His body was found some moments later by old Kano and a bridge keeper.
It was caught among the pilings of a boat-landing several hundred feet
farther down the tide. A thin, sluggish stream of blood followed it
like a clue, and, when he was dragged up upon the bank, gushed out
terribly from a wound near his temple. He had seized, in falling,
Umè-ko's lacquered geta, and his fingers could not be unclasped. In
spite of the early hour (across the river the sun still peered through
folds of shimmering mist) quite a crowd of people gathered.
"It is the newly adopted son of Kano Indara," they whispered, one to
another. "He is but a few weeks married to Kano's daughter, and is
called 'The Dragon Painter.'"
The efficient river-police summoned an ambulance, and had him taken to
the nearest hospital. Here, during an entire day, every art was
employed to restore him to consciousness, but without success. Life,
indeed, remained. The flow of blood was stopped, and the wound
bandaged, but no sign of intelligence awoke.
"It is to be an illness of many weeks, and of great peril," answered
the chief physician that night to Kano's whispered question. The old
man turned sorrowfully away and crept home, wondering whether now, at
this extremity, the gods would utterly desert him.
Mata, prostrated at first by the loss of her nursling, soon rallied her
practical old wits. She went, in secret, to the hospital, demanded
audience of the house physician, and gave to him all details of the
strange situation which had culminated in Umè's desperate act of
self-renunciation, and induced Tatsu's subsequent madness. She did not
ask for a glimpse of the sick man. Indeed she made no pretence of
kindly feeling toward him, for, in conclusion, she said, "Now, August
Sir, if, with your great skill in such matters, you succeed in giving
back to this young wild man the small amount of intelligence he was
born with, I caution you, above all things, keep from his reach such
implements of self-destruction as ropes, knives, and poisons. Oh, he
is an untamed beast, Doctor San. His love for my poor young mistress
was that of a lion and a demon in one. He will certainly slay himself
when he has the strength. Not that I care! His death would bring
relief to me, for in our little home he is like the spirit of storm
caged in a flower. Would I had never seen him, or felt the influence
of his evil karma! But my poor old master still dotes on him, and,
with Miss Umé vanished, if this Dragon Painter, too, should die at
once, Kano could not endure the double blow!" The old woman began to
sob in her upraised sleeve, apologizing through her tears for the
discourtesy. The physician comforted her with kind words, and thanked
her very sincerely for the visit. Her disclosures did, indeed, throw
light upon a difficult situation.
From the hospital the old servant made her way to Uchida's hotel, to
learn that he had gone the day before to Kiu Shiu. With this tower of
strength removed Mata felt, more than ever, that Kano's sole friend was
herself. The loss of Umè was still to her a horror and a shock. The
eating loneliness of long, empty days at home had not yet begun; but
Mata was to know them, also.
Kano, during the first precarious days of his son's illness,
practically deserted the cottage, and lived, day and night, in the
hospital. His pathetic old figure became habitual to the halls and
gardens near his son. The physicians and nurses treated him with
delicate kindness, forcing food and drink upon him, and urging him to
rest himself in one of the untenanted rooms. They believed the
deepening lines of grief to be traced by the loss of an only daughter,
rather than by this illness of a newly adopted son. In truth the old
man seldom thought of Umè-ko. He was watching the life that flickered
in Tatsu's prostrate body as a lost, starving traveller watches a
lantern approaching over the moor. "The gods preserve him,--the gods
grant his life to the Kano name, to art, and the glory of Nippon," so
prayed the old man's shrivelled lips a hundred times each day.
After a stupor of a week, fever laid hold of Tatsu, bringing delirium,
delusion, and mad raving. At times he believed himself already dead,
and in the heavenly isle of Ho-rai with Umè. His gestures, his
whispered words of tenderness, brought tears to the eyes of those who
listened. Again he lived through that terrible dawn when first he had
read her letter of farewell. Each word was bitten with acid into his
mind. Again and again he repeated the phrases, now dully, as a wearied
beast goes round a treadmill, now with weeping, and in convulsions of a
grief so fierce that the merciful opiate alone could still it.
The fever slowly began to ebb. For him the shores of conscious thought
lay scorched and blackened by memory. More unwillingly than he had
been dragged up from the river's cold embrace was he now held back from
death. His first lucid words were a petition. "Do not keep me alive.
In the name of Kwannon the Merciful, to whom my Umè used to pray, do
not bind me again upon the wheel of life!" Although he fought against
it with all the will power left to him, strength brightened in his
veins. Stung into new anguish he prayed more fervently, "Let me pass
now! I cannot bear more pain. I 'll die in spite of you. Oh, icy men
of science, you but give me the means with which to slay myself! I
warn you, at the first chance I shall escape you all!"
"Mad youth, it is my duty to give you back your life even though you
are to use it as a coward," said the chief physician.
Once when his suffering had passed beyond the power of all earthly
alleviation, and it seemed as if each moment would fling the shuddering
victim into the dark land of perpetual madness, Kano urged that the
venerable abbot from the Shingon temple on the hill be summoned. He
came in full regalia of office,--splendid in crimson and gold. With
him were two acolytes, young and slender figures, also in brocade, but
with hoods of a sort of golden gauze drawn forward so as to conceal the
faces within. They bore incense burners, sets of the mystic vagra, and
other implements of esoteric ceremony. The high priest carried only
his tall staff of polished wood, tipped with brass, and surmounted by a
glittering, symbolic design, the "Wheel of the Law," the hub of which
is a lotos flower.
