Chapter Twelve.
Agrémens of Cat Life.
Before we can thoroughly understand the ways and habits of any animal, we must try, in a manner, to put ourselves in that animal’s place, and thus be able to study life from its point of view.
I don’t believe that God made any creature to be otherwise than happy, and He has endowed each member of His creation with just that amount of reason and instinct which shall enable it to find its food and a place to rest in, make love in its own way, marry after its own fashion—by civil contract—bring up its young, and, in a word, be generally jolly. I found a poor bee this morning getting drowned in the water-butt. “Yes,” I said, “I’ll save your life, but I will give you as a treat to my pet spider.” Man has the proposing, but not the disposing. I laid my bee for one moment on the edge of the butt to dry, when whirr! away he darted through the bright morning sunshine, and my spider had to be content with a bluebottle for breakfast. This spider, I may tell you, is a very large and beautiful specimen, striped and marked like a silver tabby. He lives in an outhouse, and has a web, the network of which is a yard in diameter, with goodness knows how many feet of tack, and sheet, and stay, and guy. And a very amusing rascal he is, and not a bit afraid of me. Nearly every day, I give him a bee with the sting out. (It is in the kaleidoscope of events; that some day I may leave the sting in, just to see how he feels it.) I place the bee in the web, and it is amusing to see how quickly my friend shins up the rigging—he catches the bee by the shoulders, and makes him spin for a few seconds like a top, till he is completely enveloped in a gauzy shroud, and there is a big hole in the web. I tell my spider he shouldn’t make a hole in the web. “Never mind that,” he replies, “soon make that all right,” and sure enough next morning the web is nicely repaired, and the bee nearly eaten. I don’t think he eats all the bee himself. I am convinced that he has a little wife who lives somewhere in a corner, and that every day he is careful to send her a leg, or a wing, or a bit of the breast. Well, he is happy, I know. Hadn’t he a nice private house, without rent or taxes, maybe a wife, and a thriving business, to say nothing at all about the bee. I have studied cats as I have studied that spider. I have imagined myself that spider. I have been, or imagined myself to be, a cat—a Tom, you know, and I can fully understand a pussy’s life and a pussy’s joys and sorrows.
“How different,” I thought, as I mused one morning under a tree, “is the life of a cat from that of a dog. I’m the parson’s cat to be sure, but then I’m my own master. Now, there is the parson’s Saint Bernard dog, Dumpling for instance,—an honest, contented fellow enough, but, bless you, he isn’t free. I am. Dumpling can’t do as he pleases. I can. I can go to bed when I like, rise when I like, and eat and drink, when, where, or what I choose. Dumpling can’t. Really I feel I can forgive Dumpling for chasing me into the apple-tree last Sunday when I think of the dull life the dog leads, and how few are his joys compared to mine. Poor Dumpling needs servants to wait upon him, and he can’t even walk a couple of miles, and make sure of his way home, or sure of not getting into a row, or not getting stolen, or something else equally ridiculous. The other day Dumpling actually sat on the door-step for two hours in the rain, till his great shaggy coat was wet through and through, because, forsooth, he didn’t know how to get the door opened. Would I have done that? No. I should have walked up politely to the first kind-faced passenger, and asked that passenger to ‘be good enough to ring this bell for me, please, ’cause I ain’t big enough,’ and the thing would have been done. Could Dumpling unlatch a door or catch a mouse? Could he climb a tree and rob a sparrow’s nest? or could he find his way home over the tiles on a dark night? I would laugh to see him try.
“Now here am I on this bright, beautiful summer morning, as fresh as a daisy, as happy as a king. Catch me sleeping in the house on a summer’s night!
“How sweetly the birds are singing, but how much more sweetly they will taste! What a glorious day I had of it yesterday all through! Put in an appearance at the parson’s breakfast-table, just for fashion’s sake, and pretended to drink the milk my kind mistress placed before me. Fairly won the old lady’s heart by rubbing my head affectionately against the canary’s cage. ‘Dear Tom,’ said she, ‘you would never touch the pretty bird?’ Oh! wouldn’t I, though?
