With my eyes cast down, I took the bill the waiter brought and went silently to the desk by the door to pay it. There the head waiter, with whom I was slightly acquainted, was sitting languidly with his hair sprucely parted.
“There’s a man over there teaching English. Is he employed to teach in this café?,” I asked as I paid my bill, and he, gazing out into the street and looking bored, replied,
“No, he’s not employed. He only comes every night and teaches like that. They say he’s an old has-been English teacher whom nobody will employ anywhere, so he probably comes here to kill time. He orders a cup of coffee and sits in on us all evening, so we’re not over-pleased.”
When I heard this, Mōri Sensei’s sorrowful glance always pleading for something unknown came suddenly before my eyes. Ah, Mōri Sensei! At that moment I felt that I had been able for the first time dimly to understand him, to understand his sturdy character. If there is such a thing as a born educator, he was surely one. It was as impossible for him to stop teaching English as to stop breathing. If he were forced to stop, his splendid vitality would droop instantly just like a plant deprived of water. So, urged on by his interest in teaching English, he deliberately came alone to this café every evening to sip a cup of coffee. Of course his was no such leisure as to deserve being taken for time-killing by the head waiter. More, our mistaking him long before and deriding him for working only for a living, now was proven a shameful blunder. How he must have been tormented by the vulgar construction put upon his actions by the world, which credited him only with killing time or making a living! Of course, even in such torment, always assuming an attitude of serenity and caparisoned in that purple necktie and derby hat, he went on translating unflinchingly, braver than Don Quixote. But still in his eyes was there not sometimes that sorrowful gleam entreating the sympathy of the students he was teaching—nay, the sympathy of all the world he was facing?