Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/187

made him appreciate and admire the student's Asiatic tenacity of purpose, his steel-riveted thoroughness and efficiency which made it impossible for him to forget a fact which he had once mastered and stored away. Perhaps his method of learning was parrotlike. Perhaps his memory was mechanical, automatic, the fruit of his early schooling when, with the mountain wind blowing icy through the flimsy shoji walls, he had knelt in front of Komoto and had laboriously learned by heart long passages from the Yuen-Chioh and the erudite commentaries of Lao-tse. Whatever the basic cause, whatever his method, the result was peculiar—and startling to his fellow students. Given a certain discussion, a certain argument which sent his German class-mates scuttling for library and reference books, the young samurai seemed to turn on a special spigot in his brain and give forth the desired information like a sparkling stream.

"Sie sind ja so'n echter Wunderknabe, Sie Miniatur gelbe Gefahr!" (for that's what he called him: a "miniature yellow peril") the professor would exclaim; and he would give him a resounding slap on the back which would cause the little wizened body to shake and smart.

But, sensing the kindliness beneath rough words and rougher gesture, Takagawa would bow old-fashionedly, with his palms touching his knees, and suck in his breath noisily.

He was learning—learning honorably; and at night, when he returned to his rooms in the pension, he would go over the garnered wisdom of the day together with Kaguchi, his old servant. Word for word he would repeat to him what he had learned, until the latter, whose brain was as that of his master—persistent,