“Won’t you paint for me, Sensei, a picture of myself, drowned and floating in water,—not struggling and in agony—but a nice little picture of me floating in easy, painless eternal repose.”
“Eh?”
“Thunder and lightning, you are astonished?”
Nami-san got to her feet lightly and three steps brought her to the opening of my room. She turned back and threw at me the most innocent of her smiles, as she walked out of it. For a long time I sat immobile as one lost in reverie.
CHAPTER X.
My curiosity brought me, the next day, to the Kagamiga Ike, a pool of water, not more than half a mile in circumference, by an actual survey, but looking immeasurably larger, when seen through openings in the brushwood, embowering its zigzag water-edge. I left it to my feet to take me where they liked, and I stopped when they came to a halt at a spot close to and falling into water, determined not to move till I got sick of it. Lucky that I could indulge in a whim like this; for in Tokyo I would be run over by a tram car, if not sternly chased away by a policeman. Ah! the city is a place where they make a beggar of a peaceful citizen, and pay a high salary to detectives who are all but boss pickpockets!
I sat on a damp cushion, which I found in incipient Spring grass, satisfied that I was in the bosom of nature, where neither wealth nor power could disturb me, and where I could heartily laugh at the folly of Timon’s wrath. I then took out and lighted a cigarette, and as a streak of smoke from the match took the shape of a dragon with its tail tapering to a line, and vanished in a moment, I drew nearer to the water edge. I looked into the clear and placid water of the pond and saw some slender weeds reposing as in eternal peace in its not necessarily unfathomable depth. Unlike the shear grass on the bank which moved in the breeze, the weeds down in the bottom were doomed, I fancied, never to stir till their surrounding water moved in ripples, an event, which in all appearance, seemed never to come. Possessed of willingness to be animate, but imprisoned in the watery dungeon, they appeared to have been waiting in vain, morning after morning, and evening after evening, for an opportunity to be sported with, and eking out a life of forced immobility, unable to die. I picked up a couple of pebbles and dropped one of them into the water. I saw a couple or three of the thin stalks of weeds move wearily, as some bubbles came up to the surface; but the next moment more bubbles hid them from sight, as if they must not be seen in motion. I threw in the other pebble, with some force this time; but the poor resigned thing would not respond to my efforts to awaken them, and I left the place and walked a little way up the slow incline.
A huge tree stood over my new position of vantage, screening me from the sun and making me feel chilly. Near the water’s edge, on the other side of the pond, was an overhanging camellia tree in full bloom. There is something very heavy and dull in the green of camellia leaves, even when seen in the sunshine, and I would have never known this particular plant but for its blood red flowers, which are never attractive, though fiery and striking. I never look at camellia flowers in a deep forest or mountain without wishing that I had not seen them; their red is not a common red, but a red with something weird in it like a she-demon in a fair woman’s mask, who fascinates you with her black eyes and beauty and breathes poison into your pores before you know it. The pear blossoms in rain never fail to arouse a sentiment of pity; the aronia in pale moon light awakens love; but the camellia’s cheerless red be-speaks a dark poison and something ominous.
As I was looking at those dark red flowers, as if under a spell, one of them fell into the water below, absolutely the only thing in motion in the still Spring day. Presently another dropped. The eerie thing about the camellia flower is that it never breaks up when it falls, as do most other flowers, but keeps compactly together, never to let its secret out, as it were. But one more fell, followed by another, after an interval, by still another, and still another, like the minute gun. Surely, I thought, the whole surface of the pond would turn red, by and by. I fancied the water looked slightly reddish already where the flowers were floating. Would they ever sink? Their red would melt, they would rot, become mud and fill up the pool, until there would be no more Kagamiga Ike, but a dry land after thousands of years. Hoy! one more extra-big blood red flower fell, and drop, drop, drop, followed by others, never ceasing to pass into eternity.
I now became seized with a queer idea, how it would look to paint a pond like this, with a beautiful woman floating in its water. I went back to the spot where I first stopped and there continued to think on the imaginary picture. Then with a tingling sensation, rushed back to my memory, the joking remark of Nami-san of the hot spring hotel, yesterday, that she should like to have me paint her dead, but floating with a pleasant face in the water. Suppose, I thought, I made her float in the water under that camellia. I wondered if I could make my brush tell that the blood red flowers were forever dropping, dropping, dropping into the water on her, and she was forever lying in her watery bed, in her eternal peaceful repose. But it was no easy matter, I told myself, to give expression to the idea of super-human eternity, without rising above the level of mortal humanity.