I Am a Cat (27 page)

“But I hear that the Goldfield girl is yearning to be Coldmoon’s bride.” My master makes a fair summary of Suzuki’s representations, while the latter, annoyance twitching from every feature on his face and electric messages flashing from his eyes, signals desperately for disengagement. My master, like some nonconducting substance, remains immune to these distraught discharges.

“How bizarre. It strains the mind to think that the daughter of such a man might fall in love. . . Not, I would imagine, that it could be love of any quality, just rubbing noses.”

“Whatever its nature,” my master commented, “let’s hope that Coldmoon marries her.”

“What’s that?” said Waverhouse. “Who’s now hoping Coldmoon marries her? Only the other day you were dead against such a disastrous match. Have you gone soft or something?”

“It’s not a matter of going soft. I never go soft, but. . .”

“But something’s happened? That’s it, isn’t it? Now look here, Suzuki, since you’re some kind of lower life-form in the business jungle, let me give a piece of advice to guide your future slitherings. It’s with reference to that grunting Goldfield and his piglet daughter. The idea that reasonable persons might be called upon to treat that creature with the respect due to the wife of Mr. Avalon Coldmoon, that talented national figure, why, man, the thing’s impossible. They’d no more balance each other than would a paper-lantern and a big bronze bell. No one who calls himself a friend to Coldmoon could stand by and not speak against the folly of such a misalliance. Surely, Suzuki, even you, looking at it as a businessman, can see the sense in what I’m saying.”

“What a kerfuffle you do still manage to kick up! Always something stirring, eh? You haven’t changed one little bit in all of these ten years.

Really, it’s remarkable.” Suzuki tries to slither round the question.

“Since you compliment me as being remarkable, let me display some more remarkable dollops of learning appropriate to this case. The ancient Greeks set very high store by physical prowess and encouraged its pursuit by awarding valuable prizes to the winners of all sorts of athletic contests. But, strangely enough, there is no record that they ever offered prizes for intellectual prowess. Until recently this curious circumstance incessantly puzzled me.”

“I see,” says Suzuki still trying to make himself agreeable. “That does seem odd.”

“However, just the other day, I chanced, in the course of my researches into aesthetics, to light upon the explanation. Years of accumulated worrying fell instantly away from me and, in that blessed trice, as though disburdened of all errors and earthly delusions, I found myself transported to that pure realm of infinite enlightenment where my soul rejoiced in its transcendence of the world and its attainment of pansophic self-awareness.”Waverhouse departs on such a flight of gongoristic drivel that even the toadying Suzuki allows his face to slip into the lineaments of having had enough. “He’s at it again” may be read in my master’s resigned expression as, with eyes cast down, he sits there tapping, kan-kan-kan, on the rim of the cake-dish with his ivory chopsticks.

Nowise disconcerted,Waverhouse blathers on.

“And to whom do you think we are indebted for that brilliant logical analysis, which, by its simple explanation of this seeming anomaly, has rescued us forever from the dark abyss of doubt? It was that famous Greek philosopher, the greatest of all scholars since scholarship began, the renowned founder of the Peripatetic School, Aristotle himself. His explanation—I say, Sneaze, please stop flogging that cake-dish and pay a little more attention—may be summarized thus. The prizes awarded at Greek contests were worth more than the performances that earned them, for the prizes were intended not only to stimulate effort but to reward achievement. Consequently, if one were to give a prize for intellectual prowess, for knowledge itself, one would have to find something to award which was more valuable than knowledge. But knowledge already is the rarest gem in the world. The Greeks, unwilling to debase the value of knowledge, piled up chests all crammed with gold to the height of Mount Olympus. They gathered in the wealth of Croesus, and wealth beyond that wealth, but in the end they recognized that the value of knowledge cannot be matched, let alone exceeded. So, masters of reason that they were, they decided that the prize should be nothing at all. From this, Suzuki, I trust you will have learnt that, whatever the color of your money, it is worthless stuff compared with learning. Let us accordingly apply this revealed truth, this fundamental principle, to the particular problem that has arisen today. Surely you’re bound to see that Goldfield’s merely a paper man, a bill of exchange with eyes and a nose scrawled onto it. If I may put it epigrammatically, the man’s no more than an animated banknote. And if he’s money in motion, currency one might say, his daughter’s nothing but a circulating promissory note. In contrast, now, let us consider Coldmoon. With consummate ease he graduated with the best degree of his year from the highest seat of learning in our land. On leaving the Imperial University, he showed no sign of slackening of effort. On the contrary, fiddling with the antique fastening-strings of his short surcoat, he devotes himself both day and night to intensive study of the thorny problem of the stability of acorns. And in addition to all that, this indefatigable servant of learning is just about to publish a thesis which, unquestionably, will embody intellectual concepts beside whose depth, originality, and scope those adumbrated by the great Lord Kelvin must pale into insignificance. It is true he was concerned in an abortive attempt at suicide, but that was no more than a passing fancy of a kind common among lads of spirit. Certainly the incident can cast no serious doubt upon his reputation as a vast repository of learning and intelligence. If I may adapt to Coldmoon’s case one of my own earlier turns of phrase, I should describe him as a circulating library. He is a high-explosive shell, perhaps only a twenty-eight centimeter, but compactly charged with knowledge.

