tion. I did not expect that I would be as I am now, a widow and not a
widow. I had thought that we would be together in this world and that
we would share the same lotus in the next world, where my chief hopes
lay. Then your own life took that extraordinary turn and I was back in a
city I thought I had left forever. I was happy for you and I grieved for him.
And now I learn that we are not to meet again. Everyone thought him a
very eccentric and unsociable man even before he left court, but two young
strong. We had faith in each other. We are still almost within calling
distance of each other, and we are kept apart. Why should it be?" The old
lady's face was twisted with grief.
Her daughter too was weeping bitterly. "What good are promises of
great things? I do not consider myself worthy of any great honors, but it
does seem too sad that he should end his days like a forgotten exile. It is
easy to say that what must be must be. He has gone off into those wild
mountains, and we cannot any of us be sure how long we will live. It all
seems so empty and useless."
They gave the night over to sad talk.
<P 576>
"Genji knows that I was in the southeast quarter last night," said the
lady. "I am afraid he will think it rude and selfish of me to have come away
without leave. I do not care about myself, but I have her to think of." She
returned at dawn.
"And how is the baby?" asked her mother. "Don't you suppose they
might let me see him?"
"Oh, I am sure of it. You'll see him before long. The princess speaks
very fondly of you, and Genji remarked by way of something or other that
if things go well--it was inviting bad luck to make distant predictions, he
said, but if things go well he hopes that you will be here to enjoy them.
I cannot be sure, of course, what he had in mind."
The old lady smiled. "There you have it. For better or for worse, I seem
to have been meant for peculiar things."
The Akashi lady had someone take the letter box to the southeast
quarter.
The crown prince was impatient to have the princess back at court.
There were repeated summonses.
"I quite understand," said Murasaki. "Such a happy event, and he is
being left out of it." She got the baby ready for a quiet visit to his father.
The princess had hoped for a longer stay at Rokujo~. She was seldom
permitted to leave court, and it had been a frightening experience for so
young a lady. She was even prettier for the loss of weight.
"You have been kept so busy," said her mother. "You need a good,
quiet rest."
"But I think he should see her before she begins putting on weight
again," said Genji. "He is sure to like her even better."
In the evening, when Murasaki had returned to her wing of the house
and the crown princess's rooms were quiet, the lady spoke to her daughter
of the box that had come from Akashi. "I should wait until everything is
completely in order, I suppose, and all our hopes have been realized But
life is uncertain and I may die, and I am not of such rank that I can be sure
of a final interview. It seems best to tell you of these trivialities while I still
have my wits about me. You will find that his vows are in a cramped and
ugly hand, I fear, but do please glance over them. Keep them in a drawer
beside you, and when the time seems right go over them again and see that
all the promises are kept. Do not, please, speak of them to anyone who is
not likely to understand. Now that your affairs seem in order, I too should
think of leaving the world. I somehow feel that time is running out. Do
not--and this I most genuinely beg of you--do not ever let anything come
between you and the lady in the east wing. I have come to know what an
extraordinarily gentle and thoughtful person she is and I pray that she will
live a much longer life than l. It was clear from the outset that I would only
do you harm by being with you, and so I let her have you. I worried, of
course, because stepmothers are not famous for their kindness, but I finally
came to see that I had nothing to worry about."
<P 577>
It had been for her a long speech. She had always been very formal
even with her daughter. The girl was in tears. The old man's letter was
indeed difficult. The five or six sheets of furrowed Michinoku paper were
stiff and discolored with age, but they had been freshly scented. She turned
half away. Her hair, now shining with tears, framed a lovely profile.
Genji came in from the Third Princess's rooms. There was no time to
hide the letter, but the lady pulled up a curtain frame and half hid herself.
"And is he awake? I want to rush back for another look at him when
I have been away even a few minutes."
The princess did not answer. Murasaki had taken the child, said her
mother.
"You must not let her monopolize it. She is always carrying it around
and so she is always having to change to dry clothes. She can come here
if she wants to see it."
"You are being unkind, and I do not think you have thought things
through very carefully. I would have no doubts at all about letting her take
a little girl off with her, and we can be much bolder with little boys even
when they are princes. Is it your wise view that the two of them should
be kept apart?"
"I shall defer to your wiser view, though not before protesting your
treatment of me. I have no doubt that I am a pompous old fool, but you
need not make me so aware of that fact by leaving me out of things and
talking behind my back. I have no doubt that you say the most dreadful
things about me."
He pulled aside the curtain and found her leaning against a pillar,
dignified and elegantly dressed. The box was beside her. She had not
wished to attract his attention to it by pushing it out of sight.
"And what is this? Something of profound significance, no doubt. An
endless poem from a lovelorn gentleman, all locked up in a strong box?"
"Again you are being unkind. You seem very young these days, and
sometimes your humor is beyond the reach of the rest of us."
She was smiling, but it was clear that something had saddened her.
He was so openly curious, his head cocked inquiringly to one side, that she
thought an explanation necessary.
"My father has sent a list of prayers and vows from his cave in Akashi.
He thought that I might perhaps ask you to look at them sometime. But
not quite yet, I think, if you don't mind."
