I Am a Cat (76 page)

“What a relief!” sighed Waverhouse, heaving a grotesquely simulated sigh.

“As the masters say, ‘One must perish into life.’ Isn’t that so, Coldmoon?” Even Singleman, who winked as he offered his observation, now seems disposed to treat his friend’s spiritual experience in the spirit of light farce. However, his Zen reference was completely lost on Coldmoon.

“Having been thus startled back into my usual self, I looked around me. The whole vast mountain was now dead quiet: nothing, not even the drip of a raindrop, could be heard. What then was that ghastly cry? Too piercing to have been human, too loud for any bird. Could it have been a monkey? But around there there aren’t any monkeys. What on earth could it have been? Once that question had entered my head and I began to search around for its answer, all the demons of misgiving who had hitherto lain quiet in the crannies of my mind erupted into pandemonium. You remember how the city crowds went wild, people running here and there and even all over each other in a lunacy of welcome, when Prince Arthur of Connaught came to Tokyo in February 1906? Well, inside my head it was worse than that. And then things suddenly came to a crisis. I felt my very pores gape open and through their yawn my body’s flightiest visitors—Courage, Pluck, Prudence, and Composure departed from me. Like cheap alcohol blown in a spray on hairy shins to cool them, my visitors evaporated. Under my ribs my heart began to hammer. It leapt and danced like a red frog. My legs trembled like the humming strings of a kite. And my nerve broke. In mindless panic I grabbed my scarlet blanket around my head and, with the violin clutched beneath one arm, I scrambled down from the low flat rock and helter-skelter fled away down the rough mountain path. When, scampering like a rat through the layers of dead leaves, I came at last to my lodgings, I crept in quietly and hid myself in my bed. I had been so exhausted by terror that I fell immediately asleep. D’you know, Beauchamp, that was the most terrifying experience of my whole life.”

“And then?”

“That’s it. There isn’t any more.”

“No playing of the violin?”

“How could I possibly have played? If you had heard that eldritch cry, I bet my boots the last thing you’d have thought about would be playing a violin.”

“I find your story less than satisfactory.”

“Perhaps so, but it was the truth.” Coldmoon, vastly pleased with himself, surveyed his audience. “Well,” he said, “and what did you think of it?”

“Excellent. A point well taken,” laughed Waverhouse. “You really must have gone through great travail to bring your story to that remarkable conclusion. In fact, I’ve been following your account with the closest attention, for it seemed increasingly clear to me that, in the person of yourself, these Eastern climes have perhaps been visited by a male reincarnation of Sandra Belloni.” Waverhouse paused in the obvious hope that someone would give him an opportunity to air his knowledge of Meredith’s heroine by asking for clarification of this obscure reference. But all the members of his audience, having been caught that way before, held their peace; so Waverhouse, regrettably uncued, simply rattled on. “Just as Sandra Belloni’s harp playing and Italian song in a moonlit forest called down the goddess of that silver orb, so Coldmoon’s near performance with a violin upon the ledges of Mount Ko-shin called up some phantom badger from a fen. There is, of course, a difference of degree but the principle’s the same. What I find peculiarly interesting is that such a slight difference in degree should produce so vast a difference in result: in Sandra’s case a manifestation of ethereal beauty, but in Coldmoon’s nothing but crude and earthy farce. That must have been a painful disappointment to you.”

“No disappointment at all,” said Coldmoon who seemed genuinely uninterested, perhaps not in his own weird experience, but certainly in Waverhouse’s question.

“Trying to play a violin on a mountain top! What effete behavior! It serves you right that you got scared silly.” My master’s scathing comment showed his usual lack of sympathy with anything beyond the world of his own wizened imagination.

Singleman piped in:

“How more than pitiful it is to find

That one must live one’s human life confined

Within a world of an inhuman kind.”

