I
The old folks call it Yeddo. To the young, "Tokyo" has a pleasant,
modern sound, and comes glibly. But whether young or old, those whose
home it is know that the great flat city, troubled with green hills,
cleft by a shining river, and veined in living canals, is the central
spot of all the world.
Storms visit Tokyo,--with fury often, sometimes with destruction.
Earthquakes cow it; snow falls upon its temple roofs, swings in wet,
dazzling masses from the bamboo plumes, or balances in white strata
along green-black pine branches. The summer sun scorches the face of
Yeddo, and summer rain comes down in wide bands of light. With evening
the mist creeps up, thrown over it like a covering, casting a spell of
silence through which the yellow lanterns of the hurrying jinrikishas
dance an elfish dance, and the voices of the singing-girls pierce like
fine blades of sound.
But to know the full charm of the great city, one must wake with it at
some rebirth of dawn. This hour gives to the imaginative in every land
a thrill, a yearning, and a pang of visual regeneration. In no place
is this wonder more deeply touched with mystery than in modern Tokyo.
Far off to the east the Sumida River lies in sleep. Beyond it, temple
roofs--black keels of sunken vessels--cut a sky still powdered thick
with stars. Nothing moves, and yet a something changes! The darkness
shivers as to a cold touch. A pallid haze breathes wanly on the
surface of the impassive sky. The gold deepens swiftly and turns to a
faint rose flush. The stars scamper away like mice.
Across the moor of gray house eaves the mist wavers. Day troubles it.
A pink light rises to the zenith, and the mist shifts and slips away in
layers, pink and gold and white. Now far beyond the grayness, to the
west, the cone of Fuji flashes into splendor. It, too, is pink. Its
shape is of a lotos bud, and the long fissures that plough a mountain
side are now but delicate gold veining on a petal. Slowly it seems to
open. It is the chalice of a new day, the signal and the pledge of
consecration. Husky crows awake in the pine trees, and doves under the
temple eaves. The east is red beyond the river, and the round, red
sun, insignia of this land, soars up like a cry of triumph.
On the glittering road of the Sumida, loaded barges, covered for the
night with huge squares of fringed straw mats, begin to nod and preen
themselves like a covey of gigantic river birds. Sounds of prayer and
of silver matin bells come from the temples, where priest and acolyte
greet the Lord Buddha of a new day. From tiny chimneyless kitchens of
a thousand homes thin blue feathers of smoke make slow upward progress,
to be lost in the last echoes of the vanishing mist. Sparrows begin to
chirp, first one, then ten, then thousands. Their voices have the
clash and chime of a myriad small triangles.
The wooden outer panels (amado) of countless dwellings are thrust
noisily aside and stacked into a shallow closet. The noise
reverberates from district to district in a sharp musketry of sound.
Maid servants call cheerily across bamboo fences. Shoji next are
opened, disclosing often the dull green mosquito net hung from corner
to corner of the low-ceiled sleeping rooms. Children, in brilliant
night robes, run to the verandas to see the early sun; cocks strut in
pigmy gardens. Now, from along the streets rise the calls of flower
peddlers, of venders of fish, bean-curd, vegetables, and milk. Thus
the day comes to modern Tokyo, which the old folks still call Yeddo.
On such a midsummer dawn, not many years ago, old Kano Indara, sleeping
in his darkened chamber, felt the summons of an approaching joy.
Beauty tugged at his dreams. Smiling, as a child that is led by love,
he rose, drew aside softly the shoji, then the amado of his room, and
then, with face uplifted, stepped down into his garden. The beauty of
the ebbing night caught at his sleeve, but the dawn held him back.
It was the moment just before the great Sun took place upon his throne.
Kano still felt himself lord of the green space round about him. On
their pretty bamboo trellises the potted morning-glory vines held out
flowers as yet unopened. They were fragile, as if of tissue, and were
beaded at the crinkled tips with dew. Kano's eyelids, too, had dew of
tears upon them. He crouched close to the flowers. Something in him,
too, some new ecstacy was to unfurl. His lean body began to tremble.
He seated himself at the edge of the narrow, railless veranda along
which the growing plants were ranged. One trembling bud reached out as
if it wished to touch him.
