“Woman gone,
The darkness wraps us round in sable pall.”
But now I did not laugh; I felt it, and understood.
I could have sworn that all the lanterns were extinguished, that the stars had gone down. And why? Because Kotmasu and I had turned our backs upon a pair of sparkling eyes, and I had put a hundred feet or so between me and Miss Hyacinth’s beguiling, coquettish personality.
We don’t talk much, and I switch absent-mindedly at the flowers with my toy cane of bamboo, as we pass along the narrow path towards the spectral gateway, now just visible at the bottom, a gaunt, white skeleton. Not till I send a big sunflower’s head spinning off and up against my companion’s legs, who starts as if something had bitten him, do I become aware that we have not spoken since we started down the hill.
Kotmasu pulls out his watch, a relic of his college days in England, and I waste a whole wax vesta—a luxury almost priceless in Japan, which I cling to—in enabling him to see the time.
Then we hurry out through the ghostly gateway on to the rough road, and thence onward down towards my house at as quick a rate as the obstruction of loose stones, sticks and ruts will let us.
Kotmasu shakes hands at my gateway. No, he wouldn’t come in and have anything. Whisky saké would not tempt him, and “brantwein” was too much for his head, with still a good way down-hill yet to go.
My house had never seemed so lonely.