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I

When the sound of hurried footsteps went running past the gate, a huge pair of chopping-board clogs was hanging in the air inside Daisuke's head.

But as the footsteps receded, the clogs slipped out of his head and vanished.

And then he woke.

Beside his pillow, a single double-petaled camellia lay fallen on the matting.

Daisuke had distinctly heard that flower fall in the night, lying in his bed.

To his ear it had sounded as loud as a rubber ball flung down from the ceiling.

He had thought it might only be the deep quiet of the late hour, but to make sure he had laid his right hand over his heart, and had gone to sleep confirming the beat of the blood striking just below the edge of his ribs.

For a while he lay gazing vacantly at the great flower, big as a baby's head, and then, as though suddenly remembering, he put his hand on his chest without rising and began once more to examine the beating of his heart.

Listening to his pulse as he lay in bed had become a habit with him lately.

The beat was steady as always, striking surely.

With his hand still on his chest, he tried to imagine the warm crimson blood flowing quietly beneath that beat.

This, he thought, is life.

At this moment, he thought, I am pressing down the flow of life with the palm of my hand.

And then he thought that this answering sound, like the ticking of a clock, was a kind of alarm bell summoning him toward death.

If only one could live without hearing that bell — if the sack that held his blood did not also serve as the sack that held his time, how easy his mind would be.

How completely he would be able to taste life.

And yet — Daisuke shuddered in spite of himself.

He was a man so greedy for life that he could not bear to imagine a quiet heart no longer troubled by the beating of blood.

Sometimes, lying down, he would place his hand below his left breast and wonder what it would be if a hammer were to strike him there just once.

Living in perfect health, he could still find himself thinking of that plain fact of being alive as a piece of luck close to a miracle.

He took his hand from his heart and picked up the newspaper by his pillow.

When he drew both hands out of the bedding and spread the sheet wide, there on the left was a picture of a man cutting down a woman.

He shifted his eyes at once to another page.

There, in large type, was an account of the trouble at a school.

Daisuke read it for a while, and then let the paper drop with a flap from his listless hand onto the bedding.

Then, smoking a cigarette, he worked the quilt down some fifteen centimeters, picked up the camellia from the matting, turned it over, and held it under his nose.

His mouth, his mustache, and most of his nose disappeared behind it.

The smoke came so thickly that it caught and drifted among the petals and the stamens.

He set the flower down on the white sheet, got up, and went to the bathroom.

There he brushed his teeth with care.

He was always pleased with how evenly they were set.

He stripped to the waist and scrubbed his chest and back clean.

There was a fine, particular sheen to his skin.

As though scented oil had been rubbed in and then carefully wiped away, whenever he moved his shoulders or raised an arm the fat beneath the surface showed in a thin gleam.

With this too he was satisfied.

Next he parted his black hair.

Even without oil it obeyed him to an amusing degree.

His mustache, like his hair, was fine and still soft and young, and covered his upper lip with an air of good breeding.

Daisuke stroked his full cheeks two or three times with both hands, studying his face in the mirror.

His gestures were exactly those of a woman putting on powder.

In truth he was a man who took such pride in his body that, had there been reason to, he would not have shrunk from powdering his face.

What he disliked most of all was the bony frame and gaunt look of an arhat, and each time he faced a mirror he thought how glad he was not to have been born with such a face.

On the other hand, being called a dandy caused him no pain at all.

To that extent he had left the older Japan behind him.

Some thirty minutes later he sat down at the table.

As he sipped hot tea and buttered his toast, a houseboy named Kadono came in from the sitting room with the newspaper folded in his hand.

Laying the folded sheet beside the cushion, he said in a loud voice,

"Sensei, something big has started up."

That was how he put it, grandly.

This houseboy always addressed Daisuke as sensei.

At first Daisuke had objected once or twice with a wry smile, but Kadono would only laugh — heh heh heh, but you are, sensei — and go straight back to it, so that Daisuke gave up, and what he had let pass became a habit, until now, with this man alone, he answered to sensei without a thought.

In fact it was only after taking on a houseboy that Daisuke understood there was no other suitable word for a servant to use to a master such as himself.

"You mean the trouble at the school?"

Daisuke went on eating his bread with a composed face.

"Well, isn't it splendid?"

"You mean driving out the principal?"

"Yes. He'll have to resign, surely."

Kadono was delighted at the thought.

"And if the principal does resign, is there something in it for you?"

"Don't joke, sensei. A man can be pleased about a thing without counting his profit."

Daisuke went on eating his bread.

"Do you know whether they are driving him out because the man is genuinely bad, or because there is some other advantage in it for them?"

he asked, pouring water from the iron kettle into his teacup.

"I don't know. What, do you know, sensei?"

"I don't know either. But do you suppose people nowadays would make such a fuss if there were nothing in it for them? It's a means to an end, my friend."

"Well now. Is that how it is?"

Kadono put on a somewhat serious face.

Daisuke said nothing more.

Kadono was a man with whom one could get no further than that.

Beyond that point, however far one went, he would hold his ground with a placid "Well now, is that how it is."

Whether what one said reached him or not was impossible to tell.

Daisuke found that vagueness restful — it demanded nothing of him — and that was why he kept the man on.

In exchange, Kadono attended no school, did no studying, and idled the whole day away.

Now and then Daisuke would suggest that he might at least take up a foreign language.

Kadono's answer was always "Do you think so?" or "Is that how it is?"

He never once said that he would do it.

And indeed, being as lazy as he was, he could not have given any clear answer.

For his part, Daisuke had not been born to educate Kadono, so he let the matter drop.

Fortunately, unlike his head, the man's body moved well, and Daisuke found him very useful on that account.

Not only Daisuke: the old woman who had been there before him had also found things much easier since Kadono came.

As a result the two of them got on extremely well.

When the master was out they often fell into conversation.

"What does the master mean to do with himself, I wonder, ma'am?"

"A man in his position can do anything he pleases. There's no call to worry about him."

"I'm not worried. It only seems to me he might do something."

"I expect he means to take a wife first, and then look about for a post at his leisure."

"A fine plan. I'd like to spend my days like that myself, reading books all day and going off to hear music."

"You would?"

"I could do without the books. But I'd like to take my ease the way he does."

"That's all settled in a former life. There's no help for it."

"Is that how it is?"

That was the general tenor of it.

Two weeks before Kadono moved into Daisuke's house, the following conversation had passed between the young bachelor master and his prospective dependent.

"What school are you attending?"

"I did attend one. I've given it up now."

"Which one did you attend?"

"Which one — I went to several. But I tire of things easily."

"You lose interest quickly?"

"Well, yes."

"So you have no particular wish to study?"

"No, none just now. And things at home haven't been going too well lately."

"The old woman here says she knows your mother."

"Yes, we used to live close by."

"And your mother is still —"

"Still doing poor piecework at home. But times are bad and it doesn't seem to bring in much."

"You say it doesn't seem to — don't you live with her?"

"I live with her, yes, but it's a bother to ask, so I never have. She grumbles about it a good deal, from what I hear."

"And your elder brother?"

"My brother works at the post office."

"Is that the whole household?"

"There's a younger brother as well. He's at a bank — a step or two above an errand boy, I suppose."

"So you are the only one doing nothing."

"Well, that's about it."

"And what do you do when you're at home?"

"Mostly I sleep. Or else I go out for a walk, I suppose."

"Doesn't it pain you to sleep while everyone else is earning?"

"No, not particularly."

"Is your family so harmonious as all that?"

"We don't quarrel much, no. It's a strange thing."

"Still, from your mother's and your brother's point of view, they must want you to stand on your own feet as soon as possible."

"That may be so."

"You seem to be of a very easy temperament. Is that really how it is with you?"

"Yes. I've no particular reason to lie about it."

"Then you are a thoroughly carefree fellow."

"Yes — carefree, I suppose you'd call it."

"How old is your brother?"

"Let me see. Twenty-six, by the old count."

"Then he will have to take a wife before long. When your brother has a wife, do you mean to go on as you are?"

"I can't say until it happens. Anyway, I expect it will work out somehow."

"Have you no other relatives?"

"There's an aunt. She's in the freight business in Yokohama now."

"Your aunt is?"

"I suppose she doesn't run it herself. My uncle, rather."

"Why not ask them to take you on? A freight business must need plenty of hands."

"I'm lazy by nature. I expect they'd refuse."

"It won't do to say that of yourself. The fact is, your mother has asked the old woman here whether I wouldn't take you into my house."

"Yes, she said something of the sort."

"And what do you want yourself?"

"Well, I'd try not to be too idle —"

"You would rather come here, then?"

"Well, yes."

"But it won't do if all you do is sleep and go for walks."

"That will be all right. My body is sound enough. I can draw the bathwater or anything else."

"There's running water for the bath, so there's no need to draw it."

"Then I'll do the cleaning."

On these terms Kadono had become Daisuke's houseboy.

Presently Daisuke finished his meal and began to smoke.

Kadono, who until then had been sitting alone in the shadow of the tea cabinet with his knees drawn up and his back against a pillar, decided the moment had come and put another question to his master.

"Sensei, how is your heart this morning?"

Knowing his master's recent habit, he asked it in a somewhat teasing tone.

"Still safe today."

"It sounds as though tomorrow might be dangerous. If you worry about your body the way you do, sensei — you may end by catching a real illness."

"I am ill already."

Kadono only said "Well, well," and looked at Daisuke's glossy complexion and the fullness of his shoulders under his haori.

At such moments Daisuke always felt sorry for the young man.

As far as Daisuke could see, the fellow's head was packed with nothing but the brains of an ox.

In conversation he would follow you no more than fifty meters along the broad road that ordinary people walk.

If you turned off into a side street he was lost at once.

As for the shafts that logic sinks straight down from that road, he could not set foot in them at all.

His nervous system was cruder still.

One had the impression that it had been assembled out of straw rope.

Observing the way the young man lived, Daisuke sometimes wondered what he went to the trouble of breathing for.

And yet he idled on without a care.

Worse, he took this idleness to be somehow of the same order as his master's attitude, and was rather pleased with himself about it.

On top of that, trading on the sheer toughness of his body, he would press in upon the nervous weak spots of his master.

