to save their property from depredation. They place their reliance
upon artless devices which never yet were known to stay the
marauder's hand. They have their names and addresses engraved on
foolish little plates, which, riveted to their umbrellas, will, they
think, suffice to insure the safety of these useful articles. As well
might the border farmer have engraved his name and address on the
collars of his grazing herds, in the hope that the riever would
respect this symbol of authority. The history of book-plates is
largely the history of borrower versus lender. The orderly mind is
wont to believe that a distinctive mark, irrevocably attached to
every volume, will insure permanent possession. Mr. Gosse, for
example, has expressed a touching faith in the efficacy of the
book-plate. He has but to explain that he "makes it a rule" never
to lend a volume thus decorated, and the would-be borrower bows to
this rule as to a decree of fate. "To have a book-plate," he joyfully
observes, "gives a collector great serenity and confidence."
Is it possible that the world has grown virtuous without our
observing it? Can it be that the old stalwart race of book-borrowers,
those "spoilers of the symmetry of shelves," are foiled by so
childish an expedient? Imagine Dr. Johnson daunted by a scrap of
pasted paper! Or Coleridge, who seldom went through the formality
of asking leave, but borrowed armfuls of books in the absence of their
legitimate owners! How are we to account for the presence of
book-plates--quite a pretty collection at times--on the shelves of
men who possess no such toys of their own? When I was a girl I had
access to a small and well-chosen library (not greatly exceeding
Montaigne's fourscore volumes), each book enriched with an
appropriate device of scaly dragon guarding the apples of Hesperides.
Beneath the dragon was the motto (Johnsonian in form if not in
substance), "Honour and Obligation demand the prompt return of
borrowed Books." These words ate into my innocent soul, and lent a
pang to the sweetness of possession. Doubts as to the exact nature
of "prompt return" made me painfully uncertain as to whether a month,
a week, or a day were the limit which Honour and Obligation had set
for me. But other and older borrowers were less sensitive, and I have
reason to believe that--books being a rarity in that little Southern
town--most of the volumes were eventually absorbed by the gaping
shelves of neighbours. Perhaps even now (their generous owner long
since dead) these worn copies of Boswell, of Elia, of Herrick, and
Moore, may still stand forgotten in dark and dusty corners, like gems
that magpies hide.
It is vain to struggle with fate, with the elements, and with the
borrower; it is folly to claim immunity from a fundamental law, to
boast of our brief exemption from the common lot. "Lend therefore
cheerfully, O man ordained to lend. When thou seest the proper
authority coming, meet it smilingly, as it were halfway." Resistance
to an appointed force is but a futile waste of strength.
The Grocer's Cat
"Of all animals, the cat alone attains to the Contemplative
Life."--ANDREW LANG.
The grocer's window is not one of those gay and glittering enclosures
which display only the luxuries of the table, and which give us the
impression that there are favoured classes subsisting exclusively
upon Malaga raisins, Russian chocolates, and Nuremberg gingerbread.
It is an unassuming window, filled with canned goods and breakfast
foods, wrinkled prunes devoid of succulence, and boxes of starch and
candles. Its only ornament is the cat, and his beauty is more apparent
to the artist than to the fancier. His splendid stripes, black and
grey and tawny, are too wide for noble lineage. He has a broad
benignant brow, like Benjamin Franklin's; but his brooding eyes,
golden, unfathomable, deny benignancy. He is large and sleek,--the
grocery mice must be many, and of an appetizing fatness,--and I
presume he devotes his nights to the pleasures of the chase. His days
are spent in contemplation, in a serene and wonderful stillness,
which isolates him from the bustling vulgarities of the street.
