Shank's Mare Page 7

  'We've had five,' said Yaji. 'How much will that be?'

  'I don't know,' said the boy.

  'Well, let's see,' said Kita. 'Two fives are three, aren't they? So that's three coppers. There they are.'

  'That's cheap,' said Yaji. 'I'll have another. How much is this?'

  'That's three coppers,' said the boy.

  'Which, which?' cried Kita. 'That's fine. Here, boy, I paid you for what I had before. We've had four since then, so three fours make seven and a half. Knock the half off and made it seven.'

  'Halloa,' said Yaji. 'Here's some rice-cake.'

  'Where, where?' said Kita. 'That's good. How much is the rice-cake?'

  'They're four coppers each,' said the boy.

  'If they're four coppers each,' said Kita, 'let's see, we've eaten six of them, so five sixes are fifteen. There you are.'

  'I'm not going to sell any more by arithmetic,' said the boy. 'You give me five coppers six times.'

  'Eh?' said Kita. 'I wonder if I've got it.'

  'You pay up,' said the boy.

  He snatched up the coppers and counted them one at a time.

  'He's done me,' said Kita. 'Come along.'

  They started off but they had not gone more than a few yards when they started to think.

  'That's a smart boy,' said Kita. 'Those rice-cakes weren't worth four coppers each really. They were only two or three coppers. He's covered all his losses.'

  'Botheration!' said Yaji. 'It's sticking in my throat now. Ugh! Ugh!'

  Half in fun they began to revile the boy, but thinking how he had got his own back they could not help bursting into laughter.

  They walked on and soon came to Kusawa-no-Zenfukuji, where there is a stone erected to the memory of the Soga brothers. Then they reached the ferry across the Fuji River. As they crossed the ferry the sun was glittering on the rim of the western mountains, the postboys were hastening their horses while they sang, and the sparrows were making love in the bamboo groves. At last they reached Kambara.

  SECOND PART

  T appeared that a daimyō's train had just arrived at the hostel at Kambara, and a meal was being served in the kitchen. Kitahachi peeped in cautiously from outside. appeared that a daimyō's train had just arrived at the hostel at Kambara, and a meal was being served in the kitchen. Kitahachi peeped in cautiously from outside.

  'Yaji,' he called. 'Just hold this bundle a moment'

  'What are you going to do?' asked Yaji.

  'It's only for a moment,' said Kita.

  He handed the bundle to Yaji and went into the hostel, where he seated himself in a corner of the kitchen, unobserved amid the general bustle. The maids of the hostel were busy bringing in the food and setting it before the many guests.

  'Just bring a tray here,' called Kita.

  'Ay, ay,' said one of the maids and put a tray before him. As there was so much confusion nobody took any notice of him and Kita ate to his heart's content. Then, seizing an opportunity when nobody was looking, he spread out a towel and emptied a bowl of rice into it, afterwards quietly slipping away to where the puzzled Yaji was waiting impatiently under the eaves of the house opposite.

  'Is that Kitahachi?' called Yaji.

  'Ay,' said Kita.

  'Where have you been?'

  'I've been to get something to eat,' said Kita. 'It was delicious.'

  'Eh? Where did you get it?' asked Yaji.

  'At the hostel. There was such confusion I got five or six helpings.'

  'That was a good idea,' said Yaji. 'But you are a faithless chap. Why didn't you take me with you?'

  'Well, I've brought you a present,' said Kita. He undid the towel and showed the rice.

  'What's that?' said Yaji. 'Rice? Thank you. You are a smart fellow. Ah, delicious, delicious!'

  Yaji gobbled up all the rice and then shook out the towel. 'What's this?' he said. 'It's a towel. How dirty!'

  'What's dirty?' asked Kita.

  'This is,' said Yaji. 'It's the towel you've been wiping yourself with Ugh! I feel sick.'

  'Ha-ha-ha!' laughed Kita. 'But hadn't we better go along to the end of the town and look for a cheap lodging-house.'

  They went to the outskirts of the town accordingly and wandered about bewildered.

  'I'd like to stop at a house where there's a fine girl,' said Yaji.

  'You don't expect to find one at a lodging-house, do you?' said Kita. 'Let's see, where can it be?'

  They went about peeping into all the houses, and Kita got bitten by a dog he trod on, which was sleeping under the eaves of a house.