His own nerves, Daisuke thought, were the tax he paid for his particular fineness of thought and his acuteness of feeling.

They were the pain of the echo thrown back from the far shore of a refined education.

They were an unwritten sentence served for the crime of having been born an aristocrat.

It was only by accepting these sacrifices that he had become what he was.

Indeed, there were times when he found the meaning of life squarely in the sacrifices themselves.

Of all this Kadono understood nothing whatever.

"Kadono, was there no mail?"

"Mail? Let me see. Yes, there was. A postcard and a letter. I put them on the desk. Shall I fetch them?"

"No, I can go in there myself."

The answer was so half-hearted that Kadono was already on his feet.

He brought in the card and the letter.

The card, scrawled in thin ink and extremely brief, said: arriving Tokyo two o'clock today, putting up at the address on the front, reporting for the present, wish to see you tomorrow morning; on the front, in the same rough hand, were the name of an inn in Ura-Jimbocho and the sender's name, Hiraoka Tsunejiro.

"So he is here already — he must have arrived yesterday,"

Daisuke said half to himself, and picked up the letter; this was in his father's hand.

He had returned two or three days ago.

There was nothing urgent, but he had a number of things to discuss, so Daisuke should come as soon as this letter reached him — and after that came several lines of no consequence about the blossoms in Kyoto being still early and the express train having been crowded and uncomfortable.

Rolling up the letter, Daisuke looked from one to the other with an odd expression.

"Kadono, would you telephone for me? To my family's house."

"Yes. To your house. What shall I say?"

"Say I have an engagement today and someone to meet, so I cannot come. Say I shall certainly call tomorrow or the day after."

"Yes. And to whom?"

"My father is back from his trip and says to come, he has something to discuss — no, there's no need to call my father to the phone. Say it to whoever answers."

"Right."

Kadono went off without ceremony.

Daisuke went from the breakfast room through the sitting room and back to his study.

It had been swept clean.

The fallen camellia had been swept out somewhere as well.

He went to the sectional bookcase to the right of the flower vase, took down the heavy photograph album that lay on top of it, and standing there undid the gilt clasp and began to turn the leaves; halfway through he stopped short.

There was the head and shoulders of a woman of about twenty.

Daisuke lowered his eyes and gazed steadily at her face.

II

He was thinking of changing his clothes and going to call at Hiraoka's inn himself when, as luck would have it, Hiraoka arrived.

The rickshaw came rattling up to the gate, and the voice that cried "Here, here it is" as the shafts were set down was exactly the voice of the man he had parted from three years before.

And when, in the entryway, he seized the old woman who came to the door and asked her to lend him twenty sen because he had left his purse at the inn, Daisuke could not help remembering the Hiraoka of their school days.

Daisuke ran out to the entrance and all but took his old friend's hand as he brought him up into the sitting room.

"Well, then. Make yourself comfortable."

"Ah, chairs."

With that, Hiraoka flung himself down into the armchair.

He handled his own body — it must have weighed fifty kilograms and more — as though he set no value on it at all.

Then, resting his cropped head against the back of the chair, he glanced around the room.

"A very good house. Better than I expected,"

he said approvingly.

Daisuke opened the lid of the cigarette box without answering.

"Well, and how have things gone since?"

"How have they gone — I'll tell you about it, all of it."

"You used to write often, so I knew how you were, but lately you've sent nothing at all."

"No, I've neglected everyone everywhere."

Hiraoka suddenly took off his glasses, drew a crumpled handkerchief from the breast of his suit, and began to wipe them, blinking as he did so.

He had been nearsighted since their school days.

Daisuke watched him quietly.

"Never mind me — how are you?"

Hiraoka said, carrying the thin wire temples back to his ears with both hands.

"I am as I always was."

"To be as one always was is the best of all. Some of us change too much."

At that Hiraoka drew his brows together and began to look out at the garden; then, changing his tone abruptly, he said,

"Ah, a cherry tree. Only just coming into bloom. The climate is really quite different."

So he remarked.

Somehow the talk would not settle into the old intimacy.

Daisuke too, a little flatly, said,

"It must be much warmer down there."

It was the sort of thing one says in passing.

But the answer came back with an almost excessive heat.

"Yes, much warmer,"

he said with force.

It was the tone of a man who has suddenly become aware of his own existence and been startled by it.

Daisuke looked at Hiraoka's face again.

Hiraoka lit a cigarette.

Just then the old woman came in at last with tea in the pot.

She had only that moment filled the kettle, she explained, and it had taken time to boil, and she was sorry to be so late; and she set the tray on the table.

The two of them looked at the rosewood tray and said nothing while she talked.

Getting no response, she smiled to herself and left the room.

"What is that?"

"An old woman. I hired her. One has to eat."

"She has a smooth tongue."

Daisuke bent the corners of his red lips slightly downward in a scornful smile.

"She has never been in service in a house like this before. It can't be helped."

"Why not bring someone from your family's house? They must have plenty."

"They are all young girls."

Daisuke answered gravely.

At this Hiraoka laughed aloud for the first time.

"So much the better if they're young, surely."

"At any rate the people in that house are no good."

"Is there anyone besides the old woman?"

"There's a houseboy."

Kadono had come back at some point and was talking with the old woman in the kitchen.

"And that's all?"

"That's all. Why?"

"You still haven't taken a wife?"

Daisuke colored slightly, but at once his manner became ordinary, entirely commonplace.

"If I had taken a wife I should at least have sent you word, shouldn't I? Rather than that, your own —"

He began, and stopped short.

Daisuke and Hiraoka had known each other since middle school, and for a whole year after they left the university they had gone back and forth almost like brothers.

In those days their greatest pleasure had been to open everything to each other and to promise each other help.

That pleasure had more than once turned into action, so that they were convinced that every word they spoke for each other's sake contained, beyond pleasure, a sacrifice of some kind.

And they never noticed the commonplace fact that if the sacrifice is paid on the spot, the pleasure turns instantly into pain.

A year later Hiraoka married.

At the same time he was assigned to a branch of his bank in the Kyoto-Osaka district.

On the day of their departure Daisuke saw the young couple off at Shimbashi station, and gripped Hiraoka's hand cheerfully, telling him to come back soon.

Hiraoka said, as though flinging the words away, that it could not be helped, he would put up with it for a while; but behind his glasses a look of enviable satisfaction moved in his eyes.

Seeing it, Daisuke suddenly hated his friend.

He went home and shut himself in his room for the whole day, brooding.

He even cried off from taking his sister-in-law to a concert, and gave her a great deal of anxiety.

Letters came constantly from Hiraoka.

A card saying he had arrived safely; word that he had set up house there; and after that, accounts of the work at the branch, his hopes for the future, and much besides.

Each time a letter came, Daisuke always sent a careful reply.

Oddly enough, whenever he wrote a reply he was seized by a certain uneasiness.

Sometimes he could not bear to endure it, and broke off the letter halfway.

Only when Hiraoka's letter happened to express some gratitude for what Daisuke had once done for him did the brush move smoothly, so that a relatively easy answer got written.

By and by the correspondence grew thinner — twice a month became once, and once became a gap of two or three months — and then it was not writing that made him uneasy, and there were times when, with nothing at all to say, he moistened the gum of an envelope simply to drive that feeling off.

Over the half year or so that this went on, Daisuke felt the structure of both his head and his heart gradually changing.

With this change came the point at which writing or not writing to Hiraoka gave him no pain whatever.

In fact, in the year and more since Daisuke had set up his own house, he had done no more than mention his present address in passing when they exchanged New Year cards this spring.

Even so, for certain reasons he could not forget Hiraoka altogether.

He remembered him now and then.

And he would try to imagine, in various ways, how the man might be living.

But he only remembered; he had neither the courage nor the need to fret himself into writing or inquiring — and so things had stood until, two weeks ago, a letter arrived suddenly from Hiraoka.

The letter said that he intended to leave the place shortly and come up to Tokyo.

However, Daisuke was not to take it as a transfer ordered from the head office, nor as a promotion of any kind.

He had his reasons, and had decided abruptly to change his line of work; when he came up to the capital he would count on Daisuke's kind offices.

Whether "count on your kind offices" meant it literally or was mere politeness was unclear, but that some sharp change had come over Hiraoka's affairs was beyond dispute.

Daisuke had felt a start when he read it.

So he had been waiting to hear the whole story the moment they met; but the talk kept sliding off, and would not come back to it.

When he watched for an opening and raised the subject himself, Hiraoka would say he would tell him at his leisure, or something of the sort, and nothing came of it.

At last Daisuke gave up and said,

"It's been a long time. Let's go and eat somewhere."

So he proposed.

Hiraoka still wanted to repeat his "at my leisure," but Daisuke dragged him off, and they went up into a Western restaurant nearby.

There they drank a good deal.

It began with someone saying that at least their eating and drinking were as they had always been, and after that their stiff tongues gradually loosened.

Daisuke, with some relish, told about the Easter service he had gone to see at the Nikolai Cathedral two or three days before.

The festival begins at the stroke of midnight, timed for the hour when the world has gone to sleep.

When the worshippers come back into the nave after going the round of the long corridor, thousands of candles have been lit all at once.

As the priests in their vestments pass by in procession, their black shadows are thrown enormously large on the plain wall.

Hiraoka listened with his chin propped on his hand, the double folds of his eyelids reddening behind his glasses.

Daisuke went on: at about two in the morning he had walked down the broad Onarikaido, over the place where the deep-night rails run straight through the darkness, all the way to the Ueno woods alone, and there he had entered among the blossoms under the electric lights.

"Cherry blossoms at night with nobody about are a fine thing,"

he said.

Hiraoka drained his cup in silence, then moved his mouth a little as though in pity.

"I'm sure they are. I've never seen them. But a man is still comfortable as long as he can do that sort of thing. Once you are out in the world it's not so easy."

It was said in a way that quietly looked down on the other's inexperience.

To Daisuke it was not the tone but the substance of the reply that seemed illogical.

He held that the experience of that Easter night meant more in a human life than the experience of getting on in the world.

So he answered like this.

"I think nothing is so stupid as what people call worldly experience. There is nothing in it but pain."

Hiraoka opened his drunken eyes a little wider.