Past the window streams the fretful crowd; in and out of the shop
step loud-voiced customers. The cat is as remote as if he were
drowsing by the waters of the Nile. Pedestrians pause to admire him,
and many of them endeavour, with well-meant but futile familiarity,
to win some notice in return. They tap on the window pane, and say,
"Halloo, Pussy!" He does not turn his head, nor lift his lustrous
eyes. They tap harder, and with more ostentatious friendliness. The
stone cat of Thebes could not pay less attention. It is difficult
for human beings to believe that their regard can be otherwise than
flattering to an animal; but I did see one man intelligent enough
to receive this impression. He was a decent and a good-tempered young
person, and he had beaten a prolonged tattoo on the glass with the
handle of his umbrella, murmuring at the same time vague words of
cajolery. Then, as the cat remained motionless, absorbed in revery,
and seemingly unconscious of his unwarranted attentions, he turned
to me, a new light dawning in his eyes. "Thinks itself some," he said,
and I nodded acquiescence. As well try to patronize the Sphinx as
to patronize a grocer's cat.
Now, surely this attitude on the part of a small and helpless beast,
dependent upon our bounty for food and shelter, and upon our sense
of equity for the right to live, is worthy of note, and, to the
generous mind, is worthy of respect. Yet there are people who most
ungenerously resent it. They say the cat is treacherous and
ungrateful, by which they mean that she does not relish unsolicited
fondling, and that, like Mr. Chesterton, she will not recognize
imaginary obligations. If we keep a cat because there are mice in
our kitchen or rats in our cellar, what claim have we to gratitude?
If we keep a cat for the sake of her beauty, and because our hearth
is but a poor affair without her, she repays her debt with interest
when she dozes by our fire. She is the most decorative creature the
domestic world can show. She harmonizes with the kitchen's homely
comfort, and with the austere seclusion of the library. She gratifies
our sense of fitness and our sense of distinction, if we chance to
possess these qualities. Did not Isabella d' Este, Marchioness of
Mantua, and the finest exponent of distinction in her lordly age,
send far and wide for cats to grace her palace? Did she not instruct
her agents to make especial search through the Venetian convents,
where might be found the deep-furred pussies of Syria and Thibet?
Alas for the poor nuns, whose cherished pets were snatched away to
gratify the caprice of a great and grasping lady, who habitually
coveted all that was beautiful in the world.
The cat seldom invites affection, and still more seldom responds to
it. A well-bred tolerance is her nearest approach to demonstration.
The dog strives with pathetic insistence to break down the barriers
between his intelligence and his master's, to understand and to be
understood. The wise cat cherishes her isolation, and permits us to
play but a secondary part in her solitary and meditative life. Her
intelligence, less facile than the dog's, and far less highly
differentiated, owes little to our tutelage; her character has not
been moulded by our hands. The changing centuries have left no mark
upon her; and, from a past inconceivably remote, she has come down
to us, a creature self-absorbed and self-communing, undisturbed by
our feverish activity, a dreamer of dreams, a lover of the mysteries
of night.
And yet a friend. No one who knows anything about the cat will deny
her capacity for friendship. Rationally, without enthusiasm,
without illusions, she offers us companionship on terms of equality.
She will not come when she is summoned,--unless the summons be for
dinner,--but she will come of her own sweet will, and bear us company
for hours, sleeping contentedly in her armchair, or watching with
half-shut eyes the quiet progress of our work. A lover of routine,
she expects to find us in the same place at the same hour every day;
and when her expectations are fulfilled (cats have some secret method
of their own for telling time), she purrs approval of our punctuality.
What she detests are noise, confusion, people who bustle in and out
of rooms, and the unpardonable intrusions of the housemaid. On those
unhappy days when I am driven from my desk by the iron determination
of this maid to "clean up," my cat is as comfortless as I am.
Companions in exile, we wander aimlessly to and fro, lamenting our
lost hours. I cannot explain to Lux that the fault is none of mine,
and I am sure that she holds me to blame.
There is something indescribably sweet in the quiet, self-respecting
friendliness of my cat, in her marked predilection for my society.
