In the morning Hori discovered that his military survey map somehow had been mistaken for a sheet of wrapping paper the day before. The torn-off section had served to carry rice cakes in my pocket. The tearing had strangely traversed mountains, valleys, and rivers along almost the line we purposed following. As Hori was still unemancipated from the idea that not to know where one is is to be lost, he was rather in a maze for the next few days, as we continually wandered off the edge of the map into unknown regions. He must have marvelled at times over the kindness of the Providence which had guided our steps from Kyoto to Nagoya.
The valley of the Kiso earnestly seeks to attest the theory that the inhabitants of localities with a similar climate and topography tend to have similar ideas, especially in working out ways of doing the same thing. The wide sweeping view with the snow-topped mountains on the horizon might have been Switzerland, and for a more decisive deceiving of the eye into thinking so the cottages of the peasants had the overhanging roof of the Swiss chalet with the same pitch and the same arrangement of rows of boulders on them. It is a province, also, of trousered women.
We came upon a wistful-eyed, pink-cheeked, timid fairy of the mountains. She was carrying on her back a huge, barrel-shaped basket and she bent forward as she slowly walked along, her eyes fixed on a handful of wild flowers in her fingers. Even our modest knowledge of the folklore of the land told us that she must be a princess who had been captured by ugly trolls. They had set her to impossible labour as their revenge against her beauty. A young man whose niche in the world was beyond our determining—although we thought he might be a student on a vacation walking trip—had caught up with us a half-hour before and had been measuring his step with ours. When he discovered that I wished to take a picture of the princess he assisted with such effective blandishment of speech that she halted for an instant. When I asked that I might also photograph him, he laughed and vaulted up among the rocks and disappeared.
WE CAME UPON A WISTFUL-EYED, TIMID FAIRY OF THE MOUNTAINS
A little farther along we met the six sisters of the princess. They were carrying burdens equally as large and heavy as had she, but they were not so pretty nor so wistful, albeit they were just as timid. We never could find any key to the mystery why our appearance along the highway would sometimes be as startling as if we were ghostly apparitions, and at other times it would merely bring about a casual interest and staring, if it brought any interest at all. Upon this occasion it was a panic. The six maidens beheld us, they shrieked in unison, and they jumped from the road, trying to hide behind rocks and trees. Their lithe limbs might have carried them like fawns, if their shoulders had been freed from the huge baskets, but, as it was, their flight was more like that of some new and enormous variety of the beetle tribe, evoluted so far as to wear cotton clothes and to have pretty human heads turbaned under blue and white handkerchiefs. As a son of Daguerre, I should have tarried for an instant to photograph their amazing struggle, but an upsetting obsession of chivalry hurried us on. By the time we turned to look back they had scrambled to the road, all six princesses accounted for. They, too, turned to look at us and from the safety of distance began to laugh. The comedy might thus have ended if it had not been that at that instant Hori rounded the bend of the road with his thumb pressed vigorously against the strident bicycle bell. The beetles (or, better to say, the wingless butterflies) again took flight. We awaited their second reappearance. This time they did not venture laughter until they reached the curve and made sure of no further dismay.
Hori dismounted and pushed the bicycle along and we entered into one of our unending discussions. A subject sometimes in debate was O-Owre-san’s and my intense interest—our curiosity—in the conversations that Hori had with passersby along the road or in the shops. Sometimes, when we had made some simple inquiry in a shop, Hori would ask a long question; the shopkeeper would answer; Hori would enter a counter dissertation; the shopkeeper would make his reply to that; Hori would reply; the shopkeeper would reply; Hori would reply; and then it might be that the shopkeeper would have the conclusion. Hori might then turn to us with: “He says ‘no.’”
In the port city shops where English is spoken, if there is but one clerk he will answer your questions immediately. If there are two, every question is thoroughly discussed in Japanese before answering, and if there be three, four, or five clerks, the debate goes on to extraordinary length. Again and again we asked Hori for a complete translation but it must have been that he believed within himself that he had asked the question in the simplest terms, for we seldom got a verbatim translation.
