you had saved her from Komura San’s indignities. She hoped that you
would return, and waited sadly for you, until at last she grew so
ill that her father was anxious. I do not know who told him of your
visit,--Komura San, perhaps, for he was very angry at you,--but he
learned about it, and then he said that there was nothing to do with
such a forward girl but to marry her to the first man that offered.
And then”--O Kuni’s voice trembled slightly and O Tsuyu’s head bowed
low behind her sleeves,--“he came one day and said that Komura San
was willing to marry my young lady in spite of all that had happened,
because now you were dead and could not make any further trouble. O
Jo Sama[50] could not bear it,--she had always hated the man,--and
so at last she escaped, and I with her. She has now a small house at
Aoyama, so small a house that perhaps you could not find it if you were
to look, but she is happy, and I am still with her to care for her as
I have done since she was a baby. But still she thinks of you, and
to-night we came to worship before your tablet.”
Ogiwara listened to this recital with growing amazement. It was so
like, yet so unlike what he had heard before.
“Komura San told me that O Tsuyu was dead,” he said, “and I have prayed
and offered gifts to her spirit. I might have known that he was lying,
and that he had some evil plan behind that gentle voice of his. But
nothing matters now. We are both alive and together, and no one can
part us again.”
It was not until the wan light of the morning had begun to break
that Ogiwara let his visitors out and watched their figures vanish
softly through the mist, nor knew that Hanzo from his garden lodge had
seen the women as they passed. There was a faintness, a smoky, misty
look about them as they disappeared from sight that set the old man
thinking. Bidding O Koma attend the master if he called, and serve his
breakfast, Hanzo slipped into his clogs and clattered along the street
and up the hill by wide flights of stone steps to the temple of Kwannon
that stood amid its cedars not far away. The priest’s house stood
beside the temple, and the old man, stopping before it, bowed low and
cried in a humble voice:--
“Excuse the trouble I am making you.”
A little black-robed acolyte, with chubby face and neatly shaven head,
answered his summons and bade him enter. Hanzo, sitting on his heels
close to the door, waited until, in flowing silken vestment, ready for
the great temple service that was soon to begin, an old priest came to
learn his need.
“Your Reverence,” he said, “it is on behalf of my master I am come.
He lives not far from here, and I am troubled lest evil spirits have
bewitched him.”
As Hanzo told his story of the change that had come over his master,
the priest listened with an occasional sympathetic exclamation, and
when at the end the old servant described the vague, cloud-like figures
that had emerged from the house at dawn, the holy man shook his head.
“Clearly,” he said, “some evil ghost is troubling him. For sin
committed either in this life or in the past, he is bearing now the
punishment. Could you persuade him to come here to me, to study the
Master’s Law and learn the control of the flesh, all might yet be well
with him.”
Hanzo shook his head. “Your Reverence,” he said, “my master is a man of
proud and impetuous spirit. His old servant could hardly persuade him
to become a monk,” and he smiled between his hands as he bowed himself
to the mats, thinking how little such a course would make for the
servant’s welfare. “Is there no other way?”
“A way there is indeed, which may avail, if the young man’s soul is
not already knit to the spirit that haunts him. The words of the Lord
Buddha have power to drive out evil ghosts, if he whom they seek does
not will them to enter.”
Armed with a talisman, the good words of the Law written on white paper
by the priest himself, Hanzo went home, to find his master already out.
“Where did the master go?” he asked of O Koma, who had seen him off.
“He told the runners to take him to Aoyama, but gave no street or
number.”
“And was he any more sad and strange than he has always been of late?”
“Nay, Hanzo, he was bright and merry, and waved me good-by, and said
that he should probably bring guests home with him.”
Still perturbed in spirit, but somewhat cheered by Koma’s account
of Ogiwara’s mood, Hanzo pottered about his work; while the master,
bowling along behind two fast-running kurumayas, was saying to himself
with each revolution of the wheels, “I’ll find her house if it takes
all day.”
Through narrow streets and wide, across moats and canals, by
grass-grown fortifications topped with leaning pine-trees, along the
sentinel-guarded wall of the Crown Prince’s Palace and across the great
parade ground where white-clad regiments were drilling, into a suburb
of green lanes, bamboo fences, grassy fields, and here and there a
rice-swamp, he came at last. Here he dismissed his men and, alone and
on foot, wandered from house to house, reading the name-boards that
hung before each gate. It was a fruitless search. No Iijima Tsuyu Ko
was to be found among them all. His gayety was gone. Tired out with
heat and disappointment, he turned at last toward home. In the sultry
August afternoon the little open-fronted shops were drowsing under
their overhanging eaves. No kuruma was in sight, hardly a foot-traveler
was visible. Tēichi stood before the gate of the great cemetery.
