly driven by a kind of instinct, he came out of the smoking-house, crying as though in a dream: «The Carnatic! the Carnatic!»
The steamer was there, smoking, ready to leave. Passepartout had only a few steps to take. He sprang up the gangplank, passed through the entry-port, and fell senseless forward, just as the Carnatic was casting off her moorings.
Some sailors, being men accustomed to such scenes, carried the poor fellow down to a second-class cabin, and Passepartout did not wake until the next morning, a hundred and fifty miles from the coasts of China.
That, then, is why, that morning, Passepartout found himself on the deck of the Carnatic, coming to breathe in deep draughts the fresh sea breezes. This pure air sobered him up. He set about collecting his thoughts, and did not manage it without difficulty. But at last he recalled the scenes of the day before, Fix's confidences, the smoking-house, and the rest.
«It is obvious,» he said to himself, «that I got abominably drunk! What will Mr. Fogg say? In any case, I did not miss the boat, and that is the main thing.»
Then, thinking of Fix:
«As for that one,» he said to himself, «I do hope we have seen the last of him, and that he did not dare, after what he proposed to me, to follow us aboard the Carnatic. A police inspector, a detective on the trail of my master, accused of that theft committed at the Bank of England! Come now! Mr. Fogg is a thief the way I am a murderer!»
Ought Passepartout to tell his master these things? Was it fitting to let him know the part Fix had played in this affair? Would he not do better to wait until they reached London, to tell him how a metropolitan police agent had trailed him around the world, and to laugh about it with him? Yes, no doubt. In any case, a question to be examined. The most pressing thing was to rejoin Mr. Fogg and to make him accept his apologies for this unspeakable conduct.
So Passepartout got up. The sea was heavy, and the steamer rolled hard. The worthy fellow, still shaky on his legs, made his way as best he could to the after part of the ship.
On deck, he saw no one resembling either his master or Mrs. Aouda.
«Good,» he said, «Mrs. Aouda is still in bed at this hour. As for Mr. Fogg, he will have found some whist player, and, true to his habit...»
Saying this, Passepartout went down to the saloon. Mr. Fogg was nowhere in it. One thing alone remained for Passepartout to do: to ask the purser which cabin Mr. Fogg occupied. The purser answered that he knew no passenger of that name.
«Excuse me,» said Passepartout, pressing the point. «It is a gentleman, tall, cold, uncommunicative, accompanied by a young lady...
--We have no young lady aboard,» replied the purser. «Besides, here is the list of passengers. You may consult it.»
Passepartout consulted the list... His master's name did not appear on it.
He felt something like a dizzy spell. Then an idea crossed his brain.
«Now then! I really am on the Carnatic?» he cried.
«Yes,» replied the purser.
«Bound for Yokohama?
--Exactly.»
For a moment Passepartout had had that fear of having taken the wrong ship! But if he was on the Carnatic, it was certain his master was not aboard her.
Passepartout let himself drop into an armchair. It was a thunderbolt. And suddenly the light broke upon him. He remembered that the Carnatic's departure time had been moved up, that he was to warn his master, and that he had not done it! So it was his fault if Mr. Fogg and Mrs. Aouda had missed that departure!
His fault, yes, but still more that of the traitor who, to separate him from his master, to hold the latter at Hong Kong, had got him drunk! For he understood at last the police inspector's manoeuvre. And now Mr. Fogg, ruined for certain, his wager lost, arrested, imprisoned perhaps!... At that thought, Passepartout tore at his hair. Ah! should Fix ever fall into his hands, what a reckoning there would be!
At last, after the first moment of dejection, Passepartout regained his composure and studied the situation. It was hardly enviable. The Frenchman was on his way to Japan. Certain of getting there, how would he get back? His pocket was empty. Not a shilling, not a penny! Still, his passage and his food aboard were paid in advance. So he had five or six days ahead of him to make up his mind. Whether he ate and drank during that crossing cannot be described. He ate for his master, for Mrs. Aouda, and for himself. He ate as if Japan, where he was about to land, were a desert country, void of all edible substance.
On the 13th, on the morning tide, the Carnatic entered the port of Yokohama.
This point is an important Pacific port of call, where all the steamers employed in the mail and passenger service between North America, China, Japan, and the islands of Malaysia put in. Yokohama lies in the very bay of Yeddo, a short distance from that immense city, second capital of the Japanese empire, once the residence of the taïkoun, in the days when that civil emperor existed, and rival of Meako, the great city inhabited by the mikado, the ecclesiastical emperor, descended from the gods.
The Carnatic came to lie alongside the quay at Yokohama, near the piers of the port and the customs warehouses, amid numerous ships belonging to all nations.
Passepartout set foot, without any enthusiasm, on this so curious land of the Sons of the Sun. He could do no better than to take chance for his guide and to wander at random through the streets of the city.
Passepartout found himself at first in an absolutely European town, with low-fronted houses adorned with verandas beneath which spread elegant peristyles, and which covered with its streets, its squares, its docks, its warehouses the whole space from the Treaty promontory to the river. There, as at Hong Kong, as at Calcutta, swarmed a jumble of people of every race—Americans, English, Chinese, Dutch—merchants ready to sell anything and buy anything, in whose midst the Frenchman found himself as foreign as if he had been flung into the land of the Hottentots.
