“A dog? That’s cruel. I’ve never before been likened to a dog.”
“As I listen to your story I feel as though I were reading the biography of some ancient, master artist, and my heart brims with sympathy for your sufferings. Our tame comedian Waverhouse was only trying to be funny when he compared you with a dog. Take no notice of his nonsense but pray continue with your story.” Beauchamp pours oil on potentially troubled waters, but Coldmoon in truth needs neither encouragement nor consolation. Come what may, he’s going to tell his story “Well,” he continues, “I wandered up Infantry Road and, along the Street of a Hundred Houses and thence, through Money-changers’
Alley, into the Street of the Falconers. There I counted first the withered willows in front of the prefectural office, and then the lighted windows in the side-wall of the hospital. I smoked two cigarettes on Dyer’s Bridge and then I looked at my watch. . .”
“Was it yet ten o’clock?”
“Not yet, I’m sorry to say. I drifted across Dyer’s Bridge and as I walked eastward along the river path I passed a home bound group of three masseurs. Somewhere in the distance dogs were howling at the moon.”
“To hear, on an autumn night by the riverside, the distant barking of dogs. . . That sounds like some scene-setting speech from a Kabuki play.
You, Coldmoon, are cast as the fugitive hero.”
“Have I done anything wrong?”
“You are about to do something frightful.”
“That’s a bit much. All I’m going to do is to buy a violin. If that’s to be considered criminal, every student at every school of music must be guilty of crime.”
“Criminality is not determined by any absolute standard of good or evil. The acts of a criminal may actually be good in absolute terms but, since they have not been recognized as good by the consensus of public opinion enshrined in the law, they will be treated, and punished, as crimes. It is extremely difficult to establish what, in truth, is a crime.
For what is truth? Christ himself in the context of his society was a criminal and was punished as a criminal. Of the bloodline from King David, he was accused by his fellow Jews of wishing to be a king. He did not deny the charge, which naturally was very serious to the Roman governor of that conquered province, and the plaque on his crucifix, ‘The King of the Jews,’ identified his crime. Now, does our handsome Coldmoon deny being an artist in a society where artists are regarded as offensive? Of lusting after a violin in a community where such a filthy emotion is virtually criminal?”
“All right,” says Coldmoon. “I acknowledge my guilt. But what worries me is how to pass the time until ten o’clock finally deigns to arrive.”
“Nonsense,” replies Waverhouse. “You can run through, yet again, that time consuming naming of the names of streets. If that doesn’t work, you can haul up your dear, old autumn sun for a few more bouts of blazing. And what about those persimmons, sun-dried, of course, to sweetness? I’m sure you could eat at least another three dozen. That sort of stuff will keep you going until ten, and I’m prepared to listen for as long as you like.”
Coldmoon had the grace to break into a broad grin. “Since you’ve taken the very words from my mouth, I won’t insist on using them myself. So, by an artistic distortion of the truth, all of a sudden it’s ten o’clock. Right on that appointed hour I returned to Kane-zen. The streets were deserted, and the sound of my wooden clogs was desperately lonely. The big outer shutters had already been hoisted into place across the front of the shop and only the paper sliding door of its small side entrance was still available for use. As I slid that light door open, I was again assailed by a vaguely uneasy feeling that some sneaky dog was still slinking along behind me.”
At this point, my master glanced up from his grubby-looking book and asked, “Have you bought that violin yet?”
“He’s just going to buy it now,” said Beauchamp.
“What! He still hasn’t bought it after all this time? Buying fiddles must be an arduous business,” my master mutters to himself and turns back to his reading. Singleman, who has by now practically covered the whole board with black and white pieces, maintains his disinterested silence.
“Summoning up my courage, I dived into the shop and, with my head buried in my hood, said that I wanted a violin. Several shop boys and young assistants who were sitting chattering around a brazier looked up in surprise and stared at my half hidden face. Automatically, with my right hand, I tugged the hood still lower. When I had asked for a second time to be shown a violin, the boy sitting nearest me, who’d been trying to peer up under my hood, got to his feet and, with a half-hearted ‘Certainly, sir,’ slouched off to the front of the shop and came back with a tied cluster of some four or five. In response to my question, he said a violin cost five yen and twenty sen.
