The Dragon Painter Part 1

The Dragon Painter.

by Mary McNeil Fenollosa.

I

The old folks call it Yeddo. To the young, "Tokyo" has a pleasant, modern sound, and comes glibly. But whether young or old, those whose home it is know that the great flat city, troubled with green hills, cleft by a shining river, and veined in living ca.n.a.ls, is the central spot of all the world.

Storms visit Tokyo,--with fury often, sometimes with destruction.

Earthquakes cow it; snow falls upon its temple roofs, swings in wet, dazzling ma.s.ses from the bamboo plumes, or balances in white strata along green-black pine branches. The summer sun scorches the face of Yeddo, and summer rain comes down in wide bands of light. With evening the mist creeps up, thrown over it like a covering, casting a spell of silence through which the yellow lanterns of the hurrying jinrikishas dance an elfish dance, and the voices of the singing-girls pierce like fine blades of sound.

But to know the full charm of the great city, one must wake with it at some rebirth of dawn. This hour gives to the imaginative in every land a thrill, a yearning, and a pang of visual regeneration. In no place is this wonder more deeply touched with mystery than in modern Tokyo.

Far off to the east the Sumida River lies in sleep. Beyond it, temple roofs--black keels of sunken vessels--cut a sky still powdered thick with stars. Nothing moves, and yet a something changes! The darkness shivers as to a cold touch. A pallid haze breathes wanly on the surface of the impa.s.sive sky. The gold deepens swiftly and turns to a faint rose flush. The stars scamper away like mice.

Across the moor of gray house eaves the mist wavers. Day troubles it.

A pink light rises to the zenith, and the mist shifts and slips away in layers, pink and gold and white. Now far beyond the grayness, to the west, the cone of Fuji flashes into splendor. It, too, is pink. Its shape is of a lotos bud, and the long fissures that plough a mountain side are now but delicate gold veining on a petal. Slowly it seems to open. It is the chalice of a new day, the signal and the pledge of consecration. Husky crows awake in the pine trees, and doves under the temple eaves. The east is red beyond the river, and the round, red sun, insignia of this land, soars up like a cry of triumph.

On the glittering road of the Sumida, loaded barges, covered for the night with huge squares of fringed straw mats, begin to nod and preen themselves like a covey of gigantic river birds. Sounds of prayer and of silver matin bells come from the temples, where priest and acolyte greet the Lord Buddha of a new day. From tiny chimneyless kitchens of a thousand homes thin blue feathers of smoke make slow upward progress, to be lost in the last echoes of the vanishing mist. Sparrows begin to chirp, first one, then ten, then thousands. Their voices have the clash and chime of a myriad small triangles.

The wooden outer panels (amado) of countless dwellings are thrust noisily aside and stacked into a shallow closet. The noise reverberates from district to district in a sharp musketry of sound.

Maid servants call cheerily across bamboo fences. Shoji next are opened, disclosing often the dull green mosquito net hung from corner to corner of the low-ceiled sleeping rooms. Children, in brilliant night robes, run to the verandas to see the early sun; c.o.c.ks strut in pigmy gardens. Now, from along the streets rise the calls of flower peddlers, of venders of fish, bean-curd, vegetables, and milk. Thus the day comes to modern Tokyo, which the old folks still call Yeddo.

On such a midsummer dawn, not many years ago, old Kano Indara, sleeping in his darkened chamber, felt the summons of an approaching joy.

Beauty tugged at his dreams. Smiling, as a child that is led by love, he rose, drew aside softly the shoji, then the amado of his room, and then, with face uplifted, stepped down into his garden. The beauty of the ebbing night caught at his sleeve, but the dawn held him back.

It was the moment just before the great Sun took place upon his throne.

Kano still felt himself lord of the green s.p.a.ce round about him. On their pretty bamboo trellises the potted morning-glory vines held out flowers as yet unopened. They were fragile, as if of tissue, and were beaded at the crinkled tips with dew. Kano's eyelids, too, had dew of tears upon them. He crouched close to the flowers. Something in him, too, some new ecstacy was to unfurl. His lean body began to tremble.

He seated himself at the edge of the narrow, railless veranda along which the growing plants were ranged. One trembling bud reached out as if it wished to touch him.

