Читать книгу Autumn Wind & Other Stories - Lane Dunlop - Страница 10

The light, at about two o'clock in the July afternoon, bore down intensely everywhere on the wide parade grounds. Along the earthen outer wall of a barracks that stood at the western edge of the grounds ran an uneven road. Like the dried up, irregular channels of a stream bed, in several places it had been pounded into two or three ruts by wagon wheels, horses' hooves, and men's feet, in other places flowing together into one. If you stood there and looked east, far away in the gently undulant landscape the tops of a dark forest faintly appeared and disappeared. They were like the eastern edge of the enormous grounds. To the north and south also, large groves of tall and short trees stood in lines that, shimmering in the heat, linked up with the forest on the remote eastern side. Within these borders, aside from the summer grasses that, barely surviving the hobnailed boots of soldiers, grew here and there in islands of lifeless green, there were hardly any trees. The blue sky, saturated with the blazing light, trembling with its fever, glared down at the red dirt grounds wherever you looked. They were like two faces, each growing angry at the other's obduracy, each browbeating the other with swollen, sullen grimaces. There was not a breath of air. Unless something came between them and made peace, there would be war between these two any minute now ... no small birds, of course, but not even big birds dared to fly across the sky. Instead the cicadas, an insect kind relying on its numbers, from the deep, leafy shade of the surrounding groves, drew out their long, monotonous song of the hot, stuffy smell of grass, the irritable, heat-mirage ague of summer, a song with a touch of mockery. Even the blue-tail lizard, as if its pride and joy, the tail that gleamed blue and then green, were too much for it, left it limply extended as it stuck its head under the meager shade of the grass, its silvery white belly pulsing as if out of breath. Some very energetic ants, lugging around the body of a dragonfly left half-uneaten by a praying mantis on their black, shiny, little backs, were hard at work even in this heat. As for human beings, there were none to be seen anywhere. But no, there was just one, the arsenal sentry standing guard on the wall of the barracks. Of course, even though he was a man, anything like human mental activity had come to a halt in him. His brain simmering steadily like gray soup, he stood bolt upright. Even if the arson of the sun, like a red-hot iron, had touched off a tremendous explosion in the arsenal, surely he would not have budged an inch ...

Just then a certain young man, on his way to see a friend who lived on the far side of the parade grounds, took off his hat in the suburban trolley and let the warm wind that fitfully blew in at the window fan and tease his soft crew cut. His business being somewhat urgent, he had braved the blazing heat, but he dreaded the long walk across the parade grounds.

Suddenly at the southeast corner of the grounds, a cloud of reddish-brown smoke or dust arose. As he looked, it fanned out and hid all the view behind it. Quickly spreading across the field, it created patterns of light and shadow, spiraled about like a tornado and rushed this way like a tidal wave. In less than a minute it had swept across the parade grounds and invaded the grove on the north side. Hit head on, the trees, waving their heads and soughing in wavelike rhythms, were simultaneously deluged with red dust. At the same instant the attacking dust storm was thrown back by the earth wall on the west side, somersaulting as it danced up into the air. Caught by another blast of wind, it whirled crazily and was hurled against the barracks.

Just then the young man, having gotten off the trolley, happened by. Coming up against this wall of dust at the corner where he'd meant to turn onto the grounds, he instantly clamped down his hat and spun right around so that his back faced the wind. His summer kimono and haori over it were plastered to his body so that his rear outline down to the knot of his obi was clearly shown. Any looseness in his clothes was at once blown out streaming and flapping in front of him. His body was bent from the waist in the shape of a bow. But while leaning back into the wind, he was trying hard to straighten up again. (In a print by Hokusai, a man in a strong wind is also bent over like a bow. But that is a pictorial exaggeration.)

"Puh. It's too much." Just as he thought this, he was blown downwind two or three steps. The next-moment, made fun of by the wind he'd been leaning against, he staggered backward. As it reversed itself, the wind flung dust and sand in his face. Self-defensively he'd shut his eyes tight. Even so ... "This is awful!"

