THE TORPID AND THE ILL-BRED CAT
“Cold eyes, sleek skin, and velvet paws,
You win my indolent applause,
You cannot win my heart.”
They “divided the time into small alternate allotments of eating and sleeping.”
The torpid cat is really a kitten, but it is of enormous size, and a lively orange in colour. If it lies on the largest footstool it completely covers it, if it occupies an armchair it occupies the whole of it, if it honours the lap of a friend its head must be supported by one arm, while its tail hangs down on the other side, otherwise the centre of gravity could not be preserved and the torpid cat would slide slowly on to the floor and fall like a soft and heavy sofa cushion. It has been lying on a green velvet armchair all afternoon; being temporarily displaced at tea time it fell asleep with its head on the fender; when the chair was relinquished it went back on to it, and it will lie there now till nightfall.
If you catch the torpid cat awake you will find that it has pleasant and intelligent hazel eyes, and a rose-coloured mouth carried half open to be ready for a yawn, as you carry a gun at half-cock waiting for a shot. If you stroke the torpid cat it stretches quietly, but not too far, for fear of waking up.
The ill-bred cat is a small neat English tabby, regularly marked. We made its acquaintance first when it was about six inches long and had come to take charge of the farm. It was sitting on a heap of coals cheerlessly surveying the prospect; when it saw us it sped towards us, crying loud for sympathy and companionship. Then it spied Taffy and went back to the fence to sharpen its claws.
The torpid cat, who was at that time a lively young kitten, and the ill-bred cat made great friends.
In the evening the tabby kitten left the farm to take care of itself, and came up to play with the yellow kitten. They played at being tigers in a jungle. The tabby kitten hid between the asparagus bed and the yew hedge; the yellow kitten sat by the scullery door and pretended that he wasn’t looking. Then he began a swaggering walk towards the asparagus bed; the walk quickened as he got nearer, until he was suddenly clawed by the tabby kitten, and the shock of surprise sent him flying into the air like a rocket. Then in the twilight they fled about the garden, crouched in the rough grass beyond the lawn, rushed up the cherry-tree and peered down, all with light, agile movements, until as the light died you could hardly catch the quick rippling of the tabby’s stripes, and the yellow coat of the other grew wan.
One morning the tabby came limping and crying from the farm holding out a wounded, swollen paw. She was taken into the house and doctored, but when the paw was well she refused to go home. The two were inconveniently fond of human companionship—the yellow kitten for its own sake, the tabby for a variety of reasons. She grew more emphatically affectionate at meal times.
The yellow kitten used to accompany his mistress to feed the hens; she thought he had an eye for young chickens, but found she slandered him. He was not looking at the chickens; his ear was open for the rustle of mice in the grass, and from time to time he dashed in and despatched one. He took special pleasure in doing this in company; it was always open to him to hunt in the garden, but he used his privilege when some one was taking the air and inhaling the breath of flowers. He seemed to think it added a point to evening meditation to hear the squeak of the dying shrew or to see an innocent field-mouse untimely cut off while it was peacefully nibbling a blade of grass.
Just so both kittens, with the real self-consciousness of cats, played their games in public; they seemed to have no thought of anything but the mock combat, but the scene of the combat shifted so as to be always under the eye of a spectator. The explanation is simple: the life of a cat is a continuous drama, whether actual or imagined; and what actor will play to an empty house? The cat hunts not for food, but for sport, and the torpid cat, who refused yesterday to look at a mouse let out from the trap, spent the whole of this morning waiting behind the piano with his ear bent to listen to sundry little scratchings.
The cat eats the mouse, it is true; and the sportsman eats venison, but he does not stalk for food.
“Animals,” says Mr. Balfour,[3] “as a rule, trouble themselves little about anything unless they want either to eat it or to run away from it. Interest in and wonder at the works of nature and the doings of man are products of civilisation.”
[3] “Essays and Addresses.”
But does this explain why the yellow kitten, as it followed me about the garden, spent some minutes in quarrelling with a pansy? The pansy lifted an inane, purple face towards the sky, and its head waggled helplessly on its stalk. The yellow kitten sat down beside it, and regarded it severely for awhile. Then he slapped its silly face.
A change fell upon the kittens as they grew older. The root of the difficulty was that one had no ancestors at all, and the other only half the proper number. Their voices were too loud, their manners were bad. The yellow cat never mewed, but his purr was like a thrashing-machine; the other was clamorous in pleasure and complaint, her appetite unquenchable, her demands for affection, for comfort, for food, insistent and unabashed. She would try to drink from the milk-jug while her saucer was being filled; she would run her claws into a hand to get firm hold while she ate the scraps offered her.
