lovely breasts, big, dark, mysterious eyes—she’s the prettiest girl I’ve seen.”
He had never seen her again but by his hand-standing he kept her memory alive. Apart from this there was, I guessed, a hidden motive that made him continue his exhausting pastime. By becoming himself an expert hand-stander, as great if not greater than this girl, was he not in some way derogating from the perfection which he had originally seen in her, thereby making her, in this respect at least, less wonderful? By surpassing her in the art of hand-standing, by taking for himself the praise that had originally all been hers, was he not somehow punishing her for being so completely unattainable?
“The trouble was,” said Chō, “I didn’t have a high narrow plank to practise on. But I got round this in the end. I found a straw mat with a thin black border to do my hand-stands. This black border became the plank and both edges became sheer drops hundreds of feet high. So when I practise walking along the edge of the mat on my hands, I’m as frightened of falling as I would be in the circus. Well, I’ve got now so I can do it every time without even swaying. And if I can do it on the mat, I don’t see why I couldn’t do it in the circus like she did…. But of course I’ll never really know.”
“That girl certainly did something to you,” I said to Chō one day. Chō looked at me seriously. “It’s the same as painting,” he said. “When you see something beautiful, it gets you in some way, doesn’t it, and that makes you want to paint it. You’ll work away like mad trying to paint it, won’t you? Well, it’s the same with me. Only I can’t paint so I’ve got to imitate what I’ve seen. Is that so strange?”
His explanation struck me as quite reasonable.
“Look, Chō,” said Kichikō that evening when I first heard about the hand-standing, “why don’t you let us see you do it now?” He laughed and looked round. The last rays of the summer sun were fading; the sky had lost its brightness and become a light transparent blue. A slight wind had blown up and dull, vaguely-coloured clouds scudded past high above us.