We were in the midst of some such discussion when we looked up to see an old man standing before us, leaning on a long staff. His white beard fell benignly and his steady eyes carried a message of goodwill. He returned our greetings by a dignified inclination of his head. We were at the peak of the road and, as often may be found at such points, there was a small rest tea-house for travellers. We asked the old man if he would sit down with us and share a pot of tea.
The iron pot, filled with mountain spring water, steamed hospitably on the hibachi and the fragrance of the tea was a friendly invitation to relax. Our guest stood his long staff in the corner, sat down on a cushion, and drew his feet from his dusty sandals. After the true manner of happily met travellers he was easily persuaded to tell us the tale of his wanderings. The translation is somewhat rhetorical but, as Hori explained, the tale was told in the language of etiquette.
“I was born,” said he, “in the forty-first year of the rule of the Shogun Ienari. I was young and am now old. My eighty and seven summers have seen the downfall of the once mighty before the rising to full glory of the Meiji, and now, from the Palace of Yedo, shine upon us the divine rays of the Way of Heaven. Great is the Mercy of Enlightenment. The Eternal Glory is the Way.
“As a child I knew these mountains which you see. The provinces of our land were then fortified by many castles and these roads were traversed by armed men. The castles have been razed to the ground but the temples of the gods still stand. The two-sworded warriors have gone but I, a humble pilgrim, walk the roads they once knew. The white clouds rest in the blue sky above Fuji-san as when I looked upon them as a child. The clouds will rest above Fuji when these eyes shall see them not.
“In the fourteenth year of my youth I took the vow that my life should be lived in honouring the holy images of Buddha, each and all as my steps might find them, from the shrines erected by the peasants to the bronze statues of the great temples. I took the very staff which you see and the clothes that were upon my back and bade my family good-bye. Through the kindness in the hearts of men, the lowly and the mighty, the gods have provided me with food and rest. I have travelled without illness and my spirit has known the joy of the Way.”
“IN THE FOURTEENTH YEAR OF MY YOUTH I TOOK THE VOW THAT MY LIFE SHOULD BE LIVED IN HONORING THE HOLY IMAGES OF BUDDHA”
In those years that his bowl had not gone empty of rice, never, it may be believed, did anyone give to him as a beggar asking. Japan is of the East, possessing the intuition that the spiritual is a mystic interflow.
His eyes were young; they were not clouded in contemplation of the abstract. They sparkled from a delight in life. It had not been demanded of him that his vicarious pilgrimage should be one of tragic sacrifice. He had given and he had received. While his theoretical faith might be that life is an illusion and only the Way is eternal, nevertheless he was born to love his fellowmen and he could not escape from the practical faith that was in him that this temporal life must be of some use and of some meaning. I remembered in strange comparison a sturdy British unemployed whom I had once come upon. He was lying under a hedge in Monmouthshire. He borrowed a pipeful of tobacco and then turned over onto his back to gaze into the blue sky. After a time he said: “Activity is a fever. Therefore it is a disease. Laziness is a promise. Rest and forgetfulness are divine.” He did not make the effort to add a good-bye when I left him.
A path of our pilgrim led over the road which we had just travelled. We parted, bowing many times. Hori unfolded his ravaged map and found a village named Narii a few miles farther along. The railroad down in the valley according to the map went somewhere near Narii. Hori’s nerves had been rasped by the temperamental vagaries of the bicycle on the steep slopes and he decided to await a train, promising to meet us.
After a time our path dropped down to the bed of the river. Across a bridge the road forked, one branch continuing along the valley and the other winding off into the hills. The hill trail, particularly as it led into the unknown regions off Hori’s map, tempted, and we shouted down an inquiry to some children playing in the water. They were successfully attempting to get as wet as possible while remaining as dirty as possible. There is a mystery which overhangs grimy Japanese children. When the little noses present a constant temptation to the seiyo-jin handkerchief that in itself is a caste sign that you will find the faces of their fathers and mothers unhappy, dull, and lustreless. When the children are brightly scoured and polished there is a general appearance of happiness and contentment in the community. It is not the simple equation that poverty equals dirt; one village is scrubbed and the next one is not—otherwise neither seems richer nor poorer except in happy looks.