The absence of exuberance on her part, and the restraint I put upon
myself, lend an element of dignity to our intercourse. Assured that
I will not presume too far on her good nature, that I will not indulge
in any of those gross familiarities, those boisterous gambols which
delight the heart of a dog, Lux yields herself more and more passively
to my persuasions. She will permit an occasional caress, and
acknowledge it with a perfunctory purr. She will manifest a
patronizing interest in my work, stepping sedately among my papers,
and now and then putting her paw with infinite deliberation on the
page I am writing, as though the smear thus contributed spelt, "Lux,
her mark," and was a reward of merit. But she never curls herself
upon my desk, never usurps the place sacred to the memory of a far
dearer cat. Some invisible influence restrains her. When her tour
of inspection is ended, she returns to her chair by my side,
stretching herself luxuriously on her cushions, and watching with
steady, sombre stare the inhibited spot, and the little grey phantom
which haunts my lonely hours by right of my inalienable love.
Lux is a lazy cat, wedded to a contemplative life. She cares little
for play, and nothing for work,--the appointed work of cats. The
notion that she has a duty to perform, that she owes service to the
home which shelters her, that only those who toil are worthy of their
keep, has never entered her head. She is content to drink the cream
of idleness, and she does this in a spirit of condescension,
wonderful to behold. The dignified distaste with which she surveys
a dinner not wholly to her liking, carries confusion to the hearts
of her servitors. It is as though Lucullus, having ordered Neapolitan
peacock, finds himself put off with nightingales' tongues.
For my own part, I like to think that my beautiful and urbane
companion is not a midnight assassin. Her profound and soulless
indifference to mice pleases me better than it pleases my household.
From an economic point of view, Lux is not worth her salt. Huxley's
cat, be it remembered, was never known to attack anything larger and
fiercer than a butterfly. "I doubt whether he has the heart to kill
a mouse," wrote the proud possessor of this prodigy; "but I saw him
catch and eat the first butterfly of the season, and I trust that
the germ of courage thus manifested may develop with years into
efficient mousing."
Even Huxley was disposed to take a utilitarian view of cathood. Even
Cowper, who owed to the frolics of his kitten a few hours' respite
from melancholy, had no conception that his adult cat could do better
service than slay rats. "I have a kitten, my dear," he wrote to Lady
Hesketh, "the drollest of all creatures that ever wore a cat's skin.
Her gambols are incredible, and not to be described. She tumbles head
over heels several times together. She lays her cheek to the ground,
and humps her back at you with an air of most supreme disdain. From
this posture she rises to dance on her hind feet, an exercise which
she performs with all the grace imaginable; and she closes these
various exhibitions with a loud smack of her lips, which, for want
of greater propriety of expression, we call spitting. But, though
all cats spit, no cat ever produced such a sound as she does. In point
of size, she is likely to be a kitten always, being extremely small
for her age; but time, that spoils all things, will, I suppose, make
her also a cat. You will see her, I hope, before that melancholy
period shall arrive; for no wisdom that she may gain by experience
and reflection hereafter will compensate for the loss of her present
hilarity. She is dressed in a tortoiseshell suit, and I know that
you will delight in her."
Had Cowper been permitted to live more with kittens, and less with
evangelical clergymen, his hours of gayety might have outnumbered
his hours of gloom. Cats have been known to retain in extreme old
age the "hilarity" which the sad poet prized. Nature has thoughtfully
provided them with one permanent plaything; and Mr. Frederick Locker
vouches for a light-hearted old Tom who, at the close of a long and
ill-spent life, actually squandered his last breath in the pursuit
of his own elusive tail. But there are few of us who would care to
see the monumental calm of our fireside sphinx degenerate into senile
sportiveness. Better far the measured slowness of her pace, the
superb immobility of her repose. To watch an ordinary cat move
imperceptibly and with a rhythmic waving of her tail through a
doorway (while we are patiently holding open the door), is like
looking at a procession. With just such deliberate dignity, in just
such solemn state, the priests of Ra filed between the endless rows
of pillars into the sunlit temple court.
