"And when Maeldune and his men went into the best of the houses
they saw no one in it but a little cat that was in the middle of
the house, and it playing about on the four stone pillars that were
there, and leaping from one to another. It looked at the men for a
short space, but it did not stop from its play."
--Lady Gregory's _Book of Saints and Wonders_.
People are people, and cats are cats. We do not know our pussies. We
pet them but we cannot tame them. Landor's Cincirollo,
"wagging his dread jaw at every chirp
Of bird above him on the olive branch,"
is latent in Wordsworth's
"kitten on the wall
Sporting with the leaves that fall."
These charming fireside tenants of ours have their own concerns, which
lie aloof from the human. Even nursery-lore bears witness to this:
"'Pussy-cat, Pussy-cat,
Where have you been?'
'I've been to London,
To see the Queen.'
'Pussy-cat, Pussy-cat,
What did you there?'
'I frightened a little mouse
Under her chair.'"
But if we cannot forego the consciousness of those tiger claws hid in
the velvet daintiness of the light feet, neither can tabby put her
trust in us. Race memory and, too often, individual experience accuse
us. Her reticence with humankind, her stealth, her self-reliance, might
well have been stamped deep into cat character by the monstrous
cruelties she has suffered at our hands. Her reputed connection with
witches, of whom it is estimated that Christendom put to death some
nine million, involved the poor animal in their hideous tortures.
Indeed, she caught it from all sides. Cats were flung into the bonfires
to perish with the helpless old crones who had cared for them. A witch
might be exorcised by whipping a cat, like the wretched puss long and
solemnly flogged by twelve priests "in a parlor at Denham, til shee
vanished out of theyr sight." And it was a cat, so confession on the
rack declared, that after an accursed christening was cast into the sea
to raise a storm that should drown James of Scotland, "the devil's
worst enemy," on his wedding journey home from Denmark. This royal
witch-hunter, who came thirteen years later to the throne of England,
was not content until thirty human victims had paid by horrible deaths
for the black art of that storm.
A few of these maligned cats have left a distinctive record on the
blurred page of history. Rutterkin, the familiar of Agnes Flower, whose
very name should have attested her innocence, was black as the soot of
hell, but Mother Fraunces, who learned the secrets of sorcery from her
own grandmother, had "a whyte spotted cat * * * to be her sathan,"
while the leader of the infernal chorus in the cavern scene of
_Macbeth_ was a tabby:
"Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed."
Into other inoffensive little beasts, "hedgepigs," puppies, owls, bats,
crows, rabbits, toads, the evil spirits were believed to enter, though
Thomas Heywood notes with satisfaction that no imp was ever so
sacrilegious as to masquerade as dove or lamb; but the cat calumny has
lasted longest.
"And shall I be afrayd
Of Cats in mine own Countrey?"
Some of us are, for a recent criminal trial in one of the Middle States
brought out the fact that many an American pocket, even to-day, carries
a silver bullet as a talisman against the "black hex," or witch-cat.
Yet from the cruelties of superstition poor puss has suffered less than
from the cruelties of sport. Rustic festivals in Merry England were not
complete without the archery matches whose target was a terrified,
bleeding cat, hung up in a wicker "bottle," while shouts of glee
greeted the successful hits in the whizzing storm of arrows. As a
special merry-making, a great company of our jovial ancestors would set
forth on horseback, with drum-beating and all manner of hullabaloo,
attended by half the population of the town, to enjoy themselves at the
expense of some ill-fated pussy. A barrel, half full of soot, was swung
from a cross-beam firmly fixed on two high poles. Into this barrel she
was plunged and under it the valiant horsemen rode as gayly as the
English ride to a fox-hunt even yet, striking it tremendous blows with
clubs and wooden hammers. If any life was left in the bruised and
mangled cat, after the destruction of the barrel, the man who put an
end to her by some spectacular novelty of barbarity was the hero of the
day.
