Page:The Tale of Genji.pdf/99

Rh ease he leant forward and deliberately examined the house. The gate, also made of a kind of trellis-work, stood ajar, and he could see enough of the interior to realize that it was a very humble and poorly furnished dwelling. For a moment he pitied those who lived in such a place, but then he remembered the song ‘Seek not in the wide world to find a home; but where you chance to rest, call that your house’; and again, ‘Monarchs may keep their palaces of jade, for in a leafy cottage two can sleep.’

There was a wattled fence over which some ivy-like creeper spread its cool green leaves, and among the leaves were white flowers with petals half unfolded like the lips of people smiling at their own thoughts. ‘They are called Yūgao, “Evening Faces,” ’ one of his servants told him; ‘how strange to find so lovely a crowd clustering on this deserted wall!’ And indeed it was a most strange and delightful thing to see how on the narrow tenement in a poor quarter of the town they had clambered over rickety eaves and gables and spread wherever there was room for them to grow. He sent one of his servants to pick some. The man entered at the half-opened door, and had begun to pluck the flowers, when a little girl in a long yellow tunic came through a quite genteel sliding door, and holding out towards Genji’s servant a white fan heavily perfumed with incense, she said to him ‘Would you like something to put them on? I am afraid you have chosen a wretched-looking bunch,’ and she handed him the fan. Just as he was opening the gate on his way back, the old nurse’s son Koremitsu came out of the other house full of apologies for having kept Genji waiting so long—‘I could not find the key of the gate’ he said. ‘Fortunately the people of this humble quarter were not likely to recognize you and press or stare; but I am afraid you must have been very much bored waiting in this hugger-mugger back street,’