Six days were gone. The marriage was a thing accomplished, yet old
Kano sat, lean, dispirited, drowned apparently in depths of fathomless
despair, in the centre of his corner room. Mata, busy about her
household tasks, sometimes passed across the matting, or flaunted a
dusting-cloth within a partly opened shoji. At such moments her look
and gesture were eloquent of disdain. Her patience, long tried by the
kindly irritable master, was about at an end. Surely a spoiled old
man-child like the crouching figure yonder would exhaust the
forbearance of Jizo Sama himself!
Six days ago he had been happy,--indeed, too happy! for he and Uchida
had drunk themselves into a condition of giggling bliss, and had needed
to be taken away bodily from the bridal bower, hoisted into a double
jinrikisha, and driven off ignominiously, still embracing, still
pledging with tears an eternity of brotherhood. Yes, on that day Kano
had hailed the earth as one broad, enamelled sakè-cup, the air, a new
infusion of heavenly brew. But now----
"Mata!" the thin voice came, "are you certain that this is but the
sixth day of my son's wedding?"
"It is but the sixth day, indeed, since your daughter's sacrifice to a
barbarian, if that is what you mean," returned Mata, with a belligerent
flourish of her paper duster.
"That is what I meant," said the other, passively. "Then the week is
not to be finished until to-morrow at noon. Twenty-four hours of
torture to me! I suppose that the ingrates will count time to the last
shadow! Oh, Mata, Mata, you once were a faithful servant! Why did you
let me make that foolish promise of giving them an entire week? A day
would have been ample, then Tatsu and I could have begun to paint."
"Ara!" said Mata, uttering a sound more forcible than respectful. "Had
it been a decent person thus married to my young mistress, instead of a
mountain sprite, they should have had a month together!"
Kano groaned under the suggestion. "Then, heartless woman, at the end
of the month you would have been without a master; for surely my
sufferings would, in a month, have shrunk me to an insect gaki chirping
from a tree."
"It is to me a matter of honorable amazement that in one week you are
not already a gaki, with your incessant complaints," retorted the old
dame, still unrelenting.
"If I could be sure he is painting all this interminable time," said
Kano to himself, wringing the nervous hands together.
"You may be augustly sure he is not," chuckled the cruel Mata.
The old man got hastily to his feet. "Mata, Mata, your tongue is that
of a viper,--a green viper, with stripes. I will go from its reach
into the highway. Of course my son is painting. What else could he be
doing?"
The old dame's laugh fell like salt upon a wound. Kano caught up a
bamboo cane and, hatless, went into the street. It was odd, how often
during this week he found need of walking; still stranger, how often
his wanderings led him to the dodan hedge enclosing Tatsu's cottage.
He paused at the gate now, tormented by the reflection that he himself
had drawn the bolt. How still it was in there! Not even a sparrow
chirped. Could something be wrong? Suddenly a laugh rang out,--the
low spontaneous laugh of a happy girl. Kano clutched the gate-post.
It was not the sort of laugh that one gives at sight of a splendid
painting. It had too intimate, too personal, a ring. But surely Tatsu
was painting! What else did he live for, if not to paint? The old man
bore a heavy homeward heart.
Next day, exactly at the hour of noon, the culprits tapped upon Kano's
wooden gate. During the morning the old man had been in a condition of
feverish excitement, but now that the agony of waiting had forever
ceased, he assumed a pose of indifference.
Tatsu entered first, as a husband should. In mounting the stone which
served as step to the railless veranda, he shook off, carelessly, his
wooden shoes. Umè-ko lifted them, dusted the velvet thongs, and placed
them with mathematical precision side by side upon the flat stone. She
then entered, placing her small lacquered clogs beside those of her
husband.
Kano, from the tail of his eye, marked with approval these tokens of
wifely submission. From a small aperture in the kitchen shoji, however
(a peephole commanding a full view of the house), dour mutterings might
have been heard, and a whispered lament that "she should have lived to
see her young mistress wipe a Tengu's shoes!"
When the various genuflections and phrases of ceremonial greeting were
at last accomplished, the old artist broke forth, "Well, well, son
Tatsu, how many paintings in all this time?"
Tatsu looked up startled, first at the questioner, then at his wife.
She gave a little, convulsive giggle, and bent her shining eyes to the
floor.
"I have not painted," said Tatsu, bluntly.
"Not painted? Impossible! What then have you done with all the golden
hours of these interminable days?"
