I Am a Cat (37 page)

“The silliest broken heart that ever was. Observe, my dear Coldmoon, how gay and lively he contrives to be despite his broken heart.”Turning toward Coldmoon, my master registers his low opinion of his friend’s disastrous love affair.

“But,” says Coldmoon, “if the girl had not been bald, and if Waverhouse had brought her back with him to Tokyo, he might now be livelier than he is. The fact remains that it is infinitely pitiable that the young lady happened to be bald. But tell me, Waverhouse, how did it come about that a girl so young should have lost her hair?”

“Well, naturally I’ve thought about that too, and I’m certain now that the depilation must be due entirely to over-indulgence in snake-rice. It goes to the head, you know. It drives the blood upward, damaging the capillaries in the follicles of the scalp.”

“I’m so glad nothing so terrible happened to you,” says Mrs. Sneaze with an undertone of sarcasm.

“It is true that I was spared the affliction of going bald, but instead, as you can see, I have become a presbyope.” Taking off his goldrimmed spectacles, he polishes them carefully with his pocket handkerchief.

There was a short silence. To be a presbyope sounded so awful that none dared ask for an explanation. But my master, possibly being made of sterner stuff, possibly because he knows that nearsightedness is more often caused by the passing of the years than by one night’s meal of snake-rice, was not yet done.

“I seem to remember,” he eventually said,“that you mentioned some mystery that would have moved the interest of Lafcadio Hearn. What mystery?”

“Did she buy the wig or simply pick it up, and, if she picked it up, where? That,” said Waverhouse, replacing his spectacles on his nose, “is the mystery. To this day I cannot work it out.”

“It’s just like listening to a comic storyteller,” says Mrs. Sneaze.

As Waverhouse’s improbable tale had come to its conclusion, I thought he might shut-up. But no. He appears by nature incapable of keeping quiet unless actually gagged. For he’s at it again already.

“My disappointment in love was, of course, a bitter experience: but had I married that heavenly girl in ignorance of kettledom, the matter would have remained a lifelong cause of friction. One has to be careful.

In matters like marriage, one tends only to discover at the very last moment hidden defects in unexpected places. I therefore advise you, Coldmoon, not to waste your youth in futile yearnings or in pointless despair but to keep on grinding away at your balls of glass with an easy mind and heart.”

“I’d be happy,” answers Coldmoon, “to do nothing more. However, the Goldfield ladies, to my considerable botheration, do keep on at me.”

He grimaces in exaggerated annoyance.

“True. You are, in your case, somewhat put upon. But there are many comic cases of people thrusting themselves forward to invite disquiet.

Take, for example, the case of Knarle-Damson, that well-known piddler upon seats of learning. His was extremely odd.”

“What did he do?” asks my master, entering into the swing of the conversation.

“Well, it was like this. Once upon a long, long time ago, he stayed at the East-West Inn in Shizuoka. Just for one night, mind you, but that same evening he offered marriage to one of the servants working there.

I myself am pretty easy-going, but I would not find it easy to go as far as that. The fact was, that in those days one of the maids at that Inn, they called her Summer, was a raving beauty, and it just so happened that she looked after Knarle-Damson’s room, so he could not help but meet her.”

“The meeting was no doubt fated, just like yours in that something-or-other pass,” observes my master.

“Yes, there is some resemblance between the cases. Indeed, there are obvious similarities between Knarle-Damson and myself. Anyway, he proposed to this Summer girl but, before she gave her answer, he felt a need for watermelon.”

“Huh?” My master looks puzzled. And not only he, for both his wife and Coldmoon cock their heads sideways as they try to see the connection. Waverhouse disregards them all and proceeds blithely with his story.

“He summoned the girl and asked her if one could get a watermelon in Shizuoka. She replied that, though the town was not as up-to-date as Tokyo, even in Shizuoka watermelons could be had, and almost immediately she brought him a tray heaped high with slices of the fruit. So, while waiting for her answer, Knarle-Damson scoffed the lot. But before she gave her answer, Knarle-Damson got the gripes. He groaned away like mad but, since that didn’t help, he summoned the girl again and this time asked if there was a doctor available. The girl replied that, though the town was not as up-to-date as Tokyo, still, even in Shizuoka, doctors were available, and in a matter of minutes she ushered one in to his room. The doctor, incidentally, had a very odd name, something like Heaven-and-Earth, anyway something obviously cribbed, for effect, from the Chinese classics. Well, next morning when Knarle-Damson woke up, he was to find his gut-ache gone, and, some fifteen minutes before he was due to leave, he again summoned the Summer girl and asked for her answer to his proposal of marriage. The girl replied with laughter. She then said that down in Shizuoka it is possible to find doctors and watermelons at very short notice but that, even in Shizuoka, few find brides in a single night. She turned, went out of the room and that was the last he saw of her. And ever since that day, Knarle-Damson has remained, like me, a man scarred by a disappointment in love.