The cat is a freebooter. She draws no nice distinctions between a
mouse in the wainscot, and a canary swinging in its gilded cage. Her
traducers, indeed, have been wont to intimate that her preference
is for the forbidden quarry; but this is one of many libellous
accusations. The cat, though she has little sympathy with our vapid
sentiment, can be taught that a canary is a privileged nuisance,
immune from molestation. The bird's shrill notes jar her sensitive
nerves. She abhors noise, and a canary's pipe is the most piercing
and persistent of noises, welcome to that large majority of mankind
which prefers sound of any kind to silence. Moreover, a cage presents
just the degree of hindrance to tempt a cat's agility. That Puss
habitually refrains from ridding the household of canaries is proof
of her innate reasonableness, of her readiness to submit her finer
judgment and more delicate instincts to the common caprices of
humanity.
As for wild birds, the robins and wrens and thrushes which are
predestined prey, there is only one way to save them, the way which
Archibald Douglas took to save the honour of Scotland,--"bell the
cat." A good-sized sleigh-bell, if she be strong enough to bear it,
a bunch of little bells, if she be small and slight,--and the
pleasures of the chase are over. One little bell is of no avail, for
she learns to move with such infinite precaution that it does not
ring until she springs, and then it rings too late. There is an
element of cruelty in depriving the cat of sport, but from the bird's
point of view the scheme works to perfection. Of course rats and mice
are as safe as birds from the claws of a belled cat, but, if we are
really humane, we will not regret their immunity.
The boasted benevolence of man is, however, a purely superficial
emotion. What am I to think of a friend who anathematizes the family
cat for devouring a nest of young robins, and then tells me exultingly
that the same cat has killed twelve moles in a fortnight. To a pitiful
heart, the life of a little mole is as sacred as the life of a little
robin. To an artistic eye, the mole in his velvet coat is handsomer
than the robin, which is at best a bouncing, bourgeois sort of bird,
a true suburbanite, with all the defects of his class. But my friend
has no mercy on the mole because he destroys her garden,--her garden
which she despoils every morning, gathering its fairest blossoms to
droop and wither in her crowded rooms. To wax compassionate over a
bird, and remain hard as flint to a beast, is possible only to
humanity. The cat, following her predatory instincts, is at once more
logical and less ruthless, because the question of property does not
distort her vision. She has none of the vices of civilization.
"Cats I scorn, who, sleek and fat,
Shiver at a Norway rat.
Rough and hardy, bold and free,
Be the cat that's made for me;
He whose nervous paw can take
My lady's lapdog by the neck,
With furious hiss attack the hen,
And snatch a chicken from the pen."
So sang Dr. Erasmus Darwin's intrepid pussy (a better poet than her
master) to the cat of Miss Anna Seward, surely the last lady in all
England to have encouraged such lawlessness on the part of
a--presumably--domestic animal.
For the cat's domesticity is at best only a presumption. It is one
of life's ironical adjustments that the creature who fits so
harmoniously into the family group should be alien to its influences,
and independent of its cramping conditions. She seems made for the
fireside she adorns, and where she has played her part for centuries.
Lamb, delightedly recording his "observations on cats," sees only
their homely qualities. "Put 'em on a rug before the fire, they wink
their eyes up, and listen to the kettle, and then purr, which is
_their_ music." The hymns which Shelley loved were sung by the
roaring wind, the hissing kettle, and the kittens purring by his
hearth. Heine's cat, curled close to the glowing embers, purred a
soft accompaniment to the rhythms pulsing in his brain; but he at
least, being a German, was not deceived by this specious show of
impeccability. He knew that when the night called, his cat obeyed
the summons, abandoning the warm fire for the hard-frozen snow, and
the innocent companionship of a poet for the dancing of witches on
the hill-tops.
The same grace of understanding--more common in the sixteenth than
in the nineteenth century--made the famous Milanese physician,
Jerome Cardan, abandon his students at the University of Pavia, in
obedience to the decision of his cat. "In the year 1552," he writes
with becoming gravity, "having left in the house a little cat of
placid and domestic habits, she jumped upon my table, and tore at
my public lectures; yet my Book of Fate she touched not, though it
was the more exposed to her attacks. I gave up my chair, nor returned
to it for eight years." Oh, wise physician, to discern so clearly
that "placid and domestic habits" were but a cloak for mysteries too
deep to fathom, for warnings too pregnant to be disregarded.
