16

The end of the year approached. Tayu~ came to see him in his palace apartments. He was on easy terms with her, since he did not take her very seriously, and they would joke with each other as she performed such services as trimming his hair. She would visit him without summons when there was something she wished to say.

“It is so very odd that I have been wondering what to do.” She was smiling.

“What is odd? You must not keep secrets from me.”

“The last thing I would do. You must sometimes think I forget myself, pouring out all my woes. But this is rather difficult.” Her manner suggested that it was very difficult indeed.

“You are always so shy.”

“A letter has come from the Hitachi princess.” She took it out.

“The last thing you should keep from me.”

She was fidgeting. The letter was on thick Michinoku paper* and nothing about it suggested feminine elegance except the scent that had been heavily burned into it. But the hand was very good.

“Always, always my sleeve is wet like these.

Wet because you are so very cold.”

He was puzzled. “Wet like what?”

Tayu~ was pushing a clumsy old hamper toward him. The cloth in which it had come was spread beneath it.

“I simply couldn't show it to you. But she sent it especially for you to wear on New Year's Day, and I couldn't bring myself to send it back, she would have been so hurt. I could have kept it to myself, I suppose, but that didn't seem right either, when she sent it especially for you. So I thought maybe after I had shown it to you—”

“I would have been very sorry if you had not. It is the perfect gift for someone like me, with 'no one to help me dry my tear-drenched pi110w.'“+

He said no more.

It was a remarkable effort at poetry. She would have worked and slaved over it, with no one to help her. The nurse's daughter would no doubt, had she been present, have suggested revisions. The princess did not have the advice of a learned poetry master. Silence, alas, might have been more successful. He smiled at the thought of the princess at work on her poem, putting all of herself into it. This too, he concluded, must be held to fall within the bounds of the admirable. Tayu~ was crimson.

In the hamper were a pink singlet, of an old-fashioned cut and re-markably lusterless, and an informal court robe of a deep red lined with the same color. Every stitch and line seemed to insist on a peculiar lack of distinction. Alas once more—he could not possibly wear them. As if to amuse himself he jotted down something beside the princess's poem. Tayu~ read over his shoulder:

“Red is not, I fear, my favorite color.

Then why did I let the safflower stain my sleeve? A blossom of the deepest hue, and yet—” *

The safflower must signify something, thought Tayu~—and she thought of a profile she had from time to time seen in the moonlight.+ How very wicked of him, and how sad for the princess!

“This robe of pink, but new to the dyer's hand:

Do not soil it, please, beyond redemption. That would be very sad.”

She turned such verses easily, as if speaking to herself. There was nothing especially distinguished about them. Yet it would help, he thought again and again, if the princess were capable of even such an ordinary exchange. He did not wish at all to defame a princess.

Several women came in.

“Suppose we get this out of the way,” he said. “It is not the sort of thing just anyone would give.”

Why had she shown it to him? Tayu~ asked herself, withdrawing in great embarrassment. He must think her as inept as the princess.

In the palace the next day Genji looked in upon Tayu~, who had been with the emperor.

“Here. My answer to the note yesterday. It has taken a great deal out of me.”

The other women looked on with curiosity.

“I give up the red maid of Mikasa,” he hummed as he went out, “even as the plum its color.” *

Tayu~ was much amused.

“Why was he smiling all to himself?” asked one of her fellows.

“It was nothing,” she replied. “I rather think he saw a nose which on frosty mornings shows a fondness for red. Those bits of verse were, well, unkind.”

“But we have not one red nose among us. It might be different if Sakon or Higo were here.” Still uncomprehending, they discussed the various possibilities.

His note was delivered to the safflower princess, whose women gath-ered to admire it.

“Layer on layer, the nights when I do not see you.

And now these garments—layers yet thicker between us?”

It was the more pleasing for being in a casual hand on plain white paper.

On New Year's Eve, Tayu~ returned the hamper filled with clothes which someone had readied for Genji himself, among them singlets of delicately figured lavender and a sort of saffron. It did not occur to the old women that Genji might not have found the princess's gift to his taste. Such a rich red, that one court robe, not at all inferior to these, fine though they might be.+

“And the poems: our lady's was honest and to the point. His is merely clever.”

Since her poem had been the result of such intense labor, the princess copied it out and put it away in a drawer.