Almost a recluse, he’ll only go to a library when pressed there by his bladder. Which all goes to show the wickedness and cruelty of women.”

My master, most unusually, comes out this time in strong support of Waverhouse’s theme. “How right you are,” he says, “how very right. Just the other day I was reading one of de Musset’s plays in which some character quoted Ovid to the effect that, lighter than a feather is dust; than dust, wind; than wind, woman; but than woman, nothing. A very penetrating observation, isn’t it? Women are indeed the dreaded end.” My master adopts an exceedingly cavalier attitude, but his wife, of course, is not going to let these flourishes pass unchallenged.

“You complain about women being light, but I can’t see any particular merit in the fact that men are heavy.”

“What do you mean by heavy?”

“Heavy is just heavy. Like you.”

“Why d’you say I’m heavy?”

“Because you are heavy.Very heavy.”

They’re off on one of their crazy arguments again. For a time Waverhouse just sits there, listening with amusement to their increasingly bitter bickering, but eventually he opens his mouth.

“The way you two go on at each other, hammering away until you’re red in the face, is perhaps the clearest possible demonstration that you truly are husband and wife. I’m inclined to think that marriage in the old days was a less meaningful thing than it is today.” None of his listeners could tell whether he was teasing or complimenting his host and hostess but, since their bickering was halted, he could with profit have just stopped there. But that’s not the way of a Waverhouse, who always has more to say.

“I hear that in the old days no woman would have dreamt of answering back to her husband. From the man’s point of view it must have been like marriage to a deaf-mute. I wouldn’t have liked that. Not one little bit. I certainly prefer women who, like you, Mrs. Sneaze, have the spirit to retort,‘Because you are heavy,’ or something else in the same vein.

If one is to be married, it would be insupportably boring never to have the liveliness of an occasional spat. My mother, for instance, spent her whole life saying,‘Yes’ and ‘You’re right’ to my frequently foolish father.

She lived with him for twenty or so assenting years, and in all that stretch she never set foot outside the house except to go to a temple.

Really, it’s too pitiful. There were, of course, advantages. Thus my mother has the enormous satisfaction of knowing that she knows by heart the full posthumous names of all my family’s ancestors. This hideous sort of relationship did not exist simply between man and wife but extended to cover the whole range of relations between the sexes. When I was a lad it was quite out of the question for a young man and a young woman even to play music together. There was no such thing as a lovers’ meeting. They couldn’t even meet in the world of the spirit, like Coldmoon here, by a long range swap of souls.”

“It must have been awful,” says Coldmoon with a sort of shrinking bow.

“Indeed it was. One weeps for one’s ancestors. Still, women in those days were not necessarily any better behaved than the women of today.

You know, Mrs. Sneaze, people talk down their noses about the depraved conduct of modern, girl students, but the truth is that things were very much worse in those so-called good old days.”

“Really?” Mrs. Sneaze is serious.

“Of course. I’m not just making it up. I can prove what I say. You, Sneaze, will probably remember that when we were maybe five or six there were men going about in the streets with two panniers hanging down from each end of their shoulder-poles, and in the panniers, like so many pumpkins, they had little girls for sale. You remember?”

“I don’t remember anything of the sort.”

“I don’t know how things were in your part of the country, but that’s most certainly the way it was in Shizuoka.”

“Surely not,” murmurs Mrs. Sneaze.

“Do you mean that for a fact?” asks Coldmoon in a tone of voice that shows he can’t quite credit it.

