“A little lion, dainty, sweet,--
(For such there be)--
With sea-grey eyes and softly stepping feet.”
[Illustration: Kitten by Madame Ronner]
Out of the basket there stepped a forlorn little figure, dusky grey,
pathetically wailing, cold, hungry, and tired. He was not eight weeks
old, every relation and friend in the world was left far behind him;
but he was in entire possession of himself and his manners. The ruffled
coat was a uniform tint; the little pointed head gave evidence of the
long pedigree he trailed behind him. In these weary and destitute
circumstances the true air of _noblesse oblige_ was on him.
His very appetite had deserted him, and for days he had to be forcibly
fed with warm milk in a teaspoon. He remonstrated about this, but it
impaired not the least his confidence in human nature.
Then he grew better, and became an elf-like creature, playing rather
seriously with his own tail, but venturing not far from the skirts of
his mistress. Once he saw the old cat, and would have run to her, but
she turned on him a look so malevolent that we snatched him out of
harm’s way, and still scowling she proceeded to take possession of his
sleeping basket. She used it for a day or two, but finding that it had
been given up to her she abandoned it.
When I joined Mentu and his mistress on a tour in Cornwall some weeks
later he had become a different creature. He was still very polite, but
had grown in size and in confidence, and he was fast developing the
drama of the cat and the madness of the kitten’s spirits. He whirled
round the room to catch the crackling paper hanging on a string; he
played the clown with a cardboard paper-basket, hurling himself into
it with such force that it upset and poured him out like water on the
other side; he retrieved paper balls, and hanging over the bars of
chairs and tables beat them with the tips of his paws; he hid them
under corners of carpets and expended an immense amount of time and
strategy in finding them again. The paper flew into the air, and sped
across the room so fast that only a very clever and agile kitten could
ever have caught it. Then Mentu discovered the Shadow Dance.
One evening while the paper was swinging on a string in the lamplight,
Mentu suddenly saw the shadow. Thenceforward he renounced the substance
and deliberately pursued the shadow. If the actual paper came in his
way he hit it with a pettish gesture, and searched the carpet for the
shadow. And he knew the two were connected, for at sight of the paper
he began to look about for the shadow. Then he rushed after it, and
through it; he spread himself out on the carpet to catch it, and it
was gone; he fled round and round in a circle after it, and cared for
nothing so much as the pursuit of nothingness.
We went to an empty hotel, hidden in a little bay near the Lizard.
Green slopes, covered even in March with flowering gorse, fall quickly
to the pillared basalt coves. Here you may sit on slabs of rock
sheltered from east and north wind, scenting the sweet, pungent incense
breath of the gorse, and watching the gulls at play beneath. You can
see the great liners pass, signalling at Lloyd’s station, and branching
off below the Lizard Lights to cross the ocean; or you can watch the
gallant ships come in, corn laden, with men crowding to the side for
their first glimpse of English shores. But, except on Sunday, when
Lizard Town walks two and two on the cliff, you see no man there and
hardly a stray beast.
So here Mentu became the companion of our strolls, scudding across open
stretches of green, rushing into shelter from imagined foes under gorse
and heather, dancing with sidelong steps and waving tail down little
grassy slopes, or lying on ledges of rock as grey as himself, starred
with lichen as yellow as his eyes.
Once we went out along the cliff to return by the road, but here
Mentu’s faith in us deserted him. He set out to go home alone, but
dared not; he wished to come with us, but was tired; he would not be
carried for he saw children in the distance, and a cat prefers to trust
its own sense and agility in danger. So in despair of his wavering
decision we walked on, until, turning, we caught sight of a pathetic
figure silhouetted against the dusty road--a silky kitten with wide
mouth opened in a despairing outcry against fate.
Once Mentu met a cow grazing on the cliff. Here was terror, but that he
realised the compelling power of the feline eye. He fixed on her two
yellow orbs with fear-distended pupils, prepared to make himself very
large and terrible by an arched back if she so much as turned towards
him, and thus holding her paralysed with terror (though she appeared
to graze unconcernedly the while) he walked by with tiptoe dignity and
scudded to shelter.
But Mentu himself was once nearly petrified by a very awful kind of
Gorgon. He was tripping and smelling, and coming to the edge of a
little stone well he looked in. Suddenly we saw him turn rigid, with a
face of inexpressible horror. He stood statue-like for a moment, then
lifting silent paws retired backwards noiselessly, imperceptibly, step
by step from the edge. Once out of sight of the pool he turned and
fled. I went to look in. A frog sat there.
Sometimes we went down a stony winding path to the cove beneath; a
wren was building here, for the cock-wren sat on a bush and girded
at Mentu as he passed. One day I heard from far below the sharp note
whirring like a tiny watchman’s rattle, and returned to find Mentu
lying on the path with swishing tail cruelly eyeing the atom which
scolded him from above.
When the time came to go home Mentu had undergone another
transformation. He had trebled in size; he had lost the rough, reddish
“kitten hair”; his coat was shining, silky, ashen-grey; his eyes were
the colour of hock. Blue Persians were not plentiful in Cornwall, and a
little crowd followed us up and down the platform, for Mentu travelled
no longer in a basket.
In the train he was perfectly calm; looked out of the window at
stations, and regarded railway officials with an impartial and critical
eye. A fellow traveller pronounced him “a kind of dog-cat,” alluding,
we supposed, to his intelligent and self-possessed demeanour as he sat
upright on his mistress’ lap.
