Erant Enim Piscatores

THE last rays of the setting sun gilded the distant camel-hump of Hieizan; up the valleys crept the soft fingers of a Japanese night. Spring was abroad in the air, in the bat fluttering over the surrounding paddy-fields, in the yellow evening-primroses already abloom; everywhere save in the young foreign teacher Addison’s heart. On his shoulders rested a terrible responsibility; and as the boll for evening prayers clanged through the dormitory, the perpendicular cleft in his conscientious forehead deepened, and he grappled anew with his latest disciplinary problem.

How to present the matter in the most favorable, most compelling light — that was the question. He watched the shadows outside lengthen. Well, he’d put it up to these Japanese boys just as he had to the fellows at the College ‘Y’ six months before, at home. They ’d understand. Things certainly could n’t continue to go on as at present, from difficult bad to intolerable worse.

Below stairs, stumbling to a chair beyond the ping-pong table and babyorgan, he sat down on a baseball glove, that may or may not have got there by mistake, just as Yagi San screwed a new bulb into its socket and flooded the disorderly room with light. He watched the boys absently, as with tattered hymnals and much flapping of indoor sandals they drew up into the usual circle, giggled, and subsided into vivid silence.

There were ten, in all, present. First, to the left wriggled the Koyama cousins, — Jusan and Eisan, — thirteen and twelve years old respectively; Jusan so fat that his eyes were completely invisible behind horizontal slits; Eisan, tiny, wraithlike, the dormitory’s inimitable mimic (when Addison was not present), charter-member of that universal brotherhood of contemporaries whose idea of the last word in humor calls for the intimate association of a chair, a dignified older person, and a tack or a pin. Hirose San, an overgrown, somewhat stupid-looking boy of seventeen — big-headed, moon-faced, thick-lipped — loomed beyond. Then Kuroda San, baseball fan and fielder, sat silent and somewhat bored by his friend Ouye San, also seventeen and fellow admirer of Mr. Babe Ruth. The pair, with their sun-baked hawk countenances, would have made excellent American Indians, had they worn blankets instead of kimonos. Yagi San, of the same age, — a pretty boy, pale, with almost infantile features, — was finding the place in the hymnal for little Fujimura San — a newcomer from Ōsaka, apple-cheeked, fourteen years old. Kawazura San, tall, lean, humorless, a good student, carrying his sixteen years as a Buddha carries his centuries, sat sphinx-like, ready to begin, his large eyes staring. Stunted Inouye San, his neighbor, fifteen years of age, at seven o’clock was already nodding, half asleep. Last, completing the circle, sat good, faithful, handsome, manly Suzuki. (The adjectives were all applicable, thought Addison.) He was nineteen and would be graduated next year. Not a bad bunch, not half a bad bunch, mused their teacher, while waiting for the meeting to come fully to order and life.

‘To-night we’ll sing no hymns. I want to talk. What I say Suzuki here will translate. All right?'

Suzuki blushed and everybody laughed, Addison loudest. Then, remembering his solemn duty, he resolutely banished his smile and summoned again the difficult frown.

’Fellows,’he began threateningly (his manner had been much admired in similar meetings at home), and thumping his closed hymn-book, ‘awfully sorry, and all that, but you and I have got to go to the mat now on at least two counts.’

He glared round on all present, and the boys, who knew him in private life as a being not wholly impossible to propitiate, and also as a corking good baseball pitcher, registered appropriate and sympathetic solemnity, without understanding one word. Sotto voce: ‘Shoot ’em that, Suzuki!’

Suzuki, politely, deprecatingly, in Japanese: ‘Honorable everyone! Pardon me, but the Sensei says we’re going to the jiu-jitsu room to meet two counts.'

Interested surprise manifested everywhere, but gravity still maintained, since the occasion and the Sensei’s face seemed to demand it.

‘Number one,’holding up a long forefinger, ‘hereafter we’ve got to cut out all late hours.'

Suzuki, hesitating: ‘The first count says we must operate on ourselves. That is’ — uncertainly — ‘so the Sensei says.’

Puzzlement on part of audience; but foreigners are funny creatures anyhow — even Sensei.

Addison, warming up: ‘That’s right, that’s right, Suzuki; give it to ’em straight, give it to ’em straight!’

Then, fixing a baleful eye on trembling twelve-year-old Eisan Koyama, he shouted in a voice of thunder, —

‘MEN —'

‘Males,’ courteously murmured the faithful Suzuki.

