The Cat

by Violet Hunt

Up to now, none of us had ever succeeded in getting out of the bed by ourselves. We were lifted out by them to walk about a little, keeping our stomachs off the ground with great difficulty. Our legs had a strange tendency to slip away beyond us, 'doing splits' as they do in the pantomime—so Auntie May called our way of getting ourselves along. When at last we did succeed in keeping our legs at right angles to our bodies, we wobbled sadly, and longed to be put back again among the hay. But at times, when we weren't eating or sleeping, but thoroughly awake, and there wasn't much doing in the old dull bed, we used to try to get out of it. We three boys used to make a ladder of Zobeide, and, propping ourselves up on her, get over the edge in a jerk, but at first we could only one of us look over, and then Zobeide would meanly crumble away under us, and pitch us all head-over-heels into the bed again. She took an unfair advantage, too, and bit our hind legs.

One day, however, I managed to climb up without the help of Zobeide, till my paws rested on the top of the basket, and I was screwing up my hind legs till they came nearly up to join the front ones, when somebody—I believe it was Rosamond—gave the after-part of me a push and I came over on to the floor on my nose, which, luckily, is flat, not Roman. I rose unsteadily, and walked away like one in a dream. I think I must have walked right out of the door and into the bathroom. Rosamond was behind me, and I had a sort of feeling that I would like to run away from her—a feeling that I have had many a time since with nearly all of Them. It was because she was behind me. Now if she had been in front I should have longed to pass her, and then turn round and jeer at her. But as it was, Run! Run! was my motto, and into a corner for preference. I chose a corner, and squeezed myself in behind some old boxes in the bathroom. They must have been very full of dust, for I sneezed twice and so told Rosamond where I was, and she put a great hand like a house in and caught hold of me.

'Naughty little thing!' she said. That was the first hint I had that They expect us to stay beside them and not run away. I took the hint; at least, I was good enough to stop running away sometimes, when she said my name very decidedly. You never know what They may have in their hands to make it worth your while to stop; as often as not it is something to eat. Rosamond put me back in the box, and mother cleaned me for half-an-hour quite unnecessarily, saying, 'My children shall be kept unspotted from the world as far as I can manage it, for the world is very dirty.'

She is indeed most particular. She washed off the marks of people's hands carefully wherever they had touched us. It looks rude, I think, to see a cat, the moment it has been kindly stroked, turn round and begin to lick the stain away. Rosamond said it is just as if she took out her pocket-handkerchief after grandpapa had kissed her, and wiped her cheek with it.

We could all get out of our bed now. In fact, we would not stay in, except for sleeping and eating (mother still fed us a little, so as to let us down easy). We were all over the place, and the door of the study had to be always kept shut. Rosamond said that being cat-maid was much harder than lessons at home, for she could keep Fraülein in order, but she could not keep us.

'I can't keep them in,' she complained to her grandpapa. 'I collect them all in my pinafore and drop them all into bed, and out they ooze in a moment like so many india-rubber balls! Fred especially is a fiend. He is in to everything. He is outside everything. He touches everything—licks it mostly. I am glad to say that he burnt his nose badly the other day on the electric radiator. He won't touch that again in a hurry!'

No, that he won't! He singed off a bit of his whiskers, and we all laughed at him awfully. He was a queer little cat, not a bit like Zobeide or Togo. We never wanted to fight, but he lay down in a corner of the bed and said, 'Come on, you!' Then Zobeide or I took a hand, and he knocked us down and drove the straws into our eyes. Mother punished him by taking him in her arms and kicking him with her hind legs, but he bit her face and she had to leave off. When we packed ourselves to go to sleep, mother happening to be away, we always made a sort of cross, lying over each other for warmth, and Freddy always took the top, out of his turn, and having so much the biggest head, always managed to get his own way. We three others hoped that the first one of us Auntie May sold or gave away would be Fred, but nothing was said about that. Auntie May bought a ball with a jingle in it for us all, she distinctly said so, but Fred always assumed that it was his ball, and he went so far as to claw the jingle out of it, saying that it amused him quite as much without. We never got a chance of playing with that ball unless Auntie May happened to leave her house shoes in the room, and then Fred said we might take the ball, for he didn't get a chance of real leather to gnaw every day.

Altogether he was a terror, and Mary used to say she would like to wring his neck. That didn't frighten Fred; he knew she wouldn't do anything of the kind, and he went on jumping on to the back of her neck, and getting among the ashes when she was lighting the fire and being swept up by mistake, and plopping on to paper parcels, and eating coals, and needles, and buttons, and corks, and working off a hundred wicked tricks he had invented.

You see, Fred never would attend to mother's lectures when we were left quite alone in the room, and she told us all the little catly rules that we should have to guide our conduct by when we left her. Some of them, she said, were traditional, going back to the days beyond the dawn of history, when cats were worshipped. She said we must never forget that great fact, never allow ourselves to lose sight of it, but let it regulate all our conduct and our relations towards Them. They no longer worship us, though they are kind to us. They have perhaps forgotten, but we need not. Therefore we must be gentle, obedient, subservient to Them, but with a reservation. We should, if we thought proper, come to their call, but never with vulgar alacrity. She thought it the highest possible praise of a cat to have said of him, as Auntie May had once said of a friend's cat, 'The more he is called, the more he doesn't come.' We should find time to sit down on the way and make pretence to attend to our personal appearance, or what not. We might suffer Them to hold us in their arms, but not in inconvenient or indecorous positions, such as upside down, or round their necks like a boa, or pretending we are wheelbarrows, and so on. She said They—the more punctilious of Them—have a way of holding a cat up by the loose skin of its neck, that being considered the least uncomfortable one to us personally. Quite a mistake, she said; they only think so because we do not usually protest—how can we, when the skin is strained so tightly over our throats as to preclude all attempt at conversation? The only proper way to hold a cat is to take both hands to it and support the lower limbs, instead of letting the whole weight of the body depend from the shoulders or the paws. She told us how to open a door, if it was left ever so little ajar. That is to walk up it—about two good steps will do. If it is shut, the handle should be turned; but that needs special aptitudes. Then if we mew passionately before a closed door and it is opened for us, we should not go in, as would naturally occur to an undisciplined cat to do, but sit down at a distance and lick our face, so as to show we do not really care about it.

She told us the proper way to lie down—never at once, but after having described two or three circles. The right thing to do is to turn round and round, brushing our fur the right way till we are more or less in the form of a ball. Then, and not till then, we may definitely lie down with an expression of contentment if we feel like it. We are to imagine ourselves making a nest in some very high grass, beating it down all round us to form a bed before we can settle in for the night. Then we must tuck our heads in symmetrically, and safely too, taking care to keep one eye free, ready to open and see what is going on, and an ear cocked to hear strange or unusual sounds. That kind of high long grass was, she said, called jungle grass, and our ancestors long ago, in the time before they were worshipped, lived in the jungle and ran wild there. The worshipping came afterwards.