I Am a Cat (23 page)

Just imagine that. He’s a man of thirty. No sane grown-up could act in such a way. Perhaps,” she ended hopefully, “despair has driven him dotty.”

“But what can have driven him to such an act of violence?”Their guest seems mystified that Sneaze could act so firmly.

“Nothing much really. It seems that our houseboy happened to be passing Sneaze’s place, made some innocent remark, and, before you could say Jack Robinson, Sneaze came rushing out in his bare feet and began lashing around with his stick. Whatever the houseboy may have said, he is, after all, no more than a boy. But Sneaze is a bearded man and, what’s more, supposed to be a teacher.”

“Some teacher,” says the guest.

“Some teacher,” echoed Goldfield.

It would seem that this precious trio has reached complete agreement that, if one happens to be a teacher, one should, like some wooden statue, grin and bear whatever insults anyone cares to offer.

“And then,” said Madam Conk, “there’s that fibbing crank called Waverhouse. I’ve never heard a man tell such a stream of whoppers. All quite pointless, but all f lat lies. Really, I’ve never clapped eyes on such a loony in my life.”

“Waverhouse? Yes, he seems to be bragging on as usual. Was he also there when you called on Sneaze? He, too, can be a tricky customer. He was another of our group in digs. I remember I was always having rows with him on account of his incessant, ill-judged mockery and his warped sense of humor.”

“A man like that would rile a saint. We all, of course, tell lies, sometimes out of loyalty, sometimes by demand of the occasion, and in such circumstances anyone may fairly bend the truth. But that man Waverhouse tells his lies for no good reason at all. What can one do with a man like that? I just can’t see how he brings himself to rattle off such reams of barefaced balderdash. What does he expect to gain by it?”

“You’ve hit the nail on the head. There’s nothing one can do when a man tells lies for a hobby.”

“I made a special visit to that miserable house to ask no more than the normal questions about Avalon that any mother would, but all my efforts came to nothing; they vexed me and they put me down. But all the same, I felt obliged to do the decent thing, so afterward I sent our rickshawman around with a dozen bottles of beer. Can you imagine what happened? That saucy usher Sneaze had the cheek to order our man to take the bottles away because, so he said, he saw no reason why he should accept them. Our fellow pressed him to take the bottles as a token of our appreciation. So then Sneaze said that he liked jam but reckoned beer too bitter. Then he just shut the door and went off back to his room. Now can you beat that? How damned rude can one get?”

“That’s terrible.” The guest seems, this time genuinely, to think it’s really terrible.

After a brief pause I hear the voice of old man Goldfield. “And that’s, in fact, precisely why we’ve asked you here today. It’s something, of course, to make fun of that fool Sneaze behind his back, but that sort of thing doesn’t entirely suit our present purpose. . .” Splash, spatter; spatter, spatter, splash. He’s patting his pate as though he’s just been eating sliced, raw tuna fish. Of course, being tucked away underneath the veranda, I cannot actually see him beating that wet tattoo on the skin of his hairless head, but I’ve seen so much of him lately that, just as a priestess in a temple gets to recognize the sound of each particular wooden gong, so I can tell, from the quality of the sound, even though I’m under the floor, when old man Goldfield takes to drumming on his skull.

“And it occurred to me to ask for your assistance in this matter. . .”

“If I can be of any service, please don’t hesitate to ask me. After all, it’s entirely due to your kind influence that I have had the great good fortune to be transferred to the Tokyo office.” Their guest is so obviously anxious to oblige that he must be another of those many persons under obligation to return some form of help to Goldfield. Well, well, so the plot thickens. I wandered out today simply because the weather was so wonderful, and I certainly had not expected to stumble upon such exciting news of planned skulduggery. It is as though one had gone to the family temple dutifully intending to feed the Hungry Dead, only to find oneself invited to a right old lash-up of rice-cake dumplings and bean-paste jam in the private room of a priest. Wondering what kind of assistance will be sought from this client-guest, I prick my ears to listen.

“Don’t ask me to explain it, but that nitwitted teacher keeps planting crazy notions in the head of young Coldmoon: like, for instance, hinting that he shouldn’t marry any daughter of mine.” He turned to his wife.

