Part 3

The going to bed was merely shutting them up in an old granary at the end of the courtyard, almost hidden under a growth of vines and honeysuckles; it was really in Sylvester’s quarters, beside his chamber; so that every evening they said good-night together, the cats and he. When each one of these days--these unappreciated days now wept for--was ended, fallen in the abyss of time, Sylvester was called and my mother would say in a half solemn tone, as if fulfilling a religious duty, “Sylvester, it is time for the cats to go to bed.”

At the first words of this phrase, uttered in ever so low a voice, Pussy White pricked up her ears; then knowing there was no mistake about it, jumped down from her cushion with an important though disturbed air, and ran to the door, that she might make her exit first, and on her own feet, unwilling to be carried, and determined to go of her own free will or not at all. The Chinese, on the contrary, endeavored to delay the inevitable change; reluctant to quit the warm room, she got down slyly, crouching very low on the carpet to be less in view, and glancing around to ascertain if any one had seen her, would hide under some article of furniture. The big Sylvester, accustomed to these subterfuges, called with his childlike tone and smile: “Where are you, Pussy Gray? I know you are not far off.” Tenderly she responded “Trr! Trr! Trr!” knowing further pretense useless, and allowing herself to be lifted to the broad shoulder of her friend. The procession finally took up the line of march: at the head, Pussy White, independent and superb; behind followed Sylvester who said “Good-night,” and who in one hand carried his lantern, and with the other grasped the long tail of Pussy Gray which hung pendent on his breast. The Angora usually proceeded resignedly to her proper sleeping place. Sometimes it happened, at certain phases of the moon, that vagabond fancies seized her, aspirations to play the truant and sleep at the angle of some roof, or at the summit of a solitary pear tree, in the bracing air of December, after having passed the entire day in an armchair by the fireside. On these occasions Sylvester soon reappeared with a drolly despondent face, still holding the tail of Pussy Gray who clung close to his neck: saying “Again that Pussy White will not go to bed!”--“Again! Ah! what actions!” replied Aunt Clara indignantly. And she stepped outside, herself, to try the effect of her authority, calling “Pussy, Pussy” in her dear, feeble voice which I can hear now, as it echoed then in the courtyard through the sonorous depth of the winter night. But no, Pussy obeyed not; from the height of a tree, from the top of a wall she gazed about her with a nonchalant air, seated at her ease on her chosen throne, her furry robe making a white spot in the darkness and her eyes emitting tiny phosphorescent gleams. “Pussy, Pussy! Oh you naughty creature! It is shameful, miss, such conduct, shameful!”

Then out in her turn came my mother, shivering in the cold, and trying to make Aunt Clara come in. An instant after, I follow to bring both indoors. And then to see ourselves gathered in the courtyard, in a freezing night, Sylvester also of the group and still holding his cat by the tail, and all this united authority set at defiance by a little cat perched high above us, gave an irresistible desire to laugh at ourselves, beginning with Aunt Clara, and in which we all joined. I have never believed there existed in the entire world two such blessed old ladies,--Oh! how old, alas!--capable of such hearty laughter with the young; knowing so well how to be amiable, how to be gay. Truly I have been happier with them than with any or all others; they always discovered in seemingly insignificant trifles an amusing or comical aspect. Pussy White decidedly had the best of the discussion! We reëntered, crestfallen and chilled, the little room too much cooled by the opened door, to gain our respective chambers by a series of stairways and sombre passages. And Aunt Clara, with a relapse of anger, when reaching her threshold, said to me, “Good-night; but, on the whole, what is your opinion of that cat?”

(XXI)

The life of a cat may extend over a period of twelve to fifteen years, if no accident occurs.

Our two pets lived to enjoy together the light and warmth of another delicious summer; they found again their days of blissful idleness, in company of the everlasting tortoise, Suleïma, whom the years forgot, between the blooming cacti, on the sun-heated pavements,--or stretched on the old wall amidst the profusion of jasmines and roses. They had many kittens, raised with tender care and afterward advantageously domiciled in the neighborhood; those of the Chinese were in great demand, being of a peculiar color and bearing distinctive race marks.

They lived another winter and recommenced their long naps in the chimney corner, their meditations before the changing aspect of the flame or embers of our wood fire.

But this was their last season of health and joy, and soon after, their decline began. In the succeeding spring some mysterious malady attacked their little bodies, which should have endured vigorous and sound for still some years.

Pussy Chinese, first attacked, seemed stricken by some mental trouble, a sombre melancholy,--regrets perhaps for her native Mongolia. Refusing both food and drink, she made long retreats to the wall top, lying there motionless for entire days; replying only to our appeals by a sorrowful glance and plaintive “Meaou.”

