<P 691>
had concluded." She was weeping. "So I had concluded before I discovered
what sort of man he is."
A gently, forlornly elegant little figure, the princess could only weep
with her.
"Certainly there is nothing wrong with your appearance," continued
the mother, gazing at her, "nothing that singles you out as remarkably
inferior. What can you have done in other lives that you should have no
happiness in this one?"
She was suddenly in very great pain. Malevolent spirits have a way
of seizing upon a crisis. She fell into a coma and was growing colder by
the moment. The priests offered the most urgent supplications. For her
favorite priest there was a special urgency. He had compromised his vows,
and it would be a cruel defeat to take down his altar and, having accom-
plished nothing at all, wander back up the mountain. Surely he deserved
better treatment at the hands of the Blessed One.
The princess was beside herself.
In the midst of all the confusion a letter arrived from Yu~giri. The old
lady, now dimly aware of what was happening, took it as evidence that
another night would pass without a visit. Worse and worse--nothing now
<P 692 >
could keep her daughter from being paraded before the world as an utter
simpleton. And she herself--what could have persuaded her to write so
damaging a letter?
These were her last thoughts. She was no more.
I need not describe the grief and desolation she left behind. She had
been ill much of the time, victim of a malign possession, and more than
once they had thought that she was dying. It had been assumed that this
was another such seizure, and the priests had been feverishly at work. But
it was soon apparent that the end had come. The princess clung to her,
longing to go wherever she had gone.
"We must accept the inevitable, my lady." The women offered the
usual platitudes. "Of course you are sad, but she has gone the way from
which there is no returning. However much you may wish to go with her,
it is not possible." They pulled her from her mother's side. "You are
inviting bad luck, and your dear mother will have much to reprove you
for. Do please come with us."
But the girl seemed to waste away before their eyes, and to understand
nothing of what was said to her.
The altar was taken down. Two and three at a time, the priests were
departing. Intimates of the family remained, as might have been expected,
but everything was over, and the house was still and lonely. Messages of
condolence were already coming in, for the news had spread swiftly. A
dazed Yu~giri was among the first to send condolences. There were mes-
sages from Genji and To~ no Chu~jo~ and many others.
There was an especially touching letter from the princess's father, the
Suzaku emperor. The princess forced herself to read it.
"I had known of her illness for some time, but I had known too, of
course, that she had long been in bad health. I see now that I was not as
worried as I should have been. But that is over and finished, and what
concerns us now is your own state of mind. Please be sure, if it is any
comfort, that I am grieving with you, and please try to take some comfort
from the thought that everything must pass."
Through her tears, she set down an answer.
The old lady had left instructions that the funeral take place that same
day. Her nephew, the governor of Yamato, had charge of the arrange-
ments. The princess asked for a last silent interview with her mother, but
of course it accomplished nothing. The arrangements were soon in order.
At the worst possible moment Yu~giri appeared.
"I must go to Ono today," he had said as he left Sanjo~. "If I don't go
today I don't know when I can go. The next few days are bad." The image
of the grieving princess was before his eyes.
"Please, my lord," said the women. "You should not seem to be in
such a hurry."
But he insisted.
The journey to Ono was a long one and a house of grief awaited him
at the end of it. Gloomy screens and awnings kept the funeral itself from
<P 693>
his view. He was shown to the princess's room, where the governor of
Yamato, in tears, thanked him for his visit. Leaning against a corner railing,
he asked that one or two of the princess's women be summoned. They
were none of them in a state to receive him, but Kosho~sho~ did presently
come in. Though he was not an emotional man, what he had seen of the
house and its occupants so moved him that he was at first unable to speak.
Generalizations about the evanescence of things were suddenly particular
and immediate.
"I had allowed myself to be persuaded that she was recovering," he
said, controlling himself with difficulty. "It always takes time to awaken,
as they say, and this has been so sudden."
The cause of her mother's worst torments, thought the princess, was
here before her. She knew about inevitability and all that sort of thing. But
how cruel they were, the ties that bound her to him! She could not bring
herself to send out an answer.
"And what may we tell him you have said, my lady? He is an impor-
tant man and he has come running all this distance to see you. Do not,
please, make it seem that you are unaware of his kindness."
"Imagine how I feel and say what seems appropriate. I cannot think
of anything myself." And she went to bed.
Her women quite understood. "Poor lady, she is half dead herself,"
said one of them. "I have told her that you are here."
"There is nothing more I can say. I shall come again when I am a little
more in control of myself and when your lady is somewhat more com-
posed. But why did it happen so suddenly?"
With many pauses and with some understatement, Kosho~sho~ de-
scribed the old lady's worries. "I fear I will seem to be accusing you of
something, my lord. This dreadful business has left us somewhat dis-
traught, and it may be that I have been guilty of inaccuracies. My lady
seems only barely alive, but these things too must end, and when she is
a little more herself perhaps I can describe things a little more clearly and
listen more carefully to whatever you may wish to say to her."
She did not seem to be exaggerating her grief. There was little more
to be said.
"Yes, we all wandering in pitch-blackness. Please do try to comfort
her, and if there should be the briefest answer--"
He did not want to go, but it was a delicate situation and he had his
dignity to consider. It had not occurred to him that the funeral would take
place this very evening. Though the arrangements had been hurried, they
did not seem in any way inadequate. He left various instructions with the
people from his manors and started for the city. Ceremonies which because
of the haste might have been almost perfunctory were both grand and well
attended.
"Extraordinarily kind of Your Lordship," said the governor of
Yamato.
