ness and irresponsibility. She had been a comfort to them over the days,
an unexpected light in the mountain gloom; and now the light had gone
out.
It was as his fellows had said: the bishop's powers were extraordinary.
The First Princess having recovered, his name inspired yet greater rever-
ence. Since complications can follow an apparent recovery, however, the
services were continued. The bishop remained at court for a time. One still,
rainy night when he was among the clerics on duty, he was summoned for
nocturnal rites. The ladies-in-waiting, exhausted from the strain of these
last few days, were resting. Only a few were in the royal presence. The
empress herself was among them.
"I have thought so all along," she said, "and now I feel more than ever
that we may look to you for assistance in this life and the next."
"I have been informed by the Blessed One that I have not long to live
and that this year and next are particularly dangerous ones for me; and so
I had thought to stay in solemn retreat, concentrating upon the holy name.
Your Majesty's own summons has brought me here."
The empress spoke of how stubborn the malign spirit in possession
of her daughter had been, and how frightening it is when these spirits
insist upon announcing themselves under a variety of names.
"Your Majesty has chosen to speak of malign spirits. I am reminded
of a most unusual happening. Late this spring my mother, a very old lady,
went on a pilgrimage to Hatsuse by way of fulfilling a vow. Taken ill on
the return journey, she stopped over at the late Suzaku emperor's Uji villa.
Evil spirits have a way of occupying large houses that have been neglected
over the years, and I feared that she had chosen an unfortunate spot for
her convalescence. I was right." And he described how they had found
Ukifune.
"What an extraordinary thing!" Quite unnerved, the empress aroused
the women nearby. That Kosaisho~ in whom Kaoru had shown a certain
interest had heard the bishop's story. The others had been asleep. The
bishop, noting the royal perturbation, saw that his narrative had perhaps
been too vivid, and did not go into further details.
"But let me just tell you a little about the young lady. On my way
down from the mountain I looked in on the nuns at Ono. She wept as she
told me how desperately she wanted to leave the world, and I administered
vows. My sister, the widow of the guards captain, seems to adore the girl,
and even to look upon her as a substitute for her own daughter. No doubt
she is berating me for what I have done. The girl is a very pretty, I must
say, a most elegant young lady, and it does seem a pity that she should
be wasted in a nunnery. I have no notion who she might be."
"But why should such a pretty girl have been left in such a place?"
asked Kosaisho~. "Surely you have found out who she is?"
"No, I fear I have not--though she may have told my sister. If she is
<P 1072>
what she appears to be, a girl of good family, then the secret cannot be kept
forever. Not of course that I would wish to be understood as saying that
there are no beauties among girls of the lower classes. Ours is a world in
which even the ogre maiden finds salvation. But if she should prove to
be a person of no background, then the fact that she is so lovely would
mean that she came into this life with a remarkably light burden of sin
from other lives."
The empress remembered having heard of a girl who disappeared in
Uji or thereabouts, in the spring it must have been. Kosaisho~ had had the
sad story from the girl's sister. But of course they could not be sure that
this was the same girl. And the bishop had said that the girl wanted her
very existence to be kept secret, and had hidden herself away like a
fugitive from some terrible enemy. He found it all very strange, the bishop
said again, as if he did not want to elaborate further; he had brought the
matter up only because it had occurred to him that Her Majesty might be
interested. Kosaisho~ thought it best to keep the story to herself.
"It may well be the same girl," said the empress when the bishop had
withdrawn. "Suppose we tell my brother."
But secrecy was important to both of them, it seemed, and no one was
entirely sure of the facts; and Kaoru was such a difficult man to talk to in
any case.
The princess having recovered, the bishop returned to his mountain
retreat. He looked in on the nuns once more. His sister assaulted him with
great vehemence.
"You must be charged with a grave sin, sir, in condemning a mere
child to a nunnery. How can you have done it without asking me first? I
can think of no reasonable explanation for your conduct."
But of course these recriminations came too late.
"Be diligent with your prayers," said the bishop to Ukifune. "Life is
uncertain for old and young alike. It is most proper that you should have
awakened to the facts of this fleeting world."
The girl disliked even such oblique reference to her past.
"Have a new habit made for yourself," he said, taking out gossamers
and damasks and unfigured silks. "I shall see to your needs, I promise you,
while I am here to do it. You need not feel uncertain on that score. It would
seem that, for me, for you, for most of us, bonds with this transient world
are not easy to break so long as we remain preoccupied with its illusory
triumphs and glories. Lose yourself in your devotions, here in the forest
depths, and shame and regret need not be a part of your life. This wordly
existence' is but a thin blade of grass.?" And he added after a moment:
"'Now comes dawn to the gate among the pines,
And lingers yet the moon in the sky above.'"
<P 1073>
His knowledge ranged far beyond the scriptures, and such allusions
gave his homilies a certain grandeur. To the girl it seemed (though she may
not have understood everything) that he was saying exactly what she
wanted to hear.
The wind moaned the whole day through. "The wandering monk off
in the mountains wants to sob aloud on such a day," said the bishop.
She had become one of the wanderers herself, thought the girl, and
it was perhaps for that reason that she was so given to weeping.
Gazing out from the veranda, she saw in the distance a troop of men
in variegated travel robes. Even people on their way up the mountain
tended to pass the nunnery by, though occasionally the nuns would catch
a glimpse of a monk, from perhaps Black Valley. Men in lay dress were
a very rare sight indeed. These proved to be in attendance upon the captain
whom she had so disappointed. He had come with further complaints, now
useless, of course, but the autumn leaves, just at their best, more richly
tinted here at Ono than elsewhere along the range, made him forget them
for a time. What a start it would give a man, he thought, to come upon
a bright, lively girl in such a place.
