Views and Opinions

by Ouida

‘She’ (she is a little Chinese cat which had taken refuge on board his frigate) ‘came out of the shadow, stretching herself slowly, as if to give herself time for reflection. She came towards me with several pauses, sometimes with a Mongolian grace; she lifted one paw in the air before deciding to put it down and take a further step; and all the while she gazed at me fixedly, questioningly. I wondered what she could want with me. I had had her well fed by my servant. When she was quite near, very near, she sat down, brought her tail round her legs, and made a very soft little noise. And she continued to look at me, to look at me in the eyes, which indicated that intelligent ideas were thronging through her small head. It was evident that she understood, as all animals do, that I was not a thing, but a thinking being, capable of pity, and accessible to the mute entreaty of a look. Besides, it was plain that my eyes were really eyes to her, that is, they were mirrors in which her little soul sought anxiously to seize some reflection from my own.

‘And whilst she thus gazed at me, I let my hand droop on to her quaint little head, and stroked her fur as my first caress. What she felt at my touch was certainly something more than a mere impression of physical pleasure; she had some sentiment, some comprehension of protection and sympathy in her forsaken misery. This was why she had ventured out of her hiding-place in the dark; this was what she had resolved to ask me for with diffidence and hesitation. She did not want either to eat or drink, she only wanted a little companionship in this lonely world, a little friendship.

‘How had she learned that such things were, this stray, hunted creature, never touched by a kind hand, never loved by anyone, unless, perhaps, on board some junk, by some poor little Chinese child who had neither caresses nor playthings, sprung up by chance like a sickly plant, one too many in the grovelling yellow crowd, as unhappy and as hungry as herself, and of whom the incomplete soul will at its disappearance from earth leave no more trace than hers? Then one frail paw was timidly laid on my lap, with such infinite delicacy, such exceeding discretion! and, after having lingeringly consulted and implored me through the eyes, she sprang upon my lap, thinking the moment come when she might establish intimate relations with me. She installed herself there in a ball, with a tact, a reserve, a lightness incredible, and always gazing up in my face ... and her eyes becoming still more expressive, still more winning, said plainly to mine,—

‘“In this sad autumn day, since we are both alone in this floating prison, rocked and lost in the midst of I know not what endless perils, why should we not give to one another a little of that sweet exchange of feeling which soothes so many sorrows, which has a semblance of some immaterial eternal thing not subjected to death, which calls itself affection, and finds its expression in a touch, a look?″’

In the dying hours of another cat, the charming Moumoutte Blanche, whose frolics we follow, and whose snowy beauty we know so well, the same thought comes to him.

‘She tried to rise to greet us, her expression grateful and touched, her eyes showing, as much as human eyes could, the internal presence and the pain of that which we call the soul.

‘One morning I found her stiff and cold, with glassy orbs, a dead beast, a thing men cast out on to the dust heap. Then I bade Sylvester dig a little grave in a corner of the courtyard, at the foot of a shrub.... Where was gone that which I had seen shine in her dying eyes, the little, flickering, anxious flame from within: where was it gone?’

And he carries her little lifeless body himself down into the open air.

‘Never had there been a more radiant day of June, never a softer silence and warmth crossed by the gay buzzing of summer flies; the courtyard was all blossom, the rose boughs covered with roses; a sweet country calm rested on all the gardens around; the swallows and martins slumbered; only the old tortoise, Suleima, more widely awake the warmer it became, travelled merrily without aim or goal over the old sun-bathed stones. There was everywhere that melancholy of skies too fair, of weather too fine, in the exhaustion of a hot noon-day. All the plants, all the things, seemed to cruelly shout there the triumph over their own perpetual new birth, without pity for the fragile human creatures who heard that song of summer, weighed themselves with the consciousness of their own impending, unavoidable end.

‘This garden was and is to me the oldest and most familiar of all the places of the earth, in which all the smallest details have been known to me from the earliest hours of the vague and surprised impressions of infancy. So much so that I am attached to it with all my soul; that I love with a singular force and regard almost as my fetish the venerable plants which grow there, its trellised branches, its climbing jessamines, and a certain rose-coloured diclytra which every month of March displays on the same spot its early-burgeoning leaves, sends out its flowers in April, grows yellow in the suns of June, and at last, burnt up by August, seems to give up the ghost and perish.... And with an infinite melancholy, in this place so gay with the fresh sunlight of a young year, I watched the two beloved figures with white hair and mourning gowns, my mother and Aunt Claire, going and coming, leaning down over a flower border as they had done so many years to see what blossoms were already opening, or raising their heads to look at the buds of the creepers and the roses. And when the two black robes went onward and became farther away in the far perspective of a long green avenue, I saw how much slower was their step, how bent were their forms. Alas for that time too close at hand when in the green avenue which would be ever the same, I should behold their shadows no more! Is it possible that a time will ever come when they shall have left this life? I feel as if they will not entirely depart so long as I myself shall be here, to invoke their benevolent presence, and that in the summer evenings I shall still see their blessed shades pass under the old jessamines and vines, and that something of their spirit will remain to me in the plants which they cherished, in the drooping boughs of the honeysuckle and in the rosy petals of the old diclytra!’