MISTER WATKINSON

By BRYAN GUINNESS

THE beauties of Japanese and English architecture are distinct, but their ugly characteristics seem sometimes to coincide. It was astonishing, as we drove up to the modern hotel in the precincts of the Temple grounds, to observe how its lines, though based on some Japanese con- vention, resembled those of an ill-designed golfing hotel at an English watering place. The sloping roof seemed to jut at the same angle, and there was the same dingy, colourless effect, the same plate glass windows and the same omnivor- ously revolving doors.

We wandered off through the celebrated park, and saw something of Japanese architecture at its best. The dinginess of the hotel gave place to the austerity of the temples, and between them we were entertained by the gaiety of booths for the visitors, where sacred deer run in to feed when the shop- keepers are not looking.

As we returned, we heard the music of fifes and drums, proceeding from the top of a little hill, and saw a band of children rehearsing a religious dance before a shrine. Then we came in to our hotel, and immersed ourselves in hot baths of Western design, not without some regret for the Japanese pattern to which we were growing accustomed.

We had the dining-room almost to ourselves for supper. It was not the season apparently for visitors. But there was one other dining there ; a distinguished-looking elderly man, with a resemblance, it struck me, to King Edward the Seventh.

I passed a remark upon this, and my wife observed how often members of a previous generation seem to imitate the monarchs reigning when they were in their prime. I passed my hand self-consciously over my clean-shaven chin and wondered when it would be out of date.

After our supper was finished, we sat drinking coffee in the lounge, which was European even to the leather arm- chairs with brass ash-trays attached. America had added spittoons at our feet. As my wife and I neither smoke nor spit we were complaining to one another of the ubiquity of such utensils, when the likeness of King Edward VII came up and, after giving us a- slight bow, settled down not far away.

He looked lonely and, as we were two to one, I felt it my duty to address him. I enquired what he had thought of the temples ?

" I never go near the plaCes," he replied.

" Have you been here long ? " I asked, and was not a little astonished at 'his reply of five years.

". Oh ! " I said. " Do you live here, then ? " asked my wife. " Yes," replied the gentleman.

The waiter said something to him which caused him to excuse himself and leave us. Soon from an adjoining room we heard the gentle click of billiard-balls.

On the next day we asked the waiter the gentleman's name. " Oh, that is Mister Watkinson," he said ; " he is a very great Gentleman."

We sent a message to invite the great Gentleman to lunch with us. He came over from what was evidently his habitual place and, after courteously 'bowing to us, sat down at our table.

After a preamble that was so brief as to be perhaps barely polite, I showed my curiosity by enquiring of his business in this place.

" Oh, I retired ten years ago," he explained.

I learnt that he had become head of a firm of merchants in Yokohama. His wife had died many years before at the birth of his only child, a daughter, whom he had sent to England to his wife's family to bring up.

" I did not like parting from the baby," he said, " but it was for the child's own good that she should be brought up in England."

I imagined him saving his salary to pay the child's school fees, and his letters to her in writing which he must hive wondered which aspects of Japan would amuse a little girl; and her letters to him of the Lacrosse Fixtures of the first twelve, and other pieces of official school news of small interest to either father or daughter.

" My daughter is married now," Mr. Watkinson explained. " Her husband works in a bank in London. When I retired, ten years ago I went to live with them in South Harrow. But it did not work."

And so the story of Mr. Watkinson's life was revealed. As we talked on of other things I pictured him waiting, a trifle impatiently, for his retirement, and at last his return from exile. He would be met perhaps at Victoria by his daughter, whom he would only be able to recognise by a pre-arranged button-hole. He would endeavour to see traces in her features of the child he remembered and of the wife he had lost.

His daughter must have been inevitably a stranger to him. He would not have been able even to talk to her of her mother, since she had never known her. He would try not to blame her for her mother's death, but there would lurk possibly at the back of his mind an unconscious sense of grievance against her: He would hope to get to know her and understand her with time.

The little house in South Harrow, so proudly detached from its neighbours, would seem at first pleasant enough, and Arthur, his son-in-law, a decent enough fellow. He would be glad to see his daughter so happily married. They would celebrate his return at dinner. The neighbours would be asked in to meet him. There would be rejoicings, ter- minating in bridge.

Then later the friction would begin. Mister Watkinson would make suggestions, buy furniture, change rooms. He would ask tactfully, of course, why there were no children. He would criticise their favourite neighbours, and invite intolerable cronies who had returned from Japan and with whom he could talk shop. His son-in-law would feel at last that his home was no longer his own. The smallness of the house would make it impossible for him to address his wife out of the sight, or at least the hearing, of her father.

" Yes," Mr. Watkinson was saying to me, " They make me very comfortable here. And there's a fellow who comes up from the town every Saturday to play billiards with me." And so, I thtlught) perhaps the last straw in South Harrow was a billiard table. I pictured Mister Watkinson presenting his son-in-law with an unwieldy birthday present.

" I've got a little surprise for you," I seemed to hear him say, as the furniture van appeared at the garden gate. I pictured the forced delight of the daughter and son-in-law, and the devastation produced in the living room by the presence of the table.

" There's just enough space to get round," I imagined Mr. Watkinson assuring them ; and then the practising would begin : and every evening the gentle clicking of the balls would appease the old man and infuriate the young.

But then it would seem to Mister Watkinson that the younger generation was inconsiderate. They would not listen to his stories of Japan. They were not interested in the price levels obtaining in Yokohama in the last four decades. They were barely polite to his friends. And their friends were, in his judgement, several of them nothing but bounders.

At last someone must have spoken his mind. Perhaps Mr. Watkinson, accustomed in Japan, by his age and his position,to command, would have first reproved his son-in- law for some trifling neglect. Arthur would perhaps have meekly accepted the reproof, but his wife would have turned against her father. To be rebelled against by his own flesh and blood must have infuriated the old man, who would have been accustomed in Japan to see parents treated by their children with proper veneration. At first he would have spoken out ; then suddenly, aggrieved and wounded, he would have left the room and the house. He would have walked down the street to buy flowers for his daughter. Peace would have been made : apologies would have been general : but surreptitiously Mr. Watkinson would have booked a place in a steamship bound for Japan, and gently he would have broken the news that he must leave his daughter at least for a time, for business reasons.

" I feel quite at home here," said Mr. Watkinson, as our meal drew to a close : " The service is good, and I do The Times crossword puzzle every day."

I asked him about the rate of exchange as I paid our share of the bill.

He replied with the exact enthusiasm of an expert. He spoke at some length. " In 1898," he concluded, " the yen stood at two shillings and eight pence point 35 of a penny."

After luncheon we had to leave : and Mister Watkinson, Times in hand, came out to see us off.

I expressed a hope, which he was good enough to recipro- cate, that we might meet him again.

" You'll know where to find me," he said.

And so we drove away, leaving Mister Watkinson to wait, at home in his exile, for his days to pass.