We might have guessed this, had we been wise enough, from his appearance. His very colour was uncertain. His mistress could see that he was blue—a very dark, handsome blue Persian. Those who knew less than she did about cats called him black. One, as rash as she was ignorant, said he was brown; but as there are no brown cats Ra could not have been brown. Finally, a so-called friend named him “The Incredible Blue.”
When the Incredible Blue sat at a little distance two large green eyes were all that could be discerned of his features. The blue hair was so extremely dark that it could be hardly distinguished from his black nose and mouth. This gave him an inexpressibly serious appearance.
The solemnity of his aspect was well borne out by the stolidity of his behaviour. There is little to record during his youth except an unrequited attachment to a fox-terrier. In earlier days Ra’s grandmother had been devoted to the same dog—a devotion as little desired and as entirely unreciprocated.
But it was necessary that Ra should leave the object of his devotion and come with us to live in a town; and now it became apparent that his affections had been somehow nipped in the bud. Whether it was the loss of the fox-terrier, the new fear of Taffy’s boisterous pursuits, or the severity of his grandmother’s treatment—for the first time he came into close contact with that formidable lady—whatever the reason may have been, it was plain that Ra’s heart was a guarded fortress. He set himself with steady appetite to rid the house of mice, but he neither gave nor wanted affection.
He would accept a momentary caress delicately offered; but if one stroked him an instant too long, sharp, needle-like teeth took a firm hold of the hand. We apologised once to a cat lover for the sharpness of Ra’s teeth. “I think the claws are worse,” was all he said.
Ra was an arrant coward. If a wild scuffle of feet was heard overhead we were certain that it was the small agile grandmother in pursuit of Ra. If Taffy were seen careering over the lawn, and leaping into the first fork of the mulberry-tree, it was because Ra had not faced him out for a moment, but was peering with dusky face and wide emerald eyes between the leaves.
Once or twice there was an atmosphere of tension in the house, no movement of cat or dog, and it was found that the three were fixed on the staircase unable to move. Taffy looking up from below with gleaming eyes; Granny malevolently scowling from above; and Ra in sight like Bagheera, in heart like a frightened mouse protected by the very fact that he was between the devil and the deep sea. Taffy did not dare to chase Ra for fear of the claws of the cat above; Granny did not care to begin a scrimmage downstairs, which would land them both under the dog’s nose. So they sat, free but enthralled, till human hands carried them simultaneously away.
But the general tension of feeling grew too great. Ra’s life was a burden through fear, Granny’s through jealousy, Taffy’s through scolding. Ra was sent off to a little house in London, and here his second stage of development began.
He had always been pompous, now he grew grand. It took ten minutes to get him through the door, so measured were his steps, so ceremonious the waving of his tail. He sat in the drawing-room in the largest armchair. Then it irked him that there was no garden, so he searched the street until he discovered a house with a garden, and he went to stay there for days together. A house opposite was being rebuilt, and Ra surveyed the premises and overlooked the workmen, sliding through empty window-frames and prowling along scaffolding with a weight of disapproval in his expression.
Thus Ra, who had hitherto caused no anxiety to his family, now became a growing responsibility; visions of cat stealers, of skin-dealers, of cat’s-meat men, of policemen and lethal chambers began to flit through the imagination whenever Ra was missing—which was almost always. So to save the nerves and sanity of his friends Ra left London.