It was too hard!” His note was on thin white paper and imposingly written, but nothing about it particularly caught the eye. The hand was very fine. He actually had a great deal of learning. The Mistress of Staff, to whom his absence for a night meant nothing, ignored his earnest concern and did not even answer. He was crushed and spent the day in gloom.
Since his wife seemed still to be suffering, he commissioned a solemn Great Rite and prayed in his heart that at least for now she should remain safely in her right mind. He thought that he would never have survived the horror of this night if he had not known how deserving she really was.
After sunset he hurried off as always. Not having been handsomely dressed, he had resented his ill-assorted costume; and now, without even a proper dress cloak, he was a sight. His outer garments from the evening before, burned through here and there, smelled curiously and most unpleasantly scorched. His gowns had picked up the odor, too. That he had got it from his wife was all too obvious, and he changed and took a thorough bath, since otherwise even his darling might want no more to do with him.
“That fire to my mind flamed up from the agony of a heart that burns
with the ceaseless, searing pain of one left always alone,”
Moku said, perfuming a robe. “How could the simplest onlooker not be shocked by the way you have put my lady out of your life?” She covered her mouth as she spoke, but her glance accused him, and all he could think (and how cruelly!) was What did I ever see in a woman like her?
“Ah, when that outrage confounds my serenity, then tendrils of smoke
rise indeed, and more and more, from all my burning regret!”
As he left, he sighed, “I would be in a proper fix if word of these extraordinary goings-on ever got out.”
A single night apart from his love only disclosed to him new visions of her beauty, until he could hardly imagine portioning out his affections to anyone else, and all this had been so frustrating that he shut himself up with her for a very long time. The news that the spirit had persisted in its violent ravings, despite the rite of intercession and so on, terrified him, and he stayed well away lest some unspeakable blot or shame disgrace him. When he did go home, he stayed elsewhere in the house and summoned only his children. These were a daughter of twelve or thirteen and two younger sons. He had always treated his wife with the highest regard, despite the distance that had come between them in recent years, and now that she knew the end had come, her gentlewomen grieved bitterly as well.
His Highness her father heard what had happened. It would earn you nothing but shame and ridicule if you were still to forbear, now that he is about to leave you openly. Why should you gamely put up with him further, as long as I am alive?” he said;12 and suddenly he brought her home. She herself was sufficiently in her right mind to lament this calamitous break. I might insist on staying on to see this through to the very end, she thought, but I would only make myself look a little more foolish for it. She made up her mind to go.
One of her brothers, the Intendant of the Watch, was a senior noble, and his presence would have made too much of the move. The Captain, the Adviser, and the Commissioner of Civil Affairs therefore came for her in three carriages. Her gentlewomen had long assumed that this day would come, but even so, the thought that it had actually arrived reduced them all to abundant tears. “How can we all stay with our lady, when she is setting out on her first journey in many years and will be living under such awkwardly restricted circumstances?” they asked each other. “Some of us should go home instead and wait until she is better settled.” They therefore sent off their meager belongings and dispersed each to her own home.
All, high or low, wept loudly while they packed the furnishings that their mistress would require, presenting as they did so a thoroughly ill-omened scene.13 She summoned her children, who were wandering about through it all, uncomprehending. “Now that I have no doubt about my unhappy destiny, I have no further wish to cling to the world, and I accept whatever lies ahead. It will be so sad for you all to part while you are still so young! You,” she told her daughter, “must stay with me whatever happens. I am afraid that you boys will have to see your father often, although he is unlikely to pay much attention to you and you may feel quite lost. You may do well enough as long as His Highness is still with us, but in a world subject to the will of His Grace and His Excellency you will bear the burden of their disapproval, and you will not easily succeed. How terrible it will be for me, even in the life to come, if you then follow me into the mountains and forests!”14 She was weeping, and they, who did not understand very well what all this was about, wrinkled up their faces and wept with her.
She gathered the children's nurses about her, and they grieved together. “In the old tales, too, there are fathers who mean as well as any and who still turn out to be callous after all, as they change with the times and follow shifting favor,” a nurse observed.
“Then just look at him!” her mistress cried. “He is a father in name only—he no longer thinks of his children at all, and despite appearances he will do nothing for them.”
The sun set, and the sky this dreary evening promised more snow. Her brothers had come to fetch her, and while they urged her to make haste because, they said, the weather looked threatening, she sat staring vacantly before her, wiping her eyes. Her daughter, always the Commander's great favorite, lay facedown nearby, wondering how she would live without seeing her father. What if I were to go away forever and not even say good-bye? she thought. She seemed quite unwilling to move.
“It is not at all nice of you to feel this way,” her mother protested. The girl just wanted her father to come home now, but what was the chance of that, with night approaching? It upset her to think of leaving the pillar on the east side, against which herself she had leaned so often, to someone else, and she therefore pasted together some bits of paper the color of cypress bark, wrote on them in tiny letters, and with a hairpin pushed the paper into a crack in the pillar:
“I am leaving now a home that has long been mine: O handsome pillar,
you whom I have loved so well, please do not forget me yet!”
