One day when he returned from school, he found Yamada the steward waiting for him at the entranceway.
“His Excellency came home early today, and he expressed a desire to play billiards with the young master. He now awaits him in the billiard room,” Yamada announced.
Kiyoaki felt his heart beat faster as he heard this altogether extraordinary summons. True, the Marquis did sometimes feel the whim to have Kiyoaki’s partnership in a game of billiards, but this was customarily restricted to the mellow period after dinner when the Marquis still savored the effects of the wine he had been drinking.
If his father were seized by such a mood while it was still no more than mid-afternoon, he must, Kiyoaki thought, be either in exceptionally good or exceptionally bad spirits.
He hardly ever entered the billiard room during the day. He pushed open the heavy door and walked in. The sun was shining in through the west windows, its rays slightly distorted by the glass. When he saw how the oak paneling gleamed in the sunlight, he had the feeling that he had entered this room for the first time.
The Marquis, cue in hand and face pressed close to the baize, was in the act of taking aim at a white ball. The fingers of his left hand, cradling the tip of his cue, made Kiyoaki think of the bridge under a koto string.
“Shut the door,” said the Marquis to Kiyoaki, who had stopped just inside the half-opened door, still in his school uniform. His father’s features were tinged by reflections from the green surface of the billiard table so close to his face, so Kiyoaki found it difficult to gauge his expression.
“Read that. It’s Tadeshina’s farewell,” said the Marquis, straightening up at last and using the tip of his cue to indicate an envelope that was lying on a small table by the window.
“Is she dead?” asked Kiyoaki, feeling his hand shake as he picked up the envelope.
“No, she’s not dead. She’s recovering. She’s not dead—which makes the whole thing that much more disgraceful.” As he answered, the Marquis appeared to be making an effort not to march over to where his son was standing.
Kiyoaki hesitated.
“Hurry up and read it!” For the first time, there was a cutting edge to the Marquis’s voice.
He unrolled the long sheet of paper on which Tadeshina had written what was intended as her deathbed testimony, and began to read, still standing in front of the window.
When the time comes for Your Excellency to deign to take forbearing note of this letter, I would beg you to think of Tadeshina who writes it as one who has already departed this world. But before I cut the slender thread that binds this wretched creature to life—the just reward for what I contritely acknowledge to be my heinous and sinful deeds—I am writing this in anxious haste both to confess the gravity of my sins and to offer a dying plea to Your Excellency.
The truth of the matter is that it has recently become evident that, due to Tadeshina’s negligence in her entrusted duties, Miss Satoko Ayakura is pregnant. Being overcome with dread when I learned of this, I endeavored to persuade her that something must be done about her condition at once, but try as I might, my words were of no avail. Realizing that the matter would become more crucial as time went by, I went to Count Ayakura on my own initiative and told him everything in full detail. But my master did no more than say ‘What am I to do? What am I to do?’ and he did not deign to give the least indication of his intention to take definite action. Finally, knowing full well that it would become more difficult to settle this matter as each month passed, and that it might become a grave affair of state, it became clear that Tadeshina, whose disloyalty was the source of all this tribulation, now had no other course open to her but to sacrifice herself and to cast herself in supplication at the feet of Your Excellency.
I fear that this will anger Your Excellency, but since this matter of Miss Ayakura’s pregnancy may be something that could be termed ‘within the family’ please, please, I beg of Your Excellency that you bring to it your gracious wisdom and discretion. Please have pity on an old woman hurrying toward death, and deign to intercede in this matter of my mistress. This I beg of you from the shadow of the grave.
When he had finished reading the letter, Kiyoaki suppressed the momentary rush of cowardly relief that he had not been named in it, and hoped that his look would not express a dishonest denial to his father. Nevertheless, he noticed that his lips were dry and his temples were throbbing feverishly.
