“If you will say he is not here, I am not going to waste my time or yours, about that. When the man himself is disposed that way, it would do him little good, even if I got him by forcing a search through your house. So, I’m going to say to you a good morning; but here is something, Somékichi san, that I’d wish you to tell to this man Shinsuké, should you fall upon him by any chance. Tell him this straight and right, please, that my word is always good, I would never break what was sealed with a true man’s words,—even if he broke his part of the promise. He can put himself at ease, because nothing will ever leak through my lips. But tell him that, if he wants so much to live, I want him to live straight and right, not to disappoint the man who trusted him, not to do anything that means cropping his own life,—in a word, to change himself into a new man. I think he’s been doing little good, since going away from my place. I wish he would take himself in hand from this on, at least, and turn his back upon the way he has been following. It’s my honest wish and you will tell him, as straight from my heart, just to oblige this old man.—My regret for taking up so much of your time, and my wish for a good day to you.” And Kinzo took his leave.
“Shin san, it went off fine!” Tsuya came upstairs, proud of the way she had dispatched the matter. But when she found him glum and cheerless, she suggested: “If you are so worried, what of doing away with that old man, too?”
“Thought of it myself; but to kill him, that man of all men,—I think God’s vengeance would be too heavy!” he shook his head, heaving a sigh.
It was a fact that his mind had become, these days, a prey to haunting ideas wherein the killing of a man and the taking of his money invariably loomed prominent. The man and woman whose lives were welded in much blood and crime seemed to feel themselves alive only to a filmed sense of life, without new stimulation of bloody intensity. He could not cast his eyes on a man’s face but he conjectured a vision of the same being laid low in a hideous corpse. He could not overcome the ominous presentiment that there were yet to be one or two more lives to be dispatched at his hands, somehow.
Just about this time, the business of the boatman Seiji began to bring him into the professional life of Tsuya. What with his thriving business, and with unaccountable earnings of illicit description, he prosperously carried him on all the year round. A new house had replaced the old. He had won his way into recognition as one of the opulent folk of the Takabashi way. Having attained such circumstances of fortune where he commanded homage and servility amongst his own numbers, with little fear of Tokubey who was dead to all appearances, only too ready to feel anew the old fire that he had neither lived out nor forsaken, and not without other obvious reasons, he took it upon himself to wait upon the pleasure of the woman who had knowledge of his dark secret. Perhaps, no more dragged by his guilty conscience than spurred on by his freshened gusto, he sought patiently to please and win her over, though he found her whims and fancies quite costly.
Nursing a design in her heart from the start, Tsuya’s reception of the man was calculated never to be discouraging or cold. He was to be led on and be made to dance to her music, until she should be ready to cast aside his fleeced remains, after he had been drained to her satisfaction.
“If all that sweetness you tell is true, I can’t deny that it warms up my heart toward you. But, while you are with your Ichi san, I wouldn’t quite relish the idea.” It was the refrain with which she would always parry his advance beyond a certain point. Ichi was the boatman’s third wife; she herself had been a geisha in the Yoshi-cho quarter until two or three years ago, when Seiji bought her out to be kept as his mistress. On the death of his last wife, he took her into his own family. Not a woman of so much attractiveness, she had nevertheless an accountably strong hold upon the man. Moral slips on his part or any little things suggestive of such an eventuality, if smelt out, were sure to expose him to a connubial tirade, often accompanied by a muscular display of much vehemence. However strongly he might covet Tsuya, the idea of driving out this woman seemed to be the one thing he was never likely to buckle himself to.
“Little difference if the old woman was with me,” he would say expediently. “Why, there are a lot of ways so she would never be the wiser.” To such she would retort, “If it suits you, it won’t suit me. If you love me truly, there is to be no other woman,—and no wife but myself.” If her thrust thus driven home to him was meant as an idea to thwart him, it was as effective as it was intended to be.
“Listen, Seiji san, you say you are in love with me, but you don’t know what you talk about, do you? If you love me so much, why shouldn’t you make a quick work of your woman who is wise to your doings?” At last, she saw her chance on one occasion, and pushed her argument thus far.
“A man like yourself who would kill Shin san in cold blood who had no fault except he loved me, wouldn’t stop at a little thing like that, would he?—”