Segaki, page 9
Once more the lantern slide clicked, and light swept across his face. It was closed off again and the woman grunted. She and Yasumaro talked privately. It seemed she did not want to agree. But Yasumaro had drawn back into darkness and his voice was terrible.
“You who believe in no pleasures and no ghosts, you go with her, and do as she tells you,” he roared. And though he was angry, he also sounded endlessly compassionate.
“Who is she?”
“One of the dead. She will take you to her mistress.”
Muchaku did not move.
“I said go.”
The woman said nothing. She started off through the garden, the wind whipping her garments. From somewhere the dog started up and growled.
Yasumaro came clattering down the steps, grabbed the dog, and held it while it yelped in his arms.
“He cannot go with you,” he said. He looked at his brother gravely, with a mixture of sorrow and distaste. “I send you only because it is something you must learn. If you value your life, do as you are told.” He turned and went back to the house. Muchaku followed the maid, who was already half-way across the garden, her lantern casting its glow in a pond, as she crossed a stepping-stone. Something broke and squished beneath his feet. He did not have to look to know it was a snail.
5
As soon as they had stepped through the garden gate, the gale hit them in the face. The maid stood aside, shut the gate, and then walked ahead of him. As before, she said no word, and was so hidden in the muslin veils of her hat, that nothing could be seen of her.
Though the moon was only one quarter in the descendent, the wood here was so tall and thick that it was impossible to see anything but an endless multiplicity of tall soaring stalks. One might as well have been crouched at the bottom of an immense lily pond, and sound here had the quality, what sound there was, of setting up little waves and dangerous vibrations, rather than of being audible.
Indeed there was no sound but his own breathing and the usual uncertain stirring of a nightwood. In addition to the pines, there were also giant cryptomeria, whose shaggy bark spiralled up into invisibility overhead. Not even the wind could disrupt the faintly disturbing silence of those trees.
It was difficult to keep the woman in sight. She moved rapidly and soundlessly, and only an occasional ray from the lantern showed him where she was. There was something compressed and faded about her, as though she had slipped sideways out of the darkness.
They were once more back in that plain dotted with the hummocks of trees. But now, with the filtered moonlight, and the iciness of the air, the ground cover had turned black. The wind, having less to catch at, whistled and fluted through the dry grasses, snapping off here and there a dead flower. The sound was quite audible.
There were no lights, and though he hurried to catch up with his guide, he could not seem to do so. She moved lightly and vagrantly to and fro, emitting now and then a beam from her lantern, but at times all he saw was the faint radiance of her hood, and his thin body felt tight with cold. As they moved across the meadow, their steps began to reverberate along the frozen ground. It was almost winter weather. As they shifted, so did the hummocks seem to shift. Somewhere in those copses something cried, and he heard the sudden shocked drumming of a jack rabbit, shaking the ground underfoot.
The moonlight was mottled and became mottled more, as flats of fog were wind-shifted out of the copses, travelling along as though on wires, to meet with a jerk and then settle into place. These multiplied so fast, that soon it was as though they were walking through an orchard hung with midnight washing, flapping wet and brittle around him. Instinctively he ducked. They were beginning to climb, and as they climbed there was more and more of this wash to be hung out. Very far in the distance he could hear the roar of the waterfall. He had lost his guide. Then he caught the unoiled squeaking of tiny thick wooden wheels, and saw her again, standing motionless on a rise, surrounded by an ashen whirl of bats. One of the trees must be a rookery. He could not see their little red eyes.
He joined her, and together they looked down into a concealed hollow, through which somewhere water invisibly ran, and in which the surrounding cordon of rusty dripping trees contained a denser fog, but a fog given to little outpourings of surreptitious light. The moonlight, too, now and then flooded over the boiling surface of the mist.
The air seemed different here, scented somehow with blossoms. The path they travelled was not well worn. The weeds had had their way with it, and the pebbles were sharp underfoot. She made a beckoning gesture, and then plunged down into the fog. As best he could he followed after her. He had had enough of fogs on his way from Noto. He wished the dog were there, and thought of it curled up snugly on the veranda of his deserted bedroom. He doubted if it whined for him.
Somewhere he heard ahead the single peremptory tinkle of a tiny bell. Evasive though it was, it yet had the sharp insistence of an order.
The fog immediately rose.
Ahead he could certainly see something, as all this shapelessness drifted lazily into the forms of shape. The air was warmer. The ground felt firmer under his feet. Looking down, he saw it had become a smooth ridged sand, with all the ridges pointing in parallels ahead of him.
Then, with an almost audible click, followed by a sigh, the fog vanished and the building ahead of him settled seemingly into place.
The last wisps rose up into the air. The moonlight flooded over everything, running in a cool ripple ahead of him, as though someone had idly flung a stone down into sleep, causing the concentric rings to widen out until they touched the shores of consciousness.
The maid had vanished. He was completely alone. He was also awed, for ahead of him loomed something beautiful and long ago.
