by Ivan Morris
That might be true, but I felt no right to discuss the process on which he had worked so long. Yet if I were to leave him to his own devices, he would do as his wife told him, and she was a woman who could think of nothing not immediately before her eyes.
I wanted to do what I could for him—indeed that wish became an obsession. When I was in the shop, it seemed that all the processes and all the materials were waiting for me to put them in order. I came to look upon Karubé as a menial, and, worse than that, his somewhat histrionic manner annoyed me. But then my feelings began to move in another direction. I noted again how Karubé’s eyes were fixed on my smallest action. When I was at work his gaze almost never left me. It seemed clear that the wife had told him of her husband’s latest research and of the red-plating process. Whether she had also told him to watch me, I could not be sure. I had begun to wonder if Karubé and the wife would not one day steal the secret, and I was telling myself that it might be well to do a little watching myself. I was therefore under no illusion that the two of them did not have similar doubts about me. When I was the object of suspicious looks, I did, it is true, feel somewhat uncomfortable; but it amused me to think, perhaps impudently, that I was watching them in turn.
About this time the master told me of his new research: he had long been looking for a way to tarnish metal without using ferric chloride. So far he had found nothing satisfactory. He wondered if in my spare time I would help him. However good-natured he was, I thought he should not be giving out information on so important a matter. Still, I was touched that he should trust me. It did not occur to me that the trusted one is usually the loser, and that the master thus perpetually defeated us all. That infinite childishness was not something one could acquire; it gave him his worth. I thanked him from my heart and told him that I would do what I could to help him.
I thought that some time in my life I’d like to have someone thank me from his heart. But since the master had no petty thoughts about “doing and being done by,” I could only bow lower before him. I was trapped as if hypnotized. Miracles, I found, are not worked from without; they are rather the result of one’s own inadequacy. With me as with Karubé, the master came first. I began to feel hostile toward the wife who controlled him, hostile toward everything she did. Not only did I wonder by what right such a woman monopolized such a man, I even thought occasionally of how I might free him from her. The motives that made Karubé lash out at me became clear as day. When I saw him I saw myself, and the revelation fascinated me.
One day the master called me into the darkroom. He was holding a piece of aniline-coated brass over an alcohol burner, and he began to explain. In coloring a plate, one must pay the most careful attention to changes under heat. The sheet of brass was now purple, but presently it would be brownish black, and when, at length, it turned black, it promised in the next test to react to ferric chloride. The coloring process, he said, was a matter of catching a middle stage in a given transformation. The master then ordered me to make burning tests with as many chemicals as possible. I became fascinated with the organic relationships between compounds and elements, and as my interest grew I learned to see delicate organic movements in inorganic substances. The discovery that in the tiniest things a law, a machine, is at work came to me as the beginning of a spiritual awakening.
When Karubé noticed that I had free entry to the darkroom (until then no one had been admitted), his attitude changed. He was thinking, no doubt, that the care with which he had watched me had been wasted, since what was not permitted to him—to him who thought only of the master—was now permitted to me, a newcomer. Still more, he was thinking that unless he was careful he might find himself completely in my power. I knew that I should be more circumspect, but who was Karubé that I need worry about him at every move I made? I felt no sympathy for him, only a cool, detached interest in what the fool might be up to next, and I continued to treat him with lofty indifference.
He was infuriated. Once when I needed a punch he had been using, it disappeared. Hadn’t he been using it until a minute ago, I asked. What had disappeared had disappeared, whether he had been using it or not, he answered, and I could go on hunting until I found it. That was true; but hunt as I would I could not find it. Then I happened to glance at his pocket and there it was. Silently, I reached for it. Who the devil did I think I was, reaching into a person’s pocket without permission, he wanted to know. Another person’s pocket indeed! I retorted; while we were here in the shop everyone’s pocket was everyone else’s. Because that was the way I felt, he said, I was the sort that would go around stealing secrets.
“When did I steal anything? If helping the master with his work means stealing, then you’re stealing too,” said I.
For a moment he was silent. Then, lips quivering, he stammered: “Get out of here! Get out of this shop!”
“All right, I’ll go. But I owe it to the master not to leave until the research has gone a little farther.”
“Then I’m going.”
I tried to quiet him. “You’ll only be causing trouble. Wait until I leave myself.”
But he insisted he would go.
“All right. Go ahead. I’ll take on the work of us both.”
With that he snatched up the powdered calcium at his elbow and threw it into my face.
I knew that I was in the wrong, but wrongdoing could be interesting. I understood his impatience clearly, the fretful irritation in the man’s good heart. I felt like relaxing to enjoy the sport, but at the same time I knew that would not do; so I sought to quiet him a bit. I had been wrong to ignore him. But it would have taken more of a man than I was to cower before each new wave of indignation. The smaller one is, the more one does to make people angry. As Karubé grew progressively angrier, I recognized the measure of my own smallness. In the end, I no longer knew what to do, about myself or about Karubé. Never before had I found myself so unmanageable. It has been well said that the spirit follows the body’s dimensions. In silence I reflected that mine seemed to match exactly.
