Sigurd Our Golden Collie, and Other Comrades of the Road
"What next?" asked Joy-of-Life, who was already losing her heart to the unresponsive monster.
"Water," pronounced Sir Oracle. "Turtles won't feed except under water. They can't swallow if their heads aren't completely immersed. It will take your largest dishpan – "
"It's mesilf that is going home to-morrow – to stay," announced Mary.
"Wouldn't a washtub do?" compromised Joy-of-Life. "There's that old one, you know, Mary, that you never use."
"First-rate. Show me where to find it, Mary. I'll give you a start to that wild cherry."
With a craft beyond the semblance of his open countenance, Young Audubon raced Mary to the cellar, where she arrived panting too hard for protests. They soon returned in amicable companionship, carrying a battered blue tub between them.
Jerking up Emilius by the cord, we plumped him into the tub, poured in abundant water and left him to be happy. Then our troubles began.
In the first place, Emilius absolutely refused to eat, in water or out. Understanding from our one authority that he needed a carnivorous diet, we tempted him, day after day, with every variety of meat brought to our door in the butcher's white-hooded cart with its retinue of hungry dogs, but nothing whatever would our boarder touch. And in the second place, he was, unlike Diogenes, forever scrambling out of his tub and digging himself in at one point or another on the bank. Several times a day one or the other of us might be seen tugging up Emilius by his cord from the bowels of the earth and solicitously dumping him down again into his tub of water, which a shovelful of mud, shreds of meat and other attractions still failed to render homelike. His one object in life was to get out of it.
"If Emilius would only take a nap!" I sighed one warm afternoon, when I had just rescued him from a deep pit of his frenzied digging for the third time that day.
"Read him poetry," advised Joy-of-Life. Magical snatches of Bliss Carman's deep-sea songs ran through my head: —
"When sheering down to the LineCome polar tides from the North,Thy silver folk of the brineMust glimmer and forth;"* * * * *"The myriad fins are moving,The marvelous flanges play."Chesterton, who chuckled over another grotesque denizen of the deep, would have felt the charm of Emilius:
"Dark the sea was, but I saw him,One great head with goggle eyes,Like a diabolic cherubFlying in those fallen skies.* * * * *"For I saw that finny goblinHidden in the abyss untrod;And I knew there can be laughterOn the secret face of God."But it was almost too early for Chesterton, and quite too early for the fascinating fish poems of Rupert Brooke or for Chauncey Hickox's feeling apostrophe to a tortoise:
"Paludal, glum, with misdirected legs,You hide your history as you do your eggs,And offer us an osseous nut to crackMuch harder than the shell upon your back.No evolutionist has ever guessedWhy your cold shoulder is within your chest —Why you were discontented with a planThe vertebrates accept, from fish to man.For what environment did you provideBy pushing your internal frame outside?How came your ribs in this abnormal place?Inside your rubber neck you hide your faceAnd answer not.Besides, I had no ground for hope that Emilius would be pleased by my reading of poetry or by anything else that I could do for him. He impressed me as intensely preoccupied, a turtle of a fixed idea.
I was standing by the tub at sunset, trying to ingratiate myself with its sulky occupant, whom I had just dragged up from his latest hole in the bank, by tickling his flippers with a playful twig, when Giant Bluff strode over from his adjacent territory and made us a party of three.
"How's your snapper?"
"I don't know. He doesn't tell. But I'm afraid he can't be feeling very fit, for he hasn't eaten anything since he came, a week ago."
"Hasn't, though? Huh! Looked out of my window at three o'clock last night and saw it grazing out there at the length of its rope, munching grass like any old cow."
Previous conversations with Giant Bluff had impaired our faith in his strict veracity.
"I thought turtles ate only animal food."
"If it's fresh and kicking. What you ought to do is to catch it a mess of frogs. 'Twould tear a live frog to pieces fast enough. But you've starved it to grass. That's all right. I raised turtles out on the Mojave desert one spell and fed 'em on nothing but grass. Quite a dainty out there. Sold 'em for five dollars apiece. Turned over a cool thousand – "
"Of turtles?"