Tears almost prevented her from finishing.
“Come along!” her mother said.
“That handsome pillar may still recall your love, but what then? I ask:
what is it I leave behind that could ever make me stay?
Her women were sad, too, each in her own way. They all were blowing their noses and resting their gaze fondly on some little plant or tree that they had never noticed much before.
Moku, who served her lord, was to stay on, which moved Chūjō to say,
“Shallow it may be, but the stream among the rocks still runs sweet and clear—
yet the mistress of the house is obliged to go away!15
I never thought to see the like! Oh, to think that I must leave you!”
Moku replied,
“No, among these rocks the stream is choked and silent, for I have no words,
and this is no life for me, that I should now wish to stay!
Dear me, no!”
Chūjō looked back as the carriage drove away and mourned that she might never see the place again. Her mistress gazed at every branch and turned back again and again until the house was lost to view, not because her love lived there16 but because this was where she had spent so many years and amassed so many memories.
His Highness received her with anguish, and her mother wept aloud. “You thought the Chancellor made such a superb alliance,” she cried, “but all I see is what an enemy he has always been. He has never missed a chance to embarrass our Consort, but you, like everyone else, claim he only meant to teach us a lesson as long as you and he remained on bad terms. Is that right, I ask you? It never made much sense anyway, because if he was to be so keen on that girl, past example suggests that his feelings should have extended to those around her—but no, far from it, he takes in some sort of vague stepdaughter and then, out of pit
y when he is finished with her himself, he snares her the very thing, a completely reliable gentleman unlikely ever to misbehave! Is that not unforgivable?”
“That will be enough!” His Highness replied. “You may not abuse His Grace as you please, when he receives not a breath of public criticism. He is a far-seeing man, and I imagine that he laid his plans and has been looking forward to getting back at me this way for a long time. It is my own misfortune that he feels this way about me. He always manages very skillfully, without betraying himself, to help or harm people according to how they behaved when he was in disgrace. It is only because he after all considers me a close relative that a year or two ago he gave me a celebration far more brilliant than anything my house deserved. That should do me enough honor for this lifetime.”
His wife, however, only became still angrier and spouted all sorts of imprecations. She had an evil temper, that woman.
The Commander heard that his wife had left. How extraordinary! he thought. She has gone off in a fit of jealousy, just as though we were newlyweds! She is not that prickly or hotheaded, though—no, His Highness is the one who goes in for that sort of nonsense. There were the children, too. All this was extremely embarrassing for them, and that troubled him.
“That is what has happened. It is astonishing!” he explained to the Mistress of Staff. “I actually think it makes things easier in a way, but I had been counting on someone as mild as she staying quietly in her corner. This sudden move must be His Highness's doing. I must go and give him some idea of how bad this makes me look as well. I shall be back.” He went imposingly dressed in a superb outer garment,17 a willow train-robe, and blue-gray gathered trousers of light silk twill. The gentle-women could see nothing unworthy about him, but his news had only impressed their mistress with the reality of her own misfortune, and she gave him not so much as a glance.
Having set off to give His Highness a piece of his mind, he went first to his own residence, where Moku came out and told him everything that had occurred. Touchingly enough, her description of his daughter's departure moved him to tears, despite his manly efforts at self-control. “Then in the end she has ignored the loyalty with which I have for years overlooked all sorts of strangeness on her part, as no one else would have done!” he said. “Would any man who only pleased himself have stayed with her that long? Never mind, though. It hardly matters anymore, now that she seems to be lost either way. I wonder what she means to do with the children.” He sighed. He had a look at the “handsome pillar” and was moved to such tender feelings by the spirit it conveyed, despite the childishness of the writing, that he wiped his tears away all the way to His Highness's, where he had no chance of seeing his wife.
“And why should you see him?” His Highness naturally insisted. “This is not the first time his mind has changed with the times. I have been hearing for ages how infatuated he is, and I would just like to know how long we might have to wait for him to come to his senses. It would only mean your making a further spectacle of your unfortunate condition.”
“All this makes me feel like such a child,” the Commander began. “I cannot apologize enough for the foolishly complacent way I assumed that she would never leave the children. For the present, though, I can only beg your indulgence and hope that you will not go through with this until it is plain to everyone that my offense is irretrievable.” He hardly knew what else to say. “I should so like at least to see my daughter,” he went on; but she was not to be allowed out. His ten-year-old son was a privy page and extremely attractive. People liked him, for although he had little in the way of looks, he was extremely clever and quick. The younger son, now eight, was very sweet, and he was so like his sister that the weeping Commander caressed him and said to him fondly, “You are the one I have now to remind me of the child I miss!” He hoped that His Highness would consent to meet him in person, but all he got back was “Unfortunately, I am unwell, and I doubt that I am up to it.” He went away nursing this rebuff.