He was at the bottom of the concealed bowl. Around him, quite high up, black trees circled the depression. The ground under his feet was flat, and all unnoticed, he had come through a stately three portalled gate set in a high wall verdigrised with moss. Arcaded and orange tiled, the wall extended on three sides of him. The smooth raked sand led a hundred yards ahead, and was a hundred yards to left and right. There were no footsteps on the sand, and the garden was empty of anything but two late plum trees, of considerable age, which blossomed in high tubs set on either side of a wide shallow staircase. The staircase led to a large horizontal villa supported on poles. The air was motionless. A dim light poured through the open door, across the porch, and down the flood of stairs, so that on either side the two trees cast dim but confusing shadows.
Again that bell rang.
Hesitantly he moved forward, the only figure there, and then more rapidly, until he stood at the foot of the flood of stairs. As he mounted them, the light seemed to grow a little dimmer, the air more aromatic, and the wood began to creak. The building, though in repair, was ancient, in the style of the last Regency but one. On the thatch roof, two chains hung down from the ridgepole, and these, he had seen in the moonlight, rattled softly as they rose and fell, as though the building were breathing.
He looked behind him, but saw nothing but the smooth sand, with his own footprints leading from the gate, whose black openings seemed to watch him. He went inside, and found himself standing in a large hall, slightly musty, with square hewn scented cedar columns and a clerestory, floored with tatami mats brittle underfoot, and absolutely empty. The walls were elaborately painted, in blue, green, and gold, in the Fujiwara style, with clouds and pine boughs, but here and there the paint was rubbed and dull. He could not tell where the light came from, and the atmosphere was absent-minded and sad.
Again a bell rang, but once more, though the silence seemed to whirr, nothing happened. He found himself being watched by a smooth gold statue of the Buddha. He heard footsteps, far at the end of the hall, and stepping farther in, peered around him. It was hard, in that forest of surrounding pillars, to make out anything at all. But the building itself could only be a royal villa of a hundred and fifty years ago, if not more.
He recognized the white head-dress of the maid. She was waiting for him. As he walked towards her, she turned and hurried down one of the side aisles of the hall and out a door at the end. She was now carrying a feeble indoor lamp.
The place was so beautiful, that it did not even occur to him to be frightened. They went through many corridors, always bearing towards the left, and once, between two open walls, climbed a flight of stairs. He guessed if anything they were moving towards the female apartments of whatever this building might once have been.
But though they passed the open screens of many rooms, he could sense that the place was utterly deserted, except for himself, and whoever this shrouded woman was, if she was not the ghost of a servant, a servant, however, clearly, from the flightly pensive way she moved, the deliberate awkwardness with which she held the lamp, of some exalted status, a lady-in-waiting perhaps, such as one reads about in the Pillow Book. They entered now a little pavilion open on all sides. She walked ahead of him, and abruptly vanished up to the waist, as she descended some stairs. It took him some moments to realize that that was what she had done. Then he followed.
Before him lay a courtyard enclosed by stone walls. The moon cast a long shadow half-way across it, but he could see that it was clogged with a grey, insubstantial moss, of the texture of tripe, that had half-healed over the irregular wet stones which made a path across it. She was already on the far side, and after each step she took the moss seemed to heal more closely around the stone behind her.
On the opposite side of the court, again supported on columns, though these only about three feet off the ground, was a long, low, insubstantial pavilion with an enormous steep pitched roof. It glowed with a dim, subdued, but constantly humming light. It was a building clearly suffused with the rustling presence of women. He hurried after her, mounted the stairs, and entered a gallery, beyond which lay still another large room. She slid the panel shut behind him, lifted her veil and examined him, but he could not make out her features, for she stood in shadow. With one slim white arm snaking out into the light, she motioned him to wait, and then moved off. He heard a panel slide shut somewhere behind him.
The room was slightly warm, but the light was not so bright as he had imagined, so that its far corners were in darkness. Again there was the rich smell of aromatic woods. To one side, two or three blue and green silk pillows were precisely aligned on the floor, before a low stand. An hibachi stood nearby, with two or three folded quilts embroidered with metallic thread. It was to the cushions she had motioned him, and as he went towards them to sit down, again a silvery bell chimed somewhere close by.
On the hibachi was a small iron dish of leched meat and water chestnuts, and a covered pot of what he discovered to be rice. On a stand were a white porcelain vial of rice wine, two cups, a compote of sweetmeats, three rosy peaches, and a tray of thick but delicate almond cakes, a neatly roasted almond lying in the exact centre of each, with the outer skin brittle and baked loose.
It was true he was hungry, and no doubt he was expected to appear imperturbable. He ate.
The wine, too, warmed him, and over it he lingered for as long as he dared. It was with the second glass that the bell rang once more, it seemed to ring just before something happened, and he became aware that he was being watched from somewhere ahead of him in the shadows.
His hand trembled, but he poured himself another cup of the light green wine. He was careful to keep his eyes down, careful to remain composed, but he was aware of the way his thin fingers, sweated down to the bone, held their cup. And the lamp, too, he saw, was placed so that alone in that room his face was lighted.
