[169]
SHORTLY BEFORE the train arrived at their station, as the weather that had been a concern to all of them was beginning to clear, the rain on the verge of abating, Tsuda gazed up at the sky and beheld a bank of clouds sailing across it. On they came like a stampede passing the train overhead from the opposite direction. They bore down with no space separating one from the next as if they were in mutual pursuit. Presently patches within the moving bank that appeared wispier than the rest gradually expanded. One corner in particular appeared to be breaking up in the wind and about to allow a pale light to shine through.
Thankful that the weather appeared to be more kindly disposed toward him than he had anticipated, Tsuda got off the train and onto a streetcar just steps away, where he encountered again the two travelers from before. Seeing that, as he had imagined, they were after all traveling in the same direction as he and using the same transportation, he looked carefully at their hand luggage. But he saw nothing either large or bulky enough to have occasioned concern about getting wet in the rain. The elder at any rate appeared to have forgotten what he had said before.
“Looks like we’re in luck. That’s why I always say when you feel like leaving get up and go. Imagine how miserable we’d be if we’d of stayed home thinking if only we’d of known and feeling sorry for ourselves.”
“Exactly. But I wonder if the weather in Tokyo is as good as this right now?”
“No telling without you go back and have a look. We could always phone and ask. But I’ll wager it is — wherever you go in Japan, the weather’s about the same.”
Tsuda was amused. Just then the old man addressed him.
“I reckon you’re heading for the hot springs. I thought so the minute I saw you.”
“Is that so?”
“Yessir. When a man’s on his way to a spa, you can tell just by looking at him. Right?”
He turned to his companion sitting next to him.
“Exactly,” the fedora replied as if he had no choice.
Unable to suppress an uncomfortable smile at this display of clairvoyance, Tsuda tried to terminate the conversation, but the expansive elder wasn’t about to turn him loose.
“Seriously, though, traveling is so handy anymore. No matter where you’re going, you don’t need to bring nothing along but just yourself. It’s made to order for an impatient old geezer like me. Take this trip; except for my pouch here and that bag of the General’s, all I brought along is me own hide. Isn’t that so, General?”
Once again, the man who had been addressed as “General” had nothing more to say than “Exactly.” If this single piece of hand luggage couldn’t be brought aboard and had to be loaded on a baggage car to soak in the rain, the so-called narrow gauge would have to be either jammed with passengers or poorly designed beyond imagining. Tsuda considered inquiring but decided there was no point in asking now and remained silent.
After alighting from the streetcar, he lost sight of the two men. In the teahouse in front of the station, gazing at the assortment of color posters and gravures on the wall advertising one spa after the other as appealingly as possible, he took lunch. It was more than an hour past his usual lunchtime, and he attacked his tray hungrily. But his departure time was approaching. By the time he had put aside his chopsticks, it was time to board the narrow gauge.
The station at the beginning of the line was directly in front of the teahouse. Tsuda received his change from the waitress with his eye on the train, which appeared to be smaller than the trolley, and went outside at once. There was scarcely any distance between the ticket taker and the platform. A few strides carried him to the steps. Inside the car he encountered his fellow travelers yet again.
“Well met. Have a seat.”
The elder slid over for Tsuda, making room for him to spread out the lap blanket he carried over his arm.
“It’s nice and empty today.”
Describing with gusto and his usual effusiveness the milling crowd that rode this line to the hot springs at New Year’s and again in July and August to escape the heat, he turned to his companion.
“In season, it’s a sin to bring a woman along. For one thing their rear ends are too blessed big to fit in the seats. And they get drunk on you right away. We’re packed in here like sardines and they’re belching and puking; it’s enough to make a good man sick.”
He spoke as if oblivious of the young woman sitting next to him.
[170]
IT APPEARED that even here on the narrow gauge, Tsuda was not to be left in peace by this aging optimist. What would he find when he arrived at his destination? What attitude would he adopt in accordance with the circumstances? As considerations like these faded in and out of the scenes he conjured in his imagination — the inn, the surrounding mountains, whitewater streams — the elder roused him, rapping smartly at the door to his reveries.
“They’re still making do with a temporary bridge; you’d think they didn’t have a care in the world. Even so, them laborers are scrambling down there.”
When the elder had finished cursing the fact, implying that the railroad’s negligence was at fault, that the real bridge had yet to be replaced after a flood had washed it away a year ago, he called Tsuda’s attention to a newly constructed house at the mouth of a river that flowed into the sea.
“That house was washed away, too, but somebody didn’t waste no time rebuilding it. Put the railroad to shame.”
“They probably don’t want to lose this year’s summer guests.”
“Closed for the summer in these parts will set you back some, that’s for certain. Without greed it seems that nothing gets done in much of a rush. It’s the same with this narrow gauge; one way or another they’re making do with a temporary bridge so the company jumps on its high horse and won’t replace it.”
Tsuda was left with no choice but to fall into step alongside the elder’s view of life, but during lulls in the conversation he closed his eyes as if dozing and abandoned himself to his own thoughts. A series of random, fragmented images paraded back and forth across his mind: the expression on O-Nobu’s face that morning; the Yoshikawas’ houseboy at the station; the basket of fruit he had carried onto the train. He was aware of an impulse to open the basket and share Madam’s gift with the two travelers. But he pictured vividly the effort the gesture would cost him and their insufferably overdone expressions of gratitude on accepting his generosity. Thereupon the elder and the fedora abruptly vanished and in their place a shadow-puppet image of plump Madam Yoshikawa marched into his imagination. From there at once he leaped to Kiyoko, the focal point at the center of his destination. In tandem with the train, his heart lurched forward.
The conveyance hyperbolically deemed a train clanked and rattled perilously up the steep grade of a mountainside that rose directly above the sea and then in a twinkling had nosed into the mountains and was ascending and descending on its way. The tangerines planted in terraces on most of the slopes spread a colored carpet of warm southern autumn beneath the beautiful sky.