I had been down this way into the town scores of times before, of course, and the people knew me. The old man in the corner shop of the street, whose signboard was a queer mixture of Japanese and English of a sort, was painstakingly decorating the same large blue Nankin vase with sprays of chrysanthemums and the inevitable storks, as he was a week ago. But this morning I didn’t stop, as I usually did, for a chat and to express my admiration for his painstaking art, which though almost totally lacking perspective, was yet quaint and pretty.
“No! I am in a hurry”—this to him.
“Is the sir going back to England?”
“No!” scarcely stopping.
“That is well! Good, good! The Nankin vases you, most illustrious sir, are so condescending as to admire are still unsold. Will you take them, honourable sir? They are——” All this I hear him say in his queer, cracked, high-pitched, monotonous voice ere I turn the corner.
“Yes, Mr. Kotmasu is in,” replied San, my friend’s clerk, and I could see him.
Kotmasu’s office is a strange mixture of East and West. It is on the second floor of a warehouse, down on the Natoba near the water-side. He, with memories of English ways, has a writing-table made of mahogany, with camphor-wood and ebony inlaid work; but he still writes with a fine brush, either in Indian ink or vermilion, as the occasion requires, on dainty slips of flimsy and, to my Western mind, unbusiness-like rice paper.
How a London merchant would laugh at the idea of grinding up one’s ink in a tiny saucer as one required it! And yet this is just what my good friend was doing when I entered—in a tiny jade saucer inlaid with threads of gold, with a minute bronze frog, just ready for a dive, upon the edge.
I sat down in a revolving chair, which had once graced the saloon of an English steamer lost along the coast, and opened fire upon Kotmasu concerning Miss Hyacinth.
I felt so miserably sure, with the pessimism of an ardent lover, that he must be in love with my darling. But it proved that he had no intentions. So much was evident to me after five minutes’ talk in the cool room. He didn’t want to chatter about her, but began instead to tell me untellable things about the new geisha. He didn’t even seem to think Miss Hyacinth pretty. How strange, I thought! And then he went on again to sing the praises of the geisha, who was called Silver-Moon Face. His taste was evidently vitiated; he preferred art to nature, tricks to charms, a whitened face with two hectic spots of rouge, and the gold-lined lip, to the damask skin and smiles of my mousmé. But all this was very satisfactory to me, nevertheless.