only refuge, and her illness must be her excuse. _Then_ they could look
forward to long and companionable years together. This one resolve she
must carry through.
Hoping that it did not seem pompous, she said to her sister: "I begin
to feel that I am almost beyond help. I have heard that a woman sometimes
lives a little longer if she becomes a nun. Might you point this out to the
abbot?"
<P 865>
But the house echoed with the objections of her women. "Absolutely
out of the question. Think of the poor young gentleman who has been so
kind. Think of the effect it would have on him."
They refused even to consider telling him of her wishes.
Talk of his retreat was meanwhile going the rounds at court. Several
courtiers came to make inquiry. His personal staff and certain stewards and
others with whom he was on friendly terms noted that Oigimi's illness
seemed important to him, and commissioned services of their own. Back
he city the festival would be reaching its grand and noisy climax. At
Uji it was a day of wild storms and winds. It would be more clement in
the city, and he could as well have been there. Oigimi was to leave him,
it seemed, still a stranger; but something about the fragile figure made him
incapable of reproving her for what was over and finished. He was lost in
hopeless longing, to see her again, for even a few days, as she once had
been, to pour forth before her the whole turbulent flood of his thoughts.
Darkness came over an already sunless sky.
He whispered to himself:
"In mountains deep, where clouds turn back the sun,
Each day casts darker shadows upon my heart."
He seldom left Oigimi's bedside, and his presence was a comfort to
the women of the house. The wind was so high that Nakanokimi was
having trouble with her curtains. When she withdrew to the inner rooms
the ugly old women followed in some confusion. Kaoru came nearer and
spoke to Oigimi. There were tears in his voice.
"And how are you feeling? I have lost myself in prayers, and I fear
they have done no good at all. It is too much, that you will not even let
me hear your voice. You are not to leave me."
Though barely conscious, she was still careful to hide her face. "There
are many things I would like to say to you, if I could only get back a little
of my strength. But I am afraid--I am sorry--that I must die."
Tears were painfully near. He must not show any sign of despair--
but soon he was sobbing audibly. What store of sins had he brought with
him from previous lives, he wondered, that, loving her so, he had been
rewarded with sorrow and sorrow only, and that he now must say good-
bye? If he could find a flaw in her, he might resign himself to what must
be. She became the more sadly beautiful the longer he gazed at her, and
the more difficult to relinquish. Though her hands and arms were as thin
as shadows, the fair skin was still smooth. The bedclothes had been pushed
aside. In soft white robes, she was so fragile a figure that one might have
taken her for a doll whose voluminous clothes hid the absence of a body.
Her hair, not so thick as to be a nuisance, flowed down over her pillow,
the luster as it had always been. Must such beauty pass, quite leave this
world? The thought was not to be endured. She had not taken care of
herself in her long illness, and yet she was far more beautiful than the
<P 866>
sort of maiden who, not for a moment unaware that someone might be
looking at her, is forever primping and preening. The longer he looked at
her, the greater was the anguish.
"If you leave me, I doubt that I will stay on very long myself. I do not
expect to survive you, and if by some chance I do, I will wander off into
the mountains. The one thing that troubles me is the thought of leaving
your sister behind."
He wanted somehow to coax an answer from her. At the mention of
her sister, she drew aside her sleeve to reveal a little of her face.
"I am sorry that I have been so out of things. I may have seemed rude
in not doing as you have wished. I must die, apparently, and my one hope
has been that you might think of her as you have thought of me. I have
hinted as much, and had persuaded myself that I could go in peace if you
would respect this one wish. My one unsatisfied wish, still tying me to the
world."
"There are people who walk under clouds of their own, and I seem
to be one of them. No one else, absolutely no one else, has stirred a spark
of love in me, and so I have not been able to follow your wishes. I am sorry
now; but please do not worry about your sister."
She was in greater distress as the hours went by. He summoned the
<P 867>
abbot and others and had incantations read by well-known healers. He lost
himself in prayers. Was it to push a man towards renunciation of the world
that the Blessed One sent such afflictions? She seemed to be vanishing,
fading away like a flower. No longer caring what sort of spectacle he might
make, he wanted to shout out his resentment at his own helplessness. Only
half in possession of her senses, Nakanokimi sensed that the last moment
had come. She clung to the corpse until that forceful old woman, among
others, pulled her away. She was only inviting further misfortunes, they
said.
Was it a dream? Kaoru had somehow not accepted the possibility that
things would come to this pass. Turning up the light, he brought it to the
dead lady's face. She lay as if sleeping, her face still hidden by a sleeve,
as beautiful as ever. If only he could go on gazing at her as at the shell of
a locust. The women combed her hair preparatory to having it cut, and the
fragrance that came from it, sad and mysterious, was that of the living girl.
He wanted to find a flaw, something to make her seem merely ordinary.
If the Blessed One meant by all this to bring renunciation and resignation,
then let him present something repellent, to drive away the regrets. So he
prayed; but no relief was forthcoming. Well, he said presently, nothing
was left but to commit the body to flames, and so he set about the sad duty
of making the funeral arrangements. He walked unsteadily beside the
body, scarcely feeling the ground beneath his feet. In a daze, he made his
way back to the house. Even the last rites had been faltering, insubstantial;
very little smoke had risen from the pyre.
The house was overrun with mourners, and the worst of the loneliness
was postponed for a time. Nakanokimi, quite aware of what people would
be saying about her predicament, was so sunk in her own sad thoughts that
she seemed hardly more alive than her sister. A great many messages of
condolence came from Niou; but she had made what now seemed to her
a marriage with a curse upon it, Oigimi having gone to her grave unable
to forgive him.
