after Agag, to working cats, who would sit at mouse-holes for hours
together, pounce and devour, and clean themselves and sleep, but among
them all there was no “character” which ever so faintly resembled even
Martha, far less Puss-cat.
I suppose the royalty of Agag, stupid and dull though he was, had
infected me with a certain snobbishness as regards cats, and
secretly--given that there were to be no more of those splendid
plebeians, like Puss-cat--I longed for somebody who combined royal
descent (for the sake of beauty and pride) with character, good or bad.
Nero or Heliogabalus or Queen Elizabeth, or even the Emperor William II.
of Germany would have done, but I didn’t want George I. on the one side
or a mere mild President of a small republic on the other.
Just after Agag’s death I had moved up to London, and for a time there
was this succession of unnoticeable heads of the state. They were
born--those presidents of my republic--from respectable hard-working
families, and never gave themselves out (though they knew quite well
that they were the heads of the state) to be anything else but what they
were: good, hard-working cats, with, of course, not only a casting, but
a determining vote on all questions that concerned them or anybody else.
We were democratic in those days, and I am afraid “freedom broadened
slowly down” from president to president. We were loyal, law-abiding
citizens under their rule, but when our president was sitting at the top
of the area steps, taking the air after his morning’s work, it used to
be no shock to me to see him tickled on the top of his head by people
like tradesmen coming for orders, or a policeman or a nursery-maid. The
president, in these circumstances, would arch a back, make poker of a
tail, and purr. Being at leisure and unoccupied with cares of State, he
did not pretend to be anything but _bourgeois_. The _bourgeoisie_ had
access to him; he would play with them, without any sense of inequality,
through the area railings. There was a nursery-maid, I remember, whom
our last president was very much attached to. He used to make the most
terrific onslaughts at her shoelaces.
But now all that _régime_ is past. We are royalist again to the core,
and Cyrus, of undoubtedly royal descent, is on the throne. The
revolution was accomplished in the most pacific manner conceivable. A
friend, on my birthday, two years ago, brought a small wicker basket,
and the moment it was opened the country, which for a month or two had
been in a state of darkest anarchy, without president or any ruler, was
a civilized state again, with an acknowledged king. There was no war;
nothing sanguinary occurred. Only by virtue of the glory of our king we
became a great Power again. Cyrus had arranged that his pedigree should
come with him; this was much bigger than Cyrus, and, being written on
parchment (with a large gold crown painted at the head of it), was far
more robust than he whose ancestors it enumerated. For his majesty, as
he peered over the side of the royal cradle, did not seem robust at all.
He put two little weak paws on the edge of his basket and tried to look
like a lion, but he had no spirit to get farther. Then he wrinkled up
his august face, and gave a sneeze so prodigious that he tumbled out of
the basket altogether, and by accident (or at the most by catarrh) set
foot in the dominions where he still reigns. Of course, I was not quite
so stupid as not to recognize a royal landing, though made in so
unconventional a manner; it was only as if George IV., in one of his
numerous landings on some pier (so fitly commemorated by the insertion
of a large brass boot print), had fallen flat on his face instead, and
was commemorated by a full-length brass, with top-hat a little
separate.
Babies of the human species, it is true, are all like each other, and I
would defy any professor of Eugenics or of allied and abstruse schools
of investigation to say, off-hand, whether a particular baby, divorced
from his surroundings, is the Prince of Wales or Master Jones. But,
quite apart from his pedigree, there was never any question at all about
Cyrus. There was no single hair on his lean little body that was not of
the true and royal blue, and his ears already were tufted inside with
downy growth, and his poor little eyes, sadly screened by the moisture
of his catarrh, showed their yellow topaz irises, that were never seen
on Master Jones. So he tumbled upside down into his new kingdom, and,
recovering himself, sat up and blinked, and said, “Ah-h-h.” I took him
up very reverently in both hands, and put him on my knee. He made an
awful face, like a Chinese grotesque instead of a Persian king, but
anyhow it was an Oriental face. Then he put a large paw in front of his
diminutive nose and went fast asleep. It had been a most fatiguing
sneeze.