After listening intently to the sound of the wind's retreat, he slowly turned around and looked out over the parade grounds. Often while crossing this field, he had run into little dust flurries, but never before this kind of hurricane-force gale. He felt a curiosity, as if now he would be able to see something absolutely new to him. Like ripplets that rise in the wake of a surge, small, whispering afterwaves of the wind blew here and there and any which way, swirling up the dust. Then in the distance, a second wall of dust, densely expanding as he looked at it, began heading his way full tilt. Although thinking "I can't take any more of this," he gazed at it now, rather with a feeling of awestruck excitement... before he knew it, from the eastern horizon a low, black cloud had closed in on him until it was almost overhead. Up to then he'd thought that the sudden dusk all around him was due simply to the clouds of dust that were blowing across the sun. Astonished by this theatrically abrupt change in the weather, he thought, "Here it comes!" Trying to decide if he should retreat to the trolley stop or make a run for it to his friend's house, he calculated the distance in both directions and, by the look of the sky, how soon the rain would start coming down. He made up his mind to go forward. Letting the second gale sweep past him, he deftly tucked up the skirt of his kimono in back and, lowering his head, began to charge. In the wind that now came at him from the side, his feet, in white tabi that in a few seconds had been dyed yellowish-brown, raced along alternately beneath his narrowed eyes. By degrees a sad, gloomy darkness completely unlike the calm darkness of night, a mysterious darkness that in old times had made men dread the unusual phenomena of heaven and earth, fell over all. It was like looking through a yellow glass. Everything lost its own colors. With the blurred contours of a volcanic region that has been showered with ashes, the scene turned a sad and dreary hue. Five or six times the wind went by, with an eerie echo that crawled along the ground. Each time the young man struck the same haughty, gallant attitude ...

For as far as he could see, he was the only man in the field. In the intervals of the wind, from the groves near and far, like the sand and pebbles drawn after a retreating wave, a chafing, uniform sound of a going, a long sighing and soughing, followed from the tops of the trees. During such lulls, piercing the thunderheads that blackly piled up in the east, lavender flashes of lightning sprinted hither and yon. Just as he thought, "Don't thunder!" a wave of thunder broke with a roar. Ducking despite himself, he felt an unease as if the thunder were reverberating in his gut. Yet he also felt a deep pleasure, somehow as if he had stood up inside himself. (This kind of extraordinary scene is often accompanied by a sublime extravagance that draws men to it.) Anyway, he was already halfway across the parade grounds. That isolated cottage on the far side of the field was his friend's place.

Just when the first drops of rain like glass pellets had begun to pelt against his straw hat, the young man slid open the lattice door of his friend's house. He was welcomed by his friend's wife, who said her husband had gone for a swim in the nearby river but would soon be back. The young guest, somehow proud of himself like a boy who has gotten himself all muddy in a war game or nicked himself on his fingertip, showed off his yellowish-brown stained tabi and the traces of rain-streaked dust smeared on his sweaty shins. Almost boastfully he told her about the bursts of thunder and gusts of wind that he'd met with on the way. Drawn into the spirit of the thing, the wife became lively and gay. Busying herself, she drew some water for him in a bucket.

By the time the guest, his bare feet not quite wiped dry, stepped up into the house proper and damply padded into the parlor, it had got even darker outside. Only the rain, pallidly gleaming as it came down like a Niagara, seemed to keep it from getting as dark as midnight. The guest and the wife, dumbfounded by this torrential downpour—it really was like a vertically plunging river—stood on the veranda and vaguely stared out at it awhile. As it often is in such storms, the rain did nothing to diminish the force of the wind. On the contrary, it was now blowing harder than ever. The shrubs planted around the outhouse were easily blown almost flat against the ground. No sooner had they lifted up their heads than, swaying and shuddering as if there was no willpower or fight left in them, they were pounded down again. Even the big oaks and cedars that towered up along the east side of the garden attached to this house, even they, which most of the time stood quietly steadfast like old giants whom nothing could move, shaking their great heads in a fine trembling apart of masses of foliage, raised an alarming shriek in the wind and rain. In the trees whose leaves had pale undersides, here and there among the leaf clusters patches of grayish-white flowed together and vanished and flowed together again. As the thick branches that they'd trusted to for safety were terribly shaken, small birds were all but blown out of the trees. In a panic, madly beating their wings, with frantic-sounding chirps that seemed to bode ill, the birds all tried to hide themselves deeper within the foliage. From the lofty treetops that one had to crane one's neck to look at, leaves and even snapped-off twigs went flying off into the distance like green sparks. The thunder, as if it were beside itself by now, pealed in a continual fury. A lightning bolt zigzagged as if to earth itself right in front of the veranda. Without a second's letup the rain came down in cataracts. The smooth garden lawn, almost instantly flooded under several inches of water, was like a rice paddy. The rodlike lines of rain, bouncing off its surface with the force of flung pebbles, shattered in spray. Uttering only an amazed "Yaaaa," the young man looked on spellbound. As with many people who are possessed of a powerful curiosity, he had a nature that derived an obscure thrill from this kind of unusual scene. Once during a summer flood in Tokyo, wading about knee deep in such neighborhoods as Shitaya, Asakusa, and Mukojima, he had stayed away from home for three days.

