Catastrophes

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Title:     Catastrophes
Author: Katharine Lee Bates [More Titles by Bates]

"And when Maeldune and his men went into the best of the houses they saw no one in it but a little cat that was in the middle of the house, and it playing about on the four stone pillars that were there, and leaping from one to another. It looked at the men for a short space, but it did not stop from its play."

--Lady Gregory's Book of Saints and Wonders.

People are people, and cats are cats. We do not know our pussies. We pet them but we cannot tame them. Landor's Cincirollo,

"wagging his dread jaw at every chirp
Of bird above him on the olive branch,"

is latent in Wordsworth's

"kitten on the wall
Sporting with the leaves that fall."

These charming fireside tenants of ours have their own concerns, which lie aloof from the human. Even nursery-lore bears witness to this:

"'Pussy-cat, Pussy-cat,
Where have you been?'
'I've been to London,
To see the Queen.'
'Pussy-cat, Pussy-cat,
What did you there?'
'I frightened a little mouse
Under her chair.'"

But if we cannot forego the consciousness of those tiger claws hid in the velvet daintiness of the light feet, neither can tabby put her trust in us. Race memory and, too often, individual experience accuse us. Her reticence with humankind, her stealth, her self-reliance, might well have been stamped deep into cat character by the monstrous cruelties she has suffered at our hands. Her reputed connection with witches, of whom it is estimated that Christendom put to death some nine million, involved the poor animal in their hideous tortures. Indeed, she caught it from all sides. Cats were flung into the bonfires to perish with the helpless old crones who had cared for them. A witch might be exorcised by whipping a cat, like the wretched puss long and solemnly flogged by twelve priests "in a parlor at Denham, til shee vanished out of theyr sight." And it was a cat, so confession on the rack declared, that after an accursed christening was cast into the sea to raise a storm that should drown James of Scotland, "the devil's worst enemy," on his wedding journey home from Denmark. This royal witch-hunter, who came thirteen years later to the throne of England, was not content until thirty human victims had paid by horrible deaths for the black art of that storm.

A few of these maligned cats have left a distinctive record on the blurred page of history. Rutterkin, the familiar of Agnes Flower, whose very name should have attested her innocence, was black as the soot of hell, but Mother Fraunces, who learned the secrets of sorcery from her own grandmother, had "a whyte spotted cat * * * to be her sathan," while the leader of the infernal chorus in the cavern scene of Macbeth was a tabby:

"Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed."

Into other inoffensive little beasts, "hedgepigs," puppies, owls, bats, crows, rabbits, toads, the evil spirits were believed to enter, though Thomas Heywood notes with satisfaction that no imp was ever so sacrilegious as to masquerade as dove or lamb; but the cat calumny has lasted longest.

"And shall I be afrayd
Of Cats in mine own Countrey?"

Some of us are, for a recent criminal trial in one of the Middle States brought out the fact that many an American pocket, even to-day, carries a silver bullet as a talisman against the "black hex," or witch-cat.

Yet from the cruelties of superstition poor puss has suffered less than from the cruelties of sport. Rustic festivals in Merry England were not complete without the archery matches whose target was a terrified, bleeding cat, hung up in a wicker "bottle," while shouts of glee greeted the successful hits in the whizzing storm of arrows. As a special merry-making, a great company of our jovial ancestors would set forth on horseback, with drum-beating and all manner of hullabaloo, attended by half the population of the town, to enjoy themselves at the expense of some ill-fated pussy. A barrel, half full of soot, was swung from a cross-beam firmly fixed on two high poles. Into this barrel she was plunged and under it the valiant horsemen rode as gayly as the English ride to a fox-hunt even yet, striking it tremendous blows with clubs and wooden hammers. If any life was left in the bruised and mangled cat, after the destruction of the barrel, the man who put an end to her by some spectacular novelty of barbarity was the hero of the day.

