Part 5

One evening while the paper was swinging on a string in the lamplight, Mentu suddenly saw the shadow. Thenceforward he renounced the substance and deliberately pursued the shadow. If the actual paper came in his way he hit it with a pettish gesture, and searched the carpet for the shadow. And he knew the two were connected, for at sight of the paper he began to look about for the shadow. Then he rushed after it, and through it; he spread himself out on the carpet to catch it, and it was gone; he fled round and round in a circle after it, and cared for nothing so much as the pursuit of nothingness.

We went to an empty hotel, hidden in a little bay near the Lizard. Green slopes, covered even in March with flowering gorse, fall quickly to the pillared basalt coves. Here you may sit on slabs of rock sheltered from east and north wind, scenting the sweet, pungent incense breath of the gorse, and watching the gulls at play beneath. You can see the great liners pass, signalling at Lloyd’s station, and branching off below the Lizard Lights to cross the ocean; or you can watch the gallant ships come in, corn laden, with men crowding to the side for their first glimpse of English shores. But, except on Sunday, when Lizard Town walks two and two on the cliff, you see no man there and hardly a stray beast.

So here Mentu became the companion of our strolls, scudding across open stretches of green, rushing into shelter from imagined foes under gorse and heather, dancing with sidelong steps and waving tail down little grassy slopes, or lying on ledges of rock as grey as himself, starred with lichen as yellow as his eyes.

Once we went out along the cliff to return by the road, but here Mentu’s faith in us deserted him. He set out to go home alone, but dared not; he wished to come with us, but was tired; he would not be carried for he saw children in the distance, and a cat prefers to trust its own sense and agility in danger. So in despair of his wavering decision we walked on, until, turning, we caught sight of a pathetic figure silhouetted against the dusty road--a silky kitten with wide mouth opened in a despairing outcry against fate.

Once Mentu met a cow grazing on the cliff. Here was terror, but that he realised the compelling power of the feline eye. He fixed on her two yellow orbs with fear-distended pupils, prepared to make himself very large and terrible by an arched back if she so much as turned towards him, and thus holding her paralysed with terror (though she appeared to graze unconcernedly the while) he walked by with tiptoe dignity and scudded to shelter.

But Mentu himself was once nearly petrified by a very awful kind of Gorgon. He was tripping and smelling, and coming to the edge of a little stone well he looked in. Suddenly we saw him turn rigid, with a face of inexpressible horror. He stood statue-like for a moment, then lifting silent paws retired backwards noiselessly, imperceptibly, step by step from the edge. Once out of sight of the pool he turned and fled. I went to look in. A frog sat there.

Sometimes we went down a stony winding path to the cove beneath; a wren was building here, for the cock-wren sat on a bush and girded at Mentu as he passed. One day I heard from far below the sharp note whirring like a tiny watchman’s rattle, and returned to find Mentu lying on the path with swishing tail cruelly eyeing the atom which scolded him from above.

When the time came to go home Mentu had undergone another transformation. He had trebled in size; he had lost the rough, reddish “kitten hair”; his coat was shining, silky, ashen-grey; his eyes were the colour of hock. Blue Persians were not plentiful in Cornwall, and a little crowd followed us up and down the platform, for Mentu travelled no longer in a basket.

In the train he was perfectly calm; looked out of the window at stations, and regarded railway officials with an impartial and critical eye. A fellow traveller pronounced him “a kind of dog-cat,” alluding, we supposed, to his intelligent and self-possessed demeanour as he sat upright on his mistress’ lap.

We parted again, and from time to time I had accounts of Mentu. In spring time he relinquished the pursuits of shadows in favour of less innocuous sport. He was found curled up in a blackbird’s nest, meditating on the capital dinner he had made of the inhabitants. He laid little offerings of dead, unfledged birds on his mistress’ chair or footstool. He was seen trotting across the lawn, his head thrown proudly back, so that the nest he was bringing her should clear the ground. Saddest of all, she hung up a cocoanut for the tits outside her window, and a dead blue-tit was soon laid at her feet.

