The Dragon Painter | Page 2

vanishing mist. Sparrows
begin to chirp, first one, then ten, then thousands. Their voices have the
clash and chime of a myriad small triangles.
The wooden outer panels (amado) of countless dwellings are thrust
noisily aside and stacked into a shallow closet. The noise reverberates
from district to district in a sharp musketry of sound. Maid servants call

cheerily across bamboo fences. Shoji next are opened, disclosing often
the dull green mosquito net hung from corner to corner of the
low-ceiled sleeping rooms. Children, in brilliant night robes, run to the
verandas to see the early sun; cocks strut in pigmy gardens. Now, from
along the streets rise the calls of flower peddlers, of venders of fish,
bean-curd, vegetables, and milk. Thus the day comes to modern Tokyo,
which the old folks still call Yeddo.
On such a midsummer dawn, not many years ago, old Kano Indara,
sleeping in his darkened chamber, felt the summons of an approaching
joy. Beauty tugged at his dreams. Smiling, as a child that is led by love,
he rose, drew aside softly the shoji, then the amado of his room, and
then, with face uplifted, stepped down into his garden. The beauty of
the ebbing night caught at his sleeve, but the dawn held him back.
It was the moment just before the great Sun took place upon his throne.
Kano still felt himself lord of the green space round about him. On their
pretty bamboo trellises the potted morning-glory vines held out flowers
as yet unopened. They were fragile, as if of tissue, and were beaded at
the crinkled tips with dew. Kano's eyelids, too, had dew of tears upon
them. He crouched close to the flowers. Something in him, too, some
new ecstacy was to unfurl. His lean body began to tremble. He seated
himself at the edge of the narrow, railless veranda along which the
growing plants were ranged. One trembling bud reached out as if it
wished to touch him.
The old man shook with the beating of his own heart. He was an artist.
Could he endure another revelation of joy? Yes, his soul, renewed ever
as the gods themselves renew their youth, was to be given the inner
vision. Now, to him, this was the first morning. Creation bore down
upon him.
The flower, too, had begun to tremble. Kano turned directly to it. The
filmy, azure angles at the tip were straining to part, held together by
just one drop of light. Even as Kano stared the drop fell heavily,
plashing on his hand. The flower, with a little sob, opened to him, and
questioned him of life, of art, of immortality. The old man covered his
face, weeping.

The last of his race was Kano Indara; the last of a mighty line of artists.
Even in this material age his fame spread as the mists of his own land,
and his name was known in barbarian countries far across the sea.
Tokyo might fall under the blight of progress, but Kano would hold to
the traditions of his race. To live as a true artist,--to die as one,--this
was his care. He might have claimed high position in the great Art
Museum recently inaugurated by the new government, and housed in
an abomination of pink stucco with Moorish towers at the four corners.
He might even have been elected president of the new Academy, and
have presided over the Italian sculptors and degenerate French painters
imported to instruct and "civilize" modern Japan. Stiff graphite pencils,
making lines as hard and sharp as those in the faces of foreigners
themselves, were to take the place of the soft charcoal flake whose
stroke was of satin and young leaves. Horrible brushes, fashioned of the
hair of swine, pinched in by metal bands, and wielded with a hard
tapering stick of varnished wood, were to be thrust into the hands of
artists,--yes,--artists--men who, from childhood, had known the soft
pliant Japanese brush almost as a spirit hand;--had felt the joy of the
long stroke down fibrous paper where the very thickening and thinning
of the line, the turn of the brush here, the easing of it there, made visual
music,--men who had realized the brush as part not only of the body
but of the soul,--such men, indeed,--such artists, were to be offered a
bunch of hog bristles, set in foreign tin. Why, even in the annals of
Kano's own family more than one faithful brush had acquired a soul of
its own, and after the master's death had gone on lamenting in his
written name. But the foreigners' brushes, and their little tubes of
ill-smelling gum colored with dead hues! Kano shuddered anew at the
thought.
Naturally he hated all new forms of government. He regretted and
deplored the magnanimity