I will speak. But will you give me a rupee if what I say is convincing? Otherwise I will not open my mouth, and you may do what you like. Am I right? You were left for dead. You will never see any more of him. Guru Nayak, listen carefully to what I have to say. Take the next train and be gone.
I see once again great danger to your life if you go from home. Never travel southward again, and you will live to be a hundred. I hope at least he died as he deserved. The place was deserted by the time the astrologer picked up his articles and put them into his bag.
The green shaft was also gone, leaving the place in darkness and silence. The stranger had gone off into the night, after giving the astrologer a handful of coins. It was nearly midnight when the astrologer reached home. His wife was waiting for him at the door and demanded an explanation. One man gave all that. She was overjoyed. The child has been asking for sweets for so many days now.
I will prepare some nice stuff for her. She looked up at him. What is wrong? I thought I had the blood of a man on my hands all these years. That was the reason why I ran away from home, settled here, and married you. He is alive. We drank, gambled, and quarreled badly one day—why think of it now?
He allowed himself to get mixed up with the fortunes of the persons to whom he was carrying letters. At No. Thanappa had seen him as a youngster, and had watched him day by day greying on the pial, sitting there and hoping for a big prize to come his way through solving crossword puzzles.
How many children has he now? It doesn't matter. When I bring you your appointment order you must feed me with coconut payasam" And at each of these places he stopped for nearly half an hour. Especially if anyone received money orders, he just settled down quite nicely, with his bags and bundles spread about him, and would not rise till he gathered an idea of how and where every rupee was going.
If it was a hot day he sometimes asked for a tumbler of buttermilk and sat down to enjoy it. Everybody liked him on his beat.
He was a part and parcel of their existence, their hopes, aspirations, and activities. Of all his contacts, the one with which he was most intimately bound up was No. Rumanujam was a senior clerk in the Revenue Division Office, and Thanappa had carried letters to that address for over a generation now. His earliest association with Ramanujam was years and years ago. Ramanujam's wife was away in the village.
A card arrived for Ramanujam. Thanappa, as was his custom, glanced through it at the sorting table itself ; and, the moment they were ready to start out, went straight to Vinayak Mudali Street, though in the ordinary course over addresses preceded it.
He went straight to Ramanujam's house, knocked on the door and shouted : " Postman, sir, postman. Happy father! After all these years of prayers! Don't complain that it is a daughter.
Daughters are God's gift, you know. Kamakshi lovely name! Ah, so shy! Here is your grandfather's card asking for your photo. Why should he want it, unless it be. Ramanujam looked worried after reading it. The postman asked : " I hope it's good news? Ramanujam said : " My father-in-law thinks I am not sufficiently active in finding a husband for my daughter. He has tried one or two places and failed. He thinks I am very indifferent. But money is not everything.
Horoscopes do not agree. They are demanding too much. Evidently they, do not approve of her appearance. She looks like a queen. Unless one is totally blind. The season would be closing, with only three more auspicious dates, the last being May 2Oth. The girl would be seventeen in a few days.
The reminders from her grandfather were becoming fiercer. Ramanujam had exhausted all the possibilities and had drawn a blank everywhere. He looked helpless and miserable. Makunda of Temple Street was after him. Makunda and you are of the same sub- caste, I believe. Over a hundred letters have passed between them already.
But I know they are definitely breaking off. It is over some money question. They have written their last message on a postcard and it has infuriated these people all the more. As if post- cards were an instrument of insult! I have known most important communications being written even on picture postcards ; when Rajappa went to America two years ago he used to write to his sons every week on picture postcards.
Let us see. No time to waste now. Open it and tell me what they have written," said Thanappa. He trembled with suspense. So they approve of the photo! Who wouldn't? I might as well apply for leave till Kamakshi's marriage is over. God knows how many hurdles we have to cross now. Liking a photo does not prove anything.
The family was divided over the question. Ramanujam, his mother, and his wife none of them had defined views on the question, but yet they opposed each other vehemently.
If you stand on all these absurd antiquated formalities, we shall never get any- where near a marriage. It is our duty to take the girl over even to Delhi if necessary.
Time was marching. The postman had got into the habit of dropping in at the end of his day's work, and joining in the council. Listen to me," he said. What you cannot achieve by a year's correspondence you can do in an hour's meeting. I am sure it is from your husband. What is the news? He said : " I have some registered letters for those last houses. I will finish my round, and come back. I will offer a coconut to our Vinayaka tonight. We had an idea of doing it during next Thai month.
