I Am a Cat (53 page)

“Keep them out? How can I keep them out when their ball keeps flying in? They’d come in anyway.”

“Well, if you say you can’t help it, I suppose you can’t. But why get so tense and stiff-necked about it? A man with jagged edges is permanently handicapped: he can never roll smoothly along in this rough world. Anything rounded and easy going can easily go anywhere, but angular things not only find it hard to roll but, when they do roll, get their corners snagged and chipped and blunted, which hurts. You see, old chap, the world’s not made simply and solely for you. You can’t always have things your way. In a nutshell, it doesn’t pay to defy the wealthy. All you’ll achieve are strained nerves, damaged health, and an ill name from everyone. Whatever you do and however much you suffer, those with money won’t care a damn. All they have to do is to sit back and hire others to work for them, including whatever dirty work they happen to want done. It’s obvious that you can’t stand up to people like that. Dogged adherence to high moral principle is all very well in its way, but it seems to me that the price you might have to pay, indeed the price you are apparently paying, is a total disruption of both your private studies and your daily employment. You’ll finish up completely worn out for no gain whatsoever.”

“Excuse me, but another ball’s come in. May I go around to the back and get it?”

“Look,” said Suzuki with a knowing laugh, “here they are again.”

“The impudent brats,” my master shouted from a face stung red with rage.

The purpose of his mission now achieved, Suzuki made polite excuses and, as he left the house, invited my master to call upon him sometime.

No sooner had Suzuki gone but we had another visitor, the family physician, Dr. Amaki. The record of history since the most ancient times shows very few persons describing themselves as frenzied, and it’s obvious that when they can recognize themselves as a bit odd, they’ve passed the peak of their derangement. My master reached and passed that peak during yesterday’s major incident, and, though he started off all flame and fury only to settle down in dust and ashes, the fact remains that he did achieve a settlement. Yesterday evening, as he ruminated over the business of that busy day, he recognized there had been something odd about it. Whether the oddness lay with himself or with the inmates of the Hall—that, naturally, remained in doubt. But there was no doubt at all that something very odd was going on. In the course of his rumina-tions, he even realized that, despite the constant provocation that having a middle school for a neighbor must inevitably generate, it was nevertheless a bit peculiar to have lost his temper, to have been dispossessed of his self-possession, day in day out, for weeks on end. If the oddity lay in himself something must be done about it. But what, he wondered, what? In the end he concluded he had no choice but to seek some drug or medicine which would suppress or tranquilize his irritation at its internal source. Having reasoned thus far, my master decided that he’d call in Dr. Amaki and ask for a physical checkup. We need not concern ourselves with the wisdom or folly of that decision, but my master’s determination to cope with his frenzy once he’d noticed it commands, unquestionably, respect and praise.

Dr. Amaki is his usual smiling self as he serenely asks, “And how are we today ?” Most physicians ask that curious question in the plural, and I wouldn’t trust a doctor who didn’t.

“Doctor, I’m sure my end is near.”

“What? Nonsense. That’s impossible.”

“Tell me frankly, do doctors’ medicines ever do one good?”

Dr. Amaki was naturally taken aback by the form of that question but, being a man of courteous disposition, he answered gently without showing any annoyance: “Medicines usually do some good.”

“Take my stomach trouble for instance. No amount of medicine produces the least improvement.”

“That’s not quite true.”

“No? Do you think my medicine is making me feel better?” He’s off again about his blessed stomach, inviting external opinions on an internal condition about which his nervous system sends him regular on-site reports.

“Well,” says the doctor, “no cure comes in the twinkling of an eye. These things take time. But you’re already better now than you used to be.”

“Really? Do you think so?”

“Are you still easily irritated?”

“Of course I am. I fly off the handle even in my dreams.”

“Perhaps you’d better take more exercise.”

“If I do that, I’ll lose my temper yet more quickly.”

Dr. Amaki must have felt exasperated, for he said, “Let’s take a look at you,” and began examining my master. As soon as the examination was over, my master suddenly asked in a very loud voice, “Doctor, the other day I was reading a book about hypnotism which claimed that all sorts of ailments, including kleptomania and other strange disorders, respond well to hypnotic treatment. Do yon think it’s true?”

“Yes, that treatment has been known to effect cures.”

“Is it still practiced today?”

“Yes.”

“Is it difficult to hypnotize a person?”

“No, quite easy. I often do it.”

“What? You do it?”

