women who had withdrawn into deepest mourning kept constant vigil.
<N 9>
Niou too sent messages, but they were not of a sort that the princesses
could bring themselves to answer.
"My friend gets different treatment," he said, much chagrined. "Why
am I the one they will have nothing to do with?"
He had thought that Uji with the autumn leaves at their best might
feed his poetic urges, but now, regretfully, he had to conclude that the time
was inappropriate. He did send a long letter. The initial period of mourn-
ing was over, he thought, and there must be an end to grief and a pause
in tears. Dispatching his letter on an evening of chilly showers, he had this
to say, among many other things:
"How is it in yon hills where the hart calls out
On such an eve, and dew forms on the _hagi_?
I cannot think how on an evening like this you can be indifferent to
melancholy like mine. Autumn brings an unusual sadness over Onoe
Moor."
"He is right," said Oigimi, urging her sister on. "We do let these notes
<P 810>
pile up, and I'm sure he thinks us very rude and unfeeling. Do get some-
thing off to him."
Enduring the days since her father's death, thought Nakanokimi, had
she once considered taking up brush again? How cruel those days had
been! Her eyes clouded over, and she pushed the inkstone away.
"I cannot do it," she said, weeping quietly. "I have come this far, you
say, and sorrow has to end? No--the very thought of it makes me hate
myself."
Oigimi understood, and urged her no further.
The messenger had left the city at dusk and arrived after dark. How
could they send him back at this hour? They told him he must stay the
night. But no: he was going back, he said, and he hurried to get ready.
Though no more in control of herself than her sister, Oigimi wished
to detain him no longer, and composed a stanza for him to take back:
"A mist of tears blots out this mountain village,
And at its rustic fence, the call of the deer."
Scarcely able to make out the ink, dark in the night, against dark
paper, she wrote with no thought for the niceties. She folded her note into
a plain cover and sent it out to the man.
It was a black, gusty night. He was uneasy as he made his way through
the wilds of Kohata; but Niou did not pick men Who were noted for their
timidity. He spurred his horse on, not allowing it to pause even for the
densest bamboo thickets, and reached Niou's mansion in remarkably quick
time. Seeing how wet he was, Niou gave him a special bounty for his
services.
The hand, a strange one, was more mature than the one he was used
to, and suggestive of a deeper mind. Which princess would be which? he
wondered, gazing and gazing at the note. It was well past time for him to
be in bed.
They could see why he would wish to wait up until an answer came,
whispered the women, but here he was still mooning over it. The sender
must be someone who interested him greatly. There was a touch of
asperity in these remarks, as of people who wished they were in bed them-
selves.
The morning mists were still heavy as he arose to prepare his answer:
"The call of the hart whose mate has strayed away
In the morning mist--are there those whom it leaves unmoved?
My own wails are no less piercing."
"He is likely to be a nuisance if he thinks we understand too well,"
said Oigimi, always withdrawn and cautious in these matters. "Before
Father died we had him to protect us. We did not want to outlive him, but
<P 811>
here we are. He thought of us to the last, and now we must think of him.
The slightest little misstep would hurt him." She would not permit an
answer. Yet she did not take the view of Niou that she did of most men.
His writing and choice of words, even at their most casual, had an elegance
and originality which seemed to her, though she had not had letters from
many men, truly superior. But to answer even such subtle letters was
inappropriate for a lady in her situation. If the world disagreed, she had
no answer: she would live out her life as a rustic spinster, and the world
need not think about her.
Kaoru's letters, on the other hand, were of such an earnest nature that
she answered them freely. He came calling one day, even before the period
of deepest mourning was over. Approaching the lower part of the east
room, where the princesses were still in mourning, he summoned Ben-
nokimi. Wanderers in darkness, they found this sudden burst of light quite
blinding. Their own somber garments were too sharp a contrast. They were
unable to send out an answer.
"Do they have to go on treating me like a stranger? Have they com-
pletely forgotten their father's last wishes? The most ordinary sort of
conversation, now and then, would be such a pleasure. I have not mastered
the methods of suitors and it does not seem at all natural to have to use
a messenger."
"We have lived on, as you see," Oigimi finally managed to send back,
"although I do not remember that anyone asked our wishes. It has been
one long nightmare. I doubt if our wishes matter much more even now.
Everything tells us to stay out of the light, and I must ask you not to ask
the impossible."
"You are being much too conservative. If you were to come marching
gaily out into the sunlight or the moonlight of your own free will, now--
but you are only creating difficulties. Acquaint me with the smallest parti-
cle of what you are thinking and, who knows, I might have a small bit of
comfort to offer."
"How nice," said the women of the house. "Here you are floundering
and helpless, and here he is trying to help you."
Oigimi, despite her protestations, was recovering from her grief. She
remembered his repeated kindnesses (though one might have said that any
good friend would have done as much), and she remembered how, over
the years, he had made his way through the high grasses to this distant
moor. She moved a little nearer. In the gentlest and friendliest way possi-
ble, he told how he had felt for them in their grief, and how he had made
certain promises to their father. There was nothing insistent in his manner,
and she felt neither constraint nor apprehension. Yet he was not, after all,
a real intimate; and now, to have him hear her voice--and her thoughts
were further confused by the memory of how, over the weeks, she had
<P 812>
come to look to him vaguely for support--no, it was still too painful. She
was unable to speak. From what little he had heard he knew that she had
scarcely begun to pull herself from her grief, and pity welled up afresh. It
was a sad figure that he now caught a glimpse of through a gap in the
curtains. It suggested all too poignantly the unrelieved gloom of her days;
and he thought of the figure he had seen faintly in the autumn dawn.