How can we expect wise old Grimalkin to forgive us our atrocities? She
remembers. Accepting or rejecting at her pleasure what courtesies are
offered her, she maintains her own reserves. Rare are the recorded
instances of her going out of her way to serve mankind, to whom she
owes no debt of gratitude. Yet a legend, attested by two portraits of
this Good Samaritan, tells that when Sir Henry Wyatt, father of the
poet, was imprisoned in the Tower under Richard III and left to perish
of starvation, a cat came daily to his window-grating, bringing him a
pigeon from a neighboring dove-cot, which doubtless had its own opinion
of her charity. No wonder that Sir Henry, in his later, honored years
under the Tudors, "would ever make much of cats, as other men will of
their spaniels or hounds."
With the best will in the world toward _felis domestica_, I have never
been able to maintain fortunate relations with the individuals that
have come my way. Colleagues of mine have reared kittens that have
become the pride and joy of their hearths, as yellow Leo, who passed
from the happiest of homes into a lyric shrine; but my own cats make a
sorry parade down the avenue of memory. At the far, dim end of the
avenue glints out a chubby child in a calico-caped sunbonnet,
laboriously trundling in her doll-carriage five blind kittens, with the
benevolent intent of giving them a pleasant airing. The little
copper-toed shoes bump on the rocks and are caught in the brambles of
that rough pasture, while at every jolt that sprawl of kittenhood
overflowing the small red chariot miauls so dolorously that their
benefactor is sorely tempted to sit down and cry with them. But
amazement at their lack of appreciation is less than resentment at the
conduct of their grim, gray mother, Old Spotnose, who comes tearing
after in fierce pursuit and overtakes the rocking vehicle, whence she
snatches one of the wailing passengers by the scruff of its neck and
races back with her dangling burden to the woodshed. Determined to make
the remaining kittens happy, the child goes tugging and panting on, but
still there is heard that dreaded rush in the rear, and another,
another, another and yet another of those squallerkins is kidnapped.
Nothing is left at last but an empty doll-carriage, overturned among
the daisies and, deep within the sunbonnet, a puckered, crimson face
flowing with tears.
Throughout my childhood Old Spotnose continued to be an unsocial and
ungracious being. Perhaps annoyed by our persistent attentions to her
frequent families in the woodshed, she sought out all manner of
hiding-places from haymow to cellar. Memorable is the Sunday morning
when our mother lifted down the hatbox from her upper closet shelf and
looked in, her Sabbath expression completely destroyed, to find a
huddle of new kittens reposing in the crown of her best bonnet. The
sudden disappearances of these successive kitten groups were to my
slowly dawning apprehension first a mystery and then a horror. Old
Spotnose finally took to the woods, returning to the kitchen door for
food, a gaunt, half-savage creature, only under stress of icebound
weather. When we moved away from the village, she could not be found,
but one of my brothers, back for a visit the following summer, heard
that she had been seen skulking about the house and that kindly
neighbors had thrown meat and fish in her way. Carrying a basin of
milk, he went to a break in the barn foundations and, lying flat on the
ground, called and coaxed. Relenting toward humankind at the last, sick
Old Spotnose, hardly more than skin and bone, crawled out to him. She
would not taste the milk, but she lay against his knee for a while,
accepting his caresses; then dragged herself back under the barn to die
alone.
From that time to this, all my personal relations with cats have ended
in grief. One engaging kitten after another grew into romantic or
adventurous youth only to meet disaster. Perhaps our most heart-rending
experience was with Triptolemus, taken from his mother in such tender
infancy that we could not teach him to lap milk or even suck it from
the finger. Finally he solved the problem himself by tumbling into the
saucer and, when he was lifted out, licking his feet with relish. For
days he insisted on the saucer promenade, taking nourishment only by
applying his wayward little tongue to each foot in turn. From a
roly-poly innocent, wondering at the world out of the roundest of blue
eyes, he grew, with the astonishing speed of kittenhood, into a
profligate young ruffian, limping home from one disreputable fight
after another with torn ears and gashed neck and thighs. One wound
deepened into a festering, offensive sore, beyond the cure of our
domestic surgery, and as veterinaries and animal hospitals were then
foreign to our experience, a brother, in my absence, was bidden take
the cat down to the river and drown him. Very slowly the executioner, a
stout bag in his hand, made his way to the water's edge, Trip careering
about his feet and playing with the fatal string. The bag was weighted
with stones and the cat was ordered to enter the open mouth. Trip
sniffed at it suspiciously, did not like the game, but looked up
trustfully into the familiar face and obeyed. The boy who flung that
bag out into the current and came running home as if nine reproachful
little ghosts were at his heels could never be brought to drown a cat
again.
