Bertie and the Beast: Chapter 9 Part 2
Created | Updated Mar 13, 2010
Once again we are beholden to the current executors of the Knolly estate for letting us publish this, the second package of the great man's journals and memoirs.
Don't Cats Always Land On Their Feet?
Chapter 9 Part 2
Bertie was not far; indeed he was in
the office area sitting facing a pull down blackboard resting his chin
on one hand and tap-tap-tapping with a pencil on a notepad.
"You all right, old chum?" I asked, carefully avoiding the
luggage he’d placed by the bedroom door.
"Hmmm .... I just seem to be sticking my foot in it lately, don't
I? Constantly in Elspeth's bad books," he said rather forlornly.
"Well, I must admit that she does seem to have a bee in her bonnet
as far as Charlotte is concerned," I replied. ""But she'll
soften, you'll see. Might take a while, but she will."
Bertie nodded and there was a short silence before he spoke again.
"Knolly, I've been thinking about Charlotte .... "
"Bertie! You're not helping, you know," I hissed. “Walls
not that thick.” I added.
"Not thinking of her in, in ... that ... way. Good grief, no!"
he sighed.
"I may regret this ... but go on. What is on your mind?"
"Well, for one, she moves like a cat ...."
"Yes. That is hardly surprising, though, is it?" I replied
and settled into one of the more comfy chairs.
He began to talk enthusiastically about Charlotte's performance against
the automaton and claimed that the potential application of her skills
was almost endless. He spoke about her natural balance, about the speed
of her change of direction, about the almost unpredictable way that
she was able to move, about her ability to anticipate and react. He
spoke about how these skills and traits might benefit our mission if,
for instance, we were to find ourselves confronted by confrontational
persons. These confrontationalists would not expect to be co-confronted
by a character like Charlotte, and hence we would have as an ally the
element of surprise. The distraction and confusion caused by Charlotte
could allow colleagues to immobilise an assailant.
I considered this. He had a point ... but only up to a point.
"Bertie, you know what cats are like," I said. "If they
are interested in something, they will stick determinedly to a task.
Soon as it becomes a chore, they're off. Wonderful beasts, but I'm not
at all sure that one can trust them."
Bertie also wondered aloud if Charlotte might be able to pass on her
skills - to be able to teach them to people.
"Interesting thought, but there are a few barriers, aren't there?"
"Such as?" asked Bertie.
"Well, language for starters. And much of what Charlotte does is
instinctive and requires a certain body-type."
"I've also been thinking about Charlotte's body ..." began
Bertie. I held up a hand and stopped him dead.
"Bertie! Please do us all a favour and purge your mind of all thoughts
of Charlotte."
"Oh well," shrugged Bertie. "She'd make a fantastic dancer
as well," he grinned as he playfully ducked under the desk.
"Come on. I'm sure there's some bits-and-bobs we ought to be doing,"
I said in an attempt to occupy Bertie's mind.
"Indeed there are!" said Bertie, suddenly becoming more business-like.
"Hobbes has left some jobs for us to get the electrics and telephony
systems all checked out. Still a few snags to iron out, as I understand."
"Oh? What's wrong?" I asked.
"From what I can make out, not too much. Just started reading his
notes and comparing them with the diagrams on the board when you came
in. Oh! By the way ..." said Bertie, leaning across the desk in
a conspiratorial manner. I leaned in.
"Did you hear that Hobbes is working on developing alternative
means of generating of power?"
I had not heard it. It sounded most interesting. I leaned in further,
causing Bertie to lean away a little as, despite our long-standing friendship,
we had moved a little close to each other.
"There's something to do with generating electricity from the wind.
Modern-day windmills, I should have thought. And there's something to
do with squeezing energy from atoms."
"Good grief!" I said. "How does that work?"
"Jiggered if I know," said Bertie. "He's been speaking
with some German crackpot. Einstein, I think he said his name was. Mind
you, whatever comes from that can't be as daft as that Austrian chappie
who approached him about generating electricity from a perpetual-motion
machine."
I had not heard of this either, but from the sound of it and from the
look on Bertie's face, it was going to be a good story. I patted my
pockets and found my hipflask. Bertie took a nip, I took a nip, and
then he related the tale of Herbert Langweilig, bank teller by day and
amateur scientist by night. A liberal amount of nips were taken during
the story and this dear reader is what I recall.
Langweilig's "science" consisted mainly of fantastic ideas
that were just that; ideas that were sketched in notebooks and clearly
belonged in the realms of fantasy. He made repeated attempts to enrol
at Universities and Colleges, but he was rejected by all of the institutions
to which he applied (and, rather embarrassingly, rejected by many institutions
to which he did not apply), largely on the grounds that he was none-too-bright.