Royal Persian babies, as you perhaps know, must never, after they have
said good-bye to their royal mammas, be given milk. When they are
thirsty they must have water; when they are hungry they have little
finely chopped-up dishes of flesh and fish and fowl. As Cyrus slept,
little chopped-up things were hastily prepared for him, and when he
woke, his food and drink were waiting his royal pleasure. They seemed
to please him a good deal, but at a crucial moment, when his mouth was
quite full, he sneezed again. There was an explosion of awful violence,
but the Royal baby licked up the fragments.... We knew at once that we
had a tidy king to rule over us.
Cyrus was two months old when he became king, and the next four months
were spent in growing and eating and sneezing. His general manner of
life was to eat largely and instantly fall asleep, and it was then, I
think, that he grew. Eventually a sneeze plucked him from his slumber,
and this first alarum was a storm-cone, so to speak, that betokened the
coming tornado. Once, after I began to count, he sneezed seventeen
times.... Then, when that was over, he sat quiet and recuperated; then
he jumped straight up in the air, purred loudly, and ate again. The meal
was succeeded by more slumber, and the cycle of his day was complete.
His first refreshment he took about seven in the morning--as soon as
anybody was dressed--and an hour later, heavily slumbering, he was
brought up to my room when I was called, buttoned up in my servant’s
coat, and placed on my bed. He at once guessed that there must be a
pleasant warm cave underneath the bedclothes, and, with stampings and
purrings, penetrated into this abyss, curled himself against my side,
and resumed his interrupted slumbers. After a while I would feel an
internal stirring begin in my bed, and usually managed to deposit the
king on the floor before his first sneeze. His second breakfast, of
course, had come upstairs with my hot water, and after the sneezing was
over he leaped into the air, espied and stalked some new and unfamiliar
object, and did his duty with his victuals. He then looked round for a
convenient resting-place, choosing one, if possible, that resembled an
ambush, the definition of which may be held to be a place with a small
opening and spaciousness within.
That gave us the second clue (tidiness being the first) towards the
king’s character. He had a tactical mind, and should make a good
general. As soon as I observed this, I used to make an ambush for him
among the sheets of the morning paper, providing it with a small
spy-hole. If I scratched the paper in the vicinity of the spy-hole, a
little silver-blue paw made wild dabs at the seat of the disturbance.
Having thus frustrated any possible enemy, he went to sleep.
But the ambush he liked best was a half-opened drawer, such as he found
one morning for himself. There among flannel shirts and vests he made
himself exceedingly comfortable, pending attacks. But before he went to
sleep he made a point of putting out a small and awe-inspiring head to
terrify any marauding bands who might be near. This precaution was
usually successful, and he slept for the greater part of the morning.
For six months he stuffed and sneezed and slept, and then, one morning,
like Lord Byron and the discovery of his fame, Cyrus woke and discovered
the responsibilities of kingship. His sneezing fits suddenly ceased, and
the Cyropaidaia (or education of Cyrus) began. He conducted his own
education, of course, entirely by himself; he knew, by heredity, what a
king had to learn, and proceeded to learn it. Hitherto the pantry and my
bedroom were the only territories of his dominion that he had any
acquaintance with, and a royal progress was necessary. The dining-room
did not long detain him, and presented few points of interest, but in a
small room adjoining he found on the table a telephone with a long green
cord attached to the receiver. This had to be investigated, since his
parents had not told him about telephones, but he soon grasped the
principle of it, and attempted to get the ear-piece off its hook, no
doubt with a view to issuing orders of some kind. It would not yield to
gentle methods, and, after crouching behind a book and wriggling his
body a great deal, he determined to rush the silly thing. A wild leap in
the air, and Cyrus and the green cord and the receiver were all mingled
up together in hopeless confusion.... He did not telephone again for
weeks.
The drawing-room was less dangerous. There was a bearskin on the floor,
and Cyrus sat down in front of the head, prepared to receive homage.
This, I suppose, was duly tendered, because he tapped it on the nose (as
the King entering the City of London touches the sword presented by the
Lord Mayor), and passed on to the piano. He did not care about the
keyboard, but liked the pedals, and also caught sight of a reflection of
himself in the black shining front of it.
