The Dragon Painter | Page 3

of his Emperor in giving to his people, so
soon, a modern constitution. What need had Art of a constitution?
Across the northern end of Yeddo runs the green welt of a table-land.
Midway, at the base of this, tucked away from northern winds, hidden
in green bamboo hedges, Kano lived, a mute protest against the new.
Beside himself, of the household were Umè-ko, his only child, and an

old family servant, Mata.
Kano's garden, always the most important part of a Japanese dwelling
place, ran out in one continuous, shallow terrace to the south. A stone
wall upheld its front edge from the narrow street; and on top of this
wall stiff hedges grew. In one corner, however, a hillock had been
raised, a "Moon Viewing Place," such as poets and artists have always
found necessary. From its flat top old Kano had watched through many
years the rising of the moon; had seen, as now, a new dawn possess a
new-created earth,--had traced the outlines of the stars. By day he
sometimes loved to watch the little street below, delighting in the
motion and color of passing groups.
For the garden, itself, it was fashioned chiefly of sand, pebbles, stones,
and many varieties of pine, the old artist's favorite plant. A small
rock-bound pond curved about the inner base of the moon-viewing hill,
duplicating in its clear surface the beauties near. 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. One tree, a superb
specimen of the kind called "Crouching-Dragon-Plum," writhed and
twisted near the veranda of the chamber of its name-child, Umè-ko,
thrusting one leafy arm almost to the paper shoji of her wall. Kano's
transient flowers were grown, for the most part in pots, and these his
daughter Umè-ko loved to tend. There were morning-glories for the
mid-summer season, peonies and iris for the spring, and
chrysanthemums for autumn. One foreign rose-plant, pink of bloom, in
a blue-gray jar, had been pruned and trained into a beauty that no
western rose-bush ever knew.
Behind the Kano cottage the rise of ground for twenty yards was of a
grade scarcely perceptible to the eye. Here Mata did the family washing;
dried daikon in winter, and sweet-potato slices in the summer sun. This
small space she considered her special domain, and was at no pains to
conceal the fact. Beyond, the hill went upward suddenly with the curve

of a cresting wave. Higher it rose and higher, bearing a tangled growth
of vines and ferns and bamboo grass; higher and higher, until it broke,
in sheer mid-air, with a coarse foam of rock, thick shrubs, and stony
ledges. Almost at the zenith of the cottage garden it poised, and a great
camphor tree, centuries old, soared out into the blue like a green
balloon.
Behind the camphor tree, again, and not visible from the garden below,
stood a temple of the "Shingon" sect, the most mystic of the old
esoteric Buddhist forms. To the rear of this the broad, low, rectangular
buildings of a nunnery, gray and old as the temple itself brooded
among high hedges of the sacred mochi tree. This retreat had been
famous for centuries throughout Japan. More than once a Lady Abbess
had been yielded from the Imperial family. Formerly the temple had
owned many koku of rich land; had held feudal sway over rice fields
and whole villages, deriving princely revenue. With the restoration of
the Emperor to temporal power, some thirty years before the beginning
of this story, most of the land had been confiscated; and now, shrunken
like the papal power at Rome, the temple claimed, in land, only those
acres bounded by its own hedges and stone temple walls. There were
the main building itself, silent, impressive in towering majesty;
subordinate chapels and dwellings for priests, a huge smoke-stained
refectory, the low nunnery in its spreading gardens and, down the
northern slope of the hill, the cemetery, a lichen-growth, as it were, of
bristling, close-set tombs in gray stone, the splintered regularity broken
in places by the tall rounded column of a priest's grave, set in a ring of
wooden sotoba. At irregular intervals clusters of giant bamboo trees
sprang like green flame from the fissures of gray rock.
Even in humiliation, in comparative poverty, the temple dominated, for
miles around, the imagination of the people, and was the great central
note of the landscape. The immediate neighborhood was jealously
proud of it. Country folk, journeying by the street below, looked up
with lips that whispered invocation. Children climbed the long stone