"Your ideas seem to have changed a good deal. But wasn't it once your own argument that the pain becomes medicine afterward?"

"That was the argument of a young man with no judgment of his own, who had surrendered to the proverbs of the world and was talking nonsense. I withdrew it long ago."

"Still, you will have to go out into the world yourself before long. That attitude will not do then."

"I have been out in the world all along. Since we parted, in fact, my world seems to have grown a great deal wider. It is only a different kind of world from the one you are out in."

"Talk big if you like — you will surrender in the end."

"Of course I shall surrender the moment I have trouble eating. But why should a man who wants for nothing today go out of his way to taste an inferior kind of experience? It would be like an Indian putting on an overcoat against the coming of winter."

A flicker of displeasure passed between Hiraoka's brows.

He fixed his red eyes and puffed away at his cigarette.

Daisuke, feeling he had said too much, softened his tone a little.

"I know a man who understands nothing whatever about music. He teaches, and since one post won't feed him he holds down three or four, and it is a pitiful thing — he has no time at all except for preparing his lessons and moving his mouth mechanically in the classroom. On the rare Sunday he says he is resting his bones and sleeps the whole day through. So no matter what concert is given, no matter what master comes from abroad, he has no chance to hear it. In other words he must die without ever setting foot in that one beautiful world called music. To my mind there is no more pitiable inexperience than that. Experience that has to do with bread may be urgent, but in the end it is inferior. Unless a man has the luxurious kind of experience that has nothing to do with bread and water, there is no point in being human. You seem to think me still a boy, but in the luxurious world I live in, I consider myself a good deal your senior."

Hiraoka knocked the ash of his cigarette into the dish and said in a low, dark tone,

"Yes — it is very fine if you can go on living in that world forever."

So he said.

The heavy words seemed to drag behind them a kind of curse upon wealth.

The two of them went out into the street, drunk.

Because the drink had led them into a strange argument, the important matter of Hiraoka's own affairs had not advanced at all.

"Shall we walk a little?"

Daisuke suggested.

Hiraoka was evidently not as busy as he claimed, for he answered vaguely and fell into step beside him.

They turned off the main street into a side lane, and as they picked their way toward the quietest place for talking, a thread was somehow picked up and the conversation settled where Daisuke had wanted it.

According to Hiraoka, when he first took up the post he had worked hard, learning the business and investigating the economic conditions of the district.

He had even thought of studying how to apply the theories he had learned to actual practice; but his position was not high enough, so he had perforce kept his plans to himself, filing them away in his head for some future trial.

At the beginning he had more than once put proposals to the branch manager, but the manager was cold and never took them up.

If Hiraoka brought out any difficult theory, he grew markedly ill-tempered.

He behaved as though a green boy could not be expected to understand anything.

And yet in fact he appeared to understand nothing himself.

To Hiraoka it seemed that the man refused to engage with him not because he was beneath engaging with, but rather because he was afraid to.

That was what galled Hiraoka.

More than once or twice they had come close to open conflict.

But as time passed his temper somehow cooled, and little by little his mind began to blend with the air around him.

He also did his best to make it blend.

With that, the manager's attitude toward him gradually changed as well.

Sometimes the man even came to him for advice.

And Hiraoka, no longer the fresh graduate, took care not to say what the other could not follow or would find inconvenient.

"Not that I was flattering him or fawning on him,"

Hiraoka took the trouble to add.

Daisuke said gravely, "No, of course not,"

and left it at that.

The manager took a good deal of thought for Hiraoka's future.

It was nearly his turn to be recalled to the head office, and he half jokingly promised to take Hiraoka with him when he went.

By that time Hiraoka had grown used to the work, his credit had risen, his social obligations had multiplied, and the time for study had naturally disappeared; indeed study had begun to feel like a hindrance to the actual business.

Just as the manager confided everything to him, so he in turn trusted a subordinate of his own named Seki and consulted him about all manner of things.

But this man got involved with a geisha and, before anyone knew it, left a hole in the accounts.

When it came out, the man himself of course had to be dismissed; but for certain reasons, if it were left alone the trouble looked likely to reach as far as the manager, and so Hiraoka took the responsibility on himself and offered his resignation.

That, roughly, was Hiraoka's account; but to Daisuke it sounded as though he had been talked into it by the manager and pressed to settle the matter.

He inferred as much from a remark at the end of Hiraoka's story: "A company man can help himself the higher up he goes. To tell the truth, one almost pities a fellow like Seki, dismissed on the spot for using no more than that."

It was that one sentence that gave Daisuke the idea.

"Then the manager is helping himself best of all."

Daisuke asked.

"That may be how it is."

Hiraoka left it vague.

"And what became of the money the man took?"

"It was under a thousand yen, so I put it up."

"You had it to hand? You must have been helping yourself as well."

Hiraoka made a sour face and shot a look at Daisuke.

"Suppose I had. It is all spent. There is hardly enough to live on. That money was borrowed."

"I see."

Daisuke received it with perfect composure.

Daisuke was a man who never lost his ordinary tone, whatever the occasion.

And in that tone, low and clear as it was, there was a kind of roundness.

"I borrowed it from the manager and made up the sum."

"Why didn't the manager lend it to this Seki or whatever his name is directly?"

Hiraoka gave no answer.

Nor did Daisuke press him.

For a while the two of them walked on side by side without speaking.

Daisuke judged that there must be more to it than what Hiraoka had told him.

But he was aware that he had no right to go a step further and dig out the truth of it.

And in fact he was far too much a man of the city to feel that sort of curiosity.

Living in twentieth-century Japan, he had reached, before he was quite thirty, a state in which nothing surprised him.

His mind was not so provincial as to be startled at meeting the dark side of humanity.

His nerves were not bored enough to take pleasure in sniffing out so ordinary a secret.

Indeed, in one sense he was so worn out that he had no wish to receive even far pleasanter stimulations than this.

In the world peculiar to himself, a world that had almost nothing to do with Hiraoka's, Daisuke had already evolved this far — and it is a sad thing, now as in the past, that the reverse side of evolution is always degeneration.

Of this Hiraoka knew nothing at all.

He seemed to see Daisuke as the same innocent of three years ago.

To lay bare all one's weaknesses to such a young gentleman would be much like throwing horse dung to startle a well-bred young lady.

Better to keep silent than to disgust him by saying too much —

That was how Daisuke read Hiraoka's mind.

And so it struck him as faintly absurd that Hiraoka should walk on beside him without answering.

To the degree that Hiraoka treated Daisuke as a child, and perhaps to a greater degree, Daisuke had begun to treat Hiraoka as a child.

But by the time they had gone some thirty meters and taken up the conversation again, there was no trace of any of this in either of them.

It was Daisuke who spoke first.

"And what do you mean to do now?"

"Well —"

"Since you have the experience, perhaps the same line of work would be best."

"Well, it depends. As a matter of fact I meant to talk it over with you at leisure. What do you think — might there be an opening at your brother's company?"

"Yes, I'll ask. I have to go to the house in the next two or three days. Though I can't say how it will turn out."

"If business is no good, I thought I might go into a newspaper somewhere."

"That would do as well."

They came out again onto a street where the trams ran.

Hiraoka had been watching the front of a tram coming toward them, and now announced abruptly that he would take it and go home.

Daisuke only said, "Is that so"; he did not try to keep him, and yet he did not part from him at once either.

They walked as far as the stop with its red post.

There he said,

"And how is Michiyo?"

So he asked.

"Thank you. Much as ever. She sent you her regards. I meant to bring her today, in fact, but she said the train had shaken her head into an ache, so I left her at the inn."

A tram stopped in front of them.

Hiraoka took two or three quick steps toward it, but stopped when Daisuke pointed out his mistake.

The car he wanted had not yet come.

"It was a hard thing about the child."

"Yes. A pitiful thing. Thank you again for all your kindness then. If it was to die anyway, it would have been better never to have been born."

"And since? Is there no second one yet?"

"No, not yet, and there won't be, I expect. Her health isn't good enough."

"When you have to move about like this, having no child may actually be more convenient."

"That's true enough. Better still to be single like you — freer altogether, no doubt."

"Then become single."

"What nonsense you talk. Never mind that — my wife has been fretting about whether you had taken a wife yet or not."

Just then the tram came.

III

Daisuke's father, Nagai Toku, was old enough to have gone to war at the time of the Restoration, and yet he was still living in excellent health.

After leaving government service he had gone into business, and while he busied himself with this and that the money had naturally accumulated, so that for the last fourteen or fifteen years he had been a man of considerable property.

There was an elder brother named Seigo.

He had gone straight from the university into a company his father was connected with, and now held an important place there.

He and his wife Umeko had two children.

The elder, a boy, was named Seitaro and was fifteen.

His sister Nui was three years younger.

Besides Seigo there was another sister, but she had married a diplomat and was now abroad with her husband.

There had been another child between Seigo and this sister, and yet another between the sister and Daisuke, but both had died young.

Their mother had died as well.

Of these people Daisuke's family was composed.

Of them, only the sister who had gone abroad and Daisuke, who had lately set up a house of his own, lived outside it, so that five persons, large and small, remained in the main house.

Once a month, without fail, Daisuke went to the main house to get money.

He lived on money that was neither quite his father's nor quite his brother's.

He went there at other times too, whenever he was bored.

He would tease the children, play five-in-a-row with the houseboy, discuss the theater with his sister-in-law, and come home.

Daisuke was fond of this sister-in-law.

She was a kind of person made by splicing together, without ceremony, the manner of the Tempo era and the manner of Meiji today.

She would order from her husband's sister in France some very expensive fabric with a difficult name, and four or five of them would cut it up and make it into a sash and try it on.

Afterward it turned out that the stuff had been exported from Japan in the first place, and there was much laughter.

It was Daisuke who had gone to the Mitsukoshi showroom and looked into it.

She was also fond of Western music, and Daisuke often took her out to concerts.

On the other hand she had an enormous interest in fortune-telling.

She revered Sekiryushi and a certain Ojima.

Two or three times Daisuke had gone along with her, riding in a rickshaw all the way to a diviner's door.

The boy Seitaro was mad about baseball just now.

When Daisuke came he would sometimes pitch to him.

He was a child with curious ambitions.