"Of dollars. Easy's winking. This snapper of yours wouldn't be bad eating. Might fetch five cents a pound in the market."
I was not exactly fond of Emilius, but I hated to hear him discussed as edible pounds. Moving away a little, I began to stir lightly with my twig the loose earth in his last excavation. Giant Bluff was no favorite in our neighborhood, into which he had intruded, a stranger from the wild west, a year or two before. His little habit of sitting on his back steps, Sunday afternoons, with a rifle across his knees, and shooting with accurate aim every cat and hen that trespassed on his land was in itself enough to account for his unpopularity.
The shooting, however, except when a pet rooster or tabby was the victim, thrilled the children on the hill with a delicious terror. Only that morning I had seen Towhead, crouched behind a clump of syringas, playing sharp-shooter.
"Here!" he was shouting to Rosycheeks, who was approaching very slowly, like a fascinated bird. "Hurry up! You've got to come walking by and be shot."
"I doesn't want to," sobbed poor little Rosycheeks, "but I's tomin', – I's tomin'."
The glory of Giant Bluff, whose boasts were as prodigious as his profession was mysterious, had recently, however, been tarnished by an open discomfiture. One of our oldest and most respected citizens, a Yankee in blood and bone, driver of a depot carriage, had incurred Giant Bluff's deadly displeasure. And this was the way of it. In this beginning of our sleepy summertide, when the campus was as empty of life as a seigniorial park, when the citizens were able to use the sidewalks and the shopkeepers dozed behind their counters, the New York train dropped at our station a sharp-voiced young woman in a flamboyant hat.
Uncle Abram, the only driver to persist in meeting trains through the long vacation, watched from his carriage, with indifferent eyes, her brisk approach.
"Is this a public vehicle?"
"Think likely."
"Do you know where Mr. Benjamin Bluff lives?"
"Maybe."
"Take me there."
On the way the fare, Giant Bluff's daughter by a former marriage, questioned Uncle Abram as to her father's business and position in the town, but she might as well have tried to wring information from Emilius. Arrived at the house, she bade her driver inquire for her if Mr. Bluff was at home, saying that otherwise she would not call.
Mrs. Bluff, whom Uncle Abram had never met before, answered the bell.
"Mr. Bluff in?"
"No. Why?"
"Nothin' partic'lar," and Uncle Abram backed himself away.
"Well?" queried his passenger, as he started up Daniel Webster with a professional crack of the whip.
"Ain't to hum."
"Who came to the door?"
"Lady."
"What lady?"
"Dunno."
"Was it his wife?"
"Dunno as 'twas his wife."
His exasperated fare, afterwards tracking down her parent in Boston, made use of this incident for the slander of her stepmother.
"A nice impression she makes, to be sure! Even that numskull of a driver doubted whether she was your wife or not."
Giant Bluff came back that evening breathing out threats of slaughter. Before midnight it was noised all about our village that he had sworn to shoot Uncle Abram on sight. The old driver was warned by a group of excited boys who found him serenely smoking over a game of checkers and were quite unable to interest him in their tidings. But the next day, when the station platform was well filled with our business men waiting for the eight o'clock into town, Uncle Abram drove up to the depot and reined in Daniel Webster just against the spot where Giant Bluff was standing, a little aloof for the reason that nobody cared to stand with him.
Taken by surprise as Uncle Abram coolly looked him over, Giant Bluff, unexpectedly to himself, said:
"Good morning."
"Ez good a mornin' ez God ever made."
Giant Bluff, who prided himself on his atheism, began to swagger.
"That's stuff and nonsense. Only babies and fools believe such rubbish nowadays."
"Thet so? Ain't no God, eh, and he never made no mornin's? Wal! Maybe ye'll put me in the way of findin' out about quite a few little things like that. I've hearn tell thet ye're goin' to shoot me, an' my rheumatiz is so bad this summer thet I'd be obleeged if ye'd shoot me right now an' hev it over."
