'i I: If f’ To consult any CLIPPING removed from this item, inquire with R.B.R. staff The Tiger in the House THE FIRST EDITION OF THIS BOOK PRINTED ON ARTCRAFT INDIA TINT LAID PAPER IS LIMITED TO TWO THOUSAND COPIES OFjW^I|:H^THIS IS NUMBER i k y ' 1 BOOKS BY CARL VAN VECHTEN INTERPRETERS IN THE GARRET THE MUSIC OF SPAIN THE MERRY GO-ROUND THE TIGER IN THE HOUSE MUSIC AND BAD MANNERS MUSIC AFTER THE GREAT WAR - Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015 https://archive.org/details/tigerinhouse01vanv w a w X H < W 2 W W X O! X « w Ph pp M < k X Q < X j w A ■Ci. a ba Q o X Q < X W H X u w > < > X ca < o The T iger in theHouse Carl Van V e c h t e n “Dieu a fait le chat pour dormer a I’homme le plaisir de caresser le tigre.” MERY New York / Alfred ^ A ^ Knopf MCMXX COPYEIGHT, 1920, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMERICA FOR EDNA KENTON . . . AND FEATHERS “ Ho ■F. f i-'" 1 " I r •» By Way of Correcting a Popular Pre]udice i6o throbs a minute. A good-natured kitten may be worried into becoming a bad-natured cat, or the bad characteristics of a cat may sometimes be softened by tender treatment. I know of an instance in which a guest handled a kitten about three months old rather roughly. When released the kitten fled to safety; she was not accustomed to suffering such indignities and she resented them. Familiarity always breeds contempt in a cat. However, once the guest had taken his departure she re- sumed her old-time offhand manner and was as playful as pos- sible. A year elapsed before the offending guest again ap- peared in the circle, a year during which the kitten had grown into cathood, but the moment the young man entered the door she disappeared under a bed and could not be induced to come out until he had left. Cats have long memories. Jessie Pic- kens had a very remarkable brown tabby Persian who snarled and growled and spit at everybody except her mistress. She would indeed suffer no one but Jessie to come near her at all, but for Jessie she had an excessive fondness and had even crossed the Atlantic in her cabin seventeen times. Her fear of strangers was due to an accident which occurred when she was a kitten. Willy, really a great admirer of cats and at that time the husband of Colette, than whom no one has written more delicately and sensitively about these little rogues in fur, was calling one day. He picked the kitten up to play with her and tossed her up towards the ceiling, catching her as she dropped, but a sudden twist and puss slipped through his fingers, falling to the floor. With a cry of terror she fled from the room and it was only after two days that she was discovered hiding behind some trunks in the garret. She never permitted a stranger to touch her again. Another cat fell into a well. He managed to keep from drowning by climbing to a small rock and in time he was rescued, but thereafter he was com- pletely insane; he never regained interest in life nor seemed to have the slightest consciousness of what was going on about 15 The Tiger in the House him. Lindsay has culled another example from the “ Ani- mal World.” This cat was frightened by a peacock; a sort of terror-mania developed, agoraphobia, perhaps, involving an utter loss of self-possession, followed by a permanent tim- idity that permitted the animal to feed only in his master’s presence. Whether they inherit these traits or whether their manners and habits are encouraged or embarrassed by treatment, the fact remains that there are all kinds of cats, cross and gentle, cruel and tender, savage and tame. The curious thing is that several kittens by the same mother brought up together in' the same house will exhibit many differences. Gautier describes three kittens of the same litter: “ Enjolras was solemn, pretentious, aldermanic from his cradle; even theatrical at times in his vast assumption of dignity. Gavroche was a born Bohemian, enamoured of low company, and of the careless comedies of life. Their sister Eiponine — best loved of the three — was a delicate, fastidious little creature with an exquisite sense of propriety, and of the refinements of social intercourse. Enjolras was a glutton, caring for nothing so much as his dinner. Gavroche, more generous, would bring in from the streets gaunt and ragged cats, who devoured in a scurry of fright the food laid aside for him. I was often tempted to remonstrate, and to say to this little scamp, ‘ A nice lot of friends you do pick up I ’ But I refrained. After all, it was an amiable weakness. He might have eaten his dinner himself.” Madame Michelet thinks that colouring may have some- thing to do with temperament. Black cats, according to this femme savante, have passionate and sombre characters. The blondes are amiable and facile, with a certain submerged smil- ing melancholy. Those between the two extremes, neither blonde nor brunette, have equable temperaments. These 22 “ Mind in the Lower Animals”; Vol. II, P. i86. 23 “ Les Chats.” i6 By Way of Correcting a Popular Prejudice classifications of Madame Michelet will be considered rather fantastic by any one who has known cats of different colours. But Diderot’s “ il y a chat et chat ” is certainly just. Some cats are cold and haughty, imperious and ironic. Other cats are so frank, so persistent in demanding affection, that they almost lack mystery. There are cats who will climb on any one and purr with delight. Catnip is vodka and whisky to most cats, but Feathers merely sniffs at ft and walks away. There are all varieties and kinds and sorts of cats; there are long and short-haired cats, and Mexican cats without any hair; there are strange Australian cats with long pointed noses ; there are Angora and Persian and Siamese cats, and Manx cats without any tails; there are blue, black, and white cats; there are tortoise-shells and creams; there are orange and silver and chinchilla cats; there are combinations of all these colours; my Feathers is tortoise-shell and white smoke tabby queen, with seven toes on each front paw ! Seven or six-toed cats are by no means rare. Even in regard to the freaks of catdom there are variations: in spite of much popular opinion to the contrary white cats are not always deaf, tortoise-shells are not always females, and orange tabbies are not always males. Some pussies' coats are yellow; some amber streaked with dark; No member of the feline race but has a special mark. This one has feet with hoarfrost tipped; that one has tail that curls; Another's inky hide is striped; another's decked with pearls. Cats loom in the mind’s eye, indeed, with the heroes of history and the characters of fiction: Zola’s roving Angora, worsted in a street fight, and Edward Peple’s roving Angora who does up an alley cat and returns home tired and happy; Baudelaire’s occult cat; Lafcadio Hearn’s tortoise-shell, Tama, who played with her dead kittens in dreams, cooing to them, catching for them small shadowy things; Corporal Bunting’s devilishly grim, brindled, bandit cat, Jacobina; Madame Joli- 17 The Tiger in the House coeur’s cuddlesome, Shah de Perse, whose “ rare little cat tan- trums were but as sun-spots on the effulgence of his otherwise constant amiability Mr. Tarkington’s Gipsy, “ half broncho and half Malay pirate”; snarling, green-eyed, grey Lady Jane, who follows Mr. Krook about in “ Bleak House the pious papal cats of Leo XII, Gregory XV, and Pius IX;"'* the playful kitten companions of Richelieu; the oyster-eating Hodge of Dr. Johnson, the bane of Boswell; Edward Lear’s Old Foss; “ that troublesome old rip,” Hector G. Yelverton, When Pius IX sat down to dine, his cat came in with the soup, mounted a chair opposite him, and dumbly and decorously looked on until the pontiff had finished his meal. Then he received his own at his master’s hands and took leave until the same hour next day. The demise of puss alarmed the Pope’s household, lest he should be painfully affected by the loss of his old table com- panion, but His Holiness “ did not seem to care a bit more about it than he had cared for the death of his secretary, the Cardinal Antonelli.” 25 The fondness of Richelieu for kittens has been generally taken for granted and is stated as a fact in most of the books about cats. Champfleury, however, questions the matter in a footnote: “It is surprising that Moncrif, who, not- withstanding the jesting tone of his book, made extensive researches on the sub- ject of cats, has not said a word about Richelieu’s passion for those animals. Can it be that this peculiarity, attributed to a great political personage, is a legend misapplied? ‘Everybody knows,’ says Moncrif, ‘that one of the greatest ministers France ever possessed, M. Colbert, always had a number of kittens playing about that same cabinet in which so many institutions, both useful and honourable to the nation, had their origin.’ ” . Alexandre Landrin (“Le Chat,” p. 93) writes, “With Richelieu the taste for cats was a mania ; when he rose in the morning and when he went to bed at night he was always surrounded by a dozen of them with which he played, delighting to watch them jump and gamble. He had one of his chambers fitted up as a cattery, which was entrusted to overseers, the names of whom are known. Abel and Teyssandier came, morning and evening, to feed the cats with pates fashioned of the white meat of chicken. At his death Richelieu left a pension for his cats and to Abel and Teyssandier so that they might continue to care for their charges. When he died Richelieu left fourteen cats of which the names were: Mounard le Fougueux, Soumise, Serpolet, Gazette, Ludovic le Cruel, Mimie Piaillon, Feliraare, Lucifer, Lodoi'ska, Rubis sur I’Ongle, Pyrame, Thisbe, Racan, and Perruque. These last two received their names from the fact that they were born in the wig of Racan, the academician.” Gaston Percheron (“Le Chat,” p. 19) writes, “History records that Richelieu with one hand caressed a family of cats which played on his knees, while with the other he signed the order for the execution of Cinq-Mars.” 18 By JVay of Correcting a Popular Prejudice “with no more principle than an injun”; Mr. Garnett’s in- domitable queen, of whom has been written: And all the TomSj though never so bold. Quailed at the martial Marigold. The esoteric procession continues to pass in front of me: Scheffel’s philosophical and lyrical Tom Cat, Hiddigeigei, of sable coat and majestic tail; Hamilcar,^® the cat of Sylvestre Bonnard, who combined in his personality the formidable aspect of a Tartar chief with the heavy grace of an odalisque; John F. Runciman’s Felix-Mendelssohn-Bartholdy-Shedlock- Runciman-Felinis, who spit at hansoms at the age of six months and later attempted to play the viola-alta by trailing the bow across the floor, and his Minnie who used to put dogs to rout and died of eating needles; the charming Kallikrates of W. L. George’s “ Blind Alley’’; Tieck’s prodigiously de- lightful Hinze; Alexandre Dumas’s clairvoyant Mysouff, who once ate a 500 franc breakfast; the terrible one-eyed Pluto of Poe’s story and the one-eyed Wotan, Kraft’s cat in “Maurice Guest’’; Mr. Warner’s sage Calvin and Mark Twain’s Tom Quartz, who objected to quartz mining; Agnes Repplier’s Agrippina and Lux; John Silence’s psychic cat. Smoke, who loved to rub up against the legs of spirits; the gamine cat, Fanchette, of the adorable Claudine; Dr. Nicola’s eschatological cat, Apollyon, who was privy to the mysteries of cartomancy; Dickens’s Williamina (first named William) ; Southey’s Rumpel, “ the Most Noble the Archduke Rumpel- stiltzchen, Marcus Macbum, Earl Tomlefnagne, Baron Rati- cide, Waowhler and Scratch”; Chateaubriand’s greyish red Micetto, the gift of a Pope; Tom Hood’s Tabitha Longclaws Hamilcar was Anatole France’s own cat. After his death he was succeeded by a cat named Pascal by France’s cook, who had overheard a luncheon con- versation about the French philosopher. Pascal was a stray cat who wandered in from the streets, liked the “ city of books,” and decided to remain. He al- ways maintained his independence, and sometimes went away for a week at a time. 19 The Tiger in the House Tiddleywink and her three kittens, Pepperpot, Scratchaway, and Sootikins; the black cat of Fray Inocencio called Timoteo, a name “ bestowed upon him for the reason that this is a name well suited to a cat, and also in derisive reprobation of that schismatic monophysite of Egypt, who in the fifth century usurped the Patriarchate, and was known popularly as ‘Timothy the Cat.’”; later this puss was called Susurro,^^ which in Spanish signifies Purrer; Sandy Jenkins’s hoodoo cat, Mesmerizer ; Theophile Gautier’s Madame Theophile, who delighted in perfumes and music, India shawls lifted from boxes of sandalwood, and faint aromatic odours of the East; Victor Hugo’s Chanoine and Sir Walter Scott’s Hinse; Pierre Loti’s M'oumoutte Blanche and Moumoutte Chinoise; the wicked Rutterkin of ways mephitic; and Rosamund Marriot Watson’s Egyptian cat desired by Arsinoe : A little lion, small and dainty sweet {For such there be!) With sea-grey eyes and softly stepping feet. On strings the solemn march: Les chats prudents, les chats silencieux, Promenant leur beaute, leur grace et leur mystere, “ furred serpents,” “ green-eyed Venuses,” the “ house-ani- mal,” the ” fireside sphinx,” “ rat-eater,” “ mouse-enemy,” the “ panther of the hearth,” “ cats ... of titles obsolete or yet in use, Tom, Tybert, Roger, Rutterkin, or Puss,” Calumnious cats, who circulate faux pas. And reputations maul with murderous claws; Shrill cats, whom fierce domestic brawls delight. Cross cats, who nothing want but teeth to bite. Starch cats of puritanic aspect sad. And learned cats who talk their husbands mad; ***** Asura, the ancient Aryan name for deity, signifies the breather. 20 By Way of Correcting a Popular Prejudice Uncleanly cats who never pare their nails, Cat-gossips, full of Canterbury tales; Cat-grandams, vex'd with asthmas and catarrhs. And superstitious cats, who curse their stars. 21 Chapter ’Two: Treating of Traits Now that I have, perhaps, convinced the reader that cats have character, it is time to assert with equal positiveness that cats have characteristics. No cat-lover would be willing to deny this, for the characteristics of the cat are what make her generally beloved. Many of these traits are born of feral habits, hundreds and even thousands of years old. The dog is an animal who in the wild state travels in packs; he follows his leader in hunting expeditions. In the do- mestic state he transfers this allegiance from his leader to his master, for man is literally the master of the dog, as he is of the horse and the ass, and as he has been of the maid-servant. The cat on the other hand, in the wild state hunted and lived alone; he retains the inde- pendent habits of such a condition. Observe, for instance, a dog eating: if a man or another dog approaches him he will growl. He has a racial memory of fighting for the best food and it is his instinct to bolt it down before it can be taken away from him. A cat, ordinarily (there are excep- tions, as I have previously pointed out), displays no such trepidation. Accustomed as a wild animal to eating alone in tranquillity, as a domestic he usually eats slowly and with de- corum, having no instinctive fear that his food will be stolen. Similarly a cat’s regard for his person is acutely traceable to a memory of life in the forest and plain. A cat does not chase his prey as a dog does; he can run swiftly for a short distance, but running is not his specialty. He lies in wait for his quarry and pounces upon it suddenly. Now some of the ani- mals of which the cat is most fond for food, notably the mouse, have a keener sense of smell than their enemy; It is therefore 22 Treating of Traits essential for the good mouser to be devoid of odour. Conse- quently he washes and rewashes his fur and trims his whiskers to the last speck. “ The love of dress is very marked in this attractive animal,” writes Champfleury; “ he is proud of the lustre of his coat, and cannot endure that a hair of it shall lie the wrong way. When the cat has eaten, he passes his tongue several times over both sides of his jaws, and his whiskers, in order to clean them thoroughly; he keeps his coat clean with a prickly tongue which fulfills the office of a curry-comb; but as, notwithstanding its suppleness, it is difficult for the cat to reach the upper part of his head with the tongue; he makes use of his paw, moistened with saliva, to polish that portion.” Hippolyte Taine has written a charming description of the operation : His tongue is sponge, and brush, and towel, and curry-comb, IV ell he knows what work it can be made to do. Poor little wash-rag, smaller than my thumb. His nose touches his back, touches his hind paws too. Every patch of fur is raked, and scraped, and smoothed; What more has Goethe done, what more could Voltaire dof A similar instinct induces the cat to bury his offal, an instinct which leads him to do a deal of scratching in the domestic pan. Louis Robinson ^ has expressed an interesting and credible theory to the effect that even the cat’s colouring and the habit of hissing or spitting are protective mimicry. The most ag- gressive enemy of the cat in the wild state is the eagle. Now it is known that all animals (save perhaps the cat!) fear snakes. Tabby markings are the most common coloration in felines. If you observe a tabby cat rolled up asleep with his head in the centre of the coil you may note that he bears a very fair resemblance to a coiled serpent, quite enough resem- blance to deceive an eagle in the air. Again, suppose a cat has i“WiId Traits in Tame Animals.” 23 The Tiger in the House Loncealed her kittens In a hollow tree. At the approach of an enemy they begin to spit, and this spitting sounds very much like the hissing of a snake. No fox will stick his nose into the dark hollow of a tree from which hisses are ejected. The cat is an anarchist, while the dog is a socialist. He Is an aristocratic, tyrannical anarchist, at that. So Tiberius might have sat, Had Tiberius been a cat, wrote Matthew Arnold in a moment of wise inspiration. He prefers delicate textures, rich foods, and the best of every- thing.^ “ It, is necessary to say that if the cat holds a big place In the household It is not alone by his graces of spoiled child, his loving calineries, and the seductive abandon of his lovely Indolence; more than anything It is because he demands so much. His personality is strong, his awakenings and his wishes impatient. He refuses to wait. Under his supple grace his gesture Is one of insistence and command. You de- fend yourself In vain, he Is master and you yield.” Thus has written Madame Michelet,-"* of whom her husband, the good Jules, once retorted to her boast that she had owned a hundred cats, “ Rather a hundred cats have owned you ! ” A writer In the “Spectator”^ describes a typical cat: “We have seen a tabby with a black muzzle who, for cold, calculated, and yet 2 “ It is odd that cats show an intense dislike to anything destined or set apart for them. Mentu had a basket of his own, and a cushion made by a fond mis- tress, but to put him into it was to make him bound out like an india-rubber ball. He liked to occupy proper chairs and sofas, or even proper hearthrugs. In the same way, the well-bred cat has an inconvenient but aesthetic 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 news- paper 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.” Margaret Benson in “ The Soul of a Cat.” 3 “ Les Chats,” p. 17. 4 “The Cat as Unconscious Humorist” in “The Spectator”: August 2, 1890. 24 THIS BROWN TABBY SHORT-HAIRED CAT IS NAMED MARY GARDEN From a copyright photograph by Harriet V. Furness - Treating of Traits perfectly well-bred Insolence, could have given points to a spiteful dowager duchess whose daughter-in-law ‘ wasn’t one of us, you know.’ The heartless and deliberate rudeness of that cat’s behaviour on occasion would, had she been a man, have unquestionably justified shooting at sight. The courtiers In the most slavish palace in the East would have rebelled had they received the treatment she meted out daily to those who waited on her hand and foot. After a devoted admirer had hunted breathless and bare-headed over a large garden, and under a blazing July sun, lest puss should lose her dinner, and had at last brought her Into the dining-room In his arms, that cat, instead of showing gratitude, and instead of running with pleasure to the plate prepared for her, has been known to sit bolt upright at the other end of the room, regarding the whole table with a look of undisguised contempt, her eyes super- ciliously half-shut and a tiny speck of red tongue protruding between her teeth. If the thing had not been so exceedingly well done It would have been simply vulgar; as it was it amounted to the most exasperating form of genteel brutality Imaginable. The company having been at last thoroughly stared out of countenance and put down by this monstrous ex- hibition of Intentional rudeness, the cat In question slowly rose to her feet, and digging her claws well into the carpet, stretched and balanced herself, while yawning at the same time with lazy self-satisfaction. After this she proceeded by the most circuitous route obtainable to the plate put before her, evidently intending it to be clearly understood that she held Its presence under the side-board to be due In some way or other to her own skill and forethought, and that she in no sense regarded herself as beholden to any other person.” The cat Is the only animal that lives with man on terms of equality, nay superiority. He willingly domesticates himself but on his own conditions and never gives up his complete liberty no mat- ter how closely he Is confined. He preserves his Independence In this unequal struggle even at the cost of his life. A common 25 The Tiger in the House tom cat, living on the domestic hearth, on the best of footings with the family, visits the rooftops and the fences, becomes a leading figure at prize-fights, negotiates his amours on a lavish scale, and otherwise conducts himself when he Is away from the house exactly as he would in the Incult state. Indeed, when he is thrown on his own resources, as frequently happens both In town and country, he is perfectly capable of taking care of himself and adjusts himself to the new conditions without a moment’s hesitation. This characteristic is admirably illus- trated in a story by Charles G. D. Roberts,® a story founded on a true Incident. A dog In a similar predicament would be entirely helpless; the dog, indeed. In submitting to slavery, has entirely lost the power to take care of himself when occasion arises. It has amused Mr. Booth Tarkington, and his readers will share this jocund emotion, to paint a picture of such a cat,® a prodigious lanky beast who has forsaken the comforts of the fireside and the affections of a little girl for the pleasures of wild life and the chase. He had been a roly-poly, pepper-and- salt kitten, named Gipsy, a name to which In his subsequent career he gave real meaning. Early In youth he began to dissipate and was wont to join rowdy alley cats In their mid- night maraudings. His taste for a fast life increased with age and one night, carrying the evening beefsteak with him, he joined the underworld. “ His extraordinary size, his daring, and his utter lack of sympathy soon made him the leader — and, at the same time, the terror — of all the loose-lived cats in a wide neighbour- hood. He contracted no friendships and had no confidents. He seldom slept in the same place twice in succession, and though he was wanted by the police, he was not found. In appearance he did not lack distinction of an ominous sort; the slow, rhythmic, perfectly controlled mechanism of his ® “ How a cat played Robinson Crusoe” in “Neighbours Unknown,” p. 175. ® “ Penrod and Sam,” Chapter XII. 26 Treating of Traits tail, as he impressively walked abroad, was incomparably sinister. This stately and dangerous walk of his, his long, vibrant whiskers, his scars, his yellow eye, so ice-cold, so fire- hot, haughty as the eye of Satan, gave him the deadly air of a mousquetaire duelist. His soul was in that walk and in that eye; it could be read — the soul of a bravo of fortune, living on his wits and his valour, asking no favours and granting no quarter. Intolerant, proud, sullen, yet watchful and con- stantly planning — purely a militarist, believing in slaughter as in religion, and confident that art, science, poetry, and the good of the world were happily advanced thereby — Gipsy had be- come, though technically not a wild cat, undoubtedly the most untamed cat at large in the civilized world.” The cat whose portrait Mr. Tarkington has painted in these few brilliant strokes, discovers the back-bone of a three-pound white-fish lying within a few inches of the nose of Penrod’s old dog, Duke, and Duke awakens to the terrifying spectacle of the cat, bearing the fishbone in his horrid jaws. “ Out from one side of his head, and mingling with his whiskers, projected the long, spiked spine of the big fish; down from the other side of that ferocious head dangled the fish’s tail, and from above the remarkable effect thus produced shot the in- tolerable glare of two yellow eyes. To the gaze of Duke, still blurred by slumber, this monstrosity was all of one piece — the bone seemed a living part of it.” Duke gave a shriek of terror and the massacre began. Gipsy, too, sounded his war- cry, “ the subterranean diapason of a demoniac bass viol.” Then, “ never releasing the fishbone for an instant, he laid back his ears in a chilling way, beginning to shrink into him- self like a concertina, but rising amidships so high that he ap- peared to be giving an imitation of that peaceful beast, the dromedary. Such was not his purpose, however, for having attained his greatest possible altitude, he partially sat down and elevated his right arm after the manner of a semaphore. This semaphore arm remained rigid for a second, threatening; 27 The Tiger in the House then it vibrated with inconceivable rapidity, feinting. But it was the treacherous left that did the work. Seemingly this left gave Duke three lightning little pats upon the left ear, but the change in his voice indicated that these were no love-taps. He yelled, ‘help!’ and ‘bloody murder!’ . . . Gipsy pos- sessed a vocabulary for cat-swearing certainly second to none out of Italy, and probably equal to the best there.” Presently, this time with his right paw, he drew blood from Duke’s nose, but on the approach of Penrod he saw fit to retire, not out of fear, Mr. Tarkington explains, but probably because he could not spit without dropping the fishbone, and, “ as all cats of the slightest pretensions to technique perfectly understand, this can neither be well done nor produce the best effects unless the mouth be opened to its utmost capacity so as to expose the beginnings of the alimentary canal.” Gipsy should not be regarded as a curious exception in the feline world. The cat, indeed, is the only animal without visible means of support who still manages to find a living in the city. I do not mean to say that all cats do. Both in the city and in the country cats without homes, and even cats with homes, are largely at the mercy of a great many enemies, both aggressive and accidental. The wicked small boy, the automo- bile, the dog, the tram-car, the rabbit-trap, all quickly put an end to many superfluous pussies’ lives, but it is equally certain that the number of apparently unprovided-for cats who live wild lives in both city and country is very large indeed. Some of the males become enormous, fat and sleek, living on the contents of stray ashcans, occasionally stealing better food through an open window, catching mice in warehouses and sparrows In parks. Even the females manage somehow not only to care for themselves but also to bring up families.'^ The cat’s ability to leap and climb gives him a marked advantage both in hunting and escaping from his enemies. It is a curious fact, however, that cats who climb to considerable heights frequently refuse to descend from more modest ones. A cat in a tree, whither he has fled from a dog, or in a second storey window, yowling piteously, is no uncommon sight. Sometimes the rescue 28 Treating of Traits Water alone Is sometimes difficult or Impossible to procure, but cats can do without water for several days, the blood auto- matically thickening. One very hot August Sunday afternoon walking up Fifth Avenue I observed a large orange tabby tom rubbing himself against a hydrant and mewing. I stopped to speak with him, as is my custom with cats, when an Irish police- man approached. “ I believe he wants a drink,” suggested this very intelligent officer. “ He’s noticed that water some- times comes from that hydrant.” ” I think you are right,” I replied. “ Let’s get him one.” Now a cat will not take an excursion merely because a man wants a walking com- panion. Walking is a human habit into which dogs readily fall but it is a distasteful form of exercise to a cat unless he has a purpose in view. I have never known a cat with a purpose In view to refuse a walk. This case was no exception. The orange tabby was a complete stranger to both the police- man and myself and yet when we suggested a little drink he walked peaceably a little way behind us as we strolled down Fifth Avenue. “ I think Page and Shaw’s is open,” said the policeman. Now Page and Shaw’s was three blocks below the hydrant and yet that cat followed at our heels. When we arrived at the shop I asked Tom to sit down for a moment; the policeman went in and presently emerged with a paper cup full of water. Tom drank every bit of this and then asked for more. He had another cup. Then, having no further use for us, without a word or gesture he trotted off. An ingenious friend of Louis Robinson suggested to him that cats may look upon man as “ a kind of locomotive tree, pleasant to rub against, the lower limbs of which afford a com- fortable seat, and from whose upper branches occasionally of such a cat becomes an international matter. It has even been found expedient, on occasion, to call out the fire department. It should be remembered that a fall from any considerable height is a serious matter for a cat. In spite of the popu- lar superstition that he always lights on his feet, he is quite likely to break his spine. 29 The Tiger in the House drop tid-bits of mutton and other luscious fruit.” ® There is a good deal to be said for this theory. However cats have been known to give a more complete affection. Most cats are ready with very friendly morning greetings but there is even a certain reserve in these attentions, a reserve which in- creases as the day lengthens. There is none of the excessive cataglottism indulged in by canines. Cats only give affection where it is deserved, except sometimes through sheer per- versity when they annoy an ailurophobe with their attentions. Return good for evil is not in the cat’s book of rules. To a person deserving of their friendship, however, they occasion- ally pour out a really deep and beautiful affection. This is slow in growing and may be easily interrupted. Cats will not tolerate rough handling, beating, or teasing. They dislike exceedingly to be laughed at. A seeker of a cat’s affection must therefore proceed with care; in time he may receive some of the benefits due him, but, if he offends his cat friend, the work of the past is all undone. Cats seldom make mistakes and they never make the same mistake twice. How stupid a cat must think a human being who is constantly repeating the same errors ! A cat can be duped but once in his life ® as ® The following curious description of the cat from Edward Topsell’s “ History of Four-footed Beasts” (1658) is interesting enough to quote: “It is needless to spend any time over her loving nature to man, how she flattereth by rubbing her skin against one’s legs, how she whurleth with her voice, having as many tunes as turnes, for she hath one voice to beg and to complain, another to testify her delight and pleasure, another among her own kind by flattering, by hissing, by puffing, by spitting, in so much that some have thought that they have a peculiar intelligible language among themselves. Therefore how she playeth, leapeth, looketh, catcheth, tosseth with her foot, riseth up to strings held over her head, sometimes creeping, sometimes lying on the back, playing with foot, appre- hending greedily anything save the hand of a man, with divers such gestical actions, it is needless to stand upon; in so much as Collins was wont to say, that being free from his studies and more urgent weighty affairs, he was not ashamed to play and sport himself with his cat, and verily it may be called an idle man’s pastime.” ® An incident described by Louis de Grammont is typical of the cat’s instinct in this respect; A friend of mine occupied a house in which gas was used for cooking. He had a cat which at the period of which I write was the mother of 30 Treating of Traits there is plenty of proverbial evidence to prove. The cele- brated affair of the cat and the chestnuts is the only historic or fabulous occasion on which the cat has been fooled. Cats can be, most of them are, very cruel, but I think that George J. Romanes’s assumption that they torture mice simply for torture’s sake is wholly unjustifiable. Occasionally this may be true. The Reverend J. G. Wood’s remarkable cat, Pret, had a habit of carrying his trembling and terrified mouse quite alive to the very top of the five-storey house in which she resided and then dropping it down the well in the centre of the circular staircase and watching results with eager eyes from between the banisters. “ But the fact remains that if a cat is going to keep himself in any kind of hunting condi- tion a certain amount of practice is necessary and practice on a live animal is better practice than practice with a ball or a piece of paper with which the kitten takes his first lessons in pounc- ing on prey.^^ Some mother cats, indeed, have been known to keep hunting preserves of slightly wounded animals, released two half-grown kittens. At dinner these cats, very badly bred, had the habit of jumping on the table and helping themselves to such morsels as they could se- cure. One day at luncheon the cats were on the table as usual when the servant brought in the cutlets. At the same instant there was an explosion. Upon in- quiry it was discovered that the cook had been careless and that there had been a slight explosion of gas. No one was injured and everybody took his place again at the table except the cats who, thoroughly frightened, had disappeared. They did not come back, indeed, for several days. When they finally returned their fear was gone and they resumed their former habits. But some weeks later, when the maid again brought cutlets to the table, they fled at once. They had connected the explosion with the appearance of cutlets! Animal Intelligence.” “ Glimpses into Petland,” p. 30. 12 Madame Michelet is not of the opinion that all of the play of the kitten is an apprenticeship for the chase (“Les Chats,” p. 48): “A world of ideas, of images awake first in him, which are not images of prey. That will come to him, but later. The first attraction for him, as for a baby, is the thing that moves. It seems that this life of objects deceives their immobility. Both follow these movements with an eye at first uncertain, but soon they are captivated. The infant wishes to seize the ball suspended to the cradle and the kitten in the evening pursues his shadow. Tigrine showed a very lively taste for these sil- houettes, which assumed in her eyes more reality than the object itself.” 31 The Tiger in the House on occasion for their kittens to play with. This instinct, too, accounts for the seemingly needless slaughter indulged in by some cat-hunters, who kill and bring in eight or ten times as much game as they consume. It may also be true that some cats carry the love of hunting far beyond necessity; there is reason to suppose, indeed, that some cats love hunting as much as Theodore Roosevelt loved it, and why, in the name of all that is just, should they not love it? There are those who protest against the killing of wild life by cats who see no evil in leading tame lambs and calves to the slaughter, who enjoy eating lobsters that have been boiled alive, who wear on their hats aigrettes torn from the breasts of live nesting birds, who send cows on long sickening ocean journeys crowded so closely together that they can scarcely lie down, or pack chickens in crates so tightly that they cannot move. People who go fox-hunting three times a week in the season object to a cat torturing a mouse. Even owners of factories em- ploying child labour and dramatic critics have told me that cats are cruel. Now a cat, like a man, is a carnivorous animal; he is even more so than a man, for a healthy cat must have animal food while a healthy man {vide Bernard Shaw) may subsist entirely on fruits and nuts. He is therefore following a natural instinct in killing birds and mice and he Is keeping himself In training when he subjects his captures to a certain amount of torture. “ But cats resemble tigers? They are tigers in miniature? Well, — and very pretty miniatures they are,” writes Leigh Hunt. “ And what has the tiger himself done, that he has not a right to eat his dinner, as well as Jones ? . . . Deprive Jones of his dinner for a day or two and see what a state he will be In.” Of course, one may bell the cat, which simply means to tie a loud sounding bell around puss’s neck. Then as he runs or springs the bell warns the bird to fly away. Unfortunately for the success of this expedient an But they see no harm in teaching dogs to hunt. The crime of the cat is that he does his own hunting instead of man’s. 32 THE CAT AND THE FROG From a drawing by Steinlen in Des Chats Treating of Traits intelligent cat who is also an obstinate hunter will soon learn to hold the bell under his chin in such a manner that it will not ring. Cats, of course, are determined fighters, but these fights are like the romantic combats of chivalry, or the brabbles of the apaches of modern Paris: they are broils over the female of the species. For the cat is a great lover. The amount of amorous instinct in a healthy full-grown tom can scarcely be overestimated. And any attempt at holding this instinct in check, short of castration, is usually frustrated. As Remy de Gourmont has pointed out, chastity is a quixotic ideal towards which only man in the animal kingdom strives. It is impossible even to keep a silky Angora, whose ancestors have all been housebred, sequestered for any length of time unless he has become a neuter. Any one who tries it will be delighted, after a week or so, to let tom have his own way.^^ But it has become the general custom, except for those who keep kings for breeding purposes, to alter these toms, so that they grow into large, affectionate, and lazy animals, who sleep a good deal, eat a good deal, and are generally picturesque but not very active. These altered toms are generally the favour- ites as pets. Personally I am more interested in cats who retain their natural fervour. The females fight occasionally, especially in the protection of their young, and when they are calling (so their period of heat is poetically and literally described, for it is marked by little amorous coos, almost like the tender sighs of an eighteenth century lover) , with an effrontery born of desire, they bite the males in the throat, usually with satisfactory re- In the Middle Ages it was the custom to attach cats outside the windows of remarried widows in reference to the lubricity of the animal. The cat is op- posed to marriage. She will accept one lover, two lovers, three lovers, as many slaves as possible, but never a tyrant. The vocabulary of the professional cat-breeder is generally poetic. When a female cat is sent to a male the event is called a “ visit ” and the male’s act is called “ signing.” 