Again, it was said that he appeared suddenly, like the Cheshire cat, on a tree miles from home; and in early autumn, in the morning, he was seen crossing the lawn with a train of seventeen angry pheasants behind him.

We renewed acquaintance when I came to stay at Mentu’s home. He was out when I arrived, and as we sat with open windows in the growing dusk there was a sudden soft leap, and a presence on the window--a wild creature, with shining eyes, the very incarnation of the dusk. Even as he jumped down and came to our feet the mood changed. He purred to us, and went to his dinner plate. Finding there a satisfactory mess he began to eat, turning round to throw rapid, grateful glances towards his mistress, purring the while.

Like the Dean who gave thanks for an excellent dinner, or a moderately good dinner, so Mentu is wont to graduate his grace according to his meat. A fish’s head, or the bones of a partridge (it was long before his mistress could be persuaded that he would not prefer a nicely filleted sole) will produce the most grateful glances and the loudest purrs.

As I was occupying the sofa, Mentu took his after-dinner nap on my feet.

It is odd that cats show an intense dislike to anything destined and set apart for them. Mentu has a basket of his own, and a cushion made by a fond mistress, but to put him into it is to make him bound out like an india-rubber ball. He likes to occupy proper chairs and sofas, or even proper hearthrugs. In the same way, the well-bred cat has an inconvenient but æsthetic preference for eating its food in pleasant places, even as we consume chilly tea and dusty bread and butter in a summer glade. A plate is distasteful to a cat, a newspaper still worse; they like to eat sticky pieces of meat sitting on a cushioned chair or a nice Persian rug. Yet if these were dedicated to this use they would remove elsewhere. Hence the controversy is interminable.

The next few days Mentu was determined to devote to family life. He came to the drawing-room in the evening and was very affable and polite. He went readily to any one who invited him, and dug his claws encouragingly into their best evening dresses. We had taught him a trick in Cornwall which he still remembered. He lies on his back, two hands are put under him, and he is gently raised. A touch on elbows and knees makes him shoot forelegs and hindlegs outwards and downwards; so that head and forelegs hang down at one end, hindlegs and tail at the other, and the great grey cat lies curved into crescent shape, purring serenely.

In the course of the evening my collie, a visitor with me, came genially into the room. Mentu did not know him; he sat upright, with eyes fixed upon the dog, shaking with terror, but making no attempt to escape.

I heard Mentu calling on his mistress early next morning in a querulous tone. As her door was shut I invited him into my room, but he found it not to his mind, and soon left me. He sat all the morning with us, but was easily _ennuyé_, and walked about uttering short bored cries until he could find some one to play with him. He delighted in a game of hide and seek which he had instituted for himself. He hid and called out, lay still till he was seen, and then sprang up to scud across the room. When we went into the garden he followed, and the scolding of a blackbird made us look up to see him on a branch overhead staring down at us. He walked with us, too, or rather when we walked he plunged rustling through the bushes bordering the path, and flashed out to stand a moment in the open.

Withal one felt that a thinking being moved with us, whether bored or childishly excited, gently affectionate or suddenly grateful; a being thoroughly self-conscious, greedy of admiration, regarding himself and us, and taking his life into his own hands. And close beneath the surface of his civilisation lay the wild beast nature. One could wake it in an instant, for if I caught his eye the surface flashed sapphire for a moment, then the eye with distended pupils was fixed upon me, and silently, holding me by the eye, he believed, he stole across the room, and jumped up suddenly almost in my face. There was something uncanny about it, and even possibly dangerous, for if I looked up from a book sometimes I found that topaz eye trying to catch and arrest my own, while the great cat stole silently nearer. I think if we had not relinquished the game Mentu’s claws would have blinded me.