“Did you read it?” asked the Marquis. “Did you read the part that says she requests my gracious wisdom and discretion because this is a matter ‘within the family’? No matter how close we’ve been to the Ayakuras, one would hardly describe anything between us as a ‘family matter.’ But Tadeshina dared to put that on paper. If you can possibly make a case for yourself, go ahead and make it. Say it right here before the portrait of your grandfather! If I happen to be wrong, I’ll apologize. As your father, I have every reason in the world not to want to make such conjectures. Beyond any doubt it’s a detestable thing, a detestable conjecture.”
His frivolous hedonist of a father had never been capable of inspiring such awe in Kiyoaki before. Nor had he ever seemed possessed of such dignity. Irritably striking the palm of one hand with his billiard cue, the Marquis stood flanked by the portrait of his father and the painting of the Battle of Tsushima. This huge oil painting, which showed the vanguard of the Japanese fleet deploying before the Russians in the Sea of Japan, was more than half taken up with the massive, dark green billows of the ocean. Kiyoaki was accustomed to seeing it only at night, and the meager lamplight had prevented him from appreciating the fine detail of the waves, which merged at night into the dark irregular shadows that covered the wall. But now in daytime, he saw how the somber blue of the waves towered up in the foreground with ponderous force, while in the distance a lighter green blended in to brighten the dark water, and here and there foaming white crests topped the waves. And then the trailing wakes of the maneuvering squadron spread out with smooth uniformity over the surface of this turbulent northern sea with terrible impact. The line of the Japanese main fleet heading farther out to sea was painted horizontally on the canvas, with its plumes of smoke drifting to the right against a sky whose chilly blue contained a touch of pale green as befitted a northern May.
In contrast, the portrait of Kiyoaki’s grandfather in ceremonial robes was imbued with a human warmth, despite his evident sternness. Even now he did not seem to be chiding Kiyoaki, but rather admonishing him with both dignity and affection. He felt that he could confess anything at all to this portrait of his ancestor. Here in front of his grandfather—the face with the heavy eyelids, the cheeks with their warts, the thick lower lip—he had the exultant feeling that his indecisiveness was being cured, if only temporarily.
“There’s nothing for me to say. It is as you suppose,” he said, speaking the words without even dropping his eyes. “It’s my child.”
Despite the Marquis’s threatening pose, his actual mood on finding himself caught up in such a situation was one of desperate confusion. Handling such things had never been his strong point. So now, although the stage was set for him to proceed to a stinging rebuke, he instead began to mutter to himself.
“Once wasn’t enough for old Tadeshina,” he muttered. “She had to have a second little secret for me. Well and good the first time—nothing but a naughty houseboy. But this time it had to do with no less than the son of a marquis. And yet she could not even kill herself off successfully. Intriguing old bitch!”
The Marquis had always eluded life’s more subtle problems with a hearty burst of laughter, and now that one had cropped up calling for indignation, he was nonplussed. This beefy, red-faced man differed strikingly from his own father in that he was vain enough to try not to appear harsh and unfeeling to others, including his own son. He was thus anxious to prevent his anger from appearing as old-fashioned wrath, but his consequent bewilderment made him feel that the sustaining forces of unreason were draining away. At the same time, there was an advantage in anger: it made him quite incapable of reflection.
His father’s momentary hesitation gave him courage. Like pure water spurting from a cleft in a rock, words came out of this young man’s mouth as the most natural and spontaneous he would ever utter: “However that may be, Satoko is mine.”
“Yours, did you say? Say that again, would you? Yours, did you say?” demanded the Marquis, happy to have his son relieve him of the task of giving vent to his outrage. Now, his heart at peace, he could air his rage blindly. “How dare you speak like this now! When it first became a probability that Satoko might become engaged to Prince Toin, didn’t I try to ensure that you had no objection? Didn’t I say to you, ‘At this stage things can still be reversed. If your feelings are at all involved, tell me?’”
