Kakemono

Rain!

And the world lies like an impressionist picture washed in with white. Shut up in my miniature hansom, with the apron up to my eyes and the roof down to the brim of my hat, it passes before me in misty unreality. But for an occasional bob of the black mushroom hat of my kurumaya as he pulls the ’ricksha out of a hole, I am drawn by an invisible force.

It has rained for a week, and the streets are bogs, the puddles—ponds. The wind drives the rain with a murmured “ssssh” against the tarpaulin sides of the kuruma, but in front there is no rain, only an intangible, shadowy whiteness between the world and me.

The green bank of the moat, the dark water, even the fir-trees whose green arms stretch down long fingers into the water, are uncertain and swollen as the world to sleepy eyes. Black kuruma splash past me, with the large glass eye in their aprons shadowly suggestive. The coolie in his straw raincoat, just a walking sheaf finishing in two bare brown legs, plods on, a golden figure against the grey. A long string of carts pass by me, long narrow carts drawn by long thin horses; cart and horses hidden under a structure of yellow oil-paper, until they look like huge golden bats or mythical dragons. And with his back to the head of the horse, a halter in one hand, a yellow paper umbrella in the other, his bare brown legs lost in the mud, the walking sheaf moves on.

All the world to-day is four inches higher than its wont; and the stilt-like gheta seem an uncertain footing for their owners. Bare to the thigh is the kurumaya, and his brown legs look like the statues of Greece sunned into life, so perfect are their outlines.

Down the vanishing road are two pale yellow umbrellas, gold on grey, and I marvel at the beauty of the colour. Suddenly round the bend of the street comes a third—foreign, black—and in a flash the beauty goes; a muddy road in the drenching rain alone is left, cold, prosaic. And I shiver in my kuruma.