Within, it looked cool and quiet and green. There was an odor of
incense about it. Fresh flowers stood on every stone, and here and
there quiet parties of women and children were brushing with reverent
hands fallen petals or stray leaves from the graves.
Listlessly he wandered in, thinking of nothing but the quiet green
coolness of the place, and walking slowly toward the opposite gate,
where he was sure to find a kuruma to take him home. And as he walked
with down-dropped head, he saw before him a new-made grave. It had no
stone, only an upright pole set up to mark the spot,--sign that the
first year had not passed since death,--and hanging above the grave,
waving slightly even in the still sultry heat of the August afternoon,
was the peony lantern which had glowed from his veranda the previous
night.
“Such a small house that perhaps you could not find it, even if you
were to look--but I am still with her to care for her--and she is
happy.”
O Kuni’s words were in his ears as his tears fell fast above the “small
house.”
“At last she escaped, and I with her”--Well he understood now the words
which last night had meant so little to his dull brain.
“Happy escape,” he said to himself. “O Tsuyu San, I too must escape and
be happy!”
Somehow or other he reached his home in Negishi, and Hanzo’s heart
sank when he saw his master’s face. Untouched he sent away the supper
that Koma had prepared for his expected guests, and then dismissed his
servants for the night.
“I must have a long rest,--I am tired,” he said. “Do not wake me before
nine to-morrow morning.”
Hanzo had pasted above the gate the talisman that the good priest had
given him, but it was with an anxious heart that he closed up the
shutters for the night and then lay and listened like a cat, wondering
and dreading what the night might bring forth.
There was a faint clicking of clogs, and then two women’s voices
speaking in low tones outside the gate. Then came a stifled sobbing and
a wail, thin and piercing, shrilled into words:--
“Tēichi, oh, Tēichi, would you send me away?”
Trembling, but with every sense alert, Hanzo heard the master slide the
_amado_ aside, heard him pat-pat in the garden sandals to the gate,
heard the heavy bolt move in its socket and the hinges groan. He dared
not look, but all his brains were centred in his ears.
“O Tsuyu San,” came in a whisper, “have you come for me? I too would
escape and dwell with you in your small house in Aoyama.”
Hanzo opened his eyes, crawled to the ventilating opening in the
_amado_, and looked. Two forms like smoke or mist were drifting beside
his master. A peony lantern, glowing and waving, lighted their faces,
and they were pale as death. The voices died away, the floating vague
figures vanished within the house, and softly, very softly, the
master’s _amado_ slid back into its place.
By nine o’clock the next morning the August sun had flooded all the
little garden with its light, and driven far away the shadows and
horrors of the night. Hanzo, obedient to his master’s order, pushed
aside the _amado_, his fears almost at rest in the warmth and
brightness of the morning. All was quiet within and dark; the light
from the one opened shutter fell across the guest-room into the little
four-mat room in which the master slept. And he was sleeping still. A
peony lantern hung above his head, a smile lingered upon his lips, and
clasped tightly in his hand he held a bit of golden lacquer,[51]--an
incense-box with little spots of mould that tarnished its brightness,
and on its lid the seven flowers of autumn worked by a master hand.
Thus the two tokens of a deathless love were joined in one again, and
Tēichi too had escaped and was happy.
FOOTNOTES:
[47] A hero of the twelfth century, noted not only for his skill in
war, but also for his adventures with the fair sex.
[48] The lotus is always associated with death in the Japanese mind.
[49] See note 1, page 3.
[50] The title used in speaking to or about a young unmarried lady.
[51] It is the custom in Japan to bury with the dead any small
keepsakes specially prized during life. The lacquered incense-box seems
to have been such a keepsake, given to Tsuyu by her mother, treasured
by her in life, and buried with her.
IX
THE LADY OF THE SCROLL
Kintaro Yamazaki was sitting in his little upper room with a letter
spread out on the floor in front of him, thinking. He was thinking
so hard that his brows were wrinkled, his thick black hair stood up
straight on his head, and his eyes, fixed on vacancy, were closed to
two narrow black lines in his handsome, smooth, young face.