"My, did you ever see such a storm!"

These were the wife's words when she came out on the porch again after having gone to make preparations for tea. The guest had observed for himself that the wind was blowing the spray not only onto the porch but, according to their exposure, into the rooms. The tatami mats were turning a damp yellow. "This won't do at all."

Having looked all around him, the guest suddenly stood up on his tiptoes. With the wife he went about closing all the rain shutters in the house. Like a trolley car that as it races along the rails sends flying the muddy water that has collected in the grooves, the rain shutters ran swiftly along their slots as they sliced through the accumulated water. The guest, his skirts tucked up, had as much fun as a boy as he slid the doors shut with bangs that echoed throughout the house. He had worked his way around to the kitchen in back. There, at that moment, the wife was trying to shut the water gate. Never in good order, it was stuck fast now. The eaves being shallow on this side of the house that also faced the wind, the big raindrops splashed against the wife's impatiently frowning face and stylish Western coiffure. She was about to get soaked to the skin. Already the translucent paper of the high-paneled sliding doors was being blown to tatters.

"Here, let me try."

Saying this, the guest stepped down into the garden by the wife's side. But his efforts didn't go too well either. Constantly bucking himself up with cries of "Yo!" and "Umm!" he put his back into it. Nervously wringing her hands, the wife muttered, "This gate always gets stuck. I can't do anything with it." She put out a hand to help. Her cold, wet hand touched the guest's hand. Standing back, he let her try again. Under his eyes, on the wife's perspiring nape, the muscles stood out roundly with the force of her effort or relaxed to their former rounded smoothness. From her soaking-wet clothes, from her skin, the scent of a woman was especially strong ... at last the gate slid to. Thinking to do so before it got pitch-dark, the guest made his way back through the almost completely shuttered and darkened house to the parlor. Stumbling over the tea things, he'd seated himself tailor-style in what seemed to be the middle of the room when he heard the heavy, thudding beat of his heart. He thought back to that moment when, looking up at the sky over the parade grounds, he'd decided to go on. He now regretted that he hadn't turned back then and there. And as he did so, he listened hard to the mighty thunderstorm outside. Inside, in the shut-up house, drumming in torrents on the roof, the eaves, and all around, the rain sounded as if it had lost any outlet. It resonated eerily, as if it were falling indoors. The guest, in this isolated house surrounded and cut off by the storm, was very much bothered by his consciousness that he was alone with his friend's wife. In the darkness there floated up a picture of O-Shichi in the tale by Saikaku, as she lay inside the mosquito net on a night of thunder and rain, murmuring to herself, "Oh dear, the master will scold me for this." On a pilgrimage she had taken refuge in a wayside shrine. The illustration from an old-fashioned storybook of O-Shichi being grabbed by the hand by the rōnin in his stage wig of a warrior's shaven head drew itself in the guest's mind. The round muscles of the wife's nape worked smoothly in his mind's eye ...

"Even though you're easily swayed by the emotions of a situation, to let yourself act like those characters in old stories who forget themselves because they're alone with a young woman in a dark house in a thunderstorm—it's rating yourself too cheap." The guest tried to upbraid himself. But in the dark a series of sensual apparitions passed before him. As if it was stamped there, he felt the touch of the woman's cold, wet palm on the back of his right hand.

About ten feet away from the main part of the house the twenty-one-year-old houseboy crouched in the servant's room. Afraid of the thunder, he had blushed scarlet with shame when, at intervals in the storm, he'd heard the rain shutters being slid shut across the way. (In this house it was the custom to employ a young male student rather than a maid.) Starting to his feet, he bounded at two strides into the entryway.

