Chasing Beauty, page 13
I was immensely amused by a man [a wrestler] in the box next to us. He was a great swell, servants and all that—his beautiful clothes were carefully laid aside on account of the heat and there he sat, smoking a most beautiful pipe with nothing on but a waist cloth and a European straw hat. We didn’t even notice his want of clothes, as everybody is almost always in that undress. He had a dear little boy with him, who would have been stark naked but for an amulet bag of such beautiful damask that was fastened by a fold of red silk round his neck and that went in bow and end [sic] nearly to his heels behind. This man was intensely interested to know which wrestlers I thought would win and asked me each time. Once I couldn’t form any idea, so he coached me and said it was a sure thing for the small lithe man against a huge great fellow, so I interested myself properly in the little one—and when he threw the big one most cleverly and wonderfully, I thought my friend would have convulsions of delight, as I clapped my hands and called out.
Belle added: “Please don’t be shocked dear, at all these dreadful proceedings,” referring to the nakedness, saying, as if with a wink, “‘when in Turkey, etc.’”
On arriving in Kyoto, she found the city even more entrancing than Tokyo. “It straggles over a valley to the foot of densely wooded hills,” she wrote to Maud. On one side was their hotel, Ya’ami, set above a thick stand of very old cherry trees. In the evenings she sat out on the veranda to listen to the sounds of whippoorwills, locusts, nightingales, and cooing doves, which made her think she was “buried in some secluded spot.” The town below was illuminated with a “thicket of lights,” as residents, dressed in their finest outfits, laughed and talked, sang and danced.
During the day, she and Jack shopped the warren of stores that lined the central streets. “I’ve not had time to think; there has been so much to do,” she told Maud. She might have also added “so much to purchase,” though she didn’t. It was Jack who sardonically remarked that “somehow the boxes and packages accumulate,” but of course he knew exactly how. He truly didn’t complain. It was his job to arrange for everything to be boxed up and shipped back to Boston: embroideries, a pair of lustrous gold-painted screens, a pedestal of lacquered wood in the form of a lotus; small inro medicine boxes.
They also toured the sights: a silk factory, a girls’ school, and the city’s numerous Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. They visited Shu-gaku (Shugakuin Imperial Villa), the lush gardens of the seventeenth-century emperor, with its famous teahouses. Belle pasted into her album several maple leaves from a tree planted by Emperor Meiji to frame a large photograph of the view. She purchased professionally produced images like this one along the way for her albums. At Nara, Belle and Jack stood before the Great Buddha, the Daibutsu at Todaiji, marveling at its massive size and impassive expression. For a small sum, they were allowed to ring the enormous bell.
Belle reacted strongly when she visited places expressing a faith not her own, something that had happened on her travels through Egypt a decade before. “How beautiful are their Buddhist temples,” she now exclaimed to Maud Howe, adding that when she entered one, “I never want to come away—I could lie on the mats and look forever through the dim light.” Unlike other Western travelers, she had no impulse to contribute to proselytizing. Instead, she found this kind of immersion freeing and intensely moving. She listened for the bells and chants of the Buddhist priests in nearby temples while reading or writing letters on the veranda of the hotel where she and Jack stayed. She carefully noted in her letters and journals how the different religions were practiced.
She was not alone, of course, in her attraction to Buddhism. Ernest Fenollosa would convert to Buddhism, as would William Sturgis Bigelow, who joined the Shingon sect of the faith. For Belle, the temples and shrines awakened her eye, not so much to profess a belief or faith but to feel more deeply through aesthetic experience. Beauty of all kinds—in nature and the human-made—had a direct path to her heart and imagination. Beauty felt healing and expanding.
Interwoven in all of this, like a red thread, was something else. To be away from the familiar, from home, from the chatter of Beacon Street, and to be immersed in a wholly different scene liberated Belle. Away on this trip, she warned Maud Howe to be careful about the “horrid women” of Boston society. She knew well how their gossip and exclusions could sting and also how the resulting hurt could blunt a woman’s feelings and narrow her world. When Belle was on the move, she felt unleashed from close scrutiny, from constraint, from the tedium of upper-class womanhood; its well-worn scripts couldn’t follow her across the sea. Japanese women were, of course, no more free than American women—a primer for young Japanese girls listed “gentle obedience, chastity, mercy, and quietness” as chief requirements. No matter. Where no one recognized or expected much of Belle, she could be herself and give free rein to her senses and her feelings.
