A panel moved noiselessly aside. The proprietress again slipped into the room and clapped her hands thrice. Behind her sounded a choral whisper, and six girls, lustrous of coiffure, clad in gaily flowered kimonas, glided towards me with so silent a tread that they seemed to float through the air. All were in the first bloom of youth, as dainty of face and form as they were graceful of movement. Twice they circled around me, ever drawing nearer, then, halting a few feet away, they dropped to their knees, touched their foreheads to the floor, and sat up smiling. The landlady, standing erect, gazed down upon me.
“Sailor man, how you like?” she purred, “Ver’ nice?”
“Yes, very nice,” I echoed.
“Well, take which one you like and get married,” she continued.
The ’rickshah-man, alas, knew the ways of sailors but too well. I picked up my bundle and, glancing regretfully down upon the harbor, stepped out on the veranda.
“What!” cried the matron, following after me, “You not like get married? Ver’ nice room, ver’ good chow, ver’ nice wife, fifteen yen one week.”
I crossed the flowery courtyard towards the stone stairway.
“You no like?” called the landlady, “Ver’ sorry. Good-bye.”
Beside a canal down near the harbor I found a less luxurious hotel. The proprietor, awakened from a doze among the bottles and decanters of the bar-room, gurgled a thick-voiced welcome. He was an American, a wanderer since boyhood, for some years domiciled in Nagasaki. The real manager of the hotel was his Japanese wife, a sprightly matron whose farsighted business acumen was evidenced by a stringent rule she had laid down forbidding her besotted spouse entrance, except at meal hours, to any other section of the hostelry than the bar-room. Most interesting of the household were the offspring of this pair, a boy and girl of twelve and ten. In them were combined the best qualities of the parent races. No American children could have been quicker of wit nor more whole-heartedly diligent at work or play; no Japanese more open to impression nor more inherently polite of demeanor. Already the father was accustomed to refer to his son problems too complicated for his own unresponsive intellect; the mother left to her daughter the details of flower-plot and wardrobe.
Lodged in an airy chamber, I could have slept late next morning had I not been awakened at daybreak by what seemed to be a rapid succession of revolver shots. I sprang to the window, half fearing that the proprietor was assassinating his wife in a drunken frenzy. In the yard below squatted the half-breed children, with a stick of “punk” and a great bundle of fire-crackers. I had forgotten the date. It was the Fourth, and Nagasaki was celebrating. All through the day bombilations sounded at regular intervals about the city; nor was the racket instigated entirely by American residents.