Cooking, Bathing, Eating,
And, Worst Of All, Perpetual Drawing Water From A Well With A
Creaking Hoisting Apparatus, Are Going On From 4.30 In The Morning
Till 11.30 At Night, And On Both Evenings Noisy Mirth, Of Alcoholic
Inspiration, And Dissonant Performances By Geishas Have Added To
The Dim
In all places lately Hai, "yes," has been pronounced He, Chi, Na,
Ne, to Ito's great contempt.
It sounds like an expletive or
interjection rather than a response, and seems used often as a sign
of respect or attention only. Often it is loud and shrill, then
guttural, at times little more than a sigh. In these yadoyas every
sound is audible, and I hear low rumbling of mingled voices, and
above all the sharp Hai, Hai of the tea-house girls in full chorus
from every quarter of the house. The habit of saying it is so
strong that a man roused out of sleep jumps up with Hai, Hai, and
often, when I speak to Ito in English, a stupid Hebe sitting by
answers Hai.
I don't want to convey a false impression of the noise here. It
would be at least three times as great were I in equally close
proximity to a large hotel kitchen in England, with fifty Britons
only separated from me by paper partitions. I had not been long in
bed on Saturday night when I was awoke by Ito bringing in an old
hen which he said he could stew till it was tender, and I fell
asleep again with its dying squeak in my ears, to be awoke a second
time by two policemen wanting for some occult reason to see my
passport, and a third time by two men with lanterns scrambling and
fumbling about the room for the strings of a mosquito net, which
they wanted for another traveller.
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