She felt downhearted as they left for Shanghai on August 31 for the next leg of their journey. She well understood why her friend William Sturgis Bigelow had found he’d been utterly unable to “tear himself away” from the mysteries and panoramas of Japan.
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THE LIST OF PLACES THE GARDNERS VISITED OVER THE NEXT EIGHT months reads like names on a geography exam: Shanghai, Tianjin, Chefoo (Yantai), Peking (Beijing), back again to Shanghai, then Hong Kong, Canton (Guangzhou), Macao, Saigon, Phnom Penh, Siem Reap, Java, Surabaya, Madiun, Surakarta, Yogyakarta, Borobudur, Semarang, Batavia (Jakarta), Singapore, Malaya, and Malacca (Melaka), Penang, Burma, Moumain (Mawlamyine), Prome (Pyay), Rangoon (Yangon). The last part of the trip, through India, was almost as long in miles and included Calcutta (Kolkata), Darjeeling, Bombay (Mumbai), Hyderabad, Madras (Chennai), Madurai, Allahabad, Benares (Varanasi), Lucknow, Agra, Delhi, Lahore, Simla (Shimla), Jaipur, Mount Abu, and Ahmedabad. When Belle reported in her writing that Jack rested, is it any wonder?
She described all their travels to the Gardner family in lively and entertaining letters. She was, according to Julia Gardner’s brother-in-law, Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, another correspondent during this time, the “best letter writer I know,” who lamented burning Belle’s letters at her request, which she made later.
In one of Jack’s father’s return letters, he mused that Belle might not enjoy China as much as she had Japan. This speculation was likely based on his knowledge of both countries through his shipping business and also his prodigious reading. Certainly she noticed, as other travelers did, that China’s streets and buildings were not as manicured as those in Tokyo or Kyoto. When the Gardners arrived at Tianjin, the location of foreign embassies, she observed that they’d been all day in the city’s “dirty, small, crowded streets . . .” But Mr. Gardner needn’t have worried. Belle didn’t require that everything be just the same at each stop on the tour. Soon enough she was marveling at a passing wedding celebration, with its parade of passengers in sedan chairs carried high above the crowd and a cacophony of exploding firecrackers. She enjoyed the differences, the dissimilarities, because these signaled another place and culture to explore, and that diversity was exactly what grabbed her attention, what fired her imagination.
She was eager to get to Peking, notoriously difficult to reach because of its inland location. China, in contrast to Japan, had not built up much tourist infrastructure across its enormous landmass. Jack secured the use of two houseboats, hired the necessary help, and placed orders for daily supplies. They traveled by river for four days, then by horseback the rest of the twenty kilometers from Tung-Chow to the storied capital, where they arrived on September 21. They stayed nineteen days. The wonders of Peking “bewitched” Belle. They went to see the Temple of Confucius, then the Lama Temple, with its priests dressed in bright-yellow cloaks and matching yellow hats. She noticed the “chanting in very low voices” and the “very large gilded Buddha,” which stood high in one of the temples.
On September 25, they received a telegram saying that Jack’s mother, Catharine Peabody Gardner, had died suddenly at the age of seventy-five, news especially hard to absorb in the midst of whirlwind travel so far from home. Jack made note of the loss in his diary, as did Belle, who remarked it was an awful blow. The next day she wrote a letter of condolence to Jack’s father, to whom she continued to feel particularly close. A month later, Mr. Gardner wrote a reassuring note, stating that he was holding up. He didn’t want them to worry or feel guilt. “I am & have been very well . . . My children & Grandchildren have been so devoted, and their thoughtfulness and affection so persistent, that notwithstanding our sad bereavement & our lasting sorrow, no gloom has been allowed to settle upon us.” Belle and Jack socialized somewhat less, but otherwise they didn’t miss a step. Sorrow would wait.
