The Dragon Painter

by Mary McNeil Fenollosa

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.