I Am a Cat (26 page)

“I’d thought, Suzuki, that you’d become a bird of permanent passage, always coming or going somewhere, but I see you’ve landed back. The longer one lives, the greater the chance that something odd will turn up.” Waverhouse babbles away to Suzuki with that same complete absence of reserve which characterizes his conversations with my master. Though they lodged together in their student days, still it would be normal for a man to address someone whom he hasn’t seen for at least ten years with a little more formality. Except when that man is Waverhouse. That he pays not the least regard to the requirements of convention marks him out as either a superior soul or a rightdown job-bernowl. But which one cannot say.

“That’s a little hard. Aren’t you being a trifle pessimistic,” commented Suzuki noncommittally, but his way of fingering his watch-chain betrayed a continuing unease.

“Tell me, have you ever ridden on a tram?” My master shot this sudden and peculiar enquiry at Suzuki.

“It seems that I’ve come here today simply to provide you two city-wits with a laughingstock on which to hone your singular sense of humor. Though it’s true that I’m very much up from the provinces, I actually happen to own some sixty shares in the Tram Company of your precious city.”

“Well, that’s not to be sneezed at! I myself once used to own eight hundred and eighty-eight and a half of them. But I’m sorry to say that the vast majority have now been eaten by insects, so that I’ve nothing but one single half-share left. If you’d come up to Tokyo a little bit earlier, I would gladly have given you some ten shares that, until very recently, the moths had not yet got at. What a sad misfortune.”

“I see you haven’t changed your personal style of ridicule. But joking apart, you’re bound to do well if you just hang on to stocks of that quality. They cannot fail, year after year, to climb in value.”

“Quite right. Even half a share, provided one holds it for roughly a thousand years, will end up making you so rich you’ll need three stron-grooms. You and I, razor-minded fellows with our senses keyed to the economic inwardness of these stirring times, are, of course, keenly conscious of the significance of stocks. But what about poor Sneaze? Just look at him. To him,” said Waverhouse, conferring on my master a look of withering pity, “stocks are no more than some vague kind of gillyflower.” He helped himself to another piece of confectionery. His appetite is contagious, for my master, too, stretches out his arm toward the sweet dish. It is in the immutable nature of the human world that positivity should triumph, that initiative be aped.

“I do not care two hoots about stocks or shares, but I do wish poor old Sorosaki had lived to ride, if only once, on a tram.” With morose concentration my master studies the pattern cut by his teeth in his half-eaten sweet.

“Had Sorosaki ever got into a tram, sure as egg is egg, he’d have finished up at the end of the line in Shinagawa. He was an absent-minded man. He’s better off where he is now, engraved upon a weight-stone as Mr. the-late-and-sainted Natural Man. At least he knows where he is.”

“I’d heard that Sorosaki had died. I’m sorry. He was a brainy chap,” says Suzuki.

“Brainy, all right,”Waverhouse chipped in, “but when it came to cooking rice he was a positive imbecile. Every time it came round to Sorosaki’s turn to do the cooking, I contrived to keep body and soul together by eating out on noodles.”

“True, Sorosaki’s rice had the peculiar characteristics of smelling burnt yet being undercooked. I, too, used to suffer. What’s more, he had an odd way with the accompanying bean-curds. Uncooked and so cold that one could not eat them.” Suzuki dredges up a grievance ten years old.

“Even in those days Sneaze was Sorosaki’s closest friend. They used to trot off together every evening to gulp down rice-cakes swamped in red-bean soup, and, as a proper and inevitable result, Sneaze is now a martyr to dyspepsia. As a matter of fact, since it was Sneaze who always guzzled most, he should by rights have predeceased his crony.”

“What extraordinary chains of logic do run around in your contraption of a mind. Anyway,” remarked my master, “there was nothing particularly reprehensible about my going out for sweet-bean soup. As I remember it, your own evening expeditions took the form of haunting a graveyard in order to beat up tombstones with a bamboo stick. You called it physical exercise, but that didn’t save you from a right old rap on the knuckles when the priest came out and caught you.” In this exchange of student reminiscence I thought my master’s counter-swipe with the tombstones far more telling than that dribble of soup from Waverhouse. Indeed, by his laughter,Waverhouse himself acknowledged the defeat.

