Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/188

parrotlike, mechanical—could reel off the chemical formulæ with the ease and fluency of an ancient professor gray in the craft. He had no idea what the barbarous foreign sounds meant. But they amused him. Also he was proud that his young master understood their meaning—his young master who stood to him for Kiushu and the whole of Nippon.

Summer of the year 1914 found Takagawa still at work under Professor Kreutzer, together with half a dozen German students who like himself were using the Long Vacations for a postgraduate course in special chemical research, and a Prussian officer, a Lieutenant Baron Horst von Eschingen, who on his arrival was introduced by the professor as "a rara avis indeed—pardon me, baron!" with a lop-sided, sardonic grin—"a brass-buttoned, much-gallooned, spurred, and booted East-Elbian Junker who is graciously willing to descend into the forum of sheepskin and learned dust and stinking chemicals, and imbibe knowledge at the feet of as humble a personage as myself."

The German students laughed boisterously, while the baron smiled. For it was well known throughout the empire that Professor Kreutzer was a Liberaler who disliked bureaucratic authority, sneered at the military, and was negligent of imperial favor.

From the first Takagawa felt a strong liking and even kinship for Baron von Eschingen. He understood him. The man, tall, lean, powerful, red-faced, ponderous of gesture and raucous of speech, was nevertheless a samurai like himself. There was no doubt of it. It showed in his stiff punctiliousness and also in his way of learning—rather of accepting teaching. For the professor, who welcomed the opportunity of bullying with impunity a member of the hated ruling