I Am a Cat (39 page)

“It’s a well-turned argument,” says Waverhouse, “but I bet it would leave Kyoshi, if he ever heard it, distinctly taken aback. I accept that your exposition of the play is positivist but, if the play were to be staged, the audience reaction would undoubtedly be negative. Don’t you agree, Beauchamp?”

“Yes, I confess I think it’s a little too negative.” Beauchamp confesses with due critical gravity.

My master seems to think things have gone far enough and, to ease the pressure upon his favorite disciple, he seeks to lead the conversation away from Coldmoon’s ill-received venture into the literary field. “But tell me, Beauchamp,” he says, “have you perhaps written any new masterpieces recently?”

“Nothing really worth showing you, but I am, in fact, thinking of publishing a collection of them. Luckily, I chance to have the manuscript with me, and I’d welcome your opinion of these trifles I’ve composed.” He thereupon produced from his breast a package wrapped in a cloth of purple crepe. Loosening the material, he carefully extracted a notebook some fifty or sixty pages thick which he proceeded to deposit, reverently, before my master. My master assumes his most magisterial mien and then, with a grave “Allow me,” opens the book. There, on the first page, stands an inscription:

Dedicated

To the frail Opula

My master stared at the page, wordless and with an enigmatic expression on his face, for such a long time that Waverhouse peered across from beside him.

“What have we here? New-style poetry? Aha! Already dedicated!

How splendid of you, Beauchamp,” he says with all the enthusiasm of a hound on the scent, “to come out bang with so bold a dedication. To, if my eyes do not deceive me, a certain Opula?”

My master, now looking more puzzled than enigmatic, turns to the poet. “My dear Beauchamp,” he says, “this Opula, is she a real person?”

“Oh yes indeed. She’s one of the young ladies whom I invited to our last Reading Party, the one where Waverhouse so generously applauded me. She lives, in fact, in this neighborhood. Actually, I called at her home on my way here but learnt, to my sorrow, that she’s been away since last month. I gather that the whole family is spending the summer at Oiso.”

Beauchamp looks peculiarly solemn as, with corroborative detail, he affirms the reality of his dedication.

“Come now, Sneaze, don’t go pulling a long face like that. This is the twentieth century and you’d best get used to it. Let’s get down to considering the masterpiece. First of all, Beauchamp, this dedication seems a bit of a bosh shot. What do you mean by ‘frail’?”

“Well, I meant ‘frail’ in the romantic sense, to convey the idea of a person infinitely delicate, infinitely refined and ethereal.”

“Did you now. Well, the word can, of course, be so used but it does have other, coarser connotations. Especially if it were read as an adjectival noun, you could be thought to be calling her some sort of franion.

So if I were you, I’d rephrase it.”

“Could you suggest how? I’d like it to be unmisinterpretably poetic.”

“Well, I think I’d say something like ‘Dedicated to all that’s frail beneath the nares of Opula.’ It wouldn’t involve much change in wording, but yet it makes an enormous difference in the feeling.”

“I see,” says Beauchamp. While it is quite clear that he doesn’t understand the balderdash proposed by Waverhouse, he is trying hard to look as though he had grasped, considered, and accepted it.

My master, who has been sitting silently, turns the first page and begins to read aloud from the opening section.

“In the fragrance of that incense which I burn.

When I am weary, seemingly

Your soul trails in the smoky twist and turn

Of love requited. Woe, ah woe is me,

Who in a world as bitter as is this

Must in a mist of useless yearning yearn

For the sweet fire of your impassioned kiss.

“This, I’m afraid,” he says with a sigh, “is a bit beyond me,” and he passes the notebook along to Waverhouse.

“The effect is strained, the imagery too heightened,” says Waverhouse passing it on to Coldmoon.

“I . . . s . . . e . . . e,” says Coldmoon, and returns it to the author.

“It’s only natural that you should fail to understand it.” Beauchamp leaps to his own defense. “In the last ten years the world of poetry has advanced and altered out of all recognition. Modern poetry is not easy.

You can’t understand it if you do no more than glance through it in bed or while you’re waiting at a railway station. More often than not, modern poets are unable to answer even the simplest questions about their own work. Such poets write by direct inspiration, and are not to be held responsible for more than the writing. Annotation, critical commentary, and exegesis, all these may be left to the scholars. We poets are not to be bothered with such trivia. Only the other day some fellow with a name like Sōseki published a short story entitled ‘A Single Night.’ But it’s so vague that no one could make head or tail of it. I eventually got hold of the man and questioned him very seriously about the real meaning of his story. He not only refused to give any explanation, but even implied that, if the story happened in fact to have any meaning at all, he couldn’t care less. His attitude was, I think, typical of a modern poet.”

“He may be a poet, but he sounds, doesn’t he, downright odd,” observes my master.

“He’s a fool.”Waverhouse demolishes this Sōseki in one curt breath.

Beauchamp, however, has by no means finished defending the merits of his own daft poem. “Nobody in our poetry group is in any way associated with this Sōseki fellow, and it would be unreasonable if you gentlemen were to condemn my poems by reason of some such imagined association. I took great pains with the construction of this work, and I would like in particular to draw your attention to my telling contrast of this bitter world with the sweetness of a kiss.”

“The pains you must have taken,” says my master somewhat ambiguously, “have not gone unremarked.”