The Angora also, from the first warm days, began to languish, and by April both were really ill.

Doctors, called in consultation, gravely prescribed absurd medicines and impossible treatments. For one, pills morning and evening and poultices applied to the belly! For the other, a hydropathic course, close shaving of the body, and a cold plunge bath twice daily! Sylvester himself, who adored the pussies, who obeyed him as they would no one else, declared all this impossible. We then tried the efficacy of domestic remedies; the mothers Michel were summoned, but their simple prescriptions were of no avail.

They were going from us, our beloved and cherished pets, filling our hearts with great compassion,--and neither the loveliness of spring nor its glory of returning sunshine could rouse them from the torpor of approaching death.

One morning as I arrived from a trip to Paris, Sylvester, while receiving my valise, said to me sadly, “Sir, the Chinese is dead.”

She had disappeared for three days, she so orderly, so domestic, who never left our premises. Doubtless, feeling her end near, she had fled, obedient to an impulse or sentiment of extreme modesty which leads some animals to hide themselves to die. “She remained all the week,” said Sylvester, “up on the high wall lying on the red jasmine vine, and would not come down to eat or drink; but she always answered when we spoke to her, in such a little feeble voice!”

Where then had she gone, poor Pussy Gray, to meet the terrible hour? Perhaps, in her ignorance of the world, to some strange house, where she was not allowed to die in peace, but was tormented, driven out,--and afterwards cast on the dunghill. Truly, I would have chosen that she might die at her home; my heart swelled a little at the remembrance of her strange human glances, so beseeching, so indicative of that need of affection which she could not otherwise express, seeking my own eyes with mute interrogation forever unutterable.--Who knows what mysterious agonies rend the little, disturbed souls of the lower animals in their dying hours?

(XXII)

As if a fatal spell had been cast upon our cats, Pussy White, also, seemed near her end.

By fantasy of the dying, she had selected her last lodging in my dressing-room,--upon a certain lounge whose rose color doubtless pleased her.

There we carried to her a little food, a little milk, which were alike untasted; she looked at us whenever we entered, with kind eyes, glad to see us, and still purred feebly when caressed.

Then, one pleasant morning, she also disappeared, and we thought she would return no more.

(XXIII)

She did return, however, and I recall nothing more sad than her reappearance. It was about three days after, in one of those delightful periods at the commencement of June, which shine and glow in the unclouded heavens,--deceivers with promises of eternal duration, woeful to beings born to die. Our courtyard displayed all its leaves, all its flowers, all its roses upon its walls, as in so many past Junes; the martinets, the swallows, exhilarated with light and life, darted about with songs of joy in the blue above us; there was a universal festival of things without Soul and gay animals unconscious of death.

Aunt Clara, walking there, watching the opening blossoms, called to me suddenly, and her voice showed that something unusual had occurred.

“Oh! come! look here.--Our poor Pussy has returned.”

She was there indeed, reappearing as a wretched little phantom, emaciated, weak, her fur already discolored with earth;--she was half dead. Who knows what emotion led her home: an afterthought, a lack of courage at the last hour, a longing to see us once more!

With extreme exertion she had surmounted the lower wall, so familiar, which she was wont to cross in two bounds, when she returned from her beat of police guard, to cuff some acquaintance, to correct some neighbor. Breathless from her supreme effort, she lay extended on the new grass at the margin of the mimic lake, bending her poor head to lap a mouthful of fresh water. And her imploring eyes called for aid. “Do you not see that I am dying? Can you do nothing to help me live a little longer?”

Presages of death everywhere, this fair June morning, beneath its resplendent sky: Aunt Clara, leaning over her suffering favorite, seemed to me suddenly, so old, feebler than ever before, ready also to go from us.

We decided to carry Pussy White back to the dressing-room, and place her on the rose-colored lounge she herself had chosen the preceding week, and which had seemed to please her. I resolved to watch carefully that she should not depart again, that at least her bones might rest in the earth of our courtyard, that she should not be thrown on some dunghill,--like that of my poor Chinese companion, whose anxious eyes still haunted me. I held her to my breast with careful tenderness, and, contrary to her habitude, she allowed herself to be carried, this time, in complete confidence, her drooping head leaning on my arm.

Upon the rose-colored lounge she struggled against death for three days, so great is a cat’s vitality. The sun shone on the mansion and the gardens around us. We continued to visit her often, and she always endeavored to rise to greet us with a grateful and pathetic air, her eyes telling as plainly as those of a human being the presence and the distress of what we call the soul.

