7

He thought he would look in on her, since her room was not far away. He found her, blinds raised high, at a contest of backgammon.

Her hands at her forehead in earnest supplication, she was rattling off her prayer at a most wondrous speed. “Give her a deuce, give her a deuce.” Over and over again. “Give her a deuce, give her a deuce.”

This really was rather dreadful. Motioning his attendants to silence, he slipped behind a hinged door from which the view was unobstructed through sliding doors beyond.

“Revenge, revenge,” shrieked Gosechi, the clever young woman who was her opponent. Gosechi was not to be outdone in earnestness or shrill-ness. She shook and shook the dicebox and was not quick to make her throw.

If either of them had anything at all in her empty mind she was not showing it. The Omi daughter was small* and pretty and had beautiful hair, and could by no means have been described as an unrelieved scandal —though a narrow forehead and a too exuberant and indeed a torrential way of speaking canceled out her good points. No beauty, certainly, and yet it was impossible not to recognize immediately whose daughter she was. It made To~ no Chu~jo~ uncomfortable to realize that he might have been looking at his own mirror image.

“Are you feeling quite at home?” he presently asked. “Are they being good to you? I am very busy, I fear, and do not see you as often as I would wish.”

“Just being here is enough. No complaints, not a one.” The speed was undiminished. “All those years I just wanted to see your face. That's all I wanted, all those years. But I still get the bad throws. I don't get to look at you very much.”

“I am genuinely sorry. I rather keep to myself, and I had hoped that we would have a great deal of time for each other. But things have not so arranged themselves. You will have seen that ordinary ladies rather tend to get lost in the crowd, and it does not matter very much how they behave. That is very nice for them. But it sometimes happens that a lady comes from such a good family that people are always pointing her out, and it sometimes happens that she does not do full honor to the family name, and-?”

The full significance of the final conjunction was lost upon the lady. “Oh no oh no. I don't care if I don't stand out in a crowd. I just tell myself family makes trouble and keep out of sight. Give me the chamber pot to empty and I'll do it.”

A guffaw emerged from the minister. “Oh, that won't be necessary, I think. But if you do wish to demonstrate your keen sense of duty, then see if you can't manage to let your words have a little more room. Space them a little more generously. Let them be drawn out a little more and I will feel that the years of my life are being drawn out with them.” He smiled at his little joke.

“I've always had the fastest tongue. Mother scolded me for it, way back when I was a baby. The steward of the Myo~ho~ji Temple, she said, it was all his fault. He was there when I was born way out in Omi, and he had the fastest tongue too, and that was where I got it. I'll see what I can do about it.” She said it most solemnly, as if prepared to sacrifice anything in the cause of filial duty.

He was touched. “He did you a disservice, the good steward, in pre-siding at your birth. He sounds like someone who has much to atone for. The Lotus Sutra tells us that dumbness and stammering are punishment for blasphemy.”

He was in some awe of his daughter at court, and was having second thoughts about letting her see this new sister. The mistake had been Kashiwagi's, in bringing the strange creature home before he knew what she was. People were laughing, and there was nothing to be done.

“Your sister is with us at the moment. Watch her carefully, and see how she behaves. Good manners have a way of spreading out from the center. Think of it that way, and see what she has to teach you.”

“I'd be delighted. Morning and night it's the thing I asked for, just to be one of them and make them take me as one of them. Morning and night and months and years it's what I've wanted. just tell her to make them make me one of them and I'll do anything she tells me. I'll bring in the water. I'll bring it in on my head.” She had gathered such momentum that she was next to incomprehensible and somewhat intimidating.

“Oh, I doubt that she will ask you to cut the kindling. What will be asked of you is that you rid yourself of the good steward and find yourself a new model.”

She was not as alive as she might have been to irony, nor did she seem aware what a great man she was addressing. She did not share in the general awe.

“So when shall I go see her?”

“Suppose we pick a lucky day. No, we needn't make such a thing of it. Just drop in on her when you feel like it, today if you wish.” And he went out.

Just see what a father she had found for herself. An ordinary turn around the house, and just look at all the Fourth Rankers and Fifth Rankers he had with him. “And I'm his own little girl. Why did I have to grow up in Omi?”

“Too fine a papa, really,” said Gosechi. “Don't you think you might have been better off with an ordinary one who cared a little about you?”

“There you go. You always make everything turn out wrong. Well, just you remember something. You're with your betters, and don't you forget it. I've got big things ahead of me.”

One could not be angry with her. Commonness and honest, sturdy indignation could be charming. The trouble was with her speech. She had grown up among country people, and it was very inelegant. Pure, precise speech can give a certain distinction to rather ordinary remarks. An impromptu poem, for instance, if it is spoken musically, with an air at the beginning and end as of something unsaid, can seem to convey worlds of meaning, even if upon mature reflection it does not seem to have said much of anything at all. Torrential remarks have the opposite effect: the distinguished seems flat and vulgar. The overemphatic Omi speech patterns made everything seem less than serious. She had acquired them at her nurse's breast and was not shy about using them; and they were all wrong. Yet she did have her little accomplishments. She could without warning rattle off poem after poem of approximately the right length, and if the top half did not seem to go with the bottom half, that was all right too.