[Map of Fields]
_FOREWORD_
Those who have been content to regard the cat merely, æsthetically,
as a household ornament, economically, as a mouse-killer, or
fantastically, as an adjunct of witchcraft, will doubtless read this
book with some surprise. For Svend Fleuron has imagined (or observed)
a cat more or less cut off from relationship with men, bringing up
her kittens in the fields, against all the odds that any wild animal,
surrounded by the destructive terrors of nature, has to face. If this
novel were a true picture of human life, it would show, relentlessly
and bitterly, how nature overcame the mother and her children. As,
however, it is a picture of cat life, the end is a happy one. Grey Puss
is successful in the struggle and so are all her kittens. “The other
farm cats’ kittens were born in barn and loft and were drowned litter
after litter--but she would see that her kittens grew to be cats.”
In spite of the complete veracity of this chronicle, I can realize the
shock which the book offers to those uninformed or insensitive persons
who persist in regarding the cat as a soft plaything or a decorative
coward, for, without a touch of sentimentality, Fleuron has very
strikingly portrayed the courage, the resourcefulness, the patience,
and the independence of Grey Puss and her multicoloured brood. They
are forced to battle for their food, to compete with the crow and the
owl, to fight the fox; they are maltreated by the farmhands and pursued
by the dog, Box; even their father makes a frustrated attempt to eat
them; but they emerge triumphantly and each kitten, in his own manner,
succeeds in making his way in the world. It is well to remember that
the picture is not extraordinary or the case abnormal. Eighty out of
every hundred cats, who grow up, make their way valiantly under similar
disheartening circumstances.
Just as certain tame cats sometimes have decided to leave the hearth
for the adventures of wild life, so Grey Puss, who had once been a
children’s pet, occasionally, in spite of rebuffs and the remembered
treachery of man, hankers after domesticity, the milk-pail, the kitchen
stove, and the soft warm hay in the barn. Several of her kittens,
Grey, White, and Tiny, inherit this vague longing and eventually
settle down in human habitations, but human beings, on the whole, play
small and entirely inferior rôles in this fine novel. They seldom step
across its pages and when they do appear, we see, with Grey Puss,
only their feet and their legs as high as the knee. Box, the dog, a
more important character in this essentially feline drama, is painted
as a good-hearted, blundering brute, always in trouble, punished for
following his instincts, and finally meeting his end in an aquatic
encounter with the mother heroine.
The cat as wild animal has been treated in fiction before, notably
by Mary E. Wilkins in _The Cat_, by Charles G. D. Roberts in _How a
Cat Played Robinson Crusoe_, and by F. St. Mars in _Pharaoh_. These,
however, are short stories with a single hero. Fleuron has employed
a broader canvas. His sub-title, _A Family Chronicle_, explains his
scheme. He is writing the story of a family. It would have been easy
to confuse kitten with kitten. Lesser writers in writing about cats
have readily fallen into this error. Fleuron, however, paints distinct
portraits of each separate puss. Each of these kittens differs from
the others not alone in appearance but also in character and each
is confronted with the rewards and punishments of his own vices and
virtues. They emerge at the end of the book as rounded and recognizable
and memorable as any of the characters in _The Way of All Flesh_.
Striped Big, “thick-set and sturdy, with short tail, strong legs, and
a back which merged smoothly into a plump round stomach; big attentive
eyes with intelligence and intensity in their glance; small ears never
at rest ... the master-hunter of the litter,” who becomes a wild cat
in a deer park; Black, the quarrelsome, who “returned snarl and spit
for kind word--and he never hit softly on the nose but scratched so
that it hurt,” who battles with crows and rats, and ends his days in
the barracks among the soldiers; Tiny, the weather-prophet, a timorous
hanger-on, who becomes the pet of a midwife; Grey, “with her quiet,
thoughtful nature, who ponders carefully every step she takes,” catches
fish and eventually goes to live with a fisherman; Red, juggler and
hypocrite, subtle and deceitful, who wins all her triumphs by stealth;
and White, a merry and friendly kitten, who makes a joke of everything;
neither big nor strong, her grace and good humour serve to advance her
station in life: these are Svend Fleuron’s _Kittens_. In the end, Grey
Puss, rid, at length, of the responsibility of this particular litter,
succumbs again to her prize-fighting lover, the great piebald hero,
that rarety, a male tortoise-shell, wooed by the soft seduction of the
dream of renewed motherhood. This, to me, is one of the most delightful
episodes in the history.
Fleuron’s method is realistic and dramatic. He devotes comparatively
little space to descriptions of his characters; he tells us what they
do and feel and they do and feel nothing that it is impossible to
imagine cats doing and feeling. Human characteristics are not ascribed
to them. The philosophy inherent in the book is cat philosophy rather
than the author’s. All this would avail nothing, were it not obvious to
any one who reads a very few pages that Fleuron has observed the animal
very closely and sympathetically. Sentimentality is entirely lacking
from this book, as it should be, but sympathy, we may be sure, is never
very far away.
This novel, I like to believe, will please W. H. Hudson, who,
abhorring the idea of “pets,” enjoys watching an animal living
its own life, unrestrained. Grey Puss and her kittens forge their
own destinies, create their own careers, restricted only by their
respective characters and their environment. Their lives are not
regulated by owners or masters. No more, it is well to remember, are
those of pet cats (The Monsieur Sidi of Côte-Darly has said truly,
_Nous sommes des êtres libres, même dans l’esclavage_), but a house-cat
is accorded a certain protection which, perhaps, softens his real
nature. This, then, marks the great distinction between _Kittens_ and
such a cat biography as Pierre Lôti’s _Vies de Deux Chattes_, in which
the writer very beautifully sets down an account of the lives of two of
his cats: those were _Lôti’s_ cats and in his book he describes, for
the greater part, their relations with _him_. Grey Puss and her kittens
are observed in their relations with nature. Their relations with man
are recorded from their point of view rather than his. This is the new
note in this very authentic cat story, authentic, at least, within the
limitations the author has set himself. In much of the previous fiction
involving the cat, puss has been handled quite in the manner of a Ouida
duchess; _Kittens_ is the feline _Esther Waters_.
Carl Van Vechten.
New York.
September 27, 1921.