II

The laburnum-tree in the courtyard was dropping its amber-and-lemon

florets in the sunlight, and the sparse blossom of the lilac-bush

against the wall by Mrs. Barraclough’s window sent up a breath of such

fragrance as its soot-clogged pores could still render to the morning

air, as Gillian washed her breakfast-dishes. She had been late the night

before, having gone with Jane and Larry to hear Heinrich play the violin

by himself at another studio, after the Queen’s Hall orchestra had

dispersed for the night.

Heinrich, looking more unlike a Cupid than anything Gillian had ever

seen, had played melodies in a piercing sequence, choosing them from

orchestrated or fully harmonized scores and giving them in the naked

strangeness of a single string. The air from Borodine’s musician’s

quartette; the subject of the last movement of Smetana’s _Aus meinem

Leben_; a phrase from a Bach three-part invention; “Cherry Ripe”; the

pizzicato passage from one scherzo movement of Mozart, and other tunes,

half-recognized or quite unknown, sang again in Gillian’s memory as she

stood at the sink by the open window and let the water from the tap rush

over the old Spode plate, the leadless glaze milk-jug, the Nanking

teapot with its sodden, shabby bamboo handle, and the wide-pink-bordered

Rouen cup and saucer she always used for breakfast.

How lovely running water was, even out of an indifferently polished

brass tap! How unearthly some of Heinrich’s playing had been! Faint and

thin and high like a gnat’s music. How late it was! Nearly eleven

o’clock. The milk-cart had clattered out, before she was awake; the

butcher-boy’s bicycle had crunched swiftly over the gravel in the

courtyard while she dressed; the ten-o’clock postman had knocked at all

the doors where he had letters to deliver while she was sitting over her

breakfast. Gillian felt she was getting demoralized. No Lilac to

consider at night when she came in. No work to get her out of bed before

she had finished her sleep in the morning. It would be a good thing when

the vacancy at the secretarial school fell in next week and she had more

motive in her days again. How did that Borodine tune end?—up or down?

She turned off the tap and whistled the melody through softly to

herself. No, that wasn’t right. Odd that she could hear it in her head

and not be able to reproduce it properly. Humming was worse than

whistling. Her voice made the oddest noises. She hadn’t a pretty voice.

Still it hadn’t made, it couldn’t have made that queer little sound.

Gillian stopped her low, uncertain singing and leaned out into the

sunlight to listen. Yes. The sound was coming up from below, a shrill,

hoarse, tiny cry. Not unlike Heinrich saying “No” when they had tried to

make him play again last night.

She leaned out farther, her two hands clutching the window-sill. How

lovely it was to feel the sun on her neck, down between her

shoulder-blades as her holland overall stuck out and made a tunnel

there. A lock of her hair broke loose and hung vertically, soft and

long, below the level of the window so that the sun shone through it and

made it golden and iridescent. She shook her head a little to make the

light dance in her hair, and saw with such a glow of vanity as only the

straight-haired can feel that the movement made it curl a little at the

tip.

And still the little cry came up, tired and pleading. It sounded like

the mewing of a cat. But it was against the rules of the Club for any

member to have a cat, and Mr. Gordon’s Crack, a stout and arrogant

fox-terrier, made it his vocation to preserve the yard against strays.

But it certainly sounded like a cat. Gillian leaned out a little

farther, so far that one shoe slipped on its sole from the stone floor

and swung out behind her leaving her poised on one foot and two hands.

Yes. She could see it—wedged in under the foot-scraper by the door five

storeys below her—a kitten. Crack had probably chased it under the iron

bar and had tired of the game, and nobody had seen it to set it free.

What a good thing Gillian had heard it! What a good thing, after all,

that she had time on her hands, this lovely, dancing, shining day!

Down the ten flights of stone steps, eight to a flight, two to a

landing, she ran twisting up her flying hair as she went. The courtyard

was still empty and the kitten had wriggled itself free of the

door-scraper when she reached it; but it was mewing none the less.

