Sigurd Our Golden Collie and Other Comrades of the Road Part 19

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 d.i.c.k 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 Ta.s.so 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 p.u.s.s.y 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; G.o.d 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 p.u.s.s.y 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 G.o.ddess Pasht she was honored in life and embalmed in death. The supreme Ra, the Sun G.o.d, was addressed as "the Great Cat," and _The Book of the Dead_ holds the mystic text: "I have heard the mighty word which the a.s.s spake unto the Cat in the House of Hapt-re."

TO HAMLET, A COLLIE

Strange dog, with terror planted in your heart, At your dim root of life a piteous dread Foreboding evil doom, a panic bred Of some fierce shock to puppy nerves! No art Home kindness can devise prevents your start, Wild stare and panting breath at each new tread; Your anxious eyes keep watch, uncomforted By our poor love, too weak to take your part Against that fatal menace which, for us No less than you, lurks in the coming springs.

Of all our creeds and dreams incredulous, Thrilled by these sudden agonies, you quake Through all your lithe young body. What should make A collie know the grief of mortal things?

HAMLET AND POLONIUS

"There's something in his soul O'er which his melancholy sits on brood."

--Shakespeare's _Hamlet_.

It was a beautiful morning, whose beauty could only hurt, of the first June since Joy-of-Life went away. All green paths were desolate for lack of her glad step. And the stately kennel that had been known from the first as "Sigurd's House" stood silent, its green door closed on bare floor and cobwebbed walls. Stray cats pa.s.sed it unconcerned and hoptoads took their ease on the edges of "Sigurd's Drinking-cup"

hollowed out in the adjacent rock. In an hour when the pain of living seemed wellnigh unbearable, the Angel of Healing called me up by telephone. His voice was gruff, but kindly.

"Say, you miss that old dog of yours a sight, don't you?"

I could feel the confidential pressure of Sigurd's golden head against my knee as I briefly a.s.sented, recognizing the speaker as the proprietor of certain collie kennels not far distant.

"He had a right good home, that dog had, and you must have got pretty well used to collie ways."

"If you were going to ask me to buy another collie, please don't.

Sigurd is my dog--forever."

"Well! Since you put it that way--but I'm at my wit's end to get rid of a collie pup--a pretty little fellow, rough Scotch, sable and white, like yours--that's scairt at his own shadow."

"What scared him?"

"Blest if I know! His sire, Commander, and his dam, Whisper, are as nice, normal, easy-tempered dogs as you could find anywhere, and their litters take after 'em--'cept this youngster, who sulks all day long off in some dark hole by himself and shakes if we speak to him. n.o.body has mishandled the little chap so far's I've ever seen or heard, but the least thing--a shout or a rattle of tools or any fool noise--throws him into such a funk that all the rest of the puppies are getting panicky and the whole caboodle is running wild. There's no two ways about it. I've got to clear that born ninny out. I sold him a month ago to a lady for fifty dollars, but she brought him back in a week and said he was about as cheerful company as a tombstone. Now see here! You can have him for twenty, or for nothing, just as you feel after you've given him a try."

"But I don't want him. I shouldn't want him if he were the best dog in the country."

"Then I reckon I'll have to shoot him. I could give him away, but he's such a wretched, shivery little rascal that most any sort of folks would be too rough for him. 'Twould be kinder to put him out of the world and done with it. He's had seven months of it now and pretty well made up his mind that he don't like it. I did think maybe you might be willing to give him a chance."

I was surprised to hear my own voice saying into the telephone: "I'll try him for a few days, if you care to bring him over."

Yet I dreaded his coming. The friend who gave us Sigurd had offered us the past winter a very prince of puppies, the daintiest, most spirited, most winsome little collie that a free affection could ask, but Joy-of-Life and I could not make him ours. We could regard him only as a visitor in Sigurd's haunts, and the Lady of Cedar Hill, resenting the name of Guest which we had given him, re-named him Eric and took him to her own home. Here she soon won the utter devotion of his dog-heart, which, though now no longer beating, through that ardent and faithful love "tastes of immortality."

I was in the veranda off the study, trying to busy myself with my old toys of books and pen and paper, when the young collie was led in by a small girl, the only person at the kennels whose call he obeyed or whose companionship he welcomed. Deposited beside my chair, he promptly retreated to the utmost distance the narrow limits of his prison-house allowed, panting and quaking.

"Be good, Blazey," the child admonished him, stroking his head with a sunburned hand from whose light caress he at once shuddered away. "I'll come to see you by and by."

"By and by is easily said," the puppy made answer with incredulous eyes that first watched her out of sight and then rolled in anguish of despair from the wire screening of the porch to roof and wall.

"Is your name Blazey?" I asked him gently, but his fit of ague only grew worse as he turned his ghastly stare on me

"with a look so piteous in purport As if he had been loosed out of h.e.l.l To speak of horrors."

"I made further efforts at conversation while the day wore on, but that little yellow image of throbbing terror, upright in the remotest corner, would not even turn its head toward my voice. In vain I remonstrated:

"Alas, how is't with you, That you do bend your eye on vacancy And with the incorporal air do hold discourse?

Forth at your eyes your spirits wildly peep."

The constant tremble of the poor, scared, pitiful puppy was intensified by every train whistle and motor horn to a violent shaking. I could not flutter a leaf nor drop a pencil without causing a nervous twitch of the brown ears. Suddenly the crack of an early Fourth of July torpedo electrified him into a frenzy of fright. If it had been the fatal shot in reserve for Blazey he could not have made a madder leap nor wheeled about in more distracted circles. In one of these lunatic reels he struck against me and, gathering him close, I crooned such comfort as I had into that dizzy, quivering, pathetic face; but he tore himself loose and fled gasping back to his corner beseeching a perilous and cruel universe to let him alone. I, for one, declined:

"Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!-- Be thou a spirit of health or goblin d.a.m.n'd, Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from h.e.l.l, Be thy intents wicked or charitable, Thou comest in such a questionable shape That I will speak to thee; I'll call thee Hamlet."

The puppy accepted his new name, as he accepted his dinner, with lugubrious resignation and the air of saying to himself:

"Heaven hath pleas'd it so, To punish me with this, and this with me."

His misery was more appealing than a thousand funny gambols could have been, and the household, those of us who were left, conspired in various friendly devices to make him feel at home. The child at the kennels had taught him one sole accomplishment, that of giving his paw, and Sister Jane, in a fine spirit of sacrifice, made a point of shaking hands with him long and politely at least a dozen times a day, rushing to a faucet as soon as this hospitable rite was accomplished for a fierce scouring of her own polluted palms. Housewife Honeyvoice tempted his appet.i.te with the most savory of puppy menus and kept up such a flow of tuneful comment while he ate that, even in his days of deepest gloom, he rarely failed to polish his dish and then thump it all about in an unscientific effort to extract gravy from tinware. Esther's arms were now as strong as her feet were lively and, after the first week or so, he would let her pick him up like a baby and carry him about and would even be surprised, at times, into a game of romps. He needed play as much as he needed food, but he was curiously awkward at it, not merely with the usual charming clumsiness of puppies but with a blundering uncertainty in all his movements, miscalculating his jumps, lighting in a sprawling heap and often hurting himself by a lop-sided tumble.

Yet apart from these brief lapses he maintained his pose of hopeless melancholy, varied by frantic perturbations, until his new name fitted him like his new collar.