For the wild nature in Mentu is as strong as his inbred civilisation; and the two are at strife together. His heart and his appetite lead him back and back to the house; keep him there for days together--a dainty fine gentleman, warm-hearted, capricious. But the spirit of the wild creature rises in him, and the night comes when at bed-time no Mentu is waiting at the door to be let in; or in the evening, as he hears the wind rise and stir the branches, even while the rain beats on the window pane, the compelling power of out-of-doors is on him, and he must go; and when the window is lifted and the night air streams in, there is but one leap into the darkness.

He will return early in the morning tired and satiate, or spring in some evening as the dusk gathers, with gleaming eyes where the light of the wild woods flickers and dies down in the comfortable firelight of an English home.

This is the true cat, the real Mentu, this wild creature who must go on his mysterious errands; or who, I rather believe it, plunges out to revel in the intoxication of innumerable scents, unaccounted sounds and the half revealed forms of wood and field in twilight, in darkness or in dawn. In his soul he is a dramatist, an artist in sensation. He lives with human beings, he loves them, as we live with children and love them, and play their games. But the great world calls us and we must go; and Mentu’s business in life is elsewhere. He lives in the half-lights, in secret places, free and alone, this mysterious little-great being whom his mistress calls “My cat.”

THE CONSCIENCE OF THE BARN-DOOR FOWL

“_The trivial round, the common task._”

Few people recognise how strong an element the sense of duty is in the lives of cocks and hens.

I have a Minorca cock of superb appearance and excellent principles. I had to cut his wings once, and I felt as if I had hit a Member of Parliament in the face. It is from him I take my standard.

He receives new hens into his flock with an impressive ceremony. When they are turned into the yard in the approved condition of screaming hysterics, he assembles his old flock about him, and proceeds in a kind of agitated procession towards the newcomers. Then the cock comes a few paces in advance, and with ruffled neck struts and scrapes in front of them. Finally he goes off to the farmyard, the hens following respectfully behind him, the newcomers last of all, pecked and hustled by the rest to make them feel at home.

To his flock of hens the cock stands in much the same position as a hen towards her chickens. It is only the roughness of the instruments they have at hand which misleads us about the particular duty which each is fulfilling.

If a chicken falls on its back it must be remembered that the only instruments by which the hen can help it to regain its feet are a beak and a claw. This is like helping a newborn infant with a sword and a gun. With the full use of ten fingers I feel some anxiety about picking up a chicken. I should quite refuse to do it with a beak and a claw. The hen is braver. She first pecks the chicken to stimulate it to exertion, and then she turns and kicks it. This latter plan is usually the more successful.

But in case of hostilities it must be remembered the hen has only the same two instruments at command. She first pecks her foe and then kicks him. Thus the thoughtless are apt to confound the different intentions in the similarity of method.

In the same way if a hen, called suddenly from an orgie of herring heads in the farmyard to a meal of corn in her own enclosure, forgets where the gate is and tries to get in through the wiring, the cock has only one possible method of helping her. He flies at her from the other side and pecks her. This is not hostile, but protective; he is helping her to recover her self-control. When he has succeeded in reminding her that she cannot hope to get through galvanised wire netting he will accompany her politely round to the gate, and bring her to her food.

The range of duties is large. To help thirteen hens to keep their heads in the various emergencies of life is a heavy responsibility; add to this that the cock keeps time for them, assembles them to their meals, separates fighters, keeps a sick hen away from the flock, or bears a shy one company while she eats; it will be evident that the self-control of the cock in the matter of food is well matched by his organising ability.

There is only one thing which clashes with the imperative sense of duty of the barn-door fowl, and that is its tendency to romantic attachments.

I had two hens sitting side by side in their first experience of nesting. Daily they were found with dazed faces, ruffled and pecked as we took them out; woke from their angry trance as they felt the earth beneath, took their dust baths, ate, drank, and returned, to fall again into a condition half comatose and half savage.