Every year at the beginning of summer, when the roasted-sweet-potato sellers suddenly turn into shaved-ice sellers, the first to rush over and eat ice cream, though he had not even broken a sweat, was Seitaro.

When there was no ice cream he made do with shaved ice.

Then he came home in triumph.

Lately he had been saying that if a permanent sumo arena were ever built he wanted to be the first one inside.

He once asked Daisuke whether he knew any wrestlers.

The girl Nui, whatever was said to her, answered "That's fine" or "I don't know."

And she changed her hair ribbon any number of times a day.

Lately she had been going for violin lessons.

When she came home she practiced in a voice like the setting of a saw's teeth.

But she would never play if anyone was watching.

Since she shut the room up tight and made it screech behind the doors, her parents supposed she must be rather good.

Only Daisuke would sometimes open the door quietly, and be scolded with "That's fine, I don't know."

His brother was generally out.

When he was busy in particular, breakfast was about the only meal he ate at home, and how he spent the rest of his time the two children had no idea whatever.

To the same degree, Daisuke had no idea either.

He preferred not to know, and unless there was some need he never inquired into his brother's daily life outside the house.

Daisuke stood very high with the two children.

Fairly high with his sister-in-law as well.

With his brother, it was impossible to tell whether he stood high or not.

On the rare occasions when the brothers met, they merely talked of ordinary things.

Both wore their usual faces and carried it off with perfect ease.

They had the air of men thoroughly accustomed to the commonplace.

The one who wore hardest on Daisuke was his father.

The old man kept a young mistress at his age, but that did not matter.

From Daisuke's point of view he rather approved; it was his opinion that only men who cannot afford a mistress attack the keeping of one.

His father was also a great stickler.

As a child Daisuke had been distressed by it to the bottom of his soul.

But now that he was grown he saw no particular need to be cowed.

What did wear on him was that his father confused his own youth with Daisuke's present, and believed there was no great difference between them.

Hence the logic that it was a lie if Daisuke did not conduct himself by the same rules his father had used in making his way in the world.

Not that Daisuke had ever asked what exactly was a lie about it.

So it never came to a quarrel.

As a boy Daisuke had a fierce temper — at eighteen or nineteen he had once or twice come to grips with his father — but when he had grown up and been out of the university a while, the temper stopped short.

Since then he had never once been angry.

His father believed this to be the fruit of his own teaching, and privately prided himself on it.

In fact what his father called moral training had done nothing but gradually cool the warm feeling that lay between father and son.

At least that was how Daisuke saw it.

But in his father's mind the thing was read in exactly the opposite way.

Whatever one does, parent and child are of one flesh and blood.

The natural feeling a child has for a parent cannot alter according to how the child is handled.

Some severity for the sake of education can never affect the bond of blood and affection.

His father, formed by Confucian teaching, believed this firmly.

Convinced that the simple fact of having given Daisuke his existence was an eternal guarantee of affection against every displeasure and pain, his father pushed steadily ahead on that faith.

And so he produced a son who was cold to him.

To be sure, from about the time of Daisuke's graduation his treatment changed a good deal, and in certain respects grew astonishingly lenient.

But that was only the carrying out of one part of the plan his father had formed for him the moment he was born; it was no apt measure taken after seeing the change in Daisuke's heart.

As for the harm his teaching had done to Daisuke, of that he remained wholly unaware to this day.

His father was extremely proud of having gone to war.

He was apt to dismiss his son out of hand: you have never been in a war, so you have no steadiness of nerve, and that is what is wrong with you.

He talked as if courage of that sort were the highest faculty a human being could possess.

Daisuke felt unpleasant every time he had to listen to it.

Nerve might be a necessary qualification for survival in the barbarous times of his father's youth, when lives were violently taken and given; but in the civilized world of today, Daisuke considered, it was a tool not much different from old-fashioned archery or swordsmanship.

Indeed it seemed to him that there were many faculties which could not coexist with such nerve, and which deserved to be valued far above it.

"Father has been lecturing me on courage again.

By his account the greatest being in the world must be a stone Jizo," he once said, and laughed with his sister-in-law.

The Daisuke who said this was of course a coward.

Nor did any shame at his cowardice rise in him from the heart.

In certain moods he was almost inclined to boast of it.

As a child he had been goaded by his father into going all the way to the Aoyama cemetery in the middle of the night.

He endured the eeriness for a whole hour, and then could bear it no longer, and came home white in the face.

At the time he had thought it a disgrace himself.

When his father laughed at him the next morning, he hated his father.

According to his father, the boys of his own day, to cultivate their nerve, would dress in the dead of night and climb quite alone to the summit of Kengamine, four kilometers north of the castle, spend the night in the little roadside shrine there, worship the sunrise, and come home.

Young men today are made of different stuff from the start, was his father's comment.

A father who could say such things in earnest, and who would say them still, was a pitiable creature, Daisuke thought.

He hated earthquakes.

A tremor of an instant sent waves through his chest.

Sometimes, sitting quite still in his study, he would feel, for no reason, that an earthquake was rolling in from far away.

And then the cushion under him, and the matting, and even the floorboards beneath it, seemed distinctly to shake.

He believed that this was his true nature.

A man like his father he could only take for a rustic with undeveloped nerves, or else a fool who lied to himself.

Daisuke was sitting now face to face with this father of his.

It was a small room with a deep eave, so that when one looked out at the garden from where one sat, the garden seemed to be cut off at the edge of the eave.

At the least, no wide sky was visible.

In exchange it was quiet and settled, and a man sat easily there.

His father smoked shredded tobacco, and had drawn the long tobacco tray with its handle up in front of him, knocking the ash receiver from time to time with a sharp rap.

The sound rang out pleasantly into the quiet garden.

Daisuke, for his part, had lined up four or five gold-tipped cigarettes in the hand brazier.

He had tired of blowing smoke out through his nose, and sat with his arms folded, looking at his father's face.

There was a good deal of flesh on that face for its age.

And yet the cheeks were hollow.

Under the thick brows the skin of the eyelids sagged.

His beard was yellow rather than white.

And he had a habit, when he talked, of looking half at the other man's knees and half at his face.

The way his eyes moved then gave a glimpse of the whites, and it made the other man uncomfortable.

Just now the old man was saying this:

"A man should not think only of himself. There is the world; there is the nation. Unless he does something for others he cannot feel right. You cannot feel right yourself, idling about as you do. It might be one thing for the uneducated of the lower orders, but there is no reason why a man with the highest education should find it pleasant to do nothing. What one has learned yields its flavor only when it is applied in practice."

"That is so,"

Daisuke answered.

Whenever his father preached at him, Daisuke was at a loss for an answer, and had fallen into the habit of saying whatever came to hand.

To Daisuke's mind, his father's ideas were half-formed in every particular, setting out from something he had arbitrarily decided by himself, so that they held no fundamental meaning at all.

Not only that: just when one thought he was arguing for the sake of others, he had somehow shifted to arguing for himself.

The words came out fluently and with an air of weight, but in the end it was bottomless empty talk.

To pull it down from the foundation would be an enormous undertaking, and in the end an impossible one, so Daisuke avoided touching it wherever he could.

His father, however, took it for granted that Daisuke belonged to his own solar system, and pressed forward in the belief that he had every right to govern Daisuke's orbit.

And so Daisuke, having no choice, made a show of revolving decorously around the aging sun that was his father.

"If you dislike business, very well, dislike it. Making money is not the only way to serve Japan. You need not earn. If it came to bickering over money, you would not like it either. I will go on supporting you as I have. I may die at any time, and when I die I cannot take the money with me. I can manage your monthly living somehow. So rouse yourself and do something. Do it as a citizen's duty. You are thirty now, aren't you?"

"That is so."

"To be thirty and loafing about as an idle man makes a very poor appearance."

Daisuke did not for a moment think that he was loafing.

He merely considered himself a superior sort of person who possessed a great deal of time uncontaminated by any occupation.

Each time his father said such things, he was really sorry for him.

To his father's childish head it was wholly invisible that the fruit of using his days so meaningfully was crystallizing and coming to the surface in his own thought and feeling.

There was nothing for it, so he put on a serious face and said,

"Yes, it is a difficulty."

So he answered.

The old man treated Daisuke as a boy from the outset, and since his answers were always simple, innocent phrases with no touch of the householder in them, even while despising him his father came to feel that the young master would never grow up, and that it was a trying business.

On the other hand, Daisuke's manner was so entirely unruffled, so cool, so free of shyness or fidgeting, so perfectly ordinary, that his father also felt there was no getting hold of him.

"Your health is good."

"I have not caught so much as a cold these two or three years."

"And your head is not a poor one. Your record at school was respectable, was it not?"

"More or less."

"Then it is a waste to be idle. That fellow — what was his name — the one who used to come to your house to talk. I met him once or twice myself."

"Hiraoka?"

"Yes, Hiraoka. They say he was no great scholar, but did he not go off somewhere the moment he graduated?"

"And came to grief there, and has already come back."

The old man could not help a wry smile.

"Why was that?"

he asked.

"Because he works in order to eat, I suppose."

The old man did not follow this.

"Did he do something disgraceful, then?"

he asked again.

"He does what the situation requires at each moment, I imagine; but the thing required turns out to be a failure all the same."

"Hmm,"

said the old man without enthusiasm; then he changed his tone and began to expound.

"Young men are always talking of failure, but it is simply that they lack sincerity and zeal. I have come this far on many years of experience, and without those two a man does not succeed."

"There are times when a man comes to grief precisely because he has sincerity and zeal."

"No. Hardly ever."

Above his father's head hung, in splendid style, a framed motto: Sincerity is the Way of Heaven.

His father prized it above everything, saying it had been written for him by the late lord of their old domain.

Daisuke disliked this frame intensely.

In the first place he disliked the calligraphy.

Beyond that, the sentiment did not suit him.

He always felt like adding, after "Sincerity is the Way of Heaven," the words "and not the way of man."

Long ago, when the finances of the domain had fallen into a hopeless state, Nagai, charged with setting them right, called together two or three merchants connected with the lord's house, laid aside his sword, bowed his head before them, and asked them for a temporary accommodation.

Since he did not know whether it could ever be repaid, he confessed honestly that he did not know, and by that means succeeded at the time.

