2

They all followed, dressed very much alike and almost indistinguishable one from another in the twilight.

“Suppose you come out toward the veranda just a little,” he said, going in and addressing her in intimate tones not likely to be overheard. “Ko~bai and several of his brothers have come with me. They are all mad for introductions, and our staid and opprobrious Yu~giri does nothing at all for them. Even a very undistinguished young lady, you know, can expect suitors while she is still under her father's wing. Somehow everything in this house gets wildly blown up and exaggerated. We have not had young ladies to arouse their interest, and in my boredom I have thought it might be fun to see you at work on them. You have not disappointed me.”

He had avoided showy plantings in this northeast quarter, but the choicest of wild carnations caught the evening light beneath low, elegant Chinese and Japanese fences. The young men seemed very eager to step down and pluck them (and the flower within as well).

“They are knowledgeable, well-bred young men, all of them. They of course have their various ways. That is as it should be, and I find nothing to take serious exception to. Kashiwagi is perhaps the most serious of them. Indeed he sometimes makes me feel a little uncomfortable. Has he written to you? You must not be unkind to him.”

Yu~giri stood out even in so fine an assembly.

“I cannot think why my friend the minister dislikes him. Does he have such a high regard for his own proud name that he looks down on us offshoots of the royal family?”

“'Come and be my bridegroom,'* everyone is saying. Or so I am told.”

“I do not ask that he be invited in for a banquet, only that he be admitted inside. A clean and innocent attachment is being frustrated, and that I do not like. Is it that the boy does not yet amount to much? That is a problem which he can safely leave to me.”

These matters seemed to complicate the girl's life yet further. When, she wondered, would she be permitted to meet her own father?

There was no moon. Lamps were brought in.

“Not so close, please. Why don't we have flares down in the garden?”

Taking out a Japanese koto and finding it satisfactorily tuned, he plucked out a few notes. The tone was splendid.

“If you have disappointed me at all, it has been because you have shown so little interest in music. Might I recommend the Japanese koto, for instance? It is a surprisingly bright and up-to-date sort of instrument when you play it with no nonsense and let it join the crickets in the cool moonlight of an autumn evening. For some reason it does not always seem entirely at home in a formal concert, but it goes very well with other instruments even so. A crude domestic product if you will—but just see how cleverly it is put together. It is for ladies who do not set much stock by foreign things. I warmly recommend it if you think you might want to begin taking music lessons. You must always look for new ways to make it go with other instruments. The basic techniques may seem simple, and indeed they are; but to put them to really good use is another matter. There is no better hand in the whole court than your father, the minister. He has only to give it the slightest muted pluck* and there they all are, the grand, high tones of all the imported kotos.”

Already somewhat familiar with the instrument, she was eager to hear more. “Do you suppose we might have a concert here sometime and ask him to join us? It is the instrument all the country people play, and I had thought that there was not a great deal to it.” She did seem to be most eager. “You are right, of course. It is very different in the hands of someone who knows what he is doing.”

“It is also called the eastern koto, you know, and that brings up thoughts of the wild frontier. But when there is a concert at the palace the Japanese koto is always the first instrument His Majesty sends for. I do not know much about other countries, but in our own it must be called the grandfather of all the instruments, and you could not possibly find a better teacher than the minister. We see him here from time to time, but the trouble is that he is rather shy about playing. The really good ones always are. But you will have your chance to hear him one of these days.”

He played a few strains, the tone richer and cleaner than anything she had heard before. She wondered how her father could possibly be a better musician, and she longed more than ever to meet him, and to see him thus at home with his koto.

“Soft as the reed pillow,” he sang, very gently, “the waves of the river Nuki.” + He smiled as he came to the passage about the uncooperative parent. There was wonderful delicacy in the muted chord* with which he brought it to a conclusion.

“Now we must hear from you. In artistic matters modesty is not a virtue. I have, it is true, heard of ladies who keep 'I Long for Him'+ to themselves, but in other matters openness never seems brazen.”

But she had had lessons in the remote countryside from an old woman who said, though she gave no details, that she had been born in the capital and had royal blood in her veins. Such credentials did not inspire confidence, and the girl refused to touch the instrument.

“No, let me hear just a little more, and perhaps I will be clever enough to imitate it.” And so the japanese koto brought her close to him when other devices had failed. “Is it the wind that accounts for that extraordinary tone?” He thought her quite ravishing as she sat in the dim torchlight as if seeking an answer to her question.

“An extraordinary wind,” he said, smiling, “demonstrating that you are not after all deaf.”

He pushed the koto towards her, but he had given her reason to be out of sorts; and besides, her women were listening.

“And what of our young men? They did not pay proper attention to our wild carnations.” He was in a meditative mood. “I really must show this garden to my friend the minister sometime. Life is uncertain, of course. We are gone tomorrow. And yet all those years since he and I talked of your mother, and you yourself were our wild carnation—somehow an eternity can seem like nothing at all.

“ Were he to see its gentle hues unchanging,

Would he not come to the hedge of the wild carnation?

“And that would complicate matters, and so I have kept you in a cocoon. I fear you have found it constraining.”

Brushing away a tear, she replied:

“Who would come to seek the wild carnation

That grew at such a rough and rustic hedge?”

The note of self-effacement made her seem very young and gentle.

“If he does not come,” # whispered Genji, by no means sure how much longer he could control himself.