33 The Tiger in the House suits. The males are formidable fighters both with their own species and with other animals. They do not usually fight dogs unless they are driven into corners but cats have been known to gratuitously attack dogs. Their sharp claws and their supple joints, kept constantly in condition by applying the claws to a tree or a chair or a table or a rug and pulling and stretching, are very effective in warfare, an effectiveness that is increased by powerful jaws and sharp teeth. It is the habit of the cat when fighting to lie on his back, if possible, thus bringing all his best talents into full play and protecting his spine, his most vulnerable spot. When a cat attacks a dog he usually jumps on the dog’s back and is able to cling and at the same time tear at the beast’s head and eyes. Nature, ironic, as usual, allows the eagle this procedure with the cat. Cats frequently emerge unscathed from the most bloody frays, save for a torn ear or a scarred tail, for the skin of the feline is so loose that it can be pulled almost half way around the body without tearing and the lateral movements of the head, while not as extensive as those of the owl, are neverthe- less considerable. When the cat is fighting or in danger, he usually emits the most blood-curdling yowls; why, is a mystery, for these are not calls for assistance as the animal fighting in the wild state is usually alone and in no case can he depend on receiving help from others of his kind. These yowls may very well be battle cries, like the fife and drum corps of the army, to keep up the morale! When a cat is beaten or mistreated, however, he never cries, although he may growl or spit. “ Cats dread death terribly,” writes Andrew Lang. “ I had a nefarious old cat. Gyp, who used to open the cupboard door and eat any biscuits accessible. Gyp had a stroke of paralysis, and believed he was going to die. He was in a fright: Mr. Horace Hutchinson observed him and said that this cat justly entertained the most Calvinistic apprehensions of his future reward. Gyp was nursed back into health, as 34 Treating of Traits was proved when we found him on the roof of an outhouse with a cold chicken in his possession. Nothing could be more human.” The cat has been called a thief. To be sure, he has no re- spect whatever for other people’s property, although he can be taught to keep off a dinner-table while he is being watched. It is easier to teach a cat not to do things than to do them. When he is left alone, however, it is best to lock up the fish and the cream. There are proverbs to this effect and they have the ring of truth. Ariel used to hide spools, keys, pens, pen- cils, and scissors under rugs. She saw no more reason why she should not make such booty her own than the early settlers of America saw any reason why they should not convert aborigi- nal property to their uses. These early settlers looked upon the Indians as inferiors who had no rights, and the cat looks upon man in the same way. But Walt Whitman was wrong when he said of the animals, “ not one is demented with the mania of owning things.” As far as their own property is concerned cats have a very definite sense of property rights, rights, however, which they protect themselves; they never call in the police or the militia. Evidence of this trait is very easy to collect. All cats understand it thoroughly, so thoroughly, indeed, that only a very hungry or a very daring cat will attempt to slink through an open door into the home of another cat. In case he does so he proceeds warily and if he goes very far there is usually a scrimmage. A scene of this kind is frequently very comic. The master of the hearth crouches very low watching every move of the intruder while his hair begins to bristle. The stranger enters obliquely and appears to be unconscious of the presence of the cat who belongs in the house. Usually a few warning spits and passes of the paw from the insulted house- holder terrify the interloper into taking his departure. Oc- casionally, however, cats with charitable instincts bring In stray animals to share their food. I have already mentioned 35 The Tiger in the House Gautier’s Enjolras. I have been told of a tramp cat, fed once at a farm-house, who returned the next day with twenty-nine of his friends 1 But such interest in outsiders is rare in felines; they have been accustomed to rule over their solitary hunting ground in the wild state and the instinct survives. Persian cats share it. Not long ago I brought home a little orange kitten as gentle and sweet as possible, a little model of quaint dignity and grace. The annoyance and anger of my Feathers, the established queen of the household, showed itself immediately with sundry growls and spits. A dog will almost always exhibit signs of jealousy in the presence of a newcomer, but this emotion was downright rage. Rage that any one should dare attempt to usurp a part of her life, share her food, sit on her cushions, slink into her places in the sun. So, with that persistent patience which is as effective as inquisitional methods. Feathers set about converting me to the idea that the thing was impossible. For three days she made the kitten’s life a grievous burden. Did the kitten try to sleep. Feathers bit his tail; was he awake. Feathers would stare at him disconcertingly, then with a bound over his back light on the other side, a terrifying procedure punctuated with a growl and a spit, calculated to send chills down stouter spines. She followed the kitten from room to room, never permitting him peace or quiet or any assurance of a foothold in the apartment. More than this. Feathers altered completely in her relations with me. Ordinarily a gentle cat, during the kitten’s brief sojourn she never permitted me to pick her up or to become familiar with her in any way. She bit, she scratched, she arched her back, and she bristled her hairs. Indeed I never went near her during those three days without being spit at. Hectic home life is something I do not crave; I bowed to the inevitable and bore the orange kitten away. Immediately Feathers became all smiles and caresses, a changed and de- lighted being.^® i®Cats often consider certain chairs as their property and they will allow 36 i MRS. CTTANNTNG POLLOCK’S OSIRIS RESENTS AN INVASION From a photograt>h by Paul Thompson \ V- Treating of Traits This quality in cats, this incessant potentiality of a return to feral conditions, is very puzzling to those who have no feel- ing for or understanding of these animals. It is usually called “ bad temper ” and out of it has grown the legend that “ you cannot trust cats.” As a matter of fact no animal is so sure to react in certain ways to certain phenomena as the cat.^^ He is fond of his home and its surroundings, regards them with pride and delight. How would you, reader, care to have a stronger (of either sex) suddenly foisted on you to share your bed and board? Do you think it unreasonable for a cat to protest against so great an attack on personal liberty? You would not like it; neither does the cat. But the cat being more independent, more assertive, more liberty loving, than that sneaking cowardly animal called man, refuses absolutely to tol- erate encroachments on his individuality. A man quite conceiv- ably would put up with the inconvenience; in fact, often does. This dual personality, with its lights and shades, is in a great measure an explanation of the great power of fascination the cat possesses. There is always the possibility of a rever- sion to the wild state. The sight of a fly or a cockroach, a rat or a mouse, another cat or dog, will make a wild beast out of a tame animal in a quarter of a second. Moreover, if Fate and Nature so rule, it is entirely possible for the cat to live either existence for extended periods of time. And it must always be remembered that a cat’s relations with man, whom he usually regards with a certain amused contempt, are on an entirely different plane from his relations with cats or any other animals. neither dogs nor human beings to occupy them. I have observed a cat, in a household which he ruled, make the round of the drawing-room, driving each occupant out of his chair. His method was a simple one. He weighed twelve pounds and he insinuated himself between the person seated and the back of the chair. A well-treated cat will never scratch a friend, except accidentally in play, or under the nervous strain of a supreme insult, and a friend will never insult a cat. 37 The Tiger in the House The cat’s love for places has been exaggerated by unintelli- gent persons, who are constantly making remarks about an animal that even the most intelligent of us does not begin to understand. This love of home is regarded as a highly moral and generally satisfactory trait in man, especially when it takes the general form of patriotism. But somehow it is entirely different for a cat to love his home; once he does so he is re- garded with horror by tbe populace. The question, like that of the relative merits of cats and dogs, has become an inter- national one and is invariably introduced as a subtopic in any lay conversation about cats. “ But the home,” Madame Michelet points out, “ is often an assemblage of objects which belong to your habits, which are even you, yourself. , . . The cat is essentially conservative in his habits. However it is less to the walls of the house that he clings than to a certain arrangement of objects, of furniture, which bear more than the house itself the trace of personality. So our actual life, our facility of locomotion, the varied circumstances and the inconstant tastes which render us today so fluid, are highly antipathetic to the cat.” A poet in “ The Spectator ” has it: You Jiold your race traditions fast, While others toil, you simply live. And based upon a stable past. Remain a sound conservative. The cat thinks what has been will be. As he waits for his prey he waits for his master. He learns all the ways of escape from danger in his house, finds his favourite chair to sleep in, his familiar nook to lurk in; he does not relinquish these sureties without a certain objection. Indeed in a case where a cat has not formed an attachment for any member of the family it seems absurd to ask him to give up these advantages. The cat becomes attached to his master when that one caresses him, feeds him, and loves him. But when he is largely ig- “ Les Chats,” p. 79. 38 Treating of Traits nored he becomes more attached to the house itself than he does to its inmates. . . . Above all else it must be remem- bered that the cat loves order. In “ A Story Teller’s Holiday,” George Moore tells how, wandering about the ruins of Dublin after the Irish rebellion, he discovered a broken wall to which a mantelpiece still clung. ” A plaintive miaw reached me, and a beautiful black Persian cat appeared by the fireplace. A cat is almost articulate, and Tom asked me to explain the meaning of all this ruin. He has found his old fireplace, I said, and tried to entice him; but, though pleased to see me, he would not be persuaded to leave v/hat remained of the hearth on which he had spent so many pleasant hours, and pondering on his faithfulness and his beauty I continued my search among the ruins, meeting cats everywhere, all seeking their lost homes among the ashes and all unable to comprehend the misfortune that had befallen them. It is true that the cats suffer vaguely, but suffering is not less because it is vague, and it seemed to me that in the early ages of the world, shall we say twenty thousand years before Pompeii and Herculaneum, men groped and suffered blindly amid incomprehensible earthquakes seeking their lost homes, just like the cats in Henry Street. We are part and parcel of the same original substance, I said, and then my thoughts breaking off suddenly, I began to rejoice in Nature’s unexpectedness and fecundity. She is never commonplace in her stories, we have only to go to her to be original, I mut- tered, as I returned through the silent streets. I could have imagined everything else, the wall-paper, the overmantel, and the French clock, but not the cats seeking for their lost hearths, nor is it likely that Turgenieff could, Balzac still less.” But some cats have no aversion to moving. Some cats, in- deed, move of their own accord as did Guy Wetmore Carryl’s capricious Zut, described further along in this volume. An- drew Lang felt that there was a mystic free-masonry, a sort of Rosicrucian brotherhood among cats, so strange are their move" B9 The Tiger^ in the House merits, so inexplicable. It is possible that boredom is some- times a motive for a peregrination. “ Monotony,” writes Lindsay,^® “ as a factor of mental derangement in the lower animals, is closely associated with, and usually inseparable from, solitude and captivity. Other animals dislike monot- onous lives and occupations as much as man does; they suffer as much as he from want of novelty and variety; they have the same desire for amusement; there is equal necessity in the case of many of them for relaxation on the one hand and pleasant excitement on the other. Sameness has a similar depressing influence on them as on man, whether this sameness be of scene, surroundings, air, or food.” Persian cats, doomed usually to pass their lives in city apartments, go, of course, from one to the other without apparent discomfort or unhappiness. Occa- sionally a cat with a grand passion for a man will hunt him out. Pennant records that when the Earl of Southampton, the friend and companion of the Earl of Sussex in his fatal insurrection, was confined to the Tower of London, he was surprised by a visit from his favourite cat, who, it is said, obtained access to the Earl by descending the chimney of his apartment. ‘‘ Animals are such friends; they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms,” wrote the unenlightened George Eliot some- where or other. This is certainly not true of cats. An ordi- nary kitten will ask more questions than any five year old boy. He is the most catechismal of animals, with the possible excep- tion of the monkey. Curiosity, indeed, is a predominant cat trait and a cat’s first duty on entering a new domain is to ex- plore every square inch of it. He not only examines every corner of the house he lives in but investigates the country for miles around. Lane thinks this is the reason he can find his way back home when he has been carried away. Once this initiative ceremony is completed, the cat, in most in- “ Mind in the Lower Animals”; Vol. II, p. 247. -® C. H. Lane: “Rabbits, Cats and Cavies.” 40 Treating of Traits stances, expresses his satisfaction by turning round and round and finally settling down to sleep. There is a superstition to the effect that if you butter or grease a cat’s feet after taking him to a new home he will not run away, and Ernest Thomp- son Seton has introduced a reference to it in his story, “ The Slum Cat.” The basis of the superstition is the fact that a cat will wash himself directly you put grease on his paws and that almost always after washing, a cat will fall asleep and that if you can get a cat to sleep in a place it is pretty safe to say that he will be satisfied to remain there. Curiosity, of course, is an instinct taken over from the wild state, in which exploration was dangerous but necessary and it has been in- geniously explained that a cat circles round and round before lying down because he dimly remembers that he is treading a lair out of the tall grass. Curiosity in a cat, however, goes further than mere protective instinct. No box, no package, no paper bag ever enters my door that Feathers does not examine it, and this is no rare quality but one which is generally dis- tributed. Any new box, any open drawer serves as a new place to nap in. Cats, however, can seldom be induced to eat from the hand, and then only with great reluctance, hesi- tation, and delicacy, so exactly are curiosity and caution bal- anced in the feline mind. They also sniff at objects, but one smell is enough. They do not return for reassurance. There are those who assert that the sense of smell in a cat is not highly developed.*^ I think myself that it is largely super- 21 “ Animal Heroes.” 22 But cats are frequently intoxicated by the odour of valerian and they adore the fragrance of flowers. Sometimes even they express delight over the artifices of Houbigant, Coty, and Bichara. In this they differ from dogs, as W. H. Hud- son has pointed out (“The Great Dog-Superstition” in “The Book of a Natu- ralist”): “The pampered lap-dog in the midst of his comforts has one great thorn in his side, one perpetual misery to endure, in the perfumes which please his mistress. He too is a little Venetian in his way, but his way is not hers. The camphor-wood chest in her room is an offence to him, the case of glass- stoppered scents an abomination. All fragrant flowers are as asafoetida to his exquisite nostrils and his face is turned aside in very ill-concealed disgust from 41 The Tiger in the House seded by a highly charged electrical nervous system and by the senses of sight, hearing, and touch.^^ Madame Michelet decided that the sense of smell In a kitten was more highly de- veloped than In the grown cat. She was able to awaken kittens by putting milk under their noses. The same experiment with older cats did not prove successful. It has long been a favourite contention of mine that nothing Is more ephemeral than science; no books are sooner ready for the garret or the waste-basket than serious books. When a serious book has an artistic value, such as a book by Nietzsche, for instance, the case is altered, but the ordinary professor’s or scientist’s profound discoveries are absolutely worthless In a few years. They serve. Indeed, only to Indicate the quaint fluctuations, the ebb and flow, of human thought. The first to admit this Is the scientist himself, who tells you that you must work only along the lines of the “ latest discoveries.” Now these latest discoveries are usually ideas that have been filched from some philosopher, black magician, or monk who lived In the neolithic age. The mediaeval grlmoires are probably unworked gold mines of “ new thought.” Freud Is foreshadowed in eighteenth century philosophy; even Chris- tian Science Is not new. You can find the germ of almost every science or philosophy In Aristotle, Paracelsus, or Mes- mer. Alchemists were familiar with laws which scientists have recently rediscovered. Arlsteus, the philosophical alchemist. Is said to have delivered to his disciples what he termed the golden key of the Great Work, which had the power of render- ing all metals diaphanous. Yet I have never heard Arlsteus the sandal-wood box or fan. It is warm and soft on her lap, but an incurable grief to be so near her pocket-handkerchief, saturated with nasty white-rose or lavender. If she must perfume herself with flowery essences he would prefer an essential oil expressed from the gorgeous Rafflesia Arnoldi of the Bornean forest, or even from the humble carrion-flower which blossoms nearer home.” 2 ® Cats have an especial fondness for certain textures. They like paper or something rough that tears with a noise. “ Les Chats,” p. 202. 42 CHAMPION KING WINTER Treating of Traits described as the Inventor of the X Ray. There are few today who would attempt to duplicate the engineering feats of the Egyptians. Men who devote their lives to science usually have no sense of humour. They are often asses. A. G. Mayer, according to John Burroughs, has proved conclusively that the promethea moth has no colour sense. The male of this moth has blackish wings and the female reddish brown. Mayer caused the two sexes to change colours ; he glued the wings of the male to the female and vice versa and found that they mated just the same ! Well, Professor Mayer could have arrived at the same brilliant conclusion If he had painted a yellow tom cat black and a cream queen green. There Is a certain little reason by which a female can distinguish a male but no scien- tist would ever think of that. Serious scientific works, there- fore, may be regarded as generally negligible. In the first place because It Is Impossible to approximate truth by rushing blindly In one direction, closing out all distracting sights and sounds, no matter how strongly they bear on the subject. In the second place because there Is no such thing as truth. Any mystic philosopher can feel more than a scientist can ever learn. There have been sects of somatlsts who do not believe that the cat Is endowed with a soul. But this discussion has gone out of fashion because man Is no longer very much Interested In the soul. It Is now the part of smart scientific conversation to talk more about tbe brain. During the nineteenth century many scientists, psychologists, natural historians, zoologists, and the like, have devoted their entire time to the consideration of the problem as to whether or no animals think. Darwin, of course, for the sake of his evolutionary theory, warmly espoused the cause of thinking brutes, and Romanes and others have followed him In this direction. Other men of more or less Importance have disagreed and talk about “ Instinct,” etc. A whole literature of neglected and contradictory books has grown up on the subject and I Imagine anything written before 43 The Tiger in the House the hour of midnight of the morning on which you are reading these pages would be considered entirely worthless in any self- respecting professor’s class-room. “ II n’y a pas un de ces livres qui n* en demente un autre,” remarks the supremely sagacious Sylvestre Bonnard, “ en sorte que, quand on les connatt tous, on ne sait que penser” Elsewhere I have given a short bibliography of the subject and you may take a melan- choly pleasure in perusing some of the arguments pro and con. The worthy John Burroughs^® informs us that when he hears an animal laugh he will believe in his reason. Man, he says, can be reached through his mind, an animal only through his senses. The whole secret of the training of wild ani- mals is to form new habits in them. Any army captain will inform Mr. Burroughs that this is the whole secret of training men. There are others who will contradict Mr. Burroughs. “ There is really nothing so primitive, even so animal as reason,” writes Havelock Ellis.^'^ “ It may plausibly, how- ever unsoundly, be maintained that it is by his emotions, not by his reason, that man differs most from the beasts. ‘ My cat,’ says Unamuno, who takes this view in his new book, ‘ Del senti- miento tragico de la vida,’ ‘ never laughs or cries; he is always reasoning.’ ” Mr. Burroughs also decided that animals cannot think be- cause they have no language and that you cannot think with- out language. But have they not? The vocal language of cats is extraordinarily complete as I shall show in a later chapter. This is complemented by a gesture language which can, of course, only be completely understood by other cats. There is, for instance, the language of the tail. The cat with a tail raised high like a banner is a satisfied, contented, healthy, and proud cat. A tail carried horizontally indicates stealth or terror. A tail curled under the body is a signal of fear. 25 “ The Animal Mind”; “The Atlantic Monthly”; November 1910; Vol. 106, p. 622. 26 “ Impressions and Comments,” p. 233. 44 Treating of Traits The cat waves his tail from side to side when he is dissatisfied, annoyed, or angry; in rage he extends it with the fur distended. He lashes it as a preparation for battle and he twitches it when he is amused or pleased. And cats sometimes use their tails, as women use boas or muffs, as a means of keeping warm. The variety of ways in which a cat uses his paw is even greater. Lindsay gives us a catalogue : “ The cat not in- frequently uses its paw to touch or tap its master’s shoulder when it desires to attract his notice (‘Animal World’). A pet cat sitting at a carriage window, when anything passing takes her fancy, ‘ puts her paw on my chest,’ says her mistress, ‘ and makes a pretty little noise, as though asking me if I had seen it also.’ Another laid her paw on the lips of a lady who had a distressing cough every time she coughed, in evidence possibly of pity, possibly in order to the physical suppression of the cough by the closure of the aperture by which alone it could find vent (Wood).^* A third cat touched with her paw the lips of those who whistled a tune, ‘ as if pleased with the sound’ (Wood). Cats ‘cuff’ each other or their young — that is, they give blows, and so punish or administer rebuke to some unruly or troublesome kitten — with their paws. They also warm their paws before a fire and use them for shading the face either from the fire or the sun (‘Animal World ’) . We are told of a cat frequently patting the nose of a companion horse. It is well known that our domestic cats are in the habit of washing their faces by means of their paws, by which means also they brush and clean their foreheads and eyes. The cat uses its forepaw too in touching or testing objects — to ascertain, for instance, their hardness or other qualities (‘ Percy Anecdotes ’), or to measure the quantity or discover the level of the fluids certain vessels may contain. Thus a cat, ‘ when wishing to drink water from a jug,’ used its paw to ‘ ascertain if it was full enough ’ ( ‘ Animal World ’ ) . “ Mind in the Lower Animals,” Vol. i, p. 416. 28 “ Man and Beast: Here and Hereafter,” p. 370. 45 The Tiger in the House It takes milk from a narrow milk-pot by inserting its paw, curl- ing it for removal when saturated with milk, and then licking it (Wood). In a Birmingham burglary case, heard at the Warwick Assizes in March 1 877, ‘ the prosecutor deposed that he was awakened by his cat patting his face, puss having dis- covered the burglars rummaging his bedroom.’ (‘ Inverness Courier,’ March 29, 1877).” It might be added that the cat frequently scratches to attract attention. It would also be possible to enumerate countless ways in which the cat uses his head, his eyes, and even his fur for purposes of conversation. Professor Edward L. Thorndike undertook to make some exceedingly Ingenious and involved experiments with cats and other animals and he has written a book about them. His experiments with cats were made with “ puzzle boxes.” Cats which had been starved for a considerable period were shut in boxes over which food was placed. Now there were numerous more or less complicated ways of opening these boxes from within. The problem was to see how long it would take a cat to open his box and reach the food. From the results the professor drew his absolutely valueless conclusions. If the cats did not find the doctor’s boxes adapertile this is no start- ing point on which to found a system of animal psychology. The experiment seems to me entirely analogous to that of put- ting a hungry and terrified Cherokee Indian into a Rolls-Royce and asking him, in a strange language, to run it if he wants his dinner. One of the favourite arguments of the instinct-pushers educes the fact that cats, accustomed to bury dung in the wild state, will go through the motions of digging up earth on a marble or wooden floor, an instinctive memory of an act no longer necessary, and therefore unworthy of a being who thinks. Now this sort of thing can be knocked over by an idiot baby with one blue eye and one black one. Why, for instance, do you still shake hands? All reason for doing so, 29 “ Animal Intelligence: Experimental Studies.” 46 Treating of Traits the assurance that your friend and you carry no weapons, has passed away, and yet the stupid instinct survives. With the cat there is cause for the survival. Nature is well aware that he may be forced through circumstances or desire to again lead the wild life; when this happens he is prepared to conceal all evidence of his whereabouts from his enemies. Other scientists in claiming inferiority for the beasts, bring forward as an argument that they always do the same things, make the same movements, that they neither invent nor pro- gress. The bee constructs the same receptacle for honey, the spider weaves the same web, and the barn swallow builds the same nest. All individual liberty and spontaneity seem to have been refused them. They appear to obey mechanical rhythms which are transmitted through the centuries. But who can say that these rhythms are not superior moral laws and if the beasts do not progress it is because they sprang perfect into the world and do not need to, while man gropes, searches, changes, destroys, and reconstructs without being able to find anything stable in intelligence, any end to his desire, any harmony to his form? It is well to remember, O Chris- tian reader, that it was man that God ejected from Paradise and not the animals. Besides it is preposterous and stupid to contend that animals have not freedom of thought, that they do not think, that they cannot solve individual problems. Personally I am convinced that all these scientists, psycho- logists, etc., mean more or less the same thing; they are strug- gling more or less with the same idea, only they express it in dissimilar terms. One means instinct when he says intelligence and the other means intelligence when he says instinct. A very important system of philosophy, indeed, is based on the theory that animal instinct is of greater utility than intelli- gence and asks man to trust to it as much as possible. Women, I believe, are popularly supposed to be entirely guided by such principles. To my mind there is no more doubt that animals think, 47 The Tiger in the House after their fashion, than there is that men as a rule do not think at all. Scientists make the mistake of observing too closely and of writing down what they think they have seen. Such matters should be discussed mystically with a certain aloofness. “ I observe authors who speak concerning cats with a familiarity most distasteful,” writes Andrew Lang. Animals do not think after the manner of man; their think- ing processes are quite different. There is a certain amount of truth in the theory that they think in abstractions, cold, heat, etc., but that they do not think of them afterwards as ab- stractions as human beings do. But I can see no particular advantage in remembering and discussing such matters. Robert Louis Stevenson once observed that animals never used verbs: ‘‘That is the only way in which their thinking differs from that of men.” However one point and one point only concerns us greatly here, that is the relative intelligence of the cat, who by many is considered inferior mentally to the dog and the horse. The intelligence of cats, has, I think, been greatly underesti- mated.^*^ It can hardly be overestimated. “ We cannot with- out becoming cats, perfectly understand the cat mind,” writes St. George Mivart.^^ The cat as an individual thinks in en- tirely different directions from his human companions and therefore it is difficult to secure the right kind of evidence, especially as most of the professors judge an animal’s intelli- gence by his susceptibility to discipline, in other words by his comparative ability to become the willing slave of man. In this kind of contest the dog and the horse naturally carry off all the honours. Because the cat refuses to bend under the yoke and accept this discipline I do not think he can be proved an unintelligent animal; quite the contrary. The cat is far too intelligent to be inveigled into any drudgery or mummery. I hope I have impressed the reader with the fact that all cats are not alike. I have seen cats as stupid as any tax-payer. 31 “ The Cat,” p. 366. 48 Treating of Traits V a, le secret de reussir, C^est d’etre adroit, non d’etre utile, is the advice of the lazy old cat in a fable of Florian. He compels his human friend to accept him on his own terms. A dog’s acts are much more imitative and therefore more appli- cable to human reasoning. But T. Wesley Mills, who stu- died both animals, writes, “ The cat is far in advance of the dog in power to execute highly complex co-ordinated move- ments.” And again, “ In will-power and ability to maintain an independent existence the cat is superior to the dog.” Some acts of cats are entirely consonant with human intelli- gence. Cats have the power to draw inferences from observa- tion. They easily learn to open doors; many of them learn to ring bells for admittance. Frequently they answer bells, knowing that they mean dinner or somebody’s arrival. Feathers not only goes to the door when the bell rings but also when she hears the elevator ascending. She even runs to the telephone when it rings. These and other such ac- complishments as retrieving the cat is not easily taught. If, however, she finds it convenient to acquire them she will do so. Artault de Vevey had a cat who was fond of visiting friends on the fifth floor (de Vevey lived on the first). She would cry for admittance; if no one answered her she would scratch at the doorpanel; as a last resort she would pull the bell rope. A writer in “ The Spectator ” observed “ a large male cat who in turn was watching sparrows feeding in a court-yard. When disturbed by the opening of a back-door the sparrows always flew to a beech-hedge near. The cat noted this, walked behind the hedge and waiting opposite the spot to which the birds generally flew, jumped into the middle of them when “ The Cat and the Dog Compared”; McGill University; Papers from the Department of Physiology, 1896. This was the same Isoline who took baths. ^^“The Cat as Wild Animal”; “The Spectator,” September 12, 1896. 49 The Tiger in the House they were next disturbed. This was the result of deliberation and calculation. Another cat which was watching sparrows stepped behind a row of paving stones recently taken up as soon as it saw the writer approaching and secured one driven over its head. It saw the probability that the birds would be driven in its direction and it acted on its conclusions in a second.” Wynter relates an incident of a tom cat of Callen- dar who was seen bearing away a piece of beef in his jaws. The servant who followed him watched him lay the morsel down near a rat hole. Then he hid himself. Presently the rat came out and was dragging away the meat when the cat pounced upon him. Emile Achard’s Matapon,®® having killed all the mice in the house, took to killing field mice. This was difficult and unpleasant on rainy days but it was not long before he conceived the idea, and carried it out, of restocking the house. He brought field mice in alive and let them loose, thus establishing a new hunting preserve. Lindsay quotes the following example from the “ Animal World”: A certain cat and dog were confederates in a larder theft. The cat by its mewing called the dog when cir- cumstances were favourable to their depredations. On one occasion when the dog was followed the cat was discovered mounted on a shelf, keeping the cover of a dish partly open with one foot and throwing down good things to the dog with the other! The Reverend J. G. Wood describes an old dis- abled tom cat who made a bargain with a younger and more active animal to catch mice for him, the apprentice being paid with bones and cats’ meat. The compact was honourably car- ried out on both sides. Once, during an illness, Mrs. Sid- dons fed her cat the richest cream, the finest parts of the 85 “ Fruit Between the Leaves.” 36 “ 'Fhg History of My Friends, or Home Life with Animals.” “ Mind in the Lower Animals”; Vol. I, p. 391. 38 “ Fruit Between the Leaves.” 50 Treating of Traits chicken. Thereafter he occasionally shammed lameness in order to get these delicacies. Eugene Muller, in “ Animaux Celebres,” furnishes us with another admirable example: A professor, who wished to dem- onstrate to his pupils the uses of a pneumatic machine, intro- duced a cat under the glass bell. The animal, of course, made frantic efforts to escape, but the glass held him a prisoner. “ I am going to show you,” said the professor, “ how, as I pump, the air under the globe will become rarefied; the cat will breathe with more and more difficulty, and indeed would be asphyxiated if I pumped long enough, but we will conclude the experiment before that, and you will see that the moment the air re-enters the cat will immediately regain all his forces.” It all happened exactly as he had described it. The professor pumped, and the cat fell panting, thinking, doubtless, that his last hour was upon him. But, the instant the professor ceased to pump, puss was himself once more. He was released and ran away, making a vow, no doubt, that he would not be caught again. In a few days, however, before another class, the good doctor had occasion to repeat the experiment. The cat was captured and placed under the bell and the professor began his explanation, “ I am going to show you how, as I pump . . .” But the students observed a quite different phenomenon from that which was intended, for, as the professor pumped, the cat placed one of his paws over the opening through which the air was to be drawn away. And as often as the professor at- tempted to repeat the experiment he repeated his counter- gesture ! During the Crimean War, Col. Stuart Wortley’s cat visited the doctor’s hut to get a bayonet wound in the foot examined and bandaged. The colonel found her wounded after the battle of Malakoff and took her daily for a time to the regi- mental surgeon for treatment. But when he himself became ill she continued the visits of her own accord and sat quietly 51 The Tiger in the House down for her usual treatment.^® There are many recorded instances of cats bringing their kittens to their mistresses for treatment and cats have been known to give one another obstetrical assistance. In Madame Michelet’s book, Mr. Frederick Harrison relates a touching incident of an old lady cat. She felt she was dying before her kittens were weaned. She could hardly walk but she disappeared one morning carry- ing a kitten and came back without it. Next day, quite ex- hausted, she took away her other two kittens and then died. She had carried each kitten to a separate cat, each of which was nourishing a family and accepted the new fosterling. A cat will sit washing his face within two inches of a dog in the most frantic state of barking rage, if the dog be chained. He knows the dog cannot get away. Cats also have a habit of tantalizing dogs by lying on exposed window-sills, with paws temptingly depending just out of reach. You may also have observed for yourself how impertinent cats can be to dogs who are muzzled. Any one who has lived on terms of comparative equality with a cat knows that he will show his intelligence fifty times a day. To be sure this intelligence is usually of the variety called selfish. Thereby the cat shows how much finer his in- telligence is than that of the rest of the animal world. He is quite unwilling to perform feats of intelligence for which he can see no legitimate reason, or through which he is unable to derive any personal satisfaction. If he wantsi submaxillary massage he knows that he is pretty sure of getting it by leaping into some one’s lap. If he does not want it he knows that the best way of avoiding it is to avoid the person who insists on lavishing it. A cat, it has been said, will only come when called if dinner is in the offing. This is very much my pro- cedure. I refuse to make casual calls but often accept invita- tions to dinner. In spite of his independence and his inadaptability to human 39 “ Mind in the Lower Animals,” Vol. II, p. 374. 52 Treating of Traits desires the cat can be made useful, which is perhaps fortunate as there are certain people who consider an animal worthless who cannot be made in some way to serve that superior being man. In England cats work for the government in offices, barracks, docks and workshops. There are at least two thou- sand felines so employed and they are all on the pay-roll, re- ceiving a shilling a week. This is for food, for contrary to popular belief hungry cats do not make the best mousers. Benvenuto Cellini was right when he said, “ Cats of good breed hunt better fat than lean.” They serve to effectually rid these places of rodents. The National Printing Office of France employs a large staff of cats to guard the paper from rats and mice. Vienna has official cats and the Mid- land Railway in England has eight cats among its employees. Cats are kept in all the large United States Post Offices and in the military magazines. A writer in ” The Spectator ” tells of the regret felt in a large London factory when the ” best foundry cat ” died. The sand moulds for making casts in the foundry are mixed with flour. Mice eat the flour and spoil the moulds. Cats are kept to kill the mice but they have to be taught not to walk on the moulds or to scratch them up. The cat who died was absolutely perfect in this respect. The number of mice a good cat-hunter can destroy goes quite be- yond the probable. Lane writes of Avalking with his cat Magpie into his stables when a mob of mice dashed across the room. Magpie leaped into the group and caught four simul- taneously, two in her jaws and one under each forepaw! Such prowess is not rare in a good mouser. Every retail and whole- sale butcher-shop and green-grocer, every stationer, every res- taurateur, must therefore have his cat or cats. In some gro- ceries a cellar cat and a shop cat are kept. I have already mentioned the cold-storage cats. The cat also destroys a great number of insects, flies, cockroaches, grasshoppers and mosqui- “ The Cat About Town”; “The Spectator”; Vol. 8o, p. 197. *^'C. H. Lane: “Rabbits, Cats and Cavies,” p. 231. 53 The Tiger in the House toes. During the late war the English government conscripted 500,000 cats, a few of which were sent to sea to test submarines and the remainder to the trenches. Their warnings of the approach of a cloud of gas, long before any soldier could smell it, saved many lives. They also did a good deal towards ridding the trenches of rats and mice, and probably served as pets for many a doughboy. The cat also is the one animal, save the mongoose, that is not afraid of snakes and can battle successfully even with the venomous varieties. J. R. Rengger, who has written of the mammals of Paraguay,"*^ declares that he has more than once seen cats pursue and kill snakes, even rattle-snakes, on the sandy, grassless plains of that land. “ With their rare skill,” he Avrites, “ they would strike the snake Avith their paw, and at the same time avoid its spring. If the snake coiled Itself they would not attack it directly, but would go round it till it became tired of turning its head after them; then they would strike another blow, and instantly turn aside. If the snake started to run away, they would seize its tail, as if to play with it. By virtue of these continued attacks they usually des- troyed their enemy in less than an hour, but would never eat its flesh.” The subject has served in fiction but the man who wrote the following description was certainly writing some- thing he had once observed: “Now, as the Dryad, curled to a capital S, quivering and hissing, advanced for the last time to the charge, it was bound to strike across the edge of the sofa on which I lay, at the erect head of Stoffles, which van- ished with a juggling celerity that would have dislocated the collar-bone of any other animal in creation. From such an exertion the snake recovered itself Avith an obvious effort, quick beyond question, but not nearly quick enough. Before I could well see that it had missed its aim, Stoffles had launched out like a spring released, and, burying eight or ten claws in *2 “ Saugethiere von Paraguay.” G. H. Powell: “The Blue Dryad” in “Animal Episodes.” 