  'Oh, oh, oh!' yelled Kita.

  'Bow-wow!' said the dog.

  Then they heard the cry of a sushi-seller.

  'Hi! ' called Kita. ' Is there a lodging-house anywhere round here?'

  'It's the house at the corner there,' said the man.

  'Much obliged,' said Yaji.

  They went over to the house he had pointed to, and went in. They found themselves in a room of four or five mats, the only furniture in which was a Buddhist shrine and a bamboo trunk. The master of the house, an old man of about seventy, was seated at the edge of the fire-hole in the middle of the room twisting straw-rope. A pot was hanging from a hook over the fire, and in it something was boiling furiously. Near by were a pilgrim and two palmers, one of whom was an old man of over sixty and the other a young girl of seventeen or eighteen, who had thrown herself down by the fire, with her travelling basket still on her back, and was holding her chapped feet towards the blaze. The old woman of the house, who was putting wood on the fire, accosted them.

  'Come ye in,' she said.

  'Can you put us up for the night?' asked Kita.

  'Come in,' said the old man. 'You'll find some cold water there to wash your feet with.'

  'Yaji,' said Kita, while they were washing their feet, 'did you see that nice young palmer?'

  'Ay,' said Yaji. 'I'm going to have her. Everything tastes good when you're hungry.'

  Thus laughing together they dried their feet and mounted into the room.

  'Come and warm yourselves at the fire,' said the pilgrim.

  'Just move up a bit, Yaji,' said Kita. He shoved Yaji along and squeezed himself down beside the girl.

  Then the old woman took the pot off the hook. 'There, the gruel's ready,' she said. 'Fall to.'

  'It looks nice and hot,' said Yaji.

  'Nay, it's not for ye,' said the old woman. 'It's for these folk.'

  'The rice they gave us to-day was all blasted,' said the old palmer, 'and half of it stones too. If ye ate this your stomach would get that heavy.'

  'Master Pilgrim only brought three go,' said the old woman. 'Ye must divide it up.'

  She gave each of them a rice-bowl and they divided up the gruel and began to eat. Yaji and Kita had to sit and look on, and as they felt awkward doing nothing, they tried to scrape up some tobacco from their tobacco pouches. The pilgrim at last finished.

  'Doubtless you two gentlemen are from Edo,' he said. 'I also am from Edo, where an awful thing happened to me.'

  'What happened?' asked Yaji.

  'The story of the destiny which drove me to become a pilgrim,' said the old man, 'shows how impossible it is to rise in this world when fortune is against you. When I was young and lived in Edo, from early summer till late autumn, every day we had most extraordinary winds, and I was continually puzzling my brains how I could turn them to account. Finally I made a terrible mistake.'

  'Dear me!' said Yaji.

  'I decided to begin life as a dealer in boxes,—jewel boxes, comb-boxes, all sorts of boxes.'

  'What's the wind blowing got to do with dealing in boxes?' asked Yaji.

  'Well, I worked it out in this way. Every day there was an extraordinary amount of wind and as Edo is a very dusty place I thought the dust would naturally get into people's eyes and there would be a large number who would go blind. Then, according to my idea, I thought all these blind people would want to learn the samisen, so the samisen makers wou
ld get very busy, and a large number of cats would have to be killed, and there would be an increase in the number of rats, which would gnaw all the boxes to pieces, and thus the box trade would certainly flourish. So I laid out all my money in buying a large stock of boxes.'

  'That was a good idea,' said Yaji. 'I suppose they sold well.'

  'I couldn't sell one,' said the pilgrim. ' In spite of all my endeavours to hit upon a plan by which I could make a good profit, from the beginning to the end the whole thing was a failure and I was forced to seek the enlightenment of Buddha and become a pilgrim. Ah, the world is not what we think it is!'

  'That's an extraordinary story,' said Kita. 'You might also tell us, Master Palmer, how you came to be a palmer.'