Tatsu, at sight of them, tossed angrily on his bed, railing aloud, in
his thin, querulous voice, and scoffing at any power of theirs to
comfort, until, in spite of himself, a strange calm seemed to move
about him and encircle him. He listened to the chanted words, and the
splendid invocations, spoken in a tongue older than the very gods of
his own land, wondering, the while, at his own acquiescence. Surely
there was a sweet presence in the room that held him as a smile of love
might hold. He was sorry when the ceremony came to an end. The abbot,
whispering to the others, sent all from the room but himself, Tatsu,
and the smaller of the acolytes, who still knelt motionless at the head
of the sick man's couch, holding upward an incense burner in the shape
of a lotos seed-pod. The blue incense smoke breathed upward, sank
again as if heavy with its own delight, encircling, almost as if with
conscious intention, the kneeling figure, and then moved outward to
Tatsu and the enclosing walls.
"My son," began the abbot, leaning gently over the bed, "I have a
message from--her--"
"No, no," moaned the boy, his wound opening anew. "Do not speak it. I
was beginning to feel a little peace from pain. Do not speak of her.
You can have no message."
"I have known Kano Umè-ko her whole life long," persisted the holy man.
"She is worthy of a nobler love than this you are giving her."
"There may be love more noble, but none--none--more terrible than
mine," wailed out the sick man. "I cannot even die. I am quickened by
the flames that burn me; fed by the viper, Life, that feeds on my
despair. My flesh cankers with a self-renewing sore! Could I but
bathe my wounds in death!"
"Poor suffering one, this flesh is only the petal fallen from a
perfected bloom! Whether her tender body, or this racked and twitching
frame upon your bed, all flesh is illusion. Think of your soul and its
immortal lives! Think of your wife's pure soul, and for its sake make
effort to defy and vanquish this demon of self-destruction."
"Was not her own deed that of self-destruction?" challenged Tatsu, his
sunken eyes set in bitter triumph upon the abbot. "I shall but go upon
the road she went."
"To compare your present motives with your wife's is blasphemy," cried
the other. "Her deed held the glory of self-sacrifice, that you might
gain enlightenment; while you, railing impotently here, giving out
affront against the gods, are as the wild beast on the mountain that
cannot bear the arrow in its side."
"And it is true," said Tatsu, "I cannot bear the arrow,--I cannot
endure this pain. Show me the way to death, if you have true pity.
Let me go to her who waits me in the Meido-land."
"She does not wait you there, oh, grief deluded boy," then said the
priest. "The message that I brought is this: bound still to earth by
her great love for you her soul is near you,--in this room,--now, as I
speak, seeking an entrance to your heart, and these wild railings hold
her from you."
Tatsu half started from his pillow, and sank back. "I believe you not.
You trick me as you would a child," he moaned.
The priest knelt slowly by the bed. "In the name of Shaka,--whom I
worship,--these words of mine are true. Here, in this room, at this
moment, your Umè-ko is waiting."
"But I want her too," whispered the piteous lips. "Not only her aerial
spirit! I want her smile,--her little hands to touch me, the golden
echo of her laughter,--I want my wife, I say! Oh, you gods, demons,
preta of a thousand hells!" he shrieked, springing to a sitting posture
in his bed, and beating the air about him with distracted hands.
"These are the memories that whir down and close about me in a cloud of
stinging wasps! I cannot endure! In the name of Shaka, whom you
worship, strike me dead with the staff you hold,--then will I bless you
and believe!" In a transport of madness, he leaned out, clutching at
the staff, clawing down the stiff robes from the abbot's throat,
snarling, praying, menacing with a vehemence so terrible, that the
little acolyte, flinging down the still-burning koro, screamed aloud
for help.
It was many hours before the nurses and physicians could quiet this
last paroxysm. Exhaustion and a relapse followed. The long, dull
waiting on hope began anew. After this no visitor but Kano was
allowed. He entered the sick chamber only at certain hours, placing
himself near the head of the bed where Tatsu need not see him. He
never spoke except in answer to questions addressed him directly by his
son, and these came infrequently enough. With this second slow return
to vitality, Tatsu's most definite emotion seemed to be hatred of his
adopted father. He writhed at the sound of that timid, approaching
step, and dreaded the first note of the deprecating voice.
Kano was fully aware of this aversion. He realized that, perhaps, it
would be better for Tatsu if he did not come at all; yet in this one
issue the selfishness of love prevailed. Age and despair were to be
kept at bay. He had no weapons but the hours of comparative peace he
spent at Tatsu's bedside. Full twenty years seemed added to the old
man's burden of life. His back was stooped far over; his feet shuffled
along the wooden corridors with the sound of the steps of one too
heavily burdened. He never walked now without the aid of his friendly
bamboo cane. The threat of Tatsu's self-destruction echoed always in
his ears. Away from the actual presence of his idol it gnawed him like
a famished wolf, and his mind tormented itself with fantastic and
dreadful possibilities. Once Tatsu had hidden under his foreign pillow
the china bowl in which broth was served. Kano whispered his discovery
to the nurse, and when she wondered, explained to her with shivering
earnestness that it was undoubtedly the boy's intention to break it
against the iron bedstead the first moment he was left alone, and with
a shard sever one of his veins. Tatsu grinned like a trapped badger
when it was wrested from him, and said that he would find a way in
spite of them all. After this not even a medicine bottle was left in
the room, and the watch over the invalid was strengthened.
"But," as old Kano remonstrated, "even though we prevent him for a few
weeks more, how will it be when he can stand and walk,--when he is
stronger than I?" To these questions came no answer. The second
convalescence, so eagerly prayed for, became now a source of increasing
dread. Something must be done,--some way to turn his morbid thoughts
away from self-destruction. The old man climbed often, now, to the
temple on the hill.
The hospital room, in an upper story, was small, with matted floors,
and a single square window to the east. The narrow white iron bed was
set close to this window, so that the invalid might gaze out freely.
