(urth) Short Story 110: The Cat

Tue Aug 26 11:59:31 PDT 2014

On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 1:45 PM, Marc Aramini <marcaramini at gmail.com> wrote:
> The presence of the doll which appears at Sancha's death and the imagery of
> Domnina associated with dolls after seeing the mirrors is interesting, but
> it seems more likely that this is the toy Inire gave to Sancha as a child,
> one linked especially to her.

I found the thing 'not unlike a doll' to be quite mysterious when I
first read it.

I thought that it might be the returned form of the cat, but since it
was buried with Sancha and the cat is supposed to be haunting other
people, that doesn't work.

The doll theory has a few problems: 1. we're never told that Sancha
took the second, uncommon, path of being given a toy when Inire is too
busy, are we? 2. where did the doll go all those years? Sancha tossed
the *cat* in, not a hypothetical doll (and carrying both a doll and a
cat sounds a bit excessive). 3. why did it bleed when pricked? 4. if
it was a doll, why the odd phrasing 'a thing not unlike a doll'? In
Wolfe, this means 'it looks a bit like but was definitely not a doll,
can you figure out what it is?' 5. why bury a doll with Sanca?

The thing is clearly a homunculus of some sort. Re-reading the story,
here is what I think happens: Inire encounters a charming pleasant
child who is interested in the wider universe, does not give her a toy
but a story, then takes her to show all his gadgets, when she
impetuously (as children often do) does something rash and
ill-considered as toss her beloved pet into mortal danger and with it
goes her childish innocence and ability to love possibly as a
sacrifice to enable Inire to retrieve the cat partially as a spiteful
spirit, with Sancha's lost moral traits returning at the very end as
'a lovely child just become a woman' and justly buried with her
(shades of _The Picture of Dorian Gray_; the malign cat goes on to
persecute Sancha's enemies.

Picking out some important quotes:

> As every thinking man acknowledges, mighty powers move through this dark universe of Briah, though for the most part hidden from us by its infinite night. Is it not every man's duty to record what little he has glimpsed that may give light to it? And do not such idle tales as I heard by the fire but serve to paint yet blacker that gloom through which we grope?

This is quite a black opening and reason for Odilo to record what
seems like a charming and harmless ghost story. Why is it so sinister?
(Similar to "Suzanne Delage".)

> She was (so my father said) an extraordinarily charming child, with the face of a peri and eyes that were always laughing, darker than most exulted children but so tall that she might have been supposed, at the age of seven or eight, to be a young woman of sixteen.

So, to set the scene: Sancha is a very nice child. Odilo's father has
nothing bad at all to say about her, and she is a lovely child who
appears to almost be a woman.

She meets Father Inire, whose attentions are worth having, but like
most things worth having, come with risk:

> Permit me to say at once that these children have often benefitted from his attention. It is true, perhaps, that they have sometimes suffered for it, but that has been seldom and I think by no means by his wish.

The dangers of the mirror system are also mentioned elsewhere:

> In Thecla's story, she and her thirteen year old friend Domnina play between Father Inire's two great mirrors, and move candelabra to opposite ends of them. Inire appears and warns them there is “an imp who waits in silvered glass and creeps into the eyes of those who look into it.” Thecla perceives this as an injunction against vanity, but Domnina asks if the imp is shaped like a tear. Inire indicates that the thing she has seen is someone else and invites her to return the next day to show her.

With the mirrors, you truck with strange powers from out of time and
space, whose effects may not always be physical (Lovecraft, anyone?).
And remember Odilo's warning.

Inire speaks with her, but seems to not give her a doll, as the
description implies gadgetreey:

> some many-hued toy of the kind that wise men and humble men such as I, and all women and children, call magical...Should he find that the toy remains unbroken

Dolls wouldn't be particularly many-hued, magical, or easily-broken.
This description doesn't fit the homunculus at the end, either. In
particular, the incident seems to be Inire's *first* meeting with
Sancha, when he has spare time after a long meeting, and Sancha has
only her cat with her:

> Such a pupil Sancha became, one winter morning when she was of seven years or thereabout and my father much the same. All her replies must have pleased Father Inire; and he was doubtless returning to his apartments in our Hypogeum Apotropaic from some night-long deliberation with the Autarch. He took her with him; and so my father met them, as he often told me, in that white corridor we call the Luminary Way. Even then, when my father was only a child himself, he was struck by the sight of them walking and chatting together, Father Inire bent nearly double, like a gnome in a nursery book, with no more nose than an alouatte; Sancha already towering over him, straight as a sapling, sable of hair and bright of eye, with her cat in her arms.

(Note again the very positive description of Sancha.)