“‘As cheap as that? These must be only toys. Are they all the same price?’
“‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘all the same price. All exactly the same and all strongly and carefully constructed.’
“I took out my purse and extracted from it one five-yen note and a twenty-sen silver coin. Then I wrapped the violin in a big cloth I’d specially brought for that purpose. Apart from myself and the inquisitive shop boy, no one in the shop had spoken a word since I entered. They just sat there watching me. Since my face was well concealed, I knew there was no risk of being recognized, but I still felt nervous and anxious to get back out to the street as quickly as possible. At long last, with my cloth wrapped treasure tucked inside my overcoat, I left the shop.
‘Thank you, sir,’ they chorused as I did so, and my blood ran cold.
Outside, I glanced quickly up and down the street. It was pretty well empty; except that, perhaps a hundred yards away, I could hear some two or three voices quoting Chinese poems at each other in accents so loud as to waken the whole town. Edgy as ever and fearing lest the loudness of the voices forewarned of a troublesome incident with argumentative drunks, I slipped away westward around the corner of the shop, hurried along beside the moat until I came out on to Drug King’s Temple Road. Then, passing through Alder Village to the foot of Mount Kōshin, I at last got back to my lodgings. And the time was ten to two.”
“Then you’ve been walking practically the whole night long,” exclaimed Beauchamp with his usual admiring sympathy.
“So! At long, long last it’s over,” says Waverhouse with impolitely obvious relief. “The way it went on and on, it was like traveler’s backgammon.”
“But it’s only now,” protests Coldmoon, “that we come to the really interesting part. So far it’s only prelude.”
“More to come? But that’s terrible. You can’t expect the patience of your audience to last out through a full recital after such an exhausting prelude.”
“I only hope that, for their own sakes, my audience will bear with me.
To break off now would be, as the saying has it, to have plowed a field and then to forget to sow the seed. I shall therefore press on.”
“My dear chap,” says Waverhouse, “what you decide to say is entirely up to you. For my part, I shall simply sit and hear whatever it is I’ll hear.”
“What about you, my revered master? Will you consent to be so gracious as to hearken to my stumbling tale? May I mention, sir, that I have already bought a violin.”
“So what are you now proposing? To sell it? I see no reason to listen to an odyssey of sale.”
“I am far from selling it.”
“In that case there’s even less need to listen.”
“Your decision grieves me. Well then, Beauchamp, it seems that only you have the kindness and discriminating taste to hear me out. I confess it’s all a bit discouraging. But never mind. I’ll do my best to be brief.”
“You needn’t be brief. Take your time. I Find your story fascinating.”
“Well now, where was I? Ah yes, back safely in my lodgings, the proud possesser after so many vicissitudes of my precious violin. But my troubles were not over. First
, I didn’t know where to keep it. All sorts of visitors were accustomed to dropping in on me, so I couldn’t just leave it about the place where they would immediately spot it. If I dug a hole and buried it, it would have been tiresome to dig it up whenever I wanted to play.”
“Quite so. Could you perhaps hide it up in the ceiling?”
“I was lodged in a farmhouse, so the ceilings had no boards.”
“That was hard. Where did you put it then?”
“Where do you think I put it?”
“I’ve no idea. In the space where the storm boards for the windows can be slid away?”
“No.”
“Wrapped up in your bed clothes and tucked away in the bedding cupboard?”
“No.”
While Beauchamp and Coldmoon continue with their guessing game, my master and Waverhouse become engrossed in a totally separate conversation. “How do you read these lines?” my master asked.
“Which lines?”
“These two lines here.”
“What’s this then? Quid aliud est mulier nisi amicitie inimica. . . But it’s Latin.”
“I know it’s Latin. But how do you read it?”