When we called to the children in the Kiso they splashed out of the water like wild animals and scattered in all directions, but as two naked infants too small to run had been left on the shore, first the girls and then the boys began to edge back. They remained to stare. We pointed up the mountain path and asked if it led to Narii. Their gestures evinced a fierce encouragement to essay the ridges as if they had the contempt of the untamed for anything as conventional as a broad valley road. As a matter of fact they were undoubtedly saying that the valley road did not lead to Narii. We discovered this later when we could look down from the heights. Hori’s railroad tunnelled the hills.
According to local belief our path carried us over the “backbone” of the empire, and this crossing spot is considered sacred ground. Accordingly we should have paid special homage to the local deity whose shrine we passed, but as we were foreigners and in ignorance, the god perhaps forgave us. Furthermore, we unknowingly passed a particularly renowned view of very holy Mount Ontake. We probably did see the mountain, but being uninformed, as I said, of this special view, we did not hold ourselves in proper restraint until reaching the exact spot for appreciation. Instead we luxuriously and squanderously revelled in all four directions of the compass. It is always thus with the ignorant. Their indiscriminate enthusiasm is more irritating to the intellectuals than no appreciation at all. I was later most depressingly snubbed for having missed the sacred view by a scholar of things Japanese. He knew it from prints and sacred writings. He said that he himself would have journeyed to see the reality if it had not been for the probable annoyance of having to come in contact with so many natives on the journey. He appeared to be impatient that the British Museum does not commandeer all views, temples, and abiding places of art around the world and establish turnstiles which will keep the natives out and let the scholars in. When he actually grasped that our only reason for having arrived at that particular spot at all was that we had taken a turning to the right instead of to the left, he declared that our ideas of travelling evidence the same intelligence as might the tripping of tumbling beans and that our very presence at sacred places was a sacrilege.
We turned a corner that hung sharply over the precipice. Around the bend the shelf spread out into a miniature meadow. A peasant was lying on the grass and his straw-bonneted ox was leisurely nibbling. We sat down beside him and O-Owre-san began searching in his rucksack for a remaining cake of chocolate. During this hunt the peasant kept his eyes carefully and earnestly averted. I made the remark to him that the view was kirei and he replied by a nervous hei. O-Owre-san found the chocolate and broke it into three parts. He handed one of the squares to the peasant. The fingers that reached out for it were trembling.
The man had imaginative eyes. It was plain to see that he was suffering from some lively remembrance of a mountain folklore demon story. He knew that we were foxes or badgers who had assumed human form, and that we had come to him with no good intentions. He suspected a subtle poison. But he had courage from one thought. It is the common knowledge of the countryside that while the demands of demon badgers may not be directly refused, their evil intent may often be thwarted by the crafty intelligence of man. The immediate problem was how to avoid the appearance of refusing to eat the mysterious cake which was now getting soft and moist in his hand. Suddenly he popped the chocolate into his mouth, tin foil and all. Then he pushed back the square into his hand almost in the same movement. I pretended not to be watching. He dropped his hand with elaborate carelessness into the thickness of the grass. I felt a sense of dramatic relievement myself.
During those minutes the ox had been no such respecter of enchantment as had his master. Instead, he had stood sniffing at our boots and pulling up bits of grass round and about our ankles, all the time rolling a pair of red, angry eyes. Asiatic beasts of burden find something antagonistic to their complaisance in the odour of the Caucasian and this individual ox was progressing toward a positive bovine dissatisfaction. Furthermore, we were sitting on the sweetest and most tender tufts of grass remaining. We courteously dismissed the peasant to go his way. His marked alacrity was quite welcome.
We lingered on the grass for a little while and I told O-Owre-san my guesses. I elaborated them into the hazard that the poor man—he had not once turned to look back over his shoulder—might even then be fearing that the slight taste from the chocolate would turn him into a frog and his ox into a stork to eat him up; or perhaps he might be in distress that he and his beast might grow smaller and smaller until they would disappear into thin air.
O-Owre-san had been examining the faintness of the path. “I hope none of these things happen until the man gets over the hills to Narii. The hoof prints make an excellent trail,” he said.
