I now understood the scraping and pounding. The hot days had attacked the water tanks of the hotel until the faucets marked “Cold” were running warm. The bath boy had been laboriously stirring around a cake of ice in the tub. Blandly came the repetition, “Foreign man, he take cold bath.”
For the sake of sweet courtesy and kindly appreciation I should have sat down in that water, but I did not. I pulled out the stopper and drew a hot tub. When the boy realized this sacrilege against the custom of the foreign man, he veritably trembled from the violence of the restraint which he had to put upon himself, but his idea of courtesy was so far superior to mine that he retreated. I bolted the door against him.
O-Owre-san returned from his field with enraptured accounts. There is some sort of affinity between him and a bit of treasure. He is the hazel wand and the antique is the hidden water, but as a human divining rod he does not merely bend to magnetism, he leaps. My first initiation to that knowledge had been so sufficiently striking that no new evidences ever surprised me. That initiation had come when we were riding one Sunday morning on the top of a tram in the cathedral city of Bath. We were in the midst of a discussion. Half way through a sentence he suddenly lifted himself over the rail and disappeared down the side of the car. When I could finally alight more conventionally I ran back to find him with his nose against a dull and uninviting window. From the top of the tram he had seen within the shadows a chair. There was no arousing the antique shop on Sunday and thus he left a note of inquiry under the door and eventually that particular treasure, wrapped in burlap, made its long journey to America.
He began discussing the treasures of Nagoya when in walked Hori.
“I don’t see how you got by my door,” said he.
“Weren’t you asleep?” I asked.
“Oh, just dozing,” he explained.