The Dragon Painter

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.

VIII

Thus under, as it were, a double ban of displeasure, did the new generation of Kano, Tatsu and Umè-ko, begin life in the little cottage beneath the hill. They were given Umè's chamber near which the plum tree grew, an adjoining room having been previously fitted up for Tatsu's painting. As in the other cottage, inviting rectangles of silk, already stretched and sized, stood in blank rows against the walls. Even the fusuma were of new paper, offering, it would seem, to any inspired young artist, a surface of alluring possibilities. Paints, brushes, and vessels without number made an array to tempt, if only the tempting were not so obvious.

Umè-ko, watching closely the expression of her husband's face as he was first led into this room, drew old Kano aside, and urged that more tact and delicacy be used in leading Tatsu back to a desire for creative work. She herself, she hinted with deprecating sweetness, might do much if only allowed to follow her own loving instincts. But Kano had lost confidence in his daughter and bluntly told her so. Tatsu had been adopted and married in order to make him paint, and paint he should! Also it was Umè-ko's duty to influence him in whatever way and method her father thought best. Let her succeed,—that was her sole responsibility. So blustered Kano to himself and Mata, and not even the malicious twinkle of the old servant's eye pointed the way to wisdom.

Naturally Umè-ko did not succeed. Tatsu merely laughed at her flagrant efforts at duplicity. He felt no need of painting, no desire to paint. He had won the Dragon Maiden. Life could give him no more! There was no anger or resentment in his feeling toward Kano, or even the old scourge Mata. No, he was too happy! To lie dreaming on the fragrant, matted floor near Umè, where he could listen to her soft breathing and at times pull her closer by a silken sleeve,—this was enough for Tatsu. Nothing had power to arouse in him a sense of duty, of obligation to himself, or to his adopted father. He would not argue about it, and could scarcely be said to listen. He lived and moved and breathed in love as in a fourth dimension. To the old man's frequent remonstrances he would turn a gentle, deprecating face. He had promised Umè-ko never again to speak rudely to their father. Besides, why should he? The outer world was all so beautiful and sad and unimportant. A sunset cloud, or a bird swinging from a hagi spray could bring sharp, swift tears to his eyes. Beauty could move him, but not old Kano's genuine sufferings. Yet, the old man, bleating from the arid rocks of age, was doubtless a pathetic spectacle, and must be listened to kindly.

Finding the boy thus obdurate, Kano turned the full force of his discontent on Umè-ko. She endured in silence the incessant railing. Each new device urged by the distracted Kano she carried out with scrupulous care, though even with the performance of it she knew hopelessness to be involved. For hours she remained away from home, hidden in a neighbor's house or in the temple on the hill, it being Kano's thought that perhaps, in this temporary loss of his idol, Tatsu might seek solace in the paint room. But Tatsu, raging against the conditions which made such tyranny possible, stormed, on such occasions, through the little house, and up and down the garden, pelting the terrified gold-fish in their caves, stripping leaves and tips from Kano's favorite pine-shrubs, or standing, long intervals of time, on the crest of the moon-viewing hillock, from which he could command vistas of the street below.

"There 's your jewel of a painter," old Mata, indoors, would say. "Look at him, master,—a noble figure, indeed, standing on one leg like a love-sick stork!" And Kano, helpless before his own misery and the old dame's acrid triumph, would keep silence, only muttering invocations to the gods for self-control.

Often the young wife pretended a sudden desire for her own artistic work. She would go hurriedly to the little painting chamber, gather complex paraphernalia, and assume the pose of eager effort. Tatsu always followed her but, once within the room, bent such laughing eyes of comprehension that she dared not look into his face. Nevertheless she would paint; tracing, mechanically, the bird and flower studies in which she had once taken delight. Just in the midst of some specially delicate stroke, Tatsu would snatch her hands away, press them against his lips, his eyes, his throat, hurl the painting things to the four corners of the room, drag her down to his strong embrace, and triumph openly in the victory of love. The young wife, longing from the first to yield, attempted always to repel him, protesting in the words her father had bade her use, and urging him to rouse himself and paint, as she was doing. Then the young god would laugh magnificent music, drowning the last pathetic echo of old Kano's remembered voice. Catching her anew he would crush her against his breast, fondling her with that tempestuous gentleness that surely no mere man of earth could know, would drag up her faint soul to him through eyes and lips until she felt herself but a shred of ecstacy caught in a whirlwind of immortal love.

