Light and dark

[51]

JUST UNDER an hour later, O-Nobu left her seat with Tsugiko and followed her aunt and uncle on their way to the capacious dining room in a corner of the second floor. As they proceeded along the corridor side by side with shoulders almost touching, she spoke softly to her cousin.

“What sort of party is this?”

“I don’t know.”

Tsugiko looked down as she replied.

“We’re just going to eat dinner?”

“I suppose, yes.”

Sensing that the more questions she posed, the vaguer Tsugiko’s answers became, O-Nobu stopped talking. Perhaps Tsugiko was being reticent on account of her parents just ahead of them. Perhaps she didn’t know anything. Or, even if she did, who was to say she wasn’t responding in monosyllables in her soft voice because she didn’t want to explain to O-Nobu? The people they passed in the corridor tended to cast sharply appraising glances in their direction; the majority paid more attention to Tsugiko than to O-Nobu.

Abruptly a comparison between herself and Tsugiko flashed in O-Nobu’s mind. Her figure and posture were superior to Tsugiko’s, but her outfit and looks were certainly no match. O-Nobu glanced at this cousin of hers with a hint of jealousy in her eye: forever bashful in the manner of a child, made of innocence unblemished by any trace of care, a delicious young lady pure as a flowing stream. While a measure of pity that verged on derision wasn’t entirely absent from O-Nobu’s tangled feelings, the dramatically active component was a degree of envy sufficient to make her feel she would like to try trading places. O-Nobu questioned herself.

There was a time when I was still a miss, but was I ever such a young lady?

Standing shoulder to shoulder in the brightly illuminated bustle of the corridor, O-Nobu, who had lived her life day to day as it came to her, with no thought of measuring herself against Tsugiko, was struck by a kind of sorrow she had never felt before. The feeling was mild. But it was the sort of feeling that could easily turn to tears. It was the sort of feeling that made her want to grasp tightly the hand of the companion she had just now been observing with a jealous eye. In her heart she spoke to Tsugiko.

Cousin, you’re purer than I am. You’re so pure I envy you. Your purity is a weapon, but against your future husband it will be useless. Even if you attend to him as I attend to mine, irreproachably, without a lapse or fault, he won’t return the appreciation you long for. Soon enough, to secure his love, you will have to lose the natural purity that is your treasure. And even if you sacrifice something so very precious for him, he may repay you with harshness. I envy you, and at the same time I feel sorry for you. Because in your innocence you don’t understand that before long you will have to destroy the precious treasure you possess without even knowing it. For better or for worse, I was never blessed with a perfectly natural vessel like the one you possess, so I suppose in my case it might be said there hasn’t been so very much damage, but you are different from me. The minute you leave your parents for good, your heavenly innocence will be blemished. You deserve pity more than I.

They were walking slowly. When the Okamotos disappeared, the view of them obstructed by others in between, O-Nobu’s aunt made her way back to them.

“Hurry along, you dawdlers. Yoshikawa-san is waiting for us.”

Her aunt’s eyes were fixed on Tsugiko, her words addressed to her in particular. But the name Yoshikawa rang in O-Nobu’s ears with the force of a wind that scattered with one gust her mood until now. Her mind turned at once to Madam Yoshikawa, a woman she had no special fondness for and who, it appeared, had no particular fondness for her. As the wife of a powerful man whose not insubstantial patronage her husband regularly enjoyed, this was a person in whose presence she would be obliged to comport herself with the utmost amiability and politeness. Her face impassive, though her composure concealed a variety of uneasiness, O-Nobu followed the others into the dining room.