Muchaku was one of those men who look not what they are, but what they will become, and at forty he was more boyish, more cheerful than he had ever been in youth, more serene than he was to become for many years. It was true that he was a little too aesthetic, a little too priggish, but one felt, seeing him, that this was merely a husk that his embryonic character had not yet grown sufficiently to split away. He felt alternately too small and too big for his body, there were parts of it he did not as yet fill harmoniously, but his voice was heavy and rich and humorous, even when emotion had clouded his good humour, and though feline when joyously absorbed, he was immaculately manly, with that scrubbed fastidiousness and mental agility which is most untouchably male. He was, in short, ravishing to anyone who might prefer a masculine essence to the sweaty crudities of those whose existence consists in what they do rather than in what they are, and who so turn out to be nobodies, whose only existence lies in their futile efforts to prove that they exist. Such people one may touch once, but others always, since one may never touch them at all.
Of all this he realized nothing, since he knew nothing of women, for only a woman like him could have shown him what he was. He was aware only of being watched. He felt an enormous trapped force, watching him sadly and somehow avidly.
If we are not too afraid, and for some reason he did not feel afraid, but only somehow intangible and transparent, we can often tell much about the invisible watchers, the judges of the secret court, who weigh us but say nothing, and wait for us to pass sentence on ourselves.
He had the impression of overwhelming charm and of great but slightly rueful sadness, of timidity and yet of strength, and also of a shy innocence that longed to be pleased, and wanted somehow, if only it knew how, if only it dared to move forward, to please, with a sort of desperation, as though it would have no other chance, as though this were its last chance, to do so.
He had the feeling, more than anything else, that everything was final here. It might, indeed, be one of those houses which appear once a year or once a hundred years, in which the ghostly lady has no choice but always to live out her final drama again, though not always with the same person, as though she fed on other men’s souls.
And her robes were rich. He could not tell how he knew that, perhaps it was that she was not entirely motionless, but they were. There was that smell about them, that impression anyhow, that they had been laid away in a press for a long time, a suggestion of infinite robes, each taken out only for the proper occasion, the correct day.
Then, abruptly, he knew she was not there any more. He set down his glass and stared at it.
From somewhere in the depth of the building, there came a long low growling wail, not so much human, as the sound of a helpless gust pushed abruptly out through a narrow granite opening. It made the hairs of his neck stiffen and turn in.
Yet the room remained unchanged. He half rose, and then sank down again. The maid appeared at his left side, bearing a low brown pot of delicate tea and two oil spot bowls, lightly and densely mottled with gold under their Siamese cat glaze. Her face was expressionless and almost transparent. She gathered up the dishes, except for the almond cakes and sweetmeats, and withdrew.
Then, half turning, she spoke for the first time. Her voice was wispy and dry, as though it cost her an effort even to whisper.
“The Lady Furikake will be here soon,” she said, and drifted away.
He knew she had been there already and at the same instant, that she was there again. But whatever was watching him, now watched him from a different height, and seemed calmer and more appeased.
There was a single acid sound, as though someone had put an ice crystal on a stove. It was neither tentative nor followed by any other. It existed for a long time, even after it had died away.
He started to rise, but a voice came out of that shadowy darkness, a voice also withdrawn. “No,” it said. “Stay there.” A woman’s voice, far away, that would have been gentle, had it not been so used to command. He sat down again.
Then she began to play, at first as though merely parting infinite layers of silence, into which, somewhere, a sound had been dropped and lost. In the darkness of course her fingers would be blind. But then, carefully, they found what they were looking for.
He expected to find it painful, for the koto has that fresh innocence of youth that is always untouched by experience. No matter how much it knows, it always remains able to see everything for the first time, and so it is maddeningly vulnerable.
For the koto does all the things that water can do, as pliant and unyielding, it humorously shapes the rocks. Silence is a vast black pool with granite edges. Reaching across the strings, with poised plectrum, and a serious little smile, Lady Furikake let fall a single pebble of sound down into that silence. It rippled out. It defined the stillness. And then, with a roar, came the whole downpour of the first spring flood.
The sound remained untouched. It was just sound, the spume and spray of music, but meaningless in itself. But as it dashed against silence, it echoed round him in a thousand playful, self-absorbed ways, with the thoughtful melancholy of a completely contented child. And everything it touched it defined by a meditative echo. These are rocks, it said, these pebbles, some hard, some soft, and here I am supposed to leap down over hot stones. Here I catch at a small moss covered boulder and make a backward dashing foam. I like that. And here, caught in the air and dazzled by the sun, I suddenly hang scattered into a thousand crystal eyes. They don’t see anything. They are themselves the act of seeing. And now, in the acid shallows of a mountain pond, away from the current, I am merely watching.
And then, as naturally as a little girl would aimlessly laugh, that effortless melody smoothly flowed out into a motionless sheet and became grave. It bobbled only at a single thought, like a solitary yellow water lily, on which there was an aphid and a drop of dew, while the petals shimmered slightly in an almost imperceptible breeze, a breeze that existed only in the centre of the pond, to refresh the lily. He wanted to look more closely at that lily. He knew he had to. It meant something.
Abruptly Lady Furikake drew the plectrum sideways and diagonally across the strings, making a sound like ripped silk, very old. He wanted to say, don’t do that, the lily was so beautiful. It brought tears to his eyes.