The thought did not seem to come to any result, for soon, with a sigh,
he wrenched himself away from it, reached out for the little tea tray
that stood beside him, filled up the pot from the kettle that steamed
over the _hibachi_, and sipped his tea from a small cup with much
gusto. His face lightened with the cheering draught, and he said aloud,
perhaps by way of strengthening his own resolution, “I will ask them
to wait. Surely they might let me finish my studies first!”
A step sounded on the ladder-like stair-way that led to his room.
There was a rustling of garments in the passage, and a meek voice cried
out:--
“Excuse the trouble I am making you.”
Kintaro made no move from his place. He knew it was his landlady’s
daughter coming to see whether he had tea and water and charcoal
enough. He only shouted rather gruffly, for his mind was still on his
letter, “Come!” and plunged again into thought. The sliding paper
screen was pushed gently open, just wide enough to admit the frowzy
head and broad face of O Matsu.
“Excuse the trouble I am making you,” she said again, in a small,
humble voice, and bowed to the matted floor.
“Come in!” he answered, less gruffly, and the girl hitched meekly in
on her knees, pulled in the charcoal basket, the tea caddy, the cold
water pot, and a long, narrow bundle, and bowed once more.
“The postman brought this for you,” she said, as she bowed again,
pushing the bundle toward him with grimy fingers.
A trace of curiosity lighted Kintaro’s narrow black eyes, but the girl
did not observe it, as he nodded stiffly and left it lying. She knew as
well as he that a large package by mail was an excitement in his life,
and she would have liked to stay and watch him open it; but he made no
move, so she busied herself for a few moments with her work and crept
humbly from the room, to lie in wait outside the door and listen.
Kintaro was an art student in Tokyo, and after three or four years of
hard study and much practice he was beginning to acquire some little
reputation. He had come from his country home in the north with the
idea that he would be a great artist. He had made his way into the
studio of one of the foremost painters of the day; and had cooked,
washed dishes, run errands, swept, mixed colors, cleaned brushes, and
acted as servant apprentice, until his good temper, perseverance, and
real talent had procured for him the interest and careful attention
of his master. Little by little he had learned the secrets of art,
the firm, bold strokes, the wonderful blending of colors that had
made his master famous, and now he was taking a last year in the art
school of the Imperial University before going back to his home. He
was an only son, and his parents missed him sorely. He was given what
seemed to them an ample allowance, but what was, in the extravagant
modern Tokyo, a mere pittance, with which, for this last year, he could
only rent a small room in a poor street, and live in the cheapest
manner. The little daughter of the house, who answered his summons
when he clapped his hands, was a thorn in his flesh. She was always
grimy and disheveled; her dress was usually badly disarranged; she
was curious about him and his belongings; and once when he came home
at an unexpected hour, he found her pawing over his sketches with
dirty fingers. It was the instinct of self-defense that led him to sit
unmoved and without interest in his bundle while she puttered about
her work, and the same instinct that led him to recall her after her
exit from the room and send her out into the street for a package
of cigarettes of an unusual brand. He knew it would take her ten or
fifteen minutes to find them, and that in that time he could satisfy
his curiosity without appeasing hers.
With a sigh of relief he heard her bare feet slipping down the steep,
polished stairs, and then the clatter of her clogs as she hastened out
to make the purchase. He leaned forward and took up the bundle.
“From Noguchi,” he said, as he read the superscription. “What in the
world is he sending me? I didn’t even know he was back from China yet.”
He untied the strings and unwrapped the paper as he spoke, laying
bare a plain wooden box, tied about the middle with a heavy cord of
red silk. Kintaro’s hand trembled with eagerness as he opened the box,
unrolled the yellow cotton in which its contents were wrapped, and
carefully took out a scroll tied with silken bands. Very tenderly he
unrolled it, until at last it lay at full length on the mats.
He held his breath with amazement and delight. “What a beauty!” he
murmured at last.
It was a picture of a woman, the most beautiful that he had ever seen.
The graceful form was dressed in sumptuous trailing garments, the fair,
oval face with its crown of raven hair wore an expression of appealing
sadness. The lines and coloring were only such as a master can command.