“Indeed,” he said, “I well remember that priest. He told me I was thumping on the noddles of the dear departed, which would disturb their sleep. So, would I please desist. All I did was to make some practice passes with a bamboo wand, but General Suzuki here, training his body with wrestlers’ drills, engaged those stones in violent personal combat. I recall that on one occasion he wrestled loose and overthrew three monuments of assorted sizes.”

“That did annoy the priest. He got quite fierce about it, insisting I restore my victims to their original positions. I asked him to hold his horses for a moment while I went and hired some navvies for the job, but he wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Navvies,’ he said, ‘won’t do. Only your own hands can purge the evil they have done. The dead will accept no penitence but yours.’”

“And what a sight you were! Moaning and groaning through those muddy puddles in a calico shirt and a loincloth tied with string. . .”

“And I remember you, with a coldly serious face you stood and sketched me as I struggled with those goddam stones. Such utter heartlessness. I’m very slow to anger, but at that time, from the bottom of my heart, I ached to kill you for your insultingly dispassionate detachment.

I can still remember what you said that day. Can you, I wonder?”

“How could anyone remember what was said ten years ago. I do, however, recall the words engraved on one of the stones: Returning Fountain Hall, Lord Yellow Crane the Great Deceased, January 1776.

The stone, moreover, was antique and elegant. I was tempted to make off with it. Its general style was Gothic and chimed entrancingly with those aesthetic principles I cherish.” Waverhouse is off again, flaunting his gimcrack knowledge of aesthetics. Whoever heard of Japanese Gothic from 1776. . .

“That’s as may be, but listen to what you said. These are your very words. ‘Since I propose to devote my days to the study of aesthetics, I must, for future reference, grasp each and every opportunity to set down upon paper any event of interest in this universe which comes before my eyes.’What’s more, you were kind enough to dispassionately add ‘A man such as I, one totally and exclusively committed to the pursuit of learning, cannot permit himself the luxury of such personal feelings as those of pity or compassion.’ I could have done you in for such nonchalance. But all I did, in fact, was to grab your sketchbook with my muddied hands and rip the thing to ribbons.”

“And it was from precisely that moment that my talent as a creative artist, up until then widely accepted as remarkably promising, was nipped in the bud, never to bloom again. I have my own whole skeleton of bones still to pick with you.”

“Don’t be so daft. If anyone’s entitled to a grudge, it’s me.”

“Waverhouse, from as far back as my mind can reach, has always been a windbag.” My master, having munched his sweet to extinction, rejoins the conversation. “He never means what he says and has never been known to keep a promise. Pressed hard for an explanation, he never apologizes but trots out endless pretexts and prevarications. Once when the myrtles were in bloom in the temple yard, he told me that he would complete a treatise he was writing, on those same old cherished principles of aesthetics, before the flowers fell. ‘Impossible,’ I said. Can you guess his answer? He claimed, despite appearances, to be of iron will.‘If you doubt my word,’ he said, ‘just name your bet.’ I took him up on it and we agreed that the loser should stand a dinner at a Western restaurant over in Kanda. I took the bet because I was certain that he’d never get his writing done in time, but I confess that, not in fact having the cash to pay for the dinner if I lost, I remained a little nervous that he still might work a miracle. Anyway, he showed no signs of getting down to work. A week went by, three weeks went by, and still he hadn’t written a single page. At last the flowers of the myrtle fell, and, though the tree stood empty, Waverhouse stood calm. Looking forward to my Western meal, I pressed our friend to meet his obligation. Not to put too fine a point upon his answer, he told me to get lost.”

“No doubt,” chimed in Suzuki, “he offered this, that and the other reason?”

“Indeed he did, the barefaced rogue. You can’t imagine how obstinate he was. ‘Say what you will,’ he said, ‘about my other flaws and faults. I admit them all, and readily. But the fact remains that in strength of will I’m stronger than the pack of you.’”

“Do you mean,” asked Waverhouse himself, “that, having written nothing, I still claimed not to have lost the bet?”

