“You are tired from your trip,” she said. “Come! Sit down! Your dinner is waiting to be brought.”
He sat down and the woman clapped her hands for the maid. When the stumbling, awkward girl came the man changed the order and told the ne-san to bring sake first of all. He sat in silence until the hot rice wine came. He drank several of the small cups. Then the maid brought the lacquer tables with the dinner dishes. The man lifted up one or two covers and then suddenly jumped to his feet and declared that he was going to take a bath.
The maid led the way to the large room for baths which was just under our rooms. The woman sat before her untasted dinner. Soon there was a sound of laughing and chattering from below. There was the man’s voice and the maid’s laugh. Finally the woman arose, walked out into the hall, tentatively put a foot on the stair, then slowly walked down. She waited outside the sliding paper door. The maid had committed no breach against custom in lingering idly after carrying in towels and brushes. It was for no personal bitterness against the stupid maid that tears had gathered in the woman’s eyes. There was nothing vulgar in the words of the bantering chatter she heard. It was the fact that the man was accepting the moment so carelessly, so unfeelingly for her anguish, knowing as he must unquestionably that every word of his indifferent greeting to her had carried a torturing thrust of pain.
The dinner was brought up again, warmed over. We heard the order for another bottle of sake. We could not escape hearing through the paper wall. We had intended taking a walk but a misty rain had come down. The mosquitoes arose from the beaches of the lake. We sent for the maid and asked for the beds and mosquito netting. In the meantime Hori and I were tempted into taking another luxurious sinking into the hot baths. O-Owre-san had turned out the light before we came back. In the darkness we crawled carefully under the omnibus netting and I went to sleep immediately. I awoke in about an hour. The misty rain had been blown away and the moon was shining so clearly that when I turned over I could see that Hori’s eyes were wide open. I heard the maid, stumbling as always, come up the stairs with another bottle of sake. I asked Hori whether he had been asleep. He said that he had not, that after the woman had begun talking she had not stopped. I could hear her low, ceaseless tones. The man was smoking one pipe after another. He would knock out the ash against the brazier—four staccato raps—then there would be a pause for the three or four puffs from the refilled pipe, and then the staccato raps again.
“If we are ever going to get to sleep,” said Hori, “we’ll have to complain to the mistress. Guests haven’t any right to keep other guests awake.”
“Why wouldn’t it be better to make some such suggestion to them without calling in the mistress?” I asked.
Hori shook his head. That was not the way. However, we delayed sending for the inn mistress. Hori translated some of the conversation that he had heard before I woke up. The woman had that morning left her home and her husband. She had sent a message to the man now in the room with her, but her news had evidently been one of his least desired wishes. Before he sank into the silence of tobacco and sake he had said his disapproval.
“I thought you had more sense than to do anything so absurd, so almost final. Don’t you see that it will be almost impossible for you to go back now? How will you make any explanation that he can accept?”
“But,” she interrupted, “I came to you as you have so often said that you wished I could. That was the only way I could be even a little bit fair to him—to leave his house.”