"Theodore Sturgeon - Fluffy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sturgeon Theodore)

Fluffy
BY THEODORE STURGEON

Cats know a good deal more than they say. . . .

RANSOME lay in the dark and smiled to himself, thinking about his hostess. Ransome was always
in demand as a house-guest, purely because of his phenonmenal abilities as a raconteur. Said abilities
were entirely due to his being so often a house-guest, for it was the terse beauty of his word-pictures of
people and their opinion that made him the figure he was. And all those clipped ironies had to do with the
people he had met last week-end. Staying a while at the Joneses, he could quietly insinuate the most
scandalously hilarious things about the Joneses when he week-ended with the Browns the following
fortnight. You think Mr. and Mrs. Jones resented that? Ah, no. You should hear the dirt on the Browns !
And so it went, a two-dimensional spiral on the social plane.
This wasn't the Joneses or the Brown's, though. This was Mrs. Benedetto's menage; and to
Ransome's somewhat jaded sense of humor, the widow Benedetto was a godsend. She lived in a world
of her own, which was apparently set about with quasi-important ancestors and relatives exactly as her
living-room was cluttered up with perfectly unmentionable examples of Victorian rococo.
Mrs. Benedetto did not live alone. Far from it. Her very life, to paraphrase the lady herself, was
wound about, was caught up in, was owned by and dedicated to her baby. Her baby was her beloved,
her little beauty, her too darling my dear, andтАФso help meтАФher boobly wutsi-wutsikins. In himself he
was quite a character. He answered to the name of Bubbles, which was inaccurate and offended his
dignity. He had been christened Fluffy, but you know how it is with nicknames. He was large and he was
sleek, that paragon among animals, a chastened alley-rabbit.
Wonderful things, cats. A cat is the only animal which can live like a parasite and maintain to the
utmost its ability to take care of itself. You've heard of little lost dogs, but you never heard of a lost cat.
Cats don't get lost, because cats don't belong anywhere. You wouldn't get Mrs. Benedetto to believe
that. Mrs. Benedetto never thought of putting Fluffy's devotion to the test by declaring a ten-day
moratorium on the canned salmon. If she had, she would have uncovered a sense of honor comparable
with that of a bedbug.
Knowing this тАФ Ransome pardoned himself the punтАФcategorically, Ransome found himself vastly
amused. Mrs. Benedetto's ministrations to the phlegmatic Fluffy were positively orgiastic. As he thought
of it in detail, he began to feel that perhaps, after all, Fluffy was something of a feline phenomenon. A
cat's ears are sensitive organisms; any living being that could abide Mrs. Benedetto's constant flow of
conversation from dawn till dark, and then hear it subside in sleep only to be replaced by a nightshift of
resounding snores; well that was phenomenal. And Fluffy had stood it for four years. Cats are not
renowned for their patience. They have, however, a very fine sense of values. Fluffy was getting
something out of itтАФworth considerably more to him than the discomforts he endured, too, for no cat
likes to break even.

HE LAY still, marvelling at the carrying power of the widow's snores. He knew little of the late Mr.
Thnedetto, but he gathered now that he had been either a man of saintly patience, a masochist or a
deaf-mute. A noise like that from just one stringy throat must be an impossibility, and yet, there it was.
Ransome liked to imagine that the woman had callouses on her palate and tonsils, grown there from her
conversation, and it was these rasping together that produced the curious dry-leather quality of her
snores. He tucked the idea away for future reference. He might use it next week-end. The snores were
hardly the gentlest of lullabys, but any sound is soothing if it is repeated often enough.
There is an old story about a lighthouse tender whose lighthouse was equipped with an automatic
cannon which fired every fifteen minutes, day and light. One night, when the old man was fast asleep, the
gun failed to go off. Three seconds after its stated time, the old fellow was out of his bed and flailing
around the room, shouting, "What was that?" And so it was with Ransome.