Segaki (10 page)

The air was alternately moist and dry, it bewildered him, and he looked about him suspiciously.

Moonlight shows us what we always suspected by day, that at night the world belongs to itself. The daytime may be more real to us, but the nightside is more actual in
itself. At night things have a palpable identity more fully dimensional than their mere appearances by day. Those things which feed upon the sun, the brightly coloured flowers, fade into obscurity. Things then have their own dimensions, their breath is shallow, and the shrubs sweat like rocks. It is then that the inanimate reproduces itself, and we see how the world lived, before we came along to misunderstand its etiquette and wreak havoc with its traditions. At night the world has its own lizard
metabolism
.

It is then, too, that one sees that plants and trees and rocks are not limited to their structure, but that like people they also spread out into a certain amount of space around them, the area taken up by their habitual gestures; and it is about this ancillary space that at night the natural world fights its dangerous and dogged private wars. At night the world expands with the
ponderous
inevitability of a tidal wave sweeping up a narrow river. It rests and feeds in the day time. But it moves and thinks in the dark.

What does a rock think about? We have no way of telling. We do not think that way, and besides, we are hampered by a merely sentient vocabulary that makes it impossible for us to receive anything but zoomorphic concepts. But sometimes we are unexpectedly aware of a rock’s thinking, and they are not, to us, reassuring thoughts, for they have nothing to do with us at all.

Then he heard the sounds.

They came from the other end of the wing. He crept along the porch, moving softly, and then stopped. For though he had not heard them for many years, they were unmistakeable.

He must have been heard, for the sounds ceased. Then he heard a giggle, and deliberately, a little louder, they went on again. Yasumaro and the girl must be rolling on the floor in a mock ecstasy, and as he listened, the sounds became more intentional. It was cruel of them not to stop. He stood there aghast. It was something about his brother he did not want to know.

The panting was the worst.

He turned to run away, but did not do so, for something shadowy and white was bobbling up and down in the garden. He lost it and saw it again, while those noises became more rapid and insistent behind him. He felt deeply ashamed that they knew he was there.

The moonlight expanded and contracted. The shape emerged from the shrubs, scattering gravel every which way, and he saw it was the swaying, hasty figure of what either was or was not a woman, slim, breathless, her face enveloped in an impenetrable veil which stretched from the conical top of her hat to her chin. She was carrying a tiny storm lantern. She pulled aside the shutter so that the feeble light slapped him in the face.

He went towards her, as though her presence were something expected. Despite himself, those sounds from his brother’s room had excited him. At that moment all the brains he had could have been stuffed in the skull of a dead rabbit.

The woman was completely soundless and somehow transparent. Pebbles began to pop again underfoot, and the lantern slide snapped shut. She hurried up the steps, painfully, and glided past him. Her robes fluttered and were clammy.

Then, startlingly, she wailed, moving down the
corridor
blindly. The sounds stopped. Yasumaro stepped into the porch, saw Muchaku, sniffed contemptuously, and stretched out his arms to the strange woman.

Together they went into the room. They were gone a long time. Muchaku could not bring himself to move.

At last they came out again. Yasumaro was now dressed. He saw Muchaku, whom he had clearly forgotten, and the sight of him seemed to stop him in the middle of whatever it was he had been planning to do. The stranger was beside him.

“You were listening, weren’t you?” asked Yasumaro, his voice hard.

“Yes.”

“And watching?”

“No.”

“This is my brother. He is a priest,” said Yasumaro to the woman. “Take
him
.”

Once more the lantern slide clicked, and light swept across his face. It was closed off again and the woman grunted. She and Yasumaro talked privately. It seemed she did not want to agree. But Yasumaro had drawn back into darkness and his voice was terrible.

“You who believe in no pleasures and no ghosts, you go with her, and do as she tells you,” he roared. And though he was angry, he also sounded endlessly
compassionate
.

“Who is she?”

“One of the dead. She will take you to her
mistress
.”

Muchaku did not move.

“I said go.”

The woman said nothing. She started off through the
garden, the wind whipping her garments. From
somewhere
the dog started up and growled.