Later on, there was a graceful mite, Argon, whom I can still see
jumping after moths in the moonlight; but before the moth-season was
over, there came a night whose darkness never rendered him up. Strayed
or stolen, killed, chased, enchanted, it was not for us to know.
Years after, our home rejoiced for a few brief weeks in the charms of
Frisky Fuzzy, a peculiarly affectionate, confiding kitty, who met a
cruel death by the teeth of the rector's terrier. This young priest was
a holy man in general, but he had no regard for the sixth commandment
as broken by his dog. All the neighborhood was aroused, for one beloved
puss after another had been left torn and bleeding by that hypocritical
little brute, who always kept an eye out for fresh victims as he
trotted sedately at his master's heels, making pastoral calls. When at
last vengeance found him out and the dog lay poisoned on the parsonage
steps, the rector's grief was so sincere that my anger melted in
sympathy. There had been a coolness between us since Frisky Fuzzy's
fate, but on the next occasion when we met at a neutral tea-table, I
attempted a reconciliation.
"Perhaps your dog and my cat have made up our quarrel in heaven," I
began, passing him the sugar.
"I don't believe your cat went to heaven," he retorted, passing me the
lemon.
Our last attempt at a home kitten was with a little sprite of so
perverse and irreverent a temper that the most liberal theology could
hardly hold out to us the hope of finding her again in any Paradise
where pious pussies congregate. This impish being was foisted upon us
by an old friend whose persuasive powers, as I had long known, were
irresistible. In tones that were dulcet even by way of the telephone
she invited me to shelter her wild young puss, Polly, during the
summer, while she closed her own house and, bearing Billy in a basket,
sought the repose of an ocean isle.
"Why don't you carry Polly with you, too?"
"There isn't room in the basket and, besides, I'm sure that _two_ cats
would be against the rules of the railroad."
"But Polly takes to the trees whenever I try to pat her. She would run
away."
"Oh, I can arrange that for you very nicely. I'll let you have a kitten
of hers and then she'll be perfectly contented."
"A kitten of Polly's! She is only a kitten herself."
"Yes, you are quite right, as usual. One kitten might not be enough to
steady her. It would be better for you to have two, and then Polly will
be kept busy in teaching them to play together."
"Now how many catkins have you over there? Own up."
"Well! Not counting the pincushion pussy that the mice like to nibble,
we have six on hand just now,--Billy and Polly and the four kits. Such
darlings! Everybody wants them. The competition is really terrible, but
of course I insist that you shall have first choice. Come over this
afternoon, please. We are taking the early train to-morrow morning."
Spellbound by the cheerful audacity of these proposals, I went, and
when, after much active exertion on our part, Polly had been caught and
securely hasped down under a heaving basket-lid, I dubiously selected
two of her blind babes to bear her company.
"Who takes the other two?"
"You do," responded my friend more winsomely than ever, "unless you
want to be a horrid Herod and go down in history as another slayer of
the innocents. Look at those little dears! Listen to them! Have you the
heart to ask me to drop them into a pail of cold, cold water? What sort
of a physiologist are you to suppose that kittens, born only yesterday,
could live without their mother? And Polly would miss them dreadfully.
I never saw a more devoted family. As soon as they are old enough to
gambol, they will be such a pleasure for you all,--especially your
sister. And you can easily find nice homes for them, if you want to
give them away later on."
The four members of our summer household each had the privilege of
naming one of the kittens. Housewife Honeyvoice called the black one
Topsy; the small schoolgirl, Esther, dubbed the prettiest Daisy; I gave
to the homeliest the encouraging appellation of Cinderella, and Sister
Jane, returning from a visit to find the feline family in possession,
promptly branded the fourth as Beelzebub. Out of deference to her
outraged feelings, a nursery was prepared down cellar, where Polly, for
so inexperienced a parent, took excellent care of her babies except
when my officious ignorance interfered.
