Page:Four Japanese Tales.pdf/27

 to resist eyes which are hidden behind black glasses; for two reasons it is extremely difficult. You do not see the eyes of the other person, and you see your own. So it happened that my friend Kumamoto went away contented, after we had agreed upon our first meeting in Tokyo.

I have to confess I never had reason to regret that Kumamoto wore dark glasses. I learned many interesting things from him, he took me to places where probably I could not have gone otherwise, and because for every meeting he prepared himself diligently and systematically, he always said what he had to say quickly and intelligibly, and the rest of the time I was free to make inquiries about things that had greater significance to me. Of course on the first and second meeting he showed an inclination to repeat all that he had taken the pains to learn by heart just as soon as he had finished the first recitation; but on both occasions I clenched my fists and avoiding the black glasses, thwarted his attempts with much determination till at length he comprehended and reconciled himself to the inevitable.

Then for the first time did I notice his peculiar laugh, with which, it seemed, he was wont to disguise his embarrasementembarrassment [sic], and of which he surely was not even conscious. As if by sucking in air through his closed teeth he were whistling on one of them which was hollow thus could I approximatively describe that sound; only it was not whistling at all, but rather a sort of buzzing, very quiet and very intense, gradually rising, then bubblingly dispersing and finally stopping of a sudden. I was never able to work out a permanently acceptable theory of the physical cause of that sound; for that matter, it was enough that I knew its psychical cause, and whenever Kumamoto began to buzz like a singed! moth, I knew that in some way or other I had disconcerted him and strove to avoid a similar blunder in the future.

Once it happened, however, that Kumamoto took to buzzing under circumstances which excluded my having caused him embarrassment, even unconsciously. I had gone with him to a place of his selection, but when we reached it his information proved erroneous and nothing was left to us but to retrace our steps. I was not particularly pleased with our failure, but my disappointment was not tragic. Tokyo is large, and its surprises are many. Merely turning the first corner would have sufficed! to give the foreigner hungry for impressions ample reparation, even though it were in a small, mean street, so deserted that a native would not have hoped to find in it anything of interest to his white companion. I explained my ideas on the matter to Kumamoto, and he stopped buzzing; nev-