Gillian had seldom seen a less attractive cat. It was not so very young,

not so disarmingly small, now that she was on the same level with it. It

was almost not a kitten any longer, and it was tortoiseshell, a brand

she didn’t admire, and Manx, a thing she had never been able to bear. It

had the four white feet and the white chest and face peculiar to its

kind, and it was very dirty. Its nose was pink and dirty and its

pink-rimmed eyes were sore. Gillian sat on her heels to examine it more

closely. It smelled of indescribable things as well as of stale fish.

And it mewed—oh, how it mewed!

“I wonder if you’re hungry?” said Gillian. “Perhaps this awful smell of

a dead sardine was eaten by some stronger cat who fought you for it.”

The cat stopped mewing and took a step nearer to Gillian; then it pushed

its cold nose and weak whisker against her hand and slithered the whole

of its brindled flank against her knee with the travelling pressure cats

exert in order to produce for themselves the sensation of being stroked.

“I’d rather you didn’t do that,” said Gillian, “you’re not clean enough,

even if this overall is going to the wash.” But the cat had whisked

round and was sleeking its other side along her knee, offering the pink,

unprotected obscenity beneath its upright stump of a tail to Gillian’s

inspection.

“Oh! I don’t like you at all,” said Gillian. And she stood up.

But the cat, having attracted attention, was minded to secure a friend.

It began to wind round and round Gillian’s ankles, once more uttering

its short, exhausted mew.

“After all,” said Gillian, “you may be really hungry, and if you were a

pretty and attractive cat you’d not be here or some one else would have

taken charge of you long ago.”

And, closing her eyes, she stooped and took the unhappy thing by the

scruff of its neck and wrapped it in the front of her overall. It made

no resistance, and as she carried it upstairs she could feel the faint

thrill of a purr creeping through the holland folds in which it lay.

The cat was hungry. It lapped up two saucers full of milk almost as

quickly as Gillian could pour them out, and it ate, with quivers and

sharp, sudden jerks of the head, a cold sausage she had meant to have

had with a lettuce for her own lunch.

When it had finished eating, not because it seemed satisfied but because

there was no more to give it, Gillian bathed its eyes with some warm

boracic lotion and saw, with loathing, that it was lapping the water

from the bowl when she returned from putting the muslin rag she had used

into the dustbin.

“_Schamlos!_” said Gillian. “I apologize to Heinrich for having let your

voice remind me of him. Now you must go home. I daren’t let William know

you’ve called.”

So she put on her hat, carried the kitten down to the street with her,

set it down at a street-corner, and then walked up to South Kensington

to look at some T’ang horses in the Museum about which Larry Browne had

been talking the evening before.

Later in the day she went to tea with Old Winona, who was having all the

post-cards sent her by the honeymoon couple as they progressed round the

world along the most frequented tracks, framed and incorporated in a

screen of fretwork. She herself was inclined to have the whole screen

gilded, but Gillian thought it would look better, or at any rate that

the pictures themselves would show better if the fretting were all

black. So they were having one fold of the screen blacked and another

gilded in order to see which pleased the greater number more. Winnie

Roehampton had been in that morning and had suggested that they should

get a third fold done pea-green.

“I think Lady Roehampton must have said that in fun,” said Gillian.

“Well, my dear,” Old Winona conceded, “her manner _was_ a little

playful. Shall we say no more about it?”

“We can always say we liked the black one best,” said Gillian.

“Or the gilded one,” said Old Winona, who did not intend to like the

black one at all herself.

It was dusk before Gillian reached the Club again. She had stayed to see

whether there would be any cards from Colombo by the seven-o’clock post,

escaping before dinner as she was expecting Jane in later in the

evening. As she reached the door in the courtyard there came a soft

rubbing around her ankles and once more the short, hungry mew of the

stray tortoiseshell rose to her ears.

“Goodness,” said Gillian, “have you come for the night?”

It seemed that such was the animal’s intention. It followed her

upstairs, or rather, to be accurate, it came upstairs with her feet,

purring as it slithered around and almost under them at every step.

“It would,” said Gillian, “be far less trouble to carry you. Less

dangerous also. But that would be encouragement—and I don’t want to

encourage you.”

