My desire to kill would become so over-powering that my breath would become hurried, my heart would beat almost to suffocation and my face would flush.
Usually my grandmother, noticing my reddened face would glance up over her spectacles, from the book she was reading and say, “What ails you, Robert? You look flushed and feverish. Perhaps the room is too warm for you. Put Toi Wah down and run out in the air for a while.”
I would take Toi Wah then, and, holding her as tightly as I dared, and with my teeth clenched to restrain myself, I would put her on her cushion and go out.
My grandfather had brought Toi Wah, a little yellow, fluffy, amber-eyed kitten, home with him in his ship from that mysterious land washed by the Yellow Sea.
And with Toi Wah had come a strange tale of her taking, stolen from an old Buddhist Monastery garden nestling among age-old pines beside the Grand Canal of China.
About her neck was a beautifully-wrought collar of flexible gold, with a dragon engraved along its length, together with many Chinese characters and set with stones of Topaz and Jade. The collar was made so as to allow for expansion as the need arose, so that Toi Wah was never without her collar from her kittenhood to adult age. In fact, the collar could not be loosened without injury to the metal.
One day I descended into the kitchen with the cat in my arms and showed Charlie, our Chinese cook, who had sailed the Seven Seas with my grandfather, the collar about her neck.
The old Chinaman stared until his eyes started from his head, all the time making queer little noises in his throat. He rubbed his eyes and put on his great horn spectacles and stared again, muttering to himself.
“What is it, Charlie?” I asked, surprised at the old man, who was usually so stoically calm.
“These velly gleat words,” he said at last, shaking his head cryptically. “Words no good flo you. Words good for velly gleat cat; Gland Lama cat.”