Kaoru thought that this ultimate knowledge of evanescence might
persuade him to leave the world; but he had his mother's views in the
matter to consider, and there was the sad situation in which Nakanokimi
had been left. His mind was in a turmoil. Perhaps it would have been better
if he had done as Oigimi had suggested, taken her sister in her place. Try
though he might to think of them as one, he had not been able to transfer
his affections. Rather than invite the despair into which he now was
plunged, might he not better have taken Nakanokimi, and sought in his
visits to Uji consolation for unrequited love? He did not venture even a
brief visit to the city, and his ties with the world were as good as severed.
Since it was evident that this had been no ordinary attachment, messages
of condolence came in a steady flow, from the palace and from lesser
houses.
And so aimless days sped by. On each of the weekly memorial days
he had services conducted with unusual solemnity. There was a limit to
<P 868>
what an outsider could do, however. He would catch glimpses of the black
to which her closest attendants had changed, and regret that custom for-
bade his changing to black himself.
"Uselessly they fall, these blood-red tears,
For they do not dye these robes in black remembrance."
Clean, trim, elegant, he sat gazing out at the garden. His lavender robe
had a sheen as of melting ice, and the flow of his tears gave an added luster.
The women looked at him admiringly even as they lamented. Their grief
over this terrible event aside, they hated to think that the time had come
when he must again be a stranger. A heavy burden it was that the fates
had asked them to bear! Such a kind gentleman--and neither of their ladies
would have him.
"It would be a great comfort," he said to Nakanokimi, "if I might talk
freely with you, and think of you as a sort of keepsake. Please do not send
me away."
But he was asking too much. She had been born for sorrow and
humiliation, of that she was sure. He had always thought her a livelier girl
than her sister; but for someone in search of delicacy and gentleness, the
older girl had had the stronger appeal.
<P 869>
He spent the whole of one dark, snowy day gazing out upon that
dreariest of months--as people will have it--the last of the year. In the
evening the moon rose in a clear sky. He went to the veranda and lifted
the blinds. The vesper bells came faintly from the monastery. So another
day had passed, he said to himself as he listened.
"My heart goes after yon retreating moon.
No home, this world, in which to dwell forever."
A wind having come up, he went to lower the shutters. In brilliant
moonlight, the mountains were reflected in the icy river as in a mirror.
However much care might go into his new house, he would be unable to
fabricate a scene so lovely. Come back for but a moment, he whispered,
and enjoy it with me.
"Deep in the Snowy Mountains would I vanish,
In search of the brew that is death for those who love."
If, like the Lad of the Snowy Mountains, he had an accommodating
monster of whom he might inquire about a stanza, he would have an
excuse to fling himself away. A less than perfectly enlightened heart our
young sage had!
Seemingly unshakable in his serenity, he would talk with the women.
The younger ones quite fell in love with him, and the older ones sighed
again to think what a hapless lady they had served.
"She lost her grip on herself because she took the prince's odd behav-
ior too seriously. The whole world was laughing at them, she was sure; but
she kept it all to herself. She did not want our other lady to know how
worried she was. With everything shut up inside her she quietly stopped
eating, and that was that. You couldn't always be sure what she was
thinking, but there wasn't much that she missed. The beginning of it all
was her father, and then there was her sister--she was sure she had done
exactly what he had told her not to do." They would recount little inci-
dents, and at the end of each interview the household was abandoned to
tears.
It had been his fault, thought Kaoru, wishing he had it all to do over
again. He lost himself in prayers and turned away from the world.
Suddenly, deep in a sleepless night of freezing snow, there was a loud
shouting outside and a neighing of horses. The reverend priests started up
in surprise, wondering who could have made his way through such gales
in the dead of night. It was Niou, soaking wet, in bedraggled travel dress.
For Kaoru the pounding on the door had a familiar sound, and he withdrew
<P 870>
to seclusion in one of the inner apartments. Though the mourning was not
yet over, an impatient Niou had given a whole night over to his battle with
the snows.
The visit should have softened Nakanokimi's resentment at the days
of neglect, but she had no wish to receive him. What he had done to her
sister seemed inexcusable. He had let her die without a hint of reforming
his ways. Perhaps he meant to change now, but it was too late. Her women
were determined, however, that she do the sensible thing, and finally she
let him address her through curtains. He was profuse with his apologies.
She listened quietly, and he sensed that she was still in a daze. Was it
possible that she might go the way of her sister? Whatever punishment he
might have to face later, he would stay the night.
"You don't of course mean to leave me sitting here?"
But she turned away. "Perhaps when I am a little more myself."
Guessing what had happened, Kaoru sent a woman with a secret word
of advice." You have every right to be angry. From the beginning he
behaved in a manner one can only describe as heartless. Scold him if you
wish, but not so emphatically as to make him angry in his turn. He is not
used to being crossed, and he is easily hurt."
These sage words only made things worse. She could think of nothing
to say.
"You are being rather unpleasant, I must say, "sighed Niou. "Have
you quite forgotten my promises?"
A fierce gale came up in the night. Though he had no one to blame
but himself, he was very unhappy. She finally relented and spoke to him,
though still through curtains. Calling upon the thousand gods to be his
witnesses, he promised that he would be at her side forever. She was not
greatly comforted--a most remarkable glibness, she thought. But though
his thoughtlessness over the weeks might have seemed too much to excuse,
he was with her now, and irresistible. Her bitter resolutions wavering, she
said in a whisper:
"Unsure has been the road over which I look back.
What can I know of the road that lies ahead?"
It was not a very inviting or reassuring sort of poem.
"The road ahead must needs be short, you tell me?
Then let us presume upon it while we may.
Life is fleeting, you know, and so is everything in it. Do not make things