The Marquis tried to alternate between scorn and conciliation, but in his fury he botched the attempt. Moving along the edge of the billiard table, he came so close that Kiyoaki could see his hand trembling around the cue it held. For the first time, he felt a touch of fear.
“And what did you say then? Eh? What did you say? ‘I’m not at all involved’—that’s how you answered me. That certainly amounted to a man’s word, didn’t it? But are you a man, I wonder? I regretted raising you in such a soft and easy way, but I never realized you’d turn out like this. To lay hands on someone betrothed to an imperial prince after the Emperor himself has sanctioned the marriage! To go so far as to make her pregnant! To stain your family honor! To throw mud in your father’s face! Could there be any disloyalty, any breach of filial piety worse than this? If it were in times gone by, I as your father would have had to cut my belly open and die in atonement to the Emperor. You’ve behaved like an animal. You’ve done something that’s rotten through and through. Do you hear me? Just what do you have to say for yourself, Kiyoaki? You won’t answer me? You’ll still defy me, will you?”
The instant that he perceived the panting urgency in his father’s words, Kiyoaki dodged to one side to avoid the brandished billiard cue, but he nevertheless caught a solid blow across the back. His father followed that up at once with another that numbed the arm that had tried to protect his back. And as he frantically sought his only escape, the library door, a third blow, meant for his head, missed its target and struck across the bridge of the nose. At this point Kiyoaki collided with a chair in his path and stumbled to the floor, grasping the arm of the chair as he did so to break his fall. As the blood began to spurt from his nose, his father finally held off with his cue.
Each blow must have provoked a sharp cry from Kiyoaki, and now the library door opened to reveal his grandmother and mother in the doorway. The Marquise stood trembling behind her mother-in-law as her husband, still grasping his cue and panting heavily, went rigid.
“What’s this?” asked his grandmother.
With that, Marquis Matsugae seemed to notice his mother’s presence for the first time, though it was clear from his expression that he found it hard to believe she was actually standing in the doorway. Far less was he capable of guessing how she had got there: that his wife, grasping the drift of events, had probably gone to fetch her. His mother’s setting foot outside her retreat was by no means an everyday occurrence.
“Kiyoaki has been a disgrace. You’ll understand if you read Tadeshina’s farewell on the table there.”
“Did Tadeshina kill herself?”
“The letter came in the mail. Then I phoned the Ayakuras to find out . . .”
“And what did you find out?” asked his mother, now seated in a chair beside the small table as she slowly pulled out of her obi the black velvet case that contained the glasses she wore to boost her failing sight. She carefully opened the purselike case.
As the Marquise stood watching her mother-in-law she suddenly realized why she had not yet spared so much as a glance for her grandson. It was a sign of her determination to cope with the Marquis single-handed. Sensing this, she rushed in relief to Kiyoaki’s side. He had already taken out his handkerchief and was holding it to his bloody nose. The wound hardly seemed to be grave.
“And what did you find out?” repeated the Marquis’s mother, unrolling the scroll.
Her son felt that something inside him was already crumbling.
“I phoned and inquired about Tadeshina. They caught her in time and she’s recovering. And then the Count asked me suspiciously how I happened to know about it. Apparently he didn’t know about her letter. She took an overdose of sleeping pills and I warned the Count that he had to prevent any word of it leaking out. But since, all things considered, my son was at fault, I could not possibly put all the blame on the Count. So the whole conversation became thoroughly pointless. We have to meet as soon as possible to talk it over, I told him, but . . . At any rate, one thing at least is clear; unless I come to a decision myself, nothing at all will be done.”
“Very true. Very true indeed,” said the old lady absentmindedly as she ran her eyes over the letter.
Oddly enough, her unsophisticated country vigor—the heavy forehead glowing with health, the blunt, powerful lines of the face, the skin still ruddy with the hot sun of a generation gone by, the bobbed hair dyed a simple, glossy black—her every trait harmonized perfectly with the Victorian setting of the billiard room.