How can we expect wise old Grimalkin to forgive us our atrocities? She remembers. Accepting or rejecting at her pleasure what courtesies are offered her, she maintains her own reserves. Rare are the recorded instances of her going out of her way to serve mankind, to whom she owes no debt of gratitude. Yet a legend, attested by two portraits of this Good Samaritan, tells that when Sir Henry Wyatt, father of the poet, was imprisoned in the Tower under Richard III and left to perish of starvation, a cat came daily to his window-grating, bringing him a pigeon from a neighboring dove-cot, which doubtless had its own opinion of her charity. No wonder that Sir Henry, in his later, honored years under the Tudors, "would ever make much of cats, as other men will of their spaniels or hounds."

With the best will in the world toward felis domestica, I have never been able to maintain fortunate relations with the individuals that have come my way. Colleagues of mine have reared kittens that have become the pride and joy of their hearths, as yellow Leo, who passed from the happiest of homes into a lyric shrine; but my own cats make a sorry parade down the avenue of memory. At the far, dim end of the avenue glints out a chubby child in a calico-caped sunbonnet, laboriously trundling in her doll-carriage five blind kittens, with the benevolent intent of giving them a pleasant airing. The little copper-toed shoes bump on the rocks and are caught in the brambles of that rough pasture, while at every jolt that sprawl of kittenhood overflowing the small red chariot miauls so dolorously that their benefactor is sorely tempted to sit down and cry with them. But amazement at their lack of appreciation is less than resentment at the conduct of their grim, gray mother, Old Spotnose, who comes tearing after in fierce pursuit and overtakes the rocking vehicle, whence she snatches one of the wailing passengers by the scruff of its neck and races back with her dangling burden to the woodshed. Determined to make the remaining kittens happy, the child goes tugging and panting on, but still there is heard that dreaded rush in the rear, and another, another, another and yet another of those squallerkins is kidnapped. Nothing is left at last but an empty doll-carriage, overturned among the daisies and, deep within the sunbonnet, a puckered, crimson face flowing with tears.

Throughout my childhood Old Spotnose continued to be an unsocial and ungracious being. Perhaps annoyed by our persistent attentions to her frequent families in the woodshed, she sought out all manner of hiding-places from haymow to cellar. Memorable is the Sunday morning when our mother lifted down the hatbox from her upper closet shelf and looked in, her Sabbath expression completely destroyed, to find a huddle of new kittens reposing in the crown of her best bonnet. The sudden disappearances of these successive kitten groups were to my slowly dawning apprehension first a mystery and then a horror. Old Spotnose finally took to the woods, returning to the kitchen door for food, a gaunt, half-savage creature, only under stress of icebound weather. When we moved away from the village, she could not be found, but one of my brothers, back for a visit the following summer, heard that she had been seen skulking about the house and that kindly neighbors had thrown meat and fish in her way. Carrying a basin of milk, he went to a break in the barn foundations and, lying flat on the ground, called and coaxed. Relenting toward humankind at the last, sick Old Spotnose, hardly more than skin and bone, crawled out to him. She would not taste the milk, but she lay against his knee for a while, accepting his caresses; then dragged herself back under the barn to die alone.

From that time to this, all my personal relations with cats have ended in grief. One engaging kitten after another grew into romantic or adventurous youth only to meet disaster. Perhaps our most heart-rending experience was with Triptolemus, taken from his mother in such tender infancy that we could not teach him to lap milk or even suck it from the finger. Finally he solved the problem himself by tumbling into the saucer and, when he was lifted out, licking his feet with relish. For days he insisted on the saucer promenade, taking nourishment only by applying his wayward little tongue to each foot in turn. From a roly-poly innocent, wondering at the world out of the roundest of blue eyes, he grew, with the astonishing speed of kittenhood, into a profligate young ruffian, limping home from one disreputable fight after another with torn ears and gashed neck and thighs. One wound deepened into a festering, offensive sore, beyond the cure of our domestic surgery, and as veterinaries and animal hospitals were then foreign to our experience, a brother, in my absence, was bidden take the cat down to the river and drown him. Very slowly the executioner, a stout bag in his hand, made his way to the water's edge, Trip careering about his feet and playing with the fatal string. The bag was weighted with stones and the cat was ordered to enter the open mouth. Trip sniffed at it suspiciously, did not like the game, but looked up trustfully into the familiar face and obeyed. The boy who flung that bag out into the current and came running home as if nine reproachful little ghosts were at his heels could never be brought to drown a cat again.