Things go badly at the end. We don't know exactly what happens after
the cat goes into the mirror; Odilo quite explicitly speculates and
has no idea what actually happened:

> Knowing Father Inire as I have been privileged to know him these many years, I feel certain he must have promised poor Sancha that he would do all that lay in his power to retrieve her pet, and that he must have kept faithfully to that promise

So what *did* Father Inire do? The two of them must have done
something to summon the spirit. Well, what often happens in order to
traffic with and summon dark spirits...? You sacrifice something.

On top of that, the summoned spirit seems pretty malicious:

> So it became known, and quickly, that the girl Sancha was attended by some fey thing. When she and some friend sat alone at play, a pochette was knocked from a table and broken, or so it was said. On another occasion, a young man who sat conversing with Sancha (who must, I should think, have been somewhat older then) observed the ruffled body of a sparrow lying on the carpet at her feet, though she could scarcely have sat where she did without stepping upon it, had it been present when they began their talk.

Every example is negative: destructive of things on tables, or
littering dead creatures wantonly slain (pets don't go hungry, and
certainly not spectral pets). There is no mention of, for example,
sleeping on her lap or being petted.

Then Sancha changes, becomes scandalous and argumentative and ugly and
without friends and depending on Father Inire's charity and attracts
company only for the cheap thrill that there may be a ghost:

> As for Sancha, Aude said she believed the cat the only creature Sancha was ever to love, beyond herself; but that, I think, was spite; and Aude was but a giddypate, who knew the Chatelaine only when she was old. ...They were discovered together in that state which is too easily imagined. Sancha's rank and age equally exempted her from formal punishment; her age and her rank equally ensured that the disrepute would cling to her for life. ...and no one was surprised, my father said, to hear soon after that she had wed the heir of Fors-it was a country family not liable to know much of the gossip of the court, nor apt to care greatly for what it heard, while the Chatelaine was a young woman of some fortune, excellent family, and extraordinary beauty ...she returned and requested a suite in this hypogeum, which  Father Inire granted in observance of their old friendship. ...Her back was as bent as Father Inire's, her teeth had been made for her by a provincial ivory-turner, and her nose had become the hooked beak of a carrion bird. For whatever reason, her person now carried a disagreeable odor; she must have been aware of it, for she had ordered fires of sandalwood to counter it. ...Suffice it to say that she had borne several children, that her husband was dead, and that her elder son now directed the family estate. The Chatelaine did not get along well with his wife and had many disagreeable anecdotes to relate of her, of which the worst was that she had once denounced the Chatelaine as a gligua, such being the name the autochthons of the south employ for one who has traffic with diakka, casts spells, and the like. ...As the years passed, the Chatelaine Sancha had little need of birds or marmosets. The scandal was revived by doddering women who recollected it from childhood, and she attracted to herself a host of protegees, the daughters of armigers and exultants, eager to exhibit their tolerance and bathe in a notoriety that was without hazard.

She doesn't seem terribly loving of her family, and Aude's comment is
probably right - *after* the incident, she could no longer love
anyone. Something was lost in the incident, and I don't think it was
just the cat.

Then the finale:

> At the dying Chatelaine's cry, all turned to look at her. And all saw, as did I, that upon the snowy counterpane [bedspread] covering her withered body there had appeared the dark pawprint of some animal, and beside it a thing not unlike a doll. This was no longer than my hand, and yet it seemed in each detail a lovely child just become a woman. Nor was it of painted wood, or any other substance of which such toys are made; for when the physician pricked it with his lancet, a ruby drop shone forth.
>
> By the strict instructions of Father Inire, this little figure was interred with the Chatelaine Sancha. Our laundresses having proved incapable of removing the stain left by the creature's paw, I ordered the counterpane sent to the Chatelaine Leocadia, who being of the most advanced age was even then but dim of sight.
>
> She has since gone blind, and yet her maids report that she sees the cat, which stalks her in her dreams. It is not well for those of high station to involve the servants of their enemies in their quarrels.

So as she dies, a silent homunculus reappears with the spirit, Father
Inire (who knows what happened) orders it buried with Sancha and not
otherwise, and the spirit goes on to haunt Sancha's enemy. (Open
question: is it an accident that Odilo sends the haunted bedspread to
Leocadia, who he noted 'suffered nothing', and closes with moralizing
against Leocadia?)

At least, this seems to explain everything, puts the key action into
an explicit lacunae (very Wolfe-like), and indeed justifies Odilo's
otherwise-hyperbolic opening - sacrificing parts of your soul to dark
cosmic powers to retrieve a pet is indeed something to warn
inhabitants of the House Absolute against, inasmuch as they live in
close proximity to Father Inire & his mirrors.

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net