The old man shook with the beating of his own heart. He was an artist.
Could he endure another revelation of joy? Yes, his soul, renewed ever
as the gods themselves renew their youth, was to be given the inner
vision. Now, to him, this was the first morning. Creation bore down
upon him.
The flower, too, had begun to tremble. Kano turned directly to it.
The filmy, azure angles at the tip were straining to part, held
together by just one drop of light. Even as Kano stared the drop fell
heavily, plashing on his hand. The flower, with a little sob, opened
to him, and questioned him of life, of art, of immortality. The old
man covered his face, weeping.
The last of his race was Kano Indara; the last of a mighty line of
artists. Even in this material age his fame spread as the mists of his
own land, and his name was known in barbarian countries far across the
sea. Tokyo might fall under the blight of progress, but Kano would
hold to the traditions of his race. To live as a true artist,--to die
as one,--this was his care. He might have claimed high position in the
great Art Museum recently inaugurated by the new government, and housed
in an abomination of pink stucco with Moorish towers at the four
corners. He might even have been elected president of the new Academy,
and have presided over the Italian sculptors and degenerate French
painters imported to instruct and "civilize" modern Japan. Stiff
graphite pencils, making lines as hard and sharp as those in the faces
of foreigners themselves, were to take the place of the soft charcoal
flake whose stroke was of satin and young leaves. Horrible brushes,
fashioned of the hair of swine, pinched in by metal bands, and wielded
with a hard tapering stick of varnished wood, were to be thrust into
the hands of artists,--yes,--artists--men who, from childhood, had
known the soft pliant Japanese brush almost as a spirit hand;--had felt
the joy of the long stroke down fibrous paper where the very thickening
and thinning of the line, the turn of the brush here, the easing of it
there, made visual music,--men who had realized the brush as part not
only of the body but of the soul,--such men, indeed,--such artists,
were to be offered a bunch of hog bristles, set in foreign tin. Why,
even in the annals of Kano's own family more than one faithful brush
had acquired a soul of its own, and after the master's death had gone
on lamenting in his written name. But the foreigners' brushes, and
their little tubes of ill-smelling gum colored with dead hues! Kano
shuddered anew at the thought.
Naturally he hated all new forms of government. He regretted and
deplored the magnanimity of his Emperor in giving to his people, so
soon, a modern constitution. What need had Art of a constitution?
Across the northern end of Yeddo runs the green welt of a table-land.
Midway, at the base of this, tucked away from northern winds, hidden in
green bamboo hedges, Kano lived, a mute protest against the new.
Beside himself, of the household were Umè-ko, his only child, and an
old family servant, Mata.
Kano's garden, always the most important part of a Japanese dwelling
place, ran out in one continuous, shallow terrace to the south. A
stone wall upheld its front edge from the narrow street; and on top of
this wall stiff hedges grew. In one corner, however, a hillock had
been raised, a "Moon Viewing Place," such as poets and artists have
always found necessary. From its flat top old Kano had watched through
many years the rising of the moon; had seen, as now, a new dawn possess
a new-created earth,--had traced the outlines of the stars. By day he
sometimes loved to watch the little street below, delighting in the
motion and color of passing groups.
For the garden, itself, it was fashioned chiefly of sand, pebbles,
stones, and many varieties of pine, the old artist's favorite plant. A
small rock-bound pond curved about the inner base of the moon-viewing
hill, duplicating in its clear surface the beauties near. A few
splendid carp, the color themselves of dawn, swam lazily about with
noses in the direction of the house whence came, they well knew,
liberal offerings of rice and cake.
Kano had his plum trees, too; the classic "umè," loved of all artists,
poets, and decent-minded people generally. One tree, a superb specimen
of the kind called "Crouching-Dragon-Plum," writhed and twisted near
the veranda of the chamber of its name-child, Umè-ko, thrusting one
leafy arm almost to the paper shoji of her wall. Kano's transient
flowers were grown, for the most part in pots, and these his daughter
Umè-ko loved to tend. There were morning-glories for the mid-summer
season, peonies and iris for the spring, and chrysanthemums for autumn.
