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but just as he was telling Niou of these hopes, a guards commander who was an elder brother of the captain already in attendance arrived from the city with a large and splendid retinue. He had come at the behest of the empress. Such expeditions might be undertaken surreptitiously, she had said, but they were certain to attract notice and so to become precedents He had run off without a by-your-leave, very inadequately escorted. She was most displeased. And so Niou had another captain and any number of ranking courtiers on his hands. Kaoru's plans were in ruin, and for the two friends the pleasure of the evening had evaporated. Unaware of this unhappiness, the party drank and sang the night away.

Niou was thinking that he would like to spend the day at Uji. But another horde of courtiers arrived, headed by his mother's chamberlain. They made him no more eager to return to the city.

He sent a note across the river. Eschewing any attempt to be witty or clever, he sought to convey in some detail his honest thoughts. Nakanokimi, knowing that he would be surrounded by prying eyes, did not answer. She knew more than ever how useless it was to think of joining so grand a company. She had been resentful, and with cause, at his pro-longed failure to visit her, but she had been able to tell herself that he would one day come; and here he was madly reveling before her very eyes, and he had not a glance for her. She was hurt and she was angry.

Niou's own gloom was almost beyond enduring—and even the fish in the weirs seemed to favor him with their attentions. The catch was large. His men brought it to him, laid out on autumn leaves of various tints. They were delighted, it had been an expedition with something in it to please every one of them. But Niou stood apart, gazing into space, pain clutching at his heart. The trees in the old garden across the river were extraordinarily powerful, strands of ivy, visible even from this distance, adding a venerable melancholy to the evergreens.

Kaoru was thinking that he had not done very well. The ladies would be the more resentful for his having prepared them so carefully. Several among the attendants remembered the cherry blossoms of the year before and remarked to one another on the sad lot of the princesses, now without a father. A few of them seemed to have caught a hint that their master had intended to make a quiet crossing, and even the more obtuse had something to say about the beautiful princesses. Secluded and cloistered though a life may be, word does somehow get around. Truly superior beauties, the talk had it, and superior musicians as well, their princely father having had them at constant practice.

The captain remembered Kaoru's affection for the Eighth Prince:

“We saw yon trees in the spring, a blaze of flowers.

Beneath them too sad autumn now has stolen.”

Kaoru offered this in reply:

“With flowers that fade, with leaves that turn, they speak

Most surely of a world where all is fleeting.”

The newly arrived guards commander also had a poem:

“Regretfully, we leave the autumn groves

Whence autumn, unobserved, has slipped away.”

And the chamberlain:

“The vine yet clings to the stone-walled mountain village,

Longer-lived than he whom once I knew.”

The oldest man in the party, he was in tears, remembering how it had been when the Eighth Prince was young.

And finally Niou, also in tears, had a poem:

“Blow not harshly, wind from the mountain pines,

Through trees where sadness waxes as autumn wanes.”

The men who knew even a little about his feelings made admiring note of their genuineness, and of the trial it must have been for him to let such an opportunity pass. Nothing was to be done: they could not send a grand flotilla out across the river.

The more interesting passages from the Chinese poems were intoned over and over again, and there were a great many Japanese poems as well, inspired by the place and the season; but is anything really original likely to emerge from drunken revelry? The smallest fragment would do injury to my story, I fear, if I were to write it down.