THE SCHOOLROOM
We soon could do more than lap, we could eat things. Auntie May and
Rosamond had a chafing-dish, and they used to cook all sorts of messes
in it for us and for mother, who was very fussy about her food, and
took dislikes to the most ordinary things. For instance, porridge
she would not touch, or cod-liver oil biscuits, while Hovis food, or
Horlick's, or a sardine put her out of her mind with delight. They say
that a sardine will sometimes bring a dying cat back to life. They
burnt methylated spirit in the chafing-dish, and the first time I
saw the sly curling flame winding up among Auntie May's new novel, I
confess I was frightened. But mother reassured us; she said if I looked
attentively I would see that it was a very obedient flame, and would
go straight up into the air and do no harm unless they interrupted it.
She gave it a wide berth herself, and hoped we would do the same when
we began to be able to get out of our basket and walk about. Auntie
May and Rosamond were not so very careful, for once when they thought
the spirit was getting low, Rosamond took the whole bottle and poured
some more on. Huh! it took fire, and she dropped it pretty quick, and
it broke, and there were three separate burning pools on the floor.
Mother put a paw over us all, though we could not have got out of the
bed even if we had wanted to, and gripped Freddy by the neck, ready to
lift him out if it should be necessary. Luckily Auntie May was there,
and there was a large flowerpot full of earth in the room. She tilted
out the flower, head over roots, and poured the earth on the burning
pools, instead of the water which Rosamond had torn off to the bathroom
to get. It was soon out, and the poor child got a scolding and a lesson
in chemistry from her grandpapa.
They had not got proper things to work with, mother said. They had no
spoon, but used to stir up the mixture with the butt-end of one of
Auntie May's pens. When it was ready, they would pour it out into any
piece of china that was handy--Japanese pots and plates that cost a
fortune, so I was told. Then they washed them up in the bath, and we
used to hear this sort of thing: 'Mind that cloisonné, Rosamond!' or,
'That is a bit of Persian four-mark you have chipped, I do believe!'
But it was no matter, they got a new bit out of the studio. Mr. Graham
was a collector, and nothing was too good for the cats.
Up to now, none of us had ever succeeded in getting out of the bed by
ourselves. We were lifted out by them to walk about a little, keeping
our stomachs off the ground with great difficulty. Our legs had a
strange tendency to slip away beyond us, 'doing splits' as they do in
the pantomime--so Auntie May called our way of getting ourselves along.
When at last we did succeed in keeping our legs at right angles to our
bodies, we wobbled sadly, and longed to be put back again among the
hay. But at times, when we weren't eating or sleeping, but thoroughly
awake, and there wasn't much doing in the old dull bed, we used to
try to get out of it. We three boys used to make a ladder of Zobeide,
and, propping ourselves up on her, get over the edge in a jerk, but at
first we could only one of us look over, and then Zobeide would meanly
crumble away under us, and pitch us all head-over-heels into the bed
again. She took an unfair advantage, too, and bit our hind legs.
One day, however, I managed to climb up without the help of Zobeide,
till my paws rested on the top of the basket, and I was screwing up
my hind legs till they came nearly up to join the front ones, when
somebody--I believe it was Rosamond--gave the after-part of me a push
and I came over on to the floor on my nose, which, luckily, is flat,
not Roman. I rose unsteadily, and walked away like one in a dream. I
think I must have walked right out of the door and into the bathroom.
Rosamond was behind me, and I had a sort of feeling that I would like
to run away from her--a feeling that I have had many a time since with
nearly all of Them. It was because she was behind me. Now if she had
been in front I should have longed to pass her, and then turn round and
jeer at her. But as it was, Run! Run! was my motto, and into a corner
for preference. I chose a corner, and squeezed myself in behind some
old boxes in the bathroom. They must have been very full of dust, for
I sneezed twice and so told Rosamond where I was, and she put a great
hand like a house in and caught hold of me.
'Naughty little thing!' she said. That was the first hint I had that
They expect us to stay beside them and not run away. I took the hint;
at least, I was good enough to stop running away sometimes, when she
said my name very decidedly. You never know what They may have in
their hands to make it worth your while to stop; as often as not it is
something to eat. Rosamond put me back in the box, and mother cleaned
me for half-an-hour quite unnecessarily, saying, 'My children shall be
kept unspotted from the world as far as I can manage it, for the world
is very dirty.'