But the human attitude, so long as it is not brutally repulsive, makes

no difference to a cat. This one, meek outcast though it seemed, had

that soft persistence by means of which the meek obtain fulfilment of

the promise that they shall inherit the earth. Up to the fifth floor it

squirmed, escaping injury as only a cat can, every time Gillian stumbled

over its soft and moving form.

“I shall let William see you this time,” said Gillian.

But William proved an unexpected failure so far as discouraging the

pensioner went. After a preliminary greeting of “Bow-wow-Bow-wow-wow”

(William always got his animals wrong and had insulted Crack and

seriously alienated Mr. Gordon by shouting “Baa-lamb” after the

fox-terrier at their first meeting) he took very kindly to the

tortoiseshell. And when Gillian, feeling that there was no need to

deprive William of his wonted freedom because this dingy stray had

invited itself to supper, let William out of his cage before she sat

down to the table, William not only refrained from shooing the cat away

from the plate of scraps Gillian cut for it from the boiled beef and

suet dumpling which had come up for her dinner from the kitchens, but

waddled across the floor with crusts of bread for the visitor’s plate

himself.

“Pretty cocky,” said William surprisingly, as he deposited each fresh

crust, “pretty cocky,” and finally, deserting his perch on the back of

Gillian’s chair, he established himself on the top rung of the

fender-rail and turned his boot-button eye downwards on the eating,

furry thing, and fixed it with cold, unwinking goodwill.

And then the tortoiseshell cat broke down the last barrier of Gillian’s

resistance to its adoption of herself and home by sitting up on its

horrid stump of a tail when she began to clear the table and, with the

aid of its pale, dry, little tongue and a grimy forepaw, beginning, very

feebly, to wash itself.

“Goodness,” said Gillian for the second time that evening. “If I’m a

reforming influence in your poor little life I suppose you’ll have to

stay.”

“Weak,” said Jane Bird when she came in and heard the story, “weak but

characteristic. There is no reason in logic or morals why any creature

should reform itself under your roof against your will. Besides, it’s a

vagabond. It has a bleary eye. It doesn’t want to stay. It only wants to

get you into trouble. I shall take it down to its native gutter when I

go.” And she did.

But the next morning, while Gillian was having her breakfast, the now

familiar mew, slightly stronger and more insistent came up from the

foot-scraper by the courtyard door.

She had received a letter by the early post telling her that she might,

if she liked, begin her training at once at the very exclusive

establishment Lilac had selected as the proper place in which her sister

was to be polished into fitness for a Cabinet Minister’s confidence, and

she was in a hurry to avail herself of the sudden vacancy in Miss de

Stormont’s exclusive ranks. So she dressed to go out and, taking a jug

of milk and a saucer in one hand, she locked up the flat and went

downstairs intending to nourish the kitten by stealth behind the little

box hedge that had succeeded in growing half across the north side of

the yard.

But, by the time she reached the door-scraper, the kitten had stopped

mewing, and had almost disappeared into the box hedge. The stub of its

tail alone was visible, and that quivered as though the rest of its

person were in the act of consuming food. Gillian put her jug and saucer

down on the ground-floor scullery window-sill and stalked the beggar to

its grove. There, on the stony soil from which the box hedge sprung,

stood a shallow bowl, a china bowl with a spiked, green dragon coiled

around it, a beautiful bowl that was still half full of Devonshire

cream.

Gillian had no time to waste. The cat had evidently found a richer

benefactor than herself and, musing a little who it might be in this

Club who had cream for a cat and could set it before the creature in a

piece which looked like part of the loot from Pekin, she hurried off to

her first class in Buckingham Gate.

The new surroundings, the unfamiliar routine drove this small but

pictorial mystery from her mind for the rest of the day. But at four

o’clock (Miss de Stormont gave short hours, half-past ten till one, and

an hour and a half after luncheon to prepare for the next day) it came

back to her with a thrill of romantic excitement as she turned in under

the archway from the street and saw that the cat was lapping from the

same bowl once more, but that this time the green dragon coiled over the

faintly dimpled glaze, in the open, from the flagstone by the

door-scraper.