“Yes. Crossing the mountain will be some job, but by taking a boat, though a little detour. …”
The youth did not decline this time; but remained silent.
“Are you going to China?” I ventured to ask.
“Yes.”
The monosyllable left me musing that he might not be the worse for a few more; but I felt no particular necessity to dig, and I held my peace. I noticed that the shadow of haran had changed its position.
“Well, gentleman, you see the present war—he was formerly with the colours in one year service—and he has been called out to join his old regiment.”
My old host volunteered in his nephew’s place to let me understand that the youth was destined to leave for Manchuria in a day or two. I had thought that there was only feathered songsters to listen to, only flowers to see fall, only hot spring to warble forth in this dreamy land of poetry in a mountain bosom, in peaceful Spring. Alas, the living world had come crossing the sea and mountain and oozing into this home of a forgotten tribe, and the time may come when a small fraction of blood making a crimson sea of bleak Manchuria may flow from this youth’s arteries. This very youth is sitting next to an artist who sees nothing worth seeing in human life but dreaming. He sits so near that the artist may hear his heart throb. In that throb may be resounding even now, the tide rolling high in a plain hundreds of miles away. Fate has accidentally brought these two together in a room, but tells nothing else, nor gives the reason why.
IX
“Studying?” asked a woman’s voice outside my door. On returning to my room, I took out one of the books I had brought, tied to my tripod, and was reading it.
“Go right ahead, Sensei, don’t mind me,” said the voice before I gave any answer, and its owner walked right into my room with no conventionality whatever.
A shapely neck, looking all the more fair because of the subdued colour of the part of kimono protecting its lower half, it was this charming contrast that struck my eye, as the woman sat before me.
“A foreign book? Full of hardy, knotty problems, I suppose, Sensei?”
“No, not quite.”
“Then, what is it all about?”
“Well, to be honest, I do not know well enough to tell you.”
“Ho, ho, ho, and yet you are studying?”
“I am not studying. I put it on the desk, open it at random, and just skim the open page. That is all.”
“Does that sort of thing interest you?”
“Marvellously.”
“How?”
“How? Why, that is the most interesting way of reading novels.”
“You are so odd, Sensei.”
“Yes, I should say I am rather.”
“Why should you not read them from the beginning?”
“If you begin to read from the beginning, you will have to read to the end, don’t you see?”
“How absurdly you talk. There can be nothing wrong in reading through a novel?”
“No, of course not. If it is to read the plot, I, also shall do so.”
“What else is there to read, if not the plot?”
She is after all a woman, I thought, and felt like testing her.
“Do you like novels?”
“I?” She made a pause after the word, and then said ambiguously: “Well in a way.” She seemed not to care much about novel-reading.
“Perhaps you are not sure yourself that you like or you do not like reading-novels?”
“What difference does it make if one likes or not likes novels?” Novels seemed to have no claim to existence in her mind.
“It would not matter, then, if one read them from the beginning or from the end, or from any page one happened to open. I should think, you need not be so curious about my way of reading.”
“But you and I are different.”
“In what way, please.” I looked into the woman’s eyes, thinking, I was testing her. But they spoke nothing.
“Ho, ho, ho, you don’t see?”
“But you must have read a good many in your younger days?” I made a little detour, instead of keeping straight to my point.
“I am still young—at least in heart—you unkind man.” The falcon I let off was once more going astray to miss the prey: she would let me have no chance. But I managed to bring her back on the track by retorting: “Being able to say that sort of thing in the face of a man, you must be counted among the not young.”
“Arn’t you, who say that, also well up in age? And you mean to say that you still delight in reading of love, Cupid and all that kind of trash?”
“Yes, they are delightful and will not cease to interest me even till my last hour.”
“Well I declare! That is how you can give yourself up to a profession like yours, I suppose?”
“Precisely so. Because I am an artist, I have no need to read through novels from the beginning to the end. But they interest me no matter what part I read. It delights me to talk with you, so much so that I should be glad to be all the time talking with you, while I am here. If you would have it, I have not the slightest objection, on my part, to falling incandescently, in love with you. That would be most interesting. But, however intensely in love, there is no need that we should become husband and wife. One must need read through novels from the beginning to the end, as long as one feels the necessity of love ending in a marriage.”
“The artist is, then, he who makes an inhuman love?”
“Not inhuman but unhuman. The plots of novels do not count at all, because we read them unhumanly. You see, I open the book thus, as in a lottery drawing, and I read the first page that lies flat before me. And there is the
