Two coolies started quarreling under the Barringtons' window. They too had been drinking. They did not hit out at each other like Englishmen, but started an interchange of abuse in gruff monosyllables and indistinguishable grunts and snorts.
"Baka! Chikushomé! Kuso! (Fool! Beast! Dung!)"
These amenities exasperating their ill humour, they began to pull at each other's coats and to jostle each other like quarrelsome curs. This was a sign that affairs were growing serious; and the police intervened. Again each combatant was pushed away by his companions into opposite byways.
With these exceptions, all tramplings, squeezings, pushings and pokings were received with conventional grins or apathetic staring. Yet in the paper next day it was said that so great had been the crowd that six deaths had occurred, and numerous persons had fainted.
"But where is the Yoshiwara?" Geoffrey asked at last. "Where are these wretched women kept?"
Reggie waved his hand in the direction of the three roads facing them.
"Inside the iron gates, that is all the Yoshiwara, and those high houses and the low ones too. That is where the girls are. There are two or three thousand of them within sight, as it were, from here. But, of course, the night time is the time to see them."
"I suppose so," said Geoffrey vaguely.
"They sit in shop windows, one might say," Reggie went on, "only with bars in front like cages in the Zoo. And they wear gorgeous kimonos, red and gold and blue, and embroidered with flowers and dragons. It is like nothing I can think of, except aviaries full of wonderful parrakeets and humming-birds."
"Are they pretty?" Asako asked.