“For an absolute, rock hard fact. I can even remember how once my father haggled over the price of one. I must then have been about six. As my father and I were coming out of a side street into the main thoroughfare, we saw a man approaching us who was bawling out,‘Girls for sale! Girls for sale! Anyone want a baby girl?’When we reached the corner of the second block in the street, we came face-to-face with this hawker, just in front of the draper’s. Isegen’s it was. Isegen is quite the biggest draper in Shizuoka with a sixty-foot frontage and five warehouses. Have a look at it the next time you’re down there. It’s just the same today as it was then. Quite unaltered. A fine building. The chief clerk’s name is Jimbei, and he sits at his counter with the invariable expression of a man who’s lost his mother only three days back. Sitting right beside Jimbei you’ll find a young man of twenty-four, maybe twenty-five, whose name is Hatsu. Hatsu’s very pale. He looks like one of those novices who, in demonstration of their devotion to the thirty-third priest-prince of the Shingon Sect, take nothing but buckwheat-water for twenty-one days at a stretch. And next to Hatsu there’s Chodon.

Chodon’s the one who’s hunched dejectedly above his abacus as though but yesterday he lost his home in a fire. And next to Chodon. . .”

“Come off it,Waverhouse,” snaps my master. “Is this a chanting of the genealogy of your draper or is it a tale about the maiden-mongers of Shizuoka?”

“Ah yes. I was telling you the story of the maiden-mongers. As a matter of fact, there’s an extremely strange story I was going to tell you about that draper’s, but I’ll cut it out and concentrate on the sellers of little girls.”

“Why not cut that too?” suggests my master.

“Oh no! I wouldn’t feel right if I abandoned that story. For it provides exceedingly valuable data by which to compare the characters of modern women with those of their predecessors in the early Meiji Era. Now, as I was saying, when my father and I arrived in front of Isegen, the maiden-monger addressed my father in these terms: ‘’ow about one of these ’ere little leftovers? Take a toddler, sir, and I’ll make ’er special cheap.’ He’s put his shoulder-pole down on the ground and is wiping sweat from his brow. In each of the two dumped panniers there’s a little girl about two-years-old. My father says,‘If they’re really cheap, I might, but is this all you’ve got?’ The man replies respectfully, ‘Yes, sir, I’m afraid so. Today I’ve sold I ’em all, ’cept for these two little ’uns. Take your choice.’ He holds the little girls up in his hands like, as I told you, pumpkins, and he pushes them under my father’s nose. My father taps on their heads as one might rap a melon and says,‘Yes, they sound quite good.’ The negotiations then begin in earnest and, after a great deal of chaffering, my father finally says,‘That’s all very well, but can you guarantee their quality?’ ‘Yes,’ says the man. ‘That ’un in the leading basket, I can take me oath is sound, ’cos I’ve ’ad ’er all day long right in front of me own two peepers, but t’other in the back-side basket could be a wee mite cracked. I’ve not got eyes in the back of me ’ead, so I won’t go making no promises. Tell you what, just for you, I’ll knock a bit more off for that ’un.’ To this day I can clearly remember every word of their dickering and, though only a nipper myself, I did then learn how insidiously cracked a little girl can be. However, in this thirty-eighth year of the Emperor’s reign there’s none so foolish now as to go trotting through the streets with little girls for sale. So one no longer hears people saying how those at the back, those that one can’t keep one’s own sharp watchful eye on, are liable to be damaged. It is consequently my opinion that, thanks to the beneficent influx of Western civilization, the conduct of women has in fact improved. What do you think, Coldmoon?”

Coldmoon hesitated, cleared his throat and then gave his opinion in a low and measured tone. “Women today, on their way to and from schools, at concerts, at charity parties and at garden parties, are, in effect, already selling themselves. Their light behavior is tantamount to such statements as, ‘Hey, how about buying me?’ or ‘Oh, so you’re not much interested!’There is accordingly no contemporary need for hawkers or other middlemen selling on commission, and the street cries of our modern cities are of course the poorer by the disappearance of maiden-mongers shouting their wares. Such changes are bound to follow from the introduction and dissemination of modern ideas of the individual’s independence. The older generation get unnecessarily worked up and moan and groan as though the world were coming to its end, but that’s the trend of modern civilization and I, for one, welcome and encourage these changes. For instance, there’s no need nowadays for anyone to go tapping poor tots on the skull to see if they’re good enough to buy. In any case, no one ever gets anywhere in this hard world by being unduly choosey. That way, one can easily end up husbandless and, even after fifty or sixty years of assiduous search, still not be a bride.”