This was rather a shock, and entailed a few swift fandango-like steps
with fore-paws waving wildly in the air. Horror! The silent image
opposite did exactly the same thing; ... it was nearly as bad as the
telephone. But the piano stood at an angle to the wall, offering a
suitable ambush, and he scampered behind it. And there he found the
great ambush of all, for the back cloth of the piano was torn, and he
could get completely inside it. Tactically, it was a perfect ambush, for
it commanded the only route into the room from the door; but his delight
in it was such that whenever he was ambushed there, he could not resist
putting his head out and glaring, if anybody came near, thus giving the
secret completely away. Or was it only indulgence towards our weak
intellects, that were so incapable of imagining that there was a king
inside the piano?
The exploration of the kitchen followed; the only point of interest was
a fox-terrier at whom the king spat; but in the scullery there was a
very extraordinary affair--namely, a brass tap, conveniently placed over
a sink, half-covered with a board. On the nozzle of this tap an
occasional drop of water appeared, which at intervals fell off. Cyrus
could not see what happened to it, but when next the drop gathered he
put his paw to it and licked it off. After doing this for nearly an hour
he came to the conclusion that it was the same water as he drank after
his meals. The supply seemed constant, though exiguous; ... it might
have to be seen to. After that he just looked in at the linen cupboard,
and the door blew to while he was inside. He was not discovered till six
hours later, and was inclined to be stiff about it.
Next day the Royal progress continued, and Cyrus discovered the garden
(forty feet by twenty, but large enough for Mr. Lloyd George to have his
eye on it, and demand a valuation of the mineral rights therein). But it
was not large enough for Cyrus (I don’t know what he expected), for
after looking at it closely for a morning, he decided that he could run
up the brick walls that bounded it. This was an infringement of his
prerogative, for the king is bound to give notice to his ministers, when
he proposes to quit the country, and Cyrus had said nothing about it.
Consequently I ran out and pulled him quietly but firmly back by the
tail, which was the only part of him that I could reach. He signified
his disapproval in what is called “the usual manner,” and tried to bite
me. Upon which I revolted and drove the king indoors, and bought some
rabbit wire. This I fastened down along the top of the wall, so that it
projected horizontally inwards. Then I let the king out again and sat
down on the steps to see what would happen.
Cyrus pretended that the walls were of no interest to him, and stalked a
few dead leaves. But even a king is bounded, not only by rabbit wire,
but by the limitations of cat-nature, which compelled him to attempt
again what he has been thwarted over. So, after massacring a few leaves
(already dead), he sprang up the wall, and naturally hit his nose
against the rabbit wire, and was cast back from the frontier into his
own dominions. Once again he tried and failed, appealed to an obdurate
prime minister, and then sat down and devoted the whole power of his
tactical mind to solving this baffling affair. And three days afterwards
I saw him again run up the wall, and instead of hitting his nose against
the rabbit wire, he clung to it with his claws. It bent with his weight,
and he got one claw on the upper side of it, then the other, wriggled
round it, and stood triumphant with switching tail on the frontier.
So in turn I had to sit and think; but, short of building up the whole
garden wall to an unscalable height, or erecting a _chevaux de frise_ on
the top of it, I had a barren brain. After all, foreign travel is an
ineradicable instinct in cat-nature, and I infinitely preferred that the
king should travel among small back-gardens than out of the area gate
into the street. Perhaps, if he had full licence (especially since I
could not prevent him) to explore the hinter-lands, he might leave the
more dangerous coast alone.... And then I thought of a plan, which
perhaps might recall my Reise-Kaiser, when on his travels. This I
instantly proceeded to test.
Now I had been told by my Cabinet that the one noise which would pluck
the king out of his deepest slumber, and would bring him bouncing and
ecstatic to the place where this sound came from, was the use of the
knife-sharpener. This, it appeared, was the earliest piece of household
ritual performed in the morning, when Cyrus was hungriest, and the sound
of the knife-sharpener implied to him imminent food. I borrowed the
knife-sharpener and ran out into the garden. Cyrus was already four
garden walls away, and paid not the slightest attention to my calling
him. So I vigorously began stropping the knife. The effect was
instantaneous; he turned and fled along the walls that separated him
from that beloved and welcome noise. He jumped down into his own
dominion with erect and bushy tail ... and I gave him three little oily
fragments of sardine-skin. And up till now, at any rate, that metallic
chirruping of the sharpened knife has never failed. Often I have seen
him a mere speck on some horizon roof, but there appears to be no
incident or interest in the whole range of foreign travel that can
compete with this herald of food.