“What a nasty old man that Farmer Trump is! I’m sure, if it wasn’t that I have a taste for pigeons, and am a little bit of a Columbarian, I would never have thought of looking at his lot, anyhow. Besides, I had only eaten two when in came he, and out went I. Well, if he didn’t take his gun and fire after me. Well, if he hadn’t done anything of the sort, he wouldn’t have shot his bantam cock.
“I didn’t go into that milk cellar of my own free will. It was purely accidental. I was chased by a dog, but being in, how could I, being only a thirsty cat, and amid such profusion, help helping myself to a drop of cream? And if the clumsy old dairymaid hadn’t thrown her shoe at me, she wouldn’t have broken the milk-house window. It was no business of mine. I met Master Black-and-tan outside, and warmed him. I gave him sore eyes. That old shoe brought luck with it, however, for about an hour after I found myself in a large and beautiful garden, filled with beds of the rarest flowers. It isn’t always you get a bed made for you, thinks I; so I scraped about me a bit, and went off to sleep in the sun. Where did that half-brick come from? I wonder. I’m somehow of opinion that it was meant for me. However, if people will use profane language, and heave bricks at the heads of unoffending cats, they mustn’t be astonished if they do smash the cucumber frame.
“I find it so much better to live in the free forest, because, if I live in the house, a day never passes that I do not get into a row, and I always get the worst of it. Only yesterday I looked in for a few minutes at tea-time, and there was Dumpling standing, with a yard of tongue hanging from one side of his mouth; and Master must pat him, and call him a fine fellow; then I jumped on the sofa-stool, and smacked him in the face, and Dumpling knocked down the stool to get at me, besides a cup and saucer, with his wisp of a tail, and I bolted through a pane of glass, and got blamed for that. Day before, a mouse was pleased to get behind a china vase, and I had to break the vase to get at it—I got blamed for that. Same day I ran away with a mackerel. That mackerel seemed positively to say, ‘Oh, pussy, do run away with me, and eat me in some nice, quiet corner.’ And I did; and, would you believe it, I was even blamed for that!
“I’m going to see Zelina to-night. Zelina is a beautiful black Persian angel, with hazel eyes and flowing fur, and a voice that would lure the larks from the sky. Zelina belongs to the barber, and I met her by appointment in the back garden, and found her very thick with three other fellows. That’s the worst of Zelina. But I fellowed them! For five minutes you wouldn’t have seen either of us for fluff, and at the end of that time little remained of the other cats save the teeth. Meanwhile Zelina looked calmly on. Then I wooed Zelina beneath the moon, and thrashed her, and beat her, and bit her, till at last she consented to fly with me to a foreign shore; but we made such a row that we awoke the brute of a barber, and he threw a basin of dirty water right over us, and there was no more foreign shore thought of. But I’ll see her to-night, sweet Zelina!”
I’ll conclude this paper with a rather curious anecdote, told me by Captain A. Brown, late of Arbroath, now of Chatham, Canada. “We have a cat,” says Captain Brown, “who brought up a kitten in a loft above the woodshed, until it was old enough to wean; she then brought it down to run about, but the dog (a puppy) would on every opportunity take the kitten in its mouth and drag it about. This the cat didn’t seem to like, so one day she took it in her mouth, and carried it along, on the top of the fence, to the nearest farm, a quarter of a mile off, where the kitten’s father lived. She placed the kitten at the male parent’s feet, gave it suck once more, then started off home along the fence, and never went near it again.”
This anecdote, for the truth of which the captain vouches, clearly proves that pussy has a much larger amount of reasoning power than most people give her credit for. It was just as though pussy had addressed the male cat thus:
“I’ve brought you your youngster, Thomas. It cannot live at home for the mischievous puppy. Goodness knows I’ve done my duty to him as a mother; now, hub, you have a turn. Time about’s fair-play, Thomas; good-bye.”