None of Singleman’s mangled quotations from the works of deluded medieval metaphysicians ever makes the least sense to Coldmoon. Or to anyone else. Perhaps not even to Singleman. His words were left to float away into the nothingness of a long silence.

After a while, Waverhouse changed the subject by asking, “Incidentally, Coldmoon, are you still haunting the university in order to polish your little, glass balls?”

“No. My visit home rather interrupted things. Indeed, I doubt if I’ll ever resume that line of research. It was always, if you’ll pardon the joke, something of a grind, and lately I’ve been finding it a real bore.”

“But without your polished beads, you won’t get your doctorate,” says my master, looking slightly worried.

Coldmoon seems no more concerned about his doctorate than he was with his failure to become a Japanese version of Sandra Belloni. “Oh that,” he says with a careless laugh. “I’ve no longer any need for a degree.”

“But then the marriage will be canceled and both sides will be upset.”

“Marriage? Whose marriage?”

“Yours.”

“To whom am I supposed to be getting married?”

“To the Goldfield girl.”

“Really?”

“But surely you’ve already plighted your troth?”

“I’ve never plighted anything. I had no part in the spread of that particular rumor.”

“That’s a bit thick,” says my master. “I say, Waverhouse, you, too, remember that incident, don’t you?”

“Incident? You mean that business when the Nose came shoving herself in here? If so, it’s not just you and I who’ve heard about the engagement, but the world and his wife have long been in on the secret. As a matter of fact, I’m constantly being pestered by some quite respectable newspapers who want me to let them know when they may have the honor of printing photographs of Coldmoon and his blushing Opula in their Happy Couples column. What’s more, Beauchamp there finished his epic epithalamium, ‘A Song of Lovebirds,’ at least three months ago and has since been waiting anxiously to learn the right date for its publication. You don’t want your masterpiece to rot in the ground like buried treasure just because Coldmoon’s grown bored with buffing up his little, glass beads, do you, Beauchamp, eh?”

“There’s no question of pushing for early publication. Of course, my very heart and soul have gone into that poem, but I am happily convinced that it will remain suitable for publication at any appropriate time.”

“There, you see: the question of whether or not you take your degree has wide and potentially painful repercussions. So, pull yourself together. Get those beads rubbed spherical. Polish the whole thing off.”

“I like the joke in your phrasing, and I’m truly sorry if I’ve given any of you cause to worry. But I really do not any longer need a doctorate.”

“Why not?”

“Because I have already got my own wife.”

“I say, that’s grand! When did this secret marriage take place? Life is certainly full of surprises. Well, Sneaze, as you’ve just heard, Coldmoon has apparently acquired a wife and children.”

“No children yet. It would be terrible if a child were born after less than a month of marriage.”

“But when and where did you ever get married?” demanded my master as though he were the presiding judge at some official court of inquiry.

“As a matter of fact, during my recent trip home. She was there waiting for me. Those dried bonitos were one of the wedding presents from her relatives.”

“Three miserable dried bonitos! That was rather a stingy gift.”

“No, no. There were scads of them. I only brought you three.”

“So your bride is from your own home district? Does it then follow that she’s on the dark skinned side?”

“Yes, she’s dark complexioned. Exactly right for me.”

“And what are you going to do about the Goldfields?”

“Nothing.”

“But you can’t just leave things, poof like that,” my master bleated.

“What do you think,Waverhouse?”

“I think he can. The girl will marry someone else. After all, marriage is little more than two people bumping against each other in the dark.

If they cannot manage such bumping by themselves, other people contrive their blind collision. It doesn’t much matter who bumps whom. In my opinion, the only person deserving our tears and pity is the unfortunate author of ‘A Song of Lovebirds.’”

“Thank you, but please don’t worry. My epithalamium, as it stands, is perfectly suitable for dedication to Coldmoon on the already achieved occasion of his marriage. I can easily write another when Opula gets wed.”

“Ah, that marvelous, heartless professionalism of the true poet,” sighed Waverhouse, “whipping out a masterpiece at the drop of a hat.