It was time to sling on our packs and follow. When we reached the next turn we could see the peasant’s straw hat and the ox’s straw bonnet bobbing along just over the bush tops. We maintained this distance without closing the gap. As O-Owre-san had predicted, the hoof marks were useful. The path often grew so faint that it had no other resolute indication. We had been sure, without thought of other possibility, that the crest of the hill we were climbing would be the summit of the range. When we reached the crest we stood looking up at another peak rising from a shallow valley at our feet.
“Which way does the ox say to go?” I asked.
The hoof marks were there in the soft earth, but where our feet had stopped there they had stopped. They stopped as absolutely as if the peasant and his ox had been whisked away in a chariot to the sunset sky. The bushes were too low for concealment. There was no cave, nor hole in the earth.
If there be no such thing as magic, in the Japanese mountains at least, where did that man and his beast go? The disappearance was as complete as the most exacting enchanter could have desired. We found no answer to the riddle and the sun was sinking, adding the next question of how we were going to get out of the hills in the night time if we delayed for scientific investigation. We succumbed to expediency and took a five-mile-an-hour pace over such trail as we had left, guessing at the turns. When we finally reached the next crest, deep in the valley we could see Narii. Before descending the steep, dropping path, we sat down near a spring where the birds had come to drink. They were singing evening songs mightily. Bright wild flowers were scattered in the open spaces between the intense green of the fern patches. The world was lustily at peace.
When we did start we swung down the long hill almost at a run and in a half-hour reached the edge of the village to find Hori sitting under a stone lantern in the temple yard. The evening peace had made us positive that this is the best of all possible worlds, but Hori was entertaining a different idea. He looked exceedingly gloomy. We were impatient of any discontent. If he had said that men were starving for rice in the village beyond, the fitting answer would have seemed to us the historic words of the good queen: “Give them cake.” Undoubtedly when the message about the starving peasants was brought to that Lady of France she was sitting under the shrubbery at Versailles, and the birds were singing, and it was springtime, and perhaps the fountains were playing. Impellingly she realized with an insight deeper than any historian has ever appreciated that upon such a glorious day, if there is any such thing as right or justice at all in this world, a certain amount of cake should be everybody’s inalienable possession.
As it happened, Hori’s worry had nothing to do with altruistic sorrow for starving villagers, but existed from a lively interest in our own affairs. The town was very poor, he explained, a town come down in the world from ancient prosperity. Its neck was hung with the millstone of decayed graces and thinned blood. The inn was so old that it was senile. Hori had established some excuse before entering the door for inspection which later allowed his rejection of the inn’s hospitality, but it would never do for us in turn to venture in for a glance around. That would be needlessly raising the expectation of the ancient host. We would find, he suggested, that it would be only five or six or seven miles to the next village. As we had had twenty-five or more miles behind us and most of those had been along mountain paths, we were not so inevitably tempted at that hour of night to be particular in a choice of roofs as Hori, who had come by train, was imagining.
The inn, in truth, was very old. By any law of survival chances the wandering wings should have burned to earth long ago. To greet us there were no smiling and chattering maids gathered behind a mistress; instead, an old man and a very small girl, his granddaughter or more likely his great-granddaughter, met us in the dark entrance with protests that the house was unworthy of our presence. We hastily denied them their words. Hori could employ the polite phrases of Japan. We impulsively, directly, and bluntly told them “no.” It was not alone the pathos of the two figures which appealed. It was somewhat that their dignity had not surrendered to ruin, and it was somewhat a something else, indescribable, in the atmosphere that charmed.
We followed the master along a labyrinthine corridor. The soft wood planks of the floor had been polished to a deep reddish gleam under the bare feet of generations of hurrying ne-sans. He led us past inner courtyards to the farthest wing. Our room hung over the river at an elbow of the stream. Even with the shogi pushed wide open we were hidden completely from the eyes of the town by heavily leafed trees.
The mats on the floor had turned a dingy, mottled brown and black from their once light golden yellow, but they were clean. The sacred takemona corner still compelled its importance. It had been built in an age when the demand for its existence was the ardent faith of the builders rather than an architectural tradition. The room was about thirty-five feet long and fifteen feet deep, perhaps a little larger. The ceiling was proportionately high.
