In the course of the evening my collie, a visitor with me, came genially into the room. Mentu did not know him; he sat upright, with eyes fixed upon the dog, shaking with terror, but making no attempt to escape.
I heard Mentu calling on his mistress early next morning in a querulous tone. As her door was shut I invited him into my room, but he found it not to his mind, and soon left me. He sat all the morning with us, but was easily ennuyé, and walked about uttering short bored cries until he could find some one to play with him. He delighted in a game of hide and seek which he had instituted for himself. He hid and called out, lay still till he was seen, and then sprang up to scud across the room. When we went into the garden he followed, and the scolding of a blackbird made us look up to see him on a branch overhead staring down at us. He walked with us, too, or rather when we walked he plunged rustling through the bushes bordering the path, and flashed out to stand a moment in the open.
Withal one felt that a thinking being moved with us, whether bored or childishly excited, gently affectionate or suddenly grateful; a being thoroughly self-conscious, greedy of admiration, regarding himself and us, and taking his life into his own hands. And close beneath the surface of his civilisation lay the wild beast nature. One could wake it in an instant, for if I caught his eye the surface flashed sapphire for a moment, then the eye with distended pupils was fixed upon me, and silently, holding me by the eye, he believed, he stole across the room, and jumped up suddenly almost in my face. There was something uncanny about it, and even possibly dangerous, for if I looked up from a book sometimes I found that topaz eye trying to catch and arrest my own, while the great cat stole silently nearer. I think if we had not relinquished the game Mentu’s claws would have blinded me.
For the wild nature in Mentu is as strong as his inbred civilisation; and the two are at strife together. His heart and his appetite lead him back and back to the house; keep him there for days together—a dainty fine gentleman, warm-hearted, capricious. But the spirit of the wild creature rises in him, and the night comes when at bed-time no Mentu is waiting at the door to be let in; or in the evening, as he hears the wind rise and stir the branches, even while the rain beats on the window pane, the compelling power of out-of-doors is on him, and he must go; and when the window is lifted and the night air streams in, there is but one leap into the darkness.
He will return early in the morning tired and satiate, or spring in some evening as the dusk gathers, with gleaming eyes where the light of the wild woods flickers and dies down in the comfortable firelight of an English home.
This is the true cat, the real Mentu, this wild creature who must go on his mysterious errands; or who, I rather believe it, plunges out to revel in the intoxication of innumerable scents, unaccounted sounds and the half revealed forms of wood and field in twilight, in darkness or in dawn. In his soul he is a dramatist, an artist in sensation. He lives with human beings, he loves them, as we live with children and love them, and play their games. But the great world calls us and we must go; and Mentu’s business in life is elsewhere. He lives in the half-lights, in secret places, free and alone, this mysterious little-great being whom his mistress calls “My cat.”