Easy as a wink of an eye. One’s heart is cramped with jealousy.”

“Have you notified the Goldfields?” My master is still touchingly concerned about the feelings of that granite clan.

“No, and why should I? I never proposed to the girl or asked her father for her hand in marriage. I have no reason whatsoever to say a single word to either of them. Moreover, I’m sure they’ve already learned the last least detail from those dozens of detectives they employ.”

My master’s face, as the word “detectives” entered his ear, immediately turned sour. “You’re right, Coldmoon, tell such people nothing,” and he proceeded to offer the following comments on detectives as though they were all weighty arguments against observing the proprieties in handling a broken engagement. “Persons who snatch property from the unwary in the streets are called pickpockets; those who snitch the thoughts of the unwary are called detectives. Those who jimmy open your doors and windows are called thieves; those who use leading questions to lever out one’s private thoughts are called detectives. Those who threateningly jab their swords into one’s floor matting as a way of forcing the surrender of money are called armed burglars; those who by the jabbing menace of their words force one into admissions against one’s will are called detectives. To my way of thinking, it inexorably follows that pickpockets, thieves, armed burglars, and detectives are all spawn of the same subhuman origin, things unfit to be treated even as men.

Their every endeavor should be thwarted and they themselves quite mercilessly put down.”

“Don’t work yourself into such a lather. I’m not frightened by detectives, even though they should appear by the battalion. Let all be warned with whom they will be dealing. Am I not the King of the Glass Ball Polishers, Avalon Coldmoon B.Sc.?”

“Bravo! Well spoken! That’s the stuff to give ’em! Just the spirited words one would expect from a newly married bachelor of science. However, Sneaze,” Waverhouse continued, “if you categorize detectives with such grubs as pickpockets, thieves, and common robbers, where do you place a creature such as Goldfield who gives employment to such vermin?”

“Perhaps a modern version of that long departed villain, Kumasaka Cho-han.”

“Oh yes, I like that. Cho-han, as I recall it, was said to have disappeared when he was sliced in half. But our modern version over the way, squatting on a fortune made by blatant usury, is so intensely alive in his meanness and sharp greediness that, cut in a million pieces, he’d reappear as a million Cho-han clones. It would be a lifelong source of trouble if such a blood-sucking creature ever came to believe he had a bone to pick with you. So be careful, Coldmoon.”

“To hell with that! I shall face him down with the sort of speech you hear from heros of the Ho-sho- style of Noh play. You know what I mean.

‘Pretentious thief though well aware of my fearsome reputation, you yet dare break into my house.’ That should stop him short.” Coldmoon, unwisely careless of the real dangers he might have to cope with from a vengeful Goldfield, strikes a series of dramatic poses.

“Talking of detectives, I wonder why it is that nearly everyone nowadays tends to behave as detectives do.” In strict accordance with his usual style, Singleman begins his observations by reference to the matters under discussion and then veers off into complete irrelevance.

“Perhaps,” says Coldmoon kindly, “it’s because of the high cost of living.”

Beauchamp mounts his hobbyhorse. “I myself believe it’s because we have lost our feeling for art.”

“It’s because the horns of modern civilization are sprouting from the human head and the irritations of that growth, like nettles in one’s underwear, are driving us mad.” It’s a pity that Waverhouse, who is both well-read and intelligent, still should strive to be merely clever.

When it came to my master’s turn, he opened the following lecture with an air of enormous self-importance. “I have, of late, devoted considerable thought to this topic and I have concluded that the current marked trend toward detective-mindedness is entirely caused by the individual permitting himself too strong a realization of the self. By that I do not mean self-realization of the spiritual nature which Singleman pursues in his Zen search for his ‘unborn face,’ that self he was before he contrived to be born. Nor do I mean that other form of Zen self-realization where, by either gradual or sudden enlightenment, the mind perceives its own identity with heaven and earth. . .”