“Come off it, Sneaze,” says Waverhouse evasively as his sensitive nose scents danger, “you’re always bragging about your knowledge of dead languages. Can’t you read it yourself?”
“Of course I can. Quite easily. But I’m asking you for your reading of this particular text.”
“You know how to read it, and yet you ask me what it means. That’s a bit thick, you know.”
“Never mind if it’s thick or thin. Just translate the Latin into English.”
“Tut-tut. Such giving of orders, such military ways. D’you take me for your batman or something?”
“Don’t slide away from the question behind a military smoke screen.
Just be so good as to let me hear your version of these two lines.”
“Let’s leave your Latin problems for the moment. I’m keen—aren’t you?—to keep up with developments in Coldmoon’s extraordinary story. He’s just coming to a crisis point, trembling between discovery and the successful caching of his treasure. Am I not right, Coldmoon?
Well, how then did you cope with your dilemma?” Waverhouse evinces a sudden new enthusiasm for Coldmoon’s fantasy on a violin and moves over to rejoin the fiddle group. My wretched master, I regret to say, is left alone with his text.
Encouraged by this unexpected attention, Coldmoon proceeded to explain where he’d hidden his violin. “I ended up,” he said, “by smuggling it away into the old, varnished, wicker box that my grandmother had given me for storing clothes when I’d first left home. It was her parting gift to me, and she herself I seem to remember, brought it into the family as part of her own bridal gear.”
“Such an antique would hardly seem to sort with a brand-new violin.
What do you think, Beauchamp?”
“I agree they sound a poor match.”
“But you yourself suggested the ceiling, and that,” said Coldmoon, squashing Beauchamp, “is hardly a good match either.”
“Despite the oddity of Coldmoon’s hideyhole, his decision strikes me as the very stuff of haiku. So let’s not start a squabble. How about this?
In an ancient, wicker box a hidden violin:
A feeling of utter lonesomeness
As the autumn closes in.”
“Today you’re fairly oozing with little squibs.”
“Not just today. Day in, day out, they well up in my mind. My knowledge of the art is so profound that even the late, great Masaoka Shiki was struck dumb by its depth.”
“Goodness, did you know Shiki?” asked the honest-hearted Beauchamp. His voice rose in serious enquiry and he sounded thrilled actually to know someone who had known the late, great, master poet.
“We were never physically close,” said Waverhouse, “but we were always directly in warm contact by a kind of spiritual telepathy.” Shocked, even disgusted, by this ridiculous answer, Beauchamp fell silent.
Coldmoon merely smiled and went on with his own improbable story. “Having decided on how to hide it, my next problem was how to make use of it. I foresaw no trouble about taking it out from its wicker box and looking at it, but such mere gloating would hardly suffice. I needed to be able actually to play it. But the resulting sounds would scarcely pass unnoticed. Therein lay a particular danger because the leading bully-boy of those damnable Dregs happened to lodge in the boarding house immediately south of mine: the two buildings were, in fact, separated only by a scrawny hedge consisting of a single row of Roses of Sharon.”
“That was stinking luck,” Beauchamp chimes in sympathetically.
“Stinking luck indeed. For one cannot mask a telltale sound. As we all well know, the whereabouts of the luckless Lady Kogō were betrayed to the vengeful Taira by the sound of her harp. If,” says Waverhouse, “you were merely guzzling stolen food or faking paper money, that could be managed, but one cannot scrape a fiddle and keep one’s presence hidden.”
“If only my fiddle made no sound, I could have gotten away with it. . .”
“You speak as though sound were the only betrayer, but there are soundless things which still can not be hidden. I remember that years ago, when we were self-catering students lodging in a temple over in Koishikawa, one of our gang, a certain Suzuki Tō, was passionately fond of sweetened, cooking saké. He used to keep it in a beer bottle, never offered it around but swigged it all by himself. One day, when Suzuki was out for a walk, the otherwise decent Sneaze, very unwisely, nicked Suzuki’s bottle, took a couple of gulps and then. . .”