"Takebe-san, have you been cowering in your room all this time?"

In the dark corridor, looking startled and ready to flee, the wife was caught in the pallid light that just reached her from the entryway. Dripping wet, her sleeves were rolled up all the way to her shoulders, like those of the villain Sadakuro in the puppet play The Treasury of Loyal Retainers. Her white, plump arms hung limply at her sides. The inner front skirt of her summer kimono, pulled high up on her thighs and tucked into her half-width obi, revealed a slightly damp-looking white muslin slip and, beneath it, her bare feet to clear above her ankles. The houseboy, who'd literally taken a leap in the dark, stood as if fixed to the spot when he saw the wife before his eyes in a state of undress.

The pale face, dimly afloat in the half light, gave a casual laugh and asked again, "You have been, haven't you?"

". . . "

The houseboy's answer, drowned out by the sound of the rain, did not reach the wife's ears. But that does not matter much. What's more interesting is that the houseboy himself had no memory of how he'd replied. He knew that the husband had gone for a swim. But he did not at all know that the guest had dashed into the house just before the downpour began. That was how mesmerized he had been by the thunder. The thought now took hold in him that he was alone with the wife in the darkened house. Until that moment when, working himself up with a desire to do his duty, he had rushed inside the main house, he'd been as good as ignorant of this fact. But now that he stood face to face with his mistress, it flashed through his mind like a lightning bolt. His knowledge of it at once took on a weird clarity that clung around his heart. From here on he would follow a psychological path that was more or less the same as that described for the guest. He too heard the thudding of his heart. He too regretted having come into the house. And in listening hard to the storm outside as he did so, he was also like the guest. That the wife, with a levity unusual for her, had teased him this way went far to stir up a certain thought in him. In the darkness before his eyes, he repeatedly visualized and erased the wife's face that had just now sunken into them. Thanks to that "certain thought," this houseboy who was even younger than the guest was finely trembling. There was a tightness in his chest, as if his breath was coming and going only in his mouth.

When he heard the wife's voice from over toward the entryway, the guest, his heart beating harder than ever, stood up to go to that part of the house. He thought he'd heard her say "Kato-san, will you please help me" or words like these. Then he heard a man's voice, mumbling what sounded like an apology. When only now he realized that it was the houseboy, he tried to feel relieved. But that was not at all what he really felt. At once the sallow face of the houseboy came back to him. Even more than before, it seemed the face of someone who belonged to the lower classes. It irked him extremely that the vulgar houseboy should make his appearance in what up until now had been a splendid pantomime. But when he guessed at the passions that even in the oafish servant must be making his heart pound with exactly the same temptation as his own, he felt an almost unbearable self-contempt. "This hackneyed role is just right for him. It's quite clear that he's not the leading man. As for the woman's part . . . h'm, I'll let you have it. Here it is. Eat." As if tossing a piece of tainted meat to a dog, the guest did his best to hold aloof from the scene. Just then he heard the wife's footsteps coming his way.

The wife was not at all concerned about her husband's whereabouts. A very good friend of his lived on the bank of the river where he'd gone for a swim. He always invited this man to join him, so it was almost certain that having encountered this sudden storm her easygoing husband was enjoying himself at his friend's house. He was not one to come home if it meant charging through wind and rain.

When, having changed out of her wet kimono, she came into the eight-mat guest room, this fact floated across the wife's heart with a strange clarity. But unlike the two men (the guest and the houseboy) she did not at all feel bothered and menaced by her awareness of it. Like most women, as she considered a fact that she had placed center stage in her consciousness, if she felt it was an inconvenient fact that might make for trouble in a given situation, she at once and skillfully pushed it back down under the threshold of her thoughts, using sensitivity, guile, timidity, and wisdom to make sure it didn't raise its head again. This is a characteristic of women that might well be called intelligent foolishness. It gives a lot of men difficulty.

"My, my ... it's pitch-dark. Where are you?"

"Shall I open one of the shutters a little? It's too dark."

From the darkness came the guest's voice, tinged with a faint trembling and heavy, as if he were sighing. "But it's still teeming."