Later on, there was a graceful mite, Argon, whom I can still see jumping after moths in the moonlight; but before the moth-season was over, there came a night whose darkness never rendered him up. Strayed or stolen, killed, chased, enchanted, it was not for us to know.

Years after, our home rejoiced for a few brief weeks in the charms of Frisky Fuzzy, a peculiarly affectionate, confiding kitty, who met a cruel death by the teeth of the rector's terrier. This young priest was a holy man in general, but he had no regard for the sixth commandment as broken by his dog. All the neighborhood was aroused, for one beloved puss after another had been left torn and bleeding by that hypocritical little brute, who always kept an eye out for fresh victims as he trotted sedately at his master's heels, making pastoral calls. When at last vengeance found him out and the dog lay poisoned on the parsonage steps, the rector's grief was so sincere that my anger melted in sympathy. There had been a coolness between us since Frisky Fuzzy's fate, but on the next occasion when we met at a neutral tea-table, I attempted a reconciliation.

"Perhaps your dog and my cat have made up our quarrel in heaven," I began, passing him the sugar.

"I don't believe your cat went to heaven," he retorted, passing me the lemon.

Our last attempt at a home kitten was with a little sprite of so perverse and irreverent a temper that the most liberal theology could hardly hold out to us the hope of finding her again in any Paradise where pious pussies congregate. This impish being was foisted upon us by an old friend whose persuasive powers, as I had long known, were irresistible. In tones that were dulcet even by way of the telephone she invited me to shelter her wild young puss, Polly, during the summer, while she closed her own house and, bearing Billy in a basket, sought the repose of an ocean isle.

"Why don't you carry Polly with you, too?"

"There isn't room in the basket and, besides, I'm sure that two cats would be against the rules of the railroad."

"But Polly takes to the trees whenever I try to pat her. She would run away."

"Oh, I can arrange that for you very nicely. I'll let you have a kitten of hers and then she'll be perfectly contented."

"A kitten of Polly's! She is only a kitten herself."

"Yes, you are quite right, as usual. One kitten might not be enough to steady her. It would be better for you to have two, and then Polly will be kept busy in teaching them to play together."

"Now how many catkins have you over there? Own up."

"Well! Not counting the pincushion pussy that the mice like to nibble, we have six on hand just now,--Billy and Polly and the four kits. Such darlings! Everybody wants them. The competition is really terrible, but of course I insist that you shall have first choice. Come over this afternoon, please. We are taking the early train to-morrow morning."

Spellbound by the cheerful audacity of these proposals, I went, and when, after much active exertion on our part, Polly had been caught and securely hasped down under a heaving basket-lid, I dubiously selected two of her blind babes to bear her company.

"Who takes the other two?"

"You do," responded my friend more winsomely than ever, "unless you want to be a horrid Herod and go down in history as another slayer of the innocents. Look at those little dears! Listen to them! Have you the heart to ask me to drop them into a pail of cold, cold water? What sort of a physiologist are you to suppose that kittens, born only yesterday, could live without their mother? And Polly would miss them dreadfully. I never saw a more devoted family. As soon as they are old enough to gambol, they will be such a pleasure for you all,--especially your sister. And you can easily find nice homes for them, if you want to give them away later on."

The four members of our summer household each had the privilege of naming one of the kittens. Housewife Honeyvoice called the black one Topsy; the small schoolgirl, Esther, dubbed the prettiest Daisy; I gave to the homeliest the encouraging appellation of Cinderella, and Sister Jane, returning from a visit to find the feline family in possession, promptly branded the fourth as Beelzebub. Out of deference to her outraged feelings, a nursery was prepared down cellar, where Polly, for so inexperienced a parent, took excellent care of her babies except when my officious ignorance interfered.