It was on that account that the lord wrote the motto for him.

Ever since, Nagai had kept it hanging in his own room and looked at it morning and evening.

Daisuke had lost count of how many times he had been told the history of that frame.

Fifteen or sixteen years ago, when the monthly expenses of the old lord's household mounted and the finances they had so painfully restored began to break down again, Nagai, on the strength of his earlier feat, was entrusted with a second reorganization.

On that occasion Nagai stoked the bathhouse fire himself, and began his inquiry from the discrepancy between the actual consumption and the figures in the books; and by pouring his whole soul into this one thing, day and night, he was able within about a month to establish an admirable system.

From then on the lord's household lived in comparative ease.

Possessing such a history, and never once stepping outside it in his thinking, Nagai wanted to bring everything back to sincerity and zeal.

"Somehow you seem to lack sincerity and zeal. That will not do. That is why you can accomplish nothing."

"I have both sincerity and zeal. I simply cannot apply them between myself and other people."

"How so?"

Again Daisuke was at a loss for an answer.

To his mind, sincerity or zeal was not a ready-made thing stored up in one's breast; like the spark struck from stone and iron, it was a phenomenon that arose between two people when, the other party being what he was, the friction happened to come out right.

Rather than a quality one possessed, it was an exchange between two spirits.

So if the other party was bad, it could not arise at all.

"You say such things, Father, because you have swallowed bars of gold — the Analects, Wang Yangming, and the rest."

"Bars of gold?"

Daisuke was silent for a time, and then said at last,

"They come out again as bars."

So he said.

Nagai, though not without curiosity, declined to take it up, dismissing it as one of the pointless epigrams that bookish, cranky, unworldly young men like to make.

About forty minutes later the old man changed his clothes, put on his hakama, got into a rickshaw, and went off somewhere.

Daisuke saw him as far as the entrance, but then turned back, opened the door of the drawing room, and went in.

This was a Western-style wing added lately; most of the interior decoration and the rest had been ordered from specialists on Daisuke's own designs.

The decorative painting set around the transom in particular he had commissioned from a painter he knew, after long discussion, so that it interested him especially.

Standing there, Daisuke gazed at the long band of color, spread out like a picture scroll; but for some reason it looked far poorer than when he had last come to see it.

Thinking that it would not do, he was still examining it part by part when his sister-in-law came suddenly in.

"Oh, are you in here?"

she said, and then, "You haven't seen a comb of mine lying about, have you?"

So she asked.

The comb was at the foot of the sofa.

She had lent it to Nuiko yesterday and the girl had lost it somewhere, so she had come to look.

Pressing her head with both hands, she pushed the comb into the base of her Western-style coil, and looking up at Daisuke from under her brows she said,

"Idling as usual, I see."

She was teasing him.

"I have just had a sermon from Father."

"Again? You are scolded a great deal. And the very day he gets back, too — you have no tact at all. But you are not much better yourself. You never do a single thing he says."

"I never argue in front of Father. I keep myself small and behave nicely."

"That is exactly what makes it worse. Yes sir, yes sir, and then you don't listen to a word of it."

Daisuke smiled ruefully and said nothing.

Umeko turned toward him and sat down in a chair.

She was a woman of slender build, with a darkish complexion, thick brows, and thin lips.

"Well, sit down. I'll keep you company for a while."

Daisuke remained standing, watching his sister-in-law.

"That's an odd collar you have on today."

"This?"

Umeko drew in her chin and frowned, trying to see the collar of her under-kimono.

"I bought it the other day."

"A good color."

"Never mind that; sit down there."

Daisuke sat down directly opposite her.

"There, I am sitting."

"Now what were you scolded about today?"

"What I was scolded about is not very clear. But Father's service to the state and society astonishes me. It seems he has been serving without a break from the age of eighteen to this day."

"And that is how he came to be what he is, isn't it?"

"If serving the state and society earned money the way it has for Father, I would be glad to serve too."

"Then stop idling and serve. You are sly, wanting money while you lie down."

"I have never yet tried to get money."

"You may not try, but you spend it, which is the same thing."

"Has my brother said anything?"

"Your brother has given up on you, so he says nothing at all."

"Fierce indeed. Still, my brother is a better man than Father."

"How so? — Oh, how hateful, flattering again. That is what is wrong with you. You make fun of people with a straight face."

"Is that how it is?"

"Is that how it is, indeed — it is your own affair, not somebody else's. Do give it a little thought."

"Whenever I come here I turn into Kadono, and it is very inconvenient."

"Who is Kadono?"

"Only the houseboy at my place. Whatever anyone says to him, he always answers, is that how it is, or, do you think so."

"That man? How very odd."

Daisuke broke off for a moment and looked past Umeko's shoulder, out through the gap in the curtains at the clear sky.

Far off stood a single great tree.

It had put out pale brown buds all over, and where the soft tips of its branches met the sky they were blurred, as though smudged by a fine drizzle.

"The season has turned fine. Shall we go somewhere to see the blossoms?"

"Let us. We shall go, so tell me."

"Tell you what?"

"What Father said to you."

"He said a great many things, and it is hard to repeat them in order. My head is not good."

"Still playing the fool. I know perfectly well."

"Then perhaps you had better tell me."

Umeko drew herself up a little.

"You have grown very glib lately."

"Not glib enough to floor you. — By the way, it is very quiet today. What has become of the children?"

"The children are at school."

A maid of sixteen or seventeen opened the door and put in her face.

The master asked whether madam would come to the telephone a moment, she said, and then waited in silence for Umeko's answer.

Umeko rose at once.

Daisuke rose too.

As he made to follow her out of the drawing room, Umeko turned around.

"You stay there. I have something to say to you."

Daisuke always found this commanding way of his sister-in-law's amusing.

He saw her off with a "Take your time," sat down again, and went back to looking at the painting.

After a while the colors seemed no longer to be laid on the wall, but to be flying out of his own eyeballs and sticking themselves in patches upon it.

In the end, merely by adjusting how the color came out of his eyes, he could make the figures and the trees over there change as he pleased.

So Daisuke repainted every clumsy passage, until at last he sat entranced, wrapped in the most beautiful coloring he was capable of imagining.

Then Umeko came back, and he returned at once to his ordinary self.

When he asked in earnest what her business was, it turned out to be the old question of a marriage.

Even before he left the university, Daisuke had, through Umeko, been shown any number of candidates for a wife, in photographs and in the flesh.

But they had all failed the examination.

At first he had declined with graceful excuses, but for the last two years he had grown suddenly shameless and always found fault with the woman.

The angle of the mouth to the chin was wrong, or the length of the eyes was out of proportion to the width of the face, or the ears were set in the wrong place — he never failed to bring forward some peculiar objection.

Since none of it was the sort of thing people usually say, Umeko at last began to think.

After all, this came of taking too much trouble over him; it made him presumptuous and difficult.

The best thing would be to leave him alone for a time and let him come and ask for himself.

Having so decided, she never mentioned a match again.

But the man himself showed no sign of difficulty, and went on living to this day in the same attitude, neither fish nor fowl.

And then his father came home from his travels, having found a candidate with a very close connection to the family.

Umeko had heard of it from his father two or three days before Daisuke came, and had guessed that today's talk must have been about that.

But in fact Daisuke had heard nothing at all from the old man about marriage that day.

Possibly his father had called him meaning to bring it up, and, seeing Daisuke's manner, had decided that it would be better policy to hold off a little longer and had deliberately avoided the subject.

With this candidate Daisuke stood in a peculiar relation.

He knew the family name.

But he did not know her given name.

As for her age, her looks, her education, her character, he knew nothing whatever.

But when it came to the reason why this woman had been put forward, he knew that very well.

Daisuke's father had an elder brother.

His name was Naoki, and he was only a year older than his father; but he was smaller, and so alike in feature and cast of face that strangers often took them for twins.

In those days his father was not yet called Toku.

He went by the childhood name of Seinoshin.

Naoki and Seinoshin were as much brothers in temperament as they were alike in appearance.

Except when something prevented it, whenever they could manage it they kept together in the same place and did the same things.

They went to their lessons and came home at the same hour.

They were close enough to share a single lamp for their reading.

It was in the autumn of Naoki's eighteenth year.

One day the two of them went on an errand for their father to a temple called Tokakuji on the edge of the castle town.

It was the lord's family temple, and the priest there, Sosui, was on good terms with their father, so they went to deliver the letter to this Sosui.

The business was an invitation to a game of go or something of the sort, too slight even to require an answer; but Sosui kept them, and while they talked of this and that it grew late, and it was only about an hour before dusk that they left the temple.

There was some festival that day, and the town was crowded.

Hurrying home through the throng, at the corner where they were about to turn into a side street, they collided with a certain man of the company from across the river.

There had long been bad blood between this man and the two brothers.

He was evidently well in liquor, and after two or three words he drew his sword and struck without warning.

It was the elder brother he struck at.

Naoki had no choice but to draw and face him; but the man was a notorious ruffian, and drunk as he was he was strong.

Left alone, the brother would have been beaten.

So the younger drew as well.

And between them they cut the man down and killed him.

By the custom of that day, if a samurai killed a samurai, the one who killed had to disembowel himself.

The brothers came home prepared for it.

Their father intended to set them side by side and act as second for each in turn himself.

But their mother, as it happened, had been invited to a friend's house for the festival and was out.

Out of natural feeling, wanting them to see their mother once more before he made them cut themselves open, the father sent at once to fetch her.

And while he waited for her he dragged things out as long as he could, admonishing the two of them and having the room for the act prepared.

The house where their mother was visiting was that of a distant relative named Takagi, a man of influence, and this was extremely fortunate.

For those were the years when the world had begun to move, and the samurai code was no longer enforced as rigorously as it once had been.

Moreover the man killed had been a young rogue of ill repute.

So Takagi came with their mother to the Nagai house and urged the father to leave the matter untouched for the present, until some official ruling should come.

Then Takagi set about his errands.

First he won over the chief retainer.

Then, through the chief retainer, he won over the lord.

The father of the man who had been killed proved unexpectedly reasonable as well; he had long been distressed by his son's behavior, and since it had become clear that at the time of the attack the provocation had come from his own side, he raised no particular objection to the effort to have the brothers dealt with leniently.

