13

Kaoru paid his visit late in the year. The New Year would be too busy to allow the briefest of visits. With the snow so deep, it was unusual for the ladies to receive even an ordinary caller. That he, a ranking courtier, should have set out on such a journey as if he made one every day was the measure of his kindness. They were at greater pains than usual to receive him. They had taken out and dusted a brazier of a color gayer than this house of mourning had been used to. Their women chattered about how happy his visits had made the prince. Though shy, the princesses did not want to seem rude or unkind. They did at length essay to address him from behind screens. The conversation could hardly have been called lively or intimate, but Oigimi managed to put together, for her, an uncommon number of words. Kaoru was pleased and surprised. Perhaps the time had come, he thought, for a sally. (It would seem that the best of men are sometimes untrue to their resolves.)

“My friend Niou is irritated with me, and I have trouble understand-ing why. It is just possible that I let something slip, or it may be that he guessed it all—he does not miss very much. In any event, he knows about your father's last request, and I have orders to tell you about him. Indeed, I have already told you, and you have not been very cooperative. And so he keeps complaining about what an incompetent messenger I am. The charge comes as something of a surprise, considering all I have done, and at the same time I have to admit that I have made myself his 'guide to your seashore.'* Must you be so remote and haughty?

“It is true, I know, that the gossips have given him a certain name, but beneath the rakish exterior are depths that would surprise you. It is said that he prefers not to spend his time with women who come at his beck and call. Then there are women who take things as they are. What the world does is what the world does, they say, and they do not care a great deal whether they find husbands or not. If someone comes along who is neither entirely pleasing nor entirely repulsive, well, such is life. They make good wives, rather better than you might think. And then, as the poet said, the bank begins to give way, and what is left is a muddy Tatsuta.* You must have heard of such cases—the last of the old love gone down the stream.

“But there is another possibility. Supposing he finds someone who follows him because she agrees with him, because she cannot find it in her heart to do otherwise. I do not think that he would deal lightly with such a one. He would make his commitments and stand by them. I know, because I am in a position to tell you of things he has not let other people see. Give me the signal, and I will do everything I can to help you. I will dash back and forth between Uji and the city until my feet are stumps.”

It had been an earnest discourse. Unable to think that it had reference to herself, Oigimi wondered whether it might now be her duty to take the place of her father. But she did not know what to say.

“Words fail me.” Her reply to the discourse was a quiet laugh, which was not at all unpleasant. “This sort of thing is, well, rather suggestive, I'm sure you will admit, and does not simplify the hunt for an answer.”

“Your own situation has nothing to do with the matter. Just take these tidings I bring through the snowdrifts as an older sister might be expected to. He is thinking not of you but of—someone else. I have had vague reports that there have been letters, but there again it is hard to know the truth. Which of you was it that answered?”

Oigimi fell silent. This last question was more embarrassing than he could have intended it to be. It would have been nothing to answer Niou's letters, but she had not been up to the task, even in jest; and an answer to Kaoru's question was quite beyond her.

Presently she pushed a verse from under her curtains:

“Along the cliffs of these mountains, locked in snow,

Are the tracks of only one. That one is you.”

“A sort of sophistry that does not greatly improve things.

“My pony breaks the ice of the mountain river

As I lead the way with tidings from him who follows. 'No such shallowness,'* is it not apparent?”

More and more uncomfortable, she did not answer.

She was not remote to excess, he would have said, and on the other hand she had none of the coyness one was accustomed to in young women. A quiet, elegant lady, in sum—as near his ideal as any lady he could remember having met. But whenever he became forward, however slightly, she feigned deafness. He turned to inconsequential talk of things long past.