And when at the properly chosen time this projectile makes its impact upon the world of learning, then, if it detonates, detonate it will.”

Waverhouse, unbelievably, seems to have run out of steam. Confused by his own jumble of metaphors, he almost flinches, and his flow of language peters pointlessly out. As the saying goes, the dragon’s head of his opening remarks has dwindled down to a snake’s tail of an ending.

However, though Waverhouse may falter, he’s unlikely to shut up. In a matter of seconds he’s off again.

“In that inevitable explosion things like promissory notes, though there be thousands of them, will all be blasted into dust. It follows that, for Coldmoon, such a female simply will not do. I cannot consent to so ill-suited an alliance. It would be as though an elephant, that wisest and most noble of all animals, were to marry the greediest piglet of a greedy farrow.” With a final burst of speed Waverhouse breasts the tape. “That’s so, isn’t it, Sneaze?” My master, silent, resumed his melancholy tapping on the cake-dish.

Looking a bit depressed and obviously at his wit’s end for a suitable answer, Suzuki mumbles something about not being able to entirely agree.

His position is, indeed, delicate. His hands, as it were, are still wet with blood from his verbal assassination, barely a half-hour back, of Waverhouse’s character, and a man as outrageously tactless as my master might, at any moment, come straight out with anything. Suzuki’s soundest tactic is to receive, and if possible smother, the Waverhouse attack, and then, in the general confusion, to wriggle away to safety as quickly as he can. Suzuki’s clever.Very much a man cast in the modern mold, he seeks to avoid head-on collisions and considers it positively medieval to enter into arguments that, of their nature, can have no practical result. In his opinion the purpose of life is not to talk, but to act. If events develop as one wishes, then life, its purpose thus fulfilled, is good. But if events not only develop as one wishes but do so without difficulties, fret, or altercation, then life, its purpose slitheringly fulfilled, is paradisal. Suzuki’s unwavering devotion to this Elysian principle of slithering had brought him great success in the business world he’d entered after graduating from the university. It had brought him a watch of eighteen-carat gold. It had brought him a request from the Goldfields that he should do them a small favor.

It had even enabled him to maneuver Sneaze nine-tenths of the way toward doing what the Goldfields wished. Then Waverhouse descends upon the scene. Out of the ordinary, careless of all conventions, totally eccentric, he manifests himself as an incarnation of capriciousness operating in accordance with a psychological pattern never previously observed in the human creature. No wonder that Suzuki feels a bit bewildered. Though Suzuki’s principle was invented by a variety of clever gentlemen seeking success in Meiji circumstances, its prime practitioner is Suzuki Tōjūrō himself, and it is consequently he who is most signally stumped when the principle proves inapplicable.

“It’s only because you’re out of your depth,”Waverhouse pressed on,

“that you sit there looking supercilious and offer no more useful contribution than the cool comment that you can’t entirely agree. But if you’d been here the other day when that Nose came throwing her weight around, even you, businessman to the backbone though you are, even you would have felt like throwing up. It’s true, Sneaze, isn’t it? Go on, tell him. I thought you handled the situation magnificently.”

