A minute later he was surprised to hear footsteps again, this time outside the building. Both sets of footsteps were immediately connected in his imagination. It came to him easily that the person who had avoided the bath had subsequently gone outside on purpose. Just then he heard a woman’s voice. But this issued from an entirely different direction. From what he could see outside looking up from below, the cliff leveled off at the top, and it appeared that an annex facing the baths had been built on this patch of level ground. At any rate, the voice was coming from that direction. It belonged unmistakably to the woman who had been discussing Kiyoko with the hostler a while ago on her way back from a walk.
The glass transom beneath the eaves that had been ajar last evening to let steam escape was tightly closed this morning, and as a result the woman’s words reached Tsuda indistinctly. But judging from the way she was lifting her voice, one thing was certain: she was standing on the top of the cliff calling out to someone below. In the order of things, some sort of acknowledgment was to be expected from the base of the cliff. Strangely enough, there was no response; the alternating remarks of a normal conversation did not occur. The only talking came from the top of the cliff.
But this time the footsteps did not stop as they had before. Tsuda heard the sound of garden clogs treading irregular stone steps as a woman, unmistakably a woman, ascended the path. About the time she should have been nearing the top, a portion of her skirt appeared in the upper part of the glass transom. It was gone at once. The momentary impression Tsuda retained was the fluttering of a beautiful pattern. In that pattern as it moved out of sight he had the impression he recognized colors he had seen from the bottom of the stairs the night before.
[180]
RETURNING TO his room, he sat down to his breakfast and engaged the maid who was serving him in conversation.
“Are those guests from Yokohama staying on top of the cliff I can see from the new bath?”
“Yes, did you have a look?”
“No, I just thought they might be.”
“You guessed right. Why not drop in? They’re both charming, Mr. and Missus.”
“They’ve been here a while?”
“Just ten days.”
“And they’re the ones who sing?”
“You seem to know everything. Have you heard them?”
“Not yet. Katsu-san told me.”
The maid provided answers unhesitatingly to whatever Tsuda asked, but she understood boundaries. When he touched the quick of the matter she deflected his question.
“What’s the story with that woman?”
“She’s his wife.”
“His real wife?”
“I imagine so.” The maid laughed. “I don’t guess she’s an imitation wife; why do you ask?”
“Isn’t she a bit saucy for a housewife?”
Instead of replying, the maid abruptly offered Kiyoko as a comparison.
“The lady staying in the back is more refined.”
The layout of the rooms was such that Kiyoko was behind him. The man and woman from Yokohama were staying in what amounted to the front.
“So I’m midway between the two,” Tsuda said, finally realizing.
Even so, since his room was slightly recessed it wasn’t on the way for either of them.
“Is that lady friends with the couple?”
“They’re on good terms.”
“From before?”
“I wonder — I wouldn’t know that. But most likely they became acquainted after they came here. They’re back and forth all day long; they don’t have much to do. Just yesterday they went to the park together.”
Tsuda reeled the conversation in.
“I wonder why that lady is here alone.”
“She needs to recover a bit.”
“What about her husband?”
“They came together, but he left right away.”
“He abandoned her? That wasn’t very nice. He hasn’t been back since?”
“There was something about coming back right away — I don’t know what happened.”
“She must be bored — the wife.”
“Why don’t you drop in on her for a chat?”
“Would that be all right? Ask her when you get a chance.”
“I could do that.” The maid grinned, not taking him seriously. Tsuda inquired again.
“What does she do with herself?”
“Well, she takes her baths, she walks, she listens to them singing — sometimes she does some flower arranging, and at night she often practices her calligraphy.”
“I see — does she read?”
“I suppose she does,” the maid responded carelessly and broke out laughing at the bothersome detail of Tsuda’s questions. Tsuda realized he was being obvious and hastily changed the subject as though a little flustered.
“Someone forgot their slippers outside one of the private baths this morning. At first I thought it must be occupied and didn’t want to barge in, but when I tried opening the door there was no one inside.”
“Goodness! It must have been that sensei again.”
The sensei was a calligrapher. Tsuda remembered having seen his seal here and there on framed and mounted scrolls.
“He must be pretty old.”
“He’s an old man. With a white beard down to here.”
The maid placed a hand on her chest to indicate the length of the calligrapher’s beard.
“You don’t say. Does he practice?”
“He’s working on something huge, a little bit every day; he says it’s going to be inscribed on his tombstone.”
Tsuda was surprised and impressed to hear from the maid that the calligrapher had traveled all this way expressly to work on his own epitaph.
“Can it really take so much effort to create something like that? An amateur would think it could be done in half a day.”
This observation elicited no response from the maid. And it was only a fraction of what Tsuda was thinking but didn’t say. He was comparing this aging sensei’s mission and his own. Alongside the sensei he installed the couple from Yokohama with nothing to do but rehearse old songs. He added Kiyoko to the same line-up, Kiyoko who apparently practiced flower arrangement and calligraphy for no particular reason. Finally, when he heard the maid describe the sole remaining guest as a man who neither spoke nor moved but only sat the livelong day gazing at the mountains, Tsuda said what he was thinking.
“There are all kinds of people, that’s for sure. Just five or six of us are already such an assortment, it must be a madhouse here in the summer and at New Year’s.”
“When we’re full we have 130 or 140 people.”
Having missed Tsuda’s point, the maid reported the number of guests likely to show up at the busiest seasons of the year.
[181]
AFTER SUPPER Tsuda sat at the low desk next to his mattress and wrote some of the picture postcards he had asked the maid to bring him, one line only on the back and the address on the front. He finished those he had to send, one to O-Nobu, one to his uncle Fujii, and one to Madam Yoshikawa, and a pile of empty cards remained. Still holding his fountain pen, he gazed vacantly at regional scenes with odd titles that seemed unsuited to a mountain village — Fudō Falls in Yugawara, Lunar Park in Asakusa, and others. Then he began scribbling again. In no time he wrote one to O-Hide’s husband and another to his parents in Kyoto. Now that he had begun in earnest he might as well continue; he even felt that leaving any of the postcards blank would amount to a dereliction of duty. There was Okamoto, whom he hadn’t even considered at first, and Okamoto’s son, Hajime, who put him in mind of his schoolmate, his own nephew, Makoto, and a host of others. There was one name only that had occurred to him from the beginning to whom he didn’t write. Other reasons aside, Tsuda didn’t want Kobayashi to see a postmark because he was afraid he would track him down. He was due to leave for Korea any day. Since he was leaving of his own accord with nothing to constrain him, he might be rattling along on a train even now, resolved to embark. Undisciplined as he was, however, there was no guarantee that he would leave on the day he had announced as his departure. Who could declare with any certainty that, seeing the postcard (assuming Tsuda sent him one), he wouldn’t make his way here at once? Thinking about this impossible friend who was like doing battle with unstable weather, about this enemy it were better to say, Tsuda hunched his shoulders involuntarily. Whereupon the scene he had launched in his imagination began to play. Pulling him along, it progressed unstoppably. Right before his eyes he conjured an image of Kobayashi pulling up in a rickshaw at the entrance and storming into his room shouting at the top of his lungs.