<P 694>
And so it was all over, and the princess was quite alone. She was
convulsed with grief, but of course nothing was to be done. It went against
nature, thought the women, to become so strongly attached to anyone,
even a mother.
"You cannot stay here by yourself," insisted the governor, busy with
the last details. "If you are ever to find comfort it must be back in the city."
But the princess insisted that she would live out her days at Ono, with
the mountain mists to remember her mother by. The priests who were to
preside over the mourning had put up temporary cells in the east rooms
and galleries and certain of the east outbuildings. One hardly knew that
they were still on the premises. The last traces of color had been stripped
from the princess's rooms.
The days went by, though she was scarcely able to distinguish day
from night, and it was the Ninth Month.
Harsh winds came down from the mountains, the trees were stripped
bare, and it was the melancholy time of the year. The princess's spirits
were as black as the skies. She wanted to die, but not even that was
permitted her. The gloom was general, though Yu~giri's gifts brightened
the lives of the priests a little. There were daily messages for the princess
which combined the most eloquent condolences with chidings for her
aloofness. She refused to look at them. She was still living her mother's
last days. It was as if her mother, wasting away, were still here beside her,
seeing everything in the worst light, convinced that no other interpretation
was possible. The resentment would most certainly be an obstacle on the
way into the next world. The briefest of his messages repelled her and
brought on new floods of tears. The women could not think what to do
for her.
Yu~giri at first attributed the silence to grief. But too much time went
by and he was becoming resentful. Grief must end, after all. She was being
unkind, obtuse even, and indeed he was coming to think it a rather childish
performance. If his notes had been full of flowers and butterflies and all
the other fripperies, she would have been right to ignore them; but he
made it quite clear that he felt her grief as his own.
He remembered his grandmother's death. It had seemed to him that
To~ no Chu~jo~ was inadequately grief-stricken and too easily philosophical,
and that the memorial services were more for the public than for the dead
lady herself. He had been deeply grateful to Genji, on the other hand, for
going beyond what was asked of an outsider, and he had felt very close
to Kashiwagi. Of a quiet, meditative nature, Kashiwagi had seemed the
most lovable of them all, the most sensitive to the sorrows of things. And
so he felt very keenly for the bereaved princess.
What did it all mean? Kumoinokari was asking. He had not seemed
on such very good terms with the dead lady, nor had their correspondence
been of the most flourishing.
<P 695>
One evening as he lay gazing up at the sky she sent one of her little
boys with a note on a rather ordinary bit of paper.
"Which emotion demands my sympathy,
Grief for the one or longing for the other?
"The uncertainty is most trying."
He smiled. She had a lively imagination, though he did not think the
reference to the princess's mother in very good taste. Coolly he dashed off
a reply.
"I do not know the answer to your question.
The dew does not rest long upon the leaves.
"My feelings are for the world in general."
She wished he might be a little more communicative. It was not the
fleeting dews that worried her.
He set off for Ono once more. He had thought to wait until the
mourning was over but could no longer contain his impatience. The prin-
cess's reputation was beyond saving in any event, and he might as well do
what other men did and have his way with her. He did not try very hard
to persuade Kumoinokari that her suspicions were groundless. For all the
princess's determination to be unfriendly, he had a weapon to use against
her, the old lady's reproof at his failure to come visiting that second
evening.
It was the middle of the Ninth Month, a time when not even the most
insensitive of men can be unaware of the mountain colors. The autumn
winds tore at the trees and the leaves of the vines seemed fearful of being
left behind. Someone far away was reading a sutra, and someone was
invoking the holy name, and for the rest Ono seemed deserted. Indifferent
to the clappers meant to frighten them from the harvests, the deer that
sought shelter by the garden fences were somber spots among the hues of
autumn. A stag bayed plaintively, and the roar of a waterfall was as if
meant to break in upon sad thoughts. Insect songs, less insistent, among
the brown grasses, seemed to say that they must go but did not know
where. Gentians peered from the grasses, heavy with dew, as if they alone
might be permitted to stay on. The sights and sounds of autumn, ordinary
enough, but recast by the occasion and the place into a melancholy scarcely
to be borne.
In casual court robes, pleasantly soft, and a crimson singlet upon
which the fulling blocks had beaten a delicate pattern, he stood for a time
at the corner railing. The light of the setting sun, almost as if directed upon
him alone, was so bright that he raised a fan to his eyes, and the careless
grace would have made the women envious had he been one of their
number. But alas, they could not have imitated it. He smiled, so handsome
a smile that it must bring comfort to the cruelest grief, and asked for
Kosho~sho~.
<P 696>
"Come closer please" Though she was already very near, he sensed
that there were others behind the blinds "I would expect at least you to
be a little friendlier. The mists are thick enough to hide you if you are
afraid of being seen" He glanced up at them though not as if reposing
great faith in them. "Do please come out."
She gathered her skirts and took a place behind a curtain of mourning
which she had set out just beyond the blinds. A younger sister of the
governor of Yamato, she had been taken in by her aunt and reared with
the Second Princess, almost as a sister. She had therefore put on the most
somber of mourning robes.
He was soon in tears. "To a grief that refuses to go away is added a
sense of injury quite beyond describing, enough to take all the meaning
from life. Everywhere I look I encounter expressions of amazement that it
should be so." He spoke too of the mother's last letter.
Kosho~sho~ was sobbing. "When you did not write she withdrew into
her thoughts as if she did not mean to come out again. She seemed to go
