A group of students on their way to the gymnasium walked by carrying umbrellas and wearing their sweaters draped over the shoulders of their gym uniforms. Seeing the activity on the mound, they stopped to watch.
A rumor about the lost ring had already spread through the school, but since the students considered it effeminate for a man to wear a ring, there were few who felt the least sympathy or concern for its loss or for the frantic search. They grasped its purpose, of course, as soon as they saw the two princes working their way through the wet grass on hands and knees. Prince Kridsada’s charge of theft had obviously reached their ears and now they seized the chance to express their resentment by hurling bitter taunts at the two princes. But when they caught sight of the prefect getting to his feet to look in their direction, they were taken aback. When he requested them quietly to join the hunt, they fell silent, turned their backs, and scattered in all directions.
The two princes and the prefect, each working from a different direction, had almost met up in the center of the mound, and so there was no escaping the realization that all their efforts were likely to prove in vain. The showers were now over, and some late afternoon sunshine had broken through the clouds. The wet grass sparkled as it caught the low-slanting rays, and the shadows cast by the leaves made complex patterns on its surface.
Prince Pattanadid thought he saw the unmistakable glint of an emerald in one clump of grass, but when he plunged his wet hands into it, he found nothing but a faint, unsteady gleam, blurred by the dirt, no more than a tangle of wet grass, glowing golden at the roots, with no resemblance at all to the ring.
∗
Afterwards, Kiyoaki heard the story of the futile hunt. The prefect had certainly given evidence of goodwill by helping as much as he could, but there was no denying that the search had been an unnecessary humiliation for the two princes. Not too surprisingly, they chose to make an issue of it and so furnished themselves with a good excuse to pack their bags and move to the Imperial Hotel. They confessed to Kiyoaki that they had decided to return to Siam as soon as they could.
When he heard this news from his son, Marquis Matsugae was most distressed. He realized that to allow the two princes to return home in their present mood was to leave them permanently scarred. For the rest of their lives their attitude to Japan would be tinged by bitter memories. At first he tried to mitigate the antagonism that existed between them and the school, but he found that the princes’ attitude had hardened to such an extent that there was little hope of any successful mediation at present. He therefore bided his time for the moment, having decided that the first thing was to persuade the princes not to go home, and then to work out the best plan for softening their hostility.
Meanwhile the summer vacation was almost on them. After conferring with Kiyoaki, the Marquis decided to invite the princes to the family villa on the seashore once the vacation had begun. Kiyoaki was to go with them.
31
THE MARQUIS HAD ALREADY given Kiyoaki permission to invite Honda to the villa, and so, on the first day after school ended, the four young men boarded a train at Tokyo station.
Whenever the Marquis himself went to the Kamakura villa, there had to be a huge delegation, led by the major and the chief of police, at the station to greet him with the appropriate honors. Moreover, white sand was hauled up from the beach and scattered along the road from Kamakura station to the villa at Hasé. However, since the Marquis had told the town council that he wanted the four young men to be treated as mere students without any welcome committee whatever, despite the princes’ status, they were able to get into rickshaws at the station and enjoy the ride to the villa in privacy.
The narrow winding road was overhung with branches heavy with greenery. As they neared the top of a steep hill, they saw the stone gate of the villa come into view, its name carved in Chinese characters on the right-hand pillar. It was called Chung-nan, from the title of a poem by the Tang poet Wang Wei.