One foreign rose-plant, pink of bloom, in a blue-gray jar, had been
pruned and trained into a beauty that no western rose-bush ever knew.
Behind the Kano cottage the rise of ground for twenty yards was of a
grade scarcely perceptible to the eye. Here Mata did the family
washing; dried daikon in winter, and sweet-potato slices in the summer
sun. This small space she considered her special domain, and was at no
pains to conceal the fact. Beyond, the hill went upward suddenly with
the curve of a cresting wave. Higher it rose and higher, bearing a
tangled growth of vines and ferns and bamboo grass; higher and higher,
until it broke, in sheer mid-air, with a coarse foam of rock, thick
shrubs, and stony ledges. Almost at the zenith of the cottage garden
it poised, and a great camphor tree, centuries old, soared out into the
blue like a green balloon.
Behind the camphor tree, again, and not visible from the garden below,
stood a temple of the "Shingon" sect, the most mystic of the old
esoteric Buddhist forms. To the rear of this the broad, low,
rectangular buildings of a nunnery, gray and old as the temple itself
brooded among high hedges of the sacred mochi tree. This retreat had
been famous for centuries throughout Japan. More than once a Lady
Abbess had been yielded from the Imperial family. Formerly the temple
had owned many koku of rich land; had held feudal sway over rice fields
and whole villages, deriving princely revenue. With the restoration of
the Emperor to temporal power, some thirty years before the beginning
of this story, most of the land had been confiscated; and now, shrunken
like the papal power at Rome, the temple claimed, in land, only those
acres bounded by its own hedges and stone temple walls. There were the
main building itself, silent, impressive in towering majesty;
subordinate chapels and dwellings for priests, a huge smoke-stained
refectory, the low nunnery in its spreading gardens and, down the
northern slope of the hill, the cemetery, a lichen-growth, as it were,
of bristling, close-set tombs in gray stone, the splintered regularity
broken in places by the tall rounded column of a priest's grave, set in
a ring of wooden sotoba. At irregular intervals clusters of giant
bamboo trees sprang like green flame from the fissures of gray rock.
Even in humiliation, in comparative poverty, the temple dominated, for
miles around, the imagination of the people, and was the great central
note of the landscape. The immediate neighborhood was jealously proud
of it. Country folk, journeying by the street below, looked up with
lips that whispered invocation. Children climbed the long stone steps
to play in the temple courtyard, and feed the beautiful tame doves that
lived among the carved dragons of the temple eaves.
In that gray cemetery on the further slope Kano's wife, the young
mother who died so long ago that Umè-ko could not remember her at all,
slept beneath a granite shaft which said, "A Flower having blossomed in
the Night, the Halls of the Gods are fragrant." This was the Buddhist
kaimyo, or priestly invocation to the spirit of the dead. Of the more
personal part of the young mother, her name, age, and the date of her
"divine retirement," these were recorded in the household shrine of the
Kano cottage, where her "ihai" stood, just behind a little lamp of pure
vegetable oil whose light had never yet been suffered to die. Through
this shrine, and the daily loving offices required by it, she had never
ceased to be a presence in the house. Even in his passionate desire
for a son to inherit the name and traditions of his race, old Kano had
not been able to endure the thought of a second wife who might wish the
shrine removed.
Umè-ko and her father were well known at the temple, and worshipped
often before its golden altars. But Mata scorned the ceremony of the
older creed. She was a Shinshu, a Protestant. Her sect discarded
mysticism as useless, believed in the marriage of priests, and in the
abolition of the monastic life, and relied for salvation only on the
love and mercy of Amida, the Buddha of Light.
Sometimes at twilight a group of shadowy human figures, gray as the
doves themselves, crept out from the nunnery gate, crossed the wide,
pebbled courtyard of the temple and stood, for long moments, by the
gnarled roots of the camphor tree, staring out across the beauty of the
plain of Yeddo; its shining bay a great mirror to the south, and off,
on the western horizon, where the last light hung, Fuji, a cone of
porphyry, massive against the gold.