Yasumaro came clattering down the steps, grabbed the dog, and held it while it yelped in his arms.

“He cannot go with you,” he said. He looked at his brother gravely, with a mixture of sorrow and distaste. “I send you only because it is something you must learn. If you value your life, do as you are told.” He turned and went back to the house. Muchaku followed the maid, who was already half-way across the garden, her lantern casting its glow in a pond, as she crossed a stepping-stone. Something broke and squished beneath his feet. He did not have to look to know it was a snail.

As soon as they had stepped through the garden gate, the gale hit them in the face. The maid stood aside, shut the gate, and then walked ahead of him. As before, she said no word, and was so hidden in the muslin veils of her hat, that nothing could be seen of her.

Though the moon was only one quarter in the
descendent
, the wood here was so tall and thick that it was impossible to see anything but an endless multiplicity of tall soaring stalks. One might as well have been crouched at the bottom of an immense lily pond, and sound here had the quality, what sound there was, of setting up little waves and dangerous vibrations, rather than of being audible.

Indeed there was no sound but his own breathing and the usual uncertain stirring of a nightwood. In addition to the pines, there were also giant cryptomeria, whose shaggy bark spiralled up into invisibility overhead. Not even the wind could disrupt the faintly disturbing silence of those trees.

It was difficult to keep the woman in sight. She moved rapidly and soundlessly, and only an occasional ray from the lantern showed him where she was. There was
something
compressed and faded about her, as though she had slipped sideways out of the darkness.

They were once more back in that plain dotted with the hummocks of trees. But now, with the filtered
moonlight
, and the iciness of the air, the ground cover had turned black. The wind, having less to catch at, whistled and fluted through the dry grasses, snapping off here and there a dead flower. The sound was quite audible.

There were no lights, and though he hurried to catch up with his guide, he could not seem to do so. She moved lightly and vagrantly to and fro, emitting now and then a beam from her lantern, but at times all he saw was the faint radiance of her hood, and his thin body felt tight with cold. As they moved across the meadow, their steps began to reverberate along the frozen ground. It was almost winter weather. As they shifted, so did the hummocks seem to shift. Somewhere in those copses something cried, and he heard the sudden shocked drumming of a jack rabbit, shaking the ground underfoot.

The moonlight was mottled and became mottled more, as flats of fog were wind-shifted out of the copses, travelling along as though on wires, to meet with a jerk and then settle into place. These multiplied so fast, that soon it was as though they were walking through an orchard hung with midnight washing, flapping wet and brittle around him. Instinctively he ducked. They were beginning to climb, and as they climbed there was more and more of this wash to be hung out. Very far in the distance he could hear the roar of the waterfall. He had lost his guide. Then he caught the unoiled squeaking of tiny thick wooden wheels, and saw her again, standing motionless on a rise, surrounded by an ashen whirl of bats. One of the trees must be a rookery. He could not see their little red eyes.

He joined her, and together they looked down into a concealed hollow, through which somewhere water invisibly ran, and in which the surrounding cordon of rusty dripping trees contained a denser fog, but a fog given to little outpourings of surreptitious light. The moonlight, too, now and then flooded over the boiling surface of the mist.

The air seemed different here, scented somehow with blossoms. The path they travelled was not well worn. The weeds had had their way with it, and the pebbles were sharp underfoot. She made a beckoning gesture, and then plunged down into the fog. As best he could he followed after her. He had had enough of fogs on his way from Noto. He wished the dog were there, and thought of it curled up snugly on the veranda of his deserted bedroom. He doubted if it whined for him.

Somewhere he heard ahead the single peremptory tinkle of a tiny bell. Evasive though it was, it yet had the sharp insistence of an order.

The fog immediately rose.

Ahead he could certainly see something, as all this shapelessness drifted lazily into the forms of shape. The air was warmer. The ground felt firmer under his feet. Looking down, he saw it had become a smooth ridged sand, with all the ridges pointing in parallels ahead of him.

Then, with an almost audible click, followed by a sigh, the fog vanished and the building ahead of him settled seemingly into place.