Still a blunderer, I put the kittens out on the south piazza the second day to treat them to a bracing interlude of air and sunshine. Polly at once went frantic, mewing and scratching for re-admittance. Presently a succession of queer, soft thumps brought me to the scene, and there was Polly, Beelzebub flapping from her mouth, climbing madly up the outside of the screen door. As soon as she saw me, she parted her jaws to emit another of those shrill meows that had been profaning the peace of the house and down fell poor Belze with a piteous whack on the piazza floor.

Close scrutiny of the situation revealed a big, saffron-colored cat, with a dangerous glint in his green eyes, peering from the shrubbery and, self-rebuked, I restored Polly and her jewels to the safe seclusion of the cellar.

But I still held to my faith in the open air and, as soon as the kittens began to blink, Housewife Honeyvoice and I pulled out from the lumber that chokes up cellars under feminine charge the big wire box which had been the Castle Joyous of Robin Hood. Planted firmly on the grassplot outside the cellar door, with a cat-hole just large enough for Polly cut in the wire, it was so secure as to appease even her maternal fears. Every morning she marshaled her little troop out to this new abode, carefully drove them all in and tended them there until sunset, when she led them back to the cellar. All the cats in the vicinity came to call, but Polly was the very spirit of inhospitality. She always maintained an anxious guard against marauders and, at the approach of the most amiable old gossip, would fill up the wire doorway with her own slender body, spitting and bristling in the very face of the disconcerted guest. Cinderella, the most precocious of the kittens, observed with admiration this form of welcome and scandalized all observers by scampering to the door one day, as her mother was returning from a brief constitutional, and with all due ceremonies of defiance refusing her admission. After one astonished instant, Polly recovered her presence of mind, bowled out of the way that comical ball of impudence and made it her first parental duty, after entering, to box Cinder's ears.

As the kittens grew older, they had the run of the house, which they filled with elfin mirth of motion and reels of Puckish revel. Placed in a row on my desk, they would watch the moving pen with fascinated eyes, till one shy paw after another would steal out to investigate and presently there would be a flurry of funny antics all over a blotted page. By autumn they had all gone their ways to different households, except Esther's Daisy, whom we kept, but the joy of kittenhood was the only life they had. Doom, like a black cat hunting mice, speedily caught them all, unless, perchance, dogs and motors were kinder than we fear to Cinder, who, one winter day, after her morning saucer of milk, struck blithely out into the sunshine from the best of homes and never, though search, inquiry and advertisement did their utmost, was heard of again. Little Bub proved so puny that he was left with Polly, reinstated, much to her content, in her own kingdom, but not even her puzzled solicitude, varied by cuffings, could keep him alive. As for Topsy and Daisy, I have not the heart to tell how they perished, but though I say it as should not, Daisy was too bad for this world. An incarnate imp, she mocked all discipline and scorned all affection, capering into new mischief at every rebuke and scratching herself free from caresses. Despising laps and cushions, she took to the air like an aeroplane, forever on the leap from one forbidden shelf, mantel or flower-pot to another. Her agility was supernatural. She would hang from a curtain cord, spring thence to the top of a door, pounce on a bowing caller's back, and, within ten seconds fill the hall with such skurry and commotion that Hecate and all her witches could have done no more. She could not keep quiet, even at night, until Housewife Honeyvoice devised the plan of putting her to bed in a basket, with a cork dangling from the handle for her to play with in her dreams.

Joy-of-Life was ill that winter and, because the kitten's pranks would now and then divert a suffering hour, we bore with Daisy as long as patience could, until, indeed, she forsook the house and set up an independent establishment with a battered ruffian of a cat under our south porch. Before forsaking the house, she had derided everything in it. She had, indeed, an uncanny gift of singling out for her most profane attentions the special objects that humankind holds sacred. On the top of my desk stands a small Florentine bust of Dante, whose austere countenance she loved to slap. Beyond it hangs a cross of inlaid olivewood from Jerusalem, apparently inaccessible, but this infant athlete, precariously balancing with one foot on the curved woodwork of the desk and two feet clawing the wall, would stretch herself out like an elastic until her free foot could give the lower tip of the cross a smart rap and set it swinging. Punished, she would strike back, hitting us in the face with an absurd, soft paw; called, she would run away; caught, she would kick and bite. Our most tactful cajolery she met with suspicion and disdain, if not with open ridicule. Graceful as a whirling leaf, she was untamable as the wind that whirls it,--the wildest wisp of kittenhood that ever left an aching memory.

