Charlie's favourite seat was upon the veranda rail. It gave her a wide
and beautiful view of the garden and the river and forests, to say
nothing of the far-off mountains blue, her native home, for Hylobates
Hooluck is by choice a mountaineer. Indoors, without moving more than
her head, by merely looking round, she could see the drawing-room,
whereof the veranda was an extension, and, through wide doorways never
closed, the much more interesting dining-room beyond.
Dr Clark, once famous as Gladstone's physician, is said to have been
fond of telling how he watched a little girl sitting in front of a
fire, to which a footman brought coals. The man took no notice of her
till she coughed violently; and then he looked round, and a few kind
words passed.
"Why did you cough?" asked the doctor, when the man had gone.
"To make James look at me," said the candid child; but it is
surprising in a man like Clark that he is said to have quoted this as
an indication of the _inferiority_ of women. If he really did so, it
was because he had not thought the matter out, and was confused by
words. The difference between men and women is one of kind, not of
degree. It is not a difference of less or more, but of sex. A million
women could not make one man; but neither could a million men make one
women.
Now it is true that a normal little boy, sitting where the girl sat,
would not have felt an inclination to attract the attention of a maid,
mending the fire; and it is true that normal little girls are
continually acting as the doctor saw that little one act. The gentle
sex spontaneously craves to be noticed by the other. Why? Surely,
because they have been specialised in character no less than in
physical form for domestic life; and their essential business ever is
to study and humour the men, whose function is to feed and protect
them and their children. "He for God only, she for God in him,"
remains as true as gravitation, even if we fling the Hebrew Bible
aside, and give the great Reality some other name.
That this specialisation of sex comes from a far-off date was
curiously manifested by our little Charlie. Indeed it was easy to see,
and easy to verify by observation in the hills, that "her people"
lived under social arrangements like the patriarchal family. Sir Henry
Maine, if he had known it, might have reinforced his argument on
ancient law from an antiquity manifested by the habits of these small
people, compared to which the oldest days of Rome were but as
yesterday. So completely womanly was our pet that many of her doings
were conundrums to masculine wits. It takes a woman to understand a
woman. He was a wiser man than usual who said--"When I say I know
women, I mean that I know I don't know them."
Perhaps no man could ever have guessed what Charlie found amiss with
our fine tom-cat. "Don't you see? Tom takes no notice of her," it was
explained. "He ignores her existence."
Tom's manners were simply perfect Piccadilly. If Charlie had been
conventional middle-class English, she would have been humbled. If
French or German, she might have been amused or angry, according to
circumstances. Being as irrepressibly democratic as the Burmans and
Mongolians in general, she was simply puzzled; and in playing at tig
or some other game with the other cats, which was a habit of hers, she
might often be observed to be watching Tom with a perplexed look, like
a kindly teacher "taking stock" of a backward pupil. Tom never looked
at her.
One day, as she sat on the veranda rail, she was seen to be intently
studying him. He lay motionless, as if asleep, under an easy chair,
his tail projecting far. She leapt lightly down to the floor, ran
noiselessly along it, as if on tip-toe, and was in the act of reaching
forth her hand to the tail, when Tom sprang to attention, and the
threatened tail began to swell and sway from side to side in the air.
Unabashed, (for indeed I never saw her abashed, only frightened, and
on this occasion she was not frightened), she gleefully ran round the
chair, chasing the tail, with merry cries of "Oo-oo-oo-oo-oo!"
Tom sulkily turned one way and another, keeping his tail out of reach,
and visibly perplexed. Charlie enjoyed the game immensely. It lasted a
long time, and then Tom lost patience, and thrust out his paw, with
the claws extended.
He could hardly have hoped to touch her. He might as easily have
caught a swallow. The claws did not come within five inches of her;
but the savage gesture was an outrage to her feelings. She ejaculated
what sounded like a squeak, but perhaps should be called a scream; and
as he remained callous and far from apologetic, she turned her back
upon the clown and resumed her seat upon the rail. Tom, for his part,
with a greater air of dignity than usual, if possible, the sacred tail
uplifted inviolate, that is to say, untouched, stalked grandly away;
but he had not gone two yards before Charlie leapt upon the floor
again, as noiseless as a shadow, and swift "as arrow from a bow," she
darted after him and seized the end of his tail between her finger and
thumb. She seemed to pinch it, and certainly gave it a sharp tug; and
then, like magic, when Tom whirled round, she was sitting on the rail
again, making faces at him, and audibly chuckling in the intervals of
triumphant hooting, "Oo-oo-oo-oo-oo!"
He gazed at her awhile in bewilderment, and moved away.
"He went like one that had been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn;
A sadder and a wiser cat,
He rose the morrow morn."