The old man shook with the beating of his own heart. He was an artist.

Could he endure another revelation of joy? Yes, his soul, renewed ever as the G.o.ds themselves renew their youth, was to be given the inner vision. Now, to him, this was the first morning. Creation bore down upon him.

The flower, too, had begun to tremble. Kano turned directly to it.

The filmy, azure angles at the tip were straining to part, held together by just one drop of light. Even as Kano stared the drop fell heavily, plashing on his hand. The flower, with a little sob, opened to him, and questioned him of life, of art, of immortality. The old man covered his face, weeping.

The last of his race was Kano Indara; the last of a mighty line of artists. Even in this material age his fame spread as the mists of his own land, and his name was known in barbarian countries far across the sea. Tokyo might fall under the blight of progress, but Kano would hold to the traditions of his race. To live as a true artist,--to die as one,--this was his care. He might have claimed high position in the great Art Museum recently inaugurated by the new government, and housed in an abomination of pink stucco with Moorish towers at the four corners. He might even have been elected president of the new Academy, and have presided over the Italian sculptors and degenerate French painters imported to instruct and "civilize" modern j.a.pan. Stiff graphite pencils, making lines as hard and sharp as those in the faces of foreigners themselves, were to take the place of the soft charcoal flake whose stroke was of satin and young leaves. Horrible brushes, fashioned of the hair of swine, pinched in by metal bands, and wielded with a hard tapering stick of varnished wood, were to be thrust into the hands of artists,--yes,--artists--men who, from childhood, had known the soft pliant j.a.panese brush almost as a spirit hand;--had felt the joy of the long stroke down fibrous paper where the very thickening and thinning of the line, the turn of the brush here, the easing of it there, made visual music,--men who had realized the brush as part not only of the body but of the soul,--such men, indeed,--such artists, were to be offered a bunch of hog bristles, set in foreign tin. Why, even in the annals of Kano's own family more than one faithful brush had acquired a soul of its own, and after the master's death had gone on lamenting in his written name. But the foreigners' brushes, and their little tubes of ill-smelling gum colored with dead hues! Kano shuddered anew at the thought.

Naturally he hated all new forms of government. He regretted and deplored the magnanimity of his Emperor in giving to his people, so soon, a modern const.i.tution. What need had Art of a const.i.tution?

Across the northern end of Yeddo runs the green welt of a table-land.

Midway, at the base of this, tucked away from northern winds, hidden in green bamboo hedges, Kano lived, a mute protest against the new.

Beside himself, of the household were Ume-ko, his only child, and an old family servant, Mata.

Kano's garden, always the most important part of a j.a.panese dwelling place, ran out in one continuous, shallow terrace to the south. A stone wall upheld its front edge from the narrow street; and on top of this wall stiff hedges grew. In one corner, however, a hillock had been raised, a "Moon Viewing Place," such as poets and artists have always found necessary. From its flat top old Kano had watched through many years the rising of the moon; had seen, as now, a new dawn possess a new-created earth,--had traced the outlines of the stars. By day he sometimes loved to watch the little street below, delighting in the motion and color of pa.s.sing groups.

For the garden, itself, it was fashioned chiefly of sand, pebbles, stones, and many varieties of pine, the old artist's favorite plant. A small rock-bound pond curved about the inner base of the moon-viewing hill, duplicating in its clear surface the beauties near. A few splendid carp, the color themselves of dawn, swam lazily about with noses in the direction of the house whence came, they well knew, liberal offerings of rice and cake.

Kano had his plum trees, too; the cla.s.sic "ume," loved of all artists, poets, and decent-minded people generally. One tree, a superb specimen of the kind called "Crouching-Dragon-Plum," writhed and twisted near the veranda of the chamber of its name-child, Ume-ko, thrusting one leafy arm almost to the paper shoji of her wall. Kano's transient flowers were grown, for the most part in pots, and these his daughter Ume-ko loved to tend. There were morning-glories for the mid-summer season, peonies and iris for the spring, and chrysanthemums for autumn.

One foreign rose-plant, pink of bloom, in a blue-gray jar, had been pruned and trained into a beauty that no western rose-bush ever knew.