  'Ah,' said the palmer, 'mine is a very sad tale. This girl here is my granddaughter, and we have both dedicated ourselves to the service of Buddha. I come from Nikkō, where we have many thunderstorms. One day, twenty years ago, in the summer, my Lord Thunder happened to fall at the back of my house. Unfortunately he fell on the stump of a tree, and injured himself so severely that he was unable to go back to the sky again. Accordingly I took my Lord Thunder into my house to nurse him, and while he was there he fell in love with my daughter, and I was forced to take him for my son-in-law as there was no way of separating them. Then in the summer he got a message from his parents in India to go and help with the summer thunder-showers, and he went away to the south to work for his living. My daughter and I waited for his return, and as he did not come back we began to feel anxious, fearing that he had fallen down and broken his back or that some other accident had happened to him. At last one of his friends came and told us that he had fallen into the sea and had been swallowed up by a whale. This sad news made my daughter weep very bitterly and I was at a loss what to do. Then my daughter was about to give birth to a child, and I prayed to the gods that it would not prove a demon, till at last she was delivered of this girl that you see with me. Seeing that the gods had answered my prayer and had sent a human being into the world instead of a demon, I resolved to devote myself to Buddha and become a pilgrim.'

  Tears ran down the old man's face as he finished his story.

  It was now growing late, and the old woman of the house commenced to get out mats and other things for the guests to sleep on.

  'It's time to sleep now,' said she. 'As the house is very small, I and the young palmer will go up into the attic.'

  She brought a ladder and set it up, and she and the young girl climbed up into the attic. The pilgrim took a paper mosquito net out of his basket and put it over his head.

  'Here, I've got to go out and do something,' said Kita.

  'I want to do something too,' said Yaji. They both went outside the back door.

  'I thought I'd have some fun with that young palmer,' said Yaji, 'but the old woman's taken her upstairs. What a nuisance!'

  'I squeezed her hand and pinched her while I was talking to her,' said Kita. 'You didn't know I was making love to her, did you?'

  'None of your lies,' said Yaji.

  'It's not a lie,' said Kita. 'I'm going to have that girl to-night.'

  'Ain't he quick!' said Yaji.

  They went in and shut the door, and so to sleep. The strangeness of the place where they were spending the night, the roughness of the accommodation, the broken plaster through which the wind whistled,—all these they thought would form a subject for conversation hereafter. The night deepened and at the sound of the midnight bell Kitahachi opened his eyes. He listened and heard them all snoring; they were worn out with their travels. 'Now's the time,' he thought, and getting up softly he felt round in the darkness till he had found the ladder. Now the floor of the attic was made of interlaced bamboos, on which mats were spread, and when anyone walked on the floor it made a great creaking. This startled Kita at first, but he crawled along on all fours, feeling about, till he came to the bed in which he thought the young girl was sleeping, although in reality it was the old woman's bed. He crept in and began shaking her gently to wake her up. The old woman soon opened her eyes.

  'Who's that?' she called. 'What are you doing?'

  At the sound of the old woman's voice Kita discovered his mistake and endeavoured to get away. He jumped up, but unfortunately ran a splinter of the bamboo into his foot, which made him fall down, whereupon the bamboos gave way and he fell with a crash into the room below.

  'What's that?' called the old man.

  'Whatever can it be!' called the old woman. 'What an awful noise! Get up all of you.'

  The noise had also awakened the pilgrim and the palmer.

  'What a terrible noise!' said the pilgrim. 'Light the lamp. We can't see what it is in the darkness.'

  Meanwhile the unfortunate Kita, having broken through the ceiling, had fallen into what seemed to him like a box, though what it was he could not well make out. His feet seemed to be caught in something and feeling about he found it was the halo of a Buddhist saint. Then he knew that he had fallen inside the Buddhist shrine, a fact which tickled his sense of humour in spite of the pain that he was suffering from his fall.

  Meanwhile the old man had been getting the lamp lit.

  'Seems as if it fell inside the shrine,' he said. He opened the doors of the shrine, when, to his surprise, Kitahachi walked out.

  'Oh! Oh!' he said. 'It's this man.'

  'Can you tell me the way to the Minobu?' asked Kita.

  'Don't talk nonsense,' said the old man. 'What are you doing in there?'

  'Well, I got up to go somewhere,' said Kita, 'but I lost my way.'

  'Lost your way?' said the old man. 'You haven't been doing it inside the shrine, have you?' He peeped inside and saw the ceiling was broken.

  'He fell through the ceiling,' he cried.

  'Yes,' said Kita. 'I fell through while I was running away from the cat.'