‘ MEN, things can’t go on here as they are at present. The Antis in school already say you can tell a Christian dormitory boy by his sleepy face!’

Suzuki: ‘Males, in school (in America?) there are kind aunts who give a present to every Christian boy who has a sleepy face.’ Then, hurriedly, in the same tone of voice, with unnecessary anxiety lest Addison discover any linguistic blunder: ‘So he says, but perhaps I’m not getting all this.’

Addison (in his best manner, with infinite and scathing contempt): ‘Such a condition, men, turns your stomach and fills you with disgust.’

Suzuki: ‘Such a condition, males, turns your stomach over and fills it with dust.'

Addison held up another accusing finger beside the first: ‘Count two.'

‘The second count.’

(Recrudescence of interest on the part of the audience.)

‘This count is of even greater importance.’

‘This count is of even higher rank.’

‘MEN, we are losing our vitality in getting across our propaganda.’

Here, Suzuki was forced into surrender and begged for further enlightenment. A conference ensued, and he interpreted : —

‘In spreading our propaganda we are losing our lives.’

(Visible consternation on every face except that of Inouye, who was by this time asleep.)

‘Pep, pep, PEP! We must show more pep. To win out we’ve got to get a wiggle on. (No, Suzuki, afraid you can’t make that one — get a more on, I mean.) In a school of eight hundred boys we ought to rope in more than fifty!’ And so on, the translation of his remarks illustrating anew what always happens when enterprising young Westerners try to hustle the East.

He drew for them, he thought, a picture of what the dormitory was and of what it ought to be. He told them, in racy Yankee, what, if they worked, it surely would become. He closed with a forceful appeal, begging them thenceforth to toil like yeomen (though that was not his word), like fishers tugging at the nets, and constrain, constrain members to come in.

It was a splendid effort. But perhaps, after all, it was just as well that the boys did n’t understand it quite — especially the forceful example at the end; because, except for Fujimura San, all of them hailed from the mountainous country of Tamba, in whose rapid rivers custom dictated that gentlemen should not fish at all, but lie in canopied boats at pillowed ease and merely watch other men wield the nets.

‘Now, fellows,’ he said in his ordinary voice, taking the silence for approbation and permanently dropping his frown, ‘now, fellows, as a sign of our turning over a new leaf, I suggest that we all go to the Heian Church to-night for the midweek service. We have n’t been there for months. It’ll mean a fine hike, some good words from Mr. Nishio, and an early snooze.’

What Suzuki made of this, I leave you to puzzle out. But they were going somewhere, that they knew, and they guessed it was to church.

‘Banzai!’ shouted Jusan wildly, ‘Banzai! We’re going to church to meet some counts!’ And everyone — Inouye San being roused — agreed that it was a far more suitable place than the jiu-jitsu room for receiving two such prominent persons.

To one who knew his Dickens — and who in this dark world and wide does not! — the Reverend Mr. Nishio at once recalled and expressed three illustrious characters: he was as good as Pickwick, as unctuous as Pecksniff, as hopeful as Micawber — and stouter than any of the three. And so, figuratively, if not literally, — being a Japanese, — he welcomed Addison and his nimble flock with open arms. He smiled, and winked his Jusan-like eyes, and rubbed his dimpled hands. Indeed, there was much bowing and intaking of breath on both sides.

They were just in time, it seemed; for, as they entered the main room of the church, a young lady in spectacles and dun-colored kimono had just begun an attack on an asthmatic organ. They sat in a row on the front bench, and even in their wriggling silence lent the otherwise middle-aged and demure congregation the vividness of youth. They made even the minister and organist feel their grateful aura, and turned what had begun as a very drowsy prayermeeting into something akin to life.

‘He is taking Sensei’s text,’whispered Suzuki to Addison, when Mr. Nishio, rubbing his hands, and winking and smiling more heartily than ever, began his little talk. And, as it went on, though Addison could grasp scarcely a word, in the voice, the gestures, the rising passion of the preacher, most of all in the open-eyed attention of all the boys, including even sleepy Inouye, he realized what was being said.

The old, old story of Galilee — he breathed it all. The blueness of the cloudless sky and untroubled turquoise water he felt, and saw the two rough fishermen with their ragged nets, listening rapt to the words of the tall, whiterobed One whose sandals made purer the stainless sand: —

Now as he walked by the sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew his brother casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers.

And Jesus said unto them, Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men.

And straightway they forsook their nets, and followed him.