A sullen look crept into the boy's face. Again he turned questioning
eyes upon his wife. From the troubled silence her sweet voice reached
like a caress: "Dear father, the autumn days, though golden, have held
unusual heat."
"Heat! What are cold and heat to a true artist? Did he not paint in
August? I am old, yet I have been painting!"
Again fell the silence.
"I said that I had been painting," repeated the old man, angrily.
Umè-ko recovered herself with a start. "I am--er--we are truly
overjoyed to hear it. Shall you deign to honor us with a sight of your
illustrious work?"
"No, I shall not deign!" snapped the old man. "It is his work that you
now are concerned with." Here he pointed to the scowling Tatsu. "Why
have you not influenced him as you should? He must paint! It is what
you married him for."
Umè-ko caught her breath. A flush of embarrassment dyed her face, and
she threw a half-frightened look towards Tatsu. Answering her father's
unrelenting frown, she murmured, timidly, "To-morrow, if the gods will,
my dear husband shall paint."
Tatsu's steady gaze drew her. "Your eyes, Umè-ko. Is it true that for
this--to make me paint--you consented to become my wife?"
Umè tried in vain to resist the look he gave her. Close at her other
hand, she knew, her father hung upon her face and listened, trembling,
for her words. To him, art was all. But to her and Tatsu, who had
found each other,--ah! She tried to speak but words refused to form
themselves. She tried to turn a docile face toward old Kano; but the
deepening glory of her husband's look drew her as light draws a flower.
Sullenness and anger fell from him like a cloth. His countenance gave
out the fire of an inward passion; his eyes--deep, strange, strong,
magnetic--mastered and compelled her.
"No, no, beloved," she whispered. "I cannot say,--you alone know the
soul of me."
A fierce triumph flared into his look. He leaned nearer, with a smile
that was almost cruel in its consciousness of power. Under it her eyes
drooped, her head fell forward in a sudden faintness, her whole lithe
body huddled into one gracious, yielding outline. Even while Kano
gasped, doubting his eyes and his hearing, Tatsu sprang to his feet,
went to his wife, caught her up rudely by one arm, and crushed her
against his side, while he blazed defiant scorn upon Kano. "Come
Dragon Wife," he said, in a voice that echoed through the space; "come
back to our little home. No stupid old ones there, no prattle about
painting. Only you and I and love."
[Illustration: "'Come, Dragon Wife,' he said, 'come back to our little
home.'"]
Now in Japan nothing is more indelicate, more unpardonable, or more
insulting to the listener than any reference to the personal love
between man and wife. At Tatsu's terrible speech, Umè-ko, unconscious
of further cause of offense, hid her face against his sleeve, and clung
to him, that her trembling might not cast her to the floor. Kano, at
first, was unable to speak. He grew slowly the hue of death. His
brief words, when at last they came, were in convulsive spasms of
sound. "Go to your rooms,--both. Are you mad, indeed,--this
immodesty, this disrespect to me. Mata was right,--a Tengu, a
barbarian. Go, go, ere I rise to slay you both!"
The utterance choked him, and died away in a gasping silence. He
clutched at his lean chest. Umè would have sped to him, but Tatsu held
her fast. His young face flamed with an answering rage. "Do you use
that tone to me--old man--to me, and this, my wife," he was beginning,
but Umè put frantic hands upon his lips.
"Master, beloved!" she sobbed. "You shall not speak thus to our
father,--you do not understand. For love of me, then, be patient.
Even the crows on the hilltops revere their parents. Come there, to
the hills, with me, now, now--oh, my soul's beloved--before you speak
again. Wait there, in the inner room, while I kneel a moment before
our father. Oh, Tatsu, if you love me----"
The agony of her face and voice swept from Tatsu's mind all other
feeling. He stood in the doorway, silent, as she threw herself before
old Kano, praying to him as to an offended god: "Father, father, do not
hold hatred against us! Tatsu has been without kindred,--he knows not
yet the sacred duties of filial love. We will go from your presence
now until your just anger against us shall have cooled. With the night
we shall return and plead for mercy and forgiveness. No, no, do not
speak again, just yet. We are going, now, now. Oh, my dear father,
the agony and the shame of it! Sayonara, until the twilight." She
hurried back to Tatsu, seized his clenched hand with her small, icy
fingers, and almost dragged him from the room.