The estate attached to this Japanese Chung-nan covered more than eight acres, taking up an entire wooded ravine that opened onto the beach. Kiyoaki’s grandfather had once built a simple reed-thatched cottage there, but after it was destroyed by fire some years previously, his father had immediately seized the opportunity to put up a substantial summer home with twelve guest rooms, of combined Japanese and Western design. The garden, however, which spread out from the terrace on the south side of the house, had been landscaped entirely in the Western style. From this same terrace, one could see the island of Oshima, its volcano glowing at night like a distant bonfire. A walk of no more than five or six minutes through the garden brought one to the Yuigahama beach. In fact the Marquis, with the aid of binoculars, could sit on the terrace and watch the Marquise frolicking in the surf, an incidental diversion that amused him greatly. There was a narrow field of vegetables between the garden and the beach, however, and in order to suppress this element of discord, a line of pines had been planted along the southern edge of the garden. Once these trees were fully grown, they would destroy the uninterrupted view from the garden to the sea, and the Marquis would no longer be able to amuse himself with his binoculars.
On clear summer days, the beauty of the villa’s setting was at its peak. The ravine spread out like a fan with the house at its apex, its two ridges bounding the garden on either side: the right-hand one ended in a promontory called Cape Inamuragazaki, and the left-hand one pointed to the island of Iijima.
The sweeping view was unobstructed and made one feel that all it encompassed—sky, land, and the sea embraced by the capes—was part of the Matsugae domain. No images obtruded on its sovereignty save those of the fantastically billowing clouds, the occasional bird, and the ships that passed by far out in the offing. In summer, when the cloud formations were at their peak, the whole thing seemed to be transformed into a huge theater, with the villa for the spectators and the smooth expanse of the bay becoming the vast stage on which the clouds performed their extravagant ballets.
The outside terrace was floored in heavy teak, laid out in checkers. The architect had been against exposing a wooden floor to the ravages of the weather, but he yielded when the Marquis reminded him sharply that the decks of ships were made of wood. From the vantage point of this terrace, Kiyoaki had spent whole days last summer carefully observing each subtle nuance of the shifting clouds. The sunlight became awsome as it shone on the cumulus clouds, towering up over the offing like huge masses of whipped cream, and penetrated their deep, curving hollows. While the areas that lay in shadow resisted the probing sun, its bright rays threw the rugged force of their sculptured outlines into relief. In his imagination, the parts cut off from direct light were totally different in character from those that were dazzlingly exposed. They slumbered on uneventfully, while in contrast their brilliant counterparts fiercely enacted a swiftly unfolding drama of tragic proportions. But there was no place for the human element, and so both slumber and tragedy came to the same thing, an idle game at best.
If he gazed fixedly at the clouds, he noticed no alteration, but if he looked away for a moment, he found that they had changed. Without his realizing it, their heroic mane became ruffled like hair disheveled in sleep. And as long as he kept his eyes on it, this new disorder persisted in just the same slow-moving way.
What had disintegrated? One moment their brilliant white shapes dominated the sky, and the next, they dissolved into something trivial, an enervated banality. Yet their dissolution was a kind of liberation. For as he watched, their scattered remnants gradually reformed and as they did so, they cast strange shadows over the garden as if an army were marshaling its forces in the sky above. Its might first overshadowed the beach and the vegetable field, and then, moving up toward the house, it overran the southern border of the garden. The vivid colors of the leaves and flowers that covered the garden slope, laid out in imitation of Shugakuin Palace, glowed like a mosaic in the dazzling sunlight—maples, sakakis, tea shrubs, dwarf cedars, daphnes, azaleas, camellias,
pines, box trees, Chinese black pines, and all the others—and then suddenly it was all in shadow; even the cicada’s song was hushed, as though in mourning.
The sunsets were especially beautiful. He imagined that as each one approached, every cloud knew in advance what color it would take on—scarlet, purple, orange, light green, or something else—and then, under the strain of the moment, that it paled just before turning to its new shade.
∗
“What a beautiful garden! I had no idea that summer in Japan could be so glorious,” Chao P. said, bright-eyed.
As the two brown-skinned princes stood on the terrace flooded with sunlight, Kiyoaki could not imagine anyone seeming more at home there. Today, their bleak mood was clearly gone.
Although he and Honda both thought the sunshine excessive for their taste, to the princes it was no more than pleasantly warm and exactly as they liked it. They stood on the terrace soaking it up as though they could not get enough of its heat.