On the other hand, too, if Cyrus is not quite well (this very seldom
happens), though he does not care for food, he does not, either, feel up
to foreign travel, and, therefore, the knife-sharpener may repose in its
drawer. Indeed, there are advantages in having a greedy king that I had
never suspected....
As the months went on and Cyrus grew larger and longer-haired, he
gradually, as befitted a king who had come to rule over men, renounced
all connexion with other animals, especially cats. He used to lie
_perdu_ in a large flower-pot which he had overturned (ejecting the
hydrangea with scuffles of backward-kicking hind legs), and watch for
the appearance of his discarded race. If so much as an ear or a tail
appeared on the frontier walls, he hurled himself, his face a mask of
fury, at the intruder. The same ambush, I am sorry to say, served him as
a butt for the destruction of sparrows. He did not kill them, but
brought them indoors to the kitchen, and presented them, as a token of
his prowess as a hunter, to the cook. Dogs, similarly, were not allowed,
when he sat at the area gate. Once I saw, returning home from a few
doors off, a brisk Irish terrier gambol down my area steps (Cyrus’s area
steps, I mean), and quickened my pace, fearing for Cyrus, if he
happened to be sitting there. He was sitting there, but I need not have
been afraid, for before I had reached the house a prolonged and dismal
yell rent the air, and an astonished Irish terrier shot up, as from a
gun, through the area gate again with a wild and hunted expression. When
I got there I found Cyrus seated on the top step calm and firm,
delicately licking the end of his silvery paw.
Once only, as far as I remember, was Cyrus ever routed by anything with
four legs, but that was not a question of lack of physical courage, but
a collapse of nerves in the presence of a sort of hobgoblin, something
altogether uncanny and elfin. For a visitor had brought inside her muff
an atrocious little griffon, and Cyrus had leaped on to this lady’s knee
and rather liked the muff. Then, from inside it, within an inch or two
of Cyrus’s face, there looked out a half-fledged little head, of a new
and nerve-shattering type. Cyrus stared for one moment at this dreadful
apparition, and then bolted inside the piano-ambush. The griffon thought
this was the first manœuvre in a game of play, so jumped down and
sniffed round the entrance to the ambush. Panic-stricken scufflings and
movements came from within.... Then a diabolical thought struck me:
Cyrus had never yet been in his ambush when the piano was played, and
the griffon being stowed back again in the muff, for fear of accidents,
I went very softly to the keys and played one loud chord. As the Irish
terrier came out of the area gate, so came Cyrus out of his violated
sanctuary....
Cyrus was now just a year old; his kitten-coat had been altogether
discarded; he already weighed eleven pounds, and he was clad from nose
to tail-tip in his complete royal robes. His head was small, and looked
even smaller framed in the magnificent ruff that curled outwards from
below his chin. In colour he was like a smoky shadow, with two great
topaz lights gleaming in the van; the tips of his paws were silvery, as
if wood-ash smouldered whitely through the smoke. That year we enjoyed a
summer of extraordinary heat, and Cyrus made the unique discovery about
the refrigerator, a large tin box, like a safe, that stood in the
scullery. The germ of the discovery, I am afraid, was a fluke, for he
had snatched a steak of salmon from the tray which the fishmonger had
most imprudently left on the area steps, and, with an instinct for
secrecy which this unusual treasure-trove awoke in him, he bore it to
the nearest dark place, which happened to be the refrigerator. Here he
ate as much as it was wise to gobble at one sitting, and then, I must
suppose, instead of going to sleep, he pondered. For days he had
suffered from the excessive heat; his flower-pot ambush in the garden
was unendurable, so also was his retreat under my bedclothes. But here
was a far more agreeable temperature.... This is all the reconstruction
of motive that I can give, and it is but guesswork. But day after day,
while the heat lasted, Cyrus sat opposite the refrigerator and bolted
into it whenever he found opportunity. The heat also increased his
somnolence, and one morning, when he came up to breakfast with me, he
fell asleep on the sofa before I had time to cut off the little offering
of kidney which I had meant to be my homage. When I put it quite close
to his nose he opened his mouth to receive it, but was again drowned in
gulfs of sleep before he could masticate it. So it stuck out of the
corner of his mouth like a cigarette. But eventually, I knew, he “would
wake and remember and understand.”