It will be so difficult to hurry through the arrangements now. But they say that if the marriage is done it must be done on the twentieth of May. If it is postponed the boy can't many for three years. He is being sent away for some training. You can't complain of lack of funds now. Go ahead.
I'm so happy you have his approval. More than their money, we need their blessings, sir. I hope he has sent his heartiest blessings. Ramanujam, with so short a time before him, and none to share the task of arrangements, became distraught. As far as it could go, Thanappa placed himself at his service during all his off hours.
He cut short his eloquence, advices, and exchanges in other houses. He never waited for anyone to come up and receive the letters.
He just tossed them through a window or an open door with a stentorian " Letter, sir. In such a hurry! I will come and squat in your house after that " and he was off. Ramanujam was in great tension. He trembled with anxiety as the day approached nearer.
Nothing should prove a hindrance. You have given them everything they wanted in cash, presents, and style. They are good people. It is the very last date for the year. If for some reason some obstruction comes up, it is all finished for ever. The boy goes away for three years. I don't think either of us would be prepared to bind ourselves to wait for three years.
A quiet had descended on the gathering. The young smart bridegroom from Delhi was seated in a chair under the pandal. Fragrance of sandal, and flowers, and holy smoke, hung about the air. People were sitting around the bridegroom talking.
Thanappa appeared at the gate loaded with letters. Some young men ran up to him demanding : " Postman! I know to whom to deliver. The bridegroom looked up at him with an amused smile and muttered : " Thanks. I have known that child, Kamakshi, ever since she was a day old, and I knew she would always get a distinguished husband," added the postman, and brought his palms together in a salute, and moved into the house to deliver other letters and to refresh himself in the kitchen with tiffin and coffee.
Ten days later he knocked on the door and, with a grin, handed Kamakshi her first letter : " Ah, scented envelope! I knew it was coming when the mail van was three stations away. I have seen hundreds like this. Take it from me. Before he has written the tenth letter he will command you to pack up and join him, and you will grow a couple of wings and fly away that very day, and forget for ever Thanappa and this street, isn't it so?
He said, turning away : " I don't think there is any use waiting for you to finish the letter and tell me its contents. My uncle, my father's brother, is very ill in Salem, and they want me to start immediately. Thanappa looked equally miserable. Ramanujam rallied, gathered himself up, and turned to go in. Thanappa said : " One moment, sir. I have a confession to make. See the date on the card. I was unhappy to see it. But what has happened has happened,' I said to myself, and kept it away, fearing that it might interfere with the wedding.
They will dismiss me. It is a serious offence. Ramanujam watched him dully for a while and shouted : " Postman!
I am only sorry you have done this. Raman often burst out, " Why couldn't you have come a day earlier? Raman ; for them there was something ominous in the very association.
As a result when the big man came on the scene it was always a quick decision one way or another. There was no scope or time for any kind of wavering or whitewashing. Long years of practice of this kind had bred in the doctor a certain curt truthfulness ; for that very reason his opinion was valued ; he was not a mere doctor expressing an opinion but a judge pronouncing a verdict.
The patient's life hung on his words. This never unduly worried Dr. He never believed that agreeable words ever saved lives. He did not think it was any of his business to provide unnecessary dope when as a matter of course Nature would tell them the truth in a few hours.
However, when he glimpsed the faintest sign of hope, he rolled up his sleeve and stepped into the arena : it might be hours or days, but he never withdrew till he wrested the prize from Tama's hands. Today, standing over a bed, the doctor felt that he himself needed someone to tell him soothing lies. He mopped his brow with his kerchief and sat down in the chair beside the bed. On the bed lay his dearest friend in the world : Gopal. They had known each other for forty years now, starting with their Kinder- garten days.
They could not, of course, meet as much as they wanted, each being wrapped in his own family and profession. Occasionally, on a Sunday, Gopal would walk into the consulting room, and wait patiently in a corner till the doctor was free. And then they would dine together, see a picture, and talk of each other's life and activities. It was a classic friendship standing over, untouched by changing times, circumstances, and activities. In his busy round of work, Dr.