One morning I found her dead, rigid, her open eyes glassy, expressionless,--a corpse, a thing to be hidden from view. Then I bade Sylvester make a grave in a terrace of the courtyard, at the foot of a tree. Whither had fled that which I had seen shine forth from her dying eyes; the restless Spark within, whither had it gone?

(XXIV)

The burial of Pussy White, in the quiet courtyard, under the blue sky of June, in the full sunlight of two o’clock!

At the chosen place Sylvester dug the grave,--then stopped, looking at the bottom of the excavation, and stooping to pick up something that surprised him. “What is this,” said he, stirring the small white bones which he had discovered,--“a rabbit?”

The bones of an animal, indeed; those of my cat from Senegal, an old pussy, my companion in Africa, very much beloved long ago, that I had buried there a dozen years before, and then forgotten, in the abyss where beings and things that disappear forever accumulate. And while looking at these bones mingled with the earth, these tiny legs like white sticks, this collection still suggesting what was once the back and tail of an animal,--there arose before me, with an inclination to smile and a heavy heart-throb, a scene well-nigh forgotten, a certain occasion when I had seen this same posterior of a cat, clothed in agile muscles and in silky fur, fly before me comically, tail in air, in the very height of terror.

It was one day when, with the obstinacy natural to her race, she had climbed again on a piece of furniture twenty times forbidden, and had there broken a vase which I prized very highly. I had at first given her a cuff; then my temper rising, I followed it by a rather brutal kick. She, surprised only by the blow, realized by the succeeding kick that war was declared; it was then that she swiftly fled, her plumy tail in the air, and from her refuge beneath the sofa she turned around to give me a reproachful and distressed look, believing herself lost, betrayed, assassinated by him she loved, and to whose hands she had confided her fate; and as my eyes still were angry she uttered finally her cry of surrender, of hopeless despair, that peculiar and sinister cry of animals that realize themselves on the verge of death. All my anger vanished; I called her, caressed her, still trembling and panting, upon my knees. Oh! the last agonized cry of an animal, be it that of the ox, drawn down to the abattoir, even that of the miserable rat held between the teeth of a bull-dog; that hopeless appeal, addressed to no one, which seems a protest addressed to nature itself,--an appeal to an unknown, impersonal mercy, pervading all space.

Two or three bones sunken at the foot of a tree is all now remaining of the once cherished creature that I recall so living and so droll. And her flesh, her little person, her attachment to me, her intense terror on a certain occasion, her precipitate flight, her plaintive reproach, all finally that encompassed these bones,--has become a little earth. When the hole was sufficiently deep, I went upstairs where all that remained of our beautiful Angora lay rigid on the rose-colored lounge. And in descending with my light burden, I found, in the courtyard, my mother and Aunt Clara seated on a bench in the shade, assuming to be there by chance, and pretending to converse unconcernedly: that we should thus assemble expressly for this burial would seem rather ridiculous, and we perhaps should have smiled despite our grief.

There never glowed a brighter day; never was balmier silence, unbroken save by the hum of insects; the garden was in full bloom, the rose-trees white with their blossoms; the peace of the country brooded over the neighborhood, the martinets and swallows slept, the everlasting tortoise, most lively when the sun shone hotly, trotted aimlessly to and fro on the pavement. Everything was imbued with the melancholy of too tranquil skies, of a season too monotonous, of the oppression of noonday. Against the fresh green verdure, the dazzling brightness of color, the two similar robes of my mother and Aunt Clara formed two intensely black spots. Their silvery heads were bowed down as if somewhat weary of having seen and reseen so many times, almost eighty times, the deceitful renewal. Everything around them, trees, birds, insects, and flowers, seemed chanting the triumph of their perpetual resurrection, regardless of the fragile beings who listened, already agonized by the presage of their inevitable end.

I laid Pussy White in her grave, and the black and white fur disappeared under a falling mass of earth. I was glad that I had succeeded in keeping her in her last days with us, that she had not died elsewhere like the other; at least her body would decay in our courtyard, where for so long a period she had laid down the law for all cats of the neighborhood, where she had idled away the summer hours on the vine-covered wall, and where on winter nights, at her capricious hour for retiring, her name had resounded so many times in the silence, called by the failing voice of Aunt Clara.

It seemed to me that her death was the beginning of the end of the dwellers in our home; in my consciousness, this cat was bound like a long cherished plaything to the two well-beloved guardians of my hearthstone, seated there upon the bench, and to whom she had been a faithful companion in my absences afar. My sorrow was less for herself, inexplicable and uncertain little soul, than for her existence which had just finished. It was like ten years of our own life that we had buried there in the earth.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.