18

The young page, brother of the lady of the locust shell, came to Nijo~ from time to time, but Genji no longer sent messages for his sister. She was sorry that he seemed angry with her and sorry to hear of his illness. The prospect of accompanying her husband to his distant province was a dreary one. She sent off a note to see whether Genji had forgotten her.

“They tell me you have not been well.

“Time goes by, you ask not why I ask not.

Think if you will how lonely a life is mine.

“I might make reference to Masuda Pond.” +

This was a surprise; and indeed he had not forgotten her. The uncer-tain hand in which he set down his reply had its own beauty.

“Who, I wonder, lives the more aimless life.

“Hollow though it was, the shell of the locust

Gave me strength to face a gloomy world.

“But only precariously.”

So he still remembered “the shell of the locust.” She was sad and at the same time amused. It was good that they could correspond without rancor. She wished no further intimacy, and she did not want him to despise her.

As for the other, her stepdaughter, Genji heard that she had married a guards lieutenant. He thought it a strange marriage and he felt a certain pity for the lieutenant. Curious to know something of her feelings, he sent a note by his young messenger.

“Did you know that thoughts of you had brought me to the point of expiring?

“I bound them loosely, the reeds beneath the eaves,#

And reprove them now for having come undone.”

He attached it to a long reed.

The boy was to deliver it in secret, he said. But he thought that the lieutenant would be forgiving if he were to see it, for he would guess who the sender was. One may detect here a note of self-satisfaction.

Her husband was away. She was confused, but delighted that he should have remembered her. She sent off in reply a poem the only excuse for which was the alacrity with which it was composed:

“The wind brings words, all softly, to the reed,

And the under leaves are nipped again by the frost.”

It might have been cleverer and in better taste not to have disguised the clumsy handwriting. He thought of the face he had seen by lamplight. He could forget neither of them, the governor's wife, seated so primly before him, or the younger woman, chattering on so contentedly, without the smallest suggestion of reserve. The stirrings of a susceptible heart suggested that he still had important lessons to learn.