The last wisps rose up into the air. The moonlight flooded over everything, running in a cool ripple ahead of him, as though someone had idly flung a stone down
into sleep, causing the concentric rings to widen out until they touched the shores of consciousness.

The maid had vanished. He was completely alone. He was also awed, for ahead of him loomed something beautiful and long ago.

He was at the bottom of the concealed bowl. Around him, quite high up, black trees circled the depression. The ground under his feet was flat, and all unnoticed, he had come through a stately three portalled gate set in a high wall verdigrised with moss. Arcaded and orange tiled, the wall extended on three sides of him. The smooth raked sand led a hundred yards ahead, and was a hundred yards to left and right. There were no footsteps on the sand, and the garden was empty of anything but two late plum trees, of considerable age, which blossomed in high tubs set on either side of a wide shallow staircase. The staircase led to a large horizontal villa supported on poles. The air was motionless. A dim light poured through the open door, across the porch, and down the flood of stairs, so that on either side the two trees cast dim but confusing shadows.

Again that bell rang.

Hesitantly he moved forward, the only figure there, and then more rapidly, until he stood at the foot of the flood of stairs. As he mounted them, the light seemed to grow a little dimmer, the air more aromatic, and the wood began to creak. The building, though in repair, was ancient, in the style of the last Regency but one. On the thatch roof, two chains hung down from the
ridgepole
, and these, he had seen in the moonlight, rattled softly as they rose and fell, as though the building were breathing.

He looked behind him, but saw nothing but the smooth sand, with his own footprints leading from the gate, whose black openings seemed to watch him. He went inside, and found himself standing in a large hall, slightly musty, with square hewn scented cedar columns and a clerestory, floored with tatami mats brittle
underfoot
, and absolutely empty. The walls were elaborately painted, in blue, green, and gold, in the Fujiwara style, with clouds and pine boughs, but here and there the paint was rubbed and dull. He could not tell where the light came from, and the atmosphere was absent-minded and sad.

Again a bell rang, but once more, though the silence seemed to whirr, nothing happened. He found himself being watched by a smooth gold statue of the Buddha. He heard footsteps, far at the end of the hall, and stepping farther in, peered around him. It was hard, in that forest of surrounding pillars, to make out anything at all. But the building itself could only be a royal villa of a hundred and fifty years ago, if not more.

He recognized the white head-dress of the maid. She was waiting for him. As he walked towards her, she turned and hurried down one of the side aisles of the hall and out a door at the end. She was now carrying a feeble indoor lamp.

The place was so beautiful, that it did not even occur to him to be frightened. They went through many corridors, always bearing towards the left, and once, between two open walls, climbed a flight of stairs. He guessed if anything they were moving towards the female apartments of whatever this building might once have been.

But though they passed the open screens of many rooms, he could sense that the place was utterly deserted, except for himself, and whoever this shrouded woman was, if she was not the ghost of a servant, a servant,
however
, clearly, from the flightly pensive way she moved, the deliberate awkwardness with which she held the lamp, of some exalted status, a lady-in-waiting perhaps, such as one reads about in the Pillow Book. They entered now a little pavilion open on all sides. She walked ahead of him, and abruptly vanished up to the waist, as she descended some stairs. It took him some moments to realize that that was what she had done. Then he followed.

Before him lay a courtyard enclosed by stone walls. The moon cast a long shadow half-way across it, but he could see that it was clogged with a grey, insubstantial moss, of the texture of tripe, that had half-healed over the irregular wet stones which made a path across it. She was already on the far side, and after each step she took the moss seemed to heal more closely around the stone behind her.

On the opposite side of the court, again supported on columns, though these only about three feet off the ground, was a long, low, insubstantial pavilion with an enormous steep pitched roof. It glowed with a dim, subdued, but constantly humming light. It was a building clearly suffused with the rustling presence of women. He hurried after her, mounted the stairs, and entered a gallery, beyond which lay still another large room. She slid the panel shut behind him, lifted her veil and examined him, but he could not make out her features, for she stood in shadow. With one slim white arm snaking out into the light, she motioned him to wait, and
then moved off. He heard a panel slide shut somewhere behind him.