"So that we be together,
Even the Hell of the Blood Lake,
Even the Mountain of Swords,
Mean nothing to us at all!"

He would sing, in the words of an old Buddhist folk-song. At such supreme heights of emotion she knew, consciously, that Kano's grief and disappointment were nothing. She did not really care whether Tatsu ever touched a brush again,—whether, indeed, the whole visible world fretted itself into dust. She and Tatsu had found each other! The rest meant nothing at all!

Such moments were, however, the isolated and the exceptional. As the days went by they became less frequent, and, by a strange law of contrasts, with diminution exacted a heavier toll. The strain of antagonisms within the little home became almost unbearable. Neither Kano nor Tatsu would yield an inch, and between them, like a white flower between stones, little Umè-ko was crushed. A new and threatening trouble was that of poverty. Tatsu would not paint; Kano, in his wretchedness could not.

The young wife went often now to the temple on the hill. Tatsu generally went with her, remaining outside in the courtyard or at the edge of the cliff, under the camphor tree, while she was praying within. Her entreaties were all for divine guidance. She implored of the gods a deeper insight into the cause of this strange trouble now upon them, and besought, too, that in her husband, Tatsu, should be awakened a recognition of his duties, and of the household needs. Kano visited the temple, also, and spent long hours in conference with his personal friend, the abbot. Even old Mata, abandoning for the moment her Protestantism and reverting to the yearning (never entirely stifled) for mystic practises, went to an old charlatan of a fortune-teller, and purchased various charms and powders for driving the demons from the unconscious Tatsu. Umè-ko soon discovered this, and the fear that Tatsu would be poisoned added to a load of anxiety already formidable.

By the end of October, Yeddo's most golden and most perfect month, no hours brought happiness to the little bride but those stolen ones in which she and her husband were wont to take long walks together, sometimes into the country, again through the mazes of the great capital. Even at these times of respite she was only too well aware how Kano and the old nurse sat together at home, lamenting the gross selfishness of the young,—deciding, perhaps, upon the next loved painting or household treasure to be sold for buying rice. Tatsu, now as unreasonable and obstinate as Kano himself, still refused to admit unhappiness or threatened destitution. He and Umè-ko could go to the mountains, he said. "The mountains were, after all, their true home. Once there the Sennin and the deities of cloud would see that they did not suffer."

On an afternoon very near the end of the month the young couple took such a walk together. Their course lay eastward, crossing at right angles the main streets of the great city, until they reached the shores of the Sumida River, winding down like a road of glass. They had emerged into the famous district of Asakusa, where the great temple of Kwannon the Merciful attracts daily its thousands of worshippers. Here the water course is bounded by fashionable tea-houses, many stories high, and here the great arched bridges are always crowded. Leaving this busy heart of things, they sauntered northward, finding lonelier shores, and soon wide fields of green, until they reached a bank whereon grew a single leaning willow. The body of this tree, bending outward, sent its long, nerveless leaves in a perpetual green rain to the surface of the stream, where sudden swarms of minnows, like shivers in a glass, assailed the deceptive bait. The roots of the tree—great yellowish, twisted ropes of roots—clutched air, earth, and water in their convolutions. Among them the current, swifter here than in mid-stream, uttered at times a guttural, uncanny sound as of spectral laughter.

Umè-ko stood, one slender arm about the trunk, looking out, with mournful eyes, upon the passing river show. On the farther bank grew a continuous wall of cherry trees in yellowing leaf, and above them glowed the first hint of the coming sunset. Rising against the sky a temple roof, tilted like the keel of a sunken vessel, cut sharp lines into the crimson light.

Tatsu flung himself full length upon the bank. He patted the soil with its springing grasses, and felt his heart flow out in love to it. Then he reached up, caught at the drifting gauze of Umè's sleeve, and made as if to pull her down. Umè clasped the tree more tightly.

"Tatsu," she said, "I implore you not to think always of me. Look, beloved, the thin white sails of the rice-boats pass, and, over yonder, children in scarlet petticoats dance beneath the trees."

"I have eyes but for my wife," said wilful Tatsu.

Umè-ko drew the sleeve away. She would not meet his smile. "Alas, shall I forever obscure beauty!"