“After you have washed and rested a little,” Kiyoaki said to them, “I’ll show you around the garden.”
“Why bother to rest? Aren’t we all four young and energetic?” Kridsada replied.
More than anything else, Kiyoaki thought, more than Princess Chan, the emerald ring, their friends, their school, perhaps what the princes had needed had been sunshine. It seemed that summer had the power to heal all frustrations, soothe every grief, restore their lost happiness.
As he was ruminating in this way about the torrid heat of Siam which he had never experienced, he noticed in himself too a certain intoxication with the summer that had burst on them so suddenly. He heard the cicadas singing in the garden. The coolness of reason had evaporated like cool sweat from his brow.
The four of them stepped down from the terrace and gathered around an old sundial that stood in the middle of the wide lawn around it.
The legend “1716 Passing Shades” was carved in English on its face. Its upright bronze needle was a fantastic arabesque of a bird with its outstretched neck pointing directly at the Roman numeral twelve, just between the markers that designated northwest and northeast. The shadow it cast was drawing close to three o’clock.
As Honda rubbed his finger against the letter S in the inscription, he thought of asking the princes in which direction was Siam, but he decided not to take the needless risk of arousing their homesickness again. At the same time, without meaning to, he shifted his position slightly and blocked out the sun so that his own shadow overwhelmed the one that was about to mark three o’clock.
“That’s it. That’s the secret,” said Chao P. when he saw what Honda had done. “If you did that all day, time would have to stop. When I get back home, I’m going to have a sundial set up in the garden. And then on days when I’m very, very happy, I’ll have a servant stand next to it from morning to night and cover it with his shadow. I’ll stop time passing.”
“But he’ll die of sunstroke,” said Honda, stepping aside to let the fierce sunlight restore the hour to the dial.
“No, no,” replied Kridsada, “our servants can stand all day in the sun, and it doesn’t trouble them in the least. And the sun at home is probably at least three times as strong as this.”
The princes’ skin, so richly brown and warm in the sunlight, captured Kiyoaki’s imagination. He felt that such skin must surely seal within itself a cool darkness that constantly refreshed these young men, like a luxuriant shade tree.
∗
He had only to make a casual reference to the enjoyment to be had from the walking trails in the mountains behind the villa; and immediately nothing would do but for all four of them to set out at once to explore, before Honda could wipe away the sweat brought on by the heat of the garden. Honda, moreover, was amazed at the sight of the once-indolent Kiyoaki taking the lead in this enterprise with such energy.
Despite his misgivings, however, when they had made their way up as far as the ridge, they were met by a delightfully cool sea breeze blowing through the shady pine forest, which made them forget the sweat of the climb as they enjoyed a panoramic view of the Yuigahama beach.
Kiyoaki led them along the narrow trail that followed the line of the ridge, and as they tramped energetically over last year’s fallen leaves and crashed through the ferns and bamboo grass that nearly choked the path, they felt all the energy of youth. Then all at once, Kiyoaki stopped and pointed to the northwest.
“Look over there,” he called to them. “This is the only place from which you can see it.”
A collection of shabby, nondescript houses stood in a valley that stretched out below, but towering above and beyond them, the four young men caught sight of the figure of the Great Buddha of Kamakura.
Everything about the image of this Buddha, from his rounded shoulders to the very folds of his robe, was on a grand scale. The face was in profile, and the chest partially visible as it protruded somewhat beyond the graceful lines of the sleeve that flowed smoothly down from the shoulder. The bright sunlight beat upon the glinting bronze of the rounded shoulder and struck brilliant lights from the broad bronze chest. It was already approaching sunset, and the rays caught the bronze snails coiled like hair on the Lord Buddha’s head, and each stood out in relief. The long earlobe seemed to hang like dried fruit on a tropical tree.