For a full hour, now, Kano had delighted in the morning-glories. At
intervals he strolled about the garden to touch separately, as if in
greeting, each beloved plant. Except for the deepening fervor of the
sun he would have kept no note of time. The last shred of mist had
vanished. Crows and sparrows were busy with breakfast for their
nestlings.
It was, perhaps, the clamor of these feathered parents that, at last,
awoke old Mata in her sleeping closet near the kitchen. She turned
drowsily. The presence of an unusual light under the shoji brought her
to her knees. The amado in the further part of the house were
undoubtedly open. Could robbers have come in the night? And were her
master and Miss Umè weltering in gore?
She was on her feet now, pushing with shaking fingers at the sliding
walls. She peered at first into Umè's room for there, indeed, lay the
core of old Mata's heart. A slender figure on the floor stirred
slightly and a sound of soft breathing filled the silence. All was
well in Umè's room. She knocked then on Kano's fusuma. There was no
response. Cautiously she parted them, and met an incoming flood of
morning light. The walls were opened. Through the small square
pillars of the veranda she could see, as in a frame, old Kano standing
in the garden beside the fish-pond. Even as she gazed, incredulous at
her own stupidity in sleeping so late, the temple bell above boomed out
six slow strokes. Six! Such a thing had never been known. Well, she
must be growing old and worthless. She had better fill her sleeve with
pebbles and cast herself into the nearest stream. She hurried back, a
tempestuous protest in every step.
"Miss Umè,--Umè-ko!" she called. "Ma-a-a! What has come to us both?
The Danna San walks about as if he had been awake for hours. And not a
cup of tea for him! The honorable fire does not exist. Surely a demon
of sleep has bewitched us."
She had entered the girl's room, and now, while speaking, crossed the
narrow space to fling wide, first the shoji, and then the outer amado.
Umè moved lazily. Her lacquered pillow, with its bright cushion,
rocked as she stirred. "No demon has found me, Mata San," she
murmured, smiling. "No demon unless it be you, cruel nurse, who have
dragged me back from a heavenly dream."
"Baku devour your dream!" cried Mata. "I say there is no fire beneath
the pot!"
Umè sat up now, and smoothed slowly the loops of her shining hair. The
yellow morning sun danced into the corners of her room, rioted among
the hues of her silken bed coverings, and paused, abashed, as it were,
before the delicate beauty of her face.
As Mata scolded, the girl nestled back among her quilts, smiling
mischievously. She loved to tease the old dame. "No, nurse," she
protested, "that cannot be. The baku feeds on evil dreams alone, and
this was not evil. Ah, nurse, it was so sweet a dream----"
"I can give no time to your honorable fooling," cried Mata, in
pretended anger. "Have I the arms of a Hundred-Handed Kwannon that I
can do all the household work at once? Attire yourself promptly, I
entreat: prepare one of the small trays for your august parent, and get
out two of the pickled plums from the blue jar."
Umè, with an exaggerated sigh of regret, rose to her feet. Quilt and
cushions were pushed into a corner for later airing. Her toilet was
swift and simple. To slip the bright-colored sleeping robe from her
and toss it to the heaped-up coverlids, don an undergarment of thin
white linen and a scant petticoat of blue crepe, draw over them a day
robe of blue and white cotton, and tie all in with a sash of brocaded
blue and gold,--that was the sum of it. For washing she had a shallow
wooden basin on the kitchen veranda, where cold water splashed
incessantly from bamboo tubes thrust into the hillside. Hurriedly
drying her face and hands on a small towel that hung from a swinging
bamboo hoop, she ran into the kitchen to assist the still grumbling
Mata.
By this time old Kano had again seated himself at the edge of his
veranda. The summer sun grew unpleasantly warm. The morning-glories
on their trellises had begun to droop. A little later they would hang,
wretched and limp, mere faded scraps of dissolution. Overhead the
temple bell struck seven. Kano shuddered at this foreign marking out
of hours. A melancholy, intense as had been his former ecstacy, began
to enfold his spirit. Perhaps he had waited too long for the simple
breakfast; perhaps the recent glory had drained him of vital force. A
hopelessness, alike of life and death, rose about him in a tide.
