Now he lived totally alone. He kept the house in order himself, and made the food himself—and smoked his way with cheap tobacco through the long, winter evenings.
It was quite cosy in the living-room, where a pair of large pictures of himself and his wife when young hung on the wall, and where the inevitable soldier-photographs of the boys—who all later on became navvies or brick-layers—stood upon the chest-of-drawers. In the window beneath the short cotton curtains stood well-tended pot-plants on neat wooden stands.... It was all meagre enough, but decent and orderly.
In addition to the horse, which was the old man’s jewel, and the pig, which was treated as a son, he owned a little dog called Bibs. The latter guarded the house when his master was away.
Bibs reigned in the living-room. Outside—in the stall, barn, and loft—a cat was in command; but in reality the post was vacant, for old Peter, with his pale, lack-lustre eyes and moth-eaten tail, was now so decrepit and worn-out that he could no longer hear whether mice or other vermin scratched or not.
For fourteen years the cat had lived with the fisherman, who alleged that he was so intelligent that he understood what was said to him. For instance, if the cat sat by the stove and the man bent down and shouted, “Peter, get out!” he got up and went out.
He always ran to meet the fish-cart when it came home from the fishing-place laden with eels or herring—and as reward the fisherman would fling him a squab or a dab, or perhaps a small eel. He could recognize the horse’s trot from a great distance, and when it came in sight he miauwed with delight, opening his mouth so wide that one could see far down into his stomach.
In his palmy days he used to run a mile along the road to meet the cart—but now he could only manage a couple of hundred yards.
Peter was the apple of the fisherman’s eye, and Grey would never have found favour with him had not the old cat himself received his successor, when she suddenly walked in one freezing autumn morning, with the utmost graciousness.
For Grey-kitten was a lady, and old Mr. Peter’s ingrained tendency towards gallantry acquired new life at the sight of the pretty, little, long-eared pussy-cat. A golden gleam filled the fellow’s pale eyes, and the fisherman often saw the stiff, rheumatic old tyke sitting for hours at a time under a tree up which his new, agile little lodger had fled.
But one day when it is raining hard, Grey-kitten cannot escape from the old stink-pot; she has to run up into the hayloft.