The wife was the same age of twenty-eight as the guest. But she had always tended to treat this young man, who was much younger than her husband, as if he were a child. In fact, this young bachelor who as the child of a good family had known no hardship, was quite often startled and hurt by her sharp-tongued way with him. The wife, liking to watch the look on the young man's face at such times and enjoying herself often so, had decided that he was easily manipulated, a man whose strings she could pull as she pleased. However, this belief of hers was mistaken, in that she observed only his momentary expression and not the movements of his heart afterward. It was not that she had the bad nature to flaunt her superiority and torment the young man. On the contrary, at ease in her superiority, she did not grudge him her special loving friendship. Now when the wife heard the young man's voice, she was immediately able to picture to herself his rigid attitude in the dark. Lured by the usual pleasure of her superiority, an utterly female playfulness reared its head in her.

"My word, it was simply awful out there. I was absolutely soaked ... oh, and you too, surely? You must have gotten all wet. Why don't you change? I'll give you some of my husband's clothes ... if it won't make you feel odd."

"No, it's all right. I'm fine this way."

"Really, though, do change. You'll catch your death of cold. You must have been drenched."

"No, not all that much." As he said this, the guest patted his clothes here and there.

Wouldn't the wife's hand, any second now, reach out to feel how wet his clothes were and happen to touch his hand? It was this fear that made him say "No, not all that much" and move his hand around on his clothes. But in the dark where the wife's voice had come from, there was only silence. He did not know how to interpret it. A fear arose in him that it would be broken by the wife's all-too-innocent surprise attack. Against the dusky light that leaked through cracks and knotholes in the shutters, opening his eyes wide, the guest studied even the faint tremors of air. Suddenly a flash of lightning shone into the room. As he saw her at that instant, the wife's figure had a calmness about it that disappointed him. Leaning on her left hand planted on the tatami behind her, her half-opened right hand lightly resting palm upward on her relaxed, slightly sideways lap, she sat at an angle across from him. His fear had been like a sumo wrestler grappling with himself. And yet the space between their knees was much smaller than he'd thought. Pushing himself back a little, he said, "That brightened it up a lot." No sooner had he spoken than an earsplitting peal of thunder broke with a shattering roar that seemed right outside the room. It rattled the glass panes in the sliding doors. The guest felt as if his blood had leapt all at once into his head.

"That was a big one."

He spoke these words to himself to quell his uneasiness. The next moment, however, he already felt somewhat free of his unease.

"It really came down that time. And it seemed rather nearby."

Even when he spoke out loud to her, from where the wife sat in darkness there was neither an answer nor the sound of any slight movement of her body. Because of this, how the wife looked and what she was feeling at a moment that had struck fear even into him were completely beyond the guest. Unless the wife didn't have a nerve in her body for thunderstorms, an intense emotion must have been roiled up in her that was stronger than any fear for her life. Unable to relax, the guest felt a disquiet that would not be dispelled until he'd gotten a word, any word, out of the wife.

"The thunder doesn't bother you?"

Even to this, there was no reply. Beginning to feel slightly forlorn, he mumbled as if to himself, "It's coming down like a waterfall. . . there's some more thunder."

"Don't you like it?"

Coming as abruptly as they did, the wife's words seemed to explode in his ears.

"What. . .?" The guest leaned forward despite himself. He deliberately left an interval in which a certain meaning of these words, which could be taken in two ways, might be broached, either by what the wife said or did (if she was going to make an overture). But soon becoming unable to endure that interval, the pressure of its silence, he asked again, "The thunder?" If this conversation had taken place in a bright room, he would not even have had to ask "What?" Now brusquely, he flung out the words that were appropriate to the other meaning (an extremely ordinary one), words that should have been said right away. At the same time, aware of his satisfaction in having warded off a danger and not waiting for what the wife would, of course, reply, he went on, "It's not that I particularly dislike it. But that last one was a bit too close for comfort. Anyone would have..."

Covering his words, the wife said, "I don't mind it at all myself."

"Not again!" the guest thought. It was getting ridiculous. He felt as if he were being told the same joke many times. The "snake," as long as one was afraid of it, was like a real snake. But if one deftly parried its lunge, it was nothing but a rotten straw rope that was starting to unravel. Not to have grabbed that rope and tossed it in a ditch was going too easy on the perpetrator of the prank. And for her to twirl the old rope around yet again! "This sort of woman is anathema in Soseki's stories," the guest muttered to himself. This time, for his own part, he took up the passive defense of "the silence of darkness." After a while the wife said, "What a scaredy-cat you are." But he obstinately held his tongue.