  'Are you a rat?' said the old man. 'Running away from the cat, indeed! What did you go upstairs for?'

  'Well, the rats carried off my loin-cloth, and I thought it might be upstairs, so I went up to look.'

  While Kita was making these excuses the old woman came down from upstairs.

  'It's not that at all,' she said. 'I'm sixty years old, and I don't know what part of the country he comes from, but he came upstairs and crept into my bed.'

  'What?' said the old man. 'He must be mad. Why it's twenty years since I gave up that sort of thing. Creeping into the bed of a wrinkled old woman, indeed. It's disgraceful.'

  'Please excuse me,' said Kita. 'Here, Yaji, don't lie there pretending you're asleep. Get up.'

  Yaji thus awakened concealed his amusement. 'He's very young,' he said, 'and never thinks of what he's doing. Do forgive him.'

  The pilgrim and the palmer also endeavoured to calm the old man, and finally Kita, by the sale of a kimono, raised enough money to pay for the repair of the ceiling. The affair was thus settled.

  In a short time came the dawn and Yaji and Kita quickly set out again on their travels.

  'You're very unlucky, Kita,' said Yaji. 'When we stopped at Odawara you trampled the bottom out of the bath, and last night you trampled a hole in the ceiling and we had to pay three hundred coppers to get it mended. Haven't you got any sense?'

  'I do feel bad about it,' said Kita.

  'Ha-ha-ha!' laughed Yaji. 'Your excuse last night of losing your way was funny, and the one about the rat running away with your loin-cloth. I've been thinking out a story about that.'

  'What's that?' asked Kita. 'Do tell me.'

  'Well, it's like this,' said Yaji. 'There was a palmer and a pilgrim, just the same as last night, and we were stopping at a lodging-house, and you got up in the middle of the night and went wandering about. Then everybody woke up and asked you what you were doing, and you said that the rats had run away with your loin-cloth and that you were certain they had taken it upstairs. Then the pilgrim and the palmer found that their loin-cloths, which they had put by the side of their pillows, had gone too, and they thought tha
t the rats must have taken them all. So they all went upstairs and when they got up they heard in a corner something like the sound of a samisen. ' That's strange,' they said, and peering into the rats' hole, they saw all the rats there spreading out the loin-cloths. Then one of the rats said, " I've brought the pilgrim's loin-cloth, and when you shake it it makes a noise like a samisen." Then, as the others would not believe him, he shook it out to show them and they heard the tinkle-tinkle of the samisen. " It would be funny if the pilgrim's loin-cloth only did that," said another rat. " I brought the palmer's loin-cloth. I'll shake it out and try." He took it in his mouth and shook it, and that one also went tinkle-tinkle-tinkle. " That's strange," they all thought. And then another rat said, "I brought the loin-cloth of a man named Kitahachi. It's an Etchū loin-cloth so it's short. I expect it'll only make a noise like a lute." He shook it out and it went z-z-z-z, like a gidayu samisen. That's funny, thought the rats. The loin-cloths of the pilgrim and the palmer make a pretty sound like an ordinary samisen. Why does this fellow's make such a strange sound? Then a rat in the corner, after thinking a long time, said, "Oh, yes, of course. That must be the reason." "What reason?" they asked. "Well, it's probably because that fellow Kitahachi has a futozao." '

  'Ha-ha-ha!' laughed Kita. 'Splendid! Splendid.'

  While they were thus talking they arrived at Yui, where on both sides of the way the inn girls were calling to them.

  'Come in! Come in!' they cried. 'Try our famous sugared rice-cake. Salt ones also. Come in and rest. Come in and rest.'

  'What a noisy lot they are,' said Yaji.

  Crossing the Yui River they came to Kurasawa, famous for the ear and wreath shellfish which the fishermen catch and offer for sale. There they rested a little.

  Then they crossed the Satta Pass and trudged on till suddenly it began to rain. This made them take out their rain-coats and pull their hats down over their brows. The scenery of the famous Tago-no-ura and Kiyomi-ga-seki they were unable to see because of the rain, and their feet began to get heavy with mud. At last they reached Okitsu, where they took a rest at a poor-looking teahouse.

  'Here, granny,' called Kita to the old woman who kept the house, 'just give us some of those beanflour dumplings.'