“Of course you did. You said the bet was not about finishing the treatise but about your iron will. And in respect of that iron quality, so you most willfully informed me, you would yield to none. You conceded that your memory might be poor; so poor indeed that you had next day forgotten that you intended to write a paper on the principles of aesthetics; but you maintained that your will to write it remained ferric to the core. The fault lay in your memory, not in your will. So, though the myrtle flowers were fallen and the treatise still unwritten, you made it painfully clear that you saw no reason why you should come across with my dinner.”

“Now that’s very interesting. And so very typical of Waverhouse.” I can’t see what in that rather tedious story should so particularly interest Suzuki, but the tone of his comments is markedly different from that which he used before Waverhouse came in. Perhaps such variousness is a sign of a clever man.

“Not in the least interesting.” My master interjects a sharpish contradiction.

“It distresses me that you should still be feeling so put out about it, but is it not for that very reason that I’ve had men out with lanterns searching high and low for those peacocks’ tongues I promised you?

Don’t be so huffy, Sneaze. Just wait a while and all shall be made up.

Incidentally, this talk about writing a treatise reminds me that I’ve called today with some especially odd news.”

“Since you bring round odd news every time you visit, I’ll take that statement with a pinch of salt.”

“But today’s odd news truly is sensational. Cross my heart and hope to die, it’s stunning. Coldmoon’s started writing his thesis. What about that? Since in his own quaint way Coldmoon has a fairly elevated opinion of himself, I wouldn’t have expected him to engage in such a mundane, tasteless chore as getting a thesis actually written, but it appears that he, too, is tainted with wordly ambition. Now don’t you think that odd? You’d better let that Goldfield woman know that she may now start dreaming of decking her family tree with a full-blown doctor of acorns.”

At the first mention of Coldmoon’s name, Suzuki begins jerking his chin and twitching his eyes at my master in silent pleas that nothing should be said of their recent conversation. My master fails to notice these entreating galvanisms. A short while back, under the suasion of Suzuki’s moral lecture, he had felt sufficiently sorry for the love-lorn daughter not to indulge his unabated antipathy toward her mother. But as soon as Waverhouse referred to Madam Conk, his recollection of his recent row with that virago came flooding back in full spate. That the row had had its comic aspects did not make it any the less provoking. But the news that Coldmoon had started to write his thesis, that was really marvelous. He was grateful to Waverhouse, who had more than fulfilled his boast of having something startling to say, for bringing such a welcome present. It was, indeed, a stunning piece of news; stunning but singularly pleasant. It doesn’t greatly matter, one way or the other, whether Coldmoon marries the girl, but it is certainly an excellent thing for the lad to get his doctorate. In surprising ways my master knows himself, and would with absolute humility accept that not a tear need fall if a botched wooden statue is left undecorated to rot away in some dark back-corner of a sculptor’s shop. But when a statue is superbly carved, when its basic quality is noble, then no effort should be spared and no time wasted in ensuring that it be given gilding of appropriate splendor.

“Are you really telling me that Coldmoon’s started writing?” my master enquires eagerly and paying no attention at all to the jittering Suzuki.

“What a suspicious mind you’ve got! Don’t you ever believe what I tell you? Yes, he’s started, but I regret I cannot tell you whether his thesis will be concerned with the stability of acorns or with the mechanics of hanging. Whatever the subject, a Coldmoon thesis must be a glorious snub for the Nose.”

Suzuki has been getting more and more restive as Waverhouse repeats and develops his discourteous references to Madam Conk;Waverhouse, not noticing, sails unconcernedly on.

“I have,” he said, “carried out some further research into noses and am happy to advise you of an interesting treatment of the subject in the
Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
. Had Sterne but known of that mountain of relevant material, how greatly it would have helped him. The sadness of chronology! To think that that staggering organ, eminently qualified as it is to gain immortal nose-fame, should be born, like many another nosegay, to blush unseen! One’s heart is filled with an immense compassion. When next it thrusts itself upon us, I shall sketch that vast promontory of flesh for my future reference in the study of aesthetics.” There’s no restraining Waverhouse.