The drenching figure of myself, running through a grey expanse of space, with innumerable silver shafts beating at it slantingly will make poetry, an ode, when I look at it as not my own. I make a beautiful harmony with a natural scenery, as a figure in a picture, when I forget my material self completely and take a purely objective view of myself. Only, I cease to be a figure in poetry, or in a picture, the moment I feel vexed with the falling rain and take to heart the tiredness of the stamp, stamp of my feet. I then find myself only an indifferent individual of the street, blind to the changing humour of the flying clouds; untouched by the falling flowers, and the carols of birds; nay, a perfect stranger to the beauty of my own self going alone and quietly through a mountain in Spring. I walked first with my hat pulled to one side; but later I kept my eyes pivoted on the back of my feet. Finally I went gingerly, shrugging my shoulders. The rain shook the tree tops all round, and closed in from all sides upon a lonely traveller. I felt I was having rather too strong a dose of unhumanity.
CHAPTER II.
“Are you there?” I said, but no response came.
I was standing before the humblest shop, which had at its rear papered sliding screens, shutting from view a room behind. A bunch of straw sandals for sale was hanging from the eve, swinging forlornly. Under a low counter were a few trays of cheap sweets, with some small coins lying about.
“Are you there?” I said again. The ejaculation startled, this time, a hen and her lord, which awoke clucking on a mortar, on which they had been standing bulged and asleep. I was glad to find fire going in a clay furnace, part of which had its colour changed by the rain that had been falling a minute ago. A tea-kettle was hanging from a suspender over the furnace. It was black with smoke, too black, indeed, to tell whether it was earthen or silver.
Receiving no answer, I took the liberty of walking into the shop and sitting on a bench before the fire, and this made the fowls flap their wings and hop from the mortar onto the raised and matted floor and they would have gone through the inner room had it not been for the screens. The birds clucked and cackled in alarm as if they thought I were a fox or a cur.
Presently footsteps were heard, a paper screen slid open, and out came an old woman, as I knew somebody would, with a fire going, and money lying scattered about. This was somewhat different from the city, that a woman could, with no concern, be away, leaving her shop to take care of itself and it was at any rate, unlike the twentieth century, that I could go into the shop and sit on a bench uninvited to wait, wait and wait. All this “unhuman” condition of things delighted me immensely. What charmed me most was, however, the look of the aged shop-keeper who had come out.
I discovered in her, living, the aged, masked dame of Takasago whom I saw at the Hosho “Noh” theatre, two or three years ago. I snapped that dame’s image into my mind’s camera at the time as most fascinating, wondering how an old woman could look so gentle and reverentially attractive. I say, I saw in flesh and blood this “Noh” figure in the lowly shop-keeper bowing before me. In response to my apologetic remark that I had taken possession of her bench in her absence, she said very civilly:
“I did not know that you had come in, Danna-sama.”[(4)]
“Had been raining rather hard?”