I Am a Cat (34 page)

Who knows, if such close cropping is continued, they’ll finish up with a cut inside their skulls. Maybe the minus-one-inch cut, even a minus-three-inch cut will be the ultimate fashion. In any event, I cannot understand why mankind becomes enslaved to such fool fads.

Why, for instance, do they use two legs when they all have four available? Such waste of natural resources! If they used four legs to get about, they’d all be a great deal nippier; nevertheless, they persist in the folly of using only two and leave the other pair just hanging from their shoulders like a couple of dried codfish that someone brought around as a present. One can only deduce that human beings, having so very much more spare time than do cats, lighten their natural boredom by putting their minds to thinking up such nonsenses. The odd thing is not simply that these creatures of endless leisure assure each other, whenever two of them get together, of just how busy they are, but that their faces do in fact look busy. Indeed they look so fussed that one wonders just how many men get eaten by their business. I sometimes hear them say, when they have the good fortune to make my acquaintance, how nice and easy life could be if one lived it like a cat. If they really want their lives to be nice and easy, it’s already in their own good power to make them so.

Nothing stands in the way. Nobody insists that they should fuss about as they do. It is entirely of their own free will that they make more engagements than they can possibly keep and then complain about being so horribly busy. Men who build themselves red-hot fires shouldn’t complain of the heat. Even we cats, if we had to think up twenty different ways of scissoring our fur, would not for long remain as carefree as we are. Anyone who wants to be carefree must train himself to be, like me, able to wear a fur coat in the summer. Still. . . I must admit it is a little hot. Really, it is too hot, a fur coat in the summer.

In this appalling heat I can’t even get that afternoon nap which is my sole and special pleasure. How then shall I while the time away? Since I have long neglected my study of human society, I thought I might usefully devote a few hours to watching them toiling and moiling away in their usual freakish fashions. Unfortunately, my master’s character, at least in the matter of napping, is more than a little aluroid. He takes his afternoon siestas no less seriously than I do and, since the summer holidays began, he has not done a stroke of what humans would call work.

Thus, however closely I may observe him, I should learn nothing new about the human condition. If only someone like Waverhouse would drop in, then there’d be some chance of a twitch in my master’s depressingly dyspeptic skin, some hope of him stirring from his catlike languor.

Just is I was thinking it is indeed about time that Waverhouse dropped by, I hear the sound of somebody splashing water in the bathroom. And it’s not just splashing water that I hear, for the splasher punctuates his aquatics with loud expressions of his appreciation. “Perfect. How wonderfully refreshing. One more bucketful, if you please!” The voice rings brashly through the house. There’s only one man in the world who would speak so loudly and who would make himself, unbidden, so very much at home in my master’s dwelling. It must, thank God, be Waverhouse.

I was just thinking, “Well, at least today I shall be eased of half the long day’s tedium,” when the man himself walks straight into the living room. His shoulders recovered beneath kimono sleeves, he’s wiping sweat from his face as, without any ceremony at all, he pitches his hat down on the matting and calls out, “Hello there. Tell me, Mrs. Sneaze, how’s your husband bearing up today?” Mrs. Sneaze had been comfortably asleep in the next room. Hunkered down on her knees with her gormless face bent over onto her sewing-box, she was shocked awake as Waverhouse’s yelpings pierced deep into her ears. When, trying to lever her sleepy eyes wide open, she came into the room,Waverhouse, already seated in his fine linen kimono, was happily fanning himself.

“Good afternoon,” she says and, still looking somewhat confused, almost shyly adds, “I’d no idea you were here.” As she bowed in greeting a bead of sweat glissades to gather at the tip of her nose.

“I’ve only this minute arrived. With your servant’s kind assistance I’ve just been having a most splendid shower in the bathroom. As a result I now feel greatly refreshed. Hot, though, isn’t it?”

“Very hot. These last few days one’s been perspiring even when sitting still. . . But you look as well as ever.” Mrs. Sneaze has not yet wiped the sweat-drop from her nose.

“Thank you, yes I am. Our usual spells of heat hardly affect me at all, but this recent weather has been something special. One can’t help feeling sluggish.”

“How very true. I’ve never before felt need of a nap but in this weather, being so very hot. . .”