The silence went on and on. Meanwhile, the guest sobered up from the delicious sake of superiority. Had he been wrestling himself again? If the wife's words had only the ordinary, apparent meaning of the like or dislike of thunder and held no hidden message, had he run on a little too far ahead? Yet mulling over once more their affected simplicity and their context, he did not think he was mistaken.

"But if from the start she meant that other thing, and wasn't talking about the thunder at all . . . how banal. What does she take me for?" The guest began to grow angry.

"It's all because of this darkness. I wish I could open the rain shutters right now. These silly thoughts would vanish with the dark."

This was suddenly called out by the wife in a loud voice. It startled the guest. Only now he remembered the houseboy. What had the oaf been doing with himself all this while?

"Takebe-san."

The wife raised her voice again, louder this time. She had seen some leaks in the ceiling of her husband's study and had sent the houseboy in with an empty bucket, but now thinking there might be other leaks, she wanted him to look around the rest of the house. She too wondered where he'd been in the interval. Much to her surprise the houseboy answered her from the next room, the morning room. Realizing at once that their conversation had been overheard in its entirety, she and the guest felt some displeasure. But the wife hesitated to show hers openly. Instead, in a pleasant voice, she said, "Are you all right? After that great big thunderbolt? Shall I put up the mosquito netting for you?"

From the next room came a laugh that was completely lacking in mirth.

"Takebe-san." This time the guest spoke. "I'm sorry to bother you, but will you bring some matches and a tobacco tray?"

"Oh, forgive me. I was so distracted by this uproar that I forgot all about them."

Getting to her feet, the wife went into the breakfast room. "Oh dear. The fire has gone out."

"Do you want me to light it?"

"No, it doesn't matter. Now, where are they? They were around here somewhere. How about the utility charcoal? You don't know?"

"I think it's in that cupboard." There was a sound of sticky, padding footsteps as the houseboy went to fetch it.

"Ouch!"

"Oh, excuse me."

"You hurt me. Where? At the bottom?"

"That's where it was last time."

There was a clattering sound. In the parlor the guest started to get exasperated. "Just matches will be fine. Matches."

"It was here somewhere ... isn't it in this box?"

"Yes, that's right. Probably in there."

"And the matches... ?" Then a moment later, "What are you doing?"

In his gradually heightened state of carnal desire, from this kind of talk the guest could see it all—the small space between the wife's body and the houseboy's, their contact, the wife's damp, fragrant hair, the houseboy's thudding heart and trembling body—much more vividly than if he were looking at it in a well-lighted room. And he could feel it all—the subtle inner excitement that he could not have perceived with his eyes. Once again a jealousy that was without reason raised its serpent's head in him.

From the morning room there was the sound of a match being struck and a little while afterward the wife's voice.

"Takebe-san. You're pale."

"It's nothing. It's the candle."

"Are you quite sure?"

Presently the wife, the tobacco tray in one hand and a candlestick in the other, came back into the room. By then the guest had noticed that the rain had tapered off to a drizzle.

"We no longer need a light. Probably we can open the shutters now." Saying this, he got to his feet and opened two or three himself. The pale, whitish light abruptly shone in. The darkness was gone.

The wife of his friend was standing at his side. Wonderingly he looked at her. She was his friend's wife, and nothing else.

"Why are you staring at me so?"

"Because somehow it's as if I'd met you again after a long time."

"Why, you're right! For a while there I could only hear your voice. I haven't seen you in a long time."

"Good afternoon. How have you been?"

"Fine, thank you. And you?"

The storm, as in its onset, was rapid in its ending. Each minute the raindrops were finer and farther apart. The wind died away. The sky kept on getting brighter. After twenty minutes or so the rain had completely stopped. Already patches of blue sky appeared here and there in the upper cloud cover. In the lower sky clouds like white cotton puffs still sailed before the wind at a fairish speed. Heaven and earth, in the explosion of their magnificent quarrel, the electrical enmity that each had harbored against the other until it couldn't be held back, had bared their hearts to each other. Now both were cool and refreshed, as if they'd revived. The cicadas also, which had been struck dumb by the thunder, took heart again and started up their raucous, sultry cry in chorus. The rooster, which when sky and earth had closed with each other in darkness had flown up in a panic to the perch hung from a rafter in the shed, now came down and, getting its bearings, gave a loud war cry.