Hori was still doubtful, not gloomily so, but from the knowledge that an inn is proved by its service. The host was kneeling, as immobile as a temple image, awaiting our orders. His skin was as bloodless as the vellum of the painting which hung behind him. His watchful eyes, however, were intensely bright in their deep sockets. Hori began inquiries about dinner. The ancient bowed his head to the floor, drawing in his breath sharply against his teeth. Dinner was now being prepared for his family, he said, but it would be unworthy of his guests. The formal phrase of polite deprecation carried this truth, as Hori discovered by further questioning; it was not that the dinner was or was not worthy—it was the failure of quantity. We should not have long to wait, said our host, but food would have to be sent for.
As we sat in a circle planning what we should have, the old man smiled and pointed to a patched square in the matting. Underneath the square, he said, was a depression for holding bronze braziers. When the nobility, in the old feudal times, had travelled the Nakescendo trail, this was the room of honour that had been given to the daimyos. It had been often the custom for the retainers of a daimyo themselves to prepare his dinner over the braziers. Our sitting there, planning what we should have, had reminded him of the dead past. His words came slowly as if between each word of recollection his spirit journeyed back into the very maw of oblivion and then had to return again to the world.
“Are the braziers still hidden there?” Hori interrupted.
Yes, the braziers were under the floor or somewhere to be found.
Hori turned to us and put us through a questioning until he rediscovered the word “picnic” for his vocabulary. “That’s what we will have, a picnic, right here,” he declared, and he turned back to the host to explain. The old man almost gasped, at least approaching as near to such escape of emotion as he probably ever had at the request of a guest.
“But you will then have to have a special waitress,” he said. “My granddaughter is indeed too young for that privilege.” Always when he used depreciatory adjectives about the child’s unworthiness he failed lamentably to harden his caressing tone. She was, however, as he had said, little older than a baby. The services of a maid we should have to pay for, but, under the spell of the conjuring up of the memories of those bygone revels in our room, what cared we for saving our precious yen? We had become reincarnations of the two-sworded swaggerers. We waved our arms grandiloquently.
“Tell him to send for fowls for the pot,” we oratorically assailed Hori. “Let us mix rich sauces and warm the sake. And tell him to remember that for us there can be but one choice—the maid to serve our dinner must be the prettiest maid in all Narii.”
I had not the slightest idea that Hori would translate our exact words, but I found later that such was his act.
Thus the mountain village of Narii faced a problem. Two foreigners, and a Japanese almost as alien as a foreigner, had appeared from nobody knew where, not preceded, ’twas true, by retainers as had been the travellers of old, but nevertheless demanded the old-time service with as much gusto as if they were accustomed to having what they wished. They had asked that the prettiest maid in all Narii be called to the inn to exercise the privilege of guarding the steaming rice box. It was obvious that there could be only one prettiest maid, and all Narii knew with one mind that the prettiest maid was the daughter of the Shinto priest. However, the daughter of a priest is not a likely candidate for service in an inn, even if the master has ever been a faithful devotee of the temple. Nevertheless there was the honour of the hospitality of Narii at stake. Messengers (or even appropriately, it might be said, heralds) were sent to explain the problem to the maid and her father, and to use, if necessary, the pressure of “the state demands.”
Thus came O-Hanna-san to the inn. (In all Japan there cannot be a prettier, a more bashful, or a more modest maiden.) Her eyes were downcast behind long black lashes. Her soft cheek flushed and paled—perhaps somewhat from the excitement of the adventure. Neither she nor her friends had ever seen one of that strange race, the foreigner. And, indeed, even a priest’s daughter may think that to be chosen as the prettiest maid——!! Ah, her courage failed her to glance up and words would not come to her lips to answer their questions, but they did not seem to be so very predatory nor so very fearsome—and they were very hungry.
Two great bronze braziers had been filled with glowing charcoal. The foreigners and the outer-world Japanese who could speak their strange words were busily cooking the fowls, chopped into dice, and they were arguing about their respective talents and abilities, as do all amateur cooks. Perhaps she could now look up for an instant unobserved. No, a glance met her eyes and she felt hot blushes grow again on her cheek.
