I Am a Cat (60 page)

Just at that moment we heard a sound of the entrance door being roughly opened and the sound of heavy boots crunching on the step stone.

Then a loud voice shouted, “Hello! Excuse me. Is there anyone at home?”

Unlike my sluggish master,Waverhouse is a buoyant person. Without waiting for O-san to answer the caller, he calls out, “Who is it ?” Up on his feet in a flash, he sweeps through the neighboring anteroom in a couple of strides and disappears into the entrance hall. The way he comes barging right into someone else’s house without being announced or invited is, of course, annoying, but, once inside, he generally makes himself useful by performing such houseboy functions as answering the door.

Still, though Waverhouse does in truth make himself useful, the fact remains that in this house he’s a guest; it is not proper that, when a guest flits out to the entrance hall, the master of the house should just stay sitting, disturbingly undisturbed, on the drawing room floor. Any normal person would at least get up and follow a guest, any guest, out to the entrance hall. But Mr. Sneaze is and always will be his own obdurate self.

Seemingly totally unconcerned, he sits there with his bottom planted on a cushion, but though such steadiness of bottom might be thought to imply some steadiness of nerve, he was inside a simmer of emotions.

Waverhouse can be heard conducting an animated conversation at the entrance, but eventually he turns to shout back into the drawing room.

“Sneaze,” he yells, “you’re wanted. You’ll have to come out here. Only you can cope with this.”

My master sighs in resignation and, his hands still tucked inside his robe, slowly shuffles his way to the entrance. There he finds Waverhouse, holding the visitor’s card in his hand, crouched down in the polite posture for receiving visitors. Seen from the back, however, that posture looks extremely undignified. The visiting card informs my master that his latest visitor is Police Detective Yoshida Torazo-from the Metropolitan Police Office. Standing beside Torazo- is a tall young man in his mid-twenties, smartly dressed in a kimono ensemble of fine striped cotton.

Quaintly enough, this personable young fellow is like my master in that, similarly silent, he also stands with his hands kept tucked inside his robe.

The face strikes me as vaguely familiar and, looking at him a little more closely, I suddenly realize why. Of course! It’s the man who burgled us a short while back and made off with that box of yams. And here he is again, by broad daylight, standing there as calm as you please, this time, too, at the front entrance.

“Sneaze,” says Waverhouse, “this person is a police detective. He has called specially to tell you that the man who burgled you the other night has now been caught. So he wants you to come to the police station.”

My master seems at last to understand why he is being raided by the police, and accordingly, turning to face the burglar, bows politely. An understandable mistake, since the burglar looks decidedly more presentable than the detective. The burglar must have been very surprised but, since he can hardly be expected to identify himself as a burglar, he just stands there calmly. He still keeps his hands buried in the fold of his kimono but, being handcuffed, he cannot take his hands out even if he wants to. Any sensible person could correctly interpret the situation by the appearances of the individuals concerned but my master, out of touch with modern trends, still makes much too much of officials and the police. He thinks the power of the authorities is really terrifying.

Though he is just capable of grasping that, in theory at least, policemen and other such creatures are no more than watchmen employed by us and paid by us, in actual practice he is ready to drop on his hands and knees at the first sight of a uniform. My master’s father, the headman of a district on the outskirts of some minor town, quickly developed the ugly habit of creeping to his superiors. Perhaps as an act of divine justice, his son was born with that cringing streak which one can but notice in my master’s character. I find this very pitiful.

The police detective must have had a sense of humor, for he was grinning when he said, “Please be at the Nihonzatsumi police substation tomorrow morning at nine o’clock. Would you also please tell me precisely what goods were stolen from you?”

“The stolen goods,” my master promptly responded, “consisted of. . .”

but having forgotten most of them, his voice petered out. All he could remember was that ridiculous box of yams. He didn’t really care about the yams, but he thought he would look silly and undignified if having started to identify the property stolen, he suddenly had to stop dead.