"There is no beauty now but in you! You are the sacred mirror which reflects for me all loveliness."

"Dear lord, those words are almost blasphemy," said Umè, in a frightened whisper. "Look, now, beloved, the light of the sun sinks down. Soon the great moon will come to us."

"What care I for a distant moon, oh, Dragon Maid," laughed Tatsu.

Umè's outstretched arm fell heavily to her side. "Alas!" she said again. "From deepest happiness may come the deepest pain. You dream not of the hurt you give."

"I give no hurt at all that I cannot more than heal," cried Tatsu, in his masterful way. But Umè's lips still quivered, and she turned her face from him.

In the silence that followed, the water among the willow roots gave out a rush and gurgle, a sound of liquid merriment,—perhaps the laugh of a "Kappa" or river sprite, mocking the perplexities of men. Umè-ko leaned over instantly, staring down into the stream.

"How deep it is, and strong," she whispered, as if to her own thought "That which fell in here would be carried very swiftly out to sea."

Tatsu smiled dreamily upon her. In his delight at her beauty, the delicate poise of body with its long, gray drifting sleeves, he did not realize the meaning of her words. One little foot in its lacquered shoe and rose-velvet thong, crushed the grasses at the very edge of the bank. Suddenly the earth beneath her shivered. It parted in a long black fissure, and then sank, with sob and splash, into the hurrying water. Umè tottered and clung to the tree. Tatsu, springing up at a single bound, caught her back into safety. The very branches above them shook as if in sentient fear. Umè felt herself pressed,—welded against her husband's side in such an agony of strength that his beating heart seemed to be in her own body. She heard the breath rasp upward in his throat and catch there, inarticulate. He began dragging her backward, foot by foot. At a safe distance he suddenly sank—rather fell—to earth bearing her with him, and began moaning over her, caressing and fondling her as a tiger might a rescued cub.

"Never go near that stream again!" he said hoarsely, as soon as he could speak at all. "Hear me, Umè-ko, it is my command! Never again approach that tree. It is a goblin tree. Some dead, unhappy woman, drowned here in the self-death, must inhabit it and would entice you to destruction. Oh, Umè, my wife,—my wife! I saw the black earth grinning beneath your feet. I cannot bear it! Come away from this place at once,—at once! The river itself may reach out snares to us."

"Yes, lord, I will come," she panted, trying to loosen the rigid arms, "but I am faint. This high bank is safe, now. And, lord, when you so embrace and crush me my strength does not return."

Tatsu grudgingly relaxed his hold. "Rest here then, close beside me," he said. "I shall not trust you, even an inch from me."

The river current in the tree roots laughed aloud.

Across and beyond the road of glass, the sky grew cold now and blue, like the side of a dead fish. A glow subtle and unmistakable as perfume tingled up through the dusk.

"The Lady Moon," whispered Umè, softly. Freeing her little hands she joined them, bent her head, and gave the prayer of welcome to O Tsuki Sama.

Tatsu watched her gloomily. "I pray to no moon," he said. "I pray to nothing in this place."

A huge coal barge on its way to the Yokohama harbor glided close to them along the dark surface of the tide. At the far end of the barge a fire was burning, and above it, from a round black cauldron, boiling rice sent up puffs of white, fragrant steam. The red light fell upon a ring of faces, evidently a mother and her children; and on the broad, naked back of the father who leaned far outward on his guiding pole. Umè turned her eyes away. "I think I can walk now," she said.

Tatsu rose instantly, and drew her upward by the hands. A shudder of remembered horror caught him. He pressed her once more tightly to his heart. "Umè-ko, Umè-ko, my wife,—my Dragon Wife!" he cried aloud in a voice of love and anguish. "I have sought you through the torments of a thousand lives. Shall anything have power to separate us now?"

"Nothing can part us now, but—death," said Umè-ko, and glanced, for an instant, backward to the river.

Tatsu winced. "Use not the word! It attracts evil."

"It is a word that all must some day use," persisted the young wife, gently. "Tell me, beloved, if death indeed should come—?"

"It would be for both. It could not be for one alone."

"No, no!" she cried aloud, lifting her white face as if in appeal to heaven. "Do not say that, lord! Do not think it! If I, the lesser one, should be chosen of death, surely you would live for our father,—for the sake of art!"