Despite this, Lanweilig was a pleasant enough fellow and was loyal to
his family, regularly visiting his elderly maiden aunt Mathilda to make
sure that she was healthy and well-provisioned. In return, Tante Mathilda
would fuss over her nephew, providing coffee and muffins, and insisting
that he relax and read the zeitung while she busied herself in loving
preparation of the sundry items. As Langweilig did as he was bade, her
pet cat - Kuschel - would seek attention from the visitor. Whilst the
feline appeared fond of Langweilig, the reverse could not be said to
be true. Whenever Kuschel came close, Langweilig would pick her up and
launch her across the room. Tante Mathilda was none the wiser, thinking
that the cat had simply gone into the garden in pursuit of furry quarry.
After several visits and just as many feline flingings, Langweilig noticed
that the cat would - without fail - land on her feet. He made a note
of this. Occasionally, he would accidentally drop a muffin onto the
floor. Langweilig noticed that a buttered muffin, when dropped, would
- without fail - land butter-side-down. He made a note of this.
Back at his own house, he decided to conduct an experiment based on
dropping an unbuttered muffin; he noted that it landed - without fail
- on an unbuttered side. He quickly realised that this was not a particularly
sound experiment, and so he marked the muffin such that each side could
be uniquely identified. He then dropped the muffin 100 times and recorded
the results. In his notebook, he wrote:
"On examination of my droppings, I discovered that 50 of them fell
on one side and 49 on the other side."
When asked why there were only 99 results when he had conducted 100
experiments, Lanweilig said that the final drop of the muffin resulted
in it rolling out into the garden whereupon it was snatched up by a
seagull. When Langweilig conducted the experiment with a buttered muffin,
sure enough, on 100 occasions, the buttered side fell flat on the floor.
Langweilig said that his discovery put him on a par with Sir Isaac Newton.
Newton had provided a model for how gravity worked, but admitted that
he did not why it worked. And now, he, Langweilig, had pretty much proved
that butter was a natural force, on a par with gravity and electricity
and magnetism.
Langweilig began to cogitate and contemplate his muffin results, and
his breakthrough moment came when (after several brandies) he also cogitated
and considered what happened when Kuschel was forced to take flight
at Tante Mathilda's. His thoughts went thus. He would liberally apply
butter to the back of a cat. When dropped, the cat's natural instincts
would cause its feet to point toward the floor. However, the butter
would apply its own force and would also try to land on the ground,
causing the cat to spin with its feet skyward - and hence the cycle
would continue. The Holy Grail of perpetual motion had been discovered,
and an immediate practical application was to use the spinning body
of a buttered cat as a dynamo to generate endless electricity!
Bertie acted all this out in the style of a lunatic professor. He took
a board rubber and erased all the chalkings from the board and began
to draw rough sketches, complete with annotations of the key items,
viz. a cat, a generous pat of butter, his good self, and an arrow indicating
the area of the cat's back upon which the generous pat of butter would
be applied by himself. He continued, imagining how we might use this
in our current situation on the train. We had no cat, but of course
we had Charlotte! He rubbed out his drawings and annotations of the
cat, replacing them with images and references to Charlotte.
I was laughing at the absurdity of the notion and Bertie's enactment
of the outrageous experiment - so much so that I did not hear the door
open. Before I knew it, Elspeth was in the room. Bertie was unaware
of her presence; he was chalking some other nonsense onto the board.
I expected fireworks. But none came. Elspeth was strangely subdued,
sheepish almost, and her glance was cast downward - most unlike her.
"Bertie ... I've come to ... to .... apologise," she said.
I nearly fell out of my chair. Bertie stopped in mid-chalking.
Still looking down, she continued.
"I realise that I have been jumping to conclusions as far as your
intentions toward Charlotte are concerned. You understand that I wish
only to protect her. She is a fragile thing and .... and ...... "
She looked up. She spoiled it all by looking up.
" ... and it appears that I have uncovered your little - and may
I say rather bizarre - plan to smear butter all over her back and drop
her from a height."
Bertie stood like a chastened schoolboy, his hair, face and jacket covered
in chalk dust.
"I think we shall discuss this in the morning," said Elspeth
as she stormed back to the bedroom, pausing briefly to pick of her large
bag.
"I'll, er, be along soon dear," I called sheepishly.
"No, no. I don't want to spoil your little party," she called
over her shoulder. That was me remaining out her for the duration then.
"Tomorrow's fine by me," said Bertie. "Sleep tight. Give
Charlotte a goodnight kiss from me."
Elspeth stopped. She just shook her head and then carried on walking.
Only then did Bertie realise what he had just said and began to bash
himself repeatedly upon the head with the board rubber. After a short
while, he threw down the rubber and sat with head in hands.
I did not know what to say, so I said nothing. Instead, I looked at
Hobbes' paper notes that Bertie had been perusing when I came in.
"Bertie ..... You might want that board rubber again," I said
as I looked in more detail at Hobbes' notes.
"Why?" asked Bertie, sounding rather tired.
"That stuff you rubbed from the board before your little 'lecture'
.... "
"Yes?"
"I think you’ll find that was Hobbes' master diagram of the telephone
system on the train."