Umè prostrated herself upon the veranda near him. "Good morning,
august father. Will you deign to enter now and partake of food?"
Her voice and the morning face she lifted might have won a smile from a
stone image. Kano turned sourly. "Why," he thought, "in Shaka's name,
could n't she have been a son?"
He rose, however, shaking off his wooden clogs so that they remained
upon the path below, and followed Umè to the zashiki, or main room of
the house, with the best view of the garden.
The tea was delicious in its first delicate infusion; the pickled plums
most stimulating to a morning appetite.
"Rice and fish will soon honorably eventuate," Umè assured him as she
went back, smiling, into the kitchen.
Kano pensively lifted a plum upon the point of a toothpick and began
nibbling at its wrinkled skin. Yes, why could she not have been a son?
As it was, the girl could paint,--paint far better than most women even
the famous ones of old. But, after all, no woman painter could be
supreme. Love comes first with women! They have not the strong heart,
the cruelty, the fierce imagination that go to the making of a great
artist. Even among the men of the day, corrupted and distracted as
they are by foreign innovations, could real strength be found? Alas!
Art was surely doomed, and his own life,--the life of the last great
Kano, futile and perishable as the withering flowers on their stems.
He ate of his fish and rice in gloomy silence. Umè's gentle words
failed to bring a reply. When the breakfast dishes were removed the
old man continued listlessly in his place, staring out with unseeing
eyes into his garden.
A loud knock came to the wooden entrance gate near the kitchen. Kano
heard a man's deep tones, Mata's thin voice answering an enquiry, and
then the soft murmur of Umè's words. An instant later, heavy
footsteps, belonging evidently to a wearer of foreign shoes, came
around by the side of the house toward the garden. Kano looked up,
frowning with annoyance. A fine-looking man of middle age appeared.
Kano's irritation vanished.
"Ando Uchida!" he cried aloud, springing to his feet, and hurrying to
the edge of the veranda. "Ando Uchida, is it indeed you? How stout
and strong and prosperous you seem! Welcome!"
"A little too stout for warm weather," laughed Ando, as laboriously he
removed his foreign shoes and accepted his host's assistance up the one
stone step to the veranda.
"Welcome, Ando Uchida," said Kano again, when they had taken seats.
"It is quite five years since my eyes last hung upon your honorable
face."
"Is it indeed so long?" said the other. "Time has the wings of a
dragon-fly!"
Ando had brought with him a roll, apparently of papers, tied up in
yellow cloth. This parcel he put carefully behind him on the matted
floor. He then drew from his kimono sleeve a pink-bordered foreign
pocket-handkerchief, and began to mop his damp forehead. Kano's
politeness could not hide, entirely, a shudder of antipathy. He
hurried into new speech. "And where, if it is not rude to ask, has my
friend Ando sojourned during the long absence?"
"Chiefly among the mountains of Kiu Shiu," answered the other.
"Kiu Shiu," murmured the artist. "I wandered there in youth and have
thought always to return. The rocks and cliffs are of great beauty. I
remember well one white, thin waterfall that flung itself out like a
laugh, but never reached a thing so dull as earth. Midway it was
splintered upon a sunbeam, and changed into rainbows, pearls, and
swallows!"
"I know it excellently well," said Uchida. "Indeed I have been zealous
to preserve it, chiefly for your sake."
"Preserve it? What can you mean?"
"I have become a government inspector of mines," explained Uchida, in
some embarrassment. "I thought you knew. There is a rich coal deposit
near that waterfall."
"Ando! Ando!" groaned the old man, "you were once an artist! The
foreigners are tainting us all."
"I love art still," said Ando, "but I make a better engineer. And--I
beseech you to overlook my vulgarity--I am getting rich."
Kano groaned again. "Oh, this foreign influence! It is the curse of
modern Japan! Love of money is starting a dry rot in the land of the
gods. Success, material power, money,--all of them illusions, miasma
of the soul, blinding men to reality! Surely my karma was evil that I
needed to be reborn into this age of death!"
Ando looked sympathetic and a little contrite. "Since we are indeed
hopelessly of the present," ventured he, "may it not be as well to let
the foreigners teach us their methods of success?"