“You had a nap? That’s good. If one could only sleep during the daytime and then still sleep at night. . . why, nothing could be more wonderful.” As always, he rattles along as the mood of the moment takes him. He seems, however, this time faintly dissatisfied with what’s popped out of his mouth, for he hurries to add, “Take me, for example.

By nature I need no sleep. Consequently, when I see a man like Sneaze who is invariably sleeping whenever I call, I feet distinctly envious. Well, I expect such heat is pretty rough on a dyspeptic. On days like this even a healthy person feels too tired to balance his head on his shoulders.

However, since one’s head is fixed tight, one can’t just wrench it off.”

Rather unusually,Waverhouse seems uncertain what to do with his head.

“Now you, Mrs. Sneaze, with all that hair on your head, don’t you find it hard even to sit up? The weight of your chignon alone must leave you aching to lie down.”

Mrs. Sneaze, thinking that Waverhouse is referring again to her nap by drawing attention to her disordered hair, giggles with embarrassment.

Touching her hand to her hair, she mumbles “How unkind you are!”

Waverhouse, totally unconscious of her reaction, goes off at a tangent. “D’you know,” he says, “yesterday I tried to fry an egg on the roof.”

“How’s that?”

“The roof tiles were so marvelously baking-hot that I thought it a pity not to make practical use of them. So I buttered a tile and broke an egg onto it.”

“Gracious me!”

“But the sun, you know, let me down. Even though I waited for ages, the egg was barely half-done. So I went downstairs to read the newspapers. Then a friend dropped in, and somehow I forgot about the egg. It was only this morning that I suddenly remembered and, thinking it must be done by now, went up to took at it.”

“How was it?”

“Far from being ready to eat, it had gone completely runny. In fact, it had run away, all down the side of the house.”

“Oh dear.” Mrs. Sneaze frowned to show she was impressed.

“But isn’t it strange that all through the hot season the weather was so cool and then it should turn so hot now.”

“Yes, indeed. Right up until recently we’ve been shivering in our summer clothes and then, quite suddenly, the day before yesterday, this awful heat began.”

“Crabs walk sideways but this year’s weather walks backward. Maybe it’s trying to teach us the truth of that Chinese saying that sometimes it is reasonable to act contrary to reason.”

“Come again,” says Mrs. Sneaze who’s not much up on Chinese proverbs.

“It was nothing. The fact is that the way this weather is retrogressing is really just like Hercules’ bull.” Carried away on the tide of his crankiness, Waverhouse starts making ever more odd remarks. Inevitably, my master’s wife, marooned in ignorance, is left behind as Waverhouse drifts off beyond the horizons of her comprehension. However, having so recently burnt her fingers over that bit of unreasonable Chinese reason, she was not out looking for a further scorching. So, “Oh,” she says, and sits silent. Which doesn’t, of course, suit Waverhouse. He hasn’t gone to the trouble of dragging in Hercules’ bull not to be asked about it.

“Mrs. Sneaze,” he says, driven to the direct question, “do you know about ‘Hercules’ bull’?”

“No,” she says, “I don’t.”

“Ah, well if you don’t, shall I tell you about it?”

Since she can hardly ask him to shut up, “Please do,” she answers.

“One day in ancient times Hercules was leading a bull along.”

“This Hercules, was he some sort of cowherd?”

“Oh no, not a cowherd. Indeed he was neither a cowherd nor yet the owner of a chain of butcher-shops. In those far days there were, in fact, no butcher-shops in Greece.”

“Ah! So it’s a Greek story? You should’ve told me so at the start. . . ”

At least Mrs. Sneaze has shown that she knows that Greece is the name of a country.

“But I mentioned Hercules, didn’t I?”

“Is Hercules another name for Greece?”

“Well, Hercules was a Greek hero.”

“No wonder I didn’t know his name! Well, what did he do?”

“Like you, dear lady, he felt sleepy. And in fact he fell asleep. . . ”

“Really! Mr. Waverhouse!”

“And while he slept, along came Vulcan’s son.”

“Now who’s this Vulcan fellow?”