Tatsu did not ask that it be changed though, indeed, each recurrent
dawn brought martyrdom to him. The sound of sparrows at the eaves, the
smell of dew, the look of the morning mist as it spread great wings
above the city, hovering for an instant before its flight, the glow of
the first pink light upon his coverlid, each was an iron of memory
searing a soul already faint with pain. The attendant often marvelled
why, at this hour, Tatsu buried his face from sight, and, emerging into
clearer day, bore the look of one who had met death in a narrow pass.
At noon, when the window showed a square of turquoise blue, he grew to
watch with some faint pulse of interest the changing hues of light, and
the clouds that shifted lazily aside, or heaped themselves up into
rounded battlements of snow. Quite close to the window a single cherry
branch, sweeping downward, cut space with a thick, diagonal line.
Silvery lichens frilled the upper surface of the bark, and at the tip
of each leafless twig, brown buds--small armored magazines of
beauty--hinted already of the spring's rebirth. Life was all about
him, and he hated life. Why should cherry blooms and sparrows dare to
come again,--why should that old man near him wheeze and palpitate with
life, why--why--should he, Tatsu, be held from his one friend, Death,
when she, the essence of all life and beauty,--she who should have been
immortal,--drifted alone, helpless, a broken white sea-flower, on some
black, awful tide?
In the midst of such dreary imaginings, old Kano, late in the last
month of the year, crept in upon his son. He was an hour earlier than
his custom. Also there was something unusual,--a new energy, perhaps a
new fear, noticeable in face and voice. But Tatsu, still bleeding with
his visions of the dawn, saw nothing of this. The premature visit
irritated him. "Go, go," he cried, turning his face sharply away.
"This is a full hour early. Am I to have no moments to myself?"
"My son, my son," pleaded the old man, "I have come a little before
time, because I have brought--"
"Do not call me son," interrupted the petulant boy. "It is
wretchedness to look upon you. She would be here now, but for you.
You killed her! You drove her to it!"
"No, Tatsu, you wrong me! As I have assured you, and as her own words
say,--she made the sacrifice from her own heart. It was that her
presence obscured your genius, my son. She was unselfish and noble
beyond all other women. She--went--for your sake--"
"For my sake!" jeered the other. "You mean, for the sake of the things
you want me to paint! Well, I tell you again, I will neither live
_nor_ paint! Yes, that touches you. Human agony is nothing to your
heart of jade. You would catch these tears I shed to mix a new
pigment! You do not regret her. You would think the price cheap, if
only I will paint. I hate all pictures! I curse the things I have
done! Would that, indeed, I had the tongue of a dragon, that I might
lick them from the silk!"
"Tatsu, my poor son, be less violent. I urge nothing! The gods must
do with you as they will, but here is something--a letter--" Fumbling,
with shaking fingers, in his long, black sleeve, he drew out a filmy,
white rectangle. The look of it, so like to one pinned to a certain
pillow in the dawn, sent a new thrill of misery through the boy.
"A letter! Who would write me a letter,--unless souls in the
Meido-land can write! Back, back,--do not touch me, or ere I kill
myself I will find strength to slay you first. I will drag you with me
to the underworld, as I journey in searching for my wife, and fling
your craven soul to devils, as one would fling offal to a dog! Speak
not to me of painting, nor of her!"
At the sight of extra attendants hurrying in, Tatsu waved them to leave
him, threw himself back, stark, upon the pillow, and closed his eyes so
tightly that the wrinkles radiated in black lines from the corners. He
panted heavily, as from a long race. His forehead twitched and
throbbed with purple veins.
Flung down cruelly from the exhilaration which a moment before had been
his, old Kano seated himself on a chair directly in sight of Tatsu's
bed. The nurses stole away, leaving the two men together. Each
remained motionless, except for hurried breathing, and the pulsing of
distended veins. A crow, perched on the cherry branch outside the
window, tilted a cold, inquisitive eye into the room.
Tatsu was the first to move. The reaction of excitement was creeping
upon him, drawing the sting from pain. He turned toward his visitor
and began to study, with an impersonal curiosity, the aspect of the
pathetic figure. Kano was sitting, utterly relaxed, at the edge of the
cane-bottomed foreign chair His head hung forward, and his lids were
closed. For the first time Tatsu noted how scanty and how white his
hair had grown; how thin and wrinkled the fine old face. Something
akin to compassion rose warm and human in the looker's throat. He had
opened his lips to speak kindly (it would have been the first gentle
word since Umè's loss) when the sight of his name, in handwriting, on
the letter, froze the very air about him, and held him for an instant a
prisoner of fear. The envelope dangled loosely from Kano's fingers.
On it was traced, in Umè-ko's beautiful, unmistakable hand, "For my
beloved husband, Kano Tatsu."
"The letter, the letter," he cried hoarsely, pointing downward. "It is
mine,--give it!"
Kano raised his head. The reaction of excitement was on him too, and
it had brought for him a patient hopelessness. It did not seem to
matter a great deal just now what Tatsu did or thought. He would never
paint. That alone was enough blackness to fill a hell of everlasting
night.
"Give it to me," insisted the boy, leaning far out over the bed. "Did
you bring it only to torture me? Quick, quick,--it is mine!"
"I brought it to give, and you repulsed me. I had found it but this
morning, in your painting room, pinned to a silken frame on which you
had begun her picture! She must have put it there before--before--"
"If you have a shred of pity or of love for me, give it and go," gasped
the boy.
