But after the student had taken his seat and Mōri Sensei began his own translation of the passage, laughter arose again here and there among us. For this teacher, who was such a master in pronunciation, when he came to translate, knew so few Japanese words as hardly to seem like a Japanese. Or it may have been that, even if he did know them, he was not able to find them on the spur of the moment. For instance, to translate only one line, he said, “So at last Robinson Crusoe decided to keep it. As for why he decided to keep it, it was one of these queer animals—there are many of them at the zoo—what do you call them? Er—they’re clever at tricks—you all must know what I mean, don’t you? You know, they have red faces—what? Monkeys? Yes, yes, it was one of those monkeys. He decided to keep one of those monkeys.”
Of course, since he had that much trouble with the word “monkey,” when it came to any word that was a little difficult, he could not strike upon a suitable translation till he had gone all around it many times. Besides, he was at such times greatly flustered, and putting his hand to his throat so frequently that it seemed he must tear off his purple necktie, he lifted his anxious face and looked at us with panic-stricken eyes. And then, pressing his bald head in his two hands, he would put his face down on the desk and come to an abashed stop. At such times his naturally small body shrank up timidly exactly like a deflated rubber balloon, and even his legs, hanging down from the chair, seemed to float danglingly in space. And again, we students found that funny and tittered. Then while he was repeating his translation two or three times, the laughing voices gradually became audacious and, at last, even from the front row, welled up openly. As for how much this laughter of ours hurt the good Mōri Sensei—the truth is that of late years even I have many times involuntarily wished to cover my ears at the recollection of that pitiless sound.
Yet Mōri Sensei went bravely on with his translation till the bugle announced recess. And when he had finished the last paragraph, he again assumed his original air of composure and, returning our bow, went out of the room with a show of calmness, as if he had forgotten entirely the dismal struggle he had had up to that minute. Scarcely had he gone out when there arose in our midst a great burst of laughter like a tempest and the noise of deliberately opening and shutting the lids of desks, and then one student jumped up on the platform and quickly mimicked his gestures and voice—ah, must I remember even the fact that I, decorated with the monitor’s mark and surrounded by five or six students, proudly pointed out his mistakes in translation. And what of those mistakes? To tell the truth, I was showing off, even then not knowing in the least whether they were really mistakes or not.
It was a noon hour three or four days later. Gathered in the sand pit by the turning bars, five or six of us students were chatting glibly about such things as the coming terminal examinations, as we exposed the backs of our serge uniforms to the warm winter sun. Then Tamba Sensei, who weighed a hundred and fifty pounds and had up to that moment been hanging to the horizontal bar with a student, dropped down into the sand with a loud, “One, two!” and appearing among us in his vest and athletic cap, said,
“How’s the new teacher, Mōri Sensei?”
Tamba Sensei also taught us English, but being a famous lover of athletics, and, at the same time, being credited with ability in the reciting of Chinese poems, he seemed to be very popular even with those stalwarts, the jujitsu and single-sticking champions, who hated English itself. So when he said this, one of those stalwarts, fingering a mitt, replied with a shyness unnatural to him,
“Er—he’s not too—what shall I say? Everybody says he’s not too good.”
Then Tamba Sensei, dusting the sand off his trousers with his handkerchief, smiled proudly and said,
“Is he worse than you are?”
“Of course he’s better than I am.”
“Then you have nothing to complain of, have you?”
The stalwart, scratching his head with his mitted hand, withdrew weakly. But the English genius of our class, adjusting his strong myopic spectacles, protested in a pert tone, unbecoming his years,
“But Sensei, as most of us mean to take the entrance examinations to higher schools, we want to be taught by the very best teachers.”
But Tamba Sensei, laughing spiritedly as always, said,
“Nonsense! it’s all the same whoever teaches you only for a term or so.”
“Then is Mōri Sensei to teach us only one term?”
This question seemed to touch Tamba Sensei a little near home. But this worldly-wise teacher, purposely giving no reply, took off his athletic cap, and energetically knocking the dust out of his closely cropped hair, suddenly looked all around at us and, cleverly changing the subject, said,
“Of course, Mōri Sensei’s a very old man, so he’s a little different from us. This morning when I got on a car he was seated in the very middle of it, and when we got near the place to change, he called out, ‘Conductor, conductor!’ It was so funny I nearly died laughing. Anyhow, he’s certainly different.”
But when it came to things of that sort about Mōri Sensei, there were more than enough that had astonished us without our waiting to be told about them by Tamba Sensei.
“And they say Mōri Sensei, when it rains, comes to school in his foreign clothes with wooden clogs on
