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Asako and her maid were led out of the house like two performing animals. It was bitterly cold, and Asako had no cloak. The road was already full of loafers. They stared angrily at Asako. Some laughed. Some pulled at her kimono as she passed. She heard one say: "It is a geisha; she has murdered her sweetheart."
"Where is your bedroom?" asked Asako, with a frank demand for that sign of sisterhood among Western girls; "I should so like to see it." "I generally sleep," answered the Japanese girl, "in that room at the corner where we have been already, where the bamboo pictures are. This is the room where father and mother sleep."
Asako was staring at the buildings now, at the high square prison houses, and at the low native roofs. These had each its little platform, its monohoshi, where much white washing was drying in the sun. At the farther end of one street a large stucco building, with a Grecian portico, stood athwart the thoroughfare. "What is that?" said Asako; "it looks like a church."
He explained that they had been to pay their first call on Japanese relations, and that they had been honourably out; but even so the strain had been a severe one, and Asako had retired to rest at the hotel. "But why not come and stay here with me?" suggested Reggie.
It was a square block of building some hundreds of yards long, quite foreign in character, having the appearance of factory buildings, or of a barracks or workhouse. "What a dismal-looking place!" said Asako. "Yes," agreed Reggie, "but at night it is much brighter. It is all lit up from top to bottom. It is called the Nightless City."
"How long have you been learning?" Asako wanted to know. "Oh, since I was ten years old about." "Is it so difficult then?" said Asako, who had found it comparatively easy to pour out a cup of drawing-room tea without clumsiness. Sadako smiled tolerantly at her cousin's naive ignorance of things aesthetic and intellectual.
"Did you look?" "I did not look actually, but " "You're a fool!" said the inspector. The weary questioning continued for quite two hours, until Asako had told her story of the murder at least three times. The unfamiliar language confused her, and the reiterated refrain: "You, now confess; you killed the man!" Asako was chilled to the bone.
Asako had already decided that her home was to be on the bank of the river, where she could see the boats passing, something like the house in which her father and mother had lived.
Asako, when she read, which was not often, preferred literature of the sentimental school, books like The Rosary, with stained glass in them, and tragedy overcome by nobleness of character. "I've been lonely without you and nervous," she said, "and I've had a visitor already." She pointed to a card lying on a small round table, a flimsy card printed not engraved on cream-coloured pasteboard.
After lunch he changed into a kimono of Reggie's. Then he lay down on his bed and was soon fast asleep. How long he slept he could not say; but he awoke slowly out of confusing dreams. Somebody was in his room. Somebody was near his bed. Was it Asako? Was it a dream? No, it was his comrade of the morning's voyage. It was Yaé Smith. She was sitting on the bed beside him.
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