Kano rose with slow dignity. "Yes, it is for you, and I will give it
and leave, as you ask, if I can have your promise--"
"Yes, yes, I promise everything,--anything,--I will not strive to slay
myself,--at least until after your return--"
"That is enough," said the old man, and with a sigh held the missive
out. Tatsu snatched it through the air. The perfume of plum blossoms
was stealing from it. Once alone he crushed the delicate tissue
against eyes and lips and throat. He rolled upon the bed in agony,
only to press again to his heart this balm of her written words. It
seemed to him, then, that the letter might really have come from the
Meido-land. Could it be true, as the old priest said, that her soul
continually hovered near, waiting only for him to give it recognition?
"Umè, Umè,--my wife! Come back to me!" he cried aloud in an agony so
great that it should drag her backward through that dark
shadow-world,--not only the phantom of what she was, but Umè-ko
herself, with the flower-like body, and the smile of light. He opened
the missive slowly, that not a shred should be torn, and spread the
thin tissue smoothly on his foreign pillow.
"This, beloved, being the forty-ninth day,--the seven-times-seventh-day
after my passing,--when souls of those departed are given special
privilege to return to earth, I speak thus, dumbly, to my lord.
Although the fingers tracing now these timid lines are not permitted to
touch you, oh, believe that, as you read, I wait at the door of your
heart. O thou who art so dear, give to me, I pray, a shelter and a
habitation. Then, because of my great love, I shall be one with you,
bringing you comfort and myself great blessedness. O thou, who art
still my husband, I beseech you to realize that any act on your part of
violence and self-destruction will hurl our lives apart to the full
width of the ten existences; so that, through another thousand years of
unfulfilment we shall be groping in the dark, like children who have
lost their way, calling ever, each on the name of the other.
"The birds of the air know, when storms arise, where to find their
nests. Even the fox has shelter in the hill. Shall the soul of Umè-ko
seek and find no shelter? Send me not forth again in lonely travail!
Open your heart to me, O thou who art loved as no man was ever loved
before thee! Umè-ko."
Kano, listening at the door, thought that the boy had fainted. One
nurse, then another, crept near. At last the old man, unable to endure
the strain, peered through a crevice. He fell back instantly, pressing
both hands upon his mouth to stifle the cry of joy. Tatsu alive,
awake, with eyes opened wide, gazed upward smiling, as into the face of
Buddha.
X
The New Year festival, Shogatsu, had come and gone: white-flower buds
gleamed like pearls on the lichen-covered, twisted limbs of the old
"dragon-plum" by Umè's chamber ledge, when Tatsu and his adopted father
entered once more together the little Kano home. If the young husband
had realized, all along, what this coming ordeal might mean, he had
given no sign of it. Kano and the physicians feared for him. The last
test, it was to be, of sanity and of endurance. The actual hour of
departure from the hospital fell late in January. More than once
before a day had been decreed, only to be postponed because of a sudden
physical weakening--mysterious and apparently without cause--on the
part of the patient.
"I will return with you as soon as I may," Tatsu had assured his father
on the day of reading Umè's letter. "I will try to live, and even to
paint. Only, I pray you, speak not the name of--her I have lost."
This promise was given willingly enough. Kano's chief difficulty now
was to hide his growing happiness. It was much to his interest that
the subject of Umè be avoided. Even a dragon painter from the
mountains must know something of certain primitive obligations to the
dead, and for Umè not even an ihai had been set up by that of her
mother in the family shrine. When Tatsu learned this he would marvel,
and probably be angry. If by his own condition of silence he were
debarred from attacking Kano, so much the better for Kano.
It was this disgraceful and unheard-of negligence--a matter already of
common gossip in the neighborhood--that added the last measure of
bitterness to old Mata's grief. Was her master demented through sorrow
that he so challenged public censure, and was willing to cast dishonor
upon the name of his only child? Hour after hour in the lonely house
did the old dame seek to piece together the broken edges of her
shattered faith. The master had always been a religious man,
over-zealous, she had thought, in minute observances. Yet now he was
willing to neglect, to ignore, the very fundamental principles of
social decency. Personally he had seemed wretched enough after Umè's
loss. The kindly neighbors had at first marvelled aloud at his
whitening hair and heavily burdened frame. Mata, pleased at the
sympathy, did nothing to distract it; but in her heart she knew that it
was Tatsu's illness, not his daughter's death, that bore upon old Kano
like the winter snow upon his pines.
On that most sacred period of mourning, the seven-times-seventh day
after "divine retirement," when the spirit is privileged to enter most
closely into the hearts of those that pray, Mata had believed that,
beyond doubt, the full ceremony would be held. Surely the sweet,
wandering soul was now to be given its kaimyo, was to be soothed by
prayer, and be refreshed by the ghostly essence of tea and rice and
fruit, placed before its ihai upon the shrine! What must the dead
girl's mother have been thinking all this time? Mata woke before the
dawn to pray. Kano, too, was awake early. She hurried to him, her
first words a petition. But, no, he had no thought, even on this day
of all days, for his child. He was off without his breakfast, an hour
earlier than usual, to the hospital, a letter in his hand. Mata
literally fell upon her knees before him, importuning him for the honor
of the family name, if not in love for Umè-ko, to give orders at the
temple for the holding of religious ceremonies. But Kano, himself
almost in tears, eager, excited, though obviously in quite another
whirlpool of emotions, urged her to be patient just a little longer.
"I think all will yet be well," he assured her. "I have some hope
to-day!"
"All will yet be well!" mocked the old dame through clenched teeth,
watching the bent old figure hurrying from her. "As if anything could
ever again be well, with my young mistress dead, and not even her body
recovered for burial!"
In spite of her dislike for Tatsu, the lonely woman found herself
watching, with some impatience, for the day of his actual return.
