Don’t picture the ordinary school teacher
[Miyajima Hotel]
Miyamoshita, Japan
Lover dearest:
Still not a word from any of you and I’m almost frantic. What is the matter? Each morning I compose a cable, but then I think, “Oh! Surely by evening there’ll be a letter, so I’d better just wait.” But it never comes, and I feel as though I couldn’t stand it another day! We have been here nearly a week, and it is one of the loveliest spots I’ve ever seen in Japan – way up in the mountains, and the hotel is beautiful – the finest in the country and lots of foreigners. Wasn’t it funny? We met here some people whom we knew quite intimately in New Zealand, and there are a good many too from the Philippines. They come here to miss the terrible heat there during May and June. There are lots of lovely walks and rides, and on long trips we are carried in chairs as it is too rough and mountainous for rikshas. I told you, didn’t I, about Mrs. Chandler who was my roommate on the steamer? It was she was so good to us the three weeks we spent in Tokyo. She took us places we never otherwise could have gone or even have known about. She was always planning nice things, and all her friends gave dinners, etc. for us, so we got quite friendly – she used to come down to stay all night with me whenever we were to be out late at night and this time coming from Nikko I spent the night with her (Father went on to Yokohama to have his eyes examined, and he has to have his glasses changes. They’d been troubling him for some time.) and she took me to a fascinating Japanese restaurant for dinner. Really I’ve had so much J. food and eaten with chopsticks so much lately that I wonder if I’m not getting squint eyed. Well – the point to my story is this – Mrs. Chandler is going to China with us. That is, her school is over the 4th of July, so she’ll take the first steamer to meet us in Pekin, then go on south with us. Don’t picture the ordinary school teacher, widow type for although she is both, you’d never class her as such for she is loads of fun, dresses beautifully, has traveled a lot and is fine company. She is just thirty. So I think it will be lots of fun to have her with us, and she is crazy to go, but feels a little wary, for fear she is “butting in”.
Listen, angel, I’m going to ask a favor of you, one that I always said I should ask of no one, but under the circumstances it seems different, but I don’t want you to say yes if you don’t feel like doing it – could you take some things home for me? Those two brass candle sticks have been puzzling me ever since I got them, wondering how I could pack them around with me for a whole year longer, and then suddenly I thought that you could take one and Shang one in your trunks. You said you weren’t going to travel so won’t buy much and won’t be troubled with any duty either; They are about ten inches height and are in two pieces, so you could stick them almost any where. The pair was only $3.50 all told, so the duty at most would be very little, and I’ll send you a money order for it. Now I don’t believe in smuggling, and neither do I believe in emptying every little thing you have when you reach N.Y. They don’t expect you to either at the customs house, so I doubt if you would have any trouble at all, but if you did, I should doubtless have to pay much more, for I’ll have so much more stuff, especially by that time. You see I can send it to you in England absolutely duty free, so do tell me right away if you think you can do it, also if either of you will have room for a couple of embroidered waist fronts, and some gauze luncheon sets that are as flat as paper, and how much in value you are willing to risk. Is there anything like lace or linen, etc that you’d like me to get you in China? If so I can send it via Siberia very easily, and you can sew it on a dress and have no trouble at all getting it in to N.Y. It will be the greatest help and relief imaginable if you can take these things, for my trunks are simply bursting now, and there is so much that I want to get in China and India.
We’ve been having awful earthquakes, much worse than any we felt in New Zealand or the Philippines, and I’d thought I’d got used to them, but they still scare me to pieces. Last night I was nearly shaken out of bed!
Heaps of love angel dearest.
June 1, 1913. Alice.