Still a blunderer, I put the kittens out on the south piazza the second
day to treat them to a bracing interlude of air and sunshine. Polly at
once went frantic, mewing and scratching for re-admittance. Presently a
succession of queer, soft thumps brought me to the scene, and there was
Polly, Beelzebub flapping from her mouth, climbing madly up the outside
of the screen door. As soon as she saw me, she parted her jaws to emit
another of those shrill meows that had been profaning the peace of the
house and down fell poor Belze with a piteous whack on the piazza
floor.
Close scrutiny of the situation revealed a big, saffron-colored cat,
with a dangerous glint in his green eyes, peering from the shrubbery
and, self-rebuked, I restored Polly and her jewels to the safe
seclusion of the cellar.
But I still held to my faith in the open air and, as soon as the
kittens began to blink, Housewife Honeyvoice and I pulled out from the
lumber that chokes up cellars under feminine charge the big wire box
which had been the Castle Joyous of Robin Hood. Planted firmly on the
grassplot outside the cellar door, with a cat-hole just large enough
for Polly cut in the wire, it was so secure as to appease even her
maternal fears. Every morning she marshaled her little troop out to
this new abode, carefully drove them all in and tended them there until
sunset, when she led them back to the cellar. All the cats in the
vicinity came to call, but Polly was the very spirit of inhospitality.
She always maintained an anxious guard against marauders and, at the
approach of the most amiable old gossip, would fill up the wire doorway
with her own slender body, spitting and bristling in the very face of
the disconcerted guest. Cinderella, the most precocious of the kittens,
observed with admiration this form of welcome and scandalized all
observers by scampering to the door one day, as her mother was
returning from a brief constitutional, and with all due ceremonies of
defiance refusing her admission. After one astonished instant, Polly
recovered her presence of mind, bowled out of the way that comical ball
of impudence and made it her first parental duty, after entering, to
box Cinder's ears.
As the kittens grew older, they had the run of the house, which they
filled with elfin mirth of motion and reels of Puckish revel. Placed in
a row on my desk, they would watch the moving pen with fascinated eyes,
till one shy paw after another would steal out to investigate and
presently there would be a flurry of funny antics all over a blotted
page. By autumn they had all gone their ways to different households,
except Esther's Daisy, whom we kept, but the joy of kittenhood was the
only life they had. Doom, like a black cat hunting mice, speedily
caught them all, unless, perchance, dogs and motors were kinder than we
fear to Cinder, who, one winter day, after her morning saucer of milk,
struck blithely out into the sunshine from the best of homes and never,
though search, inquiry and advertisement did their utmost, was heard of
again. Little Bub proved so puny that he was left with Polly,
reinstated, much to her content, in her own kingdom, but not even her
puzzled solicitude, varied by cuffings, could keep him alive. As for
Topsy and Daisy, I have not the heart to tell how they perished, but
though I say it as should not, Daisy was too bad for this world. An
incarnate imp, she mocked all discipline and scorned all affection,
capering into new mischief at every rebuke and scratching herself free
from caresses. Despising laps and cushions, she took to the air like an
aeroplane, forever on the leap from one forbidden shelf, mantel or
flower-pot to another. Her agility was supernatural. She would hang
from a curtain cord, spring thence to the top of a door, pounce on a
bowing caller's back, and, within ten seconds fill the hall with such
skurry and commotion that Hecate and all her witches could have done no
more. She could not keep quiet, even at night, until Housewife
Honeyvoice devised the plan of putting her to bed in a basket, with a
cork dangling from the handle for her to play with in her dreams.
Joy-of-Life was ill that winter and, because the kitten's pranks would
now and then divert a suffering hour, we bore with Daisy as long as
patience could, until, indeed, she forsook the house and set up an
independent establishment with a battered ruffian of a cat under our
south porch. Before forsaking the house, she had derided everything in
it. She had, indeed, an uncanny gift of singling out for her most
profane attentions the special objects that humankind holds sacred. On
the top of my desk stands a small Florentine bust of Dante, whose
austere countenance she loved to slap. Beyond it hangs a cross of
inlaid olivewood from Jerusalem, apparently inaccessible, but this
infant athlete, precariously balancing with one foot on the curved
woodwork of the desk and two feet clawing the wall, would stretch
herself out like an elastic until her free foot could give the lower
tip of the cross a smart rap and set it swinging. Punished, she would
strike back, hitting us in the face with an absurd, soft paw; called,
she would run away; caught, she would kick and bite. Our most tactful
cajolery she met with suspicion and disdain, if not with open ridicule.