Successive postponements had fretted her, and sharpened curiosity. She
had not seen him since his illness. Upon that January noon when his
kuruma rolled slowly in under the gate-roof, followed by anxious Kano
and one of the male nurses from the hospital, she had turned toward him
the old look of resentment: but, instead of the brief and chilling
glance she had thought to use, found herself staring, gaping, in
amazement and incredulity. She did not believe, for the first moment,
that the wreck she saw was Tatsu. This bowed and shrunken ghost of
suffering,--this loose, pallid semblance of a man, the beautiful,
defiant, compelling demigod of the mountains that had swept down upon
them! No! sorrow could wreak miracles of the soul, but no such
physical transformation as this!
She continued to watch furtively, in a sort of terror, the tall figure
as it was assisted from the kuruma and led, shambling, through the
house. The three moved on to the wing containing Umè's chamber, and
the painting room. Mata heard the fusuma close gently, the nurse's
voice give admonition to "keep his spirit strong for this last stress,"
heard old Kano falter, "Farewell, my son, no one shall disturb you in
these rooms," and had barely time to regain her presence of mind as the
two men, Kano and the nurse, entered her kitchen. The former spoke:
"Mata, your young master is to remain, unmolested, in that part of the
house. Do not offer him rice, or tea, or anything whatever. When he
needs and desires it he will himself emerge and ask for food. Above
all things, do not knock upon his fusuma or call his name. These are
the physician's orders."
"Exactly!" corroborated the nurse, with a professional air.
"Kashikomarimashita!" muttered the old dame in sullen acquiescence.
"You need not have feared that I should intrude upon him!"
For three days and nights Tatsu remained to himself. The anxious
listeners heard at times the sound of restless pacing up and down,--the
thin, sibilant noise of stockinged feet sliding on padded straw. Again
there would be a thud, as of a body fallen, or sunken heavily to the
floor. Kano, on the second day, pale with apprehension, went early to
the hospital for a revocation, or at least a modification of the
instructions. The doctor's mandate was the same, "Do not go near him.
Life, as well as reason, may depend upon this battle with his own
despair. Only the gods can help him." To the gods, then, Kano went as
well; climbing the long, steep road to the temple, where he made
offerings and poured out from his anxious heart the very essence of
loving prayer.
On the third day, Kano being thus absent, and old Mata alone in her
kitchen as nervous, she would have told you, as a fish with half its
scales off, she heard the fusuma of the distant room shudder, and then,
with a sound of feeble jerks, begin to separate. She knew that it was
Tatsu, and rallied herself for the approach. Through the shaded
corridor came a figure scarcely animate, moving it would seem in answer
to a soundless call. It entered the kitchen halting, and looking about
as one in an unfamiliar place. On a square stone brasier, fed with
glowing coals, the rice-pot steamed. The delicate vapor, tinged with
aroma of the cooking food, made a fine mist in the air. Suddenly he
thrust an arm out toward the fire. "Rice!--I am faint with hunger," he
whispered. As if the few words had taken his last store of strength,
he sank to the floor. Mata sprang to him. He had swooned. His face,
young and beautiful in spite of the centuries of pain upon it, lay
back, helpless, on her arm. She stared strangely down upon him,
wondering where the old antipathy had gone, and striving (for she was
an obstinate old soul, was Mata) consciously to recall it,--but the
core of her hate was gone. Like a true woman she began to make
self-excuses for the change. "It may have been because of this poor
boy and his unhappy karma that my nursling had to die," said she.
"But, look what love has done to him! Death is only another name for
paradise compared with the agony sunken deep into this young face!"
She placed him gently, at full length, upon the padded floor. She
chafed the flaccid wrists, the temples, the veins about his ears, and
then, leaning over, blew on the heavy lids. "Umè-ko, my wife, my
wife," he whispered, and tried to smile.
A wave of pity swept from the old dame's mind the last barrier of
mistrust. "Yes, Master, here is Umè's nurse," she said in soothing
tones. "Not Umè-ko,--she has gone away from us,--but the poor old
nurse who loves her. I will serve you for her sake. Here, put your
head upon this pillow,--she has often used it,--and now lie still until
old Mata brings you rice and tea." She bustled off, her hands
clattering busily among the cups and trays. As she worked, thankful,
through her great agitation, for the familiar offices, she fought down,
one by one, those great, distending sobs that push so hard a way upward
through wrinkled throats.
Tatsu was still a little dazed. His eyes followed her about the room
with a plaintive regard, as if not entirely sure that she was real.
"Did you say that you were--Umè's--nurse," he asked.
"Yes. Don't you remember me, Master Tatsu? I am Mata, the old
servant, and your Umè's nurse. I--I--was not always kind to you, I
fear. I opposed your marriage, fearing for her some such sorrow as
that which came. But it is past. The gods allowed it. I will now,
for her sake, love and serve you,--my true master you shall be from
this day, because I can see that your heart is gnawed forever by that
black moth, grief, as mine is. Old Kano does not grieve,--he is a man
of stone, of mud!" she cried. "But I must not speak of his sins, yet;
here is the good tea, Master, and the rice." She fed him like a child,
allowing, at first, but a single sip of tea, a grain or two of rice.
He, in his weakness, was gentle and obedient, like a good child, eating
all she bade him, and refraining when she told him that he had enough.
It was a new Tatsu that sorrow had given to the Kano home.
But more wonderful than the transformation in him was, in Mata's
thought, the complete reversal of her own emotions. Even in the midst
of service she stopped to wonder how, so soon, it could be sweet to
serve him,--to minister thus to the man she had called the evil genius
of the house. In some mysterious way it seemed that through him the
dead young wife was being served. In the smile he bent upon her, the
old nurse fancied that she caught a tenderness as of Umè's smile.