Raman had not noticed that Gopal had not called in for over three months now. He just remembered it when he saw GopaPs son sitting on a bench in the consulting hall, one crowded morning. Raman could not talk to him for over an hour. When he got up and was about to pass on to the operation room, he called up the young man and asked, " What brings you here, sir? He rushed off straight from the clinic to his friend's house, in Lawley Extension.
Gopal lay in bed as if in sleep. The doctor stood over him and asked Gopal's wife, " How long has he been in bed? He comes down once in three days and gives him medicine.
Why, why, couldn't you have sent me word earlier? There was hardly any time to be lost. He took off his coat and opened his bag. He took out an injection tube, the needle sizzled over the stove. The sick man's wife whimpered in a corner and essayed to ask questions. He looked at the children who were watching the sterilizer, and said, " Send them all away somewhere, except the eldest. The patient still remained motionless.
The doctor's face gleamed with perspiration, and his eyelids drooped with fatigue. The sick man's wife stood in a corner and watched silently. She asked timidly, " Doctor, shall I make some coffee for you? He got up and said, " I will be back in a few minutes. Don't disturb him on any account. In a quarter of an hour he was back, followed by an assistant and a nurse.
The doctor told the lady of the house, " I have to perform an operation. Will you leave your son here to help us, and go over to the next house and stay there till I call you? The nurse attended to her and led her out. At about eight in the evening the patient opened his eyes and stirred slightly in bed.
The assistant was overjoyed. He exclaimed enthusiastically, " Sir, he will pull through. It is only a false flash-up, very common in these cases.
At about eleven the patient opened his eyes and smiled at his friend. He showed a slight improvement, he was able to take in a little food. A great feeling of relief and joy went through the household. Each craft or industry was organised into a guild, an association which controlled the quality of the product, its price and its sale. Timeline: i. Early History of France: refer to Page No. Eleventh to Fourteenth Centuries — refer to Page No. The New Monarchy: refer to Page No.
The Black Death: Ships with rats carrying the deadly bubonic plague infection in Western Europe between and Capo Capo:. Contacting server This is a preview of your FlexScore. Page Scans. View Page. African American Heritage Hymnal African Methodist Episcopal Church Hymnal Ambassador Hymnal Ancient and Modern Anglican Hymns Old and New Rev.
Baptist Hymnal Scripture : Psalm Date : Breaking Bread Vol. Celebrating Grace Hymnal Chalice Hymnal Christian Worship Church Family Worship Church Hymnal, Fifth Edition Church Hymnal, Mennonite Church Hymnary 4th ed. Common Praise Hymns for Today's Church, alt. Complete Anglican Hymns Old and New Complete Mission Praise Evangelical Lutheran Worship Glory and Praise 3rd.
Glory to God 8. Hymnal Supplement 98 Hymns and Psalms Hymns for a Pilgrim People Hymns for Today's Church 2nd ed. Hymns of Glory, Songs of Praise a. Hymns of Glory, Songs of Praise b. Hymns of Promise The Penitent King Lava Me Ab Iniquitate Mea Signs and Symbols The Return The Stranger. Merlin faded in and out of sleep, his thoughts tumbling like leaves in an autumn wind. He saw, in his mind's eye, a skinny boy in loose clothes, which rather made him resemble a scarecrow, travelling down a beaten dirt road.
Before him was a dense wood, and in the distance, rising above the trees, were the white spires and turrets of a great castle, like something conjured out of the land of Faery. Somehow Merlin knew that the boy was filled with wonder and excitement, but his own stomach was a knot of dread. Under the castle slept something ancient and terrible, something which called out to the boy in a voice as low as the grinding of the earth's bones, as hot as fire, as vast as the wind-scoured sky.
Someone spoke to Merlin. The words were low as distant thunder, shaking him to his core. He tried not to listen. Perhaps, if he ignored them for long enough, whoever was speaking would go away. But the words grew louder and more insistent, pressing down on Merlin, surrounding him, shaking him out of his doze.
He started, waking to find himself perched on his stool. For a moment he stared at the guttering fire, blinking in incomprehension, his brain still addled by the last dregs of sleep. The Southron lad was looking at Merlin.
He had propped himself up in his bed, and was blinking groggily. The Southron seemed to consider this. He disentangled a trembling arm from beneath the covers, and raised a hand to his lips, miming drinking. I'm sorry," said Merlin, hurrying to fetch a cup. He dipped it into the cleanest-looking water barrel, then returned to the patient's side and extended it to him.