After shutting themselves up for a time in one room as a sign of penitence, the two brothers both left home without a word to anyone.

Three years later the elder was killed in Kyoto by a masterless samurai.

In the fourth year the country became Meiji.

Five or six years after that, Seinoshin sent for his parents to come from their province to Tokyo.

And he took a wife, and took the single-character name of Toku.

By that time Takagi, who had saved his life, was dead, and an adopted son had succeeded him.

He urged the man repeatedly to come to Tokyo and look for some official post, but the man would not.

This adopted son had two children; the boy went to Kyoto and entered Doshisha.

After graduating he spent a long time in America, they said, and now he was in business in Kobe and had become a man of some property.

The daughter had married one of the largest taxpayers in the prefecture.

The candidate for Daisuke's wife was the daughter of that large taxpayer.

"How complicated it is. I am quite amazed,"

his sister-in-law said to him.

"You have heard it from Father any number of times."

"But no marriage ever came into it before, so I listened with half an ear."

"So the Sagawas have a daughter like that. I knew nothing of it."

"Take her."

"You approve?"

"Of course I approve. It is a match made by destiny, isn't it?"

"It seems easier to marry on a destiny of one's own making than on one made by one's ancestors."

"Oh — is there such a thing?"

Daisuke smiled wryly and did not answer.

IV

Daisuke sat with his elbows on the desk, the thin foreign book he had just finished lying open before him, thinking of nothing in particular.

His head was full of the last scene.

Far off, behind a chilly-looking tree, two small lanterns could be seen swaying without a sound.

The gallows stood there.

Those who were to be executed stood in the dark.

I have lost one of my wooden shoes; I am cold, said one; what? asked another.

So the other asked again.

I have lost a shoe and I am cold, the first repeated.

Where is M, somebody asked.

Here, somebody answered.

Between the trees something large and whitish and flat could be seen.

A damp wind came from that direction.

It is the sea, said G.

After a moment a lantern lit up the paper with the sentence written on it, and the white hand that held it — an ungloved hand.

A voice said there was no need to read it aloud.

The voice was trembling.

Presently the lanterns went out. . . .

Now I am alone, said K.

And he sighed.

S too is dead.

W too is dead.

M too is dead.

I am left all alone. . . .

The sun rose out of the sea.

They loaded the corpses onto a single cart.

And they drew it away.

They loaded up the stretched necks, the protruding eyes, the tongues wet with foam of blood like terrible flowers blossoming above the lips, and went back along the road they had come. . . .

Daisuke had gone over the final scene of Andreev's The Seven Who Were Hanged

in his head as far as this, and his shoulders shrank with a shiver.

What he felt most keenly at such times was the anxiety of what he would do if he himself were ever brought to such a place.

When he thought about it, he did not see how he could possibly die.

And yet one would be killed regardless, which was cruel indeed.

Imagining himself between the craving for life and the pressure of death, and picturing the agony of going back and forth between them out of unwillingness to let go, he would sit quite still, and the skin all down his back would crawl at every pore until he could hardly bear it.

His father was always telling people how at seventeen he had cut down a man of his own clan and had prepared himself to disembowel himself for it.

By his father's account he was to have acted as second for his uncle, and his grandfather was to have seconded him — that anyone should be capable of such a thing.

Whenever his father spoke of the past, Daisuke thought less that he was a great man than that he was a disagreeable one.

Or else that he was a liar.

The liar seemed a good deal more like his father.

Nor was it only his father.

There was a story about his grandfather as well.

When his grandfather was young, a fellow student at his fencing school, a man of such skill that he drew the jealousy of the others, was cut down one night by someone on a path between the paddies as he was going home to the castle town.

The first man to reach the spot was his grandfather.

Holding up a lantern in his left hand and a naked blade in his right, he struck at the corpse with the blade, they said, crying, Gunpei, hold on, the wound is not deep.

When his uncle was killed in Kyoto, men in hoods burst into the inn in a body, and his uncle, leaping down from the eaves of the second floor, tripped on a garden stone and fell, and they cut at him from above without mercy, so that his face was turned to pulp.

About ten days before he was killed, he had walked home one night from Shijo to Sanjo in high clogs, wearing a raincoat and keeping off the snow with an umbrella.

About two hundred meters short of the inn, a voice suddenly called from behind him: Sir Nagai Naoki.

His uncle did not turn around; he came on to the door of the inn, still holding his umbrella, opened the lattice, and went in.

Then he snapped the lattice shut and asked from within: I am Nagai Naoki.

What is your business?

So he is said to have asked.

Whenever Daisuke heard such stories, fear came before any sense of gallantry.

Before he could admire the courage, the smell of blood came stinging up through his nose.

If dying was possible at all, Daisuke had long expected that it would be in the instant when a fit of passion reached its height.

But he was by no means a man of fits.

His hands trembled; his legs trembled.

His voice trembled and his heart leapt often enough.

But of late he almost never grew heated.

Since the state of being heated is a natural stair by which one may approach death, and it is plain that each time one is heated one comes nearer to being able to die, he sometimes wanted, out of curiosity, to press at least as far as the foot of that stair; but it was quite impossible.

Each time Daisuke dissected his present self, he could not help being astonished at how entirely different he was from the man of five or six years ago.

He closed the book on the desk and stood up.

Through the narrow gap where the glass door onto the veranda stood open, a warm, cheerful wind blew in.

It set the red petals of the potted amaranth swaying.

The sun lay on the great flower.

Daisuke bent down and looked into it.

Presently he took pollen from the tip of a long spindly stamen, carried it to the tip of the pistil, and painted it on carefully.

"Have the ants got at it?"

Kadono came out from the direction of the entrance.

He had his hakama on.

Daisuke looked up without straightening.

"So you've been already?"

"Yes, I went. It seems they move in tomorrow. He said he had been meaning to call on you today."

"Who? Hiraoka?"

"Yes. — Well now. He seems a very busy man. Quite different from you, sensei. — If it's ants, pour rapeseed oil on them. Then kill them one by one as they come out of the holes in their agony. Shall I do it?"

"It isn't ants. If you take the pollen on a fine day like this and put it on the pistil, in time it sets fruit. I have nothing to do, so I am doing as the gardener told me."

"I see. What a convenient world it has become. — Still, potted plants are a fine thing. Pretty, and a pleasure to keep."

Daisuke found it too much trouble to answer, and said nothing.

Presently he said,

"Perhaps I had better stop meddling,"

and stood up and sat down in the rattan armchair set out on the veranda.

After that he sat blankly, brooding over something.

Kadono, finding it dull, withdrew to his own three-mat room beside the entrance.

As he opened the paper door to go in, he was called back to the veranda.

"You say Hiraoka is coming today?"

"Yes, he spoke as though he would come."

"Then I shall wait."

Daisuke gave up going out.

The truth was that Hiraoka had been much on his mind of late.

When Hiraoka had called on him before, he was already a man who could not afford to sit still.

By his own account there were two or three places where he had prospects, and he meant for the present to try in those directions; but how those two or three places stood now, Daisuke had almost no idea.

Daisuke had gone twice to the inn in Jimbocho; once Hiraoka was out.

Once he was in.

But he was standing on the threshold of the room in his Western clothes, scolding his wife in a hurried tone.

So at least it seemed, unmistakably and all at once, to Daisuke, who had come along the corridor unannounced and appeared beside the room.

Hiraoka turned for a moment and said, ah, it's you.

There was nothing pleasant in his face or his manner.

His wife, putting her head out of the room, saw Daisuke, and her pale cheeks flushed faintly.

Daisuke somehow found it hard to sit down.

He let pass the perfunctory "come in," saying no, he had no particular business.

He had only come to see how they were getting on.

If Hiraoka was going out they would go together — and so, as though inviting him, he got them both out into the street.

Hiraoka said then that he wanted to find a house and settle in quickly, but he was too busy to do anything about it; and when now and then the people at the inn told him of a place, either the tenants had not yet moved out or the walls were still being plastered.

He went on complaining of one thing after another until they parted at the tram.

Daisuke felt sorry for him and said that in that case he would set his own houseboy to look for a house.

Times were bad, so there ought to be plenty standing empty.

Having undertaken it, he went home.

Then, as promised, he sent Kadono out to look.

No sooner was he sent than Kadono found something suitable.

He guided the Hiraokas to see it, and they parted saying it would probably do; but since there was a responsibility toward the landlord, and since they might also want to look elsewhere if it did not suit, Daisuke had sent Kadono once more to get a clear answer as to whether they would take it or not.

"You told the landlord they would take it, I suppose?"

"Yes, I stopped on the way back and said they would move in tomorrow."

Sitting in his chair, Daisuke thought about the future of a couple setting up house in Tokyo for the second time.

Hiraoka had changed a good deal from the man he had parted with at Shimbashi three years ago.

His career amounted to having missed a step or two on the ladder of the world.

One might say it was fortunate that he had not yet climbed high, but although his body had taken no bruise that the world could see, in fact his mind had already been thrown out of true.

Daisuke had thought so at once when they first met.

But allowing for the changes of three years on his own side, he had corrected himself: perhaps it was his own heart that was echoing off the other man.

Yet when he called up before him Hiraoka's manner, his words and gestures, on the day he went to the inn and came out with him without even entering the room, he was driven back to his first judgment.

Hiraoka's nerves had gathered then into the center of his face.

The place where his brows met — which looked as though a puff of wind or a blown grain of sand would set it off — twitched without restraint.

And whatever he said, no matter what its substance, struck Daisuke's ear as hurried and painfully strained.

To Daisuke, the whole of Hiraoka was like a man with weak lungs swimming for breath through thick arrowroot gruel.

"In such a hurry,"

Daisuke murmured to himself as he watched Hiraoka fly off in the tram.

And he thought of the wife left behind at the inn.

Daisuke had never once addressed her as Mrs. Hiraoka.

He always called her Michiyo, Michiyo, by her own name, as he had before she married.

After parting from Hiraoka, Daisuke thought of going back to the inn and talking with Michiyo.

But somehow he could not go.

Even when he stopped and considered it, he could find not the least reason why going should be wrong for the man he now was.

And yet his conscience pricked him and he could not go.