We parted again, and from time to time I had accounts of Mentu. In
spring time he relinquished the pursuits of shadows in favour of
less innocuous sport. He was found curled up in a blackbird’s nest,
meditating on the capital dinner he had made of the inhabitants. He
laid little offerings of dead, unfledged birds on his mistress’ chair
or footstool. He was seen trotting across the lawn, his head thrown
proudly back, so that the nest he was bringing her should clear the
ground. Saddest of all, she hung up a cocoanut for the tits outside her
window, and a dead blue-tit was soon laid at her feet.
Again, it was said that he appeared suddenly, like the Cheshire cat,
on a tree miles from home; and in early autumn, in the morning, he was
seen crossing the lawn with a train of seventeen angry pheasants behind
him.
We renewed acquaintance when I came to stay at Mentu’s home. He was out
when I arrived, and as we sat with open windows in the growing dusk
there was a sudden soft leap, and a presence on the window--a wild
creature, with shining eyes, the very incarnation of the dusk. Even as
he jumped down and came to our feet the mood changed. He purred to
us, and went to his dinner plate. Finding there a satisfactory mess he
began to eat, turning round to throw rapid, grateful glances towards
his mistress, purring the while.
Like the Dean who gave thanks for an excellent dinner, or a moderately
good dinner, so Mentu is wont to graduate his grace according to his
meat. A fish’s head, or the bones of a partridge (it was long before
his mistress could be persuaded that he would not prefer a nicely
filleted sole) will produce the most grateful glances and the loudest
purrs.
As I was occupying the sofa, Mentu took his after-dinner nap on my feet.
It is odd that cats show an intense dislike to anything destined and
set apart for them. Mentu has a basket of his own, and a cushion made
by a fond mistress, but to put him into it is to make him bound out
like an india-rubber ball. He likes to occupy proper chairs and sofas,
or even proper hearthrugs. In the same way, the well-bred cat has an
inconvenient but æsthetic preference for eating its food in pleasant
places, even as we consume chilly tea and dusty bread and butter
in a summer glade. A plate is distasteful to a cat, a newspaper still
worse; they like to eat sticky pieces of meat sitting on a cushioned
chair or a nice Persian rug. Yet if these were dedicated to this use
they would remove elsewhere. Hence the controversy is interminable.
[Illustration: _Photograph by H. R. Gourlay_
“Mentu.”]
The next few days Mentu was determined to devote to family life. He
came to the drawing-room in the evening and was very affable and
polite. He went readily to any one who invited him, and dug his claws
encouragingly into their best evening dresses. We had taught him a
trick in Cornwall which he still remembered. He lies on his back, two
hands are put under him, and he is gently raised. A touch on elbows and
knees makes him shoot forelegs and hindlegs outwards and downwards; so
that head and forelegs hang down at one end, hindlegs and tail at the
other, and the great grey cat lies curved into crescent shape, purring
serenely.
In the course of the evening my collie, a visitor with me, came
genially into the room. Mentu did not know him; he sat upright, with
eyes fixed upon the dog, shaking with terror, but making no attempt to
escape.
I heard Mentu calling on his mistress early next morning in a querulous
tone. As her door was shut I invited him into my room, but he found
it not to his mind, and soon left me. He sat all the morning with us,
but was easily _ennuyé_, and walked about uttering short bored cries
until he could find some one to play with him. He delighted in a game
of hide and seek which he had instituted for himself. He hid and called
out, lay still till he was seen, and then sprang up to scud across the
room. When we went into the garden he followed, and the scolding of a
blackbird made us look up to see him on a branch overhead staring down
at us. He walked with us, too, or rather when we walked he plunged
rustling through the bushes bordering the path, and flashed out to
stand a moment in the open.
Withal one felt that a thinking being moved with us, whether bored or
childishly excited, gently affectionate or suddenly grateful; a being
thoroughly self-conscious, greedy of admiration, regarding himself
and us, and taking his life into his own hands. And close beneath the
surface of his civilisation lay the wild beast nature. One could wake
it in an instant, for if I caught his eye the surface flashed sapphire
for a moment, then the eye with distended pupils was fixed upon me,
and silently, holding me by the eye, he believed, he stole across the
room, and jumped up suddenly almost in my face. There was something
uncanny about it, and even possibly dangerous, for if I looked up from
a book sometimes I found that topaz eye trying to catch and arrest my
own, while the great cat stole silently nearer. I think if we had not
relinquished the game Mentu’s claws would have blinded me.
For the wild nature in Mentu is as strong as his inbred civilisation;
and the two are at strife together. His heart and his appetite lead him
back and back to the house; keep him there for days together--a dainty
fine gentleman, warm-hearted, capricious. But the spirit of the wild
creature rises in him, and the night comes when at bed-time no Mentu
is waiting at the door to be let in; or in the evening, as he hears
the wind rise and stir the branches, even while the rain beats on the
window pane, the compelling power of out-of-doors is on him, and he
must go; and when the window is lifted and the night air streams in,
there is but one leap into the darkness.
He will return early in the morning tired and satiate, or spring in
some evening as the dusk gathers, with gleaming eyes where the light of
the wild woods flickers and dies down in the comfortable firelight of
an English home.
This is the true cat, the real Mentu, this wild creature who must go
on his mysterious errands; or who, I rather believe it, plunges out to
revel in the intoxication of innumerable scents, unaccounted sounds
and the half revealed forms of wood and field in twilight, in darkness
or in dawn. In his soul he is a dramatist, an artist in sensation.
He lives with human beings, he loves them, as we live with children
and love them, and play their games. But the great world calls us and
we must go; and Mentu’s business in life is elsewhere. He lives in
the half-lights, in secret places, free and alone, this mysterious
little-great being whom his mistress calls “My cat.”
[Illustration: Kitten by Madame Ronner]
[Illustration: Kitten by Madame Ronner]