Observing the unsteady motion of the Southron's fingers, Merlin brought the cup to the Southron's lips, and allowed him to drink deeply until he was satisfied. Suddenly, a fearful look came over his face, and he craned his neck backwards, staring apprehensively at the ceiling. Merlin knew what inferno meant, and he knew what the Southron was referring to, but he was too uncomfortable to reply.
He wants to see the Southron as soon as we are able-". Gaius stopped. He's revived! The Southron looked somewhat alarmed by these attentions, but he soon realised that Gaius meant no harm. It sounded like a mix of different languages. There must have been someone in the Southron camp who could translate for him. I became a n adept in the exploits of Dr. Nonsentius and Dr. Know- itall, and was intimately acquainted with all manner of spooky stories, tales of adventure, collections of jokes, songs and the like.
I was never short of material for the absurd stories I solemnly related t o make t h e members of m y family laugh. But what of my schooling? I was well on the way to winning respect. But the idea of being respected used to intimidate me exces- sively. My definition of a "respected" man was one who had succeeded almost completely in hoodwinking people, but who was finally seen through by some omniscient, omnipotent person who ruined him and made him suffer a shame worse than death.
Even sup- posing I could deceive most human beings into respect- ing me, one of them would know t h e truth, and sooner or later other human beings would learn from him. What would be the wrath and vengeance of those who realized how they had been tricked! That was a hair- raising thought. I acquired my reputation at school less because I was the son of a rich family than because, in the vulgar parlance, I had "brains.
Dur- ing recitation time at school I would draw cartoons and in the recess periods I made the other children in the class laugh with the explanations to my draw- ings. In the composition class I wrote nothing but funny stories. My teacher admonished me, but that didn't make me stop, for I knew that he secretly en- joyed my stories.
One day I submitted a story written in a particularly doleful style recounting how when I was taken by my mother on the train to Tokyo, I had made water in a spittoon in the corridor. But at the time I had not been ignorant that it was a spit- toon; I deliberately made my blunder, pretending a childish innocence. I was so sure that the teacher would laugh that I stealthily followed him to the staff room. As soon as he left the classroom the teacher pulled out my composition from the stack written by my classmates.
H e began t o read as he walked down the hall, and was soon snickering. H e went into the staff room and a minute or so later—was it w h e n he finished it? I watched h i m press my paper on the other teachers. I felt very pleased with myself. A mischievous little i m p.
I had succeeded in escaping from being respected. My report card was all A's except for deportment, where it was never better than a C or a D. This too was a source of great amusement to my family. My true nature, however, was one diametrically opposed to the role of a mischievous i m p. Already by that time I had been taught a lamentable thing b y the maids and menservants; I was being corrupted.
I now think that to perpetrate such a thing on a small child is the ugliest, vilest, crudest crime a human being can commit. But I endured it. I even felt as if it enabled me to see one more particular aspect of human beings.
I smiled in my weakness. If I had formed the habit of telling the truth I might perhaps have been able to confide unabashedly to my father or mother about the crime, but I could not folly understand even my own parents. To appeal for help to any human being —I could expect nothing from that expedient. Sup- posing I complained to my father or my mother, or to the police, the government—I wondered if in the end I would not be argued into silence by someone in good graces with the world, by the excuses of which the world approved.
It is only too obvious that favoritism inevitably exists: it would have been useless to complain to human beings. So I said nothing of the truth. Some perhaps will deride me. When did you become a Christian anyway? There was something that happened when I was a small boy.
A celebrated figure of the political party to which my father belonged had come to deliver a speech in our town, and I had been taken by the servants to the theatre to hear him. The house was packed. Everybody i n town who was especially friendly to my father was present and enthusiastically applauding.
When t h e speech was over t h e audience filtered out in threes and fives into the night. As they set out for home on t h e snow-covered roads they were scathingly commenting on the meeting. I could dis- tinguish among the voices those of my father's closest friends complaining i n tones almost of anger about h o w inept my father's opening remarks had been, and h o w difficult it was to make head or tail out of the great man's address.
Even the servants, when asked b y my mother about the meeting, an- swered as if it were their spontaneous thought, that it h a d been really interesting. These were the self- same servants w h o had been bitterly complaining on the way home that political meetings are the most boring thing in the world. This, however, is only a minor example. I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind—of people deceiving one another with- out strangely enough any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are de- ceiving one another.
