Page:Through the torii (IA throughtorii00noguiala).pdf/55

 singer’s voice rose: “The leaves fall, the tree cracks, the axe flashes. . . .” O Ryu, the willow-tree woman, shivers, trembles in pain as her last days are reached; she cries over her sleeping child, Midori, whom she got by Heitaro, her husband, and she says: “The child will grow even without the mother’s milk. If he should become great and wise and live up to his father’s reputation with arrow and bow! Oh, must his poor mother go away? The voice, sad voice, calls me back to the tree. Oh, voice calling me back,. . .”

Once she had no human form, but was only the willow-tree on whose high branch Suyetaka’s hawk alighted when he was hunting, which was almost doomed, then, to be cut down, as he saw no other way to get the hawk; it was Heitaro, the clever archer, who shot the branches to pieces and rescued the bird, of course, and also saved the tree from its ruin. The inhuman tree grew human at once in feeling the sense of gratitude towards Heitaro, whom she decided to serve in the role of woman: the days, the years that passed made her forget that she was tree; her love Rh