Shades of the Past by Harold Williams

Author:Harold Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0-8048-1030-8
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing

MR.

CAREW'S

TOMBSTONE

As soon

Seek roses in December—ice in June;

Hope constancy in wind, or corn in chaff;

Believe a woman or an epitaph,....

Lord BYRON—"Don Juan"

Fires and earthquakes have wiped out most of the Foreign Settlement records of the last century and most of the newspaper files also, but the patient researcher can still turn up from diaries and elsewhere forgotten pages of the past which, when pieced together, reveal scenes long since forgotten. And so it comes about that the following two scenes from Yokohama life of 1897, the year following that in which Mr. Walter Carew, manager of the Yokohama United Club, died of arsenic poisoning, can be presented.

It was a Saturday evening, in October, 1897. Trade had been falling off. The silk market had been erratic. The various strata in the social pyramid of the Yokohama foreign community had each experienced a number of storms-in-a-tea-cup. The litigation among the foreign members of the community, quite apart from a rash of cases between foreigners and Japanese, had been unusually great, and the ranks of the taipans had become divided by a lawsuit that had developed between two of their most exalted members. There was a temporary shortage of liquor owing to the wreck of a P. & 0. vessel. It had been mail day with all the rush and bustle associated with mail in those early days. In short, tempers were frayed, and the gathering at the bar of those feeling in need of a stimulant was more numerous than usual.

Gathered around one of the many tables were six men. There was the Anglican priest who had conducted the funeral service for Mr. Carew. There was a law clerk, named Burbles, of the law firm which had defended Mrs. Carew at the murder trial. He was a rather brilliant man, generally somewhat exhilarated of an evening, but invariably moderately inebriated throughout the whole of each week end. That being Saturday evening, the week end had well started! There was Cole Watson, the taipan of Findlay Richardson & Co., who had been one of the jurors at the Carew murder trial. He had had a very busy day! There was the editor of the Japan Gazette, who had again come off second best in a clash with Capt. Brinkley of the Japan Mail. There was a tourist who was about to commence a three months tour of Japan—that was the thorough way in which tourists in those days toured the country. He was a visitor at the club, and had brought with him a copy of Chamberlain's Things Japanese, Murray's Guide, and Johnson's Oriental Religions, in the optimistic belief that, in such a citadel of European culture, by spending an hour with residents of twenty or more years standing, he would learn more in an hour about Oriental religions than in a week's reading. All three books were at his elbow with strips of paper to mark the more complicated passages on which he hoped to receive advice and instruction. The sixth man was the manager of the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank.

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