But I have no special interest in instances of mutual deception. I myself spent the whole day long deceiving human beings with my clowning.
I have not been able to work up much con- cern over the morality prescribed in textbooks of ethics under such names as "righteousness. Human beings never did teach me that abstruse secret. In short, I believe that the reason why I did not tell anyone about that loathesome crime perpetrated on me by the servants was not because of distrust for human beings, nor of course because of Christian leanings, but because the human beings around me had rigorously sealed me off from the world of trust or distrust.
Even my parents at times displayed at- titudes which were hard for me to understand. I also have the impression that many women have been able, instinctively, to sniff out this loneliness of mine, which I confided to no one, and this in later years was to become one of the causes of my being taken advantage of in so many ways.
Women found in me a man who could keep a love secret. Every April when the new school year was about to begin these trees would dis- play their dazzling blossoms and their moist brown leaves against the blue of the sea. Soon a snowstorm of blossoms would scatter innumerable petals into the water, flecking the surface with points of white which the waves carried back to the shore. Stylized cherry blossoms flowered even on the badge of the regulation school cap and on the buttons of our uniforms.
A distant relative of mine had a house nearby, which was one reason why my father had especially selected for me this school of cherry blossoms by the sea. I was left in the care of the family, whose house was so close to the school that even after the morning bell had rung I could still make it to my class in time if I ran. That was the kind of lazy student I was, but I nevertheless managed, thanks to my accustomed antics, to win popularity with my schoolmates. This was my first experience living in a strange town.
I found it far more agreeable than my native place. One might attribute this, perhaps, to the fact that my clowning had by this time become so much a part of me that it was no longer such a strain to trick others. I wonder, though, if it was not due instead to the incontestable difference in the problem in- volved in performing before one's own family and strangers, or in one's own town and elsewhere.
This problem exists no matter how great a genius one may be. An actor dreads most the audience in his home town; I imagine the greatest actor in the world would be quite paralyzed in a room where all his family and relatives were gathered to watch him. I h a d moreover been quite a success. It was inconceivable that so talented an actor would fail away from home. The fear of human beings continued to writhe in my breast—I am not sure whether more or less intensely than before—but m y acting talents h a d un- questionably matured.
I could always convulse the classroom with laughter, and even as t h e teacher pro- tested what a good class it would be if only I were not in it, h e would be laughing behind his hand. At a word from me even the military drill instructor, whose more usual idiom was a barbarous, thunderous roar, would burst into helpless laughter.
Just when I had begun to relax m y guard a bit, fairly confident that I had succeeded by now in con- cealing completely my true identity, I was stabbed in the back, quite unexpectedly. The assailant, like most people w h o stab in the back, bordered on being a simpleton—the puniest boy in the class, whose scrof- ulous face and floppy jacket with sleeves too long for him was complemented by a total lack of profi- ciency in his studies and by such clumsiness in military drill and physical training that he was perpetually designated as an "onlooker.
Deliberately assuming as solemn a face as I could muster, I lunged overhead at the bar, shouting with the effort. I missed the bar and sailed on as if I were making a broad jump, landing with a thud in the sand on the scat of my pants. This failure was entirely premeditated, but everybody burst out laughing, exactly as I had planned.
I got to m y feet with a rueful smile and was brushing the Hand from my pants when Takeichi, who had crept up from somewhere behind, poked me in the back. H e mur- mured, "You did it on purpose. I might have guessed that someone would detect that I had deliberately unused the bar, but that Takeichi should have been the one came as a bolt from the blue.
I felt as if I h a d seen the world before me burst in an instant into the rag- ing flames of hell. It was all I could do to suppress a wild shriek of terror. T h e ensuing days were imprinted with my anxiety and dread. I continued on the surface making every- body laugh with my miserable clowning, but n o w and then painful sighs escaped my lips. Whatever I did Takeichi would see through it, and I was sure he would soon start spreading the word to everyone he saw.
If it were possible, I felt, I would like to keep a twenty-four hours a day surveillance over Takeichi, never stirring from him, morning, noon or night, to make sure that he did not divulge the secret. I brooded over what I should do: I would de- vote the hours spent with h i m to persuading h i m that my antics were not "on purpose" but the genuine article; if thing9 went well I would like to become his inseparable friend; but if this proved utterly im- possible, I had no choice but to pray for his death.