He believed he could go if he summoned the courage.

It was only that summoning that much courage was painful to him.

So he went home.

But once home he felt unsettled, dissatisfied, strangely out of sorts.

So he went out again and drank.

Daisuke was a man who could drink any amount.

That night in particular he drank heavily.

"There was something wrong with me that day,"

Daisuke said, leaning back in his chair, judging his own shadow with a relatively cool self.

"Did you want something?"

Kadono came out again.

He had taken off his hakama and his socks, and his bare feet stuck out like dumplings.

Daisuke looked at his face in silence.

Kadono looked at Daisuke's face too, and stood there a moment.

"Oh — didn't you call me? Well, well."

And he withdrew.

Daisuke did not find it particularly funny.

"He says he didn't call after all, ma'am. I thought it was strange. That's why I said there was no clap or anything."

The words came from the direction of the breakfast room.

Then Kadono and the old woman laughed.

At that moment the awaited visitor arrived.

Kadono, who went to the door, came in with a look of surprise.

And bringing that face close to Daisuke, he said in a whisper, "Sensei, it is the lady."

Daisuke left his chair without a word and went into the sitting room.

Hiraoka's wife was a woman with hair unusually black for so fair a skin, a narrow face, and clearly marked brows.

At a glance there was something forlorn about her that recalled an old woodblock print.

Since their return to Tokyo her color and the luster of her skin seemed particularly bad.

When Daisuke first saw her at the inn he had been rather startled.

He asked whether she had not yet recovered from the long shaking of the train, and when she told him no, it was always like this, he felt sorry for her.

Michiyo had borne a child in her first year away from Tokyo.

The baby died at once, and from that time her heart appeared to have been damaged, so that she was always more or less unwell.

At first she merely drifted along, but as she did not improve she finally saw a doctor, who said that he could not be sure, but it might be a heart disease with some difficult name.

If so, he pronounced, it was a troublesome illness in which the blood going out from the heart into the arteries flows back a little at a time, and a cure at the root was doubtful; and Hiraoka too was alarmed and did everything he could for her, so that within a year, whether owing to that or not, her spirits improved markedly.

There were many days when her color and complexion looked almost as clear as before, and she was pleased about it; but from a month or so before they left, her color began to go bad again.

According to the doctor, however, this time it was not the heart.

The heart would never be strong, but it was certainly no worse than before.

There was no ground at present for supposing anything wrong with the working of the valves — such was his diagnosis.

All this Michiyo had told Daisuke herself.

Looking at her face then, Daisuke had wondered whether it might not after all be some worry.

Michiyo had vivid double eyelids, beautiful lines laid neatly one upon the other.

Her eyes were of the long narrow sort, but when she fixed her gaze steadily on something they somehow looked very large.

Daisuke judged this to be the work of the dark irises.

Before Michiyo became a wife, Daisuke had often seen her look at things in that way.

And he remembered it well even now.

When he tried to call up her face in his mind, before the outline of the face had formed, those dark eyes, blurred as though moist, would float up first.

Michiyo, who had been shown along the corridor into the sitting room, now sat down opposite Daisuke.

And she laid her beautiful hands one on the other in her lap.

There was a ring on the hand underneath.

There was a ring on the hand above as well.

The upper one was a modern thing, a comparatively large pearl set in a slender gold band, a present from Daisuke three years ago on her marriage.

Michiyo raised her face.

Daisuke met those eyes without warning, and blinked once in spite of himself.

She had meant to come with Hiraoka the day after they arrived by train, but had felt unwell and missed her chance, and after that she could only come alone, so she had put it off; but today, she began, and broke off; and then, as though suddenly remembering, she apologized for the rudeness of the other day, when Hiraoka had been on the point of going out when Daisuke called, and added,

"You should have waited for us,"

with a womanly touch of civility.

But her tone was subdued.

That, however, was the tone natural to her, and it made Daisuke remember the old days instead.

"But he seemed to be in such a hurry."

"Yes, he is busy — but what of that? You might have stayed. You are much too formal."

Daisuke thought of asking what had passed between husband and wife that day, but decided against it.

Ordinarily they were on terms where he might well have said, half teasing, that she had been scolded and had blushed, and what wickedness had she been up to; but Michiyo's civility sounded to him so painfully like a covering-up after the fact that he had no spirit for jokes.

Daisuke lit a cigarette and, holding the tip in his mouth, rested his head against the back of his chair, and said in a relaxed way,

"It has been a long time. Shall I give you something good to eat?"

So he asked.

And inwardly he felt that this manner of his was some small comfort to her.

Michiyo said,

"Not today, thank you. I cannot stay so long."

And she showed for a moment the gold tooth he remembered.

"Come, it will be all right."

Daisuke put both hands behind his head, laced his fingers, and looked at her.

Michiyo bent forward and drew a small watch from her sash.

When Daisuke gave her the pearl ring, Hiraoka had bought his wife this watch.

Daisuke remembered how, after buying their separate presents in the same shop, he and Hiraoka had stepped over the threshold together and looked at each other and laughed.

"Oh, it is past three already. I thought it was only two. — I stopped on the way, that is why,"

she added, as though explaining to herself.

"Are you in such a hurry?"

"Yes, I should like to get back as soon as I can."

Daisuke took his hands from his head and knocked off his ash.

"Three years have made a housewife of you. It can't be helped."

Daisuke laughed as he said it.

But there was something bitter somewhere in his tone.

"Why, we are moving tomorrow, you know."

Michiyo's voice sounded suddenly alive.

Daisuke had entirely forgotten the move, but he was drawn along by her pleasant tone and pursued it lightly from his side.

"Then you should have come at your leisure after the move."

"But —"

said Michiyo, and a look of slight embarrassment showed at her forehead; she glanced down for a moment, and then raised her cheeks.

They were flushed a faint red.

"The truth is I came because I have a favor to ask."

Quick as he was, Daisuke understood the moment he heard her what the business was.

In fact, from the day Hiraoka arrived in Tokyo he had half consciously been bracing himself for this question.

"What is it? Say it freely."

"Could you manage a little money?"

Her words were as innocent as a child's, and yet both her cheeks stayed red.

Daisuke felt very sorry for Hiraoka's present condition, which put this woman to such shame.

As he heard more, it turned out that the money was not for the cost of tomorrow's move, nor for setting up the new household.

Of three debts, apparently, left behind when they closed up their life at the branch, one had absolutely to be settled.

They had given a firm promise to deal with it within a week of reaching Tokyo, and for certain reasons it was not the kind of thing that could be left as the others could; so Hiraoka had been anxiously running about since the day after their arrival, but with no sign of success, and at last he had told Michiyo to go and ask Daisuke.

"Is this the money borrowed from the branch manager?"

"No. That one can be put off as long as one likes; it is this other that must be seen to. It affects the efforts he is making here in Tokyo."

So there was that sort of thing too, Daisuke thought.

When he asked the amount, it was five hundred yen and a little over.

A trifle, Daisuke thought inwardly; but in fact he had not a sen.

He realized that he was a man who appeared to want for no money and was in reality very badly off for it.

"Why in the world did he run up such debts?"

"That is what makes me hate to think about it. I was ill, too, so I am partly to blame."

"Was it the cost of your illness?"

"No. Medicine comes to very little."

Michiyo said nothing more.

Nor had Daisuke the courage to ask more.

He only looked at her pale face, and felt in it a vague uneasiness about the future.

V

Early the next morning Kadono hired three carts and went to Shimbashi station to collect Hiraoka's luggage.

It had in fact arrived long before, but as no house had been settled on it had been left there until today.

Counting the time out and back and the time to load at the station, it was clearly half a day's work.

You will not be in time unless you start early, Daisuke told him the moment he got out of bed.

Kadono answered in his usual style that it was nothing at all.

He was a man with little sense of time, which was why he could answer so simply; only when Daisuke explained did he put on a face of understanding.

Then, when he was told that after delivering the luggage to Hiraoka's house he was to help until everything was in order, he undertook it cheerfully — yes, certainly, no trouble at all — and set off.

After that Daisuke read until past eleven.

Then he happened to remember the story that a man called D'Annunzio had decorated the rooms of his house in blue and red.

D'Annunzio's idea seems to be that the two great moods of life are expressed by no other colors than these.

So any room that calls for excitement — a music room, say, or a study — is painted up as red as possible.

And a bedroom, or a room for rest, or anywhere that calls for peace of mind, is done up in colors close to blue.

It looks like a poet's curiosity satisfying itself by applying the theories of the psychologists.

Daisuke wondered why a man as easily stimulated as D'Annunzio should need a red so strong that it could count as the color of excitement.

Daisuke himself did not much care for the sight of even the gate of an Inari shrine.

If he could, he would have liked at least his head to float in green and sleep in peace.

At an exhibition some time ago a man named Aoki had painted a tall woman standing at the bottom of the sea.

Of all the works shown, Daisuke thought that one alone had been made in a pleasant spirit.

That is to say, he too wanted to live in that sort of sunken, settled mood.

Daisuke went out onto the veranda and looked at the mass of green spreading out beyond the garden.

The blossoms had fallen at some point, and now it was the beginning of new shoots and young leaves.

He felt as though a brilliant green had been blown suddenly into his face.

Glad that at the bottom of this waking stimulus there was something subdued, he put on his cap and went out of the gate in his everyday pongee.

When he came to Hiraoka's new house he found the gate open and the place empty; there was no sign of the luggage having arrived, and no sign that the Hiraokas had come either.

Only a man who looked like a rickshaw puller sat on the veranda smoking.

When he asked, the man answered that they had come once earlier, but had said that at this rate it would be afternoon, and had gone back again.

"Did the master come with his wife?"

"Yes, together."

"And did they go back together?"

"Yes, they went back together."

"The luggage will come before long. Thank you."

With that he went out into the street again.

He came as far as Kanda, but he had no wish to stop at Hiraoka's inn.

And yet the two of them were somehow on his mind.

The wife especially was on his mind.

So he looked in for a moment.

The couple were eating with their trays side by side.

A maid with a tray had her back to the threshold.

He called from behind her.

Hiraoka looked up at Daisuke as though startled.

His eyes were bloodshot.

He said it was from sleeping badly for two or three nights.