“Vulcan was a blacksmith, and his son stole Hercules’ bull, but in a rather special way. Can you guess what he did? He dragged the bull off by its tail. Well, when Hercules woke up he began searching for his bull and bellowing, ‘Bull, where are you?’ But he couldn’t find it and he couldn’t track it down because, you see, the beast had been hauled off backward so there weren’t any hoofmarks pointing to where it had gone. Pretty smart, don’t you agree? For a blacksmith’s son?” Dragged off track by his own tale, Waverhouse has already forgotten that he had been discussing the unseasonable heat.

“By the way,” he rattled on, “what’s your husband doing? Taking his usual nap? When such noddings-off are mentioned in Chinese poetry they sound refined, even romantic, but when, as in your husband’s case, they happen day in, day out, the whole concept becomes vulgarized. He has reduced an eternal elegance of life to a daily form of fragmentary death. Forgive my asking you,” he brings his speech to a sudden conclusion, “but please do go and wake him up.”

Mrs. Sneaze seems to agree with the Waverhouse view of naps as a form of piecemeal perishing for, as she gets to her feet, she says, “Indeed he’s pretty far gone. Of course it’s bad for his health. Especially right on top of his lunch.”

“Talking of lunch, the fact is I’ve not had mine yet.” Waverhouse drops broad hints composedly, magnanimously, as though they were pearls of wisdom.

“Oh, I am sorry. I never thought of it. It’s lunchtime, of course. . .

Well, would you perhaps like some rice, pickles, seaweed, things like that, and a little hot tea?”

“No thanks. I can manage without them.”

“Well, as we hadn’t realized you would be honoring us today, we’ve nothing special we can offer you.” Not unnaturally, Mrs. Sneaze responds with an edge of sarcasm, which is all quite wasted on Waverhouse.

“No and indeed no,” he imperturbably replies, “neither with hot tea nor with heated water. On my way here, I ordered a lunch to be sent to your house and that’s what I’m going to eat.” In his most matter-of-fact manner Waverhouse states his quite outrageous actions.

Mrs. Sneaze said, “Oh!” But in that one gasped sound three separate “oh’s” were mingled: her “oh” of blank surprise, her “oh” of piqued annoyance, and her “oh” of gratified relief. At which moment my master comes tottering in from the study. He had just begun to doze off into sleep when it became so unusually noisy that he was hauled back into consciousness, like something being scraped against its natural grain.

“You’re a rowdy fellow,” he grumbles sourly through his yawns. “Always the same. Just when I was getting off to sleep, feeling so pleasant and relaxed. . .”

“Aha! So you’re awake! I’m extremely sorry to have disturbed your heavenly repose, but missing it just once in a while may even do you good. Please come and be seated.”Waverhouse makes himself an agreeable host to my master in my master’s house. My master sits down without a word, and, taking a cigarette from a box of wooden crazy-work, begins to puff at it. Then, happening to notice the hat which Waverhouse had tossed away into a corner, he observes, “I see you’ve bought a hat.”

“What d’you think of it?” Waverhouse fetches it and holds it proudly out for the Sneazes to inspect.

“Oh, how pretty. It’s very closely woven. And so soft.” Mrs. Sneaze strokes it almost greedily.

“This hat, dear lady, is a handy hat. And as obedient as a man could wish. Look.” He clenched his hand into a knobbly fist and drove it sharply into the side of his precious panama. A fist-shaped dent remained, but before Mrs. Sneaze could finish her gasp of surprise, Waverhouse whipped his hand inside the hat, gave it a sharpish shove, and the hat popped back into shape. He then grasped the hat by opposite sides of its brim and squashed it flat as dough beneath a rolling pin. Next he rolled it up, as one might roll a light straw mat. Finally, saying, “Didn’t I say it was handy,” be tucked it away into the breast-fold of his kimono.

“How extraordinary!” Mrs. Sneaze marvels as if she were watching that master magician Kitensai Shoichi performing one of his most dazzling sleights of hand. Waverhouse himself appears to be bitten by the spirit of his own act for, producing from his left-hand sleeve the tube of hat he’d thrust into the breast of his kimono, he announces, “Not a scratch upon it.” He then bats the hat back into its original shape and, sticking his forefinger into its crown, spins it around like a conjuror’s plate. I thought the act was over, but Waverhouse proceeded neatly to flip his whirling headgear over his head and onto the floor behind him, where, as the climax of his performance, he sat down squarely on it with a heavy solid whump.