"Success?" cried Kano, almost angrily. "What do they succeed in except
the grossest material gains? There is no humanity in them. Love of
beauty dies in the womb. Shall we strive to become as dead things?"
"The love of beauty will never perish in this land," said Ando more
earnestly than he had yet spoken. "A Japanese loves Art as he loves
life. Our rich merchants become the best patrons of the artists."
"Patrons of the artists," echoed Kano, wearily. "You voice your own
degradation, friend Ando. In the great days, who dared to speak of
patronage to us. Emperors were artists and artists Emperors! It was
to us that all men bowed."
"Yes, yes, that is honorably true," Ando hastened to admit. "And so
would they in this age bow to you, if you would but allow it."
"I am not worthy of homage," said Kano, his head falling forward on his
breast. "None knows this better than I,--and yet I am the greatest
among them. Show me one of our young artists who can stand like Fudo
in the flame of his own creative thought! There is none!"
"What you say is unfortunately true of the present Tokyo
painters,--perhaps equally of Kioto and other large cities,--but----"
Here Ando paused as if to arouse expectancy. Kano did not look up.
"But," insisted the other, "may it not be possible that in some place
far from the clamor of modern progress,--in some remote mountain
pass,--maybe----"
Kano looked up now sharply enough. Apathy and indifference flared up
like straws in a sudden flame of passion. He made a fierce gesture.
"Not that, not that!" he cried. "I cannot bear it! Do not seek to
give false life to a hope already dead. I am an old man. I have hoped
and prayed too long. I must go down to my grave without an heir,--even
an adopted heir,--for there is no disciple worthy to succeed!"
"Dear friend, believe that I would not willingly add to a grief like
this. I assure you----" Ando was beginning, when his words were cut
short by the entrance of Umè-ko. She bore a tray with cups, a tiny
steaming tea-pot, and a dish heaped with cakes in the forms and tints
of morning-glories. This offering she placed near Uchida; and then,
retiring a few steps, bowed to the floor, drawing her breath inaudibly
as a token of welcome and respect. Being merely a woman, old Kano did
not think of presenting her. She left the room noiselessly as she had
come. Ando watched every movement with admiration and a certain
weighing of possibilities in his shrewd face. He nodded as if to
himself, and leaned toward Kano.
"Was that not Kano Umè-ko, your daughter?"
"Yes," said the old man, gruffly; "but she is not a son."
"Fortunately for the eyes of men she is not," smiled Ando. "That is
the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, and I have seen many. She
welcomed me at the gate."
Kano, engaged in pouring tea, made no reply.
"Also, if current speech be true, she has great talent," persisted the
visitor. "One can see genius burning like a soft light behind her
face. I hear everywhere of her beauty and her fame."
"Oh, she does well,--even remarkably well for a woman," admitted Kano.
"But, as I said before, she is a woman, and nothing alters that. I
tell you, Ando!" he cried, in a small new gust of irritation,
"sometimes I have wished that she had been left utterly untouched by
art. She paints well now, because my influence is never lifted. She
knows nothing else. I have allowed no lover to approach. Yet, some
day love will find her, as one finds a blossoming plum tree in the
night. In every rock and tree she paints I can see the hint of that
coming lover; in her flowers, exquisitely drawn, nestle the faces of
her children. She knows it not, but I know,--I know! She thinks she
cares only for her father and her art. When I die she will marry, and
then how many pictures will she paint? Bah!"
"Poor child!" murmured Ando, under his breath.
"Poor child," mocked the artist, whose quick ears had caught the
whisper. "Poor Nippon, rather, and poor old Kano, who has no better
heir than this frail girl. Oh, Ando, I have clamored to the gods! I
have made pilgrimages and given gifts,--but there is no one to inherit
my name and the traditions of my race. Nowhere can I find a Dragon
Painter!"
Ando put his hand out quickly behind him, seized the long roll tied in
yellow cloth, and began to unfasten it.
Kano was panting with the vehemence of his own speech. He poured
another little cup of tea and drained it. He began now to watch Ando,
and found himself annoyed by the deliberation of his friend's motions.