The vanity of man revolts from the serene indifference of the cat.
He is forever lauding the dog, not only for its fidelity, which is
a beautiful thing, but for its attitude of humility and abasement.
A distinguished American prelate has written some verses on his dog,
in which he assumes that, to the animal's eyes, he is as God,--a being
whose word is law, and from whose sovereign hand flow all life's
countless benefactions. Another complacent enthusiast describes
_his_ dog as sitting motionless in his presence, "at once tranquil
and attentive, as a saint should be in the presence of God. He is
happy with the happiness which we perhaps shall never know, since
it springs from the smile and the approval of a life incomparably
higher than his own."
Of course, if we are going to wallow in idolatry like this, we do
well to choose the dog, and not the cat, to play the worshipper's
part. I am not without a suspicion that the dog is far from feeling
the rapture and the reverence which we so delightedly ascribe to him.
What is there about any one of us to awaken such sentiments in the
breast of an intelligent animal? We have taught him our vices, and
he fools us to the top of our bent. The cat, however, is equally free
from illusions and from hypocrisy. If we aspire to a petty
omnipotence, she, for one, will pay no homage at our shrine.
Therefore has her latest and greatest defamer, Maeterlinck, branded
her as ungrateful and perfidious. The cat of "The Blue Bird" fawns
and flatters, which is something no real cat was ever known to do.
When and where did M. Maeterlinck encounter an obsequious cat? That
the wise little beast should resent Tyltyl's intrusion into the
ancient realms of night, is conceivable, and that, unlike the dog,
she should see nothing godlike in a masterful human boy, is hardly
a matter for regret; but the most subtle of dramatists should better
understand the most subtle of animals, and forbear to rank her as
man's enemy because she will not be man's dupe. Rather let us turn
back and learn our lesson from Montaigne, serenely playing with his
cat as friend to friend, for thus, and thus only, shall we enjoy the
sweets of her companionship. If we want an animal to prance on its
hind legs, and, with the over-faithful Tylo, cry out, "little god,
little god," at every blundering step we take; if we are so
constituted that we feel the need of being worshipped by something
or somebody, we must feed our vanity as best we can with the society
of dogs and men. The grocer's cat, enthroned on the grocer's
starch-box, is no fitting friend for us.
As a matter of fact, all cats and kittens, whether royal Persians
or of the lowliest estate, resent patronage, jocoseness (which they
rightly hold to be in bad taste), and demonstrative
affection,--those lavish embraces which lack delicacy and reserve.
This last prejudice they carry sometimes to the verge of unkindness,
eluding the caresses of their friends, and wounding the spirits of
those who love them best. The little eight-year-old English girl who
composed the following lines, when smarting from unrequited
affection, had learned pretty much all there is to know concerning
the capricious nature of cats:--
"Oh, Selima shuns my kisses!
Oh, Selima hates her missus!
I never did meet
With a cat so sweet,
Or a cat so cruel as this is."
In such an instance I am disposed to think that Selima's coldness
was ill-judged. No discriminating pussy would have shunned the
kisses of such an enlightened little girl. But I confess to the
pleasure with which I have watched other Selimas extricate
themselves from well-meant but vulgar familiarities. I once saw a
small black-and-white kitten playing with a judge, who, not
unnaturally, conceived that he was playing with the kitten. For a
while all went well. The kitten pranced and paddled, fixing her
gleaming eyes upon the great man's smirking countenance, and pursued
his knotted handkerchief so swiftly that she tumbled head over heels,
giddy with her own rapid evolutions. Then the judge, being but human,
and ignorant of the wide gap which lies between a cat's standard of
good taste and the lenient standard of the court-room, ventured upon
one of those doubtful pleasantries which a few pussies permit to
privileged friends, but which none of the race ever endure from
strangers. He lifted the kitten by the tail until only her forepaws
touched the rug, which she clutched desperately, uttering a loud
protesting mew. She looked so droll in her helplessness and wrath
that several members of the household (her own household, which
should have known better) laughed outright,--a shameful thing to do.