After a time I went into the darkroom and, to precipitate a bismuth dye, began heating potassium chromate in a test tube. That too was an unwise move. The fact that I had free entry into the darkroom had already aroused Karubé’s envy, and now here I was in there again. He exploded, of course. Flinging the door open, he pulled me out by the collar and threw me to the floor. I let him have his way; indeed, I almost threw myself down. Violence was the only thing that worked with a person like me. He looked into the darkroom to see whether the potassium chromate had spilled, and while he was about it he went in and made a hasty circuit of the room. Then he came back and stood over me, glaring—apparently the trip around the room had not calmed him. He seemed to be wondering what to do next; he might well decide to kick me if I moved. For a few tense moments I wondered what, exactly, I was doing; but soon I began to feel as if I was dreaming. I thought I must let him have a really good tantrum, and by the time I concluded that he was angry enough to be satisfied, I was quite at ease myself. I looked in to see how much damage he had done. The devastation, I decided, was worst on my own face. Calcium was gritty in my mouth and ears. Still not sure whether I should get up, I glanced at the shining pile of aluminum cuttings by my nose and felt astonished at the amount of work I had done in three days.
“Let’s stop this foolishness and get to work,” I said. “There’s aluminum to be coated.”
But Karubé had no intention to work. “Suppose we coat your face instead!”
Shoving my head deep into the cuttings, he rubbed it back and forth as though the metal were a washcloth. I visualized my face being polished by a mountain of little plates from house doors and thought how disturbing violence could be. The corners of the aluminum stabbed at the lines and hollows of my face. Worse, the half-dried lacquer stuck to my skin. Soon my face would start swelling. I concluded that I’d done my duty and started for the darkroom again. Thereupon he seized my arm, twisted it behind my back, and pushed my f
ace against a window, thinking, apparently, to slash it with glass splinters.
The violence would not continue long, I was sure. But as a matter of fact, it did go on and on. Though much of the blame was no doubt mine, my feeling of contrition began to fade. My face, which I had hoped wore a diffident, conciliatory expression, was swelling more and more painfully, offering a pretext for new violence. I knew that Karubé was no longer enjoying his anger, but it was now beyond his control.
As he pulled me toward a vat of the most poisonous corrosive, I turned on him: “It’s your business, of course, if you want to torture me, but the experiments I’ve been working on in the darkroom are experiments no one else has done. If they’re successful, there’s no telling what profits they’ll bring in. You won’t let me work, and now you’ve upset the solution I spent all that time on. Clean it up!”
“Why don’t you let me work with you, then?”
I could not tell him that the decision was out of my hands, that a person who could not even read a chemical equation would be less of a help than a hindrance. It may have been a little cruel of me, but I took him into the darkroom, showed him the closely written equations, and explained them to him.
“If you think you’d find it interesting, go ahead—mix and remix, using these figures. Go ahead! You can do it every day in my place, all day long.” For the first time, I had the better of him.
With the fighting over, I found life easier for a time. Then, suddenly, Karubé and I became extremely busy. An order arrived from a municipal office to make name plates for a whole city, fifty thousand plates in ten days. The wife was delighted, but we knew it meant that we would have to go virtually without sleep. The master borrowed a craftsman from another name-plate shop. At first I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work; but soon I began to see something strange in the manner of the new man, Yashiki. Although his awkwardness and his sharp glance did suggest a craftsman, I suspected that he might perhaps have been sent to steal our secrets. If I were to speak of my suspicions, however, there would be no way of knowing what Karubé might do to him, and I decided to keep quiet for a time and to observe. I noted that Yashiki’s attention was always focused on the way Karubé shook his vat. Karubé’s work was the second specialty of our shop, something no other shop could imitate. Yashiki put sheets of brass into a solution of caustic soda to wash away the varnish and glue that Karubé used with corrosive ferric chloride. It was therefore natural that Yashiki should be interested. Still, given my doubts, the very naturalness of it was cause for further doubt.
But Karubé, more and more pleased with himself now that he had an audience, was in great form as he shook his vat of ferric chloride. Since he had doubts about me, he should naturally have had even greater doubts about Yashiki. Quite the reverse was true: he explained the shaking of the vat in such esoteric terms that I wondered where he might have learned them. You always laid the inscription face down, it seemed, and let the weight of the metal do the work. The uninscribed surface corroded more rapidly—suppose Yashiki try for himself. At first I listened nervously to the chatter, but in the end I decided that it made no difference. One might as well teach the secrets to anyone who wanted them. I would no longer be on my guard against Yashiki.
My chief gain from this incident was the discovery that a secret leaks out because of the conceit of its possessor. But it was not only conceit that led Karubé to tell everything. Without a doubt, Yashiki was an able seducer. Though the light in his eyes was sharp, it had a strange charm, when it softened, that had the effect of making one’s caution melt away. That same charm affected me each time he spoke, but I was so busy with all the jobs I had to rush through that I paid little attention: from early in the morning I had to lacquer heated brass and dry it, put metal coated with ammonium dichromate out to react in the sun, add aniline, and then rush from burner to polisher to cutter. There was little time for Yashiki to charm me.