Perhaps, indeed, the homeless soul, denied its usual shelter in the
shrine, made sanctuary of the husband's earthly frame. Perhaps, too,
Kano had hoped for this, and so refused the ihai. However these high
things might be, Mata knew she had gained strange comfort in the very
fact of Tatsu's presence, in the companionship of his suffering.
When, being nourished, Tatsu insisted on sitting upright, and had
recalled the scene about him, his first question was of Umè's shrine,
where the ihai had been set, and what the kaimyo. This loosened Mata's
tongue, and, with a sensation of deep relief, she began to empty her
heart of its pent-up acrimony. Tatsu listened now, attentively; not as
would have been his way three months before with gesticulations and
frequent interruptions, but gravely, with consideration, as one intent
to learn the whole before forming an opinion. Even at the end he would
say nothing but the words, "Strange, strange; there must be a reason
that you have not guessed."
"But we will get the ihai, will we not, Master? Together, when you are
strong, we will climb the long road to the temple?" she questioned
tremulously.
"Indeed we shall," said Tatsu, with his heartrending smile; "for at
best, the thoughts of Kano Indara cannot be our thoughts. He let her
die."
At this the other burst into such a passion of tears that she could not
speak, but rocked, sobbing, to and fro, on the mats beside him. He
wondered, with a feeling not far from envy, at this open demonstration
of distress.
"I cannot weep at all," he said. Then, a little later, when she had
become more calm, "Are your tears for me or for Umè-ko?"
"For both, for both," was the sobbing answer. "For her, that she had
to die,--for you, that you must live."
"Both are things to weep for," said the boy, and stared out straight
before him, as one seeing a long road.
Kano, returning later and finding the two together, marking as he did,
at once, with the quick eye of love, how health already cast faint
premonitions of a flush upon the boy's thin face, had much ado to keep
from crying aloud his joy and gratitude. By strong effort only did he
succeed in making his greeting calm. He used stilted, old-fashioned
phrases of ceremony to one recently recovered from dangerous illness,
and bowed as to a mere acquaintance. Tatsu, returning the bows and
phrases, escaped in a few moments to his room, and emerged no more that
day. Kano sighed a little, for the young face had been cold and stern.
No love was to be looked for,--not yet, not yet.
For a few days Tatsu did nothing but lie on the mats; or wander,
aimlessly, over the house and garden. He came whenever Mata summoned
him to meals, and ate them with old Kano, observing all outer
semblances of respect. But it seemed an automaton who sat there,
eating, drinking, and then, at the last, bowing over to the exact
fraction of an inch, each time, and moving away to its own rooms. The
old artist, mindful of certain professional warnings from the hospital
physicians, never spoke in Tatsu's presence of paintings, or of
anything connected with art. Within a few days it seemed to him that
Tatsu had begun to watch him keenly, as if expecting, every instant,
the broaching of that subject which he knew was always uppermost in the
other's mind. But the old man, for the first time in his whole life,
had begun to use tact. He never followed Tatsu to his rooms, never
intruded into those long conversations now held, many times a day,
between Mata and her young master; never even commented to Mata upon
her change of attitude. About five days after his first appearance in
the kitchen, Tatsu and the old servant left the house together, giving
Kano no hint of their destination. He watched them with a curious
expression on his face. He knew that they were to climb together to
the temple, and that it was a pilgrimage from which he was
contemptuously debarred. They returned, some hours later, and were
busied all the afternoon with the placing and decorations of an
exquisite "butsu-dan," or Buddhist shelf, on which the ihai of the dead
are placed. At the abbot's advice (and yet against all precedent) this
was put, not beside the butsu-dan, where Kano's young wife had for so
many years been honored, but in Tatsu's own bed-chamber, thus making of
it a "mita-yama," or spirit room.
Kano, visiting it, unperceived, next day, noted with the same curious,
half-quizzical, half-pathetic look that no Buddhist kaimyo or
after-name had been given to his daughter. It was the earth-name, Kano
Umè-ko, which the old abbot had written upon the lacquered tablet of
wood. Added to it, as a sort of title, was the phrase, "To her who
loves much." "That is true enough," thought old Kano, and touched his
eyes an instant with his sleeve.
During the following week Tatsu, of himself, drew out his painting
materials and tried to work. An instant later he had hurled the things
from him with a cry, had slammed together the walls of his chamber, and
lay in silence and darkness for many hours. At the time of the
night-meal he came forth. Kano, to whom sorrow was teaching many
things, made no comment upon his exclusion; and even old Mata refrained
from searching his face with her keen eyes.
The next day he made the second attempt. His fusuma were opened, and
Mata could see how his face blanched to yellow wax, how the lips
writhed until they were caught back by strong, cruel teeth, and how the
thin hands wavered. Notwithstanding this inward torture, he persisted.
At first the lines of his brush were feeble. His work looked like that
of a child.
Through subsequent days of discouragement and brave effort his power of
painting grew with a slow but normal splendor of achievement. His fame
began to spread. The "New Kano" and "The Dragon Painter of Kiu Shiu"
the people of the city called him. Not only his work but his romantic,
miserable story drew sympathy to him, and bade fair to make of him a
popular idol. Older artists wished to paint his portrait.
Print-makers hung about his house striving to catch at least a glimpse
of him, which being elaborated, might serve as his likeness in the
weekly supplement of some up-to-date newspaper. Sentimental maidens
wrote poems to him, tied them with long, shining filaments of hair, and
suspended them to the gate, or upon the bamboo hedges of the Kano home.