Typically enough, t h e one thing that never occurred to me was to kill him. During the course of my life I have wished innumerable times that I might meet with a violent death, but I have never once desired to kill anybody.
I thought that in killing a dreaded adversary I might actually be bringing h i m happiness. In order to win over Takeichi I clothed my face in the gentle beguiling smile of the false Christian. I strolled everywhere with him, my arm lightly around his scrawny shoulders, my head tilted affectionately towards him.
I frequently would invite him in honeyed, cajoling tones to come and play in the house where I was lodging. But instead of an answer h e al- ways gave m e only blank stares in return. One day after school was let out—it must have b e e n in the early summer—there was a sudden down- pour.
Ju6t as I was about to rush outside, I noticed Takeichi hovering dejectedly in the entrance way. I said, "Let's go. I'll lend you my umbrella. W h e n we arrived home I nuked my aunt to dry our jackets. I had succeeded in luring Takeichi to m y room. The household consisted of my aunt, a woman in h e r fifties, and my two cousins, the older of whom was a tall, frail, bespectacled girl of about thirty she h a d been married at one time but was later separated , and the younger a short, round-faced girl who looked fresh out of high school.
The ground floor of the house was given over to a shop where small quantities of stationery supplies and sporting goods were offered for sale, but the principal source of income wag the rent from the five or six tenements built by my late uncle. Takeichi, standing haplessly in my room, said, "My ears hurt. The lobes seemed filled to the bursting with pus. I simulated an exaggerated concern. It must hurt. Takeichi lay on the floor with his head on my lap, and I painstakingly swabbed his ears.
Even Takeichi seemed not to be aware of the hypocrisy, the scheming, behind my actions. Far from it—his comment as he lay there with his head pillowed in my lap was, " bet lots of women will fall for you! This, I was to learn in later years, was a kind of demoniacal prophecy, more horrible than Takeichi could have realized. Once these expressions put in an appearance, no matter how solemn the place, the silent cathedrals of melancholy crumble, leaving nothing but an im- pression of fatuousness.
It is curious, but the cathe- drals of melancholy are not necessarily demolished if one can replace the vulgar "What a messy business it is to be fallen for" by the more literary "What un- easiness lies in being loved.
No, to speak in those terms of the atmosphere engendered by so vulgar an expression as "to fall for" is to betray a precocity of sentiment not even worthy of the dialogue of the romantic lead in a musical comedy; I certainly was not moved by the farcical, self-satisfied emotions suggested b y the phrase "to have a faint inkling.
In m y immediate family women outnum- bered the men, and many of my cousins were girls. There was also the maidservant of the "crime. Never- theless, it was with very much the sensation of tread- ing on thin ice that I associated with these girls.
I could almost never guess their motives. I was in the dark; at times I made indiscreet mistakes which brought me painful wounds. These wounds, unlike the scars from the lashing a man might give, cut in- wards very deep, like an internal hemorrhage, bring- ing intense discomfort. Once inflicted it was extremely hard to recover from such wounds.
Women sleep so soundly t h e y seem to b e dead. W h o knows? Women may l i v e in order to sleep. These and various other generalizations were products of an observation of women 6ince boyhood days, but m y conclusion was that though women appear to belong to the same species as man, they are actually quite different creatures, and these incomprehensible, insidious beings have, fantastic as it seems, always looked after me.
In m y case such an expression as "to b e fallen for" or even "to b e loved" is not in the least appropriate; perhaps it describes the situation more accurately to say that I was "looked after. When I played the jester men did not go on laughing indefinitely. I knew that if I got carried away by m y success in entertaining a man and overdid the role, m y comedy would fall flat, and I was always careful to quit at a suitable place. Women, on the other hand, have no sense of modera- tion.
No matter how long I went on with my antics they would ask for more, and I would become ex- hausted responding to their insatiable demands for encores.
They really laugh an amazing amount of the time. I suppose one can say that women stuff them- selves with far more pleasures than men. Their knock on my door, no matter how often it came, never failed to startle me so that I almost jumped in fright. I would launch into some silly story, miles removed from what I was thinking.
Put them on. Here, take these glasses. The clown meekly put on the older girl's glasses. My cousins were convulsed with laughter. Exactly like Harold Lloyd.
