“This is delightful. There is beauty and variation. Motion must be of this sort to be interesting.”
“Man will be all right as long as his motion is of this sort, no matter how hard he moves.”
“You cannot move like this unless you are unhuman.”
“Ho, ho, ho, how deeply in love you are with unhumanity, Sensei!”
“Nor can you deny that you are not without partiality for it, after your bridal gown show yesterday?” I made a lunge.
She parried by saying sweetly with a coquettish smile: “A nice reward please.”
“What for, my young lady?”
“You wished to see, and so I took the trouble to get up the show for you.”
“I wished?”
“A Sensei of painting who had come up crossing the mountain, took the trouble, I am told, to ask the old woman of a humble tea house on the mountain pass to let him see me in my wedding gown.”
This came so unexpectedly that I was out of a ready answer. Nor did the woman give me any chance, she quickly came down on me:
“All obliging, however sincere, can only be lost on a man so forgetful,” came in mocking reproach, like a frontal blow. I was beginning to get the worst of it, being at her mercy, unable to catch up with the start she had of me.
“That bath tank show, last night, was then, also out of your kindness?” I narrowly managed to regain my ground.
She made no reply.
“A thousand pardons for being so ungrateful. What would you command of me in penance?” I went forward as far as I could in anticipation; but in vain. She kept on looking up to the framed calligraphy of the priest, Daitetsu, as if she saw and heard nothing. Presently she read it in a soft murmur:
“Shadow of bamboo sweeping no dust rises.” Now she turned right round to me and said as if she suddenly came back to herself:
“What did you say, Sensei?”
She said it with a studied loudness; but I was not to be caught.
“I met that priest a while ago.” I set myself in motion for her benefit, imitating the “full round” movement of the earthquake shaken pool of water.
“The Osho-san of Kaikanji? He is quite stout, isn’t he?”
“He asked me if I would paint in oil on his paper screen! Those Zen priests are full of absurdities, arn’t they?”
“Probably that is why they get so fat.”
“I also met another, a young man.”
“Kyuichi, you mean.”
“Yes Kyuichi-san.”
“You seem to know so well.”
“No, I know Kyuichi-san only by name, but nothing else about him. He seems to hate moving his lips.”
“No, he is little shy, that is all. He is a mere boy.”
“A boy? Isn’t he of about the same age as you?”
“Ho, ho, ho, you think so? He is a cousin of mine. He is going to the front, and came to say goodbye.”
“Is he stopping here?”
“No, he is staying with my brother.”
“I see. He came to take a cup of tea, then?”
“He likes ordinary hot water better than tea. But my father would have him. Poor thing, he must have had a hard half hour of it. I would have let him go before the party rose, if I were there.”
“Where have you been? The priest was asking after you—if you were out again on one of your lonely walks?”
“Yes, I was. I made a round of Kagamiga Ike pond and neighbourhood.”
“I should myself like to go and see that pond.”
“Do, by all means, Sensei.”
“Will it make a good picture?”
“It is a good place for drowning yourself.”
“I have no idea of ending my life in water for some time to come.”
“I may, before long.”
Too bold a joke for a woman, and I looked up into her eyes. She seemed quite sound, more herself than I expected.
“Won’t you paint for me, Sensei, a picture of myself, drowned and floating in water—not struggling and in agony—but a nice little picture of me floating in easy, painless eternal repose.”
“Eh?”
“Thunder and lightning, you are astonished?”
Nami-san got to her feet lightly and three steps brought her to the opening of my room. She turned back and threw at me the most innocent of her smiles, as she walked out of it. For a long time I sat immobile as one lost in reverie.
X
My curiosity brought me, the next day, to the Kagamiga Ike, a pool of water, not more than half a mile in circumference, by an actual survey, but looking immeasurably larger, when seen through openings in the brushwood, embowering its zigzag water-edge. I left it to my feet to take me where they liked, and I stopped when they came to a halt at a spot close to and falling into water, determined not to move till I got sick of it. Lucky that I could indulge in a whim like this; for in Tokyo I would be run over by a tram car, if not sternly chased away by a policeman. Ah! the city is a place where they make a beggar of a peaceful citizen, and pay a high salary to detectives who are all but boss pickpockets!
I sat on a damp cushion, which I found in incipient Spring grass, satisfied that I was in the bosom of nature, where neither wealth nor power could disturb me, and where I could heartily laugh at the folly of Timon’s wrath. I then took out and lighted a cigarette, and as a streak of smoke from the match took the shape of a dragon with its tail tapering to a line, and vanished in a moment, I drew nearer to the water edge. I looked into the clear and placid water of the pond and saw some slender
