But sad is the autumn sky as never before.”
A cold wind was blowing, and a pine cricket seemed to recognize the occasion. It was a serenade to which a happy lover would not have been deaf. Perhaps because their feelings were in such tumult, they found that the poems they might have exchanged were eluding them.
At length the lady replied:
“An autumn farewell needs nothing to make it sadder.
Enough of your songs, O crickets on the moors!”
It would do no good to pour forth all the regrets again. He made his departure, not wanting to be seen in the broadening daylight. His sleeves were made wet along the way with dew and with tears.
The lady, not as strong as she would have wished, was sunk in a sad reverie. The shadowy figure in the moonlight and the perfume he left behind had the younger women in a state only just short of swooning.
“What kind of journey could be important enough, I ask you,” said one of them, choking with tears, “to make her leave such a man?”
His letter the next day was so warm and tender that again she was tempted to reconsider. But it was too late: a return to the old indecision would accomplish nothing. Genji could be very persuasive even when he did not care a great deal for a woman, and this was no ordinary parting. He sent the finest travel robes and supplies, for the lady and for her women as well. They were no longer enough to move her. It was as if the thought had only now come to her of the ugly name she seemed fated to leave behind.
The high priestess was delighted that a date had finally been set. The novel fact that she was taking her mother with her gave rise to talk, some sympathetic and some hostile. Happy are they whose place in the world puts them beneath such notice! The great ones of the world live sadly constricted lives.
On the sixteenth there was a lustration at the Katsura River, splendid as never before. Perhaps because the old emperor was so fond of the high priestess, the present emperor appointed a retinue of unusually grand rank and good repute to escort her to Ise. There were many things Genji would have liked to say as the procession left the temporary shrine, but he sent only a note tied with a ritual cord. “To her whom it would be blasphemy to address in person,” he wrote on the envelope.
“I would have thought not even the heavenly thunderer strong
enough.
“If my lady the priestess, surveying her manifold realms,
Has feelings for those below, let her feel for me.
“I tell myself that it must be, but remain unconvinced.”
There was an answer despite the confusion, in the hand of the priestess’s lady of honor:
“If a lord of the land is watching from above,
This pretense of sorrow will not have escaped his notice.”
Genji would have liked to be present at the final audience with the emperor, but did not relish the role of rejected suitor. He spent the day in gloomy seclusion. He had to smile, however, at the priestess’s rather knowing poem. She was clever for her age, and she interested him. Difficult and unconventional relationships always interested him. He could have done a great deal for her in earlier years and he was sorry now that he had not. But perhaps they would meet again — one never knew in this world.
A great many carriages had gathered, for an entourage presided over by ladies of such taste was sure to be worth seeing. It entered the palace in midafternoon. As the priestess’s mother got into her state palanquin, she thought of her late father, who had had ambitious plans for her and prepared her with the greatest care for the position that was to be hers; and things could not have gone more disastrously wrong. Now, after all these years, she came to the palace again. She had entered the late crown prince’s household at sixteen and at twenty he had left her behind; and now, at thirty, she saw the palace once more.
“The things of the past are always of the past.
I would not think of them. Yet sad is my heart.”
The priestess was a charming, delicate girl of fourteen, dressed by her mother with very great care. She was so compelling a little figure, indeed, that one wondered if she could be long for this world. The emperor was near tears as he put the farewell comb in her hair.
The carriages of their ladies were lined up before the eight ministries to await their withdrawal from the royal presence. The sleeves that flowed from beneath the blinds were of many and marvelous hues, and no doubt there were courtiers who were making their own silent, regretful farewells.
The procession left the palace in the evening. It was before Genji’s mansion as it turned south from Nijō to Dōin. Unable to let it pass without a word, Genji sent out a poem attached to a sacred branch:
“You throw me off; but will they not wet your sleeves,
The eighty waves of the river Suzuka?”
It was dark and there was great confusion, and her answer, brief and to the point, came the next morning from beyond Osaka Gate.
“And who will watch us all the way to Ise,
To see if those eighty waves have done their work?”
Her hand had lost none of its elegance, though it was a rather cold and austere elegance.
The morning was an unusually sad one of heavy mists. Absently he whispered to himself:
“I see her on her way. Do not, O mists,
This autumn close off the Gate of the Hill of Meeting.”
He spent the day alone, sunk in a sad reverie entirely of his own making, not even visiting Murasaki. And how much sadder must have been the thoughts of the lady on the road!
From the Tenth Month alarm for the old emperor spread through the whole court. The new emperor called to inquire after him. Weak though he was, the old emperor asked over and over again that his son be good to the crown prince. And he spoke too of Genji:
“Look to him for advice in large things and in small, just as you have until now. He is young but quite capable of ordering the most complicated public affairs. There is no office of which he need feel unworthy and no task in all the land that is beyond his powers. I reduced him to common rank so that you might make full use of his services. Do not, I beg of you, ignore my last wishes.”
He made many other moving requests, but it is not a woman’s place to report upon them. Indeed I feel rather apologetic for having set down these fragments.
Deeply moved, the emperor assured his father over and over again that all of his wishes would be respected. The old emperor was pleased to see that he had matured into a man of such regal dignity. The interview was necessarily a short one, and the old emperor was if anything sadder than had it not taken place.
The crown prince had wanted to come too, but had been persuaded that unnecessary excitement was to be avoided and had chosen another day. He was a handsome boy, advanced for his years. He had longed to see his father, and now that they were together there were no bounds to his boyish delight. Countless emotions
