we soon could do more than lap, we could eat things. auntie may and rosamond had a chafing-dish, and they used to cook all sorts of messes in it for us and for mother, who was very fussy about her food, and took dislikes to the most ordinary things. for instance, porridge she would not touch, or cod-liver oil biscuits, while hovis food, or horlick's, or a sardine put her out of her mind with delight. they say that a sardine will sometimes bring a dying cat back to life. they burnt methylated spirit in the chafing-dish, and the first time i saw the sly curling flame winding up among auntie may's new novel, i confess i was frightened. but mother reassured us; she said if i looked attentively i would see that it was a very obedient flame, and would go straight up into the air and do no harm unless they interrupted it. she gave it a wide berth herself, and hoped we would do the same when we began to be able to get out of our basket and walk about. auntie may and rosamond were not so very careful, for once when they thought the spirit was getting low, rosamond took the whole bottle and poured some more on. huh! it took fire, and she dropped it pretty quick, and it broke, and there were three separate burning pools on the floor. mother put a paw over us all, though we could not have got out of the bed even if we had wanted to, and gripped freddy by the neck, ready to lift him out if it should be necessary. luckily auntie may was there, and there was a large flowerpot full of earth in the room. she tilted out the flower, head over roots, and poured the earth on the burning pools, instead of the water which rosamond had torn off to the bathroom to get. it was soon out, and the poor child got a scolding and a lesson in chemistry from her grandpapa.
they had not got proper things to work with, mother said. they had no spoon, but used to stir up the mixture with the butt-end of one of auntie may's pens. when it was ready, they would pour it out into any piece of china that was handy—japanese pots and plates that cost a fortune, so i was told. then they washed them up in the bath, and we used to hear this sort of thing: 'mind that cloisonné, rosamond!' or, 'that is a bit of persian four-mark you have chipped, i do believe!' but it was no matter, they got a new bit out of the studio. mr. graham was a collector, and nothing was too good for the cats.
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.
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.'
admiral togo always asked for the whittington story and got it, but i didn't care for it. i liked the story of the cat that told the people of the house that the basement was on fire, by running into their bedroom with her coat all smouldering where a hot splinter had fallen on it, and the pied piper of hamelin. that was all about rats, as it happened, but no matter, it made my mouth water.