Their excursion to the Great Wall at the end of September took a day and a half on a wildly uncomfortable mule litter, or cart, which clattered along over a hard road. If Belle hated sea travel, she was fearless on land, no matter how bumpy the ride. They spent a long afternoon walking on the ancient wall. When they had to leave Peking, she remembered to Maud Howe how she craned her “neck out of the mule litter to catch a last glimpse of the walls,” as if to memorize what she was seeing: “The pigeons were all whirring through the air with their strange Aeolian-harp music, made by the whistles in their tails!” She was glad to see how two “rainbow clad” people greeted each other “under the shadow of the Great Gateway, with such graceful politeness.”
None of this extensive touring would have been possible without a retinue of servants. Mary O’Callaghan had been sent back to Ireland from Shanghai, but once in China, Jack had hired a guide, Yu-Hai, and a pony-handler, Mafoo, while relying on more local assistance along the way. The entire trip, including transportation, lodging, food, servants, and other help, would cost almost $24,000 (more than $600,000 today). Their wealth paved the way. The Gardners and other rich American travelers were, as a later scholar aptly puts it, “closely bound up with colonial structures,” and this fact can make some of Belle’s omnivorous orientalizing gaze discomfiting. But it is also true that she had little interest in imposing herself or Western values on cultures not her own. If anything, she longed for a frame of reference stretching beyond the West, especially beyond the cultural narrowness of America. Morris Carter, her first biographer, explained the dynamic in relation to religious faith, noting how Eastern faiths, with their promotion of “peace, contemplation, the negation of desire,” exemplified for her “ideals which her restless spirit had not previously conceived . . .” She had no trouble recognizing that people’s lives, “directed and controlled by these faiths,” were indeed “beautiful.”
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THE SMOOTH PAGES OF SIX LARGE, HANDSOMELY BOUND TRAVEL ALBUMS map the Gardners’ itinerary. Belle liked to spend time in the morning pasting down large purchased photographs, accompanied sometimes by an identifying phrase, and often decorated with pressed flowers or leaves that she’d gathered at the site depicted in the image. She had done this with a large photograph spanning two full pages of the album of the teahouse of the Mikado (a name for the Japanese emperor) and pleasure grounds in Kyoto, attaching to its upper left-hand corner two dried maple leaves. It’s possible to follow, page after page, a long day in early October spent touring the vast Summer Palace (Yellow Temple) just outside the center of Peking. The day began with breakfast on the “marble terrace over the lake under a pretty kiosk,” followed by visits to verdant parks, temples, tiled pagodas, and impressive bridges, one with seventeen gleaming arches. Belle wanted to remember what she’d seen, of course, using the album as a memory book. She was also practicing with visual composition on the page and would take back with her to the West a version—her version—of Eastern aesthetics.
After several weeks in Shanghai, the Gardners traveled on to Hong Kong, and the city “with its feet in the water and its head on the Peak” did not disappoint. They arrived at sunset, and “the clear cut hills were every colour from bright red—pink—orange, to pale blue, all reflected in the water; then the light faded, night came so slowly; and one by one the stars, in the heavens, in the still water and in the city came out and it was all atwinkle.” A day after arriving, they traveled to the high mountain range that rings the city to see a view of the harbor. Belle and Jack turned to each other and exclaimed: “this alone paid for the whole journey from home!” All she could say later in her journal: “beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.” A few days later, after touring the streets, she wrote: “A most wonderful city. Such crowds, such movement, such colour—on our way back it was getting dark, the shops were being closed with great shutters, and fresh joss sticks, lighted in all the little stone niches.”
By November, they’d decided to skip Bangkok and go to Angkor Wat on the advice of two Frenchmen they had met in Hong Kong. The extraordinary series of buildings had been described first for European and American readers by the French naturalist Henri Mouhot several years before. To reach the ancient ruins of the Khmer Empire, the largest religious complex in the world, they’d go first by riverboat as far inland as possible, and then farther into the jungle by bullock carts and elephants.