And now Cyrus is two years old, and has reigned a year and ten months. I
think he has completed his own education, and certainly he has cleared
his frontiers of cats, and, I am afraid, his dominion of sparrows. One
misguided bird this year built in a small bush in his garden. A series
of distressing unfledged objects were presented to the cook.... He has
appropriated the chair I was accustomed to use in my sitting-room, and
he has torn open the new back-cloth that I had caused to be put on my
piano. I dare say he was right about that, for there is no use in having
an ambush if you cannot get into it. In other ways, too, I do not think
he is strictly constitutional. But whenever I return to his kingdom
after some absence, as soon as the door is open Cyrus runs down the
steps to meet me (even as Puss-cat used to do) and makes a poker of his
tail, and says “Ah-h-h-h.” That makes up for a good deal of what appears
to be tyranny. And only this morning he gave me a large spider, precious
and wonderful, and still faintly stirring....
CRANK STORIES
THE TRAGEDY OF OLIVER BOWMAN
Oliver Bowman was sitting opposite his sister after dinner, watching her
cracking walnuts in her strong, firm hands. The wonder of it never
failed: she put two walnuts in her palms, pressed her hands together as
if in silent prayer, and then there was a great crash and pieces of
walnut-shell flew about the table. It was a waste of energy, no doubt,
since close beside her were the nut-crackers that gave the nut-eater so
great a mechanical advantage; but then his sister had so much energy
that it would have been not less ridiculous to accuse the sea of wasting
energy because it broke in waves on the shore. Presently she would drink
a couple of glasses of port and begin smoking in earnest.
“And then?” asked Oliver, who was exhibiting a fraternal interest in the
way in which Alice had passed her day.
“Then I had tea at an A B C shop, and walked round the Park. Lovely day:
you ought to have come out.”
“I had a little headache,” said Oliver. He spoke in a soft voice, which
occasionally cracked and went into a high key, as when a boy’s voice is
breaking. That had happened to him some fifteen years ago, since he was
now thirty; but he had made a habit of dropping into falsetto tones, as
being an engaging remnant of youthfulness.
“A good walk in the sun and wind would have made that better,” said his
sister.
“But I don’t like the sun,” said he petulantly, “and you know I detest
the wind.”
“What did you do, then?” she asked.
“I read a story by Conrad about a storm at sea. I quite felt as if I was
going through it all without any of the inconveniences of it. That is
the joy of a well-written book: it enlarges your experiences without
paying you out for them.”
Alice dusted the fragments of walnut-shell from her fingers, poured out
a glass of port, and lit a cigarette.
“I would sooner do any one thing myself than read about any twenty,” she
observed. “I should hate to get my experiences secondhand, already
digested for me, just as I should hate to wear secondhand clothes or eat
peptonized food. They’ve got to be mine, and I’ve got to do them--I mean
digest them--myself.”
Oliver refused port, and took a very little coffee with a good deal of
hot milk in it.
“Considering Nature has been making men and women for so many million
years, it’s odd how often she makes mistakes about them,” he said. “She
constantly puts them into the wrong envelope: she puts a baby girl into
a baby boy’s envelope, and a baby boy into a baby girl’s. You ought to
have been a boy, Alice, and I ought to have been a girl.”
Alice could not resist another walnut or two, and the crashings began
again.
“That may be true,” she said; “but that’s not really the point. A woman
may be a real woman and yet want to do things herself. The real mistake
that Nature makes is to give people arms and legs and a quantity of good
red blood, and not give them the desire of using them.”
“Or to give them an imagination without the desire of using it,”
remarked Oliver.
“I’m glad I have none,” said Alice firmly. “I never imagine what a thing
is going to be like. I go and do the thing, and then I know.”