The Cold

It was a morning after the snow had stopped. Yasukichi sat in a chair in the physics instructors' room, watching the fire in the stove. As though breathing, the flames would rise in a slow yellow glow, then sink into sooty black ash. It was proof that the fire went on struggling against the cold that hung in the room. Suddenly imagining the cosmic cold beyond the earth, Yasukichi felt something close to sympathy for the coals glowing red.

"Horikawa."

Yasukichi looked up at the face of a bachelor of science named Miyamoto, who stood before the stove. Nearsighted Miyamoto, spectacles on his nose and hands in his trouser pockets, wore a kindly smile beneath his sparse mustache.

"Horikawa, do you know that women are physical bodies too?"

"I know they are animals."

"Not animals—bodies. It is a truth I have only lately discovered, after considerable effort."

"Mr. Horikawa, you mustn't take anything Mr. Miyamoto says seriously."

The speaker was the other physics instructor, a bachelor of science named Hasegawa. Yasukichi turned around. Hasegawa had paused while marking examination papers at the desk behind him, an embarrassed little smile spreading over his entire balding face.

"That's outrageous. My discovery ought to be making you very happy, Hasegawa. Horikawa, do you know the law of heat transfer?"

"Heat transfer? Is that something like heat from electricity?"

"Literary men are hopeless."

Even as he spoke, Miyamoto shoveled a load of coal into the fiery mouth of the stove.

"When two bodies of different temperatures are brought into contact, heat continues to pass from the hotter body to the colder one until their temperatures become equal."

"Isn't that obvious?"

"That is what we call the law of heat transfer. Now let us regard the woman as a physical body. All right? If the woman is one, naturally the man is too. Love, then, corresponds to heat. Bring the man and woman into contact, and love ought to pass just as heat does—from the more feverish man to the less feverish woman—until their love reaches the same level. Hasegawa's case is precisely like that...."

"There he goes."

Hasegawa gave a laugh like someone being tickled, and seemed rather pleased.

"Suppose E is the amount of heat transmitted through an area S in a time T. Then—are you following? H is temperature, X is distance measured in the direction of conduction, and K is the thermal conductivity, a constant determined by the material. In Hasegawa's case, then...."

Miyamoto began writing something like a formula on the small blackboard. Suddenly, however, he turned and tossed away his stub of chalk with an air of utter disappointment.

"With an amateur like Horikawa for an audience, I am unable even to boast properly about my splendid discovery. In any event, Hasegawa's fiancée seems to have begun heating up exactly according to the formula."

"If there really were such a formula, life would be considerably easier."

Yasukichi stretched out his legs and gazed vaguely at the snowy scene beyond the window. Since the physics instructors' room occupied a corner of the second floor, it was easy to take in at one glance the playing field with its gymnastic equipment, the row of pines beyond it, and beyond those the red-brick buildings. The sea too—the sea dimmed its dark waves between one building and the next.

"But that would put literary men out of business. How is that book you published the other day selling?"

"As usual, not at all. Apparently no heat transfer occurs between author and reader. By the way, Hasegawa, is the wedding still some time off?"

"About another month. There are all sorts of preparations to make, and I'm at my wits' end because I have no time for any studying."

"Are you so impatient that you can't study?"

"I'm not Mr. Miyamoto. For one thing, even if I am to set up a household, I have yet to find a house to rent. Just last Sunday I walked over almost the whole town. But whenever I happened upon a vacant place, it had already been taken."

"What about my neighborhood? If you don't mind taking the train to school every day."

"Your neighborhood is a little too far away. I hear there are houses to rent around there, and my wife wants to live in that direction, but—why, Mr. Horikawa, aren't your shoes burning?"

At some point Yasukichi's shoe had apparently come against the side of the stove. Along with the smell of scorching leather, hazy steam was rising from it.

"That too, you see, is heat transfer."

Polishing his spectacles, Miyamoto grinned at Yasukichi over the uncertain brow of a nearsighted man.

Four or five days later, on a frost-clouded morning, Yasukichi was hurrying with all his might along the outskirts of a certain summer-resort town to catch his train. To his right lay a wheat field; to his left, an embankment about twelve feet high carrying the railway tracks. The deserted wheat field was filled with faint sounds. They could only have been the footsteps of someone walking among the wheat, though in fact they seemed to be made by frost columns collapsing of themselves beneath the turned soil.