After all, it was he who had been burgled, and he was conscious of a certain responsibility deriving from his burgled status. If he could not give a precise answer to the policeman’s question, he would feel himself to be somehow less than a man. Accordingly, with sturdy resolution, he completed his sentence. “The stolen goods,” he said, “consisted of a box of yams.”

The burglar seemed to think this answer was terribly funny, for he looked down and buried his chin in his kimono collar. Waverhouse was less restrained and burst into hoots of laughter. “I see,” he squawked, “the yams were really precious, eh?”

Only the policeman looked at all serious. “I don’t think you’ll recover the yams,” he said, “but most of the other things will be returned.

Anyway, you can find out about all that at the station tomorrow. Of course, we shall need a receipt for everything you repossess, so don’t forget to bring your personal seal. You must arrive no later than nine in the morning at the aforementioned substation, which lies within the jurisdiction of the Asakusa Police Office. Well, goodbye.” His mission completed, the policeman walked out of the front door. The burglar followed him. Since he couldn’t take his hands out of his kimono, the burglar couldn’t close the door behind him, so after he’d gone, it just stood open. Though my master had conducted himself throughout the incident with awe-filled diffidence towards the police, he seemed annoyed by that parting rudeness: for, looking unpleasantly sullen, he closed the door with a vicious sliding slam.

“Well, well,” said Waverhouse, “you do seem awed by detectives. I only wish you’d always behave with such remarkable diffidence. You’d be a marvel of good manners. But the trouble with you is that you’re civil only to coppers.”

“But he’d come a long way out of his way to bring me that good news.”

“It’s his job to come and tell you. There was no need whatsoever to treat him as anyone special.”

“But his is not just any ordinary job.”

“Of course it’s not an ordinary job. It’s a disgusting job called ‘being a detective.’ An occupation lower and dirtier than any ordinary job.”

“If you talk like that, you’ll land yourself in trouble.”

Waverhouse snorted disrespectfully. “Very well then,” he grunted,

“I’ll lay off slandering detectives. But, you know, it’s not really a matter of respecting or not respecting those insufferable sneakers. What really is shocking is this business of being respectful to burglars.”

“Who showed respect to a burglar?”

“You did.”

“How could I conceivably number a burglar among my friends? Quite impossible!”

“Impossible, is it? But you actually bowed to a burglar.”

“When?”

“Just now, you bowed down like a hoop before him.”

“Don’t be silly. That was the detective.”

“Detectives don’t wear clothes like that.”

“But can’t you see, it’s precisely because he is a detective that he disguises himself in clothes like that.”

“You’re being very pig-headed.”

“It’s you who’s being very pig-headed.”

“Now do just think. To start with, when a detective visits someone, do you honestly imagine he will just stand there with his hands in his robes?”

“Are you suggesting detectives are incapable of keeping their hands in their robes?”

“If you get so fierce, I’ll simply have to break this conversation off. But think, man. While you were bowing to him, didn’t he just stand there?”

“Not surprising if he did. After all, he is a detective.”

“What glorious self-assurance! You’re totally deaf to reason, aren’t you?”

“No, I’m not. You keep saying that fellow was a burglar, but you didn’t actually see him committing burglary. You just imagine he did so, and you’re being extraordinary obstinate about it.”

It was at this point that Waverhouse abandoned hope and accepted my master as dim beyond redemption. He fell unwontedly silent. My master, interpreting that silence as an admission of defeat, looks uncommonly pleased with himself. But in proportion to my master’s self-elation, Waverhouse’s assessment of the wretched man has dropped. In Waverhouse’s view my master’s fat-headed obstinacy has considerably lowered his value as a man. But in my master’s view his firmness of mind has, by a corresponding amount, lifted him above the level of such pifflers as poor Waverhouse. Such topsy-turveydoms are not unusual in this imperfect world. A man who sees himself as magnified by his display of determination is, in fact, dimnished in the public estimation by that demonstration of his crass willfulness. The strange thing is that, to his dying day, the mulish bigot regards his dull opiniatrety as somehow meritorious, a characteristic worthy to be honored. He never realizes that he has made himself a despised laughing stock, and that sensible people want nothing more to do with him. He has, in fact, achieved happiness.