"Strange, strange----" Ando was murmuring. An instant later came the
whisper, "very, very strange!"
"Why do you repeat it?" cried Kano, irritably. "There was nothing
strange in what I said."
The parcel was now untied. Ando held a roll of papers outward.
"Examine these, Kano Indara," he said impressively. "If I do not
greatly mistake, the gods, at last, have heard your prayer."
Kano went backward as if from fire. "No! I cannot,--I must not hope!
Too long have I searched. Not a schoolboy who thought he could draw an
outline in the sand with his toe but I have fawned on him. I dare not
look. Ando, to-day I am shaken as if with an ague of the soul.
I--I--could not bear another disappointment." He did indeed seem
piteously weak and old. He hid his face in long, lean, twitching
fingers.
Ando was sincerely affected. "This is to be no disappointment," said
he, gently. "I pray you, listen patiently to my clumsy speech."
"I will strive to listen calmly," said Kano, in a broken voice. "But
first honorably secrete the papers once again. They tantalize my
sight."
Uchida put them down on the floor beside him and threw the cloth
carelessly above. He was more moved than he cared to show. He strove
now to speak simply, directly, and with convincing earnestness. Kano
had settled into his old attitude of dejection.
"One morning, not more than six weeks ago," began Uchida, "the
engineering party which I command had climbed some splintered peaks of
the Kiu Shiu range to a spot quite close, indeed, to that thin
waterfall which you remember----"
"One might forget his friends and relatives, but not a waterfall like
that!" interrupted Kano.
"Suddenly a storm, blown down apparently from a clear sky, caught up
the mountain and our little group of men in a great blackness."
"The mountain deities were angered at your presumption," nodded Kano,
well pleased.
"It may be," admitted the other. "At any rate, the winds now hurried
in from the sea. Round cloud vapors split sidewise on the wedges of
the rocks. Voices screamed in the fissures. We clung to the
scrub-pines and the sa-sa grass for safety."
"I can see it all. I can feel it," whispered old Kano.
"We wished to descend, but knew no way. I shouted for aid. The others
shouted many times. Then from the very midst of tumult came a
youth,--half god, half beast, with wild eyes peering at us, and hair
that tossed like the angry clouds."
"Yes, yes," urged Kano, straining forward.
"We scrambled toward him, and he shrank back into the mist. We called,
beseeching help. The workmen thought him a young sennin, and falling
on their knees, began to pray. Then the youth approached us more
deliberately, and, when we asked for guidance, led us by a secluded
path down into a mountain village."
"And you think,--you think that this marvellous youth," began Kano,
eagerly; then broke off with a gesture of despair. "I must not
believe, I must not believe," he muttered.
Ando's hand was once more on the roll of papers. He went on smoothly.
"We questioned of him in the village. He is a foundling. None knows
his parentage. From childhood he has made pictures upon rocks, and
sand beds, and the inner bark of trees. He wanders for days together
among the peaks, and declares that he is searching for his mate, a
Dragon Princess, withheld from him by enchantment. Naturally the
village people think him mad. But they are kind to him. They give him
food and clothing, and sometimes sheets of paper, like these here."
With affected unconcern he raised the long roll. "Yes, they give him
paper, with real ink and brushes. Then he leaps up the mountain side
and paints and paints for hours, like a demon. But as soon as he has
eased his soul of a sketch he lets the first gust of wind blow it away."
Kano was now shivering in his place. On his wrinkled face a light
dawned. "Shall I believe? Oh, Ando, indeed I could not bear it now!
Unroll those drawings before I go mad!"
Uchida deliberately spread out the first. It was a scene of mountain
storm, painted as in an elemental fury. Inky pine branches slashed and
hurled upward, downward, and across a tortured gray sky. A cloud-rack
tore the void like a Valkyrie's cry made visible. One huge talon of
lightning clutched at the flying scud.
Kano gave a glance, covered his face, and began to sob. Uchida blew
his nose on the pink-bordered foreign handkerchief. After a long while
the old man whispered, "What name shall I use in my prayer?"
"He is called," said Ando, "by the name of 'Tatsu.' 'Tatsu, the Dragon
Painter.'"