“Indeed,” says Waverhouse, “the skill with which you have made ‘bitter’ and ‘sweet’ reflect each other is as interesting as if you had spiced each syllable of a
haiku
with seventeen different peppery tastes. The saying speaks of only seven such peppery tangs but, so tasteful, Beauchamp, is the concoction you’ve cooked up, that no saying is sufficient to say how inimitable it is, and how totally lost I am in admiration of your art.”

Rather unkindly, Waverhouse diverts himself at the expense of an honest man. Possibly for that reason, my master suddenly got to his feet and went off into his study. Possibly not, for he quickly re-emerged with a piece of paper in his hand.

“Now that we’ve considered Coldmoon’s play and Beauchamp’s poem, perhaps you will grant me the boon of your expert comments on this little thing here that I’ve written.” My master looks as if he means what he says to be taken seriously. If so, he is to be immediately disappointed.

“If it’s that epitaph thing for Mr. the-late and-sainted Natural Man, I’ve heard it twice already. If not thrice,” says Waverhouse dismissingly.

“For heaven’s sake,Waverhouse, why don’t you just pipe down. Now, Beauchamp, I’d like you to understand that this is not an example of my best and serious work. I wrote it just for fun, so I’m not especially proud of it. But let’s just see if you like it.”

“I’d be delighted to hear it.”

“You too, Coldmoon. Since you’re here, you might as well listen.”

“Of course, but it’s not long, is it?”

“Very short. I doubt,” says my master quite untruthfully, “whether it contains as many as three score words and ten,” whereupon, giving no opportunity for further interruptions, he launches out upon a recital of his homespun master-work.

“‘The Spirit of Japan,’ cries Japanese man;

‘Long may it live,’ cries he

But his cry breaks off in that kind of cough

Which comes from the soul’s T.B.”

“What a magnificient opening,” burbles Coldmoon with real enthusiasm. “The theme rises before one, immediate, undodgeable, and imposing, like a mountain!”

“‘The Spirit of Japan,’ scream the papers,

Pickpockets scream it too:

In one great jump the Japanese Spirit

Crosses the ocean blue

And is lectured upon in England,

While a play on this staggering theme

Is a huge success on the German stage.

A huge success? A scream!”

“Splendid,” says Waverhouse, letting his head fall backwards in token of his approbation. “It’s even better than that epiphanic epitaph.”

“Admiral Tōgō has the Japanese Spirit,

So has the man in the street:

Fish shop managers, swindlers, murderers,

None would be complete,

None would be the men they are,

None would be a man

If he wasn’t wrapped up like a tuppenny cup

In the Spirit of Japan”

“Please,” breathes Coldmoon, “please do mention that Coldmoon has it too.”

“But if you ask what this Spirit is

They give that cough and say

‘The Spirit of Japan is the Japanese Spirit,’

Then they walk away

And when they’ve walked ten yards or so

They clear their throats of phlegm,

And that clearing sound is the Japanese Spirit Manifest in them.”

“Oh I like that,” says Waverhouse, “that’s a very well-turned phrase. Sneaze, you’ve got talent, real literary talent. And the next stanza?”

“Is the Spirit of Japan triangular?

Is it, do you think, a square?

Why no indeed! As the words themselves

Explicitly declare,

It’s an airy, fairy, spiritual thing

And things that close to God

Can’t be defined in a formula

Or measured with a measuring-rod.”

“It’s certainly an interesting composition and most unusual in that, defying tradition, it has a strong didactic element. But don’t you think it contains too many Spirits of Japan. One can have,” says Beauchamp mildly, “too much of the best of things.”

“A good point. I agree.”Waverhouse chips in yet again with two-pen-nyworth of tar.

“There’s not one man in the whole of Japan

Who has not used the phrase,

But I have not met one user yet

Who knows what it conveys.

The Spirit of Japan, the Japanese Spirit,

Could it conceivably be

Nothing but another of those long-nosed goblins Only the mad can see?”

My master comes to the end of his poem and, believing it pregnant with eminently debatable material, sits back in expectation of an ava-lanche of comment. However, though the piece is undoubtedly that masterpiece for which the anthologists have been waiting, its endless Western form and its lack of clear meaning have resulted in the present audience not realizing that the recitation is over. They, accordingly, just sit there. For a long time. Eventually, no more verses being vouchsafed them, Coldmoon ventures “Is that all?”

My master answers with a noncommittal, I thought falsely carefree, kind of throaty grunt.

Very much contrary to my own expectations, Waverhouse failed to rise to the occasion with one of his usual flights of fantastication.

Instead, after a brief interval, he turned to my master and said, “How about collecting some of your shorter pieces into a book? Then you, too, could dedicate it to someone.”

“How about to you?” my master flippantly suggests.

“Not on your life,” says Waverhouse very firmly. He takes out the scissors which he had earlier analyzed for the benefit of Mrs. Sneaze and begins clipping away at his fingernails.

Coldmoon turns to Beauchamp and, somewhat cautiously, enquires,

“Are you closely acquainted with Miss Opula Goldfield?”

“After I invited her to our Reading Party last spring, we became friends and we now see quite a lot of each other. Whenever I’m with her I feel, as it were, inspired, and even after we’ve parted, I still feel, at least for quite a time, such a flame alight within me that poems, both in the traditional forms and in the modern style, come singing up like steam from a kettle. I believe that this little collection contains so high a proportion of love poems precisely because I am so deeply stirred by women and, in particular, by her. The only way I know by which to express my sincere gratitude is by dedicating this book to the source of its inspiration. I stand at the end of a long tradition inasmuch as, since time immemorial, no poet wrote fine poetry save under the inspiration of some deeply cherished woman.”