She seemed to have learned her art in the academy where the daffodils are taught to dance and the bluebells to make their bow.
“It’s the Geisha Kamamura has hired—paid her something like two hundred to dance that fan-dance, or whatever they call it. She was a Tokyo girl, and had left the business to get married, but she couldn’t withstand the two hundred; the best Geisha in Japan, they say. What’s this her name? O something San. Hoots! but my memory is gone fishing to-day. Listen! she’s talking.”
The dance had ceased, and the girl, in the silence that followed the tinkling of the three accompanying chamécens, had commenced one of those poetical recitals in favor with an intellectual Japanese audience.
Her recitation was sad; it bemoaned the thing we call change. The cherry-blossom is fair, ran this untranslatable poem, but it must die and give place to the lotus.
“I cannot understand this depression in trade,” murmured the muted voice of Anderson, as he stood beside Leslie. “It’s been spreading and spreading, and there’s nothing it hasn’t spread into.”
And the lotus parts with its petals to give place to the chrysanthemum, the Royal chrysanthemum.
“We’ve had a good year till now, ourselves, but hech! man, there’s a matter of fifteen thousand gone over the breaking of the Bombay and Benares bank—clean gone, never to come back—and that takes the sugar off the cake—ay, the devil himself won’t whistle it home again.”
And the gray winter sky and the snowflakes, like ghosts of flowers, finished the poem of the Geisha, whilst Leslie stood transfixed for a second, frozen by the news he had just heard, and unable to turn. He turned round full on Anderson.
“The breaking of what?”
“The Bombay and Benares. Have you not heard the news? It came by cable to-day at one o’clock. Good God! man, you hadn’t much money in it, had you?”