Graceful as a whirling leaf, she was untamable as the wind that whirls
it,--the wildest wisp of kittenhood that ever left an aching memory.
Since the tragic exit of Daisy, whose confidence I could never
win,--and her cynical little ghost bids me admit that her distrust was
borne out by the event,--I have counted myself unworthy to take any
kitten to hearth and home. I doubt if any would come. My neighbors
across the way have a lordly old Thomas, who, smelling dog on my
skirts, spits at me as I mount the steps. My neighbors of the cross-cut
have a glossy black puss in a resplendent red collar, who politely but
unrelentingly evades all my advances. The feline heart has found me
out. Yet I still cherish a wistful regard for these delicate-footed,
wary creatures, who develop so suddenly from madcap frolic into
dignity, discretion and reserve, keeping even in the most domestic
surroundings a latent sense of a free life elder than civilization,
when, as Swinburne tells his silken crony:
"Wild on woodland ways your sires
Flashed like fires."
A friend of mine, a scholar, and therefore proud in thought and poor in
purse, living at the top of a London apartment house, had a cherished
cat by name of Fettles, who never touched the ground from September to
June. Rooms and corridor limited his promenades, except for a long box
of plants that filled the diminutive balcony. To the casual eye he
seemed well content with his cloistered life, purring on cozy cushions,
performing painstaking toilets, cuddling down on the table close to the
arm of his mistress as she read and wrote, even condescending, for her
pleasure, to play with a tassel or ball, but I noted that my arrivals
brought to Fettles a quivering excitement. It was not my conversation,
which he ignored, nor my gifts, for after his first scandalous orgy on
American catnip I was forbidden to bring him anything more tempting
than a chocolate mouse. It was my boots, especially if I had been
walking across Regent Park and brought in honest earth instead of
pavement scraps and taxi smells. Fettles would rush to my feet and
sniff at sole and heel and toe, arching his back and lashing his tail
when the odors brought him peculiarly thrilling tidings of the strange
world so far below his balcony. In the summer he was the guest of a
Devonshire cottage, but for the first week or two he would be
frightened by the vastness and queerness of out-of-doors. He would
crouch for hours on the threshold, looking out with mingled ecstasy and
terror on the garden, now and then reaching down a dubious paw to touch
the warm brown earth. By degrees he could be coaxed to join his
mistress at afternoon tea under the plum trees, cautiously placing
himself in touch of the hem of her gown. The summer would be half over
before he was at ease in his brief Paradise.
Fettles, by the way, was succeeded by Thomas Heywood, and Tommy Heywood
by Sisi, the only Londoner I know who enjoyed the air-raids. Whenever a
Zeppelin alarm scared the lodgers out of their "honey-heavy dew of
slumber," Sisi had the sport of his life. Knowing that his mistress,
even if a bomb were crashing through her ceiling, would not abandon
him, he would dash hither and yon in a rapture of disobedience, now
under the bed, now behind a bookcase, continually evading her frenzied
clutches. Slippered feet went skurrying past the door, but still Sisi
sprang and scampered, even wheeling about in giddy circles as if this
were the chance of chances for a kitten to catch its tail. My friend,
with Sisi clasped to her panting breast, was invariably the last lodger
to reach the refuge of the cellar.