54 Treating of Traits the back of its enemy’s head, pinned it down against the stiff cushion of the sofa. The tail of the agonized reptile flung wildly in the air and flapped on the arched back of the imper- turbable tigress. The whiskered muzzle of Stoffles dropped quietly, and her teeth met once, twice, thrice, like the needle and hook of a sewing-machine, in the neck of the Blue Dryad; and when, after much deliberation, she let it go, the beast fell into a limp tangle on the floor.” Moncrif speaks of this special talent of cats. According to the Frenchman a certain promontory in the Island of Cyprus is known as the Cape of Cats. Formerly there was a monastery there and the promon- tory was infested with black and white snakes. The cats belonging to the monks spent happy days hunting serpents, but, when the bell rang, always returned to the monastery for their meals. Lieutenant Colonel A. Buchanan, M, is convinced that the Indian plagues are caused by rats and that they could be prevented if the natives could be prevailed upon to keep cats.‘‘® He produces statistics which seem to prove that the villages in which there were cats in each household were free from epi- demics of cholera. In the sixteenth century a German, one Christopher of Hapsburg, projected a plan for having poison gases in jars attached to the backs of cats disseminated in battle. Chris- Moncrif: “ Les Chats,” p. 59. “ Cats as Plague Preventers”: “British Medical Journal”; London; Octo- ber 24, 1908; Vol. 3, p. 1231. Hindus, vyho believe in the doctrine of metempsychosis, have a valid ob- jection to taking life. In Bombay there is a hospital for sick animals. Professor Monier Williams, who visited it, says, “The animals are well fed and well tended, though it certainly seemed to me that a great majority would be more mercifully provided for by the application of a loaded pistol to their heads. . . . It is even said that men are paid to sleep on dirty woollen beds in different parts of the building that the loathsome vermin with which they are infested may be supplied with their nightly need of human blood. These men are drugged so that they will not involuntarily kill the vermin In their sleep.” E. P. Evans: “Evolutionary Ethics and Animal Psychology,” p. 140. 55 The Tiger in the House topher was an officer of artillery and he presented his drawing, which was not accepted for practical use, to the Council of One and Twenty at Strassbourg. It still exists in the great library there. There is another story, certainly apocryphal, that the Persians, bearing pussies in their arms, once marched upon the Egyptians who, refusing to harm the sacred animal, were put to rout. I have elsewhere related how occasionally cats bring rabbits home to their masters. They have served even stranger pur- poses. A physician told me of a lady whose milk came slowly after child-birth. He suggested the substitution of an animal at the nipple. It happened that the family cat had kittened the same night and the tiny mammal was substituted with complete success. Daughter and kitten therefore grew up as soeurs de lait. This cat acquired the pretty habit of lighting the Christmas tree, by pressing a button with her forepaw. She lived to the remarkable age of 28 but in her last year de- veloped a cancer. The physician dressed and cared for the disease until Christmas eve when she lighted her last Christmas tree and immediately afterwards was chloroformed. But it seems to me that the more useless a cat is the more he has earned his right to companionship. There are enough people “ trying to make themselves useful ” in this world with- out the added competition of cats. And those who care most for the cat certainly never think of him as a mouser or a snaker. A writer in “ The Nation ” has it: “ To respect the cat is the beginning of the aesthetic sense. At a stage of culture when utility governs all of its judgments, mankind prefers the dog” He continues: “To the cultivated mind the cat has the charm of complete- ness, the satisfaction which makes a sonnet more than an epic. . . . The ancients figured eternity as a serpent biting its own tail. There will yet arise a philoso- pher who will conceive the Absolute as a gigantic and self-satisfied cat, purring as it clasps in comfortable round its own perfection, and uttering as it purrs, that line of Edmund Spenser’s about the Cosmos — ‘It loved itself because itself was fair.’ A cat blinking at midnight among your papers and your books de- clares with more eloquence than any skull the vanity of knowledge and the use- 56 Treating of Traits and a distinguished scholar at Oxford avowed to believe that men admired cats or dogs according as to whether they were Platonists or Aristotelians: “The visionary chooses a cat; the man of concrete a dog. Hamlet must have kept a cat. Platonists, or cat-lovers, include sailors, painters, poets, and pick-pockets. Aristotelians, or dog-lovers, include soldiers, foot-ball players, and burglars.” Champfleury’s dictum is that “ refined and delicate natures understand the cat. Women, poets, and artists hold it in great esteem, for they recognize the exquisite delicacy of its nervous system; indeed, only coarse natures fall to discern the natural distinc- tion of the animal.” Madame Delphine Gay writes of the catlike man: “ The catlike man is one upon whom no tricks can be played with success. He possesses none of the qualities of the doglike man but he enjoys all the advantages of those qualities. He is selfish, ungrateful, miserly, avaricious, dap- per, persuasive, gifted with intelligence, cleverness, and the power of fascination. He possesses refined experience; he guesses what he does not know; he understands what is hidden from him. To this race belong great diplomats, successful gallants, in fact all the men whom women call perfidious.” The cat is admired for his independence, his courage, his prudence, his patience, his naturalness, and his wit. He is, as Madame Michelet reminds us, essentially a noble animal. There is no mixture in his blood. This is so true that you can tell any member of the family at a glance. Tiger, lion, and house-cat differ more in size than in appearance. The origi- nality of the cat is to offer in himself an exquisite and harmless miniature of his wild brothers. He lives like a great lord and there is nothing vulgar about him. The delicacy of the animal is one of his fascinations. All of us have wondered how a cat can leap upon a table littered with lessness of striving. . . . The cat enjoys the march of the seasons, spins through space with the stars, and shares in her quietism the inevitable life of the uni- verse. In all our hurrying can we do more? ” 57 The Tiger in the House breakable objects, alighting firmly without disturbing any- thing. Curiously enough, as Philip Gilbert Hamerton has pointed out, this is not a proof of lady-like civilization in the cat but again evidence that she has retained her savage hab- its. “ When she so carefully avoids the glasses on the dinner- table she is not thinking of her behaviour as a dependent of civilized man, but acting in obedience to hereditary habits of caution in the stealthy chase, which is the natural accomplish- ment of her species. She will stir no branch of a shrub lest her fated bird escape her, and her feet are noiseless that the mouse may not know of her coming.” Mr. Hamerton has captured and crystallized another interesting trait of the cat when he says, “ The cat always uses precisely the necessary force, other animals roughly employ what strength they happen to possess without reference to the small occasion. One day I watched a young cat playing with a daffodil. She sat on her hind-legs and patted the flower with her paws, first with one paw and then with the other, making the light yellow ball sway from side to side, yet not injuring a petal or a stamen. She took a delight, evidently, in the very delicacy of the exercise, whereas a dog or a horse has no enjoyment in his own movements, but acts strongly when he is strong, with- out calculating whether the force used may be in great part superfluous. This proportioning of the force to the need is well known to be one of the evidences of refined culture, both in manners and in the fine arts. If animals could speak as fabulists have feigned, the dog would be a blunt, outspoken, honest fellow, but the cat would have the rare talent of never saying a word too much. A hint of the same character is con- veyed by the sheathing of the claws, and also by the contracta- bility of the pupil of the eye. The hostile claws are invisible, and are not shown when they are not wanted, yet are ever sharp and ready. The eye has a narrow pupil in broad day- light, receiving no more sunshine than is agreeable, but it will “ Chapters on Animals.’ 58 '• GATHER KITTENS WHILE YOU MAY Treating of Traits gradually expand as twilight falls, and clear vision needs a larger and larger surface. Some of these cat-qualities are very desirable in criticism. The claws of a critic ought to be very sharp, but not perpetually prominent, and the eye ought to see far into rather obscure objects without being dazzled by plain daylight.” There are those who find themselves uninterested in the appearance and doings of full-grown felines who are unable to resist the fascinations of kittens. The kitten, indeed, is an irresistible bundle of animate fur, all nerves and tenderness, all play-actor, dashing madly against nothing, prancing down the garden walk with the affected arched back of a Rutterkin about to commit foul deeds, chasing his tail, making a vain attempt to capture and swallow his own shadow, peering curiously at esoteric insects, or entranced and delighted with a viper, like Cowper’s kitten. Who, never havittg seen in field or house The like, sat still and silent as a mouse; Only projecting , with attention due. Her whisker d face, she asked him, ' Who are you? ^ Where there are peacocks it is a pretty sight to see the kittens, amazed by the proud and spreading tail, dash and spring upon it and go whirling round while the furious bird attempts to throw the demons off. But it is enough to watch them lap the cream from a bowl on the breakfast table with the inno- cence of cherubs, or lie contented purring balls of warm fur in your lap or on your shoulder. Kittens, like Japanese and Negro babies, may lose some of their charm when they grow older, but as kittens they are paramount. And therefore, it is wise to follow the advice of Oliver Herford: Gather kittens while you may. Time brings only sorrow; A nd the kittens of today Will be old cats tomorrow. 59 Chapter Three: Ailurophobes and Other Cat-Haters Some 7nen there are love not a gaping pig; Some that are mad if they behold a cat. Shylock. One Is permitted to assume an attitude of placid indifference In the matter of elephants, cockatoos, H. G. Wells, Sweden, roast beef, Puccini, and even Mormonism, but In the matter of cats it seems necessary to take a firm stand. The cat him- self insists upon this; he Invariably inspires strong feelings. He is, indeed, the only animal who does. From his admirers he evokes an intense adoration which usually finds an outlet in exaggerated expression. It is practically impossible for a cat- lover to meet a stray feline on the street without stopping to pass the time of day with him. I can say for myself that it takes me considerably longer to traverse a street in which cats occur than it does a catless thoroughfare. But so magnetic an animal is bound to repel when he does not fascinate, and those who hate the cat hate him with a malignity which, I think, only snakes in the animal kingdom provoke to an equal degree. Puss has, indeed, been dubbed the “ furred serpent.” The association of the cat with witches and various supersti- tions is responsible for a good deal of this antipathy; there is also the aversion of those who love dogs and birds with un- reasonable exclusions; finally it has pleased many small boys to make scientific investigation Into the proverbial saying that a cat has nine lives. So the cat through the ages has been more cruelly and persistently mistreated than any other beast. This is, I suppose, natural, when we remember that In one 6o Ailurophobes and Other Cat-Haters epoch he was regarded as a god and in another as an adjunct of sorcery; accordingly he has suffered martyrdom along with other gnostics. There is even a disease for cat-haters, known as ailuropho- bia, in spite of the fact that ailuros (the waving ones) which the Greeks took aboard their ships to kill mice, are now thought to have been snowy-breasted martens.^ Ailurophobia is a stronger feeling than hate; it is a most abject kind of fear. Strong men and women are seized with nausea, even faint, in the presence of a tiny kitten, sometimes even an unseen kitten. The simplest form of this complaint is asthmatic ailurophobia; in other words people who suffer from asthma or hay-fever find the disease aggravated by the presence of cats. The other form is more serious. I have a friend, otherwise seemingly sane, who exhibits symptoms of the most violent terror at the sight of a kitten four weeks old; an older cat will sometimes throw her into convulsions. This malady is not rare, nor is it limited to women. Scott writes of a gallant Highland chief- tain who had been “ seen to change into all the colours of his plaid ” ^ when confronted with a cat. Probably the most celebrated ailurophobe in history was Napoleon. According to a popular legend, not long after the battle of Wagram and the second occupation of Vienna by the French, an aide-de-camp of the Corsican, who at the time occupied, together with his suite, the Palace of Schonbrunn, was proceeding to bed at an unusually late hour when, on passing the door of Napoleon’s bedroom, he was surprised to hear a most singular noise and repeated calls for assistance from the Emperor. Opening the door hastily, and rushing into the room, he saw the greatest soldier of the age, half undressed, his countenance agitated, beaded drops of perspiration standing on his brow, making frequent and convulsive lunges with his sword through the tapestry that lined the walls, behind which a cat had secreted 1 According to the researches of Professor Rolleston of Oxford. ^ “ Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft,” p. 30. 61 The Tiger in the House herself. Madame Junot was aware of this weakness and Is reported to have gained an important political advantage over the Little Corporal merely by mentioning a cat at the right moment. In one of his Spectator papers Addison tells how a lover won his lady from an ailurophobic rival with the assist- ance of a “ purring piece of tortoise-shell.” And Peggy Bacon has woven a diverting tale of an ailurophobic King and a felin- ophilistlc Queen whose troubles were finally solved by the Court Physician, who brought them a thin, wliy, long-legged creature, with no tail at all, large ears like sails, a face like a lean isosceles triangle with the nose as a very sharp apex, eyes small and yellow like flat bone buttons, brown fur, short and coarse, and large floppy feet. It had a voice like a steam siren and Its name was Rosamund. ” The King and Queen were both devoted to it; she because it was a cat, he because it seemed anything but a cat.” ^ Dr. S. Weir Mitchell spent some time investigating the matter of ailurophobla, sending letters of query all over the world. He reported * that from one point of view the result was entirely unsatisfactory. The mass of evidence he accumu- lated gave him no clue to the cause of the ailment. It has sometimes been included with prenatal phenomena but without, it would seem, sufficient justification. Dr. Mitchell educes a theory that It Is the odour which these allurophobes detect when they ferret out hidden pussies but cats, house-cats at any rate, are practically devoid of odour to the ordinary nose. However it must be remembered that there are people who can sort handkerchiefs fresh from the laundry by smelling them. Nevertheless Dr. J. G. Wood’s theory that allurophobes sense hidden cats by their electricity seems more plausible. Whatever the cause there are many recorded instances of persons suffering from ailurophobla exhibiting symptoms of distress in rooms which apparently contained no cats; later cats ® “ The Queen’s Cat” in “The True Philosopher.” ^ “ Cat Fear”; “The Ladies’ Home Journal”; March 1906. 62 Ailurophobes and Other Cat-Haters would be discovered, hidden behind curtains or in closets. Dr. Mitchell furnishes us with an interesting example: “ In my own family an uncle was the subject. My father, the late Professor John K. Mitchell, having placed a small cat in a closet with a saucer of cream, asked Mr. H. to come and look at some old books in which he would be interested. He sat down, but in a few minutes grew pale, shivered and said, ‘ There is a cat in the room.’ Doctor Mitchell said, ‘ Look about you. There is no cat in the room. Do you hear one outside?’ He said, ‘No, but there is a cat.’ He became faint and, complaining of nausea, went out and promptly re- covered.” Rudyard Kipling once wrote an amusingly ironic story ® about an ailurophobe, who, through seemingly mystic channels, was plagued with cats even as the Egyptians were plagued with locusts. Half the psychical societies in India appear to have been interested in the solution of the phenomenon but the explanation when it finally came was neither supernatural nor miraculous. The page in which Kipling describes the ” sending ” is very diverting: ” When a man who hates cats wakes up in the morning and finds a little squirming kitten on his breast, or puts his hand into his ulster-pocket and finds a little half-dead kitten where his gloves should be, or opens his trunk and finds a vile kitten among his dress-shirts, or goes for a long ride with his mackintosh strapped on his saddle- bow and shakes a little squalling kitten from its folds when he opens it, or goes out to dinner and finds a little blind kitten under his chair, or stays at home and finds a writhing kitten under the quilt, or wriggling among his boots, or hanging, head downwards, in his tobacco-jar, or being mangled by his terrier in the veranda, — when such a man finds one kitten, neither more nor less, once a day in a place where no kitten rightly could or should be, he is naturally upset. When he dare not murder his daily trove because he believes it to be a ® “ The Sending of Dana Da ” in “ In Black and White.” The Tiger in the House Manifestation, an Emissary, an Embodiment, and half a dozen other things all out of the regular course of nature, he is more than upset. Ele is actually distressed.” Ailurophobes, as a rule, do no harm to cats, although they are often quite willing to have others put them out of the way. They usually let cats alone and as cats like to be let alone they often manifest perverse attention towards ailuro- phobes, giving them marks of affection and honour. “ I once had a large silver-ringed cat,” writes Andrew Lang, “ of unemotional temperament. But finding a lady, rather ailuro- phobic, in a low dress at dinner, Tippoo suddenly leaped up and alighted on her neck. He was never so friendly with non- ailurophobes.” No, it is not from people who fear cats that puss’s greatest enemies are recruited. Perhaps unjust and stupid natural historians have had something to do with the occasional disfavour in which domestic felines are held. Witness, for example, what Buffon has to say about the tiger in the house: “ The cat is a faithless domestic, and only kept through neces- sity to oppose to another domestic which incommodes us still more, and which we cannot drive away, for we pay no respect to those, who, being fond of all beasts, keep cats for amuse- ment. Though these animals are gentle and frolicsome when young, yet they, even then, possess an innate cunning and perverse disposition, which age increases, and which education only serves to conceal. They are naturally inclined to theft and the best education only converts them into servile and flat- ® Those who have no feeling for cats regard them as ululant retromingent mammals. Thomas Pennant, perhaps, was one of these. Here is his description of the sphinx of the fireside: “It is an useful, but deceitful, domestic; active, neat, sedate, intent on its prey. When pleased it purres and moves its tail; when angry it spits, hisses, and strikes with its foot. When walking it draws in its claws: it drinks little: is fond of fish: it washes its face with its fore-foot (Linnaeus says at the approach of a storm) : the female is remarkably salacious; a piteous, squalling, jarring lover. Its eyes shine in the night: its hair when rubbed in the dark emits fire; it is even proverbially tenacious of life: always lights on its feet: is fond of perfumes, marum, cat-mint, valerian, etc.” 64 Ailurophobes and Other Cat-Haters tering robbers; for they have the same address, subtlety, and inclination for mischief or rapine. Like all knaves, they know how to conceal their intentions; to watch, wait, and choose opportunities for seizing their prey; to fly from punishment, and to remain away until the danger is over, and they can re- turn with safety. They