“Oh, yes,” said he, “but an agent can easily arrange to have her adopted into some family of a lower order and then she loses her rank and its protection.”
O-Owre-san came up from his bath and asked us what we were talking about. He had slept through the night.
XI
ANTIQUES, TEMPLES, AND TEACHING CHARM
For many days we had been passing through villages which yielded no good hunting among the antique and second-hand shops. It should be known that the lure of the curio carries poison. Two friends who have lived blithely in affection, confident that no brutal nor subtle assault could ever avail against the harmony of their intimate understanding, perchance step through the doorway of a shop. Presto! A candlestick, a vase, a box, a tumbledown chair, whatever it may be—the desire for the thing magically energizes perception. We suddenly and clearly perceive that the one-time friend at our side is hung with many false tinkling cymbals. We never break the rules of the game; it is the friend who always errs. Thus I was always learning O-Owre-san’s abysmal depths, while he was encountering my superlative virtues of unselfishness. However, as his chief fiendishness was for cloisonné and my interest was in carved iron and bronzes and old Kyoto ware, we were spared from too many overdoses of poison.
The little shops of Kama-Suwa really had curios. There were strange, imaginative odds and ends which had been made to please the whims of the eccentrics of a vanished and now almost un-understandable age. Of such whimsicality were the costumes and the heap of personal adornments which we discovered that had once been fashioned for a famous wrestler of Kama-Suwa. Even his sandals were there. He must have been a giant, truly, if his feet filled those geta. Everything for the hero had been made in faithful exaggeration to many times the size of the conventional. His leather tobacco pouch was as big as our rucksacks. Every detail of the decorations of the pouch, such as the netsuke, was increased to correct proportion. In the stockings for his feet the threads were as thick as whipcord. The grain of the shark skin binding the handle of his sword had come from some fish of the Brobdingnag world. When fully equipped, that famous man—they spoke of him reverently—must have given the effect that he had been blown into expansion by some marvellous pump.
After we had shaken a dozen or so curio shops through our sieve we wandered off into the rain seeking the village temple in the hills. By festivals and gorgeous pageants the people around the shore of Suwa still celebrate their faith and belief that its towns were built by the gods in the beginning of time. The upkeep of the temples, I suppose, must now come from the worshippers or the state as there are no longer lavish feudal patrons with immense incomes of rice. Nevertheless these temples do not seem to suffer poverty.
We easily found the path. A spring bursts from the rock of the precipitous hill back of the temple garden and its waters keep green the shrubs and grasses and the bamboo, and cherish the flowers. Perhaps the garden has achieved its perfection by minute alterations through hundreds of years, but its appeal bespeaks the original conception of its first master artist, who, by creating a subtle absence of formal arrangement, offered the supreme compliment to the beholder to carry on through his own creative imagination that approach to the ideal perfection which can never be reached.
After a time the rain, which had begun falling in torrents, drove us back from the dream garden to the shelter of the overhanging temple roof. A sliding door opened behind us and we turned around to see an old woman kneeling on the matting. She bowed low and then arose to disappear and to return again with tea and rice cakes and fruit. She placed the dishes on a low, black lacquer table. We untied our muddy shoes and moved in onto the mats. The rain fell in dull, droning monotony on the tiles of the roof far above our heads; back in the deep shadows our eyes could see the gleaming of the reddish gold edges of the lacquered idols. Every suggestion was hypnotic of sleep and I had been awake almost all the night before. I grew so sleepy that even the touch of the cup in my hand had the feeling of unreal reality. Between the raising of the cup to my lips and the putting of it down I actually plunged for an instant into sleep, then came to consciousness with a start. I looked at Hori. His eyes were blinking waveringly and with much uncertainty. Were there ever such guests of a temple? I vaguely remember that our hostess put a cushion under my head, and then came a rhythmic coolness from her fan over my face. I would have slept on the rack.