The Great Small Cat, and Others: Seven Tales

by May E. Southworth

MAROONED
Neither
Disappointment
nor
Ugly Temper
Had Broken
His Fierce Sense
of Injury or
His Indomitable
Spirit

It was a very sullen kitten that the lady had left on the lower deck after the last desperate squeeze she had given him. As she turned to take her last look back, there he sat on his haunches, as motionless as an Egyptian mummy, amid his new surroundings, but game, maintaining a lofty dignity to the last in spite of perplexity, dismay and wrath.

As the great ship swung clear of the pier and turned her clean-cut prow toward the mists of the ocean, the lady wiped the blinding tears from her eyes and waved her handkerchief bravely as a last admonition to the cat, and in adieu to the captain, who was now in command, alert and busy, all sentiment forgotten.

All on board a sailing vessel, from the captain down, love pets of every kind, but during the first hours of the ship's getting under way, when all is confusion and bustle and everybody busy with the ship's important affairs, there is no time for trifles. Naturally the new passenger was forgotten for the time being and left to his own devices and for the ocean to do its own work with him, in its own way, until things had settled down into the daily routine. When this time arrived, the cat was past all overtures of any kind and occupied exclusively with his own resentment, the anger of his betrayal having by this time entered too deeply into his being for him to accept any kind of peace-offering. He was insensible to all caresses and disdained all offers of friendly acquaintance, and from the rank rebellion brooding in his gloomy, unforgiving eyes, it was plainly evident that he was not enjoying his ocean trip. Although he had soon found his sea legs, he had also found en route a very wicked temper in thinking over the injustice of the situation, shanghaied and deserted in this heartless manner.

The men, now that they had the time, tried in every way to make up to him but coaxing of all kinds proved of no avail, the awful bitterness of his injury making him immune to any sort of cajolery, and he treated them all with a calm and persistent air of scorn. They tried to tempt him with every kind of cat dainty, but in an attitude of sullen hostility he would have nothing to do with them, venting his ill-temper on all alike and confining his dependence in the eating line to the cook, who merely threw him scraps. His angry resentment was too deep and too hopeless for any comforting; he merely wanted to be let alone, if he was doomed to stay in this dungeon, and to live his own sullen, desolate life, in resenting everything.

His former freedom among gardens and roofs made the limitation of even this big craft, a miserable home for one of his outdoor habits, and although he had all the ship's mice for diversion, there was time and time for thoughts deep and resentful. As he was unconfined and had full range of the ship, on an early tour of investigation he discovered a porthole, always open to the sun in possible weather, which seemed to attract him, as a light will draw a traveler, lost in the dark. This he decided on as his favorite resting place during the day and the sailors, knowing that he had become fully accustomed to the monotonous swaying of the boat, and in consideration of his strong prejudices, let him take possession undisturbed. Here he would sit and "let his mind work" in brooding abstraction, gazing by the hour in wide open revolt at the gray blankness of the sea, too dreary and hopeless to sleep. Perhaps it reminded him of other times and of another window where he had been wont to sit in happy anticipation of the coming of his lady. However it was, this window had a strange fascination for him and day after day, when he was not roaming drearily about the ship, he would sit here, a sad still-life study. With wide, unwinking, gloomy eyes, hour by hour he would follow the broad expanse of the desolate waves to the empty horizon, eating his homesick heart out in grim endurance of his fate.

One awful day he was caught unawares and his career came near ending tragically. The ship, without the slightest warning, made a sudden lurch and he was unceremoniously tumbled out of his resting place with a splash, into the waves that were racing along the smooth black sides of the ship. An alarm was immediately given and in five seconds everyone on board knew what had happened. The captain received the information with a few sailor expletives, nautical and to the point, and growled something about "not being worth it," but ordered "all hands to the rescue," and the middies responded valiantly. One, more venturesome than the rest, without pausing to count the odds, stripped and leaped boldly into the dangerous depths. The rest of the crew hung breathless over the rail, watching their comrade make his desperate struggle with the buffeting waves, which sucked at every ounce of his youthful will and strength. There was an instant of sickening suspense when he sunk straight down clear out of sight. But quickly his head shot up again above the swirl of water and as he shook the brine from his nostrils and eyes and struck out powerfully with his arms, there was seen between his teeth the motionless cat held fast by the neck. The small boat was lowered and the hero was picked up and helped aboard.

The cat did not show a symptom of life, as they laid him on the warm sunny deck and applied "first aid," and it looked for a time as if the shock to his nerves and the long salt bath had done their worst. But the determined mettle of this hard-shell spirit was not so easy to extinguish and as life surged back into nerve and muscle, and he struggled back to consciousness, they found he was there with all of his nine lives wide awake and still in good working commission. One would have thought that after such an appalling doom had all but closed in on him, he would have appreciated his good luck and the true value of having such heroic comrades, and would have shown some thankfulness for the risk one of them had run to save his life. On the contrary, although he had learned to keep away from the porthole, a deeper gloom than ever settled upon him, and, taking this unfortunate accident as an added insult, he treated them all with more than his usual scorn.

The cat's peculiar characteristics of temper made him not only marked, but famous. The very independence and aloofness of his dull life made him tantalizingly popular with the young fellows, and in their leisure hours they were continually seeking him out to pass the time. They thought it great fun to tease him to furious anger and then laugh at his quivering rage, but after they had had enough of this kind of entertainment they would never let him go back to seclusion without trying their very best to coax him to good temper. They never succeeded in this commendable purpose, however, even with the most heroic efforts, and would have hotly resented any insinuation that their pastime might possibly be a cruelty. The captain, too, was guilty of loving to display the cat's tabasco-like temper, being quite proud of the strong personality shown in one so ugly and vicious and still one so delightfully entertaining.