There came a temporary lull in our conversation, here, as if by mutual agreement. In the silence that followed, I once more took out my sketch book and began to make a picture of the rooster and his mate, when the jingling of bells caught my ear, the sound making a music of its own in my head. I felt as if I were listening, in a dream, to a mortar-and-pestle rhythm coming from a neighbour’s. I stopped sketching and wrote down instead:
Coming up the mountain, I passed five or six pack horses and found them all wearing aprons between their fore and hind legs, with bells jingling about their necks. I could not help imagining I was encountering in spirit ghosts long past. Presently there rose above the jingling of bells a quaintly long drawn note of mago-uta,9 floating dreamily in the peaceful Spring air of the mountain, and gradually coming upward. This made my rustic but gentle hostess say, as if speaking to herself: “Somebody is coming again.”
Every passer, coming and going seemed to be the good woman’s acquaintance, since the pass lay in a single line, and all traffic must go by the humble tea-stall. All of the half-dozen drivers of packhorses, I met on the road, must have come up or gone down the mountain, everyone of them making her think somebody was coming. I could not help wondering how often, indeed, times out of number, her ears must have caught the jingling of bells in the years past, that had turned her hair so completely grey. Oh, how long she must have lived in this little place with its lonely road, where spring had come and gone, gone and come, with no ground to walk on, lest one crushed little flowers under foot! I wrote down another haiku in my book:
“Mago-utaya Shiragamo
Somede Kururu Haru”10
The little verse did not quite express my poetical fancy, and I was gazing at the point of my pencil to compress into seventeen syllables the ideas of grey hair, and the cycles of years as well as the quaint tunes of a country packhorse driver, and departing Spring, when a live bucolic individual, leading a pony, halted before the shop and greeted the old woman:
“Good day, Oba-san!”11
“Why, it is you Gen-san. You are going down to the town?”
“I am, and shall be glad to get, if there be anything you want down there.”
“Let me see. Stop at my daughter’s, if you happen to go along Kajicho, and ask her to get for me a holy tablet of the Reiganji temple.”
“All right, only one, eh? Your O-Aki-san12 is very lucky that she has been so well married, don’t you think so, Oba-san?”
“I am thankful that she is not in want of daily needs. Maybe she is happy.”
“Of course she is. Look at that Jo-sama13 of Nakoi!”
“Poor O-Jo-sama, my heart aches for her and she is so beautiful. Is she any better these days?”
“No, the same as ever.”
“Too bad,” sighs mine hostess, and “Yes, too bad” assents Gen-san, patting his horse on the head. A gust of wind came just then and shook a cherry tree outside and the raindrops lodging precariously among its leaves and flowers shed like a fresh shower, making the horse toss his long mane up and down with a start. I had by this time fallen into a train of fancy from which I was awakened by Gen-san’s “Whoa” and the jingling of the horse’s bells, to hear the Oba-san say:
“Ah, I still see before me the Jo-sama in her bridal dress with her hair done up in a high Shimada style and going horseback. …”
“Yes, yes, she went on horseback, not by boat. We stopped here, didn’t we, Oba-san?”
“Aye, when the Jo-sama’s horse stopped under that cherry tree, a falling petal alighted on her hair, dressed so carefully.”
The old woman’s word-sketch was fascinating, well worthy of a picture; of poetry. A vision of a charming bride came before my mind’s eye, and musing on the scene described, I wrote down in my sketch book:
“Hanano Koro-o Koete
Kashikoshi Umani Yome.”14
I had a clear vision of the girl’s hair and dress, the horse and the cherry tree; but strangely enough, her face would not come to me, eagerly as my fancy travelled from one type to another. Suddenly Millais’ Ophelia came into the vision under the bride’s shimada coiffure. No good, I thought and let my vision crumble away. The same moment the bridal dress, hair, horse, and cherry tree and all disappeared from my mind’s setting; but Ophelia floating above the water with her hands clasped, remained behind mistily in my mind, lingering with a faintness, as of a cloud of smoke brushed with a palm fibre whisk, and producing a weird sensation as when looking at the fading tail of a shooting star.
“Well, goodbye Oba-san.”
“Come again on your way back. Bad time we had with the rain. The road must be pretty bad about the ‘Seven Bends.’ ”
Gen-san began to move and his horse to trot as he said: “rather a job,” leaving behind the jingling of bells.
“Was that man from Nakoi?”
“Yes, he is Gembei of Nakoi.”
“Do I understand that that man crossed this mountain with a bride on the back of his horse, some time or other?”
“He passed here with the Jo-sama of Nakoi on the back of his horse, when the ladybird went to her future husband’s house.—Time goes fast; it was five years ago.”
She is of a happy order, who laments the turning white of her hair only when she looks into the glass. Nearer an immortal, I thought, was
