Of course I myself joined in the applause with the rest. While I was applauding, however, I began, half instinctively, to hate Tamba Sensei up on the bar. But this does not mean that I sympathized with Mōri Sensei. For the applause we gave Tamba Sensei then had, at the same time, the indirect object of showing our bad will toward Mōri Sensei. Analyzing it to-day, my feeling at that moment is susceptible of explanation as scorn for Tamba Sensei morally, combined with scorn for Mōri Sensei intellectually. Or I may think of my scorn as having had added to it an impertinence from its having been given proper indorsement by Tamba Sensei’s words, “That hat’s an antique.” So while applauding him, I looked triumphantly across my elevated shoulders at the entrance of the school-house. There stood our Mōri Sensei yet motionless on the stone steps like a winter fly or something that covets the sunshine, watching with absorption the innocent play of the first year students. That derby hat and that purple necktie,--why now can I never forget that scene which I then, rather as an object of derision, took in at a glance?
* * * * *
The feeling of scorn aroused in us by Mōri Sensei’s costume and attainments on the day he took up his work grew stronger and stronger throughout all the class after Tamba Sensei’s slip. Then came a certain morning less than a week later. Snow had been falling since the night before, and the roof of the drill-shed stretching out below the windows was covered so deep that no shade of the tiles showed through, but in the class-room a coal fire blazed red in the stove, and even the snow that fell on the window panes melted away before it had time to throw in its pale blue reflected light. Sitting in a chair in front of the stove, Mōri Sensei was squeezing out his shrill voice as usual, earnestly teaching us the “Psalm of Life” from the “Choice Reader,” but of course not a single student was seriously listening. Worse yet, a certain jujitsu champion seated beside me had all along been reading a story of adventure by Oshikawa Shunro in the “Chivalrous World” spread out under his reader.
This went on for probably twenty or thirty minutes. Then Mōri Sensei, suddenly getting up from his chair, began to discuss the question of life in connection with the Longfellow poem he was reading. I do not remember the gist of his talk at all, but I think that, rather than an argument, it was something impressionistic built around his own life. For I faintly remember that he said something like this as he babbled on in an agitated tone, lifting and lowering his arms constantly just like a plucked bird:
“You don’t understand life yet. Do you? Even if you want to, you can’t. That itself doubtless makes you happy. When you get like me, you know life perfectly. You know it, but it’s mostly hardships. Understand? It’s mostly hardships. I myself have two children. Well, I must send them to school. When I send them,--er--when I send them--tuition? Yes, that’s it. Tuition is necessary. Isn’t it? So it’s mostly hardships all right.”
But of course we could not be expected to understand the feelings of this teacher who, whether he intended to or not, actually appealed against the troubles of life even to us unsophisticated middle school students. Rather, we who saw only the ridiculous side of the fact that he was making the appeal as he went on speaking, all began to snicker. Only our laughter did not turn into its usual guffaw, which was perhaps due to the fact that his shabby clothes and his expression as he ran shrilly on aroused in us a certain amount of sympathy, as if they were the hardships of life themselves. But though our laughter did not grow louder, after a moment the jujitsu champion sitting beside me suddenly put aside his “Chivalrous World” and stood up with the fierceness of a tiger. And as I wondered what he was going to do, he said,
“Sensei, we attend this class to be taught English. So if you don’t teach it to us, there’s no need of our staying in this class-room. If you go on talking like that, I shall go at once to the gymnasium.”
With that, he made as sour a face as he could and took his seat again most fiercely. I have never seen a man look so strange as Mōri Sensei did then. With his mouth still half open as if he had been struck by lightning, he simply stood like a poker by the stove for a minute or two gazing into that impetuous student’s face. But finally that imploring expression rushed into his animalish eyes and set them alight, and he suddenly put his hand to that purple necktie of his and lowering his bald head two or three times, said,
“Yes, I’m at fault. I’ve done wrong, so I apologize sincerely. To be sure, you’re all here to study English. I did wrong not to teach you English. Since I’ve done wrong, I apologize sincerely. You understand, don’t you? I apologize sincerely.”
