4

His son came in, wearing casual court dress, more becoming, Ko~bai thought, than full regalia.

He gave the boy a message for the daughter at court. “I cannot be with you this evening. You must do without me. Perhaps you can say that I am not feeling well.” That business out of the way, he smiled and turned to other business. “Bring your flute with you one of these days. It may be what your sister here needs to encourage her. Do you ever play for His Majesty? And do you please him, in your infantile way?”

He set the boy to a strain in the _so~jo~_ mode,* which he managed very commendably.

“Good, very good. I can see that you have profited from our little musicales. And now you must join him,” he said to the princess.

She played with obvious reluctance and declined to use a plectrum, but the brief duo was very pleasing indeed. Ko~bai whistled an accompaniment, rich and full.

He looked out at a rose plum in full bloom just below this east veranda.

“Magnificent. Am I right in thinking that Prince Niou is living in the palace these days? Take him a branch—the one who knows best knows best.+ How well I remember the days when Genji was young. They called him'the shining one.' It would have been when he was a guards com-mander, and I was a page, as you are now. I was lucky enough to attract his attention, and I never shall forget the pleasure it gave me. They talk about Prince Niou and his good friend Kaoru, and indeed they have become very fine young gentlemen. I may have been heard to say that they are not like Genji, really not like him at all, but that is because for me there can never be another Genji. I find myself choking up at the thought that I once stood there beside him. And I was never so very close to him. For those that were it must seem as if something had gone very wrong, that they should be here without him.” His voice had become somewhat husky. Seeking to control himself, he broke off a plum branch and, handing it to the boy, pushed him towards the door. “Prince Niou is the only one left who reminds me of him. When the Blessed One died his disciples thought they saw something of his radiance in Prince Ananda, and ventured to hope that he had come back. For me Prince Niou is the light in all the darkness.”

Full of youthful good spirits once more, he dashed off a poem on a bit of scarlet paper and folded it inside a sheet of notepaper the boy chanced to have with him.

“A purposeful breeze wafts forth the scent of our plum.

Will not the warbler be first to heed the summons?”

The boy rushed off to the palace, delighted at the prospect of seeing Niou, whom he found emerging from the empress's audience chamber. Niou singled him out among the throngs in her anterooms.