Concerning Lafcadio Hearn Part 8

"Don't talk about your dumpling now. Here is the Oni coming.

Squat down here behind my sleeve, and don't make any noise."

Presently the Oni came very close, and stopped and bowed to Jizo, and said:

"Good-day, Jizo San!"

Jizo said good-day, too, very politely.

Then the Oni suddenly snuffed the air two or three times in a suspicious way, and cried out: "Jizo San, Jizo San! I smell a smell of mankind somewhere--don't you?"

"Oh!" said Jizo, "perhaps you are mistaken."

"No, no!" said the Oni, after snuffing the air again, "I smell a smell of mankind."

Then the old woman could not help laughing, "Te-he-he!"--and the Oni immediately reached down his big hairy hand behind Jizo's sleeve, and pulled her out,--still laughing, "Te-he-he!"

"Ah! ha!" cried the Oni.

Then Jizo said:

"What are you going to do with that good old woman? You must not hurt her."

"I won't," said the Oni. "But I will take her home with me to cook for us."

"Very well," said Jizo; "but you must really be kind to her.

If you are not I shall be very angry."

"I won't hurt her at all," promised the Oni; "and she will only have to do a little work for us every day. Good-bye, Jizo San."

Then the Oni took the old woman far down the road, till they came to a wide deep river, where there was a boat, and took her across the river to his house. It was a very large house. He led her at once into the kitchen, and told her to cook some dinner for himself and the other Oni who lived with him. And he gave her a small wooden rice-paddle, and said:

"You must always put only one grain of rice into the pot, and when you stir that one grain of rice in the water with this paddle, the grain will multiply until the pot is full."

So the old woman put just one rice-grain into the pot, as the Oni told her, and began to stir it with the paddle; and, as she stirred, the one grain became two,--then four,--then eight,--then sixteen,--thirty-two, sixty-four, and so on.

Every time she moved the paddle the rice increased in quant.i.ty; and in a few minutes the great pot was full.

After that, the funny old woman stayed a long time in the house of the Oni, and every day cooked food for him and for all his friends. The Oni never hurt or frightened her, and her work was made quite easy by the magic paddle--although she had to cook a very, very great quant.i.ty of rice, because an Oni eats much more than any human being eats.

But she felt lonely, and always wished very much to go back to her own little house, and make her dumplings. And one day, when the Oni were all out somewhere, she thought she would try to run away.

She first took the magic paddle, and slipped it under her girdle; and then she went down to the river. No one saw her; and the boat was there. She got into it, and pushed off; and as she could row very well, she was soon far away from the sh.o.r.e.

But the river was very wide; and she had not rowed more than one-fourth of the way across, when the Oni, all of them, came back to the house.

They found that their cook was gone, and the magic paddle too. They ran down to the river at once, and saw the old woman rowing away very fast.

Perhaps they could not swim: at all events they had no boat; and they thought the only way they could catch the funny old woman would be to drink up all the water of the river before she got to the other bank. So they knelt down, and began to drink so fast that before the old woman was half way over, the water had become quite low.

But the old woman kept on rowing until the water had got so shallow that the Oni stopped drinking, and began to wade across. Then she dropped her oar, took the magic paddle from her girdle, and shook it at the Oni, and made such funny faces that the Oni all burst out laughing.

But the moment they laughed, they could not help throwing up all the water they had drunk, and so the river became full again. The Oni could not cross; and the funny old woman got safely over to the other side, and ran away up the road as fast as she could.

She never stopped running until she found herself at home again. After that she was very happy; for she could make dumplings whenever she pleased. Besides, she had the magic paddle to make rice for her. She sold her dumplings to her neighbours and pa.s.sengers, and in quite a short time she became rich.

THE BOY WHO DREW CATS

A long, long time ago, in a small country-village in j.a.pan, there lived a poor farmer and his wife, who were very good people. They had a number of children, and found it very hard to feed them all. The elder son was strong enough when only fourteen years old to help his father; and the little girls learned to help their mother almost as soon as they could walk.

But the youngest child, a little boy, did not seem to be fit for hard work. He was very clever,--cleverer than all his brothers and sisters; but he was quite weak and small, and people said he could never grow very big. So his parents thought it would be better for him to become a priest than to become a farmer. They took him with them to the village-temple one day, and asked the good old priest who lived there, if he would have their little boy for his acolyte, and teach him all that a priest ought to know.

The old man spoke kindly to the lad, and asked him some hard questions. So clever were the answers that the priest agreed to take the little fellow into the temple as an acolyte, and to educate him for the priesthood.

The boy learned quickly what the old priest taught him, and was very obedient in most things. But he had one fault. He liked to draw cats during study-hours, and to draw cats even when cats ought not to have been drawn at all.