The picture was mounted on blue brocade, with carved ivory rollers at
each end. As Kintaro leaned over studying it, he heard the clatter of
clogs in the courtyard below, and hastily rolling up his treasure, he
thrust it into its box, and the box into a cupboard, before the bare
feet had reached the top of the stairs.
Humbly the untidy little maid bowed as she presented the package of
cigarettes with a murmured apology for her delay in procuring them.
Kintaro looked at her with aversion. “Why do they want me to marry?” he
thought within himself. “Women are no good. I don’t want them around.”
He got up, seized his hat, and pounded noisily in his stocking-feet
down the stairs. He must get out into the streets, among the busy
crowds, and forget his thoughts.
For an hour or more he tramped along, so abstracted that he hardly
knew where he was going. Once he walked right over a toddling boy,
who was as absorbed in kite-flying as Kintaro was in meditation, and
had to pick him up and give him a penny to spend on sweets before the
urchin would cease his lusty bawling. Once a jinrikisha man tearing
along at full speed nearly ran into him, pushing him aside with his
outstretched hand just in time to prevent a catastrophe. When he
returned to his lodgings, it was dark, and the streets were full of the
moving luminous globes that light the jinrikisha men at their evening
work.
The little maid met him at the door, bowing low and murmuring “O
kaeri!” by way of greeting. He passed up to his room, where a lamp was
burning, a tea-kettle bubbling over the fire, and his supper awaiting
him on a tray.
O Matsu followed and sat down to watch him as he ate, filling his rice
bowl again and again from the covered box at her side. His aversion
came over him in full force. How could he marry? Women were disgusting
to him. Poor boy! During his years of work in Tokyo he had never spoken
to a woman higher in rank and education than his landlady, and to his
mind poor little Matsu, with her frowzy hair and grimy fingers, was the
type of womanhood.
And now his parents had written him that the question of marriage could
no longer be deferred. He was their only son, and his duty required
that he raise up grandchildren to do them honor. They wished him to
take a wife from his own province and city, and had been thinking of
their neighbor’s daughter, O Fumi, who was just seventeen years old,
and would make a good daughter-in-law, if all that they could learn of
her was true. This they had written to Kintaro in the letter he had
received that morning, and it was this that had so disturbed his mind.
O Fumi San,--he remembered her. She was a little girl when he left
home,--something of a hoyden, with a slim figure and restless ways.
He remembered how fast she could run, with her kimono tucked up to her
knees like a peasant girl’s, and her bare brown legs flashing back and
forth as fast as a jinrikisha man’s. She used to laugh at him too, for
he was always sitting on his heels working away with brush and paper;
and she had nicknamed him “Bozu,” pretending to think that he was
preparing himself for the priesthood. He had been away from home five
years now, and she was seventeen, and his parents wanted him to marry
her. Undoubtedly she had grown into a fat, red-cheeked maiden like O
Matsu there. He shuddered at the thought, and held out his rice-bowl to
be filled with tea, a sign that he had finished his meal.
“O Matsu San, how old are you?” he said, anxious to know the worst
about his proposed bride.
O Matsu, in an ecstasy of smiles and bows at this unexpected interest
in herself, answered as well as she could in the midst of her
prostrations that she was seventeen. Kintaro’s soul shrank within him.
It was just as he thought! They were like that at seventeen, he said to
himself, and the picture of roguish, bright-eyed O Fumi San vanished
from his heart, and O Matsu, his pet aversion, obsessed him once more.
The real O Matsu, humbly gathering up the supper things, vanished
backward through the screen door, leaving Kintaro lost in gloomy
meditations. Suddenly the thought of Noguchi’s present came to him,
and he shook off his forebodings, to open the cupboard, unroll the
_kakemono_,[52] and hang it in the _tokonoma_,[53] the place of honor
in the room.
How radiantly lovely it looked as it hung there! Kintaro gazed at it
as one enchanted, until to his imagination the face and figure seemed
those of a living woman. Surely those mournful eyes were looking at
him! That mouth which had been so sad was almost smiling! He moved
uneasily to the other side of the room, and looked again. The eyes were
still following him. He turned his back and sat with his face to the
wall. At last he could bear it no longer, and looked around to see
the eyes still fixed upon him, and the lips curving into a smile about
which there could be no mistake.
His spirit melted within him. His whole soul went out to the fair being
in the picture. Long after he had gone to bed he lay with wide open
eyes, staring at the _tokonoma_, and at the graceful figure that seemed
to move back and forth, to draw near and recede, in the dim light of
the night lantern.