Michiyo laughed and said he was exaggerating.

Daisuke felt sorry for him, but he was also reassured.

He declined their urging and went out, ate, had his hair cut, stopped briefly at the top of Kudan, and on his way back went to look at the new house again.

Michiyo had a towel tied over her hair, the skirts of her long Yuzen under-kimono showing, her sleeves tucked back with a cord, and was seeing to the luggage.

The maid who had helped them at the inn was there too.

Hiraoka was untying the cords of a wicker trunk on the veranda; seeing Daisuke, he laughed and told him to lend a hand.

Kadono had taken off his hakama and tucked up his skirts, and as he carried a stacked chest into the sitting room with the rickshaw man he said, "How is this for a figure, sensei? You mustn't laugh."

The next day, when Daisuke was at his breakfast tray drinking his tea as usual, Kadono came into the room with his freshly washed face shining.

"What time did you get in last night? I was worn out and dozed off and never noticed a thing. — You saw me asleep? You are a hard man, sensei. What time was it you came home, and where had you been until then?"

So he rattled on in his usual style, without effort.

Daisuke said seriously,

"You stayed until everything was in order, I hope?"

So he asked.

"Yes, we got it all in order. It was hard work, though. It is not like moving one of us, you know; there were all sorts of big things. You should have seen the lady standing in the middle of the room looking blankly round her — it was really quite comical."

"She is somewhat unwell."

"So it seems. I thought her color was not good. Quite unlike Mr. Hiraoka. He has a fine build. I was surprised when we went to the bath together last night."

Presently Daisuke went back to his study and wrote two or three letters.

One was to a friend at the Residency-General in Korea, thanking him for the Korai ware he had sent.

One was to his sister's husband in France, asking him to find an inexpensive Tanagra figure.

In the early afternoon, on his way out for a walk, he looked into Kadono's room and found him flat on his back again, snoring.

Daisuke looked at Kadono's innocent nostrils and envied him.

The truth was that he himself had suffered a good deal last night, unable to fall asleep.

As always, the pocket watch he had set beside his pillow made a great deal of noise.

It bothered him, so he reached out and pushed the watch under the pillow.

But the sound came ringing into his head all the same.

Listening to it, he drifted at last into a doze, and every other consciousness went down into a wholly dark hole.

But he was aware that one thing alone, the needle of a sewing machine stitching through the night, went on passing steadily through his head at a mincing pace.

And then at some point that sound turned into the chirping of an insect, singing deep in the shrubbery beside a beautiful entryway.

Tracing last night's dream this far, Daisuke felt he had discovered a kind of thread that joins sleep and waking.

Daisuke was a man who, once anything began to trouble him, was troubled by it without end.

And since he had brains enough to gauge exactly how absurd this was, there were times when his own way of being troubled became all the more conspicuous to him.

Three or four years ago he had tried to solve the question of how, ordinarily, he entered a dream.

At night, in bed, just as he was pleasantly drowsing off, he would think, ah, here it is, this is how one falls asleep — and start.

And at that instant he would be wide awake.

After a while, as he began to fall asleep again, again he would think, there, this is it.

Almost every night Daisuke was tormented by this curiosity, and repeated the same thing two and three times over.

In the end he wore himself out.

He wanted somehow to escape the misery of it.

More than that, he thought himself thoroughly a fool.

To submit one's unclear consciousness to one's clear consciousness and try to look back at the same moment is, as James said, like lighting a candle to examine the dark, or holding a top still to study its spinning; on such terms one would never sleep in one's life.

He knew it, and yet when night came he would start again.

This difficulty went on for about a year and then somehow receded.

Comparing last night's dream with that old difficulty, Daisuke found it curious.

For it seemed to him more elegant to cut off a part of one's waking self and hand it over, just as it was, unnoticed, into the dream.

At the same time it occurred to him that this working might not be unlike the state of going mad.

Until now Daisuke had believed that since he never flew into a passion he could not go mad.

For the next two or three days neither Daisuke nor Kadono heard anything of Hiraoka.

On the afternoon of the fourth day Daisuke went to a garden party at a house in Azabu.

A good many guests came, men and women, but the guests of honor were an inordinately tall Englishman, a member of parliament or a businessman, and his wife, who wore pince-nez.

She was a considerable beauty, too good-looking to be wasted on a country like Japan, and she carried with great satisfaction a painted parasol made in Gifu — bought heaven knows where.

It was a very fine day, and standing on the wide lawn in a frock coat one felt summer arriving distinctly along one's shoulders and back, so clear and blue was the sky.

The English gentleman screwed up his face at the sky and said it was truly beautiful.

His wife answered at once, "Lovely."

It was said in an extremely high voice, with the greatest possible emphasis, and Daisuke thought that English compliments were a thing apart.

The lady addressed two or three remarks to Daisuke as well.

But within three minutes he could bear it no longer and beat a retreat.

After that she was taken over by a young lady in Japanese dress who had deliberately had her hair done in the shimada style, and by a certain gentleman who had long been in business in New York.

This gentleman prided himself on a genius for speaking English; he never missed a meeting of the English-speaking society, where he conversed in English with his fellow Japanese and then, best of all, made after-dinner speeches in English.

He had a habit of saying something and then laughing loudly afterward as though it were very funny.

The Englishman sometimes looked puzzled.

Daisuke thought he might at least give up that.

The young lady was quite good too.

She was the daughter of a rich man, who had hired an American woman as governess and studied the use of English.

Daisuke listened with genuine admiration, thinking that her English was better than her face.

Daisuke had been invited here not through any personal connection with the host or with the English couple.

The invitation had come round entirely on the backwash of his father's and his brother's social influence.

So he drifted about here and there, bowing at random and idling.

His brother was among the company.

"Ah, you've come,"

he said, without so much as touching his hat.

"Fine weather, isn't it."

"Yes. Very good."

Daisuke was not short, but his brother was built taller still.

On top of that he had grown steadily stouter these five or six years, so that he looked quite imposing.

"Why don't you go over there and talk with the foreigners a little?"

"No, thank you."

His brother smiled wryly as he said it.

And he toyed with the fingertips at the gold chain hanging across his large stomach.

"Foreigners are very smooth. A little too smooth. Praised like that, the weather will have to improve whether it likes it or not."

"Were they praising the weather so much? Well. Isn't it a trifle too hot?"

"Too hot for me as well."

Seigo and Daisuke took out white handkerchiefs as though by agreement and wiped their foreheads.

Both wore heavy silk hats.

The brothers walked to the shade of a tree at the edge of the lawn and stopped.

There was no one nearby.

Over on the other side some entertainment had begun.

Seigo watched it from a distance with the same face he wore at home.

"When a man gets to be like my brother, it must feel the same to be at home or to be a guest. To be so thoroughly used to the world must be dull, with no pleasure left in it,"

Daisuke thought as he watched him.

"What has Father done today?"

"Father has his poetry meeting."

Seigo answered with his usual ordinary face, but Daisuke found it rather funny.

"And my sister-in-law?"

"On duty receiving guests."

Thinking of the complaints she would make afterward, Daisuke found it funnier still.

Daisuke knew that Seigo was always making a great business of being busy.

He also knew that more than half of that busyness was made up of gatherings like this one.

And he admired his brother's ability to drink irregularly, eat, keep company with women, without ever showing a distasteful face or letting fall a word of complaint, and yet never to look tired, never to grow excited, to stand serenely outside things and put on weight year by year.

When Seigo went to a teahouse, or up into a restaurant, or out to a dinner, or was invited to a lunch, or went to his club, or saw someone off at Shimbashi, or met someone at Yokohama, or paid a call at Oiso, showing his face from morning to night wherever numbers of people gathered, and looked neither elated nor disappointed, Daisuke supposed it was because he was so used to this life, as a jellyfish drifting in the sea does not find the salt water salty.

That was what Daisuke was grateful for.

For unlike their father, Seigo had never once delivered a fussy sermon at Daisuke.

Constricting things like principles, or convictions, or a view of life he never mentioned in the least, so that one could hardly tell whether he had any.

In exchange, he had never once set out to demolish those constricting principles or convictions or views of life either.

He was truly commonplace, and that was good.

But he was not interesting.

As a companion in talk, his sister-in-law was far more interesting to Daisuke than his brother.

When they met, his brother invariably said, well, how about it.

There has been an earthquake in Italy, hasn't there, he would say.

The Sultan of Turkey has been deposed, hasn't he, he would say.

Besides that: the blossoms at Mukojima are past their best, a great snake was being kept in the hold of a foreign ship at Yokohama, so-and-so was run over by a train, hasn't he — so he would say.

All of it had been in the newspapers.

In exchange he had an endless stock of harmless material.

However long one went on, there was no sign of the supply running out.

And then again.

Sometimes he would ask something odd — has that man Tolstoy died yet?

Or he would ask who was the greatest of Japan's novelists at present.

In short he was entirely indifferent to literature, and astonishingly ignorant of it; but since he stood outside both reverence and contempt and listened without concern, Daisuke found him easy to answer.

Talking face to face with such a brother, there was little stimulation, but there was no bitterness either, and it was comfortable.

The only trouble was that he was out from morning to night, so one could seldom catch him.

His wife, Seitaro, and Nuiko all found it a rarity when he stayed home a whole day and ate all three meals with the family.

So when he stood shoulder to shoulder with his brother in the shade of the tree, Daisuke thought it a good opportunity.

"Brother, I have something to talk to you about. Have you any free time?"

"Free time,"

Seigo repeated, and smiled without explaining anything.

"How about tomorrow morning?"

"Tomorrow morning I have to go to Yokohama."

"The afternoon?"

"In the afternoon I shall be at the office, but I have a conference, so even if you came we could not talk at leisure."

"The evening, then."

"In the evening I am at the Imperial Hotel. That English couple is being entertained at the Imperial tomorrow evening, so that is out."

Daisuke pursed his lips and looked hard at his brother.

And then the two of them burst out laughing.

"If it is so urgent, what about today? Today will do. Shall we have a meal together for once?"

Daisuke agreed.

But instead of going to the club as Daisuke expected, Seigo proposed eel.

"This will be the first time I have gone to an eel house in a silk hat,"

Daisuke said doubtfully.