Passepartout did have one resource: to present himself to the French or English consular agents established at Yokohama; but it repelled him to tell his story, so intimately bound up with his master's, and before coming to that, he wanted to have exhausted all the other chances.
So, after roaming the European part of the city without chance having served him in any way, he entered the Japanese part, resolved, if need be, to push on as far as Yeddo.
This native portion of Yokohama is called Benten, from the name of a goddess of the sea, worshipped on the neighbouring islands. There were to be seen admirable avenues of firs and cedars, sacred gateways of a strange architecture, bridges buried among bamboos and reeds, temples sheltered under the immense and melancholy cover of centuries-old cedars, monasteries in the depths of which vegetated the priests of Buddhism and the followers of the religion of Confucius, endless streets where one might have gathered a harvest of children with pink complexions and red cheeks, little fellows who might have been cut out of some native screen, and who played among short-legged poodles and yellowish cats, tailless, very lazy and very affectionate.
In the streets it was nothing but swarming, a ceaseless coming and going: bonzes filing past in procession, beating their monotonous tambourines; yakunines, customs or police officers, in pointed hats inlaid with lacquer and wearing two sabres at their belts; soldiers dressed in blue cottons with white stripes and armed with percussion muskets; men-at-arms of the mikado, cased in their silk doublets, with hauberk and coat of mail, and numbers of other soldiers of every condition—for in Japan the soldier's profession is as much esteemed as it is despised in China. Then mendicant friars, pilgrims in long robes, plain civilians with smooth hair black as ebony, big heads, long torsos, spindly legs, short stature, complexion coloured from the dark shades of copper to a dull white, but never yellow like that of the Chinese, from whom the Japanese differ essentially. Finally, among the carriages, the palanquins, the horses, the porters, the sail-driven wheelbarrows, the «norimons» with lacquered sides, the soft «cangos»—true bamboo litters—one saw passing, with the little steps of their little feet shod in cloth shoes, straw sandals, or worked wooden clogs, a few not very pretty women, their eyes narrowed, their chests flattened, their teeth blackened in the fashion of the day, but wearing with elegance the national dress, the «kirimon,» a kind of dressing-gown crossed by a silk scarf, whose broad sash spread out behind in an extravagant knot—which modern Parisian women seem to have borrowed from the Japanese.
Passepartout strolled for several hours amid this motley crowd, looking too at the curious and opulent shops, the bazaars where all the tinsel of Japanese goldsmithery is heaped up, the «eating-houses» decked with streamers and banners, which he was forbidden to enter, and those tea-houses where fragrant hot water is drunk by the cupful, along with «saki,» a liquor drawn from fermenting rice, and those comfortable smoking-houses where a very fine tobacco is smoked, and not opium, the use of which is nearly unknown in Japan.
Then Passepartout found himself in the fields, amid the vast rice paddies. There flourished—along with flowers casting their last colours and their last scents—brilliant camellias, borne no longer on shrubs but on trees, and, in the bamboo enclosures, cherry trees, plum trees, apple trees, which the natives cultivate for their blossoms rather than their fruit, and which grimacing scarecrows and squeaking whirligigs defend against the beaks of sparrows, pigeons, crows, and other voracious birds. Not a majestic cedar but sheltered some great eagle; not a weeping willow but covered with its foliage some heron melancholically perched on one leg; in short, everywhere rooks, ducks, sparrowhawks, wild geese, and great numbers of those cranes that the Japanese address as «Lordships,» and that symbolize for them longevity and happiness.
Wandering thus, Passepartout caught sight of a few violets among the grasses:
«Good!» he said, «there is my supper.»
But having smelled them, he found no scent in them.
«No luck!» he thought.
To be sure, the honest fellow had, by way of foresight, breakfasted as copiously as he could before leaving the Carnatic; but after a day of walking, he felt his stomach very hollow. He had indeed noticed that mutton, goat, and pork were absolutely lacking at the stalls of the native butchers, and, as he knew that it is a sacrilege to kill oxen, reserved solely for the needs of agriculture, he had concluded that meat was scarce in Japan. He was not mistaken; but, for want of butcher's meat, his stomach would have been quite content with haunches of wild boar or deer, with partridges or quails, with poultry or fish, on which the Japanese feed almost exclusively, along with the produce of the rice fields. But he had to make the best of a bad business, and put off till the next day the care of providing for his food.
Night came. Passepartout went back into the native town, and he wandered through the streets amid the many-coloured lanterns, watching the groups of mountebanks perform their marvellous feats, and the open-air astrologers who gathered crowds around their telescopes. Then he saw again the roadstead, spangled with fishermen's fires, which drew the fish by the gleam of blazing resin.
At last the streets emptied. The crowd gave way to the rounds of the yakunines. These officers, in their magnificent costumes and amid their retinue, looked like ambassadors, and Passepartout kept repeating jokingly, each time he met some dazzling patrol:
«Come now! there goes another Japanese embassy setting off for Europe!»