Thus they spent but twenty minutes daily in the enjoyment of each other’s society.

One brood came out five days before the other. The hen was found with an expression of scared surprise on her face, as instead of nine smooth silent eggs, she felt the downy creatures move and heard them cry. She and her brood were removed, and the other sat on with glazed eye till her turn came.

Then we took her also and lodged her next to the first; they had separate dwelling-houses and a common yard. We were only afraid that maternal tenderness would lead to a little pecking of the alien brood.

But it appeared that we had wholly miscalculated. While they sat dreaming side by side or took the refreshing dust bath, those hens had sworn eternal friendship. Although like a Boarding-Out Committee under the Local Government Act, the two hens were individually responsible for both broods, the chickens (unlike the children) were quite a secondary consideration. The hens’ main object in life was to sit as close to each other as they could, and the chickens squeezed themselves into corners, roosted on the hens’ backs, or moped in isolation.

When one chicken had nearly died of exposure, and three had been flattened under the combined weight of the hens, we removed the worst mother. On this she lost all the little wits she had ever possessed, and haunted the chicken enclosure like an unquiet spirit. It took the cock a long time to restore her self-control.

But I have a far darker tale to tell. There lived in a neat little house on a lawn a gold and red bantam cock with two golden brown hens. The darker was his favourite wife, but the three lived harmoniously, and the hens laid an egg daily.

Fifteen of these eggs were hatched out under a common barn-door fowl. She had no breeding and no tail; her colour was an undertone of black, irregularly sprinked with grey. She was cooped with the chickens about a hundred yards from the bantams, and screened from them by a shrubbery.

About this time the favourite bantam hen found an attractive heap of faggots: thither she repaired daily to lay an egg. When she had laid a dozen she sat down to hatch them. She had chosen her place well, for her golden brown feathers showed hardly at all against the wrinkled, russet leaves.

While she sat peacefully hidden the cock had heard the hen and chickens call; and, strolling to the other side of the shrubbery, discovered his fifteen children with their foster-mother. Thenceforward, from morning till night, he squatted near the coop, leaving the little favourite wife in her æsthetic bower, and the paler little wife to her own neat house.

It might be thought that paternal instinct kept him there, the joy of seeing his young family grow daily more like their mothers and himself; the dawning hope of the time when he should scratch for the young hens and pull the tail feathers out of the little cocks.

Not so; he was enchained by the attractions of that large, common, tailless fowl. Doubtless he thought her a fine large hen; so she was, quite four times his size. Perhaps he admired her figure, and thought her colouring a unique beauty.

Certain it is that just when the little hen was leading out a tiny family, the bantam cock, deserting his two wives and his twenty-seven children, fled with the common hen into the woods.

There they lived in a wild and wicked romance. People passing through the wood at evening might see a very small gold cock and a very large speckled hen sitting side by side on the branch of a tree; or in the morning might catch sight of the pair digging for a precarious livelihood in the grass at the covert edge; glancing round with guilty eyes and fleeing for safety into the bushes.

At last disillusionment came; it was sure to come. The cock went home.

He returned to find that _all the first family were dead and that eight of the second family were cocks_.

This is tragedy, but it is also history.

CONFUCIUS

“_Lord! what fools these mortals be._”

The Chow Dog was living in a house on the shores of Loch Lomond; and the first time I saw him was when he came with his mistress to call at the hotel. For reasons which will presently appear, I shall call him Confucius, though this is not his real name.

When his mistress came in to see us Confucius stopped outside, and I saw him through the window. He was of the shape of a neat little pig; he was soft and furry, and in colour like a golden fox; he had black eyes, and a bluish-black tongue. As soon as you saw that tongue you realised how inartistic, how unfinished, a red tongue is; one might as well have pink boots. By as much as a black Berkshire is more proper and neater than a pink pig, so is a bluish-black tongue better than a red one.

