“Seiji san[10] is a busy man and, because things didn’t turn out just as he had hoped, he might be staying back, though he wouldn’t like to disappoint us as yet.”
It was a piece of suspicion that had begun to dawn upon Shinsuké’s mind. Tsuya, however, would take the situation in a more philosophical vein.
“Why worry yourself like that, dear?” she would say. “Now that we’ve run away together, what difference if we were never taken back by our folks? We might just as well take up a home for us two only. Why, we might be better off that way, after all, and who knows? I’ve never felt so happy in all my life, as I do now. Little care, let me tell you, if I never went home to them!”
Since coming to this new abode, Tsuya had completely changed; she was more buoyant, jolly and bold. Their window looked down, almost straight below, upon a stone built bank which rose sharp over a narrow canal running into the Sumida river. Hither would daily be brought a swarm of roofed wherries to take on parties of men and geisha who had brought with them the spirit of the gay quarters in Fukagawa and up the river. Nor was it a rare happening that some of these parties should take up rooms partitioned from the young pair’s room only by the doors of paper screen, and plunge into a free and open jollity, as careless as it was annoying. It was not long before Tsuya began to pick many ways and manners from these people she saw or heard. Her hair which was done in a maiden style when she left her home soon had to be changed. On the fourth day after she came here, she had her hair washed and combed back into an easy knot at the back of her head, with only a single comb stuck in side-wise, a style of comfort at the expense of decorum. Donning a dressing gown of garish pattern that the boatman’s wife offered her against the cold and the frequent practice of smoking crowned her attempt to imitate what was thought to be the “at home” manners of a geisha. When she picked up some words from the vernacular of the prostitute class and unwittingly used them a couple or so times, Shinsuké thought he should step in and call a halt.
“What language for you to speak?” he said, with his brow knit with displeasure. “Why should you have to take to the ways of those wretches? I am even too proud to speak of them.” He fought for his and their dignity of mind. It was not difficult to imagine that, but for his Tsuya, he might have remained true to the accepted idea of the regular life of a man.
It was small heed, however, that the young woman would give to his ideas on such lines. She had been completely carried away by her own happiness and her satisfaction with the new life, and made it a life of frivolous laughter, from morn till night. And just to feel the fulness of her heart, she would even rhapsodize her whims and fancies at meals, ordering this dish and that to indulge in epicurean luxury. She would grow generous every third day or so and declare a wholesale treat to the entire family, remembering even the hired boatmen. Through the thoughtfulness of Seiji there were always bottles of drink at dinner in the evening. When she held out her cup to be filled, it was done with a gesture of one still unused, but drink she would with an eagerness to assimilate the ways of the hardy sex. Some nights when she was too heavily affected by drinking, her face would glow with such a passion as possible only of a frenzied rage. She would writhe and wallow, her body a veritable flame, giving him no sleep through the night. They were swept and dragged into a whirling eddy of pleasure which seemed to threaten to choke out their very lives.
So time wore on. The busy year-end was fast pressing on. The market day of the Hachiman shrine on the fifteenth of December was past. Still there was no news they had so anxiously awaited.
“I’m just now talking to your folks, in the thick of my fight. Four or five days’ more of patience!” Such was the refrain the boatman would harp on, with a drawn look of sincere sorrow, whenever he saw the pair and was asked to explain. And they would invariably feel that they should not press him beyond that point.
“Seiji san, what’s been done has been done, though I must ask a thousand pardons of my master, and if we are not to hope to go back there, we must have it so. We have prepared our minds for the worst, and, therefore, ready to set us up in a home of our own, if it has to come to that. There will be no disappointment or sorrow to drive us to anything extreme or rash, I assure you. So, tell us, I pray you, how you have fared with them and how you stand now; for we must know. We can’t let it go on much longer, just living off your goodness!” Shinsuké’s earnest appeal, however, would always meet with a response more benevolent than it was ever satisfactory.
“No worrying on my account,” the boatman would answer. “Of course, if I saw that things weren’t going on right, I’d have given it up and be done with it. The fact is, I’ve been up there half a dozen times now and have given them about as good talkings as I knew how, and the old folks, both sides, seem to begin to see things in my way. ‘If the young ones are so madly in love as to run away,’ I always tell them, ‘they should be made man and wife. If not, it means their parents are not quite fair and refuse to see things as they ought to.’ ‘Very well,’ I tell them then, ‘if you don’t want to take them back, I will take them in until you are ready to change your minds. And while they are with me, you may depend on me for good care!’” “Now, you see,” he said, in dismissing the subject with a touch of flippant humour, “there is nothing for you to worry about!”