Behind the Kano cottage the rise of ground for twenty yards was of a grade scarcely perceptible to the eye. Here Mata did the family washing; dried daikon in winter, and sweet-potato slices in the summer sun. This small s.p.a.ce she considered her special domain, and was at no pains to conceal the fact. Beyond, the hill went upward suddenly with the curve of a cresting wave. Higher it rose and higher, bearing a tangled growth of vines and ferns and bamboo gra.s.s; higher and higher, until it broke, in sheer mid-air, with a coa.r.s.e foam of rock, thick shrubs, and stony ledges. Almost at the zenith of the cottage garden it poised, and a great camphor tree, centuries old, soared out into the blue like a green balloon.

Behind the camphor tree, again, and not visible from the garden below, stood a temple of the "Shingon" sect, the most mystic of the old esoteric Buddhist forms. To the rear of this the broad, low, rectangular buildings of a nunnery, gray and old as the temple itself brooded among high hedges of the sacred mochi tree. This retreat had been famous for centuries throughout j.a.pan. More than once a Lady Abbess had been yielded from the Imperial family. Formerly the temple had owned many koku of rich land; had held feudal sway over rice fields and whole villages, deriving princely revenue. With the restoration of the Emperor to temporal power, some thirty years before the beginning of this story, most of the land had been confiscated; and now, shrunken like the papal power at Rome, the temple claimed, in land, only those acres bounded by its own hedges and stone temple walls. There were the main building itself, silent, impressive in towering majesty; subordinate chapels and dwellings for priests, a huge smoke-stained refectory, the low nunnery in its spreading gardens and, down the northern slope of the hill, the cemetery, a lichen-growth, as it were, of bristling, close-set tombs in gray stone, the splintered regularity broken in places by the tall rounded column of a priest's grave, set in a ring of wooden sotoba. At irregular intervals cl.u.s.ters of giant bamboo trees sprang like green flame from the fissures of gray rock.

Even in humiliation, in comparative poverty, the temple dominated, for miles around, the imagination of the people, and was the great central note of the landscape. The immediate neighborhood was jealously proud of it. Country folk, journeying by the street below, looked up with lips that whispered invocation. Children climbed the long stone steps to play in the temple courtyard, and feed the beautiful tame doves that lived among the carved dragons of the temple eaves.

In that gray cemetery on the further slope Kano's wife, the young mother who died so long ago that Ume-ko could not remember her at all, slept beneath a granite shaft which said, "A Flower having blossomed in the Night, the Halls of the G.o.ds are fragrant." This was the Buddhist kaimyo, or priestly invocation to the spirit of the dead. Of the more personal part of the young mother, her name, age, and the date of her "divine retirement," these were recorded in the household shrine of the Kano cottage, where her "ihai" stood, just behind a little lamp of pure vegetable oil whose light had never yet been suffered to die. Through this shrine, and the daily loving offices required by it, she had never ceased to be a presence in the house. Even in his pa.s.sionate desire for a son to inherit the name and traditions of his race, old Kano had not been able to endure the thought of a second wife who might wish the shrine removed.

Ume-ko and her father were well known at the temple, and worshipped often before its golden altars. But Mata scorned the ceremony of the older creed. She was a Shinshu, a Protestant. Her sect discarded mysticism as useless, believed in the marriage of priests, and in the abolition of the monastic life, and relied for salvation only on the love and mercy of Amida, the Buddha of Light.

Sometimes at twilight a group of shadowy human figures, gray as the doves themselves, crept out from the nunnery gate, crossed the wide, pebbled courtyard of the temple and stood, for long moments, by the gnarled roots of the camphor tree, staring out across the beauty of the plain of Yeddo; its shining bay a great mirror to the south, and off, on the western horizon, where the last light hung, Fuji, a cone of porphyry, ma.s.sive against the gold.

For a full hour, now, Kano had delighted in the morning-glories. At intervals he strolled about the garden to touch separately, as if in greeting, each beloved plant. Except for the deepening fervor of the sun he would have kept no note of time. The last shred of mist had vanished. Crows and sparrows were busy with breakfast for their nestlings.

It was, perhaps, the clamor of these feathered parents that, at last, awoke old Mata in her sleeping closet near the kitchen. She turned drowsily. The presence of an unusual light under the shoji brought her to her knees. The amado in the further part of the house were undoubtedly open. Could robbers have come in the night? And were her master and Miss Ume weltering in gore?

