But presently, studying his
face, they cried in a loud voice, "Nix! Alles!" and left him, as one not
desiring polish.
"German, that chap," drawled the captain of the Tsuen-Chau, lazily,
noticing the uncertain military walk of the young man's clumsy legs, his
uncouth clothes, his pale visage winged by blushing ears of coral pink.
"The Eitel's in, then," replied Cesare. And they let the young Teuton
vanish in the vision of mixed lives.
Down the lane of music and chatter and drink he passed slowly, like a
man just wakened,--assailed by Oriental noise and smells, jostled by the
races of all latitudes and longitudes, surrounded and solitary, unheeded
and self-conscious. With a villager's awkwardness among crowds, he made
his way to a German shipping-office.
"Dispatches for Rudolph Hackh?" he inquired, twisting up his blond
moustache, and trying to look insolent and peremptory, like an
employer of men.
"There are none, sir," answered an amiable clerk, not at all impressed.
Abashed once more in the polyglot street, still daunted by his first
plunge into the foreign and the strange, he retraced his path, threading
shyly toward the Quai Francois Joseph.
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