He put his sons into his carriage and talked to them on the way. Since he could hardly take them to Rokujō, he stopped instead at his own residence. “I want you to stay here, where I can come and see you easily,” he said. Their sad looks as they watched him leave deeply affected him, and he felt still more burdened by care, but it was a great comfort to see his new wife, who was so beautiful—dazzlingly so, in fact, compared to that other, pathetic figure. He soon felt much, much better. No more was heard from him at His Highness's. His excuse seemed to be the slight he had suffered there, but His Highness found his behavior reprehensible.
“I am extremely sorry that even I have caused resentment in this affair,” the lady of spring18 said, sighing, when she heard the news.
Genji felt for her. “It is difficult,” he said. “Her marriage was not entirely up to me, and His Majesty is displeased as well. I heard that His Highness of War, among others, was angry with me, too, but being the thoughtful man he is, he seems to have informed himself and to have given up any animosity. People find out all about these things in the end, whatever one may do to keep them quiet, and in this case I do not believe there is anything for which I need blame myself.”
Amid this uproar the Mistress of Staff sank further and further into melancholy that the sympathetic Commander did his best to dispel. The plan that she should go to the palace has come to nothing, he reflected, and in fact I stopped it, which for His Majesty must make me a jealous boor, while those two gentlemen no doubt have their own ideas on the subject. Can no husband ever have trusted a wife in His Majesty's service? He changed his mind and sent her to the palace in the New Year.
There was to be the men's mumming, which made just the moment for her to go amid great pomp and splendor. His Grace, His Excellency, and the Commander actually joined forces for the occasion, and the Consultant Captain19 lent her his tireless assistance. Her brothers gathered to place themselves at her disposal and looked after her very gallantly indeed.
She was lodged on the east side of the Shōkyōden.20 Since the Consort from His Highnes's21 occupied the west side, only a corridor separated them, but their hearts must have remained far apart. This was a particularly brilliant time at court, and all His Majesty's ladies vied with one another. He had few mischievous Intimates in his service at the time,22 being attended by Her Majesty, the Kokiden Consort, His Highness's Consort, and His Excellency of the Left's Consort. The only ones were the Counselor's and the Consultant's daughters.23
All these ladies' relatives then came from home for the mumming, and they wore their very best because it was to be a particularly unusual treat. Their richly cascading sleeves24 were a wonder to behold. The Consort and mother of the Heir Apparent25 put on a magnificent display, and everything was done in the height of style, although the Prince himself was still very young.
The mummers went first to His Majesty, then to Her Majesty, and then to His Eminence Suzaku, by which time the night was so well advanced that Genji, at Rokujō, decided not to overdo it this time and excused them. They had returned from the Suzaku Palace and were performing for the Heir Apparent's ladies when day broke; and there, among the terribly drunk young men singing “Bamboo River” by the lovely light of early dawn, were four or five of the Palace Minister's sons, a handsome and splendidly gallant band whose voices soared above those of the other privy gentlemen. The eighth of them, His Excellency's son by his wife and still a charming privy page, was his father's great favorite. The Mistress of Staff noted his presence beside the Commander's eldest and allowed her eye to rest on him, since he was kin. The colors of the sleeves that spilled from her rooms made a fresher and more stylish spectacle than any seen before His Majesty's greatest ladies, and even their most familiar color combinations stood out with exceptional brilliance. Both she and her gentlewomen longed to live awhile yet amid such happy splendor. Even the cotton wadding26 that she had distributed equally to all the mummers was especially handsome and nicely done, and although this was only a water stop, all present
were eager to look their best in so lively a scene. By the Commander's order the customary reception offered them had been arranged with special care.
The Commander remained in his palace quarters27 and spent the whole day reminding his darling, over and over again, “I shall require you to leave tonight. I do not like the idea of your now being tempted to remain here in service.” She did not reply.
“My lord,” her women objected, “His Grace told you that there is no hurry and that since my lady comes so rarely, she should stay until His Majesty is pleased to release her. This evening is really much too soon!” However, this only annoyed him. I have been telling her and telling her, he thought, sighing. Are things really so difficult between us?
His Highness of War, who was waiting on His Majesty for the mumming, was troubled to find himself thinking of her there in her palace rooms, and he could not resist sending her a note. The Commander was then in the Guards' Office, and since His Highness had it brought to her as though from there, it was only with great reluctance that she read it at all.
“You who waste your wings on a common mountain tree, O bird, with your song
you now usher in for me a most aggravating spring!”28
It is a song I cannot help heeding.” She blushed in sympathy for him, and she was wondering what to answer when His Majesty arrived.
His Majesty's face was ineffably beautiful in the bright moonlight, and everything about him recalled His Grace the Chancellor. Can there really be two such men? she wondered as she watched him. Genji's peculiarly keen interest in her had added cruelly to her cares; and His Majesty—why did he feel so strongly about her? She just wanted to disappear when he spoke, ever so kindly, of his unhappiness that what he had hoped had not come to pass. He said when she remained mute, her face hidden behind her fan, “How strangely silent you are! I assumed that you would know from your recent good fortune29 what my feelings for you are, but I suppose it is your way to continue pretending not to notice.” He continued,
The Tale of Genji: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Junichiro Breakdown of Genji) Page 68
