We assured her that that custom existed.
“Um-m-m,” she pondered. Our examination was evidently of import. She took another step in questioning.
“But if you married for love how can you be happy to travel so far away from your wives?”
She gasped at our claim of non-possession.
We made a second insistence regarding our unsocial state. She did not put aside her good nature but she berated us roundly for our unkindness, our lack of taste, in thinking that we could joke in such a way just because she was a peasant girl in a country inn, but when we further insisted upon repeating our tale she was really hurt. There is a time, she said, for joking to come to an end. If it were always thus our custom to insist upon a joke long after it had been laughed at and appreciated, then she did not believe that she had excessive pity for our wives and children in their being left behind while we wandered.
She then dismissed us from her questioning and appealed exclusively to Hori. She could understand that if we had been forced to marry by parental social regulation and had been united to wives whom we did not and could not love, perhaps it would be quite within reason that we should wish to have vacations in singleness, but to have had the privilege of marrying for love and then to be wandering alone—oh, it was un-understandable.
“Well,” said Hori mysteriously, “I think that what they have said is the truth but it may not be all the truth. In their country certain desperately wicked criminals are not allowed the privilege of marrying.”
There is a glamour which hangs over the notoriously wicked. The maid’s glances were now modified by appropriate awe into distinct respect. She got up, and endeavouring for dignity built a tower out of the scattered cushions. She climbed upon this shaky height and turned out the light. Then she hurried away to the backstairs regions with her tale.
In the morning it was raining. When we got up we could hear no sounds below and when we went to the bath there were no maids to fill the brass basins. Hori wandered off to the kitchen to find hot water and we did not see him again until after our maid, very heavy-eyed, had brought the breakfast tables to our room. He came as the bearer of two items of information which he had gleaned from the mistress. The first was that there had been a council sitting on our morals, presided over by our maid, which had lasted through the hours of the night. The second item was the truthful reason why we had been turned away from the first inn and the confirmation of our suspicions that we had gained admittance where we were only by an extremely narrow margin.
Once upon a time two foreigners had passed through Agematsu and had been received as guests in one of the inns. That advent had been so many years before that a new generation of mistresses and maids had succeeded the victims of the marvellous invasion, but the legend of that night of terror had been handed down undimmed. “And what do you think was their unspeakable atrocity?” Hori asked dramatically. “They made snowballs from the rice of the rice box at dinner and threw them at each other and at the maids!”