He looks a strange figure as he stands talking to me, in the sun, at the corner of the little narrow alley leading from the water-side into one of the newer streets, the incongruities of his garments thrown up into strong relief by a background formed by the sail of a large trading-junk alongside the quay, which a swarm of Japanese coolies, all dressed alike in tight hose and dark butcher’s-blue cotton tunics, with some _bizarre_ device in a different colour on the back, were unloading with extraordinary rapidity.
“I must go back to the warehouse,” he says, after considering my remark. “I will come to see you to-night.”
He shakes hands; and a coolie who has been staring at my “strange white face,” as I overheard him call it, for at least five minutes, to the neglect of his work, appears much mystified by the supposed rite.
I am glad Kotmasu is coming, as I wish him to believe in my experiment as thoroughly as I do myself.
The books have come, and I return to the warehouse of my parcels-agent to see if they are unpacked.
Mr. Karu’s office is always a source of wonder to me.
The amount of business transacted there, in a building of toy-like dimensions and fragile structure, was little less than marvellous. Whenever a parcel heavier than usual was dropped on the floor by a careless coolie, I expected that the room, with its ink-stained, paper-panelled walls, on which were pasted or fixed with quaint-headed pins the steamship bills and those of several of the theatre tea-houses, would collapse forthwith with no more warning than the crack of its slight, dry timbers.
Mr. Karu was all smiles. He was a little, short man with extremely beady eyes, quick movements, and a yellow skin deeply pitted by small-pox.
“It is very big to-day!” he exclaimed in Japanese, referring to the package. “Very much larger; half a _yen_ more, please, most honourable gentleman,” as I put down the usual amount.
The smiles were explained; and there was no doubt some truth, I thought, in what the little chief-clerk at the bank, who is so anxiously cultivating a beard, said, namely, “That most excellent friend, Karu, is in great much hurry to get much rich man.”
I pay what I know to be in great part an imposition, with an indulgent grin—I am in a hurry to get back to Mousmé, or might have argued the matter even in this heat—accept the offer of a coolie to carry my parcel for the equivalent of three-halfpence, and start to climb up the shady side of the rough-paved street to my home.