Since the tragic exit of Daisy, whose confidence I could never win,--and her cynical little ghost bids me admit that her distrust was borne out by the event,--I have counted myself unworthy to take any kitten to hearth and home. I doubt if any would come. My neighbors across the way have a lordly old Thomas, who, smelling dog on my skirts, spits at me as I mount the steps. My neighbors of the cross-cut have a glossy black puss in a resplendent red collar, who politely but unrelentingly evades all my advances. The feline heart has found me out. Yet I still cherish a wistful regard for these delicate-footed, wary creatures, who develop so suddenly from madcap frolic into dignity, discretion and reserve, keeping even in the most domestic surroundings a latent sense of a free life elder than civilization, when, as Swinburne tells his silken crony:

"Wild on woodland ways your sires
Flashed like fires."

A friend of mine, a scholar, and therefore proud in thought and poor in purse, living at the top of a London apartment house, had a cherished cat by name of Fettles, who never touched the ground from September to June. Rooms and corridor limited his promenades, except for a long box of plants that filled the diminutive balcony. To the casual eye he seemed well content with his cloistered life, purring on cozy cushions, performing painstaking toilets, cuddling down on the table close to the arm of his mistress as she read and wrote, even condescending, for her pleasure, to play with a tassel or ball, but I noted that my arrivals brought to Fettles a quivering excitement. It was not my conversation, which he ignored, nor my gifts, for after his first scandalous orgy on American catnip I was forbidden to bring him anything more tempting than a chocolate mouse. It was my boots, especially if I had been walking across Regent Park and brought in honest earth instead of pavement scraps and taxi smells. Fettles would rush to my feet and sniff at sole and heel and toe, arching his back and lashing his tail when the odors brought him peculiarly thrilling tidings of the strange world so far below his balcony. In the summer he was the guest of a Devonshire cottage, but for the first week or two he would be frightened by the vastness and queerness of out-of-doors. He would crouch for hours on the threshold, looking out with mingled ecstasy and terror on the garden, now and then reaching down a dubious paw to touch the warm brown earth. By degrees he could be coaxed to join his mistress at afternoon tea under the plum trees, cautiously placing himself in touch of the hem of her gown. The summer would be half over before he was at ease in his brief Paradise.

Fettles, by the way, was succeeded by Thomas Heywood, and Tommy Heywood by Sisi, the only Londoner I know who enjoyed the air-raids. Whenever a Zeppelin alarm scared the lodgers out of their "honey-heavy dew of slumber," Sisi had the sport of his life. Knowing that his mistress, even if a bomb were crashing through her ceiling, would not abandon him, he would dash hither and yon in a rapture of disobedience, now under the bed, now behind a bookcase, continually evading her frenzied clutches. Slippered feet went skurrying past the door, but still Sisi sprang and scampered, even wheeling about in giddy circles as if this were the chance of chances for a kitten to catch its tail. My friend, with Sisi clasped to her panting breast, was invariably the last lodger to reach the refuge of the cellar.