She is indeed most particular. She washed off the marks of people's
hands carefully wherever they had touched us. It looks rude, I think,
to see a cat, the moment it has been kindly stroked, turn round and
begin to lick the stain away. Rosamond said it is just as if she took
out her pocket-handkerchief after grandpapa had kissed her, and wiped
her cheek with it.
We could all get out of our bed now. In fact, we would not stay in,
except for sleeping and eating (mother still fed us a little, so as
to let us down easy). We were all over the place, and the door of the
study had to be always kept shut. Rosamond said that being cat-maid
was much harder than lessons at home, for she could keep Fraülein in
order, but she could not keep us.
'I _can't_ keep them in,' she complained to her grandpapa. 'I collect
them all in my pinafore and drop them all into bed, and out they ooze
in a moment like so many india-rubber balls! Fred especially is a
_fiend_. He is in to everything. He is outside everything. He touches
everything--licks it mostly. I am glad to say that he burnt his nose
badly the other day on the electric radiator. He won't touch that again
in a hurry!'
No, that he won't! He singed off a bit of his whiskers, and we all
laughed at him awfully. He was a queer little cat, not a bit like
Zobeide or Togo. _We_ never wanted to fight, but he lay down in a
corner of the bed and said, 'Come on, you!' Then Zobeide or I took a
hand, and he knocked us down and drove the straws into our eyes. Mother
punished him by taking him in her arms and kicking him with her hind
legs, but he bit her face and she had to leave off. When we packed
ourselves to go to sleep, mother happening to be away, we always made a
sort of cross, lying over each other for warmth, and Freddy always took
the top, out of his turn, and having so much the biggest head, always
managed to get his own way. We three others hoped that the first one
of us Auntie May sold or gave away would be Fred, but nothing was said
about that. Auntie May bought a ball with a jingle in it for us all,
she distinctly said so, but Fred always assumed that it was his ball,
and he went so far as to claw the jingle out of it, saying that it
amused him quite as much without. We never got a chance of playing with
that ball unless Auntie May happened to leave her house shoes in the
room, and then Fred said we might take the ball, for he didn't get a
chance of real leather to gnaw every day.
Altogether he was a terror, and Mary used to say she would like to
wring his neck. That didn't frighten Fred; he knew she wouldn't do
anything of the kind, and he went on jumping on to the back of her
neck, and getting among the ashes when she was lighting the fire and
being swept up by mistake, and plopping on to paper parcels, and eating
coals, and needles, and buttons, and corks, and working off a hundred
wicked tricks he had invented.
You see, Fred never would attend to mother's lectures when we were left
quite alone in the room, and she told us all the little catly rules
that we should have to guide our conduct by when we left her. Some of
them, she said, were traditional, going back to the days beyond the
dawn of history, when cats were worshipped. She said we must never
forget that great fact, never allow ourselves to lose sight of it, but
let it regulate all our conduct and our relations towards Them. They
no longer worship us, though they are kind to us. They have perhaps
forgotten, but we need not. Therefore we must be gentle, obedient,
subservient to Them, but with a reservation. We should, if we thought
proper, come to their call, but never with vulgar alacrity. She thought
it the highest possible praise of a cat to have said of him, as Auntie
May had once said of a friend's cat, 'The more he is called, the more
he doesn't come.' We should find time to sit down on the way and make
pretence to attend to our personal appearance, or what not. We might
suffer Them to hold us in their arms, but not in inconvenient or
indecorous positions, such as upside down, or round their necks like a
boa, or pretending we are wheelbarrows, and so on. She said They--the
more punctilious of Them--have a way of holding a cat up by the loose
skin of its neck, that being considered the least uncomfortable one to
us personally. Quite a mistake, she said; they only think so because
we do not usually protest--how can we, when the skin is strained so
tightly over our throats as to preclude all attempt at conversation?