“But I’m told,” my master almost smirked, “that my conduct on that occasion created a more favorable impression than did yours.”

The answering laugh was a mixture of pity and scorn. “What incredible self-confidence! I begin to understand how you manage to sail along at school unperturbed by the mockery of your colleagues and your pupils’ shouts of Savage Tea. In matters of willpower I’m a match for anyone, but when it comes to sheer nerve, I’m just not even in your class. I humble myself in the presence of such staggering self-confidence.”

“Why on earth should I be moved by such puerile carryings-on? Their grumbles don’t scare me. Though Sainte-Beuve was perhaps the greatest of all critics, his lectures at the Sorbonne proved so unpopular that, whenever he walked in the streets, he was obliged to carry a dagger up his sleeve to defend himself against attacks from students. Similarly, when Brunetière’s lectures attacked the novels of Zola. . .”

“Come off it, Sneaze. You’re not a professor or a university lecturer.

For a mere teacher of the English Reader to start comparing himself with world-famous professors is like a minnow demanding to be treated as a whale. If you keep on saying things like that, you’re bound to be laughed at.”

“That’s just your opinion. As I see it, Sainte-Beuve and I, considered as scholars, are of roughly the same standard.”

“What fantastic self-esteem! But if I were you, I’d give up any idea of going around with a dagger. You might cut yourself. Of course, if university professors do go armed with dirks, it might be reasonable for a teacher of the English Reader to carry a folding penknife. But even so, any edged tool is dangerous. What you ought to do is to toddle along to the Nakamise arcade down in Asakusa and get yourself a toy pop-gun.

You could carry it slung from your shoulder. You’d make a charming picture. What d’you think, Suzuki?”

Suzuki’s feeling better. Relieved that the conversation has at long last veered away from the subject of the Goldfields, he feels it safe to venture a few, and preferably flattering, sentences.

“As it always was, it’s been great fun to take part again in such a lively but good-natured discussion. Not having seen you two for a full ten years, I feel as though I had just walked back into a spacious sunny landscape out of some dark and narrow alley. As you’ll understand, conversations among business associates tend to be pretty tricky. One has to watch one’s step, constantly minding one’s p’s and q’s, and ever alert for a stab in the back. The never-ending worry and strain is genuinely painful. But I myself enjoy frank and open conversation, and it’s marvelous to be talking again with one’s student-chums in the same old style of uninhibited honesty. I’m delighted that my visit brought me the added and unexpected pleasure of running into Waverhouse. Well,” he concluded, “I must leave you now. I’ve got a man to meet.”

Having delivered himself of these slithery sentences, Suzuki was beginning to lever himself loose from my cushion, when Waverhouse remarked, “I’ll come along, too. They’re waiting for me at the Entertainment Temperance Union over in Nihombashi. Let’s run along together.”

“Fine,” said Suzuki. “Part of the way we’ll be going in the same direction.” So, arm in arm, they left.

 
II

T
O WRITE down every event that takes place during a period of twenty-four hours, and then to read that record would, I think, occupy at least another twenty-four hours. Though I am all in favor of realistically descriptive literature, I must confess that to make a literal record of all that happened in a day and a night would be a
tour de
force
quite beyond the capacities of a cat. Therefore, however much my master’s paradoxical words and eccentric acts may merit being sketched from life at length and in exhaustive detail, I regret that I have neither the talent nor the energy to set them all down for my readers. Regrettable as it is, it simply can’t be helped. Even a cat needs rest.

After Suzuki and Waverhouse had taken their departure, it became as quiet as a night when winter’s icy wind suddenly drops and the snow falls soundlessly. My master, as usual, shuts himself up in his study. In their six-mat sleeping-room, side-by-side in a bumpy row, the children lie asleep. Mrs. Sneaze in the adjoining room, a room that faces south, lies in bed giving suck to Menko, her one-year-old baby daughter. It has been a hazy day of the type we often get in springtime, and dusk has fallen early. The sound of wooden clogs passing in front of the house can be heard quite distinctly in the living room and the sound of a Chinese flute, played in random snatches by someone in the boarding-house on the next street, falls lullingly in broken drifts upon my sleepy ears.