While they feasted and laughed she had to run many times to the kitchen for forgotten dishes. When she passed along the hall by the entrance to the street she was each time stopped and besieged by the questions of the gathered mob. (Some of those inquiring investigators had also gathered outside the wall of my bath an hour before. I had been suddenly aware of an eye at every crack and crevice of the boards as I was cautiously stepping into the superheated tub. There was not a sound, merely the glitter of their star-scattered eyes.)
The foreigners put sugar on their rice and one of them even put sugar in his tea. They handled their chopsticks so awkwardly that it was marvellous that they did not spill the rice grains on the matting. She thought of the twenty rules in etiquette for the proper and graceful use of chopsticks and she imagined that if there had been a ten score of rules they might have all been broken. At last the three feasters finished their mighty meal and stretched out on the cushions to smoke in deep contentment. She doubted whether they had even noticed that her superior kimono was not such as a maid of an inn would possess. After the feast her quick feet, in spotless white tabi, carried away the bowls and little tables. Then she sat down by the door to await any further clapping of hands.
The host came in, moving silently across the matting. He kneeled and bent his forehead to the floor. Before the meal he had himself arranged the flowers, in an old iron vase, to stand in the takemona corner. We tried to express our appreciation for the flowers and our admiration of the vase.
We asked him how old the inn was. It had been his father’s before him, and his grandfather’s before his father. Yes, in those days the Nakescendo had rivalled the Tokaido, and yearly, on the hastening to Yedo to give obeisance to the Shogun, the great nobles of the northwest provinces with their armed retainers had had to pass through Narii. In the pride of their gifts to the Shogun, in their numbers, in their courage, they had never yielded place to the envoys from the great families of the South. This now forgotten inn had then been famous. Our room, overhanging the river, he repeated, had been only given to the daimyos. The samurai had crowded the other rooms. The inn had boasted a score, two score, of trained and pretty ne-sans to wait upon those fiery warriors. (The modern geisha, in many of her accomplishments, is daughter to the inn maidens of the feudal days who sang and danced and played musical instruments in addition to the graces of more domestic duties.) The inn had then rung with shouting and laughter, and sometimes the dawn of the morning start of the cavalcade found the retainers still sitting around the feast.
On the road to Yedo their purses had hung full, but the great city always plunged both its hands into those purses filled from the rice taxes, and it was often quite another story—the return journey back to the provincial castles. No rare occurrence was it indeed, for some haughty samurai to declare in the morning that he could not pay his inn bill, however modest it might be. Upon one occasion a certain warrior had been forced to leave in pledge the first mistress of his heart—his sword. A daimyo, overlord of a province, could, of course, never be in debt to an innkeeper, although he might leave a gift for his host instead of money. When such eventuality as that arose the host would declare (wisely) that his hospitality had been unworthy of any remuneration and that he was a thousand times repaid by the magnificence of the gift.
Yes, went on the old man, once a noble upon leaving the door had caused a vase to be unwrapped from its encasements of one silken bag after another and had given it to the inn. The donor had written a poem of dedication with his own hand. The vase was shaped like a bottle and the inn had been called “The Bottle Inn” from that day, seventy years in the past. Our host, a youth on that day, had thought that the inn would ever be rich and renowned. He sighed. The tradition of its renown had faded and been forgotten in this age of railways. No longer did turbulent guests demand that the bottle be brought out and shown.
If his dramatic genius had been subtly leading us toward turbulence, we obeyed the pulling of the strings. We demanded to know whether the vase was still under his roof. Our host smiled. The sacred vase was hidden safely. Would we like to see it?
He returned, carrying an old wooden box. The great-granddaughter dragged the unredeemed sword after her. The well-worn scabbard of the sword was of mediocre, conventional design, but the blade had been forged by one of the famous sword makers. Hori read the sword’s origin from the characters carved in the steel. The old man slowly slipped the sword back into the scabbard, leaving us to ponder what might have been the tragic fate of the ronin that he had never returned for his pledge.