The cats of legend are not as many as one would suppose, or perhaps the
fault is still mine. Even here they evade me. I can call but few to
mind, Puss in Boots, Sir Tybalt in the animal epic of _Reynard the
Fox_, the Kilkenny cats of tragic fame, the grinning Cheshire cat--for
whose like I vainly looked in Cheshire--the mysterious Knurremurre of
Norway, and the far-fabled "King of the Cats." English chronicles, none
too authentic, tell of a busy mouser that made Dick Whittington mayor
of London, and of a faithful puss who ventured down a chimney of The
Tower to cheer her imprisoned master, the Earl of Southampton, by a
call. More worthy of credit is John Locke's account, preserved by
Hakluyt, of an honorable incident in his voyage to Jerusalem,
undertaken in the spring of 1553. The pilgrim ship was about fifty
miles from Jaffa, when it "chanced by fortune that the Shippes Cat lept
into the Sea, which being downe, kept her selfe very valiauntly above
water, notwithstanding the great waves, still swimming, the which the
master knowing, he caused the Skiffe with halfe a dosen men to goe
towards her and fetch her againe, when she was almost halfe a mile from
the shippe, and all this while the ship lay on staies. I hardly beleeve
they would have made such haste and meanes if one of the company had
been in the like perill. They made the more haste because it was the
patrons cat. This I have written onely to note the estimation that cats
are in, among the Italians, for generally they esteeme their cattes, as
in England we esteeme a good Spaniell."
Petrarch and Tasso are eminent witnesses to the Italian fondness for
cats. The French, too, have long been famed as cat lovers; Montaigne,
Chateaubriand, Gautier, Pierre Loti, Jules Lemaitre, Baudelaire, La
Fontaine, Champfleury, Michelet have all written charmingly of the
Fireside Sphinx, leaving it to a Belgian poet, Maeterlinck, to present
poor pussy as a stage villain. English literature takes less account of
her, though Chaucer keenly expresses the friar's choice of a
comfortable seat by telling how
"fro the bench he droof awey the cat,"
and Skelton has poured invective on the slayer of Philip Sparow,
calling down vengeance
"On all the hole nacyon
Of cattes wilde and tame;
God send them sorowe and shame!"
No reader of Tudor drama needs to be reminded of Gammer Gurton's Gyb,
crouching in the fireplace, where her eyes, mistaken for sparks of
fire, refused to be blown out. Shakespeare's frequent references to the
"harmless, necessary cat" are as accurate as they are nonchalant, but
Milton does not mention her in his account of the creation, although
she would certainly have been more comforting to Eve, at least, than
"Behemoth, biggest born of earth," or "the parsimonious emmet." Indeed,
an Arabic story of the creation claims that the dog and cat were
allowed to accompany Adam and Eve, for their protection and solace,
into the waste beyond the flaming sword. Herrick's "green-eyed
kitling;" Walpole's Selima of
"The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
Her coat that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet and emerald eyes,"
--charms all forfeit to her longing for stolen goldfish; Arnold's
Atossa
--"So Tiberius might have sat,
Had Tiberius been a cat,"--
have made their way into poetry, but prose, especially the familiar
prose of letters, has kept green the memory of many a pussy more. We
love Dr. Johnson the better for his consideration of Hodge "for whom,"
reports Boswell, "he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the
servants, having that trouble, should take a dislike to the poor
creature." Of course the tender-hearted Cowper cared for cats, and even
the industrious Southey would turn his epic-blunted quill to accounts
of Rumpelstilzchen and Hurlyburlybuss,--sonorous cat-names closely
pressed upon by Mark Twain's Sour Mash, Apollinaris, Zoroaster and
Blatherskite, while Canon Liddon's Tweedledum and Tweedledee of Amen
Corner are not far behind.
No portrait of a cat in English verse is more vivid than that given in
the sestette of Mrs. Marriott Watson's oft-praised sonnet:
"Sphinx of my quiet hearth! who deign'st to dwell
Friend of my toil, companion of mine ease,
Thine is the lore of Ra and Rameses;
That men forget dost thou remember well,
Beholden still in blinking reveries,
With somber, sea-green gaze inscrutable."
It is pleasant to think that the race memory of puss goes farther back
in time and farther east in geography than the witchcraft cruelties of
Christendom. The Mohammedan faith has been kinder to her than ours.
Persia has ever held her in affection. Mahomet cut off the flowing edge
of his sleeve rather than disturb Muezza's nap. But most of all her
inherent aristocracy springs from those shining centuries by the Nile,
when under the protection of the moon-eyed goddess Pasht she was
honored in life and embalmed in death. The supreme Ra, the Sun God, was
addressed as "the Great Cat," and _The Book of the Dead_ holds the
mystic text: "I have heard the mighty word which the Ass spake unto the
Cat in the House of Hapt-re."