Beauty in Disarray. Harumi Setouchi

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СКАЧАТЬ water, she revealed a vivid reaction with precision and speed to everything he taught her. He found it interesting that without exception all the women teachers disliked her, saying she was quite assertive and conceited about everything she did and there was nothing pleasant about her. Tsuji rather felt Noe's stubbornness and serious rebellion wild and lovely.

      Gradually he found himself stimulating Noe's talents outside the classroom and enjoying his endeavors at helping the hidden sprouts within her expand.

      He would leave his own manuscripts with Noe, who late after classes were over was mimeographing in a corner of the teachers' room. "I've finished this. If you can use it, go ahead." Hardly daring to breathe, Noe read his translations of Gourmont, Shestov, and Wilde, and while reading his reviews of the recent works of Jun'ichiro Tanizaki and Kafu Nagai, she was unaware she was being taught how to appreciate literature. She became all the more engrossed in the school paper just to be able to receive Tsuji's manuscripts. Finally the rumors of her classmates reached her, but these made Noe with her unyielding spirit all the more rebellious, all the more daringly attracted to Tsuji.

      She had come to feel she was not in school at all if on even a single day she did not see his face. She began to regard things the same way he did and to regard them with his sensibilities. Having from childhood adhered to her own strong ideas, Noe was at this late date quite indifferent to the opinions of others. After school she mimeographed the school paper out of the sheer desire to have Tsuji look at it, and once she finished her work, she went to the music room to search for him. She knew that usually every day until evening he played the piano there. Though he was a teacher of English, he revealed an extraordinary passion for music, and without fail he would turn up at all the student concerts, his own performance on the piano and organ as skillful as that of the music teacher. Noe had already heard from Tsuji himself that his playing of the many-holed shakuhachi bamboo flute, in which he had even more ability than he had on the piano, would have put a professional to shame. Sometimes Tsuji would capriciously turn back to Noe, sitting behind him as he was playing the piano, her chin cupped in her two hands, her body never stirring, and he would make her sing. Though she was at first somewhat shy, she would soon begin a Schubert nursery song she had learned at school, or the chic lyric of a love song she had been taught by her father, or some provincial sad lullaby. Her clear voice was lovely and maidenly and more than made up for the trace of wildness in her features.

      Tsuji was quick to accompany her on any of these songs, and thinking to startle her he taught her some English hymns. Eventually the students came to catch sight of the figures of Tsuji and Noe keeping each other company on the way to and from school. By the time Tsuji accidentally realized it, he always found Noe walking beside him. Whether by investigation or other means, Noe had some great animal instinct for Tsuji's activities. But at those times the conversation of the two strollers was somewhat stiff and formal, quite far removed from any whispers of love. Usually it was talk of the kind in which Noe would give her impressions of the book she was reading at the moment and Tsuji would offer a proper response. Her facial expression, which had somehow looked gloomy and introverted, became brighter, her behavior much more lively and buoyant.

      In those days Tsuji was secretly enjoying a slight infatuation with a girl quite unlike Noe. Okin-chan, the daughter of a sake-dealer in Yoshiwara, was a genuine Tokyoite. Her graceful figure was perfectly suited to her kimono of yellow silk with its black neckband, her shimada coiffure with its cloth chignon band of dappled scarlet typical of a woman of the downtown quarter. A beautiful girl who looked as if she had stepped out of one of Kyoka's novels, she also resembled a girl in love with literature, a devotee of a Kyoka story. Though she had left Ueno Girls' High School in midcourse, she was two or three years older than Noe.

      Up to that time Tsuji had been attracted to several women, for example, the girl he had been friends with since childhood, her father a man who put on magic lantern shows; the daughter of an elderly minister of a church he had in his boyhood temporarily visited as if he were in a daze; and the wife of a diplomatic official living in Mukojima, whom Tsuji had taught English conversation a few times a week as a side job before he was employed at the girls' high school. With each of these women he had felt some mutual attraction bordering on love, but every instance had ended merely as passing infatuation. What had made him more timid toward women than one might have thought was the fact that he had not lived comfortably enough to wholly abandon himself to love, and there remained a lack of balance between his knowledge, more mature than might have been expected from someone his age, and his own inexperience in the real world. Even while he kept sending long love letters every day to the sake-dealer's daughter, whom he had met by chance, the fact remained he could not even bring himself to hold her hand.

      Though Okin was not intellectual, she was literary enough to forward a thick reply to his letters of affection, so their relationship had lasted a comparatively long time, and they were sufficiently content to believe themselves in love. Occasionally Okin came to Tsuji's office because the school was her alma mater, and she even spent time talking with her old classmates. Noe, with a sensitivity common to those in love, was quick to suspect the relationship between the two, but her only displeasure was in wondering why Tsuji could like such a dull downtown type whose single qualification was a beauty similar to that of a toy doll. Noe was totally unaware that the jealousy of a girl in love had instinctively made her dislike this beautiful girl. Nor was Noe yet conscious that her affection for Tsuji was love.

      From the time her parents had abruptly brought up the subject of marriage while she was at home during her summer vacation when she was a fifth-year student, Noe became all the more rapidly intimate with Tsuji. Against her will she had gone through the marriage ceremony in her hometown, and returning to Tokyo by herself after cutting short her summer vacation much earlier than expected, she went on foot directly to Tsuji's house and cast before him the disaster that had befallen her. The commonplace features of the man called Fukutaro, who had just returned from America, and his dullness in which nothing intellectual could be sensed summoned forth in her as she sat before Tsuji a hatred several times the disgust she had felt at home.

      "My uncle's to blame! He was blinded by the condition that the other party would pay for my schooling, so my uncle arranged everything in his own way. And now that things have gone this far, my uncle blames me, saying if I refuse, my parents and our family name will be put in a very bad light."

      Tsuji had the impression that in less than a month Noe, who was appealing to him with tears of mortification, had suddenly matured to take on something of the savor of a woman. The problem of her marrying, even while she was averse to it, and her anguish had unconsciously stimulated the body and soul of the woman in her and had probably roused into wakefulness this feminine vitality that had lain dormant within her. Tsuji sensed a kind of charm, absent until then, in the somewhat tight thin line along her cheeks and around her shoulders, and he observed the face of the crying and agitated woman, an ugly face yet one increasing in loveliness. She had hesitated to mention it but finally confessed she had already gone through the ceremony.

      "I was so terrified I wouldn't let him take a step near me, and I just ran away."

      Quite overwhelmed, Tsuji kept staring at her. Was it really possible for a woman to keep her husband at bay even after marrying him? Could a man exist today who remained silent while his wife dragged him down with such an insult?

      Clearly feeling Noe was asking for help, Tsuji found the only thing he could do was listen silently to her resentment and her whimpering grievance. Should he thoughtlessly offer his hand, it was quite evident to him that Noe, who had already reached the point of ignition, would transfer the blazing fire of her passion to him, and in no time at all they would together go down to ruin in flames.

      In any event, Noe, who had gone through the wedding ceremony, was already a married woman. And probably her name had been placed in the family register by the man who had said he would pay for her schooling. Though Tsuji felt pity for her, to get involved would prove troublesome. The worldly wisdom he had gained through long years of economic distress whispered to him to СКАЧАТЬ