Sigurd Our Golden Collie, and Other Comrades of the Road
"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 siresFlashed 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 nacyonOf 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 dwellFriend 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."
TO HAMLET, A COLLIE
Strange dog, with terror planted in your heart,At your dim root of life a piteous dreadForeboding evil doom, a panic bredOf some fierce shock to puppy nerves! No artHome kindness can devise prevents your start,Wild stare and panting breath at each new tread;Your anxious eyes keep watch, uncomfortedBy our poor love, too weak to take your partAgainst that fatal menace which, for usNo less than you, lurks in the coming springs.Of all our creeds and dreams incredulous,Thrilled by these sudden agonies, you quakeThrough all your lithe young body. What should makeA collie know the grief of mortal things?HAMLET AND POLONIUS
"There's something in his soulO'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 passed 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 assented, 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. Nobody 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 purportAs if he had been loosed out of hellTo 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 vacancyAnd 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 damn'd,Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,Be thy intents wicked or charitable,Thou comest in such a questionable shapeThat 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 appetite 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.
"How weary, stale, flat and unprofitableSeem to me all the uses of this world!"He was not, to be sure,