About five nights after he came, I awoke and saw Yashiki, who should have been doing night work, come from the darkroom and go into the wife’s room. While I was wondering what could be taking him there at such an hour, I unfortunately fell asleep again. But the first thought that came into my mind next morning was of Yashiki. The trouble was that I gradually became less sure whether I had actually seen him or whether it had been a dream. I had had similar experiences from overwork before, and I suspected that I had only been dreaming. I could imagine what reason he might have for going into the darkroom, but I had no idea how to explain his entry into the other room. I could not believe that the wife and Yashiki were carrying on in secret. The easiest solution, then, was to dismiss it all as a dream.
At about noon, the master began laughing and asking his wife if there had been anything out of the ordinary on the previous evening.
“I may be a heavy sleeper,” she answered quietly, “but I know who took the money. If you have to steal it, you might at least do it more cleverly.”
He laughed still more delightedly.
Had it been not Yashiki but the master I had seen going into her room? I thought it odd that the latter should be sneaking into his own wife’s room, chronically short of money though he was.
“It was you I saw coming from the darkroom?” I asked.
“The darkroom? I don’t know anything about the darkroom.”
The confusion deepened. Had it been Yashiki, after all, in the darkroom? It seemed certain that the man who had stolen into the wife’s room was not Yashiki but the husband; yet I could not think I had only dreamed Yashiki’s emergence from the darkroom. The suspicions that had for a time left me began to gather again. I saw, however, that doubting in solitude was like doubting oneself, and did no good. I’d better ask Yashiki directly. But if I did and it had in fact been he, then he would be upset, and to upset him would be no gain.
Still, the matter was of such interest that I thought it a pity not to push it further. For one thing, the secret formula for combining bismuth and zirconium silicate—the process on which I had been so hard at work—and the formula for the red amorphous selenium stain that was the master’s specialty were both kept in the darkroom. Not only would their loss be a severe blow to the business, but the loss of my own secret would take all the zest from life. If Yashiki was trying to steal the formula, there was no reason why I shouldn’t try to keep it hidden. I suspected him more intensely. When I thought how, after having been suspected by Karubé; it had now become my turn to suspect Yashiki, I wondered if I’d be giving Yashiki the same prolonged pleasure I’d had in making a fool of Karubé. But then I thought it over and decided it would do me good to let myself be made a fool of for once. So I turned my full attention to Yashiki.
Perhaps because he noticed how my eyes burned at him, Yashiki began to look exclusively in directions where his eyes would not meet mine. I was afraid that if I made him too uncomfortable he might take flight. I must be more circumspect. Eyes are strange things, however. When glances that have been wandering at the same level of consciousness meet, each seems to probe the other to its depths.
I would be at the polisher, talking of this and that, and my glance would ask him: “Have you stolen the formulas yet?”
“Not yet, not yet,” that burning eye would seem to answer.
“Well, be quick about it.”
“It takes a devil of a long time, now that you know what I’m after.”
“My formula is full of mistakes anyway. It wouldn’t do you much good to steal it now.”
“I can correct it.”
So the imaginary conversations went, while Yashiki and I worked together; and gradually I began to feel friendlier toward him than toward anyone else in the place. The Yashiki charm that had excited Karubé and made him reveal all his secrets was now working on me. I would read the newspaper with Yashiki, and on subjects that interested us both our opinions always agreed, especially on technical matters. I’d speed up reading when he speeded up and slow down when he slowed down. Our views on politics and
our plans for society were alike. The only question on which we disagreed was the propriety of trying to steal another person’s invention. He had his own views, and thought there was nothing wrong with stealing if it contributed to the advance of civilization. In such a case, the person who tries to steal may, in fact, be better than the one who does not. Comparing his spy activities with my own attempts to hide inventions, I concluded that he was doing more for the world than I. So I thought—and so Yashiki made me think. He seemed to approach nearer and nearer; yet I wanted to keep at least the secret of the amorphous selenium stain from him. So, even while I became his closest friend, I was also the one who most got in his way.
I told him that Karubé had suspected me of being a spy when I first came to work here, and had almost killed me. Karubé had not done the same to him, laughed Yashiki, because Karubé had learned a lesson with me.
“So that’s why you found it so easy to be suspicious of me,” he added mischievously.
“If you knew all along that I was suspicious, you must have come here prepared to be suspected.”
“That’s right,” he said.
He was as good as admitting he had come to steal our secrets. I could not help being astonished at the openness with which he said so. Perhaps he had seen through me and was sure that in my surprise I would come to respect him. I glared at him for some seconds.
But Yashiki’s expression had already changed. Somewhat loftily, he went on: “When you come to work in a shop like this, it’s the usual thing to have people think you’re up to something. But what could a person like me do? No—I won’t begin apologizing now. Suppose we just work and let work. The worst thing,” and he laughed, “is having someone like you look at me as if I ought to be doing something bad when I’m not.”
He had touched a sensitive spot. I felt a certain sympathy for the man. I had borne the sort of treatment he was now getting.