The room was slightly warm, but the light was not so bright as he had imagined, so that its far corners were in darkness. Again there was the rich smell of aromatic woods. To one side, two or three blue and green silk pillows were precisely aligned on the floor, before a low stand. An hibachi stood nearby, with two or three folded quilts embroidered with metallic thread. It was to the cushions she had motioned him, and as he went towards them to sit down, again a silvery bell chimed somewhere close by.

On the hibachi was a small iron dish of leched meat and water chestnuts, and a covered pot of what he discovered to be rice. On a stand were a white porcelain vial of rice wine, two cups, a compote of sweetmeats, three rosy peaches, and a tray of thick but delicate almond cakes, a neatly roasted almond lying in the exact centre of each, with the outer skin brittle and baked loose.

It was true he was hungry, and no doubt he was expected to appear imperturbable. He ate.

The wine, too, warmed him, and over it he lingered for as long as he dared. It was with the second glass that the bell rang once more, it seemed to ring just before
something
happened, and he became aware that he was being watched from somewhere ahead of him in the shadows.

His hand trembled, but he poured himself another cup of the light green wine. He was careful to keep his eyes down, careful to remain composed, but he was aware of the way his thin fingers, sweated down to the bone, held their cup. And the lamp, too, he saw, was placed so that alone in that room his face was lighted.

Muchaku was one of those men who look not what they are, but what they will become, and at forty he was more boyish, more cheerful than he had ever been in youth, more serene than he was to become for many years. It was true that he was a little too aesthetic, a little too priggish, but one felt, seeing him, that this was merely a husk that his embryonic character had not yet grown sufficiently to split away. He felt alternately too small and too big for his body, there were parts of it he did not as yet fill harmoniously, but his voice was heavy and rich and humorous, even when emotion had clouded his good humour, and though feline when joyously absorbed, he was immaculately manly, with that scrubbed fastidiousness and mental agility which is most
untouchably
male. He was, in short, ravishing to anyone who might prefer a masculine essence to the sweaty crudities of those whose existence consists in what they do rather than in what they are, and who so turn out to be nobodies, whose only existence lies in their futile efforts to prove that they exist. Such people one may touch once, but others always, since one may never touch them at all.

Of all this he realized nothing, since he knew nothing of women, for only a woman like him could have shown him what he was. He was aware only of being watched. He felt an enormous trapped force, watching him sadly and somehow avidly.

If we are not too afraid, and for some reason he did not feel afraid, but only somehow intangible and transparent, we can often tell much about the invisible watchers, the judges of the secret court, who weigh us but say
nothing
, and wait for us to pass sentence on ourselves.

He had the impression of overwhelming charm and of great but slightly rueful sadness, of timidity and yet of strength, and also of a shy innocence that longed to be pleased, and wanted somehow, if only it knew how, if only it dared to move forward, to please, with a sort of desperation, as though it would have no other chance, as though this were its last chance, to do so.

He had the feeling, more than anything else, that
everything
was final here. It might, indeed, be one of those houses which appear once a year or once a hundred years, in which the ghostly lady has no choice but always to live out her final drama again, though not always with the same person, as though she fed on other men’s souls.

And her robes were rich. He could not tell how he knew that, perhaps it was that she was not entirely motionless, but they were. There was that smell about them, that impression anyhow, that they had been laid away in a press for a long time, a suggestion of infinite robes, each taken out only for the proper occasion, the correct day.

Then, abruptly, he knew she was not there any more. He set down his glass and stared at it.

From somewhere in the depth of the building, there came a long low growling wail, not so much human, as the sound of a helpless gust pushed abruptly out through a narrow granite opening. It made the hairs of his neck stiffen and turn in.

Yet the room remained unchanged. He half rose, and then sank down again. The maid appeared at his left side, bearing a low brown pot of delicate tea and two oil spot bowls, lightly and densely mottled with gold under their Siamese cat glaze. Her face was expressionless and almost
transparent. She gathered up the dishes, except for the almond cakes and sweetmeats, and withdrew.