"I had a bit of spare time, and it seemed meant for your autumn
colors." He gazed admiringly about him. "Yes, your trees do invite one to
spend a night among them--to borrow a night from the past, so to speak."
The bishop's sister, generous as ever with her tears, offered a poem:
"Harsh the winds that come down these mountain slopes.
Our trees are bare. They give not shade or shelter."
He replied:
"Mountain trees, I know, where none awaits me;
And yet I cannot easily pass them by."
"Let me at least see her in her new robes," he said to Sho~sho~, in the
course of lengthy observations about the girl now beyond retrieving. "Al-
low me a single sign that you remember your promises."
Sho~sho~ went inside. Yes, she did indeed want to show the girl off,
slight, delicate, graceful, in a cloak of light gray and a singlet of a quiet
burnt yellow, her rich hair spread about her like a five-plaited fan. The fine
skin was as if it had been freshly and tenderly powdered. More than show
her off: Sho~sho~ would have liked to paint a picture of the little figure
engrossed in prayer, a rosary hung over a curtain rack nearby, a sutra
unrolled before her. Sho~sho~ wanted to weep. How much more extreme was
the effect likely to be upon a man who had come as a suitor! The moment
seemed propitious. She pointed to a small aperture below the latch and
pushed aside curtains and the like that might obstruct his view. He had
not been prepared for such beauty. A flawless creature--and she had
become a nun! The regrets and the sorrow were as if some dreadful mistake
<P 1074>
of his own had brought matters to this pass. He withdrew, unable to hold
back his tears and afraid that he might break into open sobbing. Was it
conceivable that no one would be searching for this lost paragon? He
would have heard if a daughter of one of the great families had disappeared
or turned in bitterness from the world.
An enigma, certainly; but one did not look with aversion upon nuns
when they were great beauties. Indeed, their condition added to the excite-
ment. Concluding that the girl was worth a secret visit from time to time,
he appealed to the bishop's sister.
"I can see that there were reasons for shyness before she had these
new defenses, but I should think that we might now have a quiet talk.
Suggest as much to her, if you will. I have called on you from time to time
because I have not been able to forget the past, and now I have another
reason."
"Yes," said the nun, in tears, "I have worried about her a great deal,
and I would be much happier if I could think that she had a friend,
someone who would promise in all honesty to see her from time to time.
I shall not be here forever, you know."
But who might the girl be? The nun's words suggested that she was
a relative.
"I may not live long myself, and I am not of much consequence in any
case; but I keep a promise when I have made one. Tell me: does no one
come to see her? You must not think that I am holding back because I do
not know who she is--and yet it does somehow stand between us."
"If she had any notion that the world ought to be paying its respects,
then she would have no lack of callers, I am sure. But as you see, she has
quite given up such things. She seems interested in her prayers and nothing
more."
He sent a note in to the girl:
"You have chosen to turn your back upon the world.
It pains me to think that I have been the occasion."
He could not have been warmer or more courteous, said the woman
who brought the note.
"Think of me as a brother," he persisted. "The most trivial sort of
conversation would be such a comfort."
"I fear that your remarks are above me," she sent back, not attempting
a real answer.
Those disastrous events had so turned her against men, it seemed, that
she meant to end her days as little a part of the world as a decaying stump.
The gloom of the last months lifted a little, now that she had had her way.
She would joke with the bishop's sister and they would play Go together.
She turned to her studies of the Good Law with a new dedication, perusing
the Lotus Sutra and numbers of other holy texts. It was winter, the snows
were deep, and there were no visitors; and now if ever was the tedious
time.
<P 1075>
The New Year came, but spring seemed far away. The silence of the
frozen waters seemed to speak with its own sad voice. Though she had
turned away in disgust from the prince who had found her so "daunt-
ing," she thought all the same of the days when she had known him.
At the writing practice that was her chief pleasure in recesses from her
devotions, she set down a poem:
"I gaze at snow that swirls over mountain and moor,
And things long gone have still the power to sadden."
Memories of the past were much with her. It was a year now since
her disappearance. Would there still be those to whom memories of her
were important?
Someone brought the first spring shoots in a coarse rustic basket. The
nun sent them in with a poem:
"Their prize these shoots that break through the mountain snows.
My joy the abundant years you have before you."
And the girl replied:
<P 1076>
"On drifted moors I shall gather early shoots.
May years of your life add to years, as snow upon snow."
How very dear of her to say so--and how much greater the joy if, over
those years, she might live the life she deserved.
A rose plum was blooming near the eaves of the girl's room, its color
and its perfume as they had always been. It was her favorite among all the
flowering trees. It told her that the spring was "the spring of old," perhaps
because she remembered the perfume of which she "knew no surfeit."
Early one morning as she was setting out votive water in preparation
for the matins, she had a nun rather younger and of lower rank than the
others break off a sprig. Petals fell as if in protest, and seemed to send out
a suddenly more compelling fragrance. A poem formed itself in the girl's
mind:
"He whose sleeve brushed mine is here no more,
And yet is here in the scent of the dawning of spring."
A grandson of the old nun who had recently returned from his duties
as governor of Kii came to pay his respects. He was a handsome man,
perhaps thirty, and he seemed very sure of himself.
"And how have you been?" he asked the old lady. "I have not seen
you in two whole years, you will remember."
But she did not seem to understand.
He went to his aunt's rooms. "She has aged terribly, poor thing. She