On Sunday, November 18, they rose at 5 A.M., drank steaming hot coffee, then started off, arriving at the gateway of Angkor Thom (which means “town”) in less than an hour. “A wonderful ride,” Belle enthused. At a certain point, they had to tramp by foot through dense jungle to see the enormous ruins. “The 48 great towers . . . with each side carved with huge Buddha heads” were awe-inspiring, overrun by a riot of banyan trees. She and Jack clambered up the structures to see as much of the enormous complex as possible. They were transfixed by the countless bas-relief friezes that covered almost every surface, and they returned the next day to see more. At the place they were staying overnight, they sat near the fire on logs and cushions, talking and smoking Mexican cigarettes. Belle would often recall her experiences at Angkor Wat, urging others to go. Years later, when a group of women in a competitive spirit wanted to discuss a foreign country Belle could not have possibly been to, they chose Cambodia, only to be shown up when she regaled them with her colorful memories.
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AT PHNOM PENH, THE GARDNERS PLANNED TO GO TO THE PALACE, which was really a village, as Belle explained in her diary. Arrangements were made for them to ride there in the royal carriage. Belle spruced up her black-and-white foulard dress, at this point “very dirty [and] old,” by wearing a diamond-and-pearl collar necklace, attaching two white diamonds on the strings of her black-lace bonnet, and pinning a large yellow diamond to the front of her dress. The first king was unwell, so they met the second king, who was very bashful. He asked them to return the next evening, which they did. They feasted on peacock, accompanied by music humming in the nearby temple. They returned a third time and met both kings, ending the evening with a palace tour, during which Belle shook hands with a Siamese princess “who wore a yellow scarf and a flower in her hair.” The second king complained about the Protectorate de France, which had become the country’s colonial overseer in 1867. When he spied Belle’s sparkling yellow diamond, he told her that even as a king, he had “no such thing.”
From Cambodia, they crossed the equator to Surabaya, to tour Java. Then, while sailing to Singapore, they witnessed the aftereffects of the catastrophic eruption of Mount Krakatoa six months before. “We passed through the fields of pumice stone floating on the sea,” she explained to Maud, adding that they’d “picked up some pieces.” The “most appalling” volcano had killed over twenty-three thousand people and “obliterated” the west coast of Java, “with all its towns and all that it had . . . The sea [is] now calmly splashing above it.”
Belle and Jack arrived in Singapore in late December. After a 7 A.M. service at the English-speaking cathedral, they spent Christmas afternoon at the city’s celebrated botanical gardens, with its many kinds of birds on view—hawks and owls, kingfishers and cuckoos. They were preparing to leave after the holidays for the last part of their journey, a three-month tour of India. Belle’s thoughts turned toward home. She mused to Maud Howe that she’d be “most interested to see Crawford’s new book,” adding that she hoped “it is good.” Frank had not left her mind. She briefly mentioned him in several earlier letters to Maud, wanting to know his plans and how his writing was going.
In her late December missive, she elaborated further. She had devoured a recent short novel by the English writer Margaret Wolfe Hungerford titled Loÿs, Lord Berresford. She urged Maud to read it, adding that her friend “must guess why I like it and want you to read it. Beg, borrow or steal it.” The reasons why were not hard to fathom. Its main character, Miss Theo Blake, is a woman torn between the love of a younger charismatic man and her rather dull fiancé and later husband. Thrillingly, she experiences no social repercussions for her romantic transgressions. Belle must have recognized a version of herself in Miss Theo, “a confirmed flirt, not so much perhaps from practice as from nature,” who is notorious for how she “coaxed and tormented and frightened everybody from her birth upwards” into giving her exactly what she wants, until she becomes “both the terror and admiration of every soul.”
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“THE WAY OF THE TRAVELER IS HARD,” ISABELLA WROTE TO A FRIEND from Benares, India, in early March—“at least it is hurried.” The Gardners had been on the move since leaving Singapore at the first of the year in 1884. They had “worked off some of the places to be seen,” as Belle explained, adopting Jack’s phrase for their mission. The coastal city of Malacca was “an uncanny sort of place, as if under a spell,” bordered by a pink-colored sea and masses of waving palm trees. She marveled at the dramatic waterfalls at Penang. In Burma (Myanmar), they went to see the wildly colorful pagoda temples, which were, as Belle reported, “even a sensation to Jack!” One scene in Rangoon, as if out of a painting, stood out to her: “woman with a long soft pink silk skirt tight about her, trailing a foot at least; a light shimmery yellow scarf about her shoulders and hanging down her back. She is holding, like Titian’s woman, a large silver bowl . . . with those long native cigarettes, the tobacco rolled up in green leaves.”
