十五

After that, I found myself bothered every time I saw the mistress’s face. Did the teacher always take such an attitude toward his wife? And if so, was the mistress content with it?

There was no way to decide whether the mistress seemed content or discontent. I had not had many chances to be close to her. Besides, she was always ordinary whenever she met me. Lastly, except when the teacher was present, she and I rarely saw each other at all.

My doubts went even further than that. Where did the teacher’s resolution toward people come from? Was it merely the result of coldly examining himself and observing the modern world? The teacher was the sort of man who sat and thought. If one only had a head like the teacher’s, would such an attitude naturally arise even just from sitting and pondering the world? I could not believe it was only that. The teacher’s resolution seemed a living resolution. It was not like the outline of a stone building burnt by fire and utterly cooled. The teacher as reflected in my eyes was certainly a thinker. And yet, behind the doctrines this thinker had gathered, a strong fact seemed woven in. Not the fact of another person severed from himself, but a fact he himself had acutely tasted, a fact that made the blood run hot and the pulse stop—that seemed folded into it.

This is nothing I could merely guess at in my own breast. The teacher had already confessed as much himself. Only that confession was like a peak of clouds. It cast something unknown and terrible over my head. And why it was terrible, even I did not understand. The confession was vague. And yet it clearly made my nerves tremble.

I hypothesized that at the base point of the teacher’s view of life lay some intense love affair. (Of course, one that had arisen between the teacher and the mistress.) Seen in light of the teacher’s once saying that love is a sin, it served to some extent as a clue. But the teacher had plainly told me he now loved the mistress. Then from the love of those two such a near-misanthropic resolution could not have come. The teacher’s words—“the memory of once kneeling before that person now makes one want to set one’s foot upon that person’s head”—seemed meant for anyone and everyone in the modern world generally, and not to apply between the teacher and the mistress.

The grave of someone unknown, in Zoshigaya—that too stirred now and then in my memory. I knew it was a grave deeply connected to the teacher. As I drew nearer to the teacher’s life yet could not draw near, I received that grave into my own head as a fragment of life within the teacher’s mind. But to me that grave was wholly dead. It was no key to open the door of life between us two. Rather it stood between us, like a demon obstructing free passage.

While things went on thus, the time came again when I had to speak face to face with the mistress. It was a busy autumn as the days closed in, a chilly season that caught no one’s particular notice. For three or four days running, there were burglaries near the teacher’s place. All had happened at nightfall. No house lost anything of great value, but wherever someone had broken in, something was taken. The mistress took it unpleasantly. Then one evening the teacher had reason he must leave the house. A friend from his home province, employed at a hospital in the country, had come up to Tokyo, and the teacher, with two or three others, had to treat this friend to a meal somewhere. The teacher explained the situation and asked me to watch the house until he returned. I accepted at once.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”