But against all these petty, personal annoyances Tatsu had the double
guard of Kano and old Mata San. The pride of the latter in this "Son
of our house" was unbounded. One would have thought that she
discovered him, had rescued him from death and that it was now through
her sole influence his reputation as an artist grew. Noble patrons
came to the little cottage bearing rolls of white silk, upon which they
entreated humbly, "That the illustrious and honorable young painter,
Kano Tatsu, would some day, when he might not be augustly
inconvenienced by so doing, trace a leaf or a cloud,--anything, in
fact, that fancy could suggest, so that it was the work of his own
inimitable hand. For the condescension they trusted that he would
allow them to give a present of money,--as large a sum as he was
willing to name."
"A second Sesshu! A second Sesshu!" old Kano would murmur to himself,
in subdued ecstacy. "So did they load his ship with silk, four
centuries ago!"
Of most of these commissions, Tatsu never heard. Kano did not wish the
boy's work to be blown wide over the great city as it had been blown
along the mountain slopes of Kiu Shiu. Nor did he wish the thought of
gain or of personal ambition to creep into Tatsu's heart. Now he spent
most of the day-lit hours secluded in his little study, painting those
scenes and motives suggested by the keynote of his mood. Of late he
had begun to read, with deep interest, the various essays on art,
gathered in Kano's small, choice library. He would sometimes talk with
his father about art, and let the eager old man demonstrate to him the
different brush-strokes of different masters. The widely diversified
schools of painting as they had flourished throughout the centuries of
his country's social and religious life aroused in him an impersonal
curiosity. He began to try experiments, realizing, perhaps, that to a
genius strong and sane as his even fantastic ventures in technique were
little more than bright images flecking, for an instant, the immutable
surface of a mirror.
All methods were essayed,--the liquid, flowing line of the Chinese
classics, Tosa's nervous, shattered lightning-strokes of painted
motion, the soft, gray reveries of the great Kano school of three
centuries before, when, to the contemplative mind all forms of nature,
whether of the outer universe or in the soul of man, were but
reflecting mirrors of a single faith; the heaped-up gold and malachite
of Korin's decoration, sweet realistic studies of the Shijo school,
even down to the horrors of "abura-yè," oil-painting, as it is
practised in the Yeddo of to-day, each had for him its special interest
and its inspiration. He leaned above the treasure-chests of time,
choosing from one and then another, as a wise old jewel-setter chooses
gems. Because ambition, art, existence had come to be, for him, gray
webs spun thin across the emptiness of his days, because all hope of
earthly joy was gone, he had now the power to trace, with almost
superhuman mimicry and skill, the shadow-pictures of his shadow-world.
Yet gradually it became not merely a dull necessity to paint, the one
barrier that held from him a devastating grief, but also something of a
solace. The room where Umè's ever-lighted shrine was kept came more
and more to seem the expression of herself. This the old priest had
promised; Umè's letter had assured him that thus she would be near. In
the blurred, purple hour of dusk when paints must be laid aside, and
the heart given over to dreaming, the little room became her very
earthly entity, the soft, smoke-tinted walls her breathing, the elastic
matted floor but the remembered echoes of her feet, the sliding sliver
fusuma her sleeves, the butsudan, with its small, clear lamp, its white
wood, and its flowers, her face.
Now always he kept the walls that used to separate their chamber and
his painting room removed; so that a single essence filled both rooms.
And here, as he worked silently day after day, it seemed to him that
she had learned to come. At first shy, undecided, in some far corner
of the space she watched him; then, taking courage, would drift near.
She leaned now by his shoulder, as he worked. Always it was the left
shoulder. He could feel her breath--colder indeed than from a living
woman--upon his bared throat. Sometimes a little hand, light as the
dust upon a moth's wing, rested the ghost of a moment on his robe.
Once, he could have sworn her cheek had touched his hair. So strong
was this impression that an ague shivered through him, and his heart
stopped, only to beat again with violent strokes. When the physical
tremor was over he arose, took up her round metal mirror, and went to
the veranda to see by strong light whether any trace of the spirit
touch remained. No, there was only, as usual, the tossed, black locks
of hair through which sorrow had begun to weave her silver strands.
January, with its snows, had passed. The plum-tree buds had opened,
one by one, in the chill, early winds of spring, giving at times
unwilling hospitality to flakes of snow whiter than themselves. In
February, under warmer sunshine, the blossoms showed in constellations,
a myriad on a single branch. Then, all too soon, the falling of wan
petals made a perfumed tragedy of snow upon the garden paths.
Tatsu grew to love the old dragon plum as Umè-ko had loved it. She was
its name-child, Umè, and he felt its sweetness to be one with her. At
night the perfume crept in to him through crannies of the close-shut
amado and shoji, revivifying, to keen agony, his longing for his wife.
There were moonlit nights he could not rest for it, but would rise,
pacing the cold, wet pebbles of the garden, or wandering, like a
distracted spirit that had lost its way, through the thoroughfares of
the sleeping town.
His whole life now, since he had cheated death, was blurred and vague.
To himself he seemed an unreal thing projected, like a phantom light,
upon the wavering umbra of two contrasting worlds. The halves of him,
body and animating thought, fitted each other loosely, and had a
strange desire to drift apart. The quiet, obedient Tatsu, regaining
day by day the strength and beauty that his clean youth owed him, was
to the inner Tatsu but a painted shell. The real self, clouded in
eternal grief, knew clarity and purpose only before a certain
flower-set shrine. He believed now, implicitly, that Umè's soul dwelt
near him, was often with him in this room. A resolve half formed, and
but partially admitted to himself,--for things of the other world are
not well to meddle with,--grew slowly in him, to compel, by worship and
never-relaxing prayer, the presence of her self,--her insubstantiate
body, outlined upon the ether in pale light, or formed in planes of
ghostly mist. Others had thus drawn visions from the under-world, and
why not he?