readily conform to the habits of society, but never acquire its manners; for of attachment they have only the appearance, as may seem by the obliquity of their motions and the duplicity of their looks. They never look in the face those who treat them the best, and of whom they seem to be the most fond, but either through fear or false- hood, they approach him by windings to seek for those caresses they have no pleasure in, but only to flatter those from whom they receive them. Very different from that faithful animal the dog, whose sentiments are all directed to the person of his master, the cat appears only to feel for himself, to live condi- tionally, only to partake of society that he may abuse it, and by this disposition he has more affinity to man than the dog, who is all sincerity.” Buffon somewhat redeems himself by his last sentence but the foregoing part of this diatribe is arrant nonsense. Far from averting their gaze, cats have a habit of staring at one by the hour; it is one of their most dlsconert- ing tricks. But why waste time confuting Buffon? In that invaluable work of reference, “ The Devil’s Dictionary,” I find that Ambrose Bierce remarks in his definition of “ Zo- ology ” : ‘‘ Two of the science’s most illustrious expounders were Buffon and Oliver Goldsmith, from both of whom we learn (‘ 1 ‘ Histoire generale des animaux ’ and ‘ A History of Animated Nature ’) that the domestic cow sheds Its horns every two years.” Bierce, himself, however, was no lover of cats. I do not think he cared for any kind of animal, certainly not for man. His definition of “ Cat ” in this same dictionary is “ A soft Indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle.” Noah Webster may be added to this infamous list. In his dictionary 65 The Tiger in the House he inserted this gratuitous insult to “ the stealthy-stepping cat”: ” The domestic cat is a deceitful animal and when en- raged extremely spiteful.” Sir Walter Scott originally dis- liked cats; in his latter days he admitted: “The greatest advance of age which I have yet found is liking a cat, an animal which I detested, and becoming fond of a garden, an art which I despised.” King Henry III of France, a weak and dissolute monarch, hated cats. So did Meyerbeer, M. Jusserand says of Ronsard, “ He cannot hide the fact that he likes to sleep on the left side, that he hates cats, dislikes servants ‘ with slow hands,’ believes in omens, adores physical exercises and gardening, and prefers, especially in summer, vegetables to meat.” And Ronsard bimself left evidence of his aversion in the following stanzas : Homme ne vit, qui tant hdisse au rnonde Les chats que moi, d’une haine profonde. Je hai leurs yeux, leur front, et leiir regard; Et les voyant je m’enfms d’ autre part? Edmund Gosse has rendered these lines into English: There is no man noiu living anywhere Who hates cats with a deeper hate than I ; I hate their eyes, their heads, the way they stare. And when I see one come, I turn and fly? Honore Schoefer and Toussenel also hated cats. The latter once remarked that no man of taste could maintain sympa- thetic relations with an animal which was fond of asparagus. Hilaire Belloc has very forcibly expressed his dislike of cats, Dr. Johnson, who really liked cats better than Boswells, was somewhat diffi- dent about saying so. The definition in his dictionary is ambiguous: “A do- mestick animal that catches mice, commonly reckoned by naturalists the lowest order of the leonine species.” ® From a long poem addressed to Remy Belleau, the poet, quoted in Graham R. Tomson’s anthology, “ Concerning Cats.” ^ “ Gossip in a Library,” p. 178. 66 Ailurophobes and Other Cat-Haters but in spite of himself, admiration for the little animals sneaks in and out of his horrid lines: “ I do not like Them. It is no good asking me why, though I have plenty of reasons. I do not like Them. There would be no particular point in saying I do not like Them if it were not that so many people doted on Them, and when one hears Them praised, it goads one to expressing one’s hatred and fear of Them. “ I know very well that They can do one harm and that They have occult powers. All the world has known that for a hun- dred thousand years, more or less, and every attempt has been made to propitiate Them. James I would drown Their mis- tress or burn her, but They were spared. Men would mum- mify Them in Egypt, and worship the mummies; men would carve Them in stone in Cyprus and Crete and Asia Minor, or (more remarkable still) artists, especially in the Western Em- pire, would leave Them out altogether, so much was Their in- fluence dreaded. Well, I yield so far as not to print Their name, and only to call Them, ‘ They ’ but I hate Them and I am not afraid to say so. “ Their master protects Them. They have a charmed life. I have seen one thrown from a great height into a London street which when It reached it It walked quietly away with the dignity of the Lost World to which It belonged. “They will drink beer. This is not a theory; I know it; I have seen it with my own eyes. They will eat special foods; They will even eat dry bread . . . but never upon any occa- sion will They eat anything that has been poisoned, so utterly lacking are They in simplicity and humility, and so abominably well filled with cunning by whatever demon first brought Their race into existence. “ All that They do is venomous, and all that They think is evil, and when I take mine away (as I mean to do next week — in a basket), I shall first read in a book of statistics what is the wickedest part of London, and I shall leave It there, for 67 The Tiger in the House I know of no one even among my neighbours quite as vile as to deserve such a gift.” Alphonse Daudet was afraid of cats; he told Georges Doc- quols the cause of this terror: ‘‘One evening we were at home, circled around the lamp. My father alone was absent and not expected to return that night. Indeed, we expected nobody. The peace of the fireside was complete and charm- ing. Suddenly, In the next room, the piano began to play Itself. As If under the gloved fingers of thick mittens, the notes cried feebly at Intervals. ... I was terrified. All of us were frightened. . . . After a moment of silence, the piano suggested lugubrious chromatic groans. It was as though souls were weeping In the drawing-room. What a sensation ! Then the piano spoke no more, ceased to groan, but there was a fall on the carpet of something light and heavy at the same time, a muffled weight Impossible to describe. . . . After another silence, a little cry. ... It was the house-cat.” If cat-haters would only be content with hating no one would have any complaint to make, but poor puss has been persecuted as virulently as Christians In ancient Rome and Jews In modern Poland. Cats both black and brave unnumbered Have for naught been foully slain. As he frequently jumped In and out of the windows of houses Inhabited by witches he speedily became affiliated In the public mind with the pythoness herself and often shared her dread fate. These mediaeval hags did nothing to dispel this belief, for often In their confessions they Inculpated cats. In a seventeenth century execution fourteen cats were shut In a cage with a woman who was roasted over a slow fire while the cats in misery and terror clawed her in their own death agonies. When Queen Elizabeth was crowned a feature of “ On Them” in “On Nothing and Kindred Subjects”; Methuen and Co.; 1908. 68 Ailurophobes and Other Cat-Haters the processor! was a wicker pope, the interior of which was filled with live cats, who “ squalled in a most hideous manner as soon as they felt the fire.” The culmination of many a religious fete in Germany, France, and England consisted in pitching some wretched puss off a height or into a bonfire. In 1753 certain Frenchmen received a quittance of one hundred sols parisis for having furnished during three years all the cats necessary for the fires of the festival of St. John. In Vosges, cats were burned on Shrove Tuesday; in Alsace they were tossed into the Easter bonfire. In the de- partment of the Ardennes, cats were flung into the bonfires kindled on the first Sunday in Lent; sometimes, in a more graceful form of cruelty, they were hung over the fire from the end of a pole and roasted alive. “ The cat, which represented the devil, could not suffer enough.” In the midsummer fires formerly lighted in the Place de Greve at Paris it was the custom to burn a basket, barrel, or sack full of live cats which was hung from a tall mast in the midst of a bonfire. In 1648 Louis XIV, crowned with a wreath of roses and bearing roses in his hands, ignited this fire, danced before it, and partook of the banquet afterwards in the Hotel de Ville.^^ Workmen in France were at one time accustomed before laying the last board in a floor to intern underneath it a living cat; this ceremony was supposed to carry good fortune to the inmates of the house. In demolishing old mansions in Paris the dried remains of pussies convulsed in suffering that they en- dured in dying are often found. In the old remedies devised by hags and sorcerers there were cat ingredients: cats’ brains, cats’ eyes and cats’ grease were called for in certain prescriptions. In an old collection called “ The Young Angler’s Delight ” the following recipe for catching fish may be found: “Smother a cat to death; then bleed him, and having flea’d and paunched him, roast him on a spit without larding; keep the dripping to mix with the These examples are from Frazer’s “ The Golden Bough.” 69 The Tiger in the House yolks of eggs and an equal quantity of oil of spikenard; mix these well together, and anoint your line, hook or bait there- with, and you will find them come to your content.” Small boys have long held it to be their prerogative to tor- ment cats, tying cans or a string of exploding firecrackers to their tails, installing their paws in walnut shells, or sending them to navigate the horse-pond in a bowl. Booth Tarking- ton, who may be considered an authority on the adolescent period, writes, “ The suffering of cats is a barometer of the nerve-pressure of boys, and it may be accepted as sufficiently established that Wednesday — after school-hours — is the worst time for cats. . . . Confirming the effect of Wednesday upon boys in general, it is probable that, if full statistics were available, they would show that cats dread Wednesdays, and that their fear is shared by other animals and would be shared, to an extent by windows, if windows possessed nervous systems. Nor must this probable apprehension on the part of cats and the like be thought mere superstition. Cats have supersti- tions, it is true, but certain actions inspired by the sight of a boy with a missile in his hand are better evidence of the work- ings of logic upon a practical nature than of faith in the super- natural.” Edwin Tenney Brewster tells how boys in de- fault of a proper football played their game through with two living cats bound together with a clothes line. “ The public is sentimental,” he observes. “ It can’t bear to have the little things killed. So it drops them into ash-harrels, where they die — in the course of time and not altogether comfortably. It tosses them into cess-pools, and happily the next rain sends water enough to drown them. Specially careful house-wives before consigning kittens to the waste heap have been known to make them into neat bundles, in paper boxes, tied with string. This kindly device protects the helpless creatures from stray dogs and allows them to smother or starve in quiet. 12 “ Penrod and Sam,” p. 205. 12 “ The City of 4,000,000 cats”; “McClure’s Magazine”; May 1912. 70 Ailurophobes and Other Cat-Haters A short and easy method in tenement districts is simply to open the window and toss the kittens out. A four-story drop on to the brick pavement or area spikes is commonly a suffi- cient hint to an intelligent kitten not to return.” Cats are thrown off church towers with blown bladders attached to their necks, killed by dogs, thrown into barrels with dogs to fight, kicked to death, drowned, turned alive into bakers’ ovens and stoves, thrown into lime, their heads crunched under heels, tied together by their tails and hung up. In Spain, in Gau- tier’s day, it was the custom to deprive cats of their ears and their tails, giving them the appearance of ” Japanese chi- meras.” In Havana, I have been told, urchins enjoy a merry sport which entails the dipping of puss into a pail of kerosene and a subsequent ignition. Then the comet-like trail of howling fiery fur is released. In 1815, just before the de- parture of Napoleon for St. Helena, a wag perpetrated a joke in the city of Chester. Handbills were distributed which an- nounced that the island was overrun with rats and that 16 shill- ings would be paid for every full-grown tom cat, los. for every full-grown female, 2s. 6d. for every kitten. On the day appointed the city was filled with men, women, and children carrying cats. A riot ensued and the cats escaped. Several hundred were killed and many others drowned while the re- mainder infested neighbouring houses and barns for many weeks afterwards.^® In France puss is undoubtedly fre- In the early editions of “ Marius the Epicurean ” you may discover this paragraph: “ It was then that the host’s son bethought him of his own favourite animal, which had offended somehow, and had been forbidden the banquet, — ‘I mean to shut you in the oven a while, little soft, white thing! ’ he had said, catching sight, as he passed an open doorway, of the great fire in the kitchen, itself festally adorned, where the feast was preparing; and had so finally for- gotten it. And it was with a really natural laugh, for once, that, on opening the oven, he caught sight of the animal’s grotesque appearance, as it lay there, half-burnt, just within the red-hot iron door.” Mr. Pater removed this passage from later editions of this book. 16 “ Voyage en Espagne,” p. 299. . i®Phyfe: “5,000 Facts and Fancies.” 71 The Tiger in the House quently eaten as rabbit. Of this custom I have found a brief mention in a book, the name of the unworthy author of which I will not further advertise. A French sailor is speaking: “Sometimes we have rabbit stew. When my sister was married we had rabbit stew. For weeks before- hand we caught cats on the roads, in the fields, in the barns. My brother caught cats and I caught cats, and my father caught cats; we all caught cats. We caught forty cats, perhaps fifty cats. Some were toms, some were females with kittens inside them. Some were black and some were white and some were yellow and some were tabbies. One cat scratched a big gash in my brother’s face and he bled. Then we locked them in a room, my father and I. . . . My brother was afraid after he had been scratched. . . . We went into the room with cudgels and beat about us, beat the cats on the head. For an hour we chased them round the room until all the cats lay dead on the floor. Flow they did howl, and screech, and fight, but we were a match for them. Then my brother and my mother skinned the cats and made a magnifi- cent rabbit stew for my sister’s wedding.” One of the ad- ventures of that arch-rogue. Till Eulenspiegel, relates how he sewed a cat in a hare’s skin and sold the beast to some fur- riers at Leipsig. Before dining on its carcass the merchants wished to enjoy the pleasures of the hunt; so they loosed the animal in the garden and set the dogs after it, but the hare climbed a tree and begun to mew, whereupon, of course, Till’s merry prank was exposed and the cat was killed. In order to test their superior theories on the subject of education it will be remembered that the inimitable Bouvard and Pecuchet experiment with a boy and a girl. These incor- rigible children proceed at once, of course, to demolish the theories. One of Victor’s horrible exploits entails the tor- ture of a cat. Hearing the screams of Marcel, the servant, Bouvard and Pecuchet rush to the kitchen. “ ‘ Take him away! It’s too much — ■ it’s too much! ’ 72 'Ailurophobes and Other Cat-Haters “ The lid of the pot flew off like the bursting of a shell. A greyish mass bounded towards the ceiling, then wriggled about frantically, emitting fearful yowls. “ They recognized the cat, quite emaciated, with its hair gone, its tail like a piece of string, and its dilated eyes start- ing out of its head. They were as white as milk, vacant, so to speak, and yet glaring. “ The hideous animal continued its howling till it flung it- self into the fireplace, disappeared, then rolled back in the middle of the cinders lifeless. “ It was Victor who had perpetrated this atrocity, and the two worthy men recoiled, pale with stupefaction and horror. To the reproaches which they addressed to him, he replied, ‘ Weill since it’s my own,’ without ceremony and with an air of innocence, in the placidity of a satiated instinct.” In “ The Brothers Karamazoff ” Dostoievsky indicates the malignance of Smerdyakoff by telling us that in his childhood he ” was very fond of hanging cats, and burying them with great ceremony. He used to dress up in a sheet as though it were a surplice and sang, and waved some object over the dead cat as though it were a censer.” In an extremely bad book called “ Nightshade ” the malevolent Dr. Meisterlim- mer flings a cat out of an open window into a courtyard. “ It fell four storeys and broke its spine. He laughed in his own hearty fashion to see it dragging itself along on its front paws and wailing. . . .” At least one cat suffered for having religious convictions. George Borrow in “ Wild Wales ” describes this poor ani- mal left behind in Llangollen by a former vicar. Nearly all the inhabitants of the village were dissenters and they re- fused to harbour the beast, nay more they persecuted it. ” O, there never was a cat so persecuted as that poor Church of England animal, and solely on account of the opinions which it 17 “ Nightshade,” by Paul Gwynne; Constable and Co., London, 1910; p. 270. Chapter VII. 73 The Tiger in the House was supposed to have imbibed in the house of its late master, for I never could learn that the dissenters of the suburb, nor indeed of Llangollen in general, were in the habit of persecut- ing other cats; the cat was a Church of England cat, and that was enough : stone it, hang it, drown it ! were the cries of almost everybody. If the workmen of the flannel factory, all of whom were Calvinistic Methodists, chanced to get a glimpse of it in the road from the windows of the building, they would sally forth in a body, and with sticks, stones, or for want of other weapons, with clots of horse-dung, of which there was always plenty on the road, would chase it up the high bank or perhaps over the Camlas — the inhabitants of a small street between our house and the factory leading from the road to the river, all of whom were dissenters, if they saw it moving about the perllan, into which their back win- dows looked, would shriek and hoot at it, and fling anything of no value, which came easily to hand at the head or body of the ecclesiastical cat.” The reader will be glad to learn that Borrow took puss in hand, cured him of an eruptive disease, fed him until he was sleek, and when he left the neighbour- hood gave him in charge to a young woman of “ sound church principles.” He subsequently learned that the cat ‘‘ continued in peace and comfort till one morning it sprang suddenly from the hearth into the air, gave a mew and died.” On vivisection, although undoubtedly one of the perils of cat life, I have no intention of dwelling here, but it seems an apt point to speak of the infernal operations of Professor Mantegazza of Milan, whose “ Physiology of Love ” is more or less familiar to English readers. Professor Mantegazza has also written a ” Physiology of Pain,” for which he con- ducted experiments ” with much delight and extreme patience for the space of a year.” There is no necessity of rehears- ing the sickening details of this fiendish book but it may be stated that among other torments the Italian devised a ma- “ Fisiologia del Dolore,” p. loi. 74 Ailurophobes and Other Cat-Haters chine, which indeed he dubbed a “ tormentor ” in which little animals which had first been “ quilted with long thin nails ”so that the slightest movement was agony, were wracked with added tortures, torn and twisted, crushed and lacerated, hour after hour. “ In the august name of Science, animals have been subjected to burning, baking, freezing; saturation with inflammable oil and then setting on fire; starvation to death; skinning alive; larding the feet with nails; crushing and tor- menting in every imaginable way. Human ingenuity has taxed itself to the utmost to devise some new torture, that one may observe what curious results may ensue.” There are those who defend cats in trouble. Octave Mirbeau describes such a one in his very harrowing story, “ Le Gardien des Vaches ” in which a kitten is tortured but the torturer in turn meets his death. What, one wonders, would the author of “ Le Jardin des Supplices ” have written about Mantegazza ? There are further the bird-lovers, some of whom are so rab- idly hysterical on the subject of cats that they would have them all destroyed.