“Yes, shall I try it on you? Anyone can be hypnotized, at least in theory. Would you like me to try?”

“Very interesting! Yes, please do try. I’ve always wanted to be hypnotized, but I wouldn’t care to remain in a permanent trance, never to wake up.”

“You needn’t worry about that. Right then, shall we start?”

Knowing my master, I was surprised at the speed with which he had agreed to this somewhat unusual form of treatment. I’ve never seen a hypnotist in action, so, thrilled by this exciting chance to witness a wonder for myself, I settled to watch from a corner of the room. Dr. Amaki began by stroking my master’s upper eyelids in a downward direction.

Though my master kept his eyes shut tight, the doctor continued his downward stroking as though endeavoring to close the lids. After a while, the doctor asks, “As I stroke your eyelids down, like this, you feel the eyes are getting heavy, don’t you?”

“True, they are becoming heavy,” answers my master.

The doctor continues stroking and stroking, and eventually says,

“Heavier and heavier, your eyes feel heavier and heavier, you feel that heaviness, don’t you?”

My master, no doubt feeling just as the doctor suggests, is silent. The stroking continues for a further three or four minutes, and then the doctor murmurs, “Now you can’t open your eyes.”

My wretched master! Blinded by his own physician!

“You mean my eyes won’t open.”

“That’s right. You can’t open them.”

My master, his eyes closed, makes no reply. And I watch this fearful scene in the compassionate conviction that he has now become blind.

After a while the doctor says, “Just try to open them—I bet you can’t.”

“No,” replies my master. No sooner had he spoken than both his eyes pop open, and, with a happy smirk, he comments, “You didn’t do me, did you?”

“No,” says Dr. Amaki, laughing in reply, “it seems I couldn’t.” So the experiment with hypnotic healing proved a flop, and Dr. Amaki left on some other mission of medical mercy.

Soon another visitor arrived. Since my master has very few friends, it’s almost unbelievable that so many of those he has should choose to call today: indeed, I’ve never known such numbers visit in the space of a single day. Still, there it is. The visitors did come, and this particular visitor was a very rare specimen. I hasten to clarify that I shall be writing about him at some length not because of his rarity but because he has a significant part to play in that promised aftermath which I am still in process of describing. I do not know the man’s name, but he looks about forty and sports a smart goatee on his long face. Just as I think of Waverhouse as an aesthete, I see this new arrival as a philosopher. It’s not that he’s laid any kind of claim to philosophic status or blown his own trumpet in the Waverhouse style, but simply that, as he talks to my master, he looks to me as a philosopher should look. I deduce that he must be another of my master’s school mates, for they speak to each other in the familiar manner of very close old friends.

“You mentioned Waverhouse. Now there’s an extraordinary man, as light and flossy as goldfish food floating around on a pond. Don’t you agree? Someone was telling me that only the other day he went out walking with a friend and, as they passed the gates of some peer or other, no one of course whom Waverhouse had ever met, he dragged his companion right into the house on the grounds that it would be pleasant to call on the owner and take a dish of tea. He really is the giddy limit!”

“And what happened?”

“I didn’t bother to find out. Something eccentric, I’ve no doubt. The man was born that way, not a thought in his head; unadulterated goldfish food. And Suzuki? You see him here? Well, well. That one’s clever all right, but not a man of the mind, not the kind I’d have thought you’d care to have around. He’s the type to whom money and a gold watch seem to gravitate. Worldly wise but ultimately worthless. A shallow man, and restless. He’s always talking about the importance of smooth-ness, of doing things smoothly, smoothing one’s way through life. But he understands nothing. Nothing at all. Not even the meaning of smooth-ness. If Waverhouse is goldfish food, Suzuki’s common jelly paste: a thing unpleasantly smooth which shakes and trembles, a thing fit only to be strung on straw, available for sale to any passerby.”

My master seems to be much impressed by this flow of denigrating simile for, which he rarely does, he broke into hearty laughter and enquires, “That’s Waverhouse and Suzuki. Now what about you?”

“Me? Well, maybe I’m a yam—long in shape and buried in mud.”

“At least you seem carefree, always so self-controlled and self-composed. How I envy you.”

“But I’m much the same as anyone else. There’s nothing about me particularly to be envied. Still, I have the luck not to envy anyone.

Which is just about the only good thing about me.”

“Financially, are you now well off?”