“That’s a flat lie. I never touched Suzuki’s stuff. It was always you who were knocking it back,” exclaimed my master suddenly and in a loud voice.
“Oh, so you’re still with us, are you? I’d thought you were so busy in your book that I could safely tell these terrible truths without fear of interruption by the guilty party. But all the time you were listening.
Which just shows what a sneaky, saké sneaking sort of fellow you are.
One talks of people who are equally skilled in thought and action.
Thought and faction are more your style. I don’t deny that, now and again, I took a modest nip from Suzuki’s bottle. But you were the villain who got found out. And how did you come to be caught? Just listen to this, you two. We all know, don’t we, that our miserable host is anyway incapable of serious drinking. Alcohol! He just can’t take it. But just because that cooking saké belonged to someone else, he slugged it down as though his life depended on it. Imagine what inevitably followed. His face swelled up and turned a ghastly red. It was a most fearsome sight.”
“Pipe down,Waverhouse! You can’t even read Latin.”
“That’s a laugh! You want a laugh? Then listen to the sequel. When Suzuki got back, he made a beeline for his grog, lifted the bottle, shook it, and immediately discovered it was more than half empty. Sneaze had really given it a hammering. Of course Suzuki realized that someone had been at it and, when he looked around, there was Sneaze flat out in a corner, as stiff and dully scarlet as some crude, clay doll.”
Remembering that ludicrous incident, Waverhouse exploded into raucous laughter and the others joined in. Even my master chuckled into his book. Only Singleman seems proof against low comedy. He’s probably overstrained his Zen-besotted mind with all those bits of stone. In any event, slumped down across the board, he’s fallen fast asleep.
When his guffaws had ended,Waverhouse began again, “I remember another occasion when a noiseless action nevertheless betrayed itself. I’d gone,” he said, “to a hot spring inn at Ubako where I found myself sharing a room with some old man who was, I believe, a retired draper from Tokyo. Since he was no more to me than a temporary roommate, it hardly matters whether he was a retired draper or a practicing second-hand clothes dealer, but I thought you’d like a bit of background detail.
In any event, he got me into trouble. That is to say, after s
ome three days at the inn I ran out of cigarettes. Ubako is an out-of-the-way place, miles up in the mountains with only a single inn and absolutely nothing else.
One can eat and one can bathe in the hot springs. But that’s all. Imagine what it’s like to run out of fags in Ubako. It put me under strain. When one is deprived of something, one begins to crave for it as never before.
Though I’m not much of a smoker, the moment I realized I was out of cigarettes I found myself aching for a puff. What made it worse was that the old man had brought with him a big stock of cigarettes carefully bundled up in a carrying cloth, from which he would take out several at a time, squat down right in front of me, and chain-smoke like a sooted chimney. If he’d smoked in an ordinary decently human sort of way, I would not have hated him so passionately, but he flaunted his tobacco wealth. He made smoke rings, blew the fumes out forward, sideways, straight up at the ceiling, in and out of his nostrils, and almost out of his ears until I could have killed him. Some men are born show-offs. This man was a smoke-off.”
“What d’you mean, a smoke-off?”
“If you flaunt your clothes or jewelry, you’re a show-off; if you flaunt your fags, you’re a smoke-off.”
“If it put you through such agony, why didn’t you simply ask him to let you have a few of his cigarettes?”
“There are things a man can’t do. To beg, I am ashamed.”
“So it’s wrong to ask for a cigarette?”
“Perhaps not actually sinful, but I could never beg.”
“Then what did you do?”
“As a matter of fact, I stole.”
“Oh, dear!”
“When the old man, clutching his personal hand towel, tottered off for a hot spring bath, I knew my chance had come. I looted his hoard and I smoked and smoked and smoked as fast as I could go. Just as I was smirking to myself, partly with the pleasure of smoking, partly with the even greater self-satisfaction of the successful thief the door opened and there he was again.”
I Am a Cat Page 56