The Night Listener and Others (38 page)

But he had no mischief in mind, only, it seemed, our joint welfare. I learned that, as the result of living so close to the granary, his chambers were infested with rodents, not the huge rats that I delighted in worrying by their necks like a terrier until my hind claws could rip open their fat bellies, but relatively inoffensive and much smaller mice.

Marley kept his victuals well stored and beyond their reach, but the books and records of his business dealings showed numerous nibblings, and I quickly deduced that many of the pages had been reduced to bedding for the innumerable litters that populated the walls of his rooms.

It was, I saw as readily, a proposition of business, in the practice of which Marley had spent his entire life. I was to rid the house of the creatures that riddled Marley’s business records, and in turn he would provide me with warm lodging (at least warmer than outdoors, for his meanness extended to his use of fuel) and a daily dish of milk. It seemed fair enough. I remained and did my job admirably, and he reciprocated in his way.

After several months our relationship deepened. I was sitting one February night by the fireside, which gave out but the bare minimum of heat. I must have been purring notwithstanding, and was startled to find Marley’s hand upon me. He was hesitantly stroking my fur, so lightly that I could barely detect his touch. I did not move, but continued my purring and kept my eyes closed. My passivity emboldened him, and his patting increased, but became no less gentle, and I discovered to my great surprise that I relished it.

My purring increased in volume, and Marley actually chuckled, the first time I had ever heard such a noise escape his throat. He rubbed behind my ears then, and I went into a near paroxysm of ecstasy. However, when he tried to rub my belly, the intimacy was too great, and I jerked up my head and gave a low and menacing growl. The hand went quickly back to my ears.

Still, we had become more than business associates, and I began to greet him when he returned in the evening from the office he shared with his partner, Ebenezer Scrooge. Marley never named me anything, for which I was grateful. I have seen many a noble feline ruined by domestication and the resulting title of “Fluff “ or “Snowball.” How can any cat so named continue to ravage the bowels of rats and dip its snout in rodent gore? If he addressed me it was always
Cat
, and I found that appellation fair, respectful, and honest, for such I was.

Marley had no visitors except Scrooge, and when he came to Marley’s chambers it was always upon the pretext of business, though there were times when the two partners would actually discuss other matters. Such discussions were nearly always limited to expressions of complaint, whether concerning the recent decisions of Parliament, choices in upcoming elections, or the follies of the Royal Family. No matter the topic, the crux of the discussion was always how it would impact upon the firm of Scrooge and Marley.

The sole time that I saw or heard Scrooge touch, ever so peripherally, upon his personal life was the first evening that he became aware of my presence in Marley’s chambers. Before, when Scrooge had called, I had remained hidden, for the man’s presence was odious to me. While Marley was just as harsh as Scrooge in their business dealings, I could abide his presence and his hand upon me. There was something about Scrooge, however, that curdled my blood. I would no sooner have let him touch me than let a rat gnaw open my jugular vein with impunity.

On the evening of which I speak, I was dozing under Marley’s armchair, concealed by the flaps of heavy fabric about its base, when a mouse, ignorant or inexperienced or both, scuttled across the floor. Immediately detecting and identifying its footfalls, I dashed from beneath the chair like a shot from a cannon, trapped it with my claws, and, taking its tiny head in my mouth, broke its neck on the instant.

You would have thought Scrooge had seen a particularly hideous ghost, for he leapt to his feet and cried, “What in heaven’s name is that?”

Marley replied calmly, “My cat, of course.”

“You keep a…pet
cat?
“ Scrooge said.

“Not a
pet
,” Marley said, as though the idea was ridiculous. “It’s here to keep down the vermin.”

“
Bah
,” said Scrooge, sitting once again, but keeping a pale eye on me. “Can’t abide the brutes. Rather have mice, m’self.” Then his gaze seemed to look beyond me, into a dark corner of the room. “Hated them ever since…” His voice faded.

“What?” said Marley. “What is it, Ebenezer?”