Whenever he found himself alone, he drew cats. He drew them on the margins of the priest's books, and on all the screens of the temple, and on the walls, and on the pillars. Several times the priest told him this was not right; but he did not stop drawing cats. He drew them because he could not really help it. He had what is called "the genius of an artist,"

and just for that reason he was not quite fit to be an acolyte;--a good acolyte should study books.

One day after he had drawn some very clever pictures of cats upon a paper screen, the old priest said to him severely: "My boy, you must go away from this temple at once. You will never make a good priest, but perhaps you will become a great artist. Now let me give you a last piece of advice, and be sure you never forget it: 'Avoid large places at night;--keep to small.'"

The boy did not know what the priest meant by saying, "Avoid large places,--keep to small." He thought and thought, while he was tying up his little bundle of clothes to go away; but he could not understand those words, and he was afraid to speak to the priest any more, except to say good-bye.

He left the temple very sorrowfully, and began to wonder what he should do. If he went straight home, he felt sure his father would punish him for having been disobedient to the priest: so he was afraid to go home. All at once he remembered that at the next village, twelve miles away, there was a very big temple. He had heard there were several priests at that temple; and he made up his mind to go to them and ask them to take him for their acolyte.

Now that big temple was closed up, but the boy did not know this fact. The reason it had been closed up was that a goblin had frightened the priests away, and had taken possession of the place. Some brave warriors had afterwards gone to the temple at night to kill the goblin; but they had never been seen alive again. n.o.body had ever told these things to the boy; so he walked all the way to the village, hoping to be kindly treated by the priests.

When he got to the village, it was already dark, and all the people were in bed; but he saw the big temple on a hill at the other end of the princ.i.p.al street, and he saw there was a light in the temple. People who tell the story say the goblin used to make that light, in order to tempt lonely travellers to ask for shelter. The boy went at once to the temple, and knocked. There was no sound inside. He knocked and knocked again; but still n.o.body came. At last he pushed gently at the door, and was quite glad to find that it had not been fastened. So he went in, and saw a lamp burning,--but no priest.

He thought some priest would be sure to come very soon, and he sat down and waited. Then he noticed that everything in the temple was grey with dust, and thickly spun over with cobwebs. So he thought to himself that the priests would certainly like to have an acolyte, to keep the place clean.

He wondered why they had allowed everything to get so dusty.

What most pleased him, however, were some big white screens, good to paint cats upon. Though he was tired, he looked at once for a writing-box, and found one, ground some ink, and began to paint cats.

He painted a great many cats upon the screens; and then he began to feel very, very sleepy. He was just on the point of lying down to sleep beside one of the screens, when he suddenly remembered the words: "Avoid large places;--keep to small."

The temple was very large; he was all alone; and as he thought of these words--though he could not quite understand them--he began to feel for the first time a little afraid; and he resolved to look for a small place in which to sleep.

He found a little cabinet, with a sliding door, and went into it, and shut himself up. Then he lay down and fell fast asleep.

Very late in the night he was awakened by a most terrible noise,--a noise of fighting and screaming. It was so dreadful that he was afraid even to look through a c.h.i.n.k of the little cabinet: he lay very still, holding his breath for fright.

The light that had been in the temple went out; but the awful sounds continued, and became more awful, and all the temple shook. After a long time silence came; but the boy was still afraid to move. He did not move until the light of the morning sun shone into the cabinet through the c.h.i.n.ks of the little door.

Then he got out of his hiding-place very cautiously, and looked about. The first thing he saw, lying dead in the middle of it, an enormous monster rat,--a goblin-rat,--bigger than a cow!

But who or what could have killed it? There was no man or other creature to be seen. Suddenly the boy observed that the mouths of all the cats he had drawn the night before, were red and wet with blood. Then he knew that the goblin had been killed by the cats which he had drawn. And then, also, for the first time, he understood why the wise old priest had said to him: "Avoid large places at night;--keep to small."

Afterwards that boy became a very famous artist. Some of the cats which he drew are still shown to travellers in j.a.pan.

At once upon reaching j.a.pan (it is plain Hearn never forgave me for compelling him to go) begin the complaints of the downright hard work of writing, consequent upon the loss of ideals. He breaks with publishers--an old-time story; he is losing his inspiration, and his only hope is that it will return to him again; in any Latin country he could at once, he thinks, get back the much coveted "thrill," or _frisson_. He would at last even relish the hated United States. From the beginning he tires of the j.a.panese character, and grows more and more tired the longer he stays; it has no depth, this thin soul-stream; it is incapable of long-sustained effort, prolonged study; he cannot much longer endure j.a.panese officialism; and the official "is something a good deal lower than a savage and meaner than the straight-out Western rough." He would wish never to write a line again about any j.a.panese subjects. Things finally came to such a pa.s.s that the only successful stimulus to work was that some one should do or say something horribly mean to him, and the force of the hurt could be measured in the months or years of resultant labour. As none ever did a mean thing to him, one may suspect that the psychology of his sudden enmities towards others was that he must perforce _imagine_ that he had been "horribly" treated.