-^ About the mere sentimentalists who protest against the cruelty of the cat I have nothing to add to my re- marks in the second chapter of this book. It is natural for a cat to kill birds; the cat is carnivorous and, like the Follies girls, he finds a bird particularly tasty. Some cats enjoy hunt- ing for its own sake and kill many birds they do not eat. Per- sian cats, because of their value, are usually kept in semi-cap- tivity and may therefore be ruled out of the discussion. The majority of those who write against the cat as a bird- hunter give the question an economic twinge. This is an old dodge of reformers, a tried and true formula of the uplift, and it almost always is efficacious in stirring up a certain kind 20 Albert Leffingwell, M. D.: “Vivisection in America” in Henry S. Salt’s book, “Animals’ Rights”; Macmillan and Co., New York, 1894. 2 t In the volume entitled “La Vache Tachetee,” p. 40. 22 In 1897 there was founded in Westphalia the Antikatzenverein, the avowed object of which was war against the cat. 7S The Tiger in the House of public interest. In this instance these gentlemen assert that the birds free the farm vegetation of grubs and that the cat in destroying the birds helps to destroy farm produce. This is all very well but I have never thought that the object of a scare-crow was to frighten cats and I have seen an entire cherry-tree denuded of its fruit in a morning by a flock of birds. It is pleasant to remember that Mr. Darwin has a curious speculation as to how a scarcity of cats in a rural dis- trict would soon affect the neighbouring vegetation as the field animals and birds they prey on would, of course, proportion- ately increase and their greater numbers tell on vegetable life. When Calvin, Charles Dudley Warner’s exceptional cat, first brought in a bird, Mr. Warner told him that it was wrong, “ and tried to convince him, while he was eating it, that he was doing wrong; for he is a reasonable cat, and understands pretty much everything except the binomial theorem and the time down the cycloidal arc. But with no effect. The killing of birds went on to my great regret and shame.” However one day when he found the pea-pods empty and the strawberry bed raped of fruit Mr. Warner had a change of heart. He called Calvin and petted him. “ I lavished upon him an enthusiastic fondness. I told him that he had no fault; that the one action that I had called a vice was an heroic exhibition of regard for my interests. I bade him go and do likewise continually. I now saw how much better instinct is than mere misguided reason. Calvin knew. ... It was only the round of Nature. The worms eat a noxious something in the ground. The birds eat the worms. Calvin eats the birds. We eat — no, we do not eat Calvin. There the chain stops. When you ascend the scale 23 The bird-lovers occasionally give themselves away. In an article in “Bird-Lore,” May 1918, William Brewster tells how he frightened chipmunks away from his tulips and starlings from his cherries with a stuffed maltese and white pussy with glaring yellow eyes. The starlings, however, soon were privy to the deception and continued their depredations. Ailurophobes and Other Cat-Haters of being, and come to an animal that is, like ourselves. Inedible, you have arrived at a result where you can rest. Let us respect the cat. He completes an edible chain.” It is pleasant to recall that most literary chapters on the cat are in a similar vein; even that great bird-lover, Olive Thorne Miller, inserted a highly laudatory chapter on the cat, the common, out-door cat at that. In one of her bird books. The malignant cat-haters. In print, are usually commissioners or superintendents. They very frequently become feverish and sometimes even foam at the mouth. One, for instance, speaks of a blood-thirsty house-bred kitten who had never seen a bird, crouching and preparing to spring at a phonograph which was negotiating a nightingale’s song.“® I can duplicate this story. Aeroplanes frequently fly past my garret window and when they do Feathers Invariably manifests the liveliest emotion, rushes to the window, gives her hunting cry; her hair bristles and she prepares to spring. Nature, as Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, Anatole France, James Branch Cabell, and some others have discovered, seldom rejects an opportunity to be ironic. It should therefore sur- prise no one to learn that a bird is one of the most dangerous enemies of the cat. The eagle swoops from the skies, seizes the cat along his spine with its terrible claws, mangles his head with its beak the while it flaps its gaunt and terrifying wings and bears the little beast aloft. A keeper in the eagle house at a London zoological garden informed Dr. Louis Robinson that when the eagles were off their food he offered them cats. “ If they won’t eat cats they are about to die,” he said. Another of the most Inveterate and selfish enemies of the 24 “ My Summer in a Garden.” 25 “ Upon the Tree-Tops.” 28 T. G. Pearson: “Cats and Birds” in “The Art World,” May 1917 . I wonder if Mr. Pearson knows that game-keepers in England sometimes kill nightingales because their singing keeps the pheasants awake? 27 “Wild Traits in Tame Animals.” 77 The Tiger in the House cat is the supposed friend who goes to Palm Beach in the winter or Lake Placid in the summer and leaves puss alone in the city to shift for himself, or the tender-hearted lady who says, “ I just can’t bear to drown those sweet kittens.” So she takes the unweaned babies away from their mother and leaves them in some public garden where they will meet a cruel death at the hands of boys or the jaws of dogs, and the mother cat suffers not only from the loss of her offspring but from a milk disease as well.^® It is quite a cheering thought to realize that cats sometimes hate as keenly as people, that they too contrive their little revenges and Sicilian vendettas whereby they may in some small degree compensate for the insults doled out to their race. A familiar Irish story has it that a man once severely chastised a cat for some misdemeanour, after which the feline disap- peared. A few days later the man met the cat in a narrow path. The animal glared at him with a wicked aspect and when he endeavoured to frighten her away, she sprang at him, fastening herself to his hand with so ferocious a grip that it was impossible to make her open her jaws and the creature’s head actually had to be severed from her body before the hand could be extricated. The man afterwards died from his injuries. Variations of this theme have appeared in fic- tion. In Frederick Stuart Greene’s story, ‘‘ The Cat of the Cane-brake,” the feline revenges himself upon a woman who had mistreated him by dragging a rattle-snake to her bed and placing it on her chest. Nor must we forget the eccentric Mr. Wilde’s cat in Robert W. Chambers’s story, ” The Repairer of Reputations.” In her first appearance in the tale she attacks the ugly dwarf: “ Before I could move she flattened her belly to the ground, crouched, trembled, and 28 I know of a case of this kind in which a friendly older cat suckled the mother until her milk disappeared. 29 “ The Metropolitan Magazine”; August 1916. 20 “The King in Yellow.” 78 THE BLACK CAT From a drawing by Aubrey Beardsley to ilhtsfrafe Poe’s story, published in a large paper edition of Tales of ilystery and Wonder, by Stone and Kimball; Chicago; jSgj Ailurophobes and Other Cat-Haters sprang into his face. Howling and foaming they rolled over and over on the floor, scratching and clawing, until the cat screamed and fled under the cabinet, and Mr. Wilde turned over on his back, his limbs contracting and curling up like the legs of a dying spider.” On a later occasion Mr. Wilde is discovered “ groaning on the floor, his face covered with blood, his clothes torn to shreds. Drops of blood were scattered over the carpet, which had also been ripped and frayed in the evidently recent struggle. ‘ It’s that cursed cat.’ he said, ceasing his groans, and turning his colourless eyes to me, ‘ she attacked me while I was asleep. I believe she will kill me yet.’ ” Mr. Wilde was perfectly right; the cat did kill him. In Poe’s tale, “ The Black Cat ” it will be recalled that the protagonist has persistently maltreated a black cat named Pluto, who in the end is responsible for handing his master over to the police as the murderer of his wife. Two old stories offer interesting corroboration of this fable. One re- lates how a murder had been committed in the city of Lyons and a physician requested to inquire into the particulars con- cerning it. Accordingly he went to the home of the murdered woman where he found her dead on the floor, lying in a pool of blood. An enormous white cat surmounted the cupboard, his eyes fixed on the corpse, his whole bearing indicative of the greatest terror. All night he kept watch over his dead mistress. The following morning, when the room was filled with soldiers, he still maintained his position, disregarding the clanking of the arms and the noisy conversation. As soon, however, as the persons under suspicion were brought in, he glared at them with particular malignancy, and then retreated under the bed. From this moment the prisoners began to lose their audacity and subsequently they confessed to the In “The Street of the Four Winds” (also in “The King in Yellow”) Mr. Chambers introduces us to a charming white cat as an antidote to his previous monster. 79 The Tiger in the House murder and were convicted.®^ A similar story is to be found in the autobiography of Miss Cornelia Wright:^® “An old woman died a few years ago. She had a nephew, to whom she left all she possessed. She had a favourite cat, which never left her, and even remained by the corpse after death. The nephew was a lawyer, and while he was reading the will after the funeral the cat remained restlessly outside the door of the room, apparently adjoining that in which the old lady died. When the door was opened the cat sprang at the lawyer, seized him by the throat, and was with difficulty prevented from strangling him. The man died about eighteen months later and on his deathbed confessed that he had murdered his aunt to obtain possession of her money.” Edward Jesse relates a tale he had from a man who was sentenced to transporta- tion for robbery. He and two other thieves had broken into the home of a gentleman who lived near Hampton Court. While they were gathering their plunder in sacks a large black cat flew at one of the robbers and fixed her claws in his face. We must not forget the old nursery rhyme: I love little pussy. Her coat is so warm; And if I don’t hurt her She’ll do me no harm. The cat, unlike the dog, refuses to return good for evil, or to turn the right cheek when struck upon the left. These re- venges, however, are extreme. A cat usually flees a persecutor or ignores him. But it is amusing to remember that this is the animal the dog-lover sometimes calls ungrateful! “ Dictionnaire d’anecdotes ” ; 1820; Vol. 2, p. 274. 33 “ Autobiography of Miss Cornelia Wright, lady companion to the Princess Charlotte of Wales,” two volumes, 1861; W. H. Allen and Co.; London. 3 * “ Gleanings in Natural History”; London; 1838. 80 Chapter Four: Fhe Cat and the Occult Notre dame la Lune blonde Est la patronne des tons chats. Elle preside a I ears ebats Avec sa grosse pace ronde, Quand le vent siffle un air de ronde, Elle rit a leurs entrechats. Notre dame la Lune blonde Est la patronne des bons chats. Mais quand, apres de long pourchas, Folle d’amour, la bande gronde, Elle se voile et cache au monde Le mystere impur des Sabbats Notre dame la Lune blonde. Raoul Gineste. The mystical character of the cat has challenged attention, delighting her admirers and terrifying her detractors, since she strolled rather suddenly and magnificently into history about 1600 B. c. Her origin Itself Is veiled in the deepest mystery, for those who believe her to be a gentle descendant of some tamed wild cat must overlook the fact that of all terrestrial beasts the wild cat of today most persistently and ferociously resists all attempts at domestication, ‘‘ Peut-etre est-il fee, est il dieii,” writes Baudelaire of puss, and again the French poet speaks of the chat mysterieux, chat seraphique, chat Strange.” A writer In the “ Occult Review ” Informs us that cats have green auras and assures us that they are the most magnetic of quadrupeds. Sir Walter Scott once ob- 81 The Tiger in the House served to Washington Irving, “Ah! cats are a mysterious kind of folk. There is more passing in their minds than we are aware of. It comes no doubt from their being so familiar with warlocks and witches.” Sir Walter, however, reversed cause and effect. Warlocks and witches are familiar with cats because cats are occult. Their tread is soft and noiseless. They leap lightly, and apparently blindly to the top of a high- boy littered with glass and china without disturbing an element in this brittle composition. The pupils of their eyes, wide open, vary with the light; in China it has sometimes been the fashion to tell the time of day by them; in Suffolk cats’ eyes are popularly supposed to dilate with the ebb and flow of the tide. Madame Michelet asserts that it is their very transparence, their clearness, which gives these eyes their mystery, these wide open eyes which see on and beyond, which stare in an ecstatic gnostic gaze which has nothing in common with the begging or reproachful eyes of a dog. At night these eyes glisten and shine in the dark. Maister Salmon, who writes of puss in his “ Compleat English Physician,” published in 1693, seems to be sufficiently bewildered: “ As to its Eyes, Authors say that they shine in the Night; and see better at the full, and more dimly at the change of the Moon. Also that the Cat doth vary his Eyes with the Sun; the Pupil being round at Sunrise, and long towards the Noon, and not to be seen at all at Night, but the whole Eye shining in the darkness. These appear- ances of the Cat’s Eyes, I am sure are true; but whether they answer to the times of Day, I have never observed.” The half-shut lids are even more suggestive and significant of strange thaumaturgic powers. They can be feral, too, these eyes, a fact that Prosper Merimee has recorded in “ 'Carmen ” : “ Eye of a gipsy, eye of a wolf is a Spanish proverb which signifies acute observation. If you have not the time to go to the zoological gardens to study the stare of a wolf, look at your cat when he lies in wait for a sparrow.” The fur har- bours electricity and sends swift currents of this lightning up 82 The Cat and the Occult the arm of him who strokes the animal. Sometimes, alone with a cat in the dead silences of the night, I have watched the creature’s eyes suddenly dilate, her ears point back; with arched spine a startling, unexpected, unexplained prance across the floor follows; then puss settles back again to laundry and repose as if nothing had happened. What has happened? What has awakened this fit of wildness? Is it some noise unheard by humans, an unwelcome smell, or some reminiscence of the terrible mediaeval nights when the cat joined the witch in her broom-stick trails across the face of the moon? The cat walks by herself, retains her pride, her dignity, her reserve, keeps the secret of the ciborium, and gives no sign of the cupellations she has witnessed in alchemystical garrets. She is perverse, refuses to be “ put ” anywhere, often takes delight in manifesting her affection for some one who has an in- herent dislike for her, while she frequently ignores an admirer. “ You never get to the bottom of cats,” says a writer in “ All the Year Round.” ” You will never find two, well known to you, that do not offer marked diversities in ways and disposi- tions, and, in general, the combination they exhibit of activity and repose, and the rapidity with which they pass from one to the other, their gentle aspects and fragile forms, united with strength and pliancy, their sudden appearances and disappear- ances, their tenacity of life and many escapes from dangers, their silent and rapid movements, their sometimes unaccoun- table gatherings, and strange noises at night — all contribute to invest them with a mysterious fascination, which reaches its culminating point in the (not very frequent) case of a com- pletely black cat.” Is it wonderful that these qualities have served to cause her to be worshipped as a god, or reviled as a demon? Animals not infrequently play important roles in mythology and enter into the elements of religion, but no other animal, it would seem, is so intimately bound with the arcane rites of several ages as the cat, waited upon by the priests of Egypt, the 83 The Tiger in the House “ familiar ” of witches in the middle ages, the companion of Saint Ives and Saint Gertrude, “ gentlest of mystics,” in Sicily sacred to St. Martha, the friend of Mohammed, the time-piece of China, and the weather-vane of Scotland and England; puss saunters with noiseless pads, through the folklore and legends of Europe, Asia, and Africa, now petted, now hated or feared, now regarded with awe or horror, now with tenderness and veneration. The cat is not mentioned in the Bible, ^ a fact which offers consolation to many dog-lovers, and her name appears only once in the Apocrypha. “ The allusion is significant. We learn that a cat may not only look at a king, she is also per- mitted to sit on a god’s head. Painters of Biblical scenes have evidently regarded puss’s omission as an oversight or an impertinent perversion and they have put her into their pictures while an old Arabian legend connects her creation with the story of the ark. According to this charming folk-tale the pair of mice originally installed on board this boat increased and multiplied to such an extent that life was rendered un- bearable for the other occupants, whereupon Noah passed his hand three times over the head of the lioness and she oblig- ingly sneezed forth the cat. Another oriental story which obtained wide credence has it that the first day the animals entered the ark they rested quietly in their state-rooms. The first to venture forth was the monkey who persuaded the lioness to forget her vows of fidelity. The result of this initial transgression of natural laws was not only the birth of the cat but also, the old author assures us, ” the spreading of 1 “ In the illuminated manuscript known as Queen Mary’s Psalter (1553) there is a picture of the Fall of Man, in which there is a modification of the idea which gained wide currency during the middle ages that it was the serpent-woman, Lilith, who had tempted Adam to eat the forbidden fruit. In this picture, while the beautiful grace and ample hair of Lilith are shown, instead of the usual female breast she has the body of a cat.” Moncure Daniel Conway: “Demon- ology and Devil-lore,” Vol. II, p. 301. 2 Baruch, VI, 22. 