Scrooge came out of himself then. He was as open and human as I had ever seen him up to that time, and possibly as Marley had seen him in many years. He told Marley a tale full of bitterness and dread from his childhood when he lived with his family in the West Country.

In a nutshell (and, unlike Scrooge’s better known chronicler, I
do
know what there is particularly concise about a nutshell), Scrooge’s mother was far younger than his father, who was a rather unsuccessful tradesman. He met the young woman on a visit to one of the farms from which he bought grain, and was smitten with her instantly. A wild girl, she was given to wandering outdoors over the heaths and moors on her own, and the elder Scrooge’s attempt to tame her met with little success. She bore him two children, Ebenezer and then Fan, and this second birth proved fatal to her.

At least, related Scrooge, this was the story told to him by his father, but as he was growing up he heard several of the less close-tongued towns-people tell another tale, which he now retold to Marley. It seemed that some of the more ignorant and superstitious fancied that Scrooge’s mother was a witch, after hearing the account of one bibulous dipsomaniac of a carter who swore that he had seen her shed her clothes in the middle of a field one stormy night, embrace the devil himself, and then transform into a black cat.

Now it was a fact, admitted Scrooge, that a large black cat had been seen in the area, and that no hunter had been able to kill it, but, he snorted, that (along with the ranting of a sole drunkard) was scant evidence for his mother’s being a shapeshifter. Still, the rumor spread, and it was not long before the people of the town shunned her, and the cruelty of parents extended to that of their children as well, making young Ebenezer’s boyhood unpleasant in the extreme.

After his mother’s death, Scrooge and his infant sister were taken by their father to the town of Strood in Rochester, where no word of the deceased Mrs. Scrooge’s alleged spiritual impropriety had traveled. Still, because of the accusations against his mother and his belief that they had in part caused her death, Scrooge could not abide the sight of cats and had never admitted one into his chambers.

Since I was anathema to Scrooge, and much about him disturbed me both physically and on a deeper level, I continued to establish covert positions during his visits and was not tempted again by the sight of any darting mice when Scrooge was present.

Several months after this visit, Marley sickened and died quickly. He had been kind to me at least, and I tried to give him what comfort I could as he lay on his deathbed by curling up next to him and permitting him to stroke my fur. This I did only when no other persons were about, particularly not Scrooge. He kept a deathwatch of sorts on his partner, more out of curiosity than concern, I reckoned, but at the end he was called away on matters of his business.

I crawled back onto the bed, and Marley’s hand was upon me when he died. The fingers stiffened for a moment, then went limp, and I scurried from under the dead embrace, since there was nothing left of my former friend in the lump of dead clay that remained on the bed. Yes, I call him friend now, for I believe I was all that he had, all that he truly loved, except for the money that he and Scrooge had gathered in.

And now the time had come to deal with Scrooge. He took over his dead partner’s chambers, and used Marley’s furniture as well. I stayed out of sight during the move, but finally admitted to myself that I could not remain in these comparatively warm chambers (for that January was bone-chillingly cold) without Scrooge’s cognizance of my presence. Therefore I waited one night until he was dozing by his fire, and deposited at his slippered feet the carcasses of five mice caught earlier that day and retained for such a moment. Then I gave a brief and, I hoped, business-like cry.

Scrooge awoke, and when he saw me his body rose in his chair as if he had glimpsed a demon. But when he noticed the five dead mice at his feet his eyes narrowed. “I assume,” he said in that smooth, mellifluous voice of his (not at all “grating,” as Dickens put it for, I suppose, dramatic effect) “that you are proposing a business partnership, the same you had with my former partner.” His fingers drummed on his lower lip as he considered the deal. “Here is what I suggest,” he said at length, as seriously as if he were sitting across the table from an adversary in an office on the Royal Exchange. “I shall allow you tenancy here, nothing more. You in turn dispose of any vermin that infest or invade the premises. Expect nothing else from me, and there shall be no further familiarity on either of our parts.”

