19

Just as the moon came flooding over the hills the captain appeared. (There had been that note from him earlier in the day.) The girl fled aghast to the rear of the house.

“You are being a perfect fool,” said Sho~sho~.* “It is the sort of night when a girl should treasure these little attentions. Do, I beg of you, at least hear what he has to say—or even a part of it. Are you so clean that his very words will soil you?”

But the girl was terrified. Though someone ventured to tell him that she was away, he probably knew the truth. Probably his messenger had reported that she was alone.

His recriminations were lengthy. “I don't care whether or not I hear her voice. I just want to have her beside me, prepared to decide for herself whether I am such an ugly threat. She is being quite heartless, and in these hills too, where it might be imagined that there would be time to cultivate the virtue of patient charity. It is more than a man should be asked to bear.

“In a mountain village, deep in the autumn night,

A lady who understands should understand.

“And I do think she should.”

“There is no one here to make your explanations for you,” said Sho~sho~ to the girl. “You may if you are not careful seem rude and eccentric.”

“The gloom of the world has been no part of my life,

And how shall you call me one who understands?”

The girl recited the poem more as if to herself than by way of reply, but Sho~sho~ passed it on to him.

He was deeply touched. “Do ask her again to come out, for a moment, even.”

“I seem to make no impression upon her at all,” said Sho~sho~, who was beginning to find his persistence, and with it a certain querulousness, a little tiresome. She went back inside—and found that the girl had fled to the old nun's room, which she had not before so much as looked in upon.

Sho~sho~ reported this astonishing development.

“With all this time on her hands,” said the captain, “she should be more than usually alive to the pity of things, and all the indications are that she is a gentle and sensitive enough person. And that very fact, you know, makes her unfriendliness cut more cruelly. Do you suppose there is something in her past, something that has made her afraid of men? What might it be, will you tell me, please, that has turned her against the whole world? And how long do you expect to have her with you?”

Openly curious now, he pressed for details; but how was Sho~sho~ to give them?

“A lady whom my lady should by rights have been looking after was lost for a number of years. And then, on a pilgrimage to Hatsuse, we found her again.”

The girl lay face down, sleepless, beside the old nun, whom she had heard to be a very difficult person. The nun had dozed off from earl y evening, and now she was snoring thunderously. With her were two nuns as old as she, snoring with equal vigor. Terrified, the girl half wondered whether she would survive the night. Might not these monsters devour her? Though she had no great wish to live on, she was timid by nature, rather like the one we have all heard of who has set out across a log bridge and then changed her mind.* She had brought the girl Komoki with her. Of an impressionable age, however, Komoki had soon returned to a spot whence she could observe this rare and most attractive caller. Would she not please come back, would she not _please_ come back? Ukifune was asking; but Komoki was little help in a crisis.

The captain presently gave up the struggle and departed.

“She is so hopelessly wrapped up in herself,” said the women, “and the worst of it is that she is so pretty.”

At what the girl judged would be about midnight the old nun awoke in a fit of coughing and sat up. In the lamplight her hair was white against her shawl.

Startled to find the girl beside her, she shaded her eyes with her hand as the mink (or some such creature) is said to do+ and peered over.

“Now this is strange,” she said in a deep, menacing voice. “What sort of thing might you be?”

The moment had come, thought the girl. She was going to be de-voured. When that malign being had led her off she had not resisted, for she had not had her senses about her. But what was she to do now? They had dragged her ignominiously back into the world, and black memories were a constant torment; and now came a new crisis, one which she seemed incapable of surmounting or even facing. Yet perhaps if she had had her way, if she had died, she would this moment be facing a crisis still more terrible. Sleepless, she thought back over her life, which seemed utterly bleak. She had not known her father and she had divided all those years between the capital and the remote provinces. And then she had come upon her sister. For a time she had been happy and secure; but that untoward incident had separated them. Some relief from her misfortunes had seemed in prospect when a gentleman declared himself ready to offer her a respectable position, and she had responded to his attentions with that hideous blunder. It had been wrong to permit even the smallest flutter of affection for Niou. The memory of her ultimate disgrace, brought on by his attentions, revolted her. What idiocy, to have been moved by his pledge and that Islet of Oranges and the pretty poem it had inspired!# Her mind moved from incident to incident, and longing flowed over her for the other gentleman. He had not exactly burned with ardor, but he had seemed calm and dependable. From him above all she wanted to keep news of her whereabouts and circumstances. Would she be allowed another glimpse of him, even from a distance? But she sternly dismissed the thought. It was wrong. She must not harbor it for a moment.