end of the year approached. Tayū came to see him in his palace apartments. He was on easy terms with her, since he did not take her very seriously, and they would joke with each other as she performed such services as trimming his hair. She would visit him without summons when there was something she wished to say.
“It is so very odd that I have been wondering what to do.” She was smiling.
“What is odd? You must not keep secrets from me.”
“The last thing I would do. You must sometimes think I forget myself, pouring out all my woes. But this is rather difficult.” Her manner suggested that it was very difficult indeed.
“You are always so shy.”
“A letter has come from the Hitachi princess.” She took it out.
“The last thing you should keep from me.”
She was fidgeting. The letter was on thick Michinoku paper and nothing about it suggested feminine elegance except the scent that had been heavily burned into it. But the hand was very good.
“Always, always my sleeve is wet like these.
Wet because you are so very cold.”
He was puzzled. “Wet like what?”
Tayū was pushing a clumsy old hamper toward him. The cloth in which it had come was spread beneath it.
“I simply couldn’t show it to you. But she sent it especially for you to wear on New Year’s Day, and I couldn’t bring myself to send it back, she would have been so hurt. I could have kept it to myself, I suppose, but that didn’t seem right either, when she sent it especially for you. So I thought maybe after I had shown it to you —”
“I would have been very sorry if you had not. It is the perfect gift for someone like me, with ‘no one to help me dry my tear-drenched pillow.’”
He said no more.
It was a remarkable effort at poetry. She would have worked and slaved over it, with no one to help her. The nurse’s daughter would no doubt, had she been present, have suggested revisions. The princess did not have the advice of a learned poetry master. Silence, alas, might have been more successful. He smiled at the thought of the princess at work on her poem, putting all of herself into it. This too, he concluded, must be held to fall within the bounds of the admirable. Tayū was crimson.
In the hamper were a pink singlet, of an old-fashioned cut and remarkably lusterless, and an informal court robe of a deep red lined with the same color. Every stitch and line seemed to insist on a peculiar lack of distinction. Alas once more — he could not possibly wear them. As if to amuse himself he jotted down something beside the princess’s poem. Tayū read over his shoulder:
“Red is not, I fear, my favorite color.
Then why did I let the safflower stain my sleeve?
A blossom of the deepest hue, and yet —”
The safflower must signify something, thought Tayū— and she thought of a profile she had from time to time seen in the moonlight. How very wicked of him, and how sad for the princess!
“This robe of pink, but new to the dyer’s hand:
Do not soil it, please, beyond redemption.
That would be very sad.”
She turned such verses easily, as if speaking to herself. There was nothing especially distinguished about them. Yet it would help, he thought again and again, if the princess were capable of even such an ordinary exchange. He did not wish at all to defame a princess.
Several women came in.
“Suppose we get this out of the way,” he said. “It is not the sort of thing just anyone would give.”
Why had she shown it to him? Tayū asked herself, withdrawing in great embarrassment. He must think her as inept as the princess.
In the palace the next day Genji looked in upon Tayū, who had been with the emperor.
“Here. My answer to the note yesterday. It has taken a great deal out of me.”
The other women looked on with curiosity.
“I give up the red maid of Mikasa,” he hummed as he went out, “even as the plum its color.”
Tayū was much amused.
“Why was he smiling all to himself?” asked one of her fellows.
“It was nothing,” she replied. “I rather think he saw a nose which on frosty mornings shows a fondness for red. Those bits of verse were, well, unkind.”
“But we have not one red nose among us. It might be different if Sakon or Higo were here.” Still uncomprehending, they discussed the various possibilities.
His note was delivered to the safflower princess, whose women gathered to admire it.
“Layer on layer, the nights when I do not see you.
And now these garments — layers yet thicker between us?”
It was the more pleasing for being in a casual hand on plain white paper.
On New Year’s Eve, Tayū returned the hamper filled with clothes which someone had readied for Genji himself, among them singlets of delicately figured lavender and a sort of saffron. It did not occur to the old women that Genji might not have found the princess’s gift to his taste. Such a rich red, that one court robe, not at all inferior to these, fine though they might be.
“And the poems: our lady’s was honest and to the point. His is merely clever.”
Since her poem had been the result of such intense labor, the princess copied it out and put it away in a drawer.
The first days of the New Year were busy ones. Music sounded through all the galleries of the palace, for the carolers were going their rounds this year. The lonely Hitachi house continued to be in Genji’s thoughts. One evening — it was after the royal inspection of the white horses — he made he made his excuses with his father and withdrew as if he meant to spend the night in his own rooms. Instead he paid a late call upon the princess.
The house seemed a little more lively and in communication with the world than before, and the princess just a little less stiff. He continued to hope that he might in some degree make her over and looked forward with pleasure to the results. The sun was coming up when, with a great show of reluctance, he departed. The east doors were open. Made brighter by the reflection from a light fall of snow, the sun streamed in unobstructed, the roof of the gallery beyond having collapsed. The princess came forward from the recesses of the room and sat turned aside as Genji changed to court dress. The hair that fell over her shoulders was splendid. If only she, like the year, might begin anew, he thought as he raised a shutter. Remembering the sight that had so taken him aback that other morning, he raised it only partway and rested it on a stool. Then he turned to his toilet. A woman brought a battered minor, a Chinese comb box, and a man’s toilet stand. He thought it very fine that the house should contain masculine accessories. The lady was rather
