21

But the next morning she avoided their eyes, for she had acted selfishly and taken no account of their wishes. Her hair seemed to scatter wildly at the ends, and no one was prepared to dress it for her in charitable silence. She kept her curtains drawn.

She had never been an articulate girl, and she had no confidante with whom to discuss the rights and wrongs of what had happened. She seated herself at her inkstone and turned to the one pursuit in which she could lose herself when her thoughts were more than she could bear, her writing practice.

“A world I once renounced, for they and I

Had come to nothing, I now renounce again.

“Finally, this time, I have done it.”

The poem moved her to set down another:

“I thought that I should see the world no more,

And now, once more"no more' is my resolve.”

As she sat jotting down poem after poem, all very much alike, a letter came from the captain. In the midst of the uproar, someone had sent word of what Ukifune had done. He was of course much distressed. There was a consistency in it all, her determination accounting for her coldness and her reluctance to embark upon even the beginning of a correspondence. Still it was very disheartening. He had begged the other night to be granted a closer look at the rich hair that had so interested him, and the nuns had told him that his time would come. He sent off a bitter reply by return messenger:

“What would you have me say?

“Make haste, make haste, lest I be left behind.

The fisher boat even now rows far from the shore.” *

The girl surprised them by showing an interest in the letter. It was a time for sadness, and she was touched by this sign that he had finally lost hope. Whatever she may have had in mind, she took up a rough scrap of paper and wrote this poem on a corner of it:

“My soul may have left the shores of this gloomy world.

But on driftwood it floats, who knows to what far shore?”

In her usual fashion, she jotted it down as if in writing practice. Someone folded it in a cover and sent it off to the captain.

“You could at least have recopied it.”

“I did not want to risk miscopying.”

The girl's answer came as a surprise, and added to the regrets.