Kano sat as she had left him, motionless, now, as the white jade vase
within the tokonoma. His anger, crimson, blinding at the first
possession, had heated by now into a slow, white rage. All at once he
began to tremble. He struck himself violently upon one knee, crying
aloud, "So thus love influences him! Ara! My Dragon Painter! Other
methods may be tried. Such words and looks before me, me,--Kano
Indara! And Umè's eyes set upon him as in blinding worship. Could I
have seen aright? He caught my child up like a common street wench, a
thing of sale and barter. And she,--she did not scorn, but trembled
and clung to him. Is the whole world on its head? I will teach them,
I will teach them."
"Have my young mistress and her august spouse already taken leave?"
asked Mata at a crack of the door.
"Either they or some demon changelings," answered the old man, rocking
to and fro upon the mats.
The old servant had, of course, heard everything. Feigning now, for
her own purposes, a soothing air of ignorance, she glided into the
room, lifted the tiny tea-pot, shook it from side to side, and then
cocked her bright eyes upon her master. "The tea-pot. It is honorably
empty. Shall I fill it?"
"Yes, yes; replenish it at once. I need hot tea. Shameless,
incredible; he has, indeed, the manners of a wild boar."
"Ma-a-a!" exclaimed the old woman. "Now of whom can my master be
speaking?"
"You know very well of whom I am speaking, goblin! Do you not always
listen at the shoji? Go, fill the pot!"
Mata glided from the room with the quickness of light and in an instant
had returned. Replacing the smoking vessel and maintaining a face of
decorous interest, she asked, hypocritically, "And was my poor Miss Umè
mortified?"
"Mortified?" echoed the artist with an angry laugh; "she admired him!
She clung to him as a creature tamed by enchantment. My daughter!
Never did I expect to look upon so gross a sight! Why, Mata----"
"Yes, dear master," purred the old dame encouragingly as she seated
herself on the floor near the tea-pot. "One moment, while I brew you a
cup of fresh, sweet tea. It is good to quiet the honorable nerves. I
can scarcely believe what you tell me of our Umè-ko, so modest a young
lady, so well brought up!"
"I tell you what these old eyes saw," repeated Kano. Once more he
described the harrowing sight, adding more details. Mata, well used to
his outbursts of anger, though indeed she had seldom seen him in his
present condition of indignant excitement, drew him on by degrees. She
well knew that an anger put into lucid words soon begins to cool. Some
of her remarks were in the nature of small, kindly goads.
"Remember, master, the poor creatures are married but a week to-day."
"Had I dreamed of such low conduct, they should never have been married
at all!"
"Of course he is n't worthy of her," sighed the other, one eye on
Kano's face.
"Nonsense! He is more than worthy of any woman upon earth if he could
but learn to conduct himself like a human being."
"That would take a long schooling."
"He is the greatest artist since Sesshu!" cried the old man, vehemently.
Mata bowed over to the tea-pot. "You recognize artists, master; I
recognize fools."
"Do you call my son a fool?"
"If that wild man is still to be considered your son, then have I
called your son a fool," answered Mata, imperturbably.
The new flush left the old man's face as quickly as it had come.
"Mata, Mata," he groaned, too spent now for further vehemence, "you are
an old cat,--an old she-cat. You cannot dream what it is to be an
artist! What one will endure for art; what one will sacrifice, and joy
in the giving! Why, woman, if with one's shed blood, with the barter
of one's soul, a single supreme vision could be realized, no true
artist would hesitate. Yes, if even wife, child, and kindred were to
be joined in a common destruction for art's sake, the artist must not
hesitate. At the thought of one's parents, the ancestors of one's
house, it might be admissible to pause, but at nothing else, nothing
else, whatever! Life is a mere bubble on the stream of art, fame is a
bubble--riches, happiness, Death itself! Would that I could tear these
old limbs into a bleeding frenzy as I paint, if by doing so one little
line may swerve the nearer to perfection! Often have I thought of this
and prayed for the opportunity, but such madness does not benefit.
Only the torn anguish of a soul may sometimes help. And with old
souls, like old trees, they do not bleed, but are snapped to earth, and
lie there rotting. He, Tatsu, the son of my adoption, could with one
strong sweep of his arm make the gods stare, and he spends his hours
fondling the perishable object of a woman, while I, who would give all,
all,--give my own child that he loves,--I remain impotent! Alas! So
topsy-turvy a world are we born in!"
He bowed his head in a misery so abject that Mata forbore to jibe. She
tried to speak again, to comfort him, but he motioned her away, and
sat, scarcely moving in his place, until the night brought Tatsu and
his young wife home again.