She was on her feet now, pushing with shaking fingers at the sliding walls. She peered at first into Ume's room for there, indeed, lay the core of old Mata's heart. A slender figure on the floor stirred slightly and a sound of soft breathing filled the silence. All was well in Ume's room. She knocked then on Kano's fusuma. There was no response. Cautiously she parted them, and met an incoming flood of morning light. The walls were opened. Through the small square pillars of the veranda she could see, as in a frame, old Kano standing in the garden beside the fish-pond. Even as she gazed, incredulous at her own stupidity in sleeping so late, the temple bell above boomed out six slow strokes. Six! Such a thing had never been known. Well, she must be growing old and worthless. She had better fill her sleeve with pebbles and cast herself into the nearest stream. She hurried back, a tempestuous protest in every step.

"Miss Ume,--Ume-ko!" she called. "Ma-a-a! What has come to us both?

The Danna San walks about as if he had been awake for hours. And not a cup of tea for him! The honorable fire does not exist. Surely a demon of sleep has bewitched us."

She had entered the girl's room, and now, while speaking, crossed the narrow s.p.a.ce to fling wide, first the shoji, and then the outer amado.

Ume moved lazily. Her lacquered pillow, with its bright cushion, rocked as she stirred. "No demon has found me, Mata San," she murmured, smiling. "No demon unless it be you, cruel nurse, who have dragged me back from a heavenly dream."

"Baku devour your dream!" cried Mata. "I say there is no fire beneath the pot!"

Ume sat up now, and smoothed slowly the loops of her shining hair. The yellow morning sun danced into the corners of her room, rioted among the hues of her silken bed coverings, and paused, abashed, as it were, before the delicate beauty of her face.

As Mata scolded, the girl nestled back among her quilts, smiling mischievously. She loved to tease the old dame. "No, nurse," she protested, "that cannot be. The baku feeds on evil dreams alone, and this was not evil. Ah, nurse, it was so sweet a dream----"

"I can give no time to your honorable fooling," cried Mata, in pretended anger. "Have I the arms of a Hundred-Handed Kwannon that I can do all the household work at once? Attire yourself promptly, I entreat: prepare one of the small trays for your august parent, and get out two of the pickled plums from the blue jar."

Ume, with an exaggerated sigh of regret, rose to her feet. Quilt and cushions were pushed into a corner for later airing. Her toilet was swift and simple. To slip the bright-colored sleeping robe from her and toss it to the heaped-up coverlids, don an undergarment of thin white linen and a scant petticoat of blue crepe, draw over them a day robe of blue and white cotton, and tie all in with a sash of brocaded blue and gold,--that was the sum of it. For washing she had a shallow wooden basin on the kitchen veranda, where cold water splashed incessantly from bamboo tubes thrust into the hillside. Hurriedly drying her face and hands on a small towel that hung from a swinging bamboo hoop, she ran into the kitchen to a.s.sist the still grumbling Mata.

By this time old Kano had again seated himself at the edge of his veranda. The summer sun grew unpleasantly warm. The morning-glories on their trellises had begun to droop. A little later they would hang, wretched and limp, mere faded sc.r.a.ps of dissolution. Overhead the temple bell struck seven. Kano shuddered at this foreign marking out of hours. A melancholy, intense as had been his former ecstacy, began to enfold his spirit. Perhaps he had waited too long for the simple breakfast; perhaps the recent glory had drained him of vital force. A hopelessness, alike of life and death, rose about him in a tide.

Ume prostrated herself upon the veranda near him. "Good morning, august father. Will you deign to enter now and partake of food?"

Her voice and the morning face she lifted might have won a smile from a stone image. Kano turned sourly. "Why," he thought, "in Shaka's name, could n't she have been a son?"

He rose, however, shaking off his wooden clogs so that they remained upon the path below, and followed Ume to the zashiki, or main room of the house, with the best view of the garden.

The tea was delicious in its first delicate infusion; the pickled plums most stimulating to a morning appet.i.te.

"Rice and fish will soon honorably eventuate," Ume a.s.sured him as she went back, smiling, into the kitchen.