Page:Modern Japanese Stories.pdf/70

 go out any hour of the day or night, you knew right away—sold body and soul to her house. Her chignon was held up in front by wires, and that only made it more obvious how thin her hair was. But her eyelashes were long, her eyes were big and round, and her face was thin and white and somehow a little sad. Her long neck, her sloping shoulders, in a kimono twice as loose at the throat as an ordinary woman would wear it—a fragile, delicate thing, sir, if anyone ever was. She said very little, she was always looking at the floor, she didn’t seem quite used to the work. A shy, retiring girl, you’d have said yourself. I began to feel sorry for her. She didn’t have the look of a person who could stay in the business long.

“Well, that was the beginning of my mistake. You can’t tell about people by their looks, sir, but there haven’t been many you could tell less about than her.”

“That doesn’t sound like you. You let her get the better of you?”

“I believe you could say that I did. I don’t think she meant to deceive me, but she was not one you could shake off. She almost made a murderer of me. It gives me a good fright even now to think how near I came. I was saved because someone else murdered her first. My name was not involved, but the murder of the geisha in Yoshi-chō did get into the papers. You may have seen it, sir. She had me help her move from Shitaya to Yoshi-chō so that she could get rid of the man she had at the time, a wandering Shinnai singer named Shimezō.

“I didn’t know then how much she liked men, how quick she was to move from one to another. She was like a hydrangea, sir, that will change colour half a dozen times in a day.

“Well, when the business was finished, I had nothing to talk to her about and I was in a hurry to go. But she turned those melancholy eyes on me from under the tangled hair and asked me to call her again. She hung on my sleeve and pleaded with me, and there was nothing I could do. It’s the ones who have little to say at the table that turn on you when you have them in bed.