"I can only imagine how hard he has worked at his devotions and
what enormous wisdom and grace he must have accumulated over the
years. I sometimes hear of a priest who has made a most awesome name
for himself, and find on looking into the matter a little more closely that
he still smells rather strongly of the world. Erudition is not enough, and
in the matter of sheer dedication and concentration your father is, I am
sure, ahead of all the others, and besides his learning and wisdom he has
a feeling for the gentler things. And through it all he is a very modest man
<P 578>
who makes no great show of his virtues. I thought when I knew him that
he did not live in the same world as the rest of us, and now he is throwing
off the last traces of our world and finding true liberation. How I would
love to go off and have a quiet talk with him!"
"I am told that he has left the seacoast and gone off into mountains
so deep that no birds fly singing overhead."
"And this is his last will and testament? Have you had a letter from
him? And your mother--what does she think of it all?" His voice trembled.
"The bond between husband and wife is often stronger than that between
parent and child. As the years have gone by and I have come to know a
little of the world, I have felt strangely near him. I can only try to imagine
what that stronger bond must be."
The part about the dream, she thought, might interest him. "It is in
an outlandish hand--it might almost be Sanskrit. Perhaps certain passages
might be worth glancing at. I thought I was saying goodbye to it all, but
there are some things, it would seem, that I did not after all leave behind."
"It is a fine hand, still very young and strong." In tears, he lingered
over the description of the dream. "He is a very learned and a very talented
man, and all that has been lacking is a certain political sense, a flair for
making his way ahead in the world. There was a minister in your family,
an extremely earnest and intelligent man, I have always heard. People who
speak of him in such high terms have always asked what misstep may have
been responsible for bringing his line to an end--though of course we have
you, and even though you are a lady we cannot say that his line has come
to a complete end. No doubt your father's piety and devotion are being
rewarded."
The old man had been thought impossibly eccentric and wholly un-
realistic in his ambitions. Genji had been in bad conscience about the
d ole Akashi episode. The crown princess's birth had seemed to tell of a
bond from a former life, but the future had seemed very uncertain all the
same. He now saw how much that one fragile dream had meant to the old
man. It had fed the apparently wild ambition to have Genji as a son-in-
law. Genji had suffered in exile, it now seemed, that the crown princess
might be born. And what sort of vows might the old man have made?
Respectfully, he looked through the contents of the box.
"I have papers that might go with them," he said to his daughter. "I
must show them to you." After a time he continued: "Now you know the
truth, or most of it, I should think. You are not to let what you have learned
make any difference in your relations with the lady in the east wing. A
little kindness or a word of affection from an outsider can sometimes mean
more than all the natural affection between husband and wife or parent
and child. And in her case it has been far more. She took responsibility for
you when she saw that everything was already in perfectly capable hands,
<P 579>
and her affection has not wavered. The wise ones of the world have always
taken it upon themselves to see that we are aware of pretense. There may
be stepmothers, they tell us, who seem kind and well-meaning, but this
is the worst sort of pretense. But even when a stepmother does in fact have
sinister intentions a child can sometimes overcome them by the simple
device of not seeing them, of behaving with quite open and unfeigned
affection. What a horrid person she has been, says the stepmother of
herself, and so she resolves to do better. There are basic and ancient
hostilities, of course, that nothing can overcome, but most disagreements
are the result of no great wrongdoing on either side. All that is needed for
reconciliation is an acceptance of that fact. The most tiresome thing is to
raise a great stir over nothing, to fume and complain when the sensible
thing would have been to look the other way. I cannot pretend that my
observations have been very wide and diverse, but I would give it to you
as my conclusion that there is a level of competence to which most of us
can attain and which is quite high enough. We all have our strong points
--or in any event I have never myself seen anyone with none at all. Yet
when you are looking for someone to fill your whole life there are not
many who seem right. For me there has been the lady in the east wing, the
perfect partner in everything. And it is unfortunately the case that even
a lady of the most unassailable birth can sometimes seem a little wispy and
undependable. "He left her to guess whom he might have in mind.
Speaking now in softer tones, he turned to the Akashi lady. "I know
that your discernment and understanding leave nothing to be desired. The
two of you must be the best of friends as you look after our princess here. "
"You need not even say it. I have been only too aware of her kindness,
and I am always speaking of it. She could so easily have taken my presence
as an affront and had nothing to do with me, but in fact her kindness has
been almost embarrassing. It is she who has covered my inadequacies."
"No very special kindness on her part, I should say. She has wanted
to have someone with the girl, and that is all. You have not chosen to stand
on your rights as a mother and that has helped a great deal. I have nothing
to complain or worry about. It is amazing the damage that obtuseness and
ill temper can do, and I cannot tell you how grateful I am that these
lamentable qualities are alien to both of you.
He went back to the east wing, and the Akashi lady was left to
meditate upon the interview. Yes, modesty and self-effacement had
brought their rewards. As for Murasaki, she seemed to claim more and
more of his attention, and her charms and attainments were such that one
could not be surprised or wish it otherwise. His relations with the Third
Princess seemed quite correct, and yet something was missing. He did not
visit her as frequently as might have been expected--and she was after all
a princess. She and Murasaki were very closely related, though her stand-
ing was perhaps just a little the higher. How sad for her. But ill of this the
Akashi lady kept to herself. She did not gossip and she did not complain.
She knew that she had done very well. Things did not always go ideally
<P 580>
well for princesses even, and she was certainly no princess. Her only
sorrow was for her father, now off in the mountain wilds. As for the old
nun, she put her faith in "the seed that falls upon good ground." She gave
up thoughts of this world for thoughts of the next.
The Third Princess had not been beyond Yu~giri's reach, and her mar-
