Haru opened the gate. Cherry-petals were sifting down like rosy snowflakes over the scarlet trembling of nanten bushes. A little way inside was a graceful house entrance half-shaded by a trailing vine. The amado were not closed, the shoji were brilliantly lighted.
With a little sob she unfastened the golden obi, rewound and tied it with the knot in front.
CHAPTER XXXIV
ON THE KNEES OF DELILAH
The room where Phil sat was softly bright with andon, through whose thin paper sides the candle-light filtered tranquilly.
It had been furnished in a plain, half-foreign fashion; a book-rack and a French mahogany desk sat in a corner, an ormolu clock ticked on its top, and beside it was a lounge piled with volumes from the shelves. On a bracket sat three small carvings in dark wood, replicas of the famous monkeys of the great Jingoro the Left-Handed, preserved in Iyeyasu temple at Nikko. With their paws one covered his eyes, another his ears, the third his mouth, representing the "I see not—I hear not—I tell not" of the ancient wisdom.
The place, however, to which these had given a suggestion of quaint and extraordinary art, was now touched with a certain tawdriness. It would have affected a Japanese almost to nausea. The severity of beauty of its etched and paneled walls, the plain elegance of its satinwood fittings, were cheapened with a veneer of vulgarity. A row of picture postcards in colors was pinned on the wall—the sort the tourist buys for ten sen on the Ginza, too highly tinted and with much meretricious gilding—and a photograph hung in a silver-gilt frame of interlocked dragons. It showed a girl in abbreviated skirts and exaggerated posture; on the mount was printed: "Miss Cissy Clifford in Gay Paree." The air was full of the sickly-sweetish smell of Turkish cigarettes. The desk was a confusion of pipes, ivory nets'ke, cigarette-boxes and what not, and a man's cloth cap and a gauntlet were tossed in a corner, beside an open gold-lacquer box heaped with gloves.
Phil, however, felt no qualm. The room fitted him as a scabbard fits its sword. He had discarded his heavier outer clothing and donned a loose, wide-sleeved robe of cool silk, tied with a crimson cord.
"Give me the whisky-and-soda," he said to the grizzled servant, in the vernacular, "and I shan't want you again to-night."