"I would kill myself just as quickly as I could!" said Tatsu, doggedly. "What comfort would painting be? I painted because I had you not."

"Because—you—had—me—not," mused little Umè-ko, her eyes fixed strangely upon the river.

"Come," said Tatsu, rudely, "did I not forbid you to speak of death? Too much has been said. Besides, the fate of ordinary mortals should have no potency for such as we. When our time comes for pause before rebirth we shall climb together some high mountain peak, lifting our arms and voices to our true parents, the gods of storm and wind. They will lean to us, beloved,—they will rush downward in a great passion of joy, catching us and straining us to immortality!"

By this they were from sight and hearing of the river, and had begun to thread the maze of narrow city streets in which now lamps and tiny electric bulbs and the bobbing lanterns of hurrying jinrikisha men had begun to twinkle. In the darker alleys the couple walked side by side. Umè, at times, even rested a small hand on her husband's sleeve. In the broad, well-lighted thoroughfares he strode on some paces in advance while Umè followed, in decorous humility, as a good wife should. Few words passed between them. The incident at the willow tree had left a gloomy aftermath of thought.

In the Kano home the simple night meal of rice, tea, soup, and pickled vegetables was already prepared. Mata motioned them to their places in the main room where old Kano was already seated, and served them in the gloomy silence which was part of the general strain. Throughout the whole place reproach hung like a miasma.

This evening, almost for the first time, Tatsu reflected, in full measure, the despondency of his companions. The elder man, glancing now and again toward him, evidently restrained with difficulty a flow of bitter words. Once he spoke to his daughter, fixing sunken eyes upon her. "The crimson lacquered wedding-chest that was your mother's, to-day has been sold to buy us food." Umè clenched her little hands together, then bowed far over, in token that she had heard. There were no words to say. For weeks now they had lived upon such money as this,—namida-kane,—"tear-money" the Japanese call it.

Tatsu, helpless in his place, scowled and muttered for a moment, then rose and hurried out, leaving the meal unfinished. Umè watched him sadly, but did not follow. This was so unusual a thing that Tatsu, alone in their chamber, was at first astonished, then alarmed. For ten minutes or more he paced up and down the narrow space, pride urging him to await his wife's dutiful appearance. In a short while more he felt the tension to be unbearable. A sinister silence flooded the house. He hurried back to the main room to find that Umè and old Kano were not there. He began searching the house, all but the kitchen. Instinctively he avoided old Mata's domain, knowing it to be the lair of an enemy. At last necessity drove him to it also. Her face leered at him through a parted shoji. He gave a bound in her direction. Instantly she had slammed the panels together; and before he could reopen them had armed herself with a huge, glittering fish-knife. "None of your mountain wild-cat ways for me!" she screamed.

In spite of wretchedness and alarm the boy laughed aloud. "I wish not to hurt you, old fool," he said. "I desire nothing but to know where my wife is."

"With her father," snapped the other.

"Yes, but where,—where? And why did she go without telling me? Where did he take her? Answer quickly. I must follow them."

"I have no answers for you," said Mata. "And even if I had you would not get them. Go, go, out of my sight, you Bearer of Discord!" she railed, feeling that at last an opportunity for plain speaking had arrived. "This was a happy house until your evil presence sought it. Don't glare at me, and take postures. I care neither for your tall figure nor your flashing eyes. You may bewitch the others, but not old Mata! Oh, Dragon Painter! Oh, Dragon Painter! The greatest since Sesshu!" she mimicked, "show me a few of the wonderful things you were to paint us when once you were Kano's son! Bah! you were given my nursling, as a wolf is given a young fawn,—that was all you wanted. You will never paint!"

"Tell me where she is or I'll—" began the boy, raving.

"No you won't," jeered Mata, now in a transport of fury. "Back, back, out of my kitchen and my presence or this knife will plunge its way into you as into a devil-fish. Oh, it would be a sight! I have no love for you!"

"I care not for your love, old Baba, old fiend, nor for your knife. Where did my Umè go? You grin like an old she-ape! Never, upon my mountains did I see so vicious a beast."

"Then go back to your mountains! You are useless here. You will not even paint. Go where you belong!"