Even now she was, for him, the one fact of the ten existences. She
knew it and he knew it. Why should not sight be added to the
unchallenged datum of the mind. Living, they had often read each
other's thoughts. They held, he knew, as yet, their separate
intelligences,--still they could bridge a blessed duality by love.
Even now it would have surprised him little to hear the very sound of
her voice echo from the inner shrine, to feel a little white hand pass
like a cloud across his upraised brow. At such moments he told himself
that he was satisfied, she was his until death and beyond. No one
could separate them now!
These were, alas, the higher peaks of love. There waited for him, as
he knew too well, steep hillsides set with swords, and valleys terrible
with fire.
"So that we be together,
Even the Hell of the Blood Lake,
Even the Mountain of Swords,
Mean nothing to us at all!"
So they had sung. So that we be together! Ah, together,--that was the
essence of it, that the key! "And this is what I want!" groaned the
suffering man. "This ghostly resignation is a self-numbing of the
heart. I care not for the ghost, the spirit, however pure. I want the
wife I have lost,--her smile, her voice, her little hands to touch me!
Oh, Umè-ko, my wife, my wife!" If, as the abbot said, this phase of
grief were bestial, were unworthy of the woman who had died for him,
then why did not the listening soul of her shrink? He knew that it was
not repelled, whatever the frenzy of his grief. Indeed, at such times
of agony she leaned down closer, longing to comfort him. If it were
given her to speak she would have cried, "My husband!" Wherever she
might drift,--in the black ocean, in the Meido-land, yes, even in the
smile of Buddha on his throne,--she yearned for her lover as he for
her, with a human love; she stretched out arms of mist to him, and
tinged the pale ether of the spirit world with love's rosy flame.
One such night, during the time of plum-tree falling, when the boy,
tortured by the almost human sweetness of the flowers, had risen from
his bed to flee memory across the wide, cold plains of night, he had
left, in his hurried going, the doors and shutters of his room spread
wide. Mata and old Kano, accustomed to these midnight sounds, merely
turned on their lacquered pillows, murmured "Poor tormented Tatsu," and
went to sleep again. It had been a day of power for the young artist,
but not a day of peace. The picture he had worked on he would have
called one of his "nightmare fancies." It showed a slender form in
gray with one arm about a willow. She and the tree both leaned above
swift, flowing water, and her eyes were fixed in sombre brooding. On
the bank, in abrupt foreshortening, lay the figure of a man. He looked
at her. From the river, unmarked as yet by either, rose the gray face
and long, red hair of a Kappa, or malicious river sprite. This sketch,
unfinished, for the Kappa was a mere indication of red locks and a
tall, thin form, stood against a pillar of the tokonoma at just the
angle where the soft light of the butsu-dan shed a pale glow across it.
Brushes, paints, and various small saucers littered the floor. Tatsu
had stopped his work abruptly, overcome by the very power of his own
delineation.
He was absent from the house for several hours. The long walk through
unseen streets and over unnoticed bridges had given the boon, at least,
of physical fatigue. Now, perhaps, he could get to sleep before the
black ants of thought had rediscovered him. Entering the room quietly
he closed the shoji, smoothed the bed-clothes with an impatient hand,
and knelt, for an instant, before the shrine. Perhaps, after all, rest
was not to come. The air was sweet and heavy with Umè-ko. The faint
perfume of sandalwood which, living, always hung about her garments,
flowed in with the odor of the plum. She must be near,--Umè herself,
in mortal garments. In the next room, the veranda, hiding in the
closet to spring out merrily upon him! He groaned and strove to plunge
his mind into prayer.
The unfinished picture stood close at hand. Suddenly he noticed it,
and, with a gasp, stooped to it. Something had changed; the whole
vibration of its lines were subtly new. There was the girl's figure,
the leaning willow, the man,--content, insensate, sprawling upon the
bank,--but the Kappa! Buddha the Merciful, could it be true? Where he
had left a Kappa, waiting until to-morrow to give the triumph, the
leering satisfaction at the human grief it fed on, rose the white form
and pitying face of Kwannon Sama,--she to whom his Umè loved to pray.
The eyes, soft, humid with compassion, looked directly out to his.
They were Umè's eyes! He caught up one brush after the other. All had
been used, and Umè's touch was upon them. Her aura permeated them.
He rushed now to the veranda. In leaving the rooms, three hours
before, he had not taken the usual stone step which led into the garden
under the branches of the plum, but had leaped directly from the low
flooring, not caring where he trod. He remembered now that the stone
had been white in the moonlight. It was now swept clean of petals, as
though by the hurried trailing of a woman's dress. Was this the way in
which she was to manifest herself? And would a spirit-robe brush
surfaces so vehemently? And would a ghostly hand use brushes and
pigments of ground-earth?
Unable to endure the room, he went again into the night, no further
this time than the little garden. In the neighborhood dogs were
barking fiercely, as though in the wake of a presence. By sound he
followed it, and it moved up the hill. The very garden now was tinged
with sandalwood.
Until the dawn, and after, he walked the pebbled paths, not thinking,
indeed not fearing, hoping, or giving conscious form to speculation.
He was dazed. But the young blood in his veins ran alternate currents
of fire and ice.
With the first sun-ray he perceived a companion in the dewy solitude.
He had noticed the figure before, but always, until this hour, at
twilight. It was the form of a nun standing, high above him on the
temple cliff, with one arm about a tree.
After this nothing mysterious broke the quiet routine of his life. The
presence of Umè in the chamber seemed to fade a little, but, for some
reason inexplicable to himself, this brought now no poignant grief. He
did not tell the wonderful thing to Mata or old Kano, but hid the still
unfinished picture where no one but himself could see it.
So February passed, and March.