"With the soft tuft of camel hair he blurred against the peak pale, luminous vapor of new cloud."
But this one swift achievement only whetted the famished appetite to more creative ardor. Sketch after sketch he made, some to tear at once into strips, others to fling carelessly aside to any corner where they might chance to fall, others, again, to be stored cunningly upon some remote shelf to which old Kano and Uchida and Mata could not reach, but whence he, Tatsu, the Dragon Painter, should, in a few days more, withdraw them and show them to his bride. The purple dusk brimmed his tiny garden, and yet he could not stop. Art had seized him by the throat, and shook him, as a prey. Uchida, peering at him from between the fusuma, perceived the glory and turned away in silence; nor for that day nor the next would he allow any one to approach the frenzied boy. The elder man had, himself in youth, fared along the valleys of art, and knew the signals on the peaks.
Tatsu, unconscious that the house was not still empty, painted on. Sometimes he sobbed. Again an ague of beauty caught him, and he needed to hurl himself full length upon the mats until the ecstacy was past. Just as the daylight went he saw, upon the one great glimmering square of silk as yet immaculate, a dream of Umè-ko, the Dragon Maiden, who had danced before him. This was an apparition too holy to be limned in artificial light. When the sun came, next day, he knew well what there was for him to do. He placed the frame upright, where the first pink beam would find it. Brushes, water vessels, and paints were placed in readiness, with such neatness and precision that old Kano's heart would have laughed in pleasure. That night the shoji and amado were not closed. Tatsu did not sleep. It was a night of consecration. He walked up and down, sometimes in the narrow room, sometimes in the garden. Often he prayed. Again he sat in the soft darkness, before the ghostly glimmer of the silk, tracing upon it visions of ethereal light. When, at last, the dawn came in, Tatsu bowed to the east, with his usual prayer of thankful piety, then, with the exaltation still upon him, lifted the silver thread of a brush and drew his first conscious outline of the woman soon to be his wife.
