(Edward Marshall: For Short Stories.)
She was not a pretty sight ... an old woman tottering under sixty years
of poverty ... and now was the worst poverty of all. Her hand, which
gathered a grimy plaid shawl at her throat, trembled ceaselessly from
privation, and the vile liquor privation had brought. She was hungry;
it seemed to her that she had never eaten. She was cold; it seemed to
her that she had never known warmth.
She crept into a little hallway on the water front. The breeze from
the river was not a strong one; but to her it was a hurricane. The
drizzling rain hurt her. The minor tones of a bell from a ship at the
near-by docks told that it was midnight. With inarticulate moans she
crouched down in a corner, closing the door to keep out the wind and
rain.
Something was in the corner, she felt it with her benumbed hands. It
was soft and warm to her touch. A plaintive mew followed. The something
was a cat. At first she rather resented its presence. Then she gathered
it up in her arms and pressed it against the bosom of her ragged old
dress. Here was a creature as miserable as she. It was only a cat, but
she felt less lonely with it in her arms. When she had been a little
girl she had had a pet kitten.
Each was cold--the cat and the woman--but each found some warmth in
the other. The cat stopped mewing and the woman stopped moaning. The
wind had shifted and the rain had ceased. The door swung open again and
the moon hanging calmly beautiful among the clouds, shone through the
tangle of masts and cordage and into the hallway.
The woman, crouched in the corner, held the cat as she would have held
a child. By-and-by she began to rock slowly to and fro. The clouds
drifted away, and the stars joined the moon in peeping through the door.
The woman’s eyes were closed and she was crooning an old-fashioned
lullaby. The cat was very faintly purring and one of its paws rested
on her bare neck. The moon sank slowly out of sight and new clouds
obscured the stars.
When the policeman peered in the hallway just before daybreak, the
woman and the cat were asleep.
And they are still sleeping.