I wanted to say more. But I was afraid of being taken for one of these argumentative men, and so I became silent. “Would you like more tea?” Sensei’s wife said to me, tactfully, when she saw that I was staring foolishly into the empty teacup. I quickly handed the cup over to her.
“How many? One lump? Two lumps?”
She had picked up a lump of sugar with a strange instrument, and was looking at me when she said this. She was not exactly trying to be ingratiating, but she was undoubtedly trying to eradicate the effect on me of her harsh words by her charming manner.
I drank tea silently. I remained silent even when I had finished the cup.
“You seem to have become very quiet,” she said.
“Well, I don’t want to be scolded for being argumentative,” I answered.
“Come, come,” she said.
We began to talk again. The conversation naturally wandered back to the subject of Sensei.
“Won’t you allow me to go on with what I was saying?” I said. “It might have seemed to you that I was indulging in meaningless rationalization, but, truly, I was being sincere.”
“Well, all right.”
“You don’t think that Sensei’s life would be the same without you, do you now?”
“I certainly wouldn’t know. Why don’t you ask Sensei? It would be more sensible to ask him.”
“Please, I am being serious. You mustn’t try to evade my question so frivolously. I wish you would be more honest with me.”
“But I am being honest. I honestly don’t know.”
“Then let me ask you a question that you, rather than Sensei, will be in a position to answer. You are very fond of Sensei, aren’t you?”
“Surely, there’s no need to ask a question like that. And with such a grave face, too!”
“You mean that the answer is obvious? That it’s a silly question to ask?”
“More or less.”
“Then what would happen to Sensei, if such a loyal companion as yourself were suddenly to leave him? He seems to take little enough pleasure in this world as it is. What would he do without you? I don’t want to know how he would answer this question. I want to know what you honestly think. Would he be happy, do you think, or unhappy?”
“Actually, I know the answer. (Though Sensei might not think that I do.) Sensei would be far more unhappy without me. Why, he might not even want to go on living, without me. It may seem very conceited of me, but I do really believe that I am able to make him as happy as is humanly possible. I believe that no one else would be able to make him as happy as I can. Without this belief, I would not be as contented as I am.”
“Such a conviction must surely be known to Sensei.”
“That is another matter entirely.”
“You still wish to maintain that Sensei dislikes you?”
“Oh, no, I don’t think for a moment that I am disliked. There is no reason why I should be. But you see, he seems to be rather weary of the world. Indeed, it would be more correct to say of Sensei these days that he is weary of people. And seeing that I am one of those creatures that inhabit this world, I can hardly hope to be regarded as an exception.”
I began to understand Sensei’s wife better.
I was deeply impressed by her capacity for sympathy and understanding. What also impressed me was the fact that though her ways were not those of an old-fashioned Japanese woman, she had not succumbed to the then prevailing fashion of using “modern” words.
I was a rather simple-minded young man; women, for example, were total strangers to the kind of world I knew or had experienced. True, being a man, I felt an instinctive yearning for women. But the yearning in me was little more than a vague dream, hardly different from the yearning in one’s heart when one sees a lovely cloud in the spring sky. Often, when I found myself face to face with a woman, my longing would suddenly disappear. Instead of being drawn to the woman, I would feel a kind of repulsion. Such, however, was not my reaction to Sensei’s wife. I did not even feel, when I was with her, that intellectual gulf which so often separates men from women. Indeed, I soon forgot that she was a woman, and came to regard her as the one person with whom I could share my sincere and sympathetic interest in Sensei.
“Do you remember,” I said, “that time when I asked you why Sensei did not go out into the world more, and you replied that he was not always so much of a recluse?”
“Yes, I remember. And really, he was not.”
“Then what was he like?”
“The kind of person you wish him to be, the kind of person I wish him to be . . . There was hope and strength in him then.”
“What caused him to change so suddenly?”
“The change was not sudden. It came gradually.”
“And you were with him all the time that this change was taking place?”
“Of course. I was his wife.”
“Surely, then, you must know the cause of the change.”
“Unfortunately, no. I am embarrassed to admit this, but no matter how much I think about it, I don’t seem to be able to find the answer. You have no idea how often I have begged him to tell me the reason for the change.”
“What does he say, when you ask him?”
“That there is nothing for him to tell, and that there is nothing for me to worry about. He says that it was simply in his nature to change so.”
I said nothing. Sensei’s wife also became silent. Not a sound came from the maid’s room. I forgot all about the burglar.
“You don’t think that I am to blame, do you?” she asked me suddenly.
“No,” I said.
“Please tell me what you really think. The thought that you might secretly think me responsible is unbearable,” she said. “You see, I like to tell myself that I do whatever I can to help Sensei.”
“I am sure that Sensei knows that,” I said. “Please don’t worry. Believe you me, Sensei knows.”
She leveled off the cinders in the brazier and poured more water from a jug into the iron kettle. The kettle stopped singing.
“Finally, I could not stand it any longer, and so I asked him to tell me frankly whether he found fault with anything I did. If he would only tell me what my faults were, I said, I would try if possible to correct them. His reply was that I had no faults, and that it was himself that was to blame. His answer made me very sad. It made me cry, and made me want to be told more than ever what my faults were.”
As Sensei’s wife said this, I noticed that there were tears in her eyes.
At first, I thought of Sensei’s wife as a woman of understanding. But in the course of our conversation her manner began gradually to change, and I found that she had ceased to appeal to my mind, and that she had begun to move my heart.
There was no ill-feeling between her and Sensei. Indeed, there was no reason why there should be. Yet, there was something that separated her from Sensei. But no matter how hard she tried, she could not find what this thing was that separated them. This, in short, was her predicament.
She claimed that since Sensei disliked the world so much, it was inevitable that she should become a part of the object of Sensei’s dislike. But she could not convince herself that this was the correct explanation. The poor lady could not avoid thinking that perhaps the very opposite of this was true: namely, that Sensei had become weary of the world because of her. But again, she could find no way of confirming her suspicion. Sensei’s manner towards her was that of a loving husband. He was kind and thoughtful. Such, then, was her secret which she had kept in her heart all these years in gentle sorrow, and which she revealed to me that night.