I stood up. They laughed all the harder. From then on whenever a Harold Lloyd movie came to town I went to see it and secretly studied his expressions. One autumn evening as I was lying in bed reading a book, the older of my cousins—I always called her Sister—suddenly darted into my room quick as a bird, and collapsed over my bed. She whispered through her tears, "Yozo, you'll help me, I know. I know you will. Let's run away from this terrible house together. Oh, help me, please. This was not the first time that a woman had put on such a scene before me, and Sister's excessively emotional words did not surprise me much.
I felt instead a certain boredom at their banality and emptiness. I slipped out of bed, went to my desk and picked up a persimmon. I peeled it and offered Sister a section. She ate it, still sobbing, and said, "Have you any interesting books? Lend me something. Long personal experience had taught me that when a woman suddenly bursts into hysterics, the way to restore her spirits is to give her something sweet. Her younger sister, Setchan, would even bring friends to my room, and in my usual fashion I amused them all with perfect impartiality.
As soon as a friend had left Setchan would tell me disagreeable things about her, inevitably concluding, "She's a bad girl. You must be careful of her. This, however, by no means implies that Takei- chi's compliment, "Womenll fall for you" had as yet been realized.
I was merely the Harold Lloyd of North- east Japan. Not for some years would Takeichi's silly statement come palpitatingly alive, metamorphosed into a sinister prophecy.
Takeichi made one other important gift to me. One day he came to my room to play. He was waving a brightly colored picture which he proudly displayed. I was startled. That instant, as I could not help feeling in later years, determined my path of escape. I knew what Takeichi was showing me. When we were children the French Impressionist School was very popular in Japan, and our first introduction to an appreciation of Western painting most often began with such works.
T h e paintings of van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne and Renoir were familiar even to students at country schools, mainly through photo- graphic reproductions. I myself had seen quite a few colored photographs of van Gogh's paintings.
His brushwork and the vividness of his colors h a d in- trigued me, but I had never imagined his pictures to be of ghosts. I took from my bookshelf a volume of Modigliani reproductions, and showed Takeichi the familiar nudes with skin the color of burnished copper. Do you suppose they're ghosts t o o?
There are some people whose dread of human beings is so morbid that they reach a point where they yearn to see with their o w n eyes monsters of ever more horrible shapes. And the more nervous they are —the quicker to take fright—the more violent they pray that every storm will be. And they did not fob people ofif with clowning; they did their best to depict these monsters just as they had appeared. Takcichi was right: they h a d dared to paint pictures of devils.
These, I thought, would be my friends in the future. I was so excited I could have wept. I'm going to paint pic- tures of ghosts and devils and horses out of hell. Ever since elementary school days I enjoyed draw- ing and looking at pictures. But my pictures failed to win the reputation among my fellow students that my comic stories did. I have never had the least trust in the opinions of human beings, and my stories represented to me nothing more than the clown's gesture of greeting to his audience; they enraptured all of my teachers but for me they were devoid of the slightest interest.
Only to my paintings, to the depic- tion of the object my cartoons were something else again did I devote any real efforts of my original though childish style. I sought to model my techniques on those of the Impressionist School, but my pictures remained flat as paper cutouts, and seemed to oflfer no promise of ever developing into anything. But Takeichi's words made me aware that my mental at- titude towards painting had been completely mistaken. What superficiality—and what stupidity—there is in trying to depict in a pretty manner things which one has thought pretty.
The masters through their sub- jective perceptions created beauty out of trivialities. They d i d not hide their interest even in things which were nauseatingly ugly, but soaked themselves in the pleasure of depicting them. In other words, they seemed not to rely in the least on the misconceptions of others.
Now that I had been initiated by Takeichi into these root secrets of the art of painting, I began to do a few self-portraits, taking care that they not be seen b y my female visitors. T h e pictures I drew were so heart-rending as to stupefy even myself. Here was the true self I had so desperately hidden. I had smiled cheerfully; I had made others laugh; but this was the harrowing reality. I disliked the thought that I might suddenly be subjected to their suspicious vigilance, when once the nightmarish reality under the clowning was detected.
On the other hand, I was equally afraid that they might not recog- nize my true self when they saw it, but imagine that it was just some new twist to my clowning—occasion for additional snickers. This would have been most painful of all. I therefore h i d the pictures in the back of my cupboard.
0コメント