Tatsu grew to love the old dragon plum as Umè-ko had loved it. She was its name-child, Umè, and he felt its sweetness to be one with her. At night the perfume crept in to him through crannies of the close-shut amado and shoji, revivifying, to keen agony, his longing for his wife. There were moonlit nights he could not rest for it, but would rise, pacing the cold, wet pebbles of the garden, or wandering, like a distracted spirit that had lost its way, through the thoroughfares of the sleeping town.
His whole life now, since he had cheated death, was blurred and vague. To himself he seemed an unreal thing projected, like a phantom light, upon the wavering umbra of two contrasting worlds. The halves of him, body and animating thought, fitted each other loosely, and had a strange desire to drift apart. The quiet, obedient Tatsu, regaining day by day the strength and beauty that his clean youth owed him, was to the inner Tatsu but a painted shell. The real self, clouded in eternal grief, knew clarity and purpose only before a certain flower-set shrine. He believed now, implicitly, that Umè's soul dwelt near him, was often with him in this room. A resolve half formed, and but partially admitted to himself,—for things of the other world are not well to meddle with,—grew slowly in him, to compel, by worship and never-relaxing prayer, the presence of her self,—her insubstantiate body, outlined upon the ether in pale light, or formed in planes of ghostly mist. Others had thus drawn visions from the under-world, and why not he?
Even now she was, for him, the one fact of the ten existences. She knew it and he knew it. Why should not sight be added to the unchallenged datum of the mind. Living, they had often read each other's thoughts. They held, he knew, as yet, their separate intelligences,—still they could bridge a blessed duality by love. Even now it would have surprised him little to hear the very sound of her voice echo from the inner shrine, to feel a little white hand pass like a cloud across his upraised brow. At such moments he told himself that he was satisfied, she was his until death and beyond. No one could separate them now!
These were, alas, the higher peaks of love. There waited for him, as he knew too well, steep hillsides set with swords, and valleys terrible with fire.
"So that we be together,
Even the Hell of the Blood Lake,
Even the Mountain of Swords,
Mean nothing to us at all!"
So they had sung. So that we be together! Ah, together,—that was the essence of it, that the key! "And this is what I want!" groaned the suffering man. "This ghostly resignation is a self-numbing of the heart. I care not for the ghost, the spirit, however pure. I want the wife I have lost,—her smile, her voice, her little hands to touch me! Oh, Umè-ko, my wife, my wife!" If, as the abbot said, this phase of grief were bestial, were unworthy of the woman who had died for him, then why did not the listening soul of her shrink? He knew that it was not repelled, whatever the frenzy of his grief. Indeed, at such times of agony she leaned down closer, longing to comfort him. If it were given her to speak she would have cried, "My husband!" Wherever she might drift,—in the black ocean, in the Meido-land, yes, even in the smile of Buddha on his throne,—she yearned for her lover as he for her, with a human love; she stretched out arms of mist to him, and tinged the pale ether of the spirit world with love's rosy flame.
One such night, during the time of plum-tree falling, when the boy, tortured by the almost human sweetness of the flowers, had risen from his bed to flee memory across the wide, cold plains of night, he had left, in his hurried going, the doors and shutters of his room spread wide. Mata and old Kano, accustomed to these midnight sounds, merely turned on their lacquered pillows, murmured "Poor tormented Tatsu," and went to sleep again. It had been a day of power for the young artist, but not a day of peace. The picture he had worked on he would have called one of his "nightmare fancies." It showed a slender form in gray with one arm about a willow. She and the tree both leaned above swift, flowing water, and her eyes were fixed in sombre brooding. On the bank, in abrupt foreshortening, lay the figure of a man. He looked at her. From the river, unmarked as yet by either, rose the gray face and long, red hair of a Kappa, or malicious river sprite. This sketch, unfinished, for the Kappa was a mere indication of red locks and a tall, thin form, stood against a pillar of the tokonoma at just the angle where the soft light of the butsu-dan shed a pale glow across it. Brushes, paints, and various small saucers littered the floor. Tatsu had stopped his work abruptly, overcome by the very power of his own delineation.
He was absent from the house for several hours. The long walk through unseen streets and over unnoticed bridges had given the boon, at least, of physical fatigue. Now, perhaps, he could get to sleep before the black ants of thought had rediscovered him. Entering the room quietly he closed the shoji, smoothed the bed-clothes with an impatient hand, and knelt, for an instant, before the shrine. Perhaps, after all, rest was not to come. The air was sweet and heavy with Umè-ko. The faint perfume of sandalwood which, living, always hung about her garments, flowed in with the odor of the plum. She must be near,—Umè herself, in mortal garments. In the next room, the veranda, hiding in the closet to spring out merrily upon him! He groaned and strove to plunge his mind into prayer.
The unfinished picture stood close at hand. Suddenly he noticed it, and, with a gasp, stooped to it. Something had changed; the whole vibration of its lines were subtly new. There was the girl's figure, the leaning willow, the man,—content, insensate, sprawling upon the bank,—but the Kappa! Buddha the Merciful, could it be true? Where he had left a Kappa, waiting until to-morrow to give the triumph, the leering satisfaction at the human grief it fed on, rose the white form and pitying face of Kwannon Sama,—she to whom his Umè loved to pray. The eyes, soft, humid with compassion, looked directly out to his. They were Umè's eyes! He caught up one brush after the other. All had been used, and Umè's touch was upon them. Her aura permeated them.
He rushed now to the veranda. In leaving the rooms, three hours before, he had not taken the usual stone step which led into the garden under the branches of the plum, but had leaped directly from the low flooring, not caring where he trod. He remembered now that the stone had been white in the moonlight. It was now swept clean of petals, as though by the hurried trailing of a woman's dress. Was this the way in which she was to manifest herself? And would a spirit-robe brush surfaces so vehemently? And would a ghostly hand use brushes and pigments of ground-earth?