"The mountains,—the mountains!" sobbed the boy, under his breath. "Yes, I must go to them or my soul will go without me! Perhaps the kindlier spirits of the air will tell me where she is!" With a last distracted gesture he fled from the house and out into the street. Mata listened with satisfaction as she heard him racing up the slope toward the hillside. "I wish it were indeed a Kiu Shiu peak he climbed, instead of a decent Yeddo cliff," she muttered to herself, as she tied on her apron and began to wash the supper dishes. "But, alas, he will be back all too soon, perhaps before my master and Miss Umè come down from the temple."

In this surmise the old dame was, for once, at fault. Tatsu did not return until full daylight of the next morning. He had been wandering, evidently, all night long among the chill and dew-wet branches of the mountain shrubs. His silken robe was torn and stained as had been the blue cotton dress, that first day of his coming. At sight of his sunken eyes and haggard look Umè-ko's heart cried out to him, and it was with difficulty that she restrained her tears. But she still had a last appeal to make, and this was to be the hour.

In response to his angry questions, she would answer nothing but that she and her father had business at the temple. More than this, she would not say. As he persisted, pleading for her motives in so leaving him, and heaping her with the reproaches of tortured love, she suddenly threw herself on the mat before him, in a passion of grief such as he had not believed possible to her. She clasped his knees, his feet, and besought him, with all the strength and pathos of her soul, to make at least one more attempt to paint. He, now in equal torment, with tears running along his bronzed face, confessed to her that the power seemed to have gone from him. Some demon, he said, must have stolen it from him while he slept, for now the very touch of a brush, the look of paint, frenzied him.

Umè-ko went again to her father, saying that she again had failed. The strain was now, indeed, past all human endurance. The little home became a charged battery of tragic possibilities. Each moment was a separate menace, and the hours heaped up a structure already tottering.

At dawn of the next day, Tatsu, who after a restless and unhappy night had fallen into heavy slumber, awoke, with a start, alone. A pink light glowed upon his paper shoji; the plum tree, now entirely leafless, threw a splendid shadow-silhouette. At the eaves, sparrows chattered merrily. It was to be a fair day: yet instantly, even before he had sprung, cruelly awake, to his knees, he knew that the dreaded Something was upon him.

On the silken head-rest of Umè's pillow was fastened a long, slender envelope, such as Japanese women use for letters. Tatsu recoiled from it as from a venomous reptile. Throwing himself face down upon the floor he groaned aloud, praying his mountain gods to sweep away from his soul the black mist of despair that now crawled, cold, toward it. Why should Umè-ko have left him again, and at such an hour? Why should she have pinned to her pillow a slip of written paper? He would not read it! Yes, yes,—he must,—he must read instantly. Perhaps the Something was still to be prevented! He caught the letter up, held it as best he could in quivering hands, and read:

Because of my unworthiness, O master, my heart's beloved, I have been allowed to come between you and the work you were given of the gods to do. The fault is all mine, and must come from my evil deeds in a previous life. By sacrifice of joy and life I now attempt to expiate it. I go to the leaning willow where the water speaks. One thing only I shall ask of you,—that you admit to your mind no thought of self-destruction, for this would heavily burden my poor soul, far off in the Meido-land. Oh, live, my beloved, that I, in spirit, may still be near you. I will come. You shall know that I am near,—only, as the petals of the plum tree fall in the wind of spring, so must my earthly joy depart from me. Farewell, O thou who art loved as no mortal was ever loved before thee.

Your erring wife,
Umè-ko.

In his fantastic night-robe with its design of a huge fish, ungirdled and wild of eyes, Tatsu rushed through the drowsy streets of Yeddo. The few pedestrians, catching sight of him, withdrew, with cries of fear, into gateways and alleys.

At the leaning willow he paused, threw an arm about it, and swayed far over like a drunkard, his eyes blinking down upon the stream. Umè-ko's words, at the time of their utterance scarcely noted, came now as an echo, hideously clear. "That which fell here would be carried very swiftly out to sea." His nails broke against the bark. She,—his wife,—must have been thinking of it even then, while he,—he,—blind brute and dotard—sprawled upon the earth feeding his eyes of flesh upon the sight of her. But, after all, could she have really done it? Surely the gods, by miracle, must have checked so disproportionate a sacrifice! Suddenly his wandering gaze was caught and held by a little shoe among the willow roots. It was of black lacquer, with a thong of rose-colored velvet. With one cry, that seemed to tear asunder the physical walls of his body, he loosed his arm and fell.

IX

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.