The only proper way to hold a cat is to take both hands to it and
support the lower limbs, instead of letting the whole weight of the
body depend from the shoulders or the paws. She told us how to open a
door, if it was left ever so little ajar. That is to walk up it--about
two good steps will do. If it is shut, the handle should be turned;
but that needs special aptitudes. Then if we mew passionately before
a closed door and it is opened for us, we should not go in, as would
naturally occur to an undisciplined cat to do, but sit down at a
distance and lick our face, so as to show we do not really care about
it.
She told us the proper way to lie down--never at once, but after having
described two or three circles. The right thing to do is to turn round
and round, brushing our fur the right way till we are more or less in
the form of a ball. Then, and not till then, we may definitely lie down
with an expression of contentment if we feel like it. We are to imagine
ourselves making a nest in some very high grass, beating it down all
round us to form a bed before we can settle in for the night. Then we
must tuck our heads in symmetrically, and safely too, taking care to
keep one eye free, ready to open and see what is going on, and an ear
cocked to hear strange or unusual sounds. That kind of high long grass
was, she said, called jungle grass, and our ancestors long ago, in the
time before they were worshipped, lived in the jungle and ran wild
there. The worshipping came afterwards.
She taught us humility, too. When we heard the strays howling outside
in the square garden, too weak to catch birds for their food perhaps,
and begging a morsel or a cup of milk from door to door, we were to
pause in our own feeding and think, 'This cat's ancestors were probably
kings, like mine. I must not be stuck-up.'
Sometimes even Fred would leave off roaming and sitting away by
himself, thinking over and planning some new bit of mischief to do, and
come back to bed and take the warm place that Zobeide had made, and beg
mother to tell us about 'Dirty Whitey' of the underground. We had all
heard it many a time, but it was a nice story.
Mother had seen her once the time she was in the underground at Notting
Hill Gate with Auntie May, and Auntie May had said:
'Oh, bother, there's that wretched cat again! It makes me quite sick to
see it playing about between the rails.'
She was waiting for her train, and a nice porter was standing near her,
and he said:
'Bless you, Miss, she knows her way better nor any of us. She takes a
little walk to High Street, Kensington, now and again, and comes back
quite safe and sound. She bringed up a family of kittens there in the
tunnel and never a one was hurt. But I don't doubt myself she'll get
copped some day!'
Auntie May said she thought so too, and she walked along to the other
end of the platform to avoid seeing the white cat crossing the line
just out of bravado as the train was coming in. When her own train
came along, she said she felt as if that cat would be under it and be
cut in bits. But it wasn't, for she saw it again a week later, and
told mother. Then quite a month later she came in and told mother that
'Dirty Whitey' had been 'copped' at last.
'Whitey' had been chasing a rat across the metals when a train was
just coming in, and professional pride had forbidden her to let go.
So the train had cut off her head with the tail of that rat in her
mouth--at least, so the porter had told Auntie May. We loved that
story, and, as I have said, even Freddy used to come and listen when
mother began to tell it to us.
Zobeide liked the story of the cat that walked all the way to London
after its master, who was very meanly moving house and had intended not
to take the family cat. Instinct, mother said. It seemed to work both
ways, for another cat was brought in a covered basket away from the
house it had been born in to one a hundred miles away in quite another
part of the country. It never saw anything, for it had been packed up
in the room in the first house, and the basket was not undone till they
had got into a room in the other and shut the door. No matter, for that
cat was not to be beaten. It just went straight up the chimney and home
again. It evidently loved places better than people, Zobeide remarked.
'It is generally the way,' mother would answer, 'but _I_ happen to love
Auntie May, and where _she_ is, is home to me. I'm not sure I even
believe those stories. I know that I should be puzzled to find my
way back to Egerton Gardens, even if I wanted to! Probably if I once
started, the gods of my ancestors would endow me with a sixth sense and
show me the way.'
Admiral Togo always asked for the Whittington story and got it, but I
didn't care for it. I liked the story of the cat that told the people
of the house that the basement was on fire, by running into their
bedroom with her coat all smouldering where a hot splinter had fallen
on it, and the Pied Piper of Hamelin. That was all about rats, as it
happened, but no matter, it made my mouth water.