VI
Through all these busy days Umè-ko moved as one but little interested. Kano and Uchida noticed nothing unusual. To them she was merely the conventional nonenity of maidenhood that Japanese etiquette demanded. It never entered their heads that she would not have agreed with equal readiness to any other husband of their choosing.
Mata knew her idol and nursling better. Hints of character and of deep-sea passion had risen now and again to the surface of the girl's placid life. There were currents underneath that the father did not suspect. Once, during her childhood, a pet bird had been injured in a fit of anger by old Kano. Umè-ko, with her ashen face under perfect control, had killed the suffering creature and carried it, wrapped in white paper, to her own room. The father, ashamed now, and filled with genuine remorse, had stormed up and down the garden paths, reviling himself for an impatient ogre, and promising more restraint in future. Mata, silent for once, had crept to her child-mistress' close-shut walls, heard the last sobbing words of a Buddhist prayer for the dead, and burst through the shoji in scant time to catch back the stroke of a dagger from the girl's slim, upraised throat. Her terrified screams summoned Kano and the neighbors as well. A priest hurried down from the temple on the hill. In time the culprit was reduced to a condition of tearful penitence, and gave her promise never again to attempt so cowardly and wicked a thing as self-destruction, unless it were for some noble and impersonal end.
The good old priest, to comfort her, chanted a sutra over the bier of her lost playmate, and bestowed upon it a high-sounding Buddhist kaimyo which Kano carved, in his finest manner, upon a wooden grave post. In time, the artist forgot the episode. Mata never forgot. Often in the long hours she thought of it now as she watched the girl's face bent always so silently above the bridal sewing. No impatience or regret were visible in her. Yet, thought Mata, surely no maiden in her senses could really wish to become the wife of an ill-mannered, untamed mountain sprite! Could Death be the secret of this pale tranquillity? Was Umè-ko to cheat them all, at the last, by self-destruction?
In such wise did the old servant fret and ponder, but no assurance came. A true insight into art might have opened many doors to her. Yet, through a life devoted to the externals of it, Mata had been tolerant of beauty, rather than at one with it. The impractical view of life which art seemed to demand of its devotees was enough to arouse suspicion, if not her actual dislike. Uchida was a hero because he had been bold enough to shake himself free from lethargic influences, and achieve a shining and substantial success.
But even had the key of art been thrust into the old dame's groping hand, and even had her master guided her, there was an inner chamber of Umè's heart which they could not have found. Umè herself had not known of it until that first instant when, now three weeks ago, a strange young face, hung about with shadows, had peered into her father's gate. With the first sound of his voice, she had entered in, had knelt before a shrine whereon, wrapped in fire, a Secret lay. Ever since she had needed to guard that shrine, not, indeed, for fear that the light would falter, but rather that it might not leap up, and lay waste her being. As one guards a flame, so Umè-ko, with silence and prayer and self-enforced tranquillity, guarded the sacred spark from winds of passion. Each day at dawn, and again at twilight of each day, it flamed high and was hard to conquer, for with dawn a letter was hers—held in the night-wet branches of her dragon-plum, and each night when Mata and her father thought her sleeping, an answer was written, and committed to the keeping of the tree.
When Tatsu did not paint, or rest from sheer exhaustion, he was writing. Umè, bending above his words, shivering at times, or weeping, marvelled that the tissue had not charred beneath the thoughts burned into it. Tatsu's phrases were like his paintings, unusual, vital, almost demoniac in force, shot through and through at times with the bolt of an almost unbearable beauty. Her own words answered his, as the tree-tops answer storm, with music. Verse alone could ease the girl of her ecstacy, and each recorded and triumphed in the demolition of yet another day. "Another stone, beloved, thrust down from the dungeon wall that severs us!"
Swiftly the heap of wedding garments grew. There were delicate kimonos, as thin and gray as mist, with sunset-colored inner robes of silk; gowns of linen and cotton for indoor wear; bath and sleeping robes with great designs of flowers, birds, or landscapes; silken bed-quilts and bright floor cushions; great sashes crusted like bark with patternings of gold; dainty toilet accessories of hairpins, girdles, collarettes, shopping-bags, purses, jewel-cases,—and new sandals of various sorts, each with velvet thongs of some delicate hue.
The sewing was, of course, done at home. Mata would have trusted this sacred rite to no domination but her own. She worked incessantly, planning, cutting, scolding,—hurrying off to the shopping district for some forgotten item, conferring with Ando Uchida about the details of Tatsu's outfit, then returning, flushed with success and importance, to new home triumphs.
Umè sewed steadily all day. Her painting materials had been put meekly aside, and, as a further precaution at old Mata's hands, hidden under the kitchen flooring. Toward the last it was found necessary to employ an assistant, a seamstress, known of old to Mata. Her companionship, as well as her sewing, proved a boon. Seated upon the springy matting, with waves of shimmering silk tumultuous about them, the old dames chatted incessantly of other brides and other wedding outfits they had known. Marvellous were their tales of married life, some of them designed to cheer, others to warn the silent little third figure, that of the bride-to-be. As a matter of fact, Umè never listened. The noise and buzz of incessant conversation affected her pleasantly, but remotely, as the chatter of distant sparrows. The girl had too much within herself to think of.