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The one possible explanation, aside from that of wanton cruelty, was a thing so marvellous, so terrible in implied suggestion, that the boy's faint soul could make for it no present home; let it drift, a great luminous nebula of hope, a little longer on the rim of nothingness. The answer now to Kano's question betrayed a hint of the more rational animosity. "You had never seemed to desire it.
"It is the newly adopted son of Kano Indara," they whispered, one to another. "He is but a few weeks married to Kano's daughter, and is called 'The Dragon Painter." The efficient river-police summoned an ambulance, and had him taken to the nearest hospital. Here, during an entire day, every art was employed to restore him to consciousness, but without success. Life, indeed, remained.
A sunset cloud, or a bird swinging from a hagi spray could bring sharp, swift tears to his eyes. Beauty could move him, but not old Kano's genuine sufferings. Yet, the old man, bleating from the arid rocks of age, was doubtless a pathetic spectacle, and must be listened to kindly. Finding the boy thus obdurate, Kano turned the full force of his discontent on Umè-ko.
"So that we be together, Even the Hell of the Blood Lake, Even the Mountain of Swords, Mean nothing to us at all!" He would sing, in the words of an old Buddhist folk-song. At such supreme heights of emotion she knew, consciously, that Kano's grief and disappointment were nothing.
"I will return with you as soon as I may," Tatsu had assured his father on the day of reading Umè's letter. "I will try to live, and even to paint. Only, I pray you, speak not the name of her I have lost." This promise was given willingly enough. Kano's chief difficulty now was to hide his growing happiness. It was much to his interest that the subject of Umè be avoided.
But Tatsu, raging against the conditions which made such tyranny possible, stormed, on such occasions, through the little house, and up and down the garden, pelting the terrified gold-fish in their caves, stripping leaves and tips from Kano's favorite pine-shrubs, or standing, long intervals of time, on the crest of the moon-viewing hillock, from which he could command vistas of the street below.
It was the name on the scrap of paper that guided me here." "Is it possible that you do not yet know the meaning of the name of Kano?" asked the artist, incredulously. A thin red tingled to his cheek, the hurt of childish vanity. "There is one of that name in my village," said Tatsu. "He is a scavenger, and often gives me fine large sheets of paper." Old Kano's lip trembled. "I am not of his sort.
Kano's irritation vanished. "Ando Uchida!" he cried aloud, springing to his feet, and hurrying to the edge of the veranda. "Ando Uchida, is it indeed you? How stout and strong and prosperous you seem! Welcome!" "A little too stout for warm weather," laughed Ando, as laboriously he removed his foreign shoes and accepted his host's assistance up the one stone step to the veranda.
"Had I dreamed of such low conduct, they should never have been married at all!" "Of course he is n't worthy of her," sighed the other, one eye on Kano's face. "Nonsense! He is more than worthy of any woman upon earth if he could but learn to conduct himself like a human being." "That would take a long schooling." "He is the greatest artist since Sesshu!" cried the old man, vehemently.
Then there were dangers of wind and storm. Visions of Tatsu drowned; of Tatsu heaped under a wreck of burning cars; starved to death in a solitary forest; set upon, robbed, and slain by footpads, all spun black silhouettes in a revolving lantern through Kano's frenzied imagination. It was at this point that Uchida had hid himself, and assumed a false name.
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