“If you know this is wrong surely you know which is right?” He replied as if he were saying the most ordinary thing in the world:
“Sir, it is not so easy as you think. Places are states of mind in this country, therefore you will honourably see that no one can tell anyone else their way and how best to get there.”
Bowing, he made to pass me. It was then that for the first time I noticed two things. One that his hair was dressed in the old-fashioned queue headdress which one sees in Japanese prints, shaved, but for a knot drawn up on the head, the other that he had a most remarkable face. The features were good, even excellent, and the dark bright colouring fine. But the eyes were arresting under the black level brows, and filled with tranquillity as a pool with shadows. On the impulse they gave me I spoke.
“I wish I could go with you.”
“Sir, that could hardly be. I come from Yedo and I go to my garden in the valley you have left.”
Yedo!—the ancient and long-disused name of Tokyo,—and Tokyo on the central island and days’ journey away! Train and boat might have brought him, and yet—shivering doubt assailed me like the thin creeping of drops of water through a dyke which presages the later roar of the flood. The garden! I could not withhold myself nor hesitate.
“May I ask your name?”
“If you want to know my name you must watch what road I take and know to what I return. How can you know? I did not even think you would have seen me. Since it is so however, I will repeat that in this road you will have great need of self-defence. Now I bid you goodbye and wish you safely at Naniwa.”
He was gone round the corner so quickly that I had a sensation of vanishing. I ran after him and looked. Nothing. So I took my way onward. He had told me nothing to change it. A word really would have sent me backward to try my luck in another direction but he had not spoken it.
Soon after it was dark and raining, with a moon very young and bewildered in drifting clouds. She gave a weary light scarcely enough to hint the track and indicate a group of trees, the first I had seen, on the right. Coming up, among them was a small flickering light, and the barking of a dog sounded homely and even inviting, for by this time I was dragging tired feet. If I could sleep there how welcome the rest and shelter!