I understand that such joy, the wallowing well-being of a pig in its sty, is even called pig’s happiness.

“Anyway,” said Waverhouse, “do you intend to go to the copper shop tomorrow?”

“Of course. I’ve been asked to be there by nine o’clock, so I’ll leave the house at eight.”

“What about school?”

“I’ll take a day off. That school—who cares!” retorts my master with almost venomous vigor.

“My, my! What a roaring boy we have become, and all of a sudden too! But will it really be all right to take the day off?”

“Of course it’ll be all right. My salary’s paid on a monthly basis, so there’s no danger of them deducting a day’s wages. It’s quite safe.” There is, of course, something unpleasantly sly in these remarks, but the very frankness of his comments reveals that my master is more simple than dishonest. Though he is, alas, both.

“Fine. But do you know how to get there?”

“Why should I know the way to a police station?” My master is clearly narked. “But it will presumably be quite easy to get there by rickshaw.”

“Your knowledge of Tokyo seems no better than that of my uncle from the provinces. I give up.”

“You’re welcome.”

Waverhouse responded to this petty spitefulness with another burst of laughter. “Don’t you realize that the police station you’ll be visiting is not in any ordinary district. It’s down in Yoshiwara.”

“Where?”

“In Yoshiwara.”

“You mean in the red light district?”

“That’s right. There’s only one Yoshiwara in Tokyo. Well, now do you still want to go?”Waverhouse starts teasing him again.

On realizing that Yoshiwara meant the Yoshiwara, my master flinched and seemed to hesitate, but, quickly thinking it over, he decided to put on a quite unnecessarily bold front. “Wherever it may be, red light district or not, I’ve said I’ll go, so go I will.” In circumstances of this kind any fool is like to prove pig-headed.

Waverhouse, unimpressed, coolly remarked, “It may prove interesting. You really ought to see that place.”

The ructions caused by the detective incident died away, and, in the subsequent conversation,Waverhouse displayed his inexhaustible gift for amusing banter. When it began to grow dark, he got up and, explaining that his uncle would be annoyed if he stayed out unduly late, took his departure. After he’d gone, my master downed a hurried dinner and withdrew to the study. There, again with his arms close-folded, he started to muse aloud.

“According to Waverhouse, Singleman Kidd, whom I admired and whose example I very much wanted to follow, is not in truth a person worthy of imitation. On the contrary, the theory he advocates seems sadly lacking in common sense and, as Waverhouse insists, contains features that strongly suggest lunacy, a suggestion which appears all the more well founded when one remembers that two of Kidd’s most enthusiastic disciples are incontrovertibly mad. An extremely dangerous situation. If I become too much involved with him, I myself am liable to be regarded as unbalanced. What’s more, that Providence Fair fellow, whose writings really impressed me so much that I believed him to be a great man with enormous depths of knowledge and insight, has turned out to be an unadulterated certified maniac, confined, under his real name of Pelham Flap, in a well-known lunatic asylum. Even allowing for the probability that Waverhouse’s portrait of the unfortunate fellow is a distorted caricature, it still seems likely that he’s having a high, old time in that loony bin under the impression that he’s superintending Heaven.

Am I, perhaps, myself a little potty? They say that birds of a feather flock together and that like attracts like. If those old sayings are true, my admiration of a loony’s thinking, well, let’s say my generous sympathy for his writings, suggest that I myself must be a borderline case at least.

Even if I’m not yet clearly certifiable, if I freely choose to live next door to a madman, there’s an obvious risk that one fine day I might, perhaps unwittingly, topple across into his demented territory and end up, like my neighbor, completely around the bend. What a terrifying prospect!