“There was a violence, a sombre bitterness, in his tone which impressed me. I thought of all the miraculous good-fortune which men attributed to him—a specimen of which I had just seen—and wondered whether he were really wearied of it. I could conceive it possible that a man of his type would find life very dull if assured beforehand of success and safety. It would be the struggle, the peril, which would appeal to him.
“He relapsed into a gloomy silence which I did not dare to break.
“We returned to Saigon on the steam-tram and shortly afterward we found ourselves seated on the deserted terrace of a café, trickling water through the sugar into our absinthe, for all the world as though we were in some bankrupt quarter of Marseilles. Natives thronged around us pestering us to buy all sorts of worthless trifles in their horrible pidgin-French—petit négre they call it. Their ‘Mossieu acheter—mossieu acheter’ at every moment thoroughly exasperated me. But Captain Strong sat lost in a brooding reverie where he did not even hear them. His eyes looked, unseeing, down the wide street.
“Suddenly an insinuating voice whined into my ear some native words I could not understand, and repeated them with a wheedling insistence which compelled my attention. I looked round into an ugly yellow face whose malicious narrow-slitted eyes glittered unprepossessingly above his fawning smile. There was something in the face that seemed familiar to me and yet I could not place it. Under the conical bamboo hat all these Annamites looked alike to me. I waved him away, but he was not to be shaken off, reiterating over and over again his incomprehensible phrase.
“I glanced enquiringly at Captain Strong, whom I knew to understand many Chinese dialects.
“‘He’s a conjurer and wants to show you a trick,’ he explained, contemptuously, adding a curt word and nod of assent to the native.
“The Annamite beamed idiotically and stretched out his skinny hands over the little table.
“‘Vous—regarder,’ he said, evidently making the most of his French, and grinned insinuatingly at me.
“With a slow, snaky motion of his skeleton-like hands he commenced to make passes in the air about six inches above my glass. I watched him, at first idly, but gradually more and more fascinated as my eyes followed the sinuous movements of his hands. Presently, to my astonishment, I saw the glass, tall and fairly heavy—a typical absinthe glass, commence to rock slightly on its base. The direction of the passes altered to a vertical, up and down, as though his hands were encouraging the glass to rise. And sure enough, it detached itself from the table and, swaying a little unsteadily, rose into the air under the hands still some distance above it. It ascended slowly, as though he were drawing it up by a magnetic attraction, to an appreciable height from the table, say three or four inches. Then, as he changed the character of the passes again so that they seemed to press it down, it sank slowly once more to the table. The native, childishly pleased with this successful exhibition of his powers, grinned ingratiatingly at us both.