Vanya, too, is perturbed by this question. He tries to open one kitten’s eyes, and spends a long time puffing and breathing hard over it, but his operation is unsuccessful. They are a good deal troubled, too, by the circumstance that the kittens obstinately refuse the milk and the meat that is offered to them. Everything that is put before their little noses is eaten by their grey mamma.
“Let’s build the kittens little houses,” Vanya suggests. “They shall live in different houses, and the cat shall come and pay them visits. . . .”
Cardboard hat-boxes are put in the different corners of the kitchen and the kittens are installed in them. But this division turns out to be premature; the cat, still wearing an imploring and sentimental expression on her face, goes the round of all the hat-boxes, and carries off her children to their original position.
“The cat’s their mother,” observed Vanya, “but who is their father?”
“Yes, who is their father?” repeats Nina.
“They must have a father.”
Vanya and Nina are a long time deciding who is to be the kittens’ father, and, in the end, their choice falls on a big dark-red horse without a tail, which is lying in the store-cupboard under the stairs, together with other relics of toys that have outlived their day. They drag him up out of the store-cupboard and stand him by the box.
“Mind now!” they admonish him, “stand here and see they behave themselves properly.”
All this is said and done in the gravest way, with an expression of anxiety on their faces. Vanya and Nina refuse to recognise the existence of any world but the box of kittens. Their joy knows no bounds. But they have to pass through bitter, agonising moments, too.
Just before dinner, Vanya is sitting in his father’s study, gazing dreamily at the table. A kitten is moving about by the lamp, on stamped note paper. Vanya is watching its movements, and thrusting first a pencil, then a match into its little mouth. . . . All at once, as though he has sprung out of the floor, his father is beside the table.