Wager in Mid-air 179
“Would you really like to see?” said Chō cheerfully. He stood up, and leant forward on one of the benches. As he put his weight on it, the bench shifted slightly on the gravel.
“I’d better do it here,” he said. He planted his hands firmly on the gound next to the bench and raised himself a couple of times falling back lightly in the same place. Then, keeping both legs closely together, he moved slowly up until he was standing vertically in the air. The soles of his straw sandals faced the surface of the limpid evening sky. His plump arms were slightly bent as they supported his heavy, squat body. As the blood ran to his head, his face became so dark that one could hardly distinguish it from the earth.
Kichikō whistled with admiration. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s pretty damned good!” Quite a few people had gathered from the neighbourhood to watch Chō’s performance and they were all exclaiming their admiration as he held his feet immobile in the air. When he stood up again, a couple of the local errand-boys and a few other enterprising young fellows began to try the trick. After I left, I turned back and saw them all in their light shirts standing upside down by the benches in the gathering dusk.
There was a large steel-works in the neighbourhood. Most of the workers were regular employees, but there was also quite a number of casual labourers who drifted in from the other factories or from the mines and usually left again after a time. One evening as we were gathered by our benches, a small, intelligent looking man joined us. “You’re new around here, aren’t you?” I said.
“That’s right. I’ve just got myself a job as a lathe man in those iron-works over there. I’ve got lodgings near here, too.”
He soon established himself as one of our group. We all found him interesting because he had spent his life moving from place to place and could describe all sorts of things that were unfamiliar to us. Although uneducated, he was a good talker and as he told us of the hardships he had undergone, the
