III
Wiley was strolling about the lobby when Nathan came down for dinner. Wiley was the Y. man who had shared Nat’s cabin. They dined together. Afterward they explored Yokohama in the warm summer evening.
Through dank, clean-smelling side streets their silent kuruma, or rickshaw men, trotted them,—in and out of moonlight and shadow, past tradesmen’s shops where the tradesman’s family sprawled on shining-matted rooms in the rear, a single electric droplight hanging from the low, polished ceiling, across a canal, northwestward where lights glowed and music played, and Theater Street reveled in illumination and bunting and laughter.
Laughter, laughter! Everywhere was laughter. The land was saturated with it. Old men laughed, young men laughed, women laughed, children shrieked continually. Everybody seemed gloriously happy.
Wiley and Nathan left their kuruma and walked the length of Theater Street, with its bizarre shops, exotic music, peanut whistles, shuffling geta; they went to a Japanese movie and sat on floor cushions while a “lecturer” talked the film as it unreeled; they bought “ice cream,”—scraped ice with fruit juice spilled upon it; three times they narrowly “dodged” being run into geisha houses.
Nathan retired to bed finally with a little twinge of disappointment. He had not met his father.
He went to the Consulate promptly next morning.
“Forge?” repeated the consul. “Came out three years ago, you say? I’ll have one of the boys look back over the books. But I don’t know any Johnathan Forge living here in the country at present.”
The books were searched. There was no record.
“Then he couldn’t have come here under that name,” Nathan was informed. “Was there any reason why he should have employed a different one?”
Nathan shrugged his shoulders.
“It doesn’t matter,” he observed.
He did not find his father.