“No, the same as ever. Little enough, but just sufficient to eat, so there’s nothing to worry about.”

“Myself, I feel so deeply discontented that I’m always losing my temper. I grouse and grumble and hardly anything else.”

“There’s nothing wrong with grumbling. When you feel like grumbling, grumble away. At least it brings one interim relief. You see, everyone is different. You can’t refashion others to be like you. Consider chopsticks and bread: you’ve got to hold chopsticks as everyone does or you’ll find it hard to eat rice; however, bread can be cut, and is best cut, in accordance with your own particular liking. A suit made by a good tailor fits like a glove from the moment you put it on, but something run up by a shoddy craftsman takes years of tiresome wearing before it adjusts itself to your own particular bone structure. If competent parents produced children all neatly shaped to fit the ways of our present world, all would be happily well. But if you have the misfortune to be born bungled, your only choice is either to suffer as a misfit or to hang on grimly until the world so changes its shape as to suit yours.”

“I see no prospect that I shall ever fit in. It’s a depressing prospect.”

“If one forces one’s way into a suit too small for one’s body, of course one tears the stitchings, by which I mean that persons violently ill suited to the world they seek to inhabit are those who pick quarrels, commit suicide, even incite real riots. But you, to be frank, are merely discontented. You’re not going to do yourself in and you’re not a natural brawler. You could be a lot worse off than you are.”

“On the contrary, I find I’m picking quarrels morning, noon, and night. When I lack a subject on whom to vent my spleen, I live in a constant fume of anger. Even such undirected ire amounts to brawling, doesn’t it?”

“I see, you brawl with yourself. Interesting. But what’s wrong with that? Brawl away to your heart’s content.”

“But I’ve grown bored with brawling.”

“Then just stop it.”

“I understand what you’re driving at, but whatever you may say, one cannot do what one likes with one’s own mind.”

“My point is that one can. But leaving that aside, what do you think is the root cause of your self-wounding discontent?”

In response to that sympathetic invitation, my master poured out before his friend the long sad catalogue of his woes and grievances.

Beginning with an account of his war with the schoolboys, he proceeded to list, in manic detail and a neatly ordered, reverse chronology, every single fretfulness, right back to the days of the terracotta badger, Savage Tea, and his petty provocations by conniving colleagues on the staff of his own school.

The visiting philosopher listened in complete silence, but, allowing a long pause after Mr. Sneaze had finished his jeremiad to add its weight to his response, offered the following sagacities. “You should pay no regard whatsoever to the things said by your staff colleagues, which were anyway all complete rubbish. The schoolkids from the Hall are not to be taken seriously, grubby little vermin, existences not worthy even to be noticed by a man at your level of intellectual attainment. What?

You insist that they disturb you? Tell me then, have your demeaning counter-activities, even your formal complaint, even that so-called settlement of the matter led to any lessening of disturbance? In all such matters I believe that the ways of our ancestors are wiser and much more effective than the ways of Europe, that so-called positivism which has lately attracted so much faddish attention. The main snag with positivism is that it acknowledges no limits. However long you may persist in positive action, the craving for ultimate satisfaction remains unsatisfied, the quest for the ideal eternally unrealized. You see those cypresses over there? Let us suppose you decide that they obstruct your view and you clear them away. Then you’ll find the boarding house behind them has become a new interruption of your view. When you’ve eliminated the boarding house, the next building beyond begins to niggle you. There’s no end to your search for a perfect view, and your ultimate dissatisfaction is the fate implicit in the European hankering for incessant progress toward an imagined ideal. Nobody at all, not even Alexander the Great or Napoleon, has ever felt satisfied with his con-quests. Take a more homespun case. You meet a man, you take a scunner to him, you get into a quarrel, you fail to squash him, you take him to court, you win your case: but if you imagine that that’s an end to the matter, you’re most lamentably mistaken. For the real issue, the problem in your mind, remains unsettled, however hard you wrestle it around, until your dying day. The same truth applies in every context you may care to posit. You happen, perhaps, to live under an oligarchic government which you dislike so much that you replace it with a parlia-mentary democracy, but, finding you’ve only hopped out of a frying pan into a fire, you run the risks of civil commotion merely to find another, no less searing, form of government. Or you find a river troublesome, so you bridge it; you are blocked by a mountain, so you tunnel through; it’s a bore to walk or ride, so you build a railway. On and on it goes, with no solution solving the real problem of a positivist’s dissatisfaction.