Juvenal—that is his name—is very fond of animals. A little too fond, we thought, when he invited a military friend’s dog to stay, during the owner’s absence at manœuvres. This animal, by name O’Reilly, arrived in dilapidated, devil-may-care, barrack-yard condition, which was a great shock to our Manchu prince. He also had pink bald elbows and knees. His hind legs were longer than his front ones, which gave him an ourang-outang gait. As became his Milesian name, he fought every one he met on his walks. Why he did not fight Loki, we do not know, for Loki loathed him and, we believe, suffered acutely in his poor little Chinese soul all during his stay. Yet unwelcome as he was, scald, ungainly, tiresome, there was something pathetic about the creature. He had a way of looking at one, deprecating and pleading at once; and he would display such rapture at the smallest token of toleration, that, despite our satisfaction at his departure, we had an ache in our hearts too. We have a shrewd suspicion that the corporal-major who owned him was a rough customer, and that poor O’Reilly’s life was not that happy one which every “owned” dog’s ought to be. A dog should not be treated as a dog.
As for cats, once they have passed the giddy days of youth, in which they are imps, sprites, goblins, pucks, furry, fairy, freakish things—anything but mere animals—one cannot help feeling a certain awe with regard to them. Despite the many cycles of years that have elapsed since their ancestors took habitation with us, they have remained true Easterns. From father to son, from mother to daughter they have handed down secret stores of occult knowledge which they keep jealously to themselves, a sacred inheritance of race. Those eyes that fix you with pupil contracted to a slit, and look through and beyond you into mysteries undreamt of by you: that lofty detachment, that ineradicable independence, that relentless indifference: have we not all felt by these signs and tokens how completely the cat puts us outside the sphere of his real thoughts and feelings? Priests or priestesses they seem to be, of some alien creed, soul satisfying, contemplative, with sudden savage rites. Have you ever watched a cat with regard turned inwards, meditating? Its body sways, but the spirit bubbles softly as if it were seething in content over a mystic fire. It does not want you to join it in its rapture, like your dog. It has no desire to admit you into its comradeship. It is as self-contained and self-absorbed as the highest grade Mahatma.
KITTY-WEE THE LOVELY
Kitty-Wee, the Lovely, is chief of our three cats. She is a Persian lady with a wonderful robe of silver grey, faintly blue, and orange eyes inherited from that most beautiful, most evil monster, Tittums the Bold-and-Bad, her father, who spent his adorable kittenhood and his stormy youth under our London roof, until his habit of lying in wait for the servants at odd corners and jumping at their elbows, made it imperative for us to part with him. He was then adopted by a gentle parson’s daughter, in the freedom of whose country dwelling it was hoped that he might sow his wild oats and settle down into respectability. But alas! the day dawned, when lying on the rector’s cassock in the dining-room, he was so incensed at the reverend gentleman’s polite request to move, that he chased him round and round the room, ran him down in the hall and bit him. The churchman was not an unreasonable being and had made many allowances for the frailty of degenerate creation; but he drew the line at the violation of his reverend elbows. Tittums was once again, with many tears and heart-rendings, passed on. This time to a lady who keeps a cattery. We hear that he has become a model of every virtue, and that she only wears a fencing mask and boxing gloves when she combs him, because on the day when she left them off, Tittums, in a fit of absence of mind, bit her through the thumb. Anyone who takes a cat paper can hear more of this most distinguished beast, under the name of “Saracinesca.”
Kitty-Wee is supposed to have inherited her father’s superlative looks—only he was “smoke”—and her mother’s angelic disposition. If occasionally a spark of the paternal temper flashes out, the gardener’s wife ‹with whom she prefers to dwell› says “Kitty is a bit nervous to-day.”
KITTY-WEE’S MESALLIANCES
It was after Kitty-Wee’s first mésalliance that she took up her abode with the worthy pair in the “little cot,” as Mrs. Adam calls it, at the bottom of the garden. Persian princesses, from the time of “A Thousand and One Nights” onwards, are proverbially capricious. But what perverse freak of youthful fancy induced our delicate silver-pawed highborn damsel to fix her young affections upon Mr. Hopkinson was and is, a painful mystery.
Mr. Hopkinson, a very hooligan among cats, so degenerate indeed as to have lost all his eastern characteristics, and to have assumed a positively “Arry-like, bank-’oliday, disreputable, Hampstead-Heath kind of vulgarity,” was a lean, mangy creature with a denuded tail. He had a black spot over one eye; the other eye was conspicuous by its absence. We could hear his raucous voice uplifted in serenade, suggestive of accordeons, night after night, and his guttural whisper of “Me ’Oighness” behind the bushes when we went on our walks. Every effort was made to discourage the preposterous suitor. But, alas! Kitty smiled. The infatuated Princess escaped the vigilance of her distracted family. Perhaps it is best to draw a veil over the consequences of this rash alliance. Kitty indeed did her best to obliterate them, refusing to do anything but sit heavily on three black and white kittens with ropy tails. She only purred again the day the last one died; “Oh! she was pleased, Mam,” said the gardener’s wife; “quite took up again, she did.”