She saw a man sitting on the edge of the trap-door and saw his smile.
Then it was as though she were extinguished, and she plunged into nothing....
CHAPTER VI
The proprietor of Yoshiwara used to earn money in a variety of ways. One of them, and quite positively the most harmless, was to make bets that no man—be he never so widely travelled—was capable of guessing to what weird mixture of races he owed his face. So far he had won all such bets, and used to sweep in the money which they brought him with hands, the cruel beauty of which would not have shamed an ancestor of the Spanish Borgias, the nails of which, however, showed an inobliterable shimmer of blue; on the other hand, the politeness of his smile on such profitable occasions originated unmistakably in that graceful insular world, which, from the eastern border of Asia, smiles gently and watchfully across at mighty America.
There were prominent properties combined within him which made him appear to be a general representative of Great Britain and Ireland, for he was as red-haired, chaff-loving and with as good a head for drink as if his name had been McFosh, avaricious and superstitious as a Scotsman and—in certain circumstances, which made it requisite, of that highly bred obliviousness, which is a matter of will and a foundation stone of the British Empire. He spoke practically all living languages as though his mother had taught him to pray in them and his father to curse. His greed appeared to hail from the Levant, his contentment from China. And, above all this, two quiet, observant eyes watched with German patience and perseverance.
As to the rest, he was called, for reasons unknown, September.
The visitants to Yoshiwara had met September in a variety of emotions—from the block-headed dozing away of the well-contented bushman to the dance-ecstatic of the Ukrainer.
But to come upon his features in an expression of absolute bewilderment was reserved for Slim, when, on the morning after his having lost sight of his young master, he set throbbing the massive gong which demanded entrance to Yoshiwara.
It was most unusual that the generally very obliging door of Yoshiwara was not opened before the fourth gong-signal; and that this was performed by September himself and with this expression of countenance deepened the impression of an only tolerably overcome catastrophe. Slim bowed. September looked at him. A mask of brass seemed to fall over his face. But a chance glance at the driver of the taxi, in which Slim had come tore it off again.
“Would to God your tin-kettle had gone up in the air before you could have brought that lunatic here yesterday evening,” he said. “He drove away my guests before they even thought of paying. The girls are huddling down in the corners like lumps of wet floor-cloth—that is, those who are not in hysterics. Unless I call in the police I might just as well close the house; for it doesn’t look as though that chap will have recovered his five senses by this evening.”