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I put the eggs into my right and left pockets, four in each, with the same old red towel hung over my shoulder, my hands inside my coat, went to Masuya. I opened the shoji of the room and Porcupine greeted me with his Idaten-like face suddenly radiant, saying: "Say, there's hope! There's hope!" Up to last night, he had been downcast, and even I felt gloomy.
In better-class houses the same simplicity prevails, though the building may be of costly materials, with posts and ceilings of ebony inlaid with gold, and floors of rare polished woods. There are neither doors nor passages. When you wish to pass from one room to the next you slide back one of the shoji, and shut it after you.
Besides these there afterwards came women from Fushimi and from Nara, who lodged scattered here and there throughout the town. This appears to have scandalized a certain reformer, named Shôji Jinyémon, who, in the year 1612, addressed a memorial to the Government, petitioning that the women who lived in different parts of the town should be collected in one "Flower Quarter."
The slight paper shoji and fusuma between the small rooms serve only partially to shut out peering eyes; they afford no protection from listening ears. Moreover, these homes of the middle and lower classes open upon public streets, and a passer-by may see much of what is done within. Even the desire for privacy seems lacking.
Only at night they would chatter as girls will, even if they are enemies; and it was then that Sadako narrated the history of her romance with the young student. One night, Asako awoke to find that the bed beside her was empty, and that the paper shoji was pushed aside. Nervous and anxious, she rose and stood in the dark veranda outside the room.
By night a Japanese house with only its shoji closed looks like a great paper-sided lantern, a magic-lantern making moving shadows within, instead of without itself. By day the shadows on the shoji are from outside only; but they may be very wonderful at the first rising of the sun, if his beams are leveled, as in this instance, across a space of quaint garden.
I and Porcupine put our faces close to the shoji, watching almost breathless. A wall clock somewhere rang half past nine. "Say, will he come to-night, do you think? If he doesn't show up, I quit." "I'm going to keep this up while my money lasts." "Money? How much have you?" "I've paid five yen and sixty sen up to to-day for eight days. I pay my bill every night, so I can jump out anytime."
So still was the place that the caged cricket hanging from the eaves of Umè's distant room beat time like an elfin metronome. Two of the four walls of the guest-room were of shoji, a lattice covered with translucent rice-paper. These opened directly upon the garden. The third wall, a solid one of smoke-blue plaster, held the niche called "tokonoma," where pictures are hung and flower vases set.
That whisper made such a wrench at her husband's heart that his grip tightened on the frail shoji, and with a nervous spasm he sent it clattering out of its socket flat upon the floor of the room, like a screen blown down by the wind. Ito dashed forward to help Geoffrey replace the damage. When they turned round again, the two women had disappeared.
To him the place stood for the last stage on the journey home. But to me, it meant more. It marked both the end of the beginning, and the beginning of the end. For I had fixed upon this spot for my turning point. It was high noon in my day of travel, like the high noon there outside the open shoji. The siesta of sensation had come.
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