She taught us humility, too. When we heard the strays howling outside in the square garden, too weak to catch birds for their food perhaps, and begging a morsel or a cup of milk from door to door, we were to pause in our own feeding and think, 'This cat's ancestors were probably kings, like mine. I must not be stuck-up.'
Sometimes even Fred would leave off roaming and sitting away by himself, thinking over and planning some new bit of mischief to do, and come back to bed and take the warm place that Zobeide had made, and beg mother to tell us about 'Dirty Whitey' of the underground. We had all heard it many a time, but it was a nice story.
Mother had seen her once the time she was in the underground at Notting Hill Gate with Auntie May, and Auntie May had said:
'Oh, bother, there's that wretched cat again! It makes me quite sick to see it playing about between the rails.'
She was waiting for her train, and a nice porter was standing near her, and he said:
'Bless you, Miss, she knows her way better nor any of us. She takes a little walk to High Street, Kensington, now and again, and comes back quite safe and sound. She bringed up a family of kittens there in the tunnel and never a one was hurt. But I don't doubt myself she'll get copped some day!'
Auntie May said she thought so too, and she walked along to the other end of the platform to avoid seeing the white cat crossing the line just out of bravado as the train was coming in. When her own train came along, she said she felt as if that cat would be under it and be cut in bits. But it wasn't, for she saw it again a week later, and told mother. Then quite a month later she came in and told mother that 'Dirty Whitey' had been 'copped' at last.
'Whitey' had been chasing a rat across the metals when a train was just coming in, and professional pride had forbidden her to let go. So the train had cut off her head with the tail of that rat in her mouth—at least, so the porter had told Auntie May. We loved that story, and, as I have said, even Freddy used to come and listen when mother began to tell it to us.
Zobeide liked the story of the cat that walked all the way to London after its master, who was very meanly moving house and had intended not to take the family cat. Instinct, mother said. It seemed to work both ways, for another cat was brought in a covered basket away from the house it had been born in to one a hundred miles away in quite another part of the country. It never saw anything, for it had been packed up in the room in the first house, and the basket was not undone till they had got into a room in the other and shut the door. No matter, for that cat was not to be beaten. It just went straight up the chimney and home again. It evidently loved places better than people, Zobeide remarked.
'It is generally the way,' mother would answer, 'but I happen to love Auntie May, and where she is, is home to me. I'm not sure I even believe those stories. I know that I should be puzzled to find my way back to Egerton Gardens, even if I wanted to! Probably if I once started, the gods of my ancestors would endow me with a sixth sense and show me the way.'