The princes startled Honda and Kiyoaki by falling to their knees as soon as they saw the statue. With no thought for their freshly creased white linen trousers, they knelt unhesitatingly on the wet, moldering leaves that covered the path and pressed their palms together in reverence toward the distant figure bathed in summer sunlight.
The other two were irreverent enough to exchange a quick glance. Faith such as this was so removed from their experience that they had never even thought of it ever touching their lives. Not that they felt the least inclination to mock the princes’ exemplary devotion. But they felt that these two young men, whom they had come to regard as students much like themselves, had suddenly flown away into a world whose ideals and faith were quite alien to them.
32
THE WALK IN THE MOUNTAINS behind the house was followed by a complete tour of the garden. All this exertion taxed their energy, so that the four of them were finally quite happy to rest for a while in the living room of the villa. There they enjoyed the sea breeze from the terrace while they sipped lemonade brought from Yokohama and cooled in the villa’s well. They were soon ready to set off again, however. This time they gave in to the impulse for a quick swim before sunset and hurried to their rooms to dress for the occasion according to their individual taste. Kiyoaki and Honda put on the red loincloths used for swimming at Peers, and over them they threw the thin cotton tunics decorated with feather-stitching that completed the uniform. Then they put on straw hats and would have been on their way to the beach if they had not been delayed by the two princes. When these two finally appeared, they were dressed in striped English bathing suits that showed their brown shoulders to advantage.
Kiyoaki and Honda had been friends for a long time, but Kiyoaki had never before invited him to the family villa during the summer, though he came once in the fall to gather chestnuts. This was therefore the first time that he had gone swimming with Kiyoaki since they both were boys together at the school villa at Katasé beach, when their present intimacy had hardly begun.
The four of them plunged impetuously down the garden slope, broke through the border of young pines, and dashed across the narrow vegetable field onto the beach.
Here Honda and Kiyoaki paused to perform the prescribed pre-swimming calisthenics, a formality that made the two princes double up with laughter. Perhaps this was a mild form of retaliation against the two Japanese for not having joined them in kneeling to the distant Great Buddha. In the eyes of the princes, this modern, totally self-centered penance was the funniest thing in the world.
However, the very nature of their laughter showed that they were feeling more at ease than ever before; not for a long time had they looked so che
erful. After they had enjoyed themselves in the water to their hearts’ content, Kiyoaki felt that he could forget about playing host for a while; the princes paired off to talk in their own language, and he and Honda talked Japanese until all four fell asleep on the beach.
The setting sun was blurred by a thin film of cloud. It had lost much of its earlier heat, but this was a pleasant time to lie in it, especially for someone whose skin was as white as Kiyoaki’s. Dressed only in his red loincloth, he threw his wet body down on the sand and lay face up, his eyes shut.
To his left, Honda sat cross-legged in the sand staring out at the waters of the bay. Though the sea was calm, its rolling waves fascinated him. As he watched, the crest of the sea seemed to be level with his eyes. How strange, he thought, that it should come to an abrupt end and give way to the land right in front of him.
He kept pouring dry sand from one palm to the other. When he had spilled a good part of it in the process, he reached down automatically and began again with a fresh handful, his thoughts completely taken up with the sea.
It ended a few feet from where he sat. The sea, broad and vast, with all its mighty force, ended right there before his eyes. Be it the edge of time or space, there is nothing so awe-inspiring as a border. To be here at this place with his three companions, at this marvelous border between land and sea, struck him as being very similar to being alive as one age was ending and another beginning, like being part of a great moment in history. And then too the tide of their own era, in which he and Kiyoaki lived, also had to have an appointed time to ebb, a shore on which to break, a limit beyond which it could not go.
The sea ended right there before his eyes. As he watched the final surge of each wave as it drained into the sand, the final thrust of mighty power that had come down through countless centuries, he was struck by the pathos of it all. At that very point, a grand pan-oceanic enterprise that spanned the world went awry and ended in annihilation.