From far across the rice paddies there was a brave answering cry. The dog, as wet as any drowned rat, its head hanging low, entered the garden shaking off the muddy water in a spray of droplets. When it saw the wife and guest, a fond, friendly look came over its face. Licking its jaws, it propped its chin on the edge of the porch and whined emptily. Chided for that, it gave itself a violent shake that sent the spray flying every which way. Sitting back on its legs, its forepaws exactly side by side, it swiveled its head around and began licking its shoulders.

Even those plants and trees that had gotten the worst of the storm, now green and dripping, washed and clean again, respired the faint, fresh scent of earth. It was as if everything, breathing through its pores a life deep in lively freshness, aware only now of the full authority and the benevolence of nature, steeped itself single-mindedly in its own happiness.

Moving their cushions to the veranda edge of the room, the wife and guest lost themselves in the lovely scene, which even in the dullest person alive must have distilled a drop of its charm and touched his heart. In the guest's heart also there was a happy contentment. Beyond the moral, negative satisfaction of not having slept with his friend's wife, he felt a pleasure approaching arrogance in the fact that today, of all days, he had attentively, intimately, honestly, and stringently, as if holding a baby in his hands, steadily, from beginning to end, looked at his heart, the heart that usually was so difficult to grasp, and especially that while doing so, he had nakedly exposed that heart to the glamour of such a temptation.

"The fact that Takebe didn't do anything wrong is a mere result of circumstance. For me it was otherwise. When I thought to go forward, I went forward. But when I did so, my feelings were not timid. I did not command them, nor did I compel them in any way. But I never let them out of my sight. That was all! I did not let myself get moralistic. I was truly pure. I might have wrestled with myself from thinking too much about it, but that's nothing to be ashamed of.. ." Looking back on himself, the guest gave himself good marks. Whether or not he was right to is not this writer's concern. But surely he was right to try to see himself clearly ...

Just then a man in a livery coat, apparently a gardener, came running along the far side of the hedge. As soon as he caught sight of the wife's face, he bowed hurriedly and called out, "Madam. There's a fire. Over there. It was set off by that worst thunderbolt."

The man immediately dashed off again. From where he had pointed to, some white smoke, which one might have mistaken for a remnant of the low clouds, quietly climbed into the now windless sky. With a start, the wife exclaimed, "But that's close by the river... do you think it's all right?"

"Didn't that man say the lightning struck the water-wheel shed?"

"No, he never said that. What are you talking about?"

"Perhaps. But somehow I feel as if he did say that."

"Wake up, now. Do you think it's all right?"

"Yes, it's all right."

"Is it really all right?"

"It's all right, I tell you."

"It's bad when you don't mean what you say."

"If you like, we can send Takebe over for a look."

"You're as cool as a cucumber, aren't you?"

"It's not that... it's just that it's all right."

A few minutes later the houseboy, dutifully getting ready, dashed off in his stocking feet. His figure, half-visible above the rice ears, rapidly receded along the twists and turns of the paddy's ridge path and before long was lost to sight. Abruptly a shaft of sunshine broke through a rift in the clouds. Gliding across the green paddies, it fanned out in a broad sweep of light toward the west.

"Strange. Why did I think that man said the lightning hit the water-wheel shed? I felt sure he did."

"You were daydreaming. Besides, the shed is right around there."

"And that's where the lightning struck. Sometimes a thing comes clear to me all by itself. It's as if I was a god. Ask them when they get back. I know that's what happened."

"Oh, here they come!"

In the gently slanting sunlight, across the beautiful, wet, shining color of the rice paddies far in the distance, the tiny figures of the houseboy and her husband were spotted by the keen-eyed wife.

"Oh. Where?"

"Way over there, by that tree. The one with the dense foliage. Just to the left. See them?"

"Which tree?"

"What poor eyes you have. You still don't see? Well, so much for your theory about the water-wheel shed ... no, no, much more toward us."

"This and the water-wheel shed are two different things."

Touching shoulders, they gave their warmth to each other. They were so close that they were almost cheek to cheek. But they were completely unaware of that . . . now and then a low peal of thunder echoed quietly in the distance. But already any danger was all gone.

In the distance the husband began to wave his hat.