No casket of precious metal can be so alluringly suggestive of trove as the simple, unpainted, pine boxes into which the Japanese put their treasures. A woven cord clasped down the lid of the box. The untying of it began the breathless ceremony. When the lid was lifted we saw the first silken wrapping, then came another, and another, and another. Some were of brocade, some were of faded plain colour,—red, blue, or rose. Finally the drawing string of the last bag was pulled open and the old man lifted the bottle. It was of yellow pottery with a thick brown glaze overrunning the sides. The mouth of the vase was capped by a bronze and silver band carved with an irregular motif.
The trustee of the possession allowed us to pass it from hand to hand.
What was one of our reasons for being in Narii at that very moment? It was that our eyes were prying for those rarer treasures in Japan which may be sometimes gleaned “away from the beaten path.” Unaccountable chance had led us to the inn. The old man was hopelessly beaten in his contest with poverty. I knew that he did not wish to sell, but if there should be the jingling of a few yen—was it likely that he could refuse? Our eyes were gleaming with desire. Surely, even if it were a venal sin to take away the bottle from The Bottle Inn the very greatness of the temptation would have brought its own special forgiveness. But because temptation and conscience can generally be argued around to our satisfaction, the gods have ironically added impulse as the third part of us. It must have been some such impulse which was the irrational lever which moved us to action. We soared to the heights. It was a superior endurance to any flight that it is likely either of us will ever attempt again. Truly such virtue is more regretted than gloried in. We did not take the bottle with us. It still functions in its environment, in harmony with its tradition. Taken away it could be only a superior vase with a history, an object of art. In that old inn it is a living part, an inspiration. In the forgotten village of Narii no numbered museum tag hangs around its neck.
The bottle dropped back into the brocade bag lined with faded crimson silk. Then the other wrappings, one by one, muffled it. It went into the box, the lid was fitted into place, and the cord was tied. Do we gain strength from resisting such temptation? The writers of the Holy Church of the Middle Ages said so. By refusing that bottle I merely gained exhaustion. This moment I am stifled by the dust of the ashes of that murdered passion. My conscience replies with no response. It has lost the vitality of recoil, and thus, if ever such time may come, I may yet glory in a greater vandalism, some supreme Hunnish act, and there will be no rasping regret.
The breezes up among the snows of the mountains came down into the valley for the night. Wherever they were going they seemed to be quite undetermined as to their path. They blow from every side and into every corner of the room by turn. Little by little, to escape the draughts, we had kept pushing along the wooden shutters until we were at length completely walled in. It was not possible to imagine that a few miles away, down on the rice plains, the millions were nudely stifling while we were going to bed to get warm. The daughter of the priest had been dragging layers of bedding to the door and, when we clapped our hands, she had innumerable mattresses for each of us. For once it was unnecessary to stretch the mosquito netting. There seemed to be nothing left but to blow out the lights and cry: “O yasumi nasai!” to the retreating patter of her footsteps.
“What’s the midget granddaughter waiting for?” I asked Hori.
“She wants you to go to bed,” said he from under his quilt.
I jumped into the soft centre of my mattresses as requested. Then the butterfly dropped on her knees and crept backward around our beds. Out of a box she was pouring a train of powder until she had us each enclosed in a magic circle.
“Why?” I demanded.
Kenjiro laughed at me.
“It’s nomi-yoke,” he said. “Insect powder—what do you say in America? Bug medicine?”
I insisted that I had not seen the sign of a bug or an insect or a flea or anything looking like a marauder.
“Of course not,” Hori stopped me as if I should have known better. “It’s just courtesy to honoured guests, to show you that they would wish to protect you if there were any. If there were crawlers,” he concluded with some scorn, “do you suppose they’d make such an effort to call attention to the fact?”
That bushido explanation satisfied Hori but I was doubtful. For the sake of verification I carefully destroyed the integrity of the rampart around my bed by opening up passages through the powder. I was willing to display a few bites in the morning to prove the truth. I went to sleep dreaming about two-sworded samurai who looked like pinch bugs, and they were swaggering around a wall of insect powder. However, the morning proved that Hori was quite correct. The delicate attention had been born of pure courtesy.