If you put her out of the door she reappeared like a conjuring trick through the window; she would jump again and again on the lap of some one who did not want her; she would never take offence. One tithe of the rebuffs she met with would have sent a well-bred cat stalking with dignity from the room; the first of the refusals would have made him turn his back on the company and fall into deep and abstracted meditation. But when her desire was accomplished and the hand weary of hurling her on to the floor, there was something disarming in the bliss on the little impudent face as she nestled in utter confidence and licked the hand that had rebuffed her.
The yellow kitten was less pressing; he had just so much refinement of spirit as to make him refuse to stay in any place where he was forcibly put. He kept his muscles tense, like a coiled spring, and so soon as the grasp slackened quite slowly and deliberately he carried out his first intention.
The two began steadily to deteriorate. Now that the pressure of necessity was removed they were fast losing the stamina of the working cat; and having no sensibilities, natural or cultivated, luxury would never make them aristocratic; they had no education and little discipline, and they gave themselves up to revel in ungraceful comfort greedily and confidently demanded.
Yet their affection for each other, their utter confidence in human nature, lends them a certain grace. You may come into the drawing-room and find the farm cat and the kitchen cat (for such are their real positions) settled in the best armchair. He is lying at luxurious length, sunk in deep slumber. Behind him, squeezed into a corner, sits the tabby; her anxious eyes peer out over his head, her soft little body is crushed by his weight, one tabby paw is round his orange neck. You rouse them and he half awakes; a long paw goes up to draw down the kitten’s face to his own; and his rosy tongue comes out and licks her from nose to forehead, then he subsides again into slumber, and her eyes beam out blissful and honoured with the somewhat uncomfortable attention.
Or the little cat has been turned out of the dining-room because of her unceasing demands, and looks in forlornly through the window. Sandy awakes, sees her, gets on the window sill and kisses her through the glass.
Both kittens are entirely fearless with Taffy. Sandy’s is a mere absence of fear, greatly due to sleep, and Taffy may wag a tail in his face, just as a friend may flap a handkerchief in it, and yet only induce a flutter of an eyelid. The little cat, on the other hand, is a friend of his, will rub against his paws, and force him to take an ashamed interest in her.
But these are surface tendernesses; the position is fundamentally untenable. A cat must either have beauty and breeding, or it must have a profession.
If it is well-bred it will take a hint; it cannot be disciplined, for a cat is a wild animal, but its very aptness to take offence will bring to it a certain self-control; if it is a working cat it has its own profession, which occupies it very closely, it has its proper sphere and its own apartments.
There is no help for it. Kindly but firmly the tabby kitten must be induced to return to the farm: kindly, for the mistake is ours. We turned its head, we set it among temptations which its nature could not meet, and we gave it no early discipline. Therefore it must be, like the Cornish nation, led and not driven back. At this age, to coerce is to terrify; and there is something truly heartrending in looking at the shrinking, furtive air that punishments produce, and thinking of the happy, courageous little beast who sharpened its claws for an attack on Taffy, and gave itself up to the human being in blissful confidence of kind dealing.
Sandy is more of an enigma. One could tell his possibilities better if he would wake up. As he sleeps he grows larger and larger, though few have seen him eat, and he never asks for food. When a teaspoonful of cream is offered him his nose has to be buried in it before he can be roused to drink. He never scratches, he is never angry; when his hazel eyes open he looks with kindness on the company and falls to sleep again. There is only one time in the day when one can be sure of seeing him awake, and that is at prayers. The presence of so many quiet people makes him feel it a good opportunity of amusing them by a little lively play with the bell-rope. If he is put out of the room he seeks an open door or window, and finds a chance of making a fine dramatic rush across the scene, accompanied by the stable cat. Prayers over, his vivacity subsides.
He has a name waiting for him when he wakes, for Sandy is to be glorified into Alexander. But what is the good of naming a cat who cannot hear you through his dreams?
Sometimes I see visions of the future for the two. The first vision is peaceful and prosaic: the tabby is instructing a rustic brood in the art of mouse-catching. She thinks no more of velvet armchairs, of porridge for breakfast and pheasant bones for lunch. Spruce and well-favoured, the very type of an English cat, guardian of the granary and terror of the mice, she licks her kittens’ faces and brings them up to an honest, industrial career.
But there is something nightmare-like in the other vision: Alexander grown to panther size suddenly waking from sleep; his coat is a tigerish orange, his tail like a magnified fox’s brush. What will he do? Is it torpor only that restrained the heavy paw from striking, and sleep that made the hazel eyes seem kindly? I find myself looking with a troubled wonder at Alexander as he fills the largest armchair. He is but eight months old—a kitten still.
Postscript.
Alas for Alexander of the pleasant hazel eyes; for he, too, has fallen a victim to the signors of the night. He was never known to poach, he never brought in a rabbit even, but it is spring, and pheasants are young, and keepers cruel.
So silently Alexander, too, has vanished away, and there is no redress.