“That’s what he hinted, didn’t he?”

“Hinting’s not the word. He said flat out ‘No one in his senses would ever marry a daughter of that creature. Coldmoon,’ he said,‘you simply mustn’t marry her.’”

“Well, blow me down. Did he really have, the brazen cheek to speak of me as a creature? Did he really pitch it as strong as that?”

“Not half he didn’t. The wife of the rickshaw-man came around double-quick just to be sure I knew.”

“Well, there you are, Suzuki. That man Sneaze is getting to be a nuisance, wouldn’t you agree?”

“How extremely irritating. Marriage negotiations are not matters in which to meddle lightly. Surely even a dunderhead like Sneaze ought to have the common sense to know that. Really, the whole thing’s beyond my comprehension.”

“In your undergraduate days you lived in the same boarding-house as Sneaze, and, though things may have changed by now, I understand that you two then used to be pretty pally. Now, what I want you to do is to go and see Sneaze and try to talk some reason into him. He may be feeling offended, but if he is, it’s really all his own fool fault. If he plays ball, I’d be willing to give him generous help with his personal affairs, and we would, of course, lay off annoying him. But if he keeps on gumming things up the way he’s so far done, it will only be natural if I find ways of my own to settle his meddlesome hash. In short, it just won’t pay him to go on acting obstinate.”

“How very right you are. Continued resistance on his part would be idiotic. It could bring him no possible profit and could well cause him loss. I’ll do my best to make him understand.”

“One more thing. Since there are many other suitors for our daughter, I can’t make any firm promise of giving her to Coldmoon, but you could usefully go so far as to hint that, if he studies hard and gets his degree in the near future, he stands a chance of winning her.”

“That should encourage him to buckle down to study. All right, I’ll do as you wish.”

“One last thing. It may sound odd, but what especially sticks in my gullet is the way that Coldmoon, who’s supposed to be so smart, laps up everything that Sneaze lets drop, and even goes around addressing that crack-brained ninny as though he were some kind of sage professor.

Of course, since Coldmoon’s not the only man we are considering for Opula, such unbecoming conduct is not of vast importance.

Nevertheless. . .”

“You see,” squawked Madam Conk, butting in on her husband’s careful sentence, “it’s just that we’re sorry for Coldmoon.”

“I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting the gentleman, but, since to marry into your distinguished family would be to ensure a lifetime’s happiness, I’m quite convinced that he himself could not possibly wish other than the marriage.”

“You’re absolutely right,” said Madam Conk. “Coldmoon’s keen to marry her. It’s only that numbskull Sneaze and his crackpot crony Waverhouse who keep throwing spanners in the works.”

“Most reprehensible. Not the style of behavior one expects from any reasonable, well-educated person. I’ll go and talk with Sneaze.”

“Please do, we’d be most grateful. Remember, too, that Sneaze knows better than anyone else what Coldmoon’s really like. As you know, during her recent call my wife failed to dig out anything much worth knowing. If in addition to ascertaining details of his scholastic talent and all that stuff, you could also find out more about Coldmoon’s character and conduct, I’d be particularly obliged.”

“Certainly. Since it’s Saturday today, Sneaze must be home by now.

Where does he live, I wonder,” says Suzuki.

“You turn right from our place, then turn left at the end of the road.

About one block along, you’ll see a house with a tumbled down black fence. That,” said Madam Conk, “is it.”

“So it’s right here in this neighborhood! Then it should be easy. I’ll go and see him on my way home. It will be simple to identify the house by the name plate.”

“You may, or you may not, find his name plate on display. I understand he uses one or two grains of cooked rice to stick his visiting card on his wooden gate. When it rains, of course, the cardboard comes unstuck. Then on some convenient sunny day he’ll paste another card in place. So you can’t be sure that his name plate will be up. It’s hard to see why he keeps to such a trouble some routine when the obvious thing to do is to hang up a wooden name board. But that,” sighed Madam Conk, “is just another example of his general cussedness.”

“Astonishing,” remarked Suzuki, “but I’ll find the place in any case by asking for the house with the black fence in a state of disrepair.”