As if to himself, he recited a verse:
"The reeds, so sparse and fragile, have changed their color,
To make me think of sleeves that now are black."
And she replied:
"Upon this sleeve, changed though its color be,
The dew finds refuge; there is no refuge for me.
'The thread from these dark robes of mourning'--" But she could not go
on. Her voice wavered and broke in midsentence, and she withdrew deeper
into the room.
He did not think it proper to call her back. Instead he found himself
talking to the old woman. An improbable substitute, she still had many
sad and affecting things to say about long ago and yesterday. She had been
witness to it all, and he could not dismiss her as just another tiresome old
crone.
"I was a mere boy when Lord Genji died," he said, "and that was my
first real introduction to the sorrows of the world. And then as I grew up
it seemed to me that rank and office and glory meant less than nothing.
And the prince, who had found repose here at Uji--when he was taken
away so suddenly, I thought I had the last word about the futility of things.
I wanted to get away from the world, leave it completely behind. You will
think, perhaps, that I have found a good excuse when I say that your ladies
are pulling me back again. But I do not want to recant a word of that last
promise I made to him. Now there is your story from all those years ago,
pulling in the other direction."
He was in tears, and the old woman was so shaken with sobs that she
could not answer. He was so like his father! Memories of things long
forgotten came back to her, flooding over more recent sorrows; but she was
not up to telling of them.
She was the daughter of Kashiwagi's nurse, and her father, a modera-
tor of the middle rank at his death, was an uncle of the princesses' mother.
Back in the capital after her father's death and some years in the far
provinces, she found that she had grown away from the family of her old
master; and so, answering an inquiry from the Eighth Prince, she had taken
service here. It could not have been said that she was a woman of
<P 813>
unusual accomplishments, and she showed the effects of having been too
much in the service of others; but the prince saw that she was not devoid
of taste and made her a sort of governess to his daughters. Although she
had been with them night and day over the years and had become their
closest friend, this one ancient secret she had kept locked within herself.
Kaoru found cause for doubt and shame even so: she might not have
scattered the news lightheartedly to all comers, but unsolicited stories from
old women were standard the world over; and, since his presence had the
apparent effect of sending the princesses deep into their shells, he feared
that she might have passed it on at least to them. He seemed to find here
another reason for not letting them go.
He no longer wanted to spend the night. He thought, as he got ready
to leave, how the prince had spoken of their last meeting as if it might
indeed be their last, and how, confidently looking forward to the continued
pleasure of the prince's company, he had dismissed the possibility. Was
it not still the same autumn? Not so many days had passed, and the prince
had vanished, no one could say where. Though his had always been the
most austere of houses, quite without the usual conveniences, it had been
clean and appointed in simple but good taste. The ritual utensils were as
they had always been, but now the priests, bustling in and out of the house
and busily screening themselves from one another, announced that the
sacred images would be taken off to the monastery. Kaoru tried to imagine
how it would now be for the princesses, left behind after even such
excitement as the priests had offered was gone.
He interrupted these sad thoughts, on the urgings of an attendant who
pointed out that it was very late, and got up to leave; and a flock of wild
geese flew overhead.
"As I gaze at an autumn sky closed off by mists,
Why must these birds proclaim that the world is fleeting?"
Back in the city, he called on Niou. The conversation moved immedi-
ately to the Uji princesses. The time had come, thought Niou, sending off
a warm
to impossible. He was one of the better-known young gallants, and his
intentions were clearly romantic. Could a note thrust from the underbrush
in which they themselves lurked strike him as other than clumsy and
comically out of date?
They worried and fretted, and their tears had no time to dry. And with
what cruel speed the days went by! They had not thought that their
father's life, fleeting though it must be, was a matter of "yesterday, to-
day." He had taught them an awareness of evanescence, but it had been
as if he were speaking of a general principle. They had not considered the
possibility of outliving him by even hours or minutes. They looked back
over the way they had come. It had, to be sure, had its uncertainties, but
<P 814>
they had traveled it with serenity and without fear or shame or any
thought that such a disaster might one day come. And now the wind was
roaring, strangers were pounding to be admitted. The panic, the terror, the
loneliness, worse each day, were almost beyond endurance.
In this season of snow and hail, the roar of the wind was as always
and everywhere, and yet they felt for the first time that they knew the
sadness of these mountains. Well, the saddest year was over, said some of
their women, refusing to give up hope. Let the New Year bring an end to
it all. The chances were not good, thought the princesses.
Because the prince had gone there for his retreats, an occasional mes-
senger came down from the monastery and, rarely, there was a note from
the abbot himself, making general inquiries about their health. He no
longer had reason to call in person. Day by day the Uji villa was lonelier.
It was the way of the world, but they were sad all the same. Occasionally
one or two of the village rustics would look in on them. Such visits,
beneath their notice while their father was alive, became breaks in the
monotony. Mountain people would bring in firewood and nuts, and the
abbot sent charcoal and other provisions.
"One is saddened to think that the generous flow of gifts may have
ceased forever," said the note that came with them.
It was a timely reminder: their father had made it a practice to send
the abbot cottons and silks against the winter cold. The princesses made
haste to do as well.
Sometimes they would go to the veranda and watch in tears as priests
and acolytes, now appearing among the drifts and now disappearing again,
made their way up towards the monastery. Even though their father had
quite renounced the world, callers would be more numerous if he were still