"You – you insulted my wife," gasped Giant Bluff.
"Not a nary," protested Uncle Abram, with a touch of indignant color in his weather-beaten cheeks. "I said I didn't know whether the lady thet come to the door was your wife or not, an' no more I didn't. I hedn't never seen her afore. But even s'posin' thet your morals didn't hurt you none, do ye think I'd let it out to a stranger? No, siree; I'd a kep my mouth shet, for the credit o' the town. An' now thet I've had my say on thet little misunderstandin', ye kin shoot me ez soon ez ye like."
The crowded platform roared for joy, the opportune train came in, and Giant Bluff, the first to swing aboard, was not seen in the village again for a fortnight. So it came to pass that he was but newly acquainted with Emilius.
As I was aimlessly poking about with my twig in the last of those mysterious holes which Emilius had been so desperately resolved on digging, a number of small, round, white objects came to view.
"Why, what are those?" was my imbecile exclamation, stooping to see them better in the half light. Forthwith Giant Bluff was stooping at my shoulder.
"Eggs. Didn't you ever see turtles' eggs before? It beats me what you learned ladies don't know."
I went abruptly in to Joy-of-Life, and there we sat in the dusk, overwhelmed with contrition. Poor, dear, misunderstood, ill-treated Emilius! All he wanted was a chance to get away from the water and lay her eggs in some warm, deep chamber, where he could lie hidden for days, and they for weeks, in comfort and security. And how we had worried her with our continual upjerkings and immersions, how we had kept him digging one forbidden nursery after another, how arrogantly we had set ourselves against the unpersuadable urge of instinct!
Before breakfast the next morning we hurried out together to set Emilius free. There was no Emilius. The tub stood empty, from the tree dangled a bit of cut cord, the loose earth that marked the holes had been neatly raked over, there were no small, white, round objects to be found. Had Emilius gone for good and taken his eggs with her?
As we searched the ground in vain, Giant Bluff sauntered out of his back door, smiling an inscrutable smile.
"Saw that snapper of yours walking off an hour since. It went under the back fence out into the woods. Reckon you can't catch it, though it was traveling rather slow; couldn't hurry much, for it had a dozen little turtles trotting along on each side. Quite a handsome family!"
Joy-of-Life and I, turning our backs on that stupendous liar, stared at each other with horror dawning in our eyes.
Had he – ? Would he – ? Could he – ?
Emilius!
HUDSON'S CAT
"This night our cat ranne crying from one side of the ship to the other, looking overboord, which made us to wonder; but we saw nothing."
– Juet's Journal.What did you see, O pussy-cat-mew,Pet of the Half-Moon's turbulent crew?Who taught them mew-tiny? Wasn't it you?Juet kept journal of storm and fogAnd the mermaid that set them all agog,But what has become of the cat-a-log?Henry Hudson, the master sage,Writ large his name on history's page,But you, you too, were a purr-sonage.Shall the tale slight you, whose tail was a-quiverAs you and Hudson sailed up the riverMade only his by Time the giver?Why did you take to adventuring,Puss-illanimous fireside thing?What was the cargo you hoped to bring?Did you dream of multitudinous miceRunning about the Isles of SpiceIn a paradoxical Paradise?Were you not homesick where monsters swam,Dolorous dolphin and clamorous clam,For your sunny stoop in Amsterdam?Months at sea, while the billows roared,And the Milky Way not a cupful poured;No wonder Tabby looked over-bored.You had your feelin's, as felines go,Poor little puss. What scared you so?O stupid sailors that didn't know!Was it a dogfish struck the sparkFrom your sea-green eyes with the quaint remarkThat you were sailing upon a bark?Millions of happy pussies fallInto oblivion; still you callFrom the top of your ancient cater-wall,Call on the centuries to concurIn praise of Tabby the Mariner,Who discovered the Catskills, named for her.CATASTROPHES
"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 chirpOf bird above him on the olive branch,"is latent in Wordsworth's
"kitten on the wallSporting 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 mouseUnder 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 afraydOf 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.
