A Silent Singer

by Clara Morris

Dinah was snatched out of her “pack” and put in the warm oven to dry, while the other members of the family slept the sleep of the weary and the worn.

Three entire years passed in alternate peace and strife. Acting in the interest of decency and cleanliness, Mrs. Tyler had covered Dinah with fresh linen several times. Little Marie had grown taller, more beautiful, and more impish; while Dinah still reigned supreme, though almost every bureau in the house had in its bottom drawer a wax doll or two, rolled up in towels.

For some time before the great disaster, we had been tormented by cats. Why our garden should have been selected for their mass-meetings, I can’t imagine. We lived in a fashionable quarter; there was an air of eternal Sabbath brooding over our heavily shaded street; a few lap-dogs resided thereon, but no one stooped to cats. Yet night and cats descended upon us together.

Mrs. Tyler raised many herbs for kitchen use, but after the arrival of the cats the herbs entered the kitchen no more. The back garden was destroyed.

They were a musical as well as warlike race, and their head notes, chest notes, and stomach notes, were poured forth with passionate ardor, but I never, never learned to distinguish the tenderest love song from the wail of complete despair, though I was quick to recognize the gage of battle. I also learned that the bitterness and ferocity of an engagement was not to be measured so surely by the loss of blood as by the loss of fur.

But let me stop right here, and not weary the reader with what I know about cats—tribal, nomadic, domestic; their habits, laws, and superstitions; their sign-language, being the very same that was taught to the tail-chasing, sacred kittens of Cheops and the first Pharaoh—and only state that in the study of feline folklore, I have known of a student becoming so absorbed that he forgot everything on earth, even the “lore,” in his mad pursuit of a feline.

Now, one evening, Mr. Tyler brought home an old friend, whom he asked to dine and pass the night. The old friend had with him a small dog, who also dined and passed the night. The gentleman was a bachelor then, and if he is alive and sane, I have the biggest and ugliest silver dollar in the world to bet against a crooked hair-pin, that he is a bachelor now. The dog was small, and it had hair—lots of hair—and judging by sight alone, that was all he had. His master claimed that he could see a difference between fore and aft, between head and tail. Well, perhaps he could when the dog was awake, but ’twas base boasting to make any such claim when he was sleeping. He was named “Bolivar,” not after the military gentleman, but in memory of his youthful and almost fatal attempt to swallow whole one of those very large, hard, round candies boys call “Bolivars.”

This four-legged guest had made that thing adored of men, “a record,” and it was for killing rats. Now you show me a dog with a record for killing rats, and I’ll show you a dog who has broken the record killing cats. It’s perfectly natural; he has to kill the cats or there would not be rats enough to make a record with.

Bolivar was graciously received by Marie, who knew but little of dogs, and who asked “why he bit his own back when everybody’s legs were in his reach,” adding, “If I was a dog I’d bite somebody else every time;” which was pure and unadulterated truth, I’m sure.

In the forenoon of that day, “Tyler’s pretty devil” had favored us with one of her wildest tantrums. The servant, Norah, had spilled a little hot tea over Dinah’s foot, and Marie had gone into a very frenzy of rage. Seizing Dinah by the legs, she had thrashed the girl out of the room and the house; had with one sweep of Dinah’s body cleared a small table of every article it held; had cut her own hand; had held her breath until she was blue; had indeed furnished her whole family with healthy but rather unpleasant exercise for both mind and body, and when she had so stirred her monkeys up that we each chattered our teeth while we swang madly from our own particular pole, she had suddenly calmed down and requested me to bandage Dinah’s scalded foot, and proceed with her to the garden, there to play “sick lady in the country.”