“Oh yes, you’ll find it easily enough. There’s not another house in the whole neighborhood quite so filthy-looking. Wait a minute! I’ve just remembered something else. Look for a house with weeds growing out of the roof. It’s impossible to miss.”

“In fact, a quite distinguished residence,” said Suzuki and, laughing, took his leave.

It would not suit my book to have Suzuki beat me home. I’ve already overheard as much as I need to know; so, still concealed beneath the veranda, I retrace my steps to the lavatory where, turning west, I briefly break cover to get back behind the hillock and, under its concealment, regain the safety of the street. A brisk cattrot soon brings me to the house with the weed-grown roof where, with the utmost nonchalance, I hopped up onto our own veranda.

My master had spread a white woolen blanket on the wooden boards and was lying there, face down, with the sunshine of this warm spring day soaking into his back. Sunshine, unlike other things, is distributed fairly. It falls impartially upon the rich and the poor. It makes a squalid hut, whose only distinctions are the tufts of shepherd’s purse sprouting from its roof, no less gaily warm than, for all its solid comfort, the Goldfields’ mansion. I am, however, obliged to confess that that blanket jars with the day’s spring feeling. No doubt its manufacturer meant that it should be white. No doubt, too, it was sold as white by some haberdasher specializing in goods imported from abroad. No less certainly, my master must have asked for a white blanket at the time he bought it. But all that happened twelve or thirteen years ago, and since that far-off Age of White, the blanket has declined into a Dark Age where its present color is a somber gray. No doubt the passage of time will eventually turn it black, but I’d be surprised if the thing survived that long. It is already so badly worn that one can easily count the individual threads of its warp and woof. Its wooliness is gone and it would be an exaggeration, even a presumption, to describe this scrawny half-eroded object as a blanket. A “blan,” possibly; even a “ket,” but a full-blown “blanket,” no. However, my master holds, or at least appears to hold, that anything which one has kept for a year, two years, five years, and eventually for a decade, must then be kept for the rest of one’s natural life. One would think he were a gypsy. Anyway, what’s he doing, sprawled belly-down on that remnant of the past? He lies with his chin stuck out, its jut supported on a crotch of hands, with a lighted cigarette projecting from his right-hand fingers.

And that is all he’s doing. Of course inside his skull, deep below the dandruff, universal truths may be spinning around in a shower of fiery sparks like so many Catherine Wheels. It’s possible but, judging from his external appearance, not likely even in one’s wildest imaginings.

The cigarette’s lit tip is steadily burning down and an inch of ash, like some gray caddis-case, plopped down onto the blanket. My master, ignoring that declension, stares intently at the rising smoke. Stirred by the light spring breeze, the smoke floats up in loops and vortices, finally to gather in a kind of clinging haze around the ends of his wife’s just-washed black hair. Gentle reader, please accept my apologies. I had completely forgotten to mention that lady’s presence.

Mrs. Sneaze is sitting so that her bottom presents itself before her husband’s face. You think that impolite? Speaking for myself I would not call it so. Both courtesy and discourtesy depend on one’s point of view.

My master is lying perfectly at ease with his cupped face in close proximity to his wife’s bottom: he is neither disturbed by its proximity nor concerned at his own conduct. His wife is equally composed to position her majestic bum bang in her husband’s face. There is neither the slightest hint nor intention of discourtesy. They are simply a much-married couple who, in less than a year of wedlock, sensibly disengaged themselves from the cramps of etiquette. Mrs. Sneaze seems to have taken advantage of the exceptionally fine weather to give her pitch-black hair a really thorough wash with a concoction made from raw eggs and some special kind of seaweed. Somewhat ostentatiously, she has let her long straight hair hang loose around her shoulders and all the way down her back, and sits, busy and silent, sewing a child’s sleeveless jacket. In point of fact, I believe it is purely because she wants to dry her hair that she’s brought both her sewing-box and a flattish cushion made from some all-woolen muslin out here. It is similarly to present her hair at the best angle to the sun that, deferentially, she presents her bottom to her spouse. That’s my belief, but it may, of course, be that my master moved to intrude his face where her bum already was.