Now, as everyone_in Kyōto knows, at the junction of Ōmiya and Shijo streets, where one takes the car for cherry-famed Arashiyama, there is a little store which, from the diversity and seasonableness of its wares, merits the name, Jack-of-all-Shops. In winter, it sells fried sweet potatoes to children (who gobble them hot out of the sack); in summer, vegetables; in fall, persimmons. At the time I am speaking of — in spring — its specialty was goldfish.

Addison and his troop, returning from church about nine o’clock, shot round the corner upon it, in full cry, so to speak.

They stopped — as who would n’t? Goldfish, goldfish everywhere! In crystal globes on stands, on shelves, globes within globes; in pails, in tubs, in artificial ponds spanned by tiny bridges; of all bulks, from minnows to full-sized carp, the magic creatures swam, twinkling and blazing under the powerful electric light.

Beside one pond in the centre — the largest and most populous of all — lay displayed miniature bamboo rods, with black threads for lines, and microscopic filament-like hooks; while overhead, in Chinese characters, ran the explanatory legend: ‘Buy a pole and take home your own catch. Fish as long as you like — only two sen.’

‘Oh-h-h-h!’ shouted the younger contingent; and plunged recklessly between the rows of glass globes for the sport to be had inside.

Addison was not the last, be it said to his credit, to cast in a line. But fishing for goldfish with a hook many sizes smaller than a pin has its own technique. Goldfish are slippery as catfish, and must be caught gently under the belly or gills, and jerked quickly into a waiting pail of water without contact with the fingers, if they are to be taken home alive and unhurt. Time and time again he raised one to the surface of the water only to have it, by a sudden flirt of its lithe body, wriggle away again; and on a dozen occasions he let one flop loose when already in the air.

‘Well,’ he said disgustedly at the hundredth mishap, ‘I quit. I’m going home — have some work to prepare anyway.’ To a questioning look of Suzuki’s: ‘All right, fellows — hang round a bit, if you care to. But don’t forget — not too late.’

'Sayonara, Sensei!’ sang the two or three others who remembered that he existed.

Next morning, Addison opened his eyes, yawned, rose on one arm, noted that the sun already stood high in the heavens, and conscientiously got out of bed. The dormitory was unusually still. Throwing on a few clothes, he slipped down to the common washroom. There, too, unwonted silence reigned. Only the old woman cook could be heard puttering about in the adjoining kitchen.

He plunged his face into a basin of cold water and came to full consciousness. On the floor stood a tub, not a small one, bubbling with panting goldfish. Their scales shone in the morning sun, though here and there a paler upturned belly showed where some weaker warrior had given up the crowded fight.

He poured fresh water into the tub from a pail standing by, and watched it give new ease and life.

‘By George, there must be a thousand of them!’ he cried.

‘Seven hundred and fifty-three,’yawned a voice.

He whipped round to find Suzuki standing at his elbow rubbing sleepfilled eyes.

‘Seven hundred and fifty-three exactly. Oh, the man he is angry — bery, bery angry. But we stay and stay and stay, and of course pay no attention to heem. “As long as you weesh,” we remind heem that he hab said. “We weesh to stay longer.” And we stay until all are catched — all. And, Sensei, eef you go there to-day you will find that the advertisement which we saw to-morrow night is no longer there. Twenty leettle sen for ten leettle poles and seven hundred fifty-three pretty leettle feesh. Also, you will find bery, bery angry man — bery angry man!’

Dazed, hurt, and not a little angry himself, Addison sternly climbed the stairs, Suzuki close behind him.

At the top he turned on the boy accusingly.

‘Suzuki, when did you fellows turn in last night?’

‘Pardon, dear Sensei, early’ — shamefacedly — ‘this morning. One o’crock.’

Addison consulted his watch.

‘Heck, only ten minutes till the first bell! No breakfast, no preparation, no anything! O Suzuki!’

Snores wafted softly down on them from six open transoms.

His voice trembled: ‘Suzuki, how could you?’

‘Sensei, do not trouble. I will awoke them before your stomach turn himself over once!’

The student touched his teacher’s arm affectionately.

‘Sensei, do not trouble. All right. Everyshing is all right. I will awoke them. Sh-h-h-h, listen to them, so brave, so innocent! I will awoke them at once. I am coming to awoke you, my boys!’

Then turning away, reverently, with upraised Nishio-like face and finger to lips: ‘Last night, feeshers in feesh. To-day, who know, feeshers in men!’