The cats of legend are not as many as one would suppose, or perhaps the fault is still mine. Even here they evade me. I can call but few to mind, Puss in Boots, Sir Tybalt in the animal epic of Reynard the Fox, the Kilkenny cats of tragic fame, the grinning Cheshire cat--for whose like I vainly looked in Cheshire--the mysterious Knurremurre of Norway, and the far-fabled "King of the Cats." English chronicles, none too authentic, tell of a busy mouser that made Dick Whittington mayor of London, and of a faithful puss who ventured down a chimney of The Tower to cheer her imprisoned master, the Earl of Southampton, by a call. More worthy of credit is John Locke's account, preserved by Hakluyt, of an honorable incident in his voyage to Jerusalem, undertaken in the spring of 1553. The pilgrim ship was about fifty miles from Jaffa, when it "chanced by fortune that the Shippes Cat lept into the Sea, which being downe, kept her selfe very valiauntly above water, notwithstanding the great waves, still swimming, the which the master knowing, he caused the Skiffe with halfe a dosen men to goe towards her and fetch her againe, when she was almost halfe a mile from the shippe, and all this while the ship lay on staies. I hardly beleeve they would have made such haste and meanes if one of the company had been in the like perill. They made the more haste because it was the patrons cat. This I have written onely to note the estimation that cats are in, among the Italians, for generally they esteeme their cattes, as in England we esteeme a good Spaniell."

Petrarch and Tasso are eminent witnesses to the Italian fondness for cats. The French, too, have long been famed as cat lovers; Montaigne, Chateaubriand, Gautier, Pierre Loti, Jules Lemaitre, Baudelaire, La Fontaine, Champfleury, Michelet have all written charmingly of the Fireside Sphinx, leaving it to a Belgian poet, Maeterlinck, to present poor pussy as a stage villain. English literature takes less account of her, though Chaucer keenly expresses the friar's choice of a comfortable seat by telling how

"fro the bench he droof awey the cat,"

and Skelton has poured invective on the slayer of Philip Sparow, calling down vengeance

"On all the hole nacyon
Of cattes wilde and tame;
God send them sorowe and shame!"

No reader of Tudor drama needs to be reminded of Gammer Gurton's Gyb, crouching in the fireplace, where her eyes, mistaken for sparks of fire, refused to be blown out. Shakespeare's frequent references to the "harmless, necessary cat" are as accurate as they are nonchalant, but Milton does not mention her in his account of the creation, although she would certainly have been more comforting to Eve, at least, than "Behemoth, biggest born of earth," or "the parsimonious emmet." Indeed, an Arabic story of the creation claims that the dog and cat were allowed to accompany Adam and Eve, for their protection and solace, into the waste beyond the flaming sword. Herrick's "green-eyed kitling;" Walpole's Selima of

"The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
Her coat that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet and emerald eyes,"

--charms all forfeit to her longing for stolen goldfish; Arnold's Atossa

--"So Tiberius might have sat,
Had Tiberius been a cat,"--

have made their way into poetry, but prose, especially the familiar prose of letters, has kept green the memory of many a pussy more. We love Dr. Johnson the better for his consideration of Hodge "for whom," reports Boswell, "he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants, having that trouble, should take a dislike to the poor creature." Of course the tender-hearted Cowper cared for cats, and even the industrious Southey would turn his epic-blunted quill to accounts of Rumpelstilzchen and Hurlyburlybuss,--sonorous cat-names closely pressed upon by Mark Twain's Sour Mash, Apollinaris, Zoroaster and Blatherskite, while Canon Liddon's Tweedledum and Tweedledee of Amen Corner are not far behind.

No portrait of a cat in English verse is more vivid than that given in the sestette of Mrs. Marriott Watson's oft-praised sonnet:

"Sphinx of my quiet hearth! who deign'st to dwell
Friend of my toil, companion of mine ease,
Thine is the lore of Ra and Rameses;
That men forget dost thou remember well,
Beholden still in blinking reveries,
With somber, sea-green gaze inscrutable."

It is pleasant to think that the race memory of puss goes farther back in time and farther east in geography than the witchcraft cruelties of Christendom. The Mohammedan faith has been kinder to her than ours. Persia has ever held her in affection. Mahomet cut off the flowing edge of his sleeve rather than disturb Muezza's nap. But most of all her inherent aristocracy springs from those shining centuries by the Nile, when under the protection of the moon-eyed goddess Pasht she was honored in life and embalmed in death. The supreme Ra, the Sun God, was addressed as "the Great Cat," and The Book of the Dead holds the mystic text: "I have heard the mighty word which the Ass spake unto the Cat in the House of Hapt-re."

[The end]
Katharine Lee Bates's short story: Catastrophes

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