Young as I was, I was somewhat prone to throwing myself headlong into things. At least, that is how it must have appeared to the Master’s eyes. To me, the Master’s conversation was of more benefit than the lectures at school. The Master’s thoughts were more precious than the opinions of the professors. In the final analysis, the great men who stood on the podium and instructed me seemed less great than the Master, who, guarding me alone, spoke little yet said much.
“You must not get so carried away,” said the Master.
“I think so because I have awakened to it,” I replied, with full confidence in myself. The Master did not nod in agreement with that confidence.
“You are feverish. When the fever breaks, you will grow weary of it. I feel pained that you should think of me so highly now. But when I imagine the change that must come over you from now on, I feel even more pained.”
“Do you think so little of me? Am I so unworthy of trust?”
“I feel sorry for you.”
“You say you feel sorry, but that you cannot trust me?”
The Master turned toward the garden with a troubled look. In that garden, not one of the camellia blossoms remained—those flowers that until recently had dotted the scene with their heavy, vivid red, dripping like drops. The Master had been in the habit of gazing at these camellia flowers from the sitting room.
“When I say I do not trust, I do not mean I single you out as untrustworthy. I trust no human being at all.”
Just then, from beyond the hedge came a voice that sounded like a goldfish seller’s. Beyond that, there was nothing to be heard. The lane, tucked two blocks deep off the main street, was surprisingly quiet. Inside the house, all was still as always. I knew that the Mistress was in the next room. I knew that the sound of my voice would reach the Mistress’s ears as she sat silently at her sewing or some such work. Yet I had utterly forgotten it.
“Then do you not trust the Mistress either?” I asked the Master.
The Master looked a little uneasy. And he avoided a direct answer.
“I do not even trust myself. That is to say, because I cannot trust myself, I have come to be unable to trust others as well. There is nothing to do but curse myself.”
“If you think that complicatedly, surely no one can be certain of anything.”
“No, it is not that I thought it. I did it. And after doing it, I was shocked. And then I became terribly afraid.”
I wished to follow the same path a little further. Then, from behind the sliding door, the Mistress’s voice called “You, you” twice. The Master answered at the second call with “What is it?” The Mistress said “Come here a moment” and summoned the Master to the next room. What business had arisen between the two, I could not tell. Before I had leisure to imagine it, the Master returned to the sitting room again, so quickly it allowed no such room.
“At any rate, you must not trust me too much. You will regret it later. And then, in return for having been deceived yourself, you will come to take a cruel revenge.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“The memory of having once knelt before that person will now demand that the person be made to place their feet upon your head. I wish to reject the respect of today, for fear of the insult of the future. Rather than endure a future self lonelier than now, I wish to endure a lonely self of now. We, born into a present filled with freedom and independence and self, must, as its sacrifice, all taste of this loneliness.”
Faced with a Master who held such resolve, I knew not what words to say.