It seemed that I was out a daily saucer of milk, but at least I would be warm in winter, and the close proximity of the granary assured me a constant supply of meat. I gave a low sound in my throat that I hoped would signify acceptance, and strode to the fire, even lower than Marley’s, near which I curled up, thankful for the bit of warmth it gave off.

Thus was Ebenezer Scrooge’s dislike of cats put in abeyance for practical purposes. He and I became partners, nothing more, for seven long years. During that time he spoke not a single word to me, and after a while I became a presence as familiar and unremarkable to him as his bedposts, his hall-tree, or the Dutch tiles that paved his fireplace.

But though he ceased to observe me, I never failed to observe him, and over the years I became both astonished and dismayed by the character, or lack of the same, of the man with whom I shared my chambers. In his dealings with his fellow creatures, Scrooge was inhuman. That is to say that there was no emotion at all that connected him to his fellow men. He thought only of his own financial position and his own gain, and although it took me a long time I finally reasoned it out. I knew why Scrooge was what he was and why he acted the way he did.

There are those members of the feline race who are the same. Those unfortunate humans who suffer from felinophobia
₁
think that all cats evince these characteristics of exclusive self-interest, but such is not the case. Most of my race are capable of extending affection beyond themselves. Only a few are so limited as to be bound up in themselves alone, and at length I saw that Scrooge was such a cat.

When I say
cat
, I mean the same. I came to believe that the drunkard’s tale was partly true, that Scrooge’s mother was in part feline, and that her blood had helped to make Scrooge what he was—totally selfish, savage in his dealings with others, and concerned only with his own well-being and potentiality for self-preservation. His catlike traits, however, stopped short at the tendency toward comfort and sloth, for there the human side of Scrooge won out, and those feelings that would actually allow him to enjoy his wealth had been replaced by the constant need for acquisition.

In other words, though Scrooge thought and acted with the selfishness of the lowest form of cat, he maintained the acquisitiveness of the lowest form of man, for his mixed blood had brought out the worst qualities of both feline and human. The balance had to be shifted, for Scrooge’s own sake and the sake of those with whom he dealt.

He was not a happy man. He had merely amassed his wealth, and had never used it for good or ill, though the ill that its acquisition had created was bad enough. Scrooge had to change, and once I had determined the cause, I eventually came up with the cure.

I decided upon Christmas Eve as the night it should be done, as the human feelings that remained hidden in Scrooge were far more susceptible to suggestion at that time of the rolling year when emotion ruled reason. Charles Dickens has chronicled, in more detail than any reader might bear, the happenings of that particular night, or at least what Scrooge thought was happening. The knocker with Marley’s face was an invention of Dickens, as was much else, but the general narrative—the appearance of Marley’s ghost, the visit of the three spirits, Scrooge’s visions of himself in the past and the horrifying images of his eventual demise, unloved and forgotten, were more or less as Scrooge described them to Dickens, for I was under the chair the following summer when Scrooge told the author of his experiences.

Scrooge lured me out at the end of the lengthy interview, cuddled me, and gave me one of the many sweetmeats he now daily bestowed upon me, but when Dickens tried to hold me I resented the familiarity and scratched him lightly. Even though I scarcely drew blood, I believe to this day that is why I make no appearance in the fiction he derived from Scrooge’s tale.

And it was indeed a fiction, for the most part. Scrooge never saw Marley or the three spirits outside of his own augmented imagination, but their imaginary visitations were enough to change his character, permanently and for the better, and to such a degree that word of the transformation of this universally hated old businessman reached the ears of Dickens among many others.

The lie in Dickens is that the manifestations started upon Scrooge’s arrival at his home. The truth is that nothing whatsoever occurred until after Scrooge had eaten his gruel. I had known of the cold in his head, and that he would take his gruel upon coming home that evening. My action was based on the principle that a constant and curmudgeonly teetotaler might be transformed by the mere act of becoming drunk some night, totally unaware that anyone had added spirits to the punch until he was totally possessed by them, and was made to see the delights of the world by having his brain altered, chemically and temporarily, by the unaccustomed alcohol.