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In the higher Government schools, and in the Normal Schools, the students who are boarders obtain a better diet than most poor boys can get at home. Their rooms are also well warmed. 6 Hachi yuki ya Neko no ashi ato Ume no hana. 7 Ni no ji fumi dasu Bokkuri kana.
More unwillingly than he had been dragged up from the river's cold embrace was he now held back from death. His first lucid words were a petition. "Do not keep me alive. In the name of Kwannon the Merciful, to whom my Umè used to pray, do not bind me again upon the wheel of life!" Although he fought against it with all the will power left to him, strength brightened in his veins.
They robed her in white with a thin lining-edge of crimson, and threw over her shining hair a veil of tissue. Some one outside called that the bride's kuruma was at the gate. Old Kano entered the room, smiling. His steps creaked and rustled with new silk. Umè turned for one fleeting glimpse of her plum tree. It seemed to stir and wave green leaves toward her.
"No demon unless it be you, cruel nurse, who have dragged me back from a heavenly dream." "Baku devour your dream!" cried Mata. "I say there is no fire beneath the pot!" Umè sat up now, and smoothed slowly the loops of her shining hair.
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.
He was an only son and his parents, wealthy and titled people, were willing to make any sacrifice for him, even that of accepting a geisha for daughter-in-law. Moreover they were not altogether displeased with Kimiko, because of her sympathy for their boy. Before going away, Kimiko attended the wedding of her young sister, Ume, who had just finished school. She was good and pretty.
"Gray, splintered stalagmites of memory," he had called them, and when the child Umé had learned the meaning of the simile she had put her little finger to a spot of lichen and asked, "Then are these silver spots our tears?" The old man stepped down very softly to the second tier. A nightingale was calling low its liquid invocation, "Ho-ren-k-y-y-o-o-o!"
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.
A few splendid carp, the color themselves of dawn, swam lazily about with noses in the direction of the house whence came, they well knew, liberal offerings of rice and cake. Kano had his plum trees, too; the classic "umè," loved of all artists, poets, and decent-minded people generally.
Restored to comparative serenity, Kano, later in the afternoon, sent for his daughter, and condescended to unfold to her those plans in which she played a vital part. "Umè-ko, my child, you have always been a good and obedient daughter. I shall expect no opposition from you now," he began, in the manner of a patriarch. Umè bowed respectfully. "Thank you, dear father.
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