From that time life put on a new aspect for Kintaro. In the daytime
his _kakemono_ lay rolled up and hidden in the cupboard, and he worked
at his art as best he could. But work as he might, only one image was
before his eyes, only one thought possessed his mind. He had written
to his parents that he was coming home in six months, and asked them
to let the matter of O Fumi San wait until his return; and with his
mind thus free for a time from the vexing question, he let his thoughts
centre about the lady of the scroll. Every night, as soon as O Matsu’s
ministrations were over, he hung the _kakemono_ on the wall, and lived
in its companionship until morning. He grew pale and thin. His fellow
students joked him on his appearance, and asked him which of the
fashionable geishas of the day was making havoc with his heart, but he
bristled up so fiercely at the jesting, and put his hand to his side
with so meaning a motion, that the mirth died away in their throats,
and he was left alone with his art and his dreams.
One evening, when O Matsu had carried away his supper tray, and he had
hung up the _kakemono_ in its accustomed place, Kintaro sat down at his
desk to write. His soul was so full that it must find expression, and
his thoughts poured out upon the paper in a poem to the object of his
worship. It was not very good poetry, perhaps, but it came from the
depths of an honest young heart, and it relieved his mind. He wrote it
out in his best hand on a poem card and hung it beside the picture,
just as he had often hung poems on the branches of his favorite
plum-tree at Kameido.
The moon was shining so brightly that night that Kintaro put out his
lamp and sat in the moonlight on the piazza of his little room. The
scent of the plum-blossoms was in the air, and in the street below
sounded the beating of drums, the clatter of many clogs, and the sweet,
high voices of excited children, for there was a great temple festival
in progress, and the whole city was out making holiday. Then suddenly
there stood before him in the moonlight the beautiful lady of the
scroll.
Kintaro did not dare to move. He thought it must be a dream. But the
vision, if vision it were, sank gracefully to the floor, bowed low
three times, and began to speak. The voice was low and sweet, and the
language was pure and elegant.
“You have done me many and great favors,” said his beautiful visitor,
“and I have been very happy since I came here. If what you say in your
poem is true, and if you really wish me to stay with you, I will be
yours forever.”
Kintaro was choking with joy and fear. He gasped, he nearly fainted. He
seized the hand of the picture lady, and it was so warm and soft and
human that his courage returned and he was himself again. Far into the
night they talked, and in answer to his eager questions she told him
all about herself.
“I lived many years ago,” she said, “in China. I was a gentleman’s
daughter, and my name was Shorei.” A tear fell from her eyes upon
Kintaro’s hand. “One year there was a famine, and riots among the
peasantry, and my father’s house was burned. We ran away and hid, for
we were all afraid of the peasants. We went up into the mountains, and
I was taken by a robber. He sold me”--she shuddered--“sold me”--her
voice dropped to a whisper--“to a tea-house.”
She was weeping now, and so was Kintaro. “They said I was beautiful,
they gave me fine clothes, and they petted me and made much of me. It
was there that the painter painted my picture. They tried to make me
like the life, but I could not bear it. I died.”
Kintaro started violently and dropped her hand. She looked at him with
her sweet, sorrowful eyes.
“I was glad when I was dead,” she said, “for spirits cannot suffer as I
suffered. Then I came to your country, and when I saw how you loved my
picture, I thought perhaps you would love me.”
She looked at him reproachfully, and he stretched forth his hand to
her, but she vanished from his sight.
In the street the lanterns twinkled and the clogs clattered and the
children shouted and sang, but Kintaro sat alone, staring at the spot
where his scroll lady had been, until the city sank to sleep and the
moon went down.
All the next day his thoughts were on his picture lady. He could hardly
wait for the coming of night, and he hurried poor little O Matsu about
her final work until she retired with her broad red face drawn into a
woeful pucker and tears in her beady black eyes.
When he hung up the scroll he noticed that the lips were smiling, and
that the eyes seemed a shade less sad. They were looking to-night,
not at him, but beyond him at the little desk at which he studied
and wrote. On the desk lay a card on which was written in an elegant
feminine hand a poem. Eagerly he read it, and the tears sprang to his
eyes. It was only a couplet,--
“God’s will it is that here I stay
To love and live with you alway.”
Over and over again he read it, and he held out his hands to the
picture. “Is it true?” he asked. “Will you live with me always?”