And he repeated the same sort of thing over and over again, smiling such a smile that he seemed almost to be weeping. Through the door of the stove, the fire cast a red light aslant across his figure, making the worn places on his coat at the shoulders and waist stand out more clearly. At the same time, his bald head, every time he ducked it, shone with a fine coppery gloss and looked even more like an ostrich egg.
But this pitiful scene then seemed to me but the exposing of this teacher’s essential inferiority. Now he was trying to escape the danger of losing his job even by humoring his students. So he was a teacher because he had to be to make a living and not because he had any interest in education itself. While hazily making such criticism, I now felt contempt not only for his clothes and scholarship, but for his character as well, and I rested my chin in my hands on my “Choice Reader” and hurled at him one impertinent laugh after another, as he stood in front of the blazing stove being burned at the stake, as it were, both in spirit and in the flesh. Of course I was not the only one. The jujitsu champion who had cornered him, when he turned red and apologized, cast a momentary glance my way and, smiling a cunning smile, promptly began again to “study” that adventure story of Oshikawa Shunro’s under his reader.
And until the bugle sounded for recess, our Mōri Sensei, more confused than ever, went on trying desperately to translate poor Longfellow. Deep down in my ears still rings his shrill, almost choking, voice, as with the perspiration beading his sallow round face and his eyes constantly pleading for something unknown, he read, “Life is real, life is earnest.” But the cry of millions of miserable human beings hidden in that shrill voice was too deep to stimulate our ear drums in those days. So there were many besides myself who even yawned brazenly aloud as we grew more and more weary during that hour. But Mōri Sensei, holding his small body erect in front of the stove, and utterly oblivious of the flying snow coating the window panes, went on brandishing his reader incessantly and shouting desperately as if a spring in his head had suddenly unwound. “Life is real, life is earnest! Life is real, life is earnest!”
* * * * *
Consequently, when the school term for which he had been employed was over and we could see Mōri Sensei no more, we were glad and never felt the least regret. No, I might better say that we were so indifferent to his going that we did not even feel glad. I, especially, was so entirely lacking in graciousness that, as I grew to manhood during seven or eight years, passing through the middle school, the high school and the university, I practically forgot the very existence of such a teacher.
Then in the autumn of the year of my graduation from the university,--I say the autumn, but it was the night of one of those rainy days toward the beginning of December when dense mist often comes down in the evening, and when the willows and plane trees along the avenues had long since shed their yellow leaves. After diligently searching at the second-hand book stores in Kanda for some German books, which had become most scarce since the beginning of the European war, and finally buying one or two, suddenly as I was passing the Nakanishiya, keeping out the all but motionless chill night air of late autumn with my turned-up overcoat collar, I somehow felt a longing for noisy human voices and warm drinks and stepped casually into a café there.
But when I once got in, I found that the room, though small, was bare-looking, and there was not a single customer. On the marble-topped tables sitting in rows, only the gilding on the sugar bowls reflected the electric light coldly. With a lonely feeling, as if I had been deceived by some one, I went over to a table in front of a built-in mirror on the wall and sat down. Then I ordered a cup of coffee from the waiter who came to me and, taking out a cigar abruptly, finally, after striking many matches, got it lighted. And soon there stood on the table before me a steaming cup of coffee, but still my spirits, having once fallen, seemed, like the low-hanging mist outside, not easily to be dissipated. The books I had just bought at the second-hand book stores were books on philosophy printed in fine type, and here it would have been painful for me to read a single page even of such distinguished discourses. Wherefore, because I could do nothing else, I rested my head on the back of my chair and, sipping Brazilian coffee and puffing my Havana by turns, allowed my purposeless gaze to stray at random into the mirror just in front of my nose.