We were so much ravished by the appearance of the Chow Dog that we went out at once to be introduced to him. As soon as he saw us coming he began to trot steadily homewards. We had to leave him to his mistress and retire indoors, and after some conflict of wills and clash of temperaments she appeared victorious with the dog tucked under her arm.

We found that he was at this time only four months old, and absolutely the most self-confident creature living. He thought he knew everything, and scorn was the very breath of his nostrils. Though his personal experience, compared to ours, was short, he felt behind him the centuries of Chinese civilisation. When his empire was elderly, our civilisation was in the cradle. This more than redressed the personal balance and left him to the good.

Confucius clearly did not care to make our acquaintance, but we felt it a privilege to be admitted to a greater intimacy with him.

He comported himself at home with dignity, though not always with civility; he had none of the puppy _abandon_ natural at his age. I tried to teach him to retrieve a piece of paper. He was bored, but he would not be taken at a disadvantage; so he walked slowly after the paper and gravely returned it to me. After I had persisted in this exercise for some time, he saw that it was meant for a game, and as he would not appear deficient in a sense of humour, he gambolled a little as he went after it.

Confucius never gave himself up to a passing emotion. I saw him once on the rocks with a real puppy, a spaniel puppy bigger than the Chow and probably older. It crouched before him sinuous and silly; it sprang up, gambolled round him and crouched again; it flew at a gallop past his nose and lay down on the other side of him. It exhausted itself in futilities, and gasped and panted with its efforts; and all this time the Chow surveyed it with a bright, contemptuous eye. When it was utterly worn out he got up and went away.

At last Confucius made a mistake. We saw him on the edge of the lake one day with something in his mouth which he swung and tossed from side to side. We called him, and with exultant pride he came towards us. The thing was soft and furry, and so long that it hindered him as he ran. He laid it down before us with jaunty tail and conceited eye--it was his first rabbit.

I had so often smarted under the sense of Confucius’ contempt that I was not prepared to be tender to his humiliation. I had not known what it would be like. He took corporal punishment with a fair amount of self-control, but he strained and howled at the indignity of a chain, and the shame of looking at that furry thing of which but just now he had been so proud. When he found that he could not get free, he sat down and thought over the situation until his tail uncurled.

In our walk that evening we were not preceded by a triumphant golden dog, with well-cocked tail and exalted nose, for Confucius followed behind, lost in thought. He did not stray for a moment into the bushes; no rustle of wild creatures could attract him. He was dreeing his weird.

He had finished dreeing it by next morning, however, and his opinion of himself was quite restored--more than restored--as he had laid up a new piece of experience.

The last time I saw the Chow was when we left Loch Lomond. He came with his party to see us off, but it was wet and the boat was late. They had to return home, while we waited sheltering in the pierman’s hut.

The party must have fallen out by the way, for we had not waited long before Confucius came trotting back alone, quite cheerful and self-possessed. He went round to the further side of the hut so as to interpose it between himself and the homeward path. Then he sat down very comfortably. If either a dog or a philosopher could have winked, Confucius would have winked at us.

The steamer drew away until the shed grew small against the fir-tree stems, and we could only see a tiny golden speck beside it. But we knew that was Confucius sitting Jacques-like to mock at the world, at our superficial brains, our simple wiles and our infant civilisation. [Illustration: Kitten by Madame Ronner]

A PARADISE OF BIRDS

“_Oh! the land of the rustling of wings._”

“‘God made the country and man made the town;’ I prefer the latter,” wrote a child. Man also made the Suez Canal and the ships upon it, and God made the Salt Lakes and their navies, and most people still agree with the child and prefer the former.

I had heard much about the first, and little about the second, when I landed in Egypt one November and went by train to Ismailia. On the left lay the famous little ditch, and the great ships looking incredibly tiny crept along it; and on the right lay out the great shallow lakes, and from the edge to the horizon they were as full of feathered fowl as Mother Carey’s Peace Pool.