Before long, the eight o'clock up train passed over the embankment, sounding a long whistle without gathering much speed. The down train Yasukichi meant to catch was not due for another half hour. He took out his watch. For some reason, however, it was already nearing eight fifteen. He decided the discrepancy must be his watch's fault. "No danger of missing the train today." Naturally, he thought something of the kind. The wheat field beside the road gradually gave way to hedges. Yasukichi lit an Asahi cigarette and walked on more easily than before.

The road, spread with coal cinders and other refuse, climbed gently toward a level crossing. As he approached it without a thought, Yasukichi noticed crowds gathered on both sides. Someone run over, he instantly concluded. Fortunately, beside the crossing gate stood a butcher's boy he knew, his laden bicycle stopped next to him. With the hand holding his cigarette, Yasukichi tapped the boy on the shoulder from behind.

"What happened?"

"He was run over. The up train just ran over him."

The boy spoke rapidly. His face, framed by rabbit-fur earmuffs, shone with a strange animation.

"Who was run over?"

"The crossing keeper. A schoolgirl was about to be hit, and he was run over trying to save her. You know the Nagai bookshop in front of Hachiman Shrine? It was their girl who nearly got hit."

"The child was saved, then?"

"Yes. That's her crying over there."

"Over there" meant the crowd on the far side of the crossing. Sure enough, a girl stood among them while a policeman questioned her. Beside her, a man who looked like an assistant stationmaster spoke to the policeman from time to time. The crossing keeper—Yasukichi discovered the body covered with a straw mat in front of the keeper's hut. The truth was that it aroused curiosity in him at the same time as disgust. Even at a distance, only the shoes on its two feet seemed to protrude from beneath the mat.

"Those men carried the body over there."

On this side, beneath a signal post, two or three railway workers surrounded a small fire. Though yellow flames rose from it, the fire gave off neither light nor smoke. For that very reason it looked especially cold. One of the workers was warming the seat of his knee breeches over it.

Yasukichi started across the level crossing. Since it lay close to the station, several tracks ran across it. Every time he stepped over one, he wondered which track the keeper had been struck on. But which one it was soon became plain even to his eyes. Blood on a single rail still told of the tragedy two or three minutes before. Almost reflexively, he shifted his gaze to the far side of the crossing. It was useless. In the startled instant before he could look away, the sight of something thick and red pooled upon the cold, gleaming surface of the steel had branded itself vividly upon his mind. What was more, a faint steam was rising from the blood on the rail....

Ten minutes later, Yasukichi was pacing restlessly along the station platform. His mind was full of the gruesome sight he had just witnessed. Most of all, he could still see the steam rising from the blood. He remembered their recent conversation about heat transfer. The heat of life dwelling in that blood was passing relentlessly into the rail, in exact accordance with the law Miyamoto had taught him, without the slightest deviation. And it made no difference whose life it was: the heat would pass just as relentlessly whether it belonged to a crossing keeper who died at his post or to a notorious criminal. He knew, of course, that such thoughts were meaningless. A dutiful son must still drown in water; a faithful wife must still burn in fire. Again and again he tried to persuade himself of this in his mind. Yet the fact he had seen with his own eyes had left so oppressive an impression that it would not readily submit to his logic.

The people on the platform, however, entirely untouched by his feelings, all wore apparently happy faces. That too irritated Yasukichi. The naval officers in particular, talking loudly among themselves, caused him almost physical discomfort. He lit a second Asahi and walked toward the end of the platform. From there he could see the crossing several hundred yards down the track. The crowds on either side seemed by now to have mostly dispersed. Only beneath the signal post did the railway workers' fire move one point of yellow flame.

Yasukichi felt something like sympathy for that distant fire. Still, the sight of the crossing remained unsettling. He turned his back on it and began making his way into the crowd once more. Before he had gone even ten steps, however, he suddenly realized that he had dropped one of his red leather gloves. When lighting his cigarette he had removed only the glove from his right hand and had been carrying it as he walked. He looked back. The glove lay at the end of the platform, palm upward. It seemed to be calling him back without a word.

Beneath the frost-clouded sky, Yasukichi felt the heart of that single red leather glove, left all alone. At the same time he felt that, even into this chill world, thin rays of warm sunlight would one day begin to fall.

(April 1924)