84 The Cat and the Occult a spirit of coquetry which endured during the whole of the sojourn the animals made there.” Still another story is re- lated by Pierre Palliot in “ La vraye et parfaicte science des armoires ” (Paris; 1664) : “The cat is more harmiful than useful, its caresses are more to be dreaded than desired, and its bite is fatal. The cause of the pleasure it gives us is strange and entertaining. At the moment of the creation of the world, says the fable, the Sun and the Moon emulated each other in peopling the earth with animals. The Sun, great, fiery, and luminous, formed the lion, beautiful, sanguinary, and generous. The Moon, seeing the other gods in admira- tion before this noble work, caused a cat to come forth from the earth, but one as disproportionate to the lion in beauty and courage as she (the Moon) is to her brother (the Sun) . This contention gave rise to derision, and also Indignation on the part of the Sun, who, being angry that the Moon should have attempted to match herself with him, Crea par forme de mepris En meme temps une souris. As, however, ‘ the sex ’ never surrenders, the Moon made herself still more ridiculous by producing the most absurd of all animals, the monkey. This creature was received by the company of stars with a burst of immoderate laughter. A flame spread itself over the face of the Moon, even as when she threatens us with a tempest of great winds, and by a last effort, in order to be eternally revenged upon the Sun, she set undying enmity between the monkey and the cat, and between the cat and the mouse. Hence comes the sole advantage which we derive from the cat.” The cat was known in Egypt at least 1600 years before the birth of Christ, as certain tablets prove. Bast or Pasht was the cat goddess, worshipped at Bubastes, and it is from this name that certain wise philologists wish to derive the word, puss; still others like to think it comes from the Latin, pusus, 85 The Tiger in the House little boy, or pusa, little girl. Herodotus informs us that Pasht occupied a similar position among the Egyptians to that of Artemis among the Greeks; this was the Diana of the Romans. Diana, indeed, assumed the form of a cat, when Typhon forced the gods and goddesses to hide themselves In animal shapes. There is also a connection with the Norse goddesses, Freyja, the Teutonic Venus, whose chariot was drawn by cats, and Helda, who was accompanied by maidens on cats or themselves distinguished In feline form. Pasht was the goddess of light, but more than Diana, of both the moon and sun. The Egyptian word man signified both light and cat. Moreover the sun-god Ra was frequently referred to as The Great Cat. Puss prefers the moon; the Hindu poet says, “ The cat laps the moonbeams In the bowl of water, thinking them to be milk.” Diana was also the goddess of wisdom, hunting, and chastity. Wise and a huntress the cat certainly is, but chaste, never! ^ Vulson de la Colombiere, whose science was heraldry, in the “ Livre de la science heroique,” speaks quaintly of the cat’s relation to the moon : “ Comme le lion est iin animal solitaire, aussi le chat est une hete liinatique, dont les yeux, clairvoyants et etincelants diirant les plus obscures nuits, croissent et decroissent a Vimitation de la lune; car, comme la lune, selon qidelle participe a la lumiere du soleil, change tons les jours de face, ainsi le chat est touche de pareille affection envers la lune, sa prunelle croissant et diminuant au meme temps que cet astre est en son croissant ou en son decours. Plusieurs naturalistes assurent que, lorsque la lune est en son plein, les chats ont plus de force et d'adresse pour faire la guerre aux souris que lorsqid elle est faible! ” The Egyptians shaved their eyebrows and went into mourn- ® But Professor W. M. Conway says in “The Cats of Ancient Egypt” (“ Eng- lish Illustrated Magazine”; Vol. 7, p. 251): “Pasht for her part was lady of love and corresponded in a crude sort of way to that much nobler conception, the Aphrodite of the Greeks.” Freyja, of course, was an amorous goddess. 86 AN EGYPTIAN BRONZE HEAD OF A CAT Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art f - ilr.- ••V- The Cat and the Occult ing when a cat died and the penalty for killing a cat was very severe. As any one who witnessed a feline death scene was often suspected of murder, Egyptian citizens took care to be as far away as possible on such occasions, not a very difficult precautionary measure, one would believe, because pussy’s in- stinct is to conceal herself when she is sick, as she is unable to confront her enemies in that condition. G. A. Henty has chosen as the central episode for his story, “ The Cat of Bubastes,” the dilemma of an Egyptian who was inadvertently responsible for a cat’s death. Cats were painted in fresco, sculptured in stone, and even mummified after death. The countless examples of these mummies in contemporary museums bear silent witness to the veneration in which the animal was held. There were several methods of embalming in use among the Egyptians. Of these only the most elaborate has left its record. The working classes might have their bodies soaked in an antiseptic mixture and so preserved for a time, but it was the privilege of kings and rulers alone to have their bodies imbued with costly drugs and sweet spices and to lie unchanged in their tombs for thousands of years until their mummied remains were removed from their long repose. . . . The privilege which was denied the workingman was granted to the cat.^ * “ But the ghost or double of a body (in ancient Egypt) had to have a ma- terial something to be the double of. The actual body was of course best; second best was an image of it made in some lasting substance. Hence arose mummi- fication to preserve the body, and portrait sculpture to replace it if destroyed. In later times a wealthy Egyptian was often buried with no less than some hun- dreds of little images in the shape of a mummy, ticketed with his name, besides one or more really fine portrait statues of him. Such statues were called Ka statues. If the mummy were destroyed the Ka could still be kept in existence by means of them. . . . As with men, so with cats; they too had their Ka and all the rest of it, and their Ka had likewise to be kept from annihilation against the great day of resurrection of cats, crocodiles and men. A rich man’s cat was elaborately mummied, wound round and round with stuff and cunningly plaited with linen ribbons dyed two different colours. His head was encased in a rough kind of papier mache, and that was covered with linen and painted, even gilt sometimes, the ears always carefully pricked up. The mummy might be enclosed 87 The Tiger in the House The fact that mummied mice have been discovered in the cat tombs has puzzled some scientists. But in the royal tombs food was always provided for the mummied ruler; what more natural than to provide food for the mummied cat! . . . We may better understand this worship of the cat if we know some- thing of animal symbolism and credit the priests of Egypt with having known more than we do. It is well also to bring forward the testimony of Professor Maspero who is of the opinion that the worship of cats among the lower middle classes of Egypt was largely adoration of the cat herself, not of the official god incarcerated in the animal. In support of this belief he describes certain stelae in the museum of Turin. On one, belonging to the age of the eighteenth dynasty, huge figures of a cat and a swallow are painted with a table of offer- ings before them, as well as two kneeling scribes. Accompany- ing phylacteries state that these offerings are to the “ good cat ” and “ good swallow,” not to any of the state gods hidden under these forms. Further it must be taken for granted that following each inundation of the Nile every farm became an island on which mice, serpents, and insects flourished, from whose depredations the farmer depended upon the cat and the ibis to free him. I remember a night in a villa on the Florentine hills, a in a bronze box with a bronze Ka statue of the cat seated on the top. Even finer burial might await a particularly grand cat. ... A poor man’s cat was rolled up in a simple lump, but the rolling was carefully and respectfully done.” W. M. Conway: “The Cats of Ancient Egypt”: “English Illustrated Maga- zine ” ; Vol. 7, p. 251. “ The cases in which the cats were placed after embalming were capital rep- resentations of the cat in life. Many of them were of carven wood, remarkably lifelike affairs, the form and even the individuality and expression being re- markably preserved. . . . Some of the cat cases are curiously decorated and some of the faces are fitted with queerly made eyes, inlaid with obsidian, or rock crystal; others are done in coloured paste.” W. S. Harwood: “The Mummifica- tion of Cats in Ancient Egypt”; “Scientific American”; Vol. 82, p. 361. Tliere are several excellent examples of cat mummies, wound in linen of two colours, Ka statues in bronze and faience, and bronze enclosing boxes in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. 88 The Cat and the Occult green Florentine night ... a dumb curiosity seized two of us and caused us to leave our chairs on the loggia where the faint breeze flickered the flames of the Roman lamps and the tall bottles of golden Strega stood half-filled, to mount the stairs, led on by a nameless questioning, and to seek the chamber di- rectly above the spot where we had been sitting, the temporary abode of two white Persian cats. . . . The room was empty when we entered; the bright moonlight streaming in from the doorway which led to a terrace which formed the roof of the loggia told us that. Noiselessly, and apparently unreason- ably, we stole carefully across the broad chamber and looked out. ... I can still see the expression of horror on my com- panion’s face, perhaps reflected on my own, as we stood just hidden by the hangings at the doorway and saw the two cats softly lift their paws from two white doves who rose un- steadily, dizzily, and lazily into the green atmosphere, while the cats rolled on their backs, stretching their claws to the air and making faint mews. . . . Did we learn why the hawk and the cat sit together in the temples of the Nile? We lose sight of the cat in the early history of Greece ® but that does not prove that she did not exist during this civiliza- tion. Emily James Putnam, in her ironic book, points out that the lady suffered a similar eclipse. In Rome dogs were not permitted in the Temple of Flercules but pussies were ad- mitted. Sacerdotal cats were welcomed even in the adytum. The priests were wise to make a virtue of necessity; it is im- possible to exclude cats from any place which they desire to enter. To this day they attend Christian’ churches of any denomination whenever they have the inclination. In Hone’s “ Every-day Book ” there is a reference to a curious mediaeval custom, for which credit is given to Mills’s “ History of the Crusades: ” “ At Aix in Provence on the festival of Corpus ® Sir George Lewis thought he had proved that there were no cats in Athens, but a vase of the best period represents a cat chasing mice. The Tiger in the House Christ!, the finest Tom cat of the country, wrapped like a child in swaddling clothes, was publicly exhibited in a magnif- icent shrine. Every knee was bent, every hand either strewed flowers or poured incense, and, in short, the cat on this occa- sion was treated in all respects as the god of the day.” This curious anecdote has found wide credence and has been re- peated in most of the cat books. A writer in the Catholic periodical, “ The Month,” however, finds little to believe In it.® According to this savant. King Rene of Anjou in 1472, al- though they had been in existence long before that, formulated a definite plan for the games of this day, theatrical interludes between the serious religious business. Unfortunately King Rene’s manuscript has been lost, but a full account of the games, with curious illustrations, made just prior to the French Revolution when the Aix procession was still unshorn of Its splendour, still exists and it is from that that the writer in ” The Month ” derives his information. There were, it seems, twelve jeiix and the cat appeared in the first one, which was called, indeed. The play of the cat: One of the performers carried a tall staff with a gilt image of a calf on top of it, round it were grouped some of the Israelites, while Moses, easily recognized by his horns, and Aaron, distin- guished by his breastplate, stood aloof and rebuked them. However, the chief subject of popular interest was the cat. How he came to be introduced Into the picture we can only conjecture, but at any rate there he was. One of the per- formers carried poor Tom in his arms, muffled up in some sort of covering, probably to keep him from scratching. As the scene proceeded he tossed him up as high as he could in the air, catching him again, amid the plaudits of the crowd, with more or less dexterity. Gregolre’s engraving represents the cat in ® “ Cats in Catholic Ritual” (signed H. T.) : “The Month,” Vol. 87, p. 487; London, 1896. This writer asserts that the story is not to be found in “The His- tory of the Crusades.” As I have not read this book I cannot offer corrobora- tion of his statement. 90 The Cat and the Occult the act of being tossed, and depicts the agonized expression of the victim. “ We can readily understand that this bit of cruel buffoonery will have been the most popular feature of the procession,” adds the Catholic author, ” but we can only explain the presence of poor pussy by supposing that besides the golden calf. King Rene wished to suggest that the Israelites had also remembered something of the animal worship of the Egyptians. At any rate it is this sense and this sense only that the inhabitants and priests of Aix can be described as paying divine honours to the cat.” The cat seems to have been at home in China from the fifth century, A. D., and she was introduced into Japan from China as late as the tenth century. In both these countries she generally plays a demonaic and reprehensible part in legend and folklore, although there are stories about cats who be- friended mortals. Usually, however, she steals precious ob- jects; she has the pernicious habit of producing dancing balls of fire; she wraps a towel around her head and walks the roof- top on her hind legs; sometimes she grows a forked tail and thereby becomes a nekomata. When she is ten years old she begins to talk. In China she is employed by old women to negotiate obliquities; in Japan she destroys these beldams. Her spiritual strength increases with age and she is able, if she attains the proper number of years, to effect certain transformations. This belief finds confirmation in European folklore in which it is held that a cat twenty years old turns into a witch, and a witch a hundred years old turns back into a cat. Neverthless, in spite of the animal’s turpitudes, the killing of a cat was a sin for which a heavy spiritual penalty existed in Japan. The curse of the beast was said to fall not only on the man himself but on his family to the seventh gener- ation. Sometimes the cat killed the culprit; sometimes she was satisfied to haunt him. The Persians also hesitate before slaying a cat as Djinns or Afreets often assume feline forms and the angry evicted demons are frequently willing to spend 91 The Tiger in the House the rest of eternity haunting the person responsible for de- stroying their dwellings. In Egypt the Arabs believe that a Djinn takes the form of a cat when he wishes to haunt a house and the last born of twins is capable, in order to satisfy her desires, of turning herself into a cat. A traveller who had killed a cat for making ravages in his storehouse at Luxor was visited next day by a neighbouring apothecary who begged him to kill no more cats. “ My daughter,” he explained, “ often visits you in the form of a cat to eat your dessert.” There is further the doctrine of metempsychosis to consider. There was a belief held in China that one became a cat after death. This belief caused the mighty Empress Wu to forbid cats entrance to her palace because a court lady, whom she had cruelly caused to be put to death, threatened to turn Her Royal Highness into a rat and tease her as a spectre-cat. There is a story in the “ Konjaku Monogatari ” of a man who was terribly afraid of cats, probably because he had been a rat in his previous existence. This belief prevailed in India, too, of course. General Sir Thomas Edward Gordon in “ A Varied Life” (1906) tells the following remarkable story: “ For twenty-five years an oral addition to the written stand- ing orders of the native guard at Government House near Poona had been communicated regularly from one guard to another on relief, to the effect that any cat passing out of the front door after dark was to be regarded as His Excellency, the Governor, and to be saluted accordingly. The meaning of this was that Sir Robert Grant, Governor of Bombay, had died there in 1838 and on the evening of the day of his death a cat was seen to leave the house by the front door and walk up and down a particular path, as it had been the Governor’s habit to do after sunset. A Hindu sentry had observed this, and he mentioned it to the others of his faith, who made it a subject of superstitious conjecture, the result being that one of the priestly class explained the mystery of the dogma of the transmigration of the soul from one body to another, and 92 JAPANESE PILLAR-PRINTS CY KORIUSAI From the collection of Arthur Davison Ficke The Cat and the Occult interpreted the circumstance to mean that the spirit of the de- ceased Governor had entered into one of the house pets. “ It was difficult to fix on a particular one, and it was there- fore decided that every cat passing out of the main entrance after dark was to be treated with due respect and the proper honours. The decision was accepted without question by all the native attendants and others belonging to Government House. The whole guard from sepoy to sibadar, fully ac- quiesced in it, and an oral addition was made to the standing orders that the sentry at the front door ‘ present arms to any cat passing out there after dark.’ ” The orientals are more astute about cats than we are. They ascribe to them a language, a knowledge of the future, an extreme sensitiveness which allows them to perceive ob- jects and beings invisible to man. They are aware that this animal wavers on the borderland between the natural and the supernatural, the conscious and the subconscious. They even allow them to have ghosts. It may be said here that an occidental clergyman has written a book to prove that ani- mals have souls and will share our future existence. A heaven without cats would, of course, be deserted for a hell with them. In Professor de Groot’s “ Religious System of China ” we find an early story of cat sorcery. The incident occurred in 598 A. D., under the Sui Dynasty. In that year the Emperor was about to order his brother-in-law, named Tuh-hu T’o, and his wife to commit suicide for having employed cat-spectres against the Empress and another lady, who had fallen ill simultaneously. By the personal intervention of the Empress herself and that of her younger brother they were granted their lives, but the man was divested of all his dignities and his wife was made a Buddhist nun. During the trial a female slave told the judges that T’o’s mother used to sacrifice to the cat-spectres at night, on every day of the rat. Whenever ^ Rev. J. G. Wood: “Man and Beast: Here and Hereafter.’’ 93 The Tiger in the House a cat-spectre murdered a victim the possessions of the dead man transferred themselves automatically to the house where the beast was kept. T’o had commanded her, so the slave testified, to make the cat-spectre enter the palace in order to secure valuable presents from the Empress. When the judges had heard this confession they ordered the woman to call the spectre back, whereupon setting out a bowl of fragrant rice-gruel, and drumming against it with a spoon, she ex- claimed, ‘ Come, pussy, remain no longer in the palace.’ After a time her face turned blue and moving as if driven by some unseen force, she muttered, ‘ Here is the cat-spectre.’ In the same year the Emperor ordered all families keeping cat-spectres to be banished to the farthest frontier regions. This act seems entirely consistent with modern governmental procedure. De Groot also tells of a hag who tormented a child and made it cry incessantly at night. She did this riding on her cat, that is on its soul as a spectral horse, but was dis- covered and routed by an exorcist. The cat was beaten to death and the hag starved, whereupon the child became ap- peased and stopped crying. The result seems worthy of al- most any means. The domestic cat was imported from China into Japan in the reign of the Emperor Ichigo (986—1011). The animal was at first a rare and high-priced luxury and consequently only the noble families could afford to keep it. How much the Emperor himself liked cats we may learn from the “ 0 -u-ki ” and the “ Makura no soshi.” The former book states that on the nineteenth day of the ninth month of the year 999 a cat brought forth young in the palace. The left and right ministers had the task of bringing up the kittens, and pre- pared boxes (with delicacies) and rice and clothes for them (as for newborn babes). Uma no myobu, a court lady, was appointed wet-nurse for the kittens. The people laughed at the matter and were rather astonished.” The attitude of the people does not seem to be unusual or surprising. The Em- 94 The Cat and the Occult peror further bestowed the fifth rank (that of the court ladies) on a cat in the palace and gave her the name, Mydbu no Omoto (Omoto, the lady-in-waiting). But poor puss, who began her life in Japan as a pampered pet, the favourite of the court, in less than three centuries began to be associated with demons in the popular mind. In the “ Kokonchomonshu ” ( 1254) there is a tale of a Budd- hist Archbishop who received a visit from a beautiful Chinese cat, who came, like Melisande and Mr. Warner’s Calvin, ap- parently from nowhere. The Archbishop was vastly diverted by the antics of the graceful animal, who liked to play with a ball and was very skilful at the game. One day, by way of jest, the priest substituted a precious mamori-sword (a sacred sword with protective magical powers) for the ball. The cat seized it in her mouth, ran away, and was never seen again. “ She was,” remarks the author solemnly, “ probably a transformed demon, who by taking the protective sword could more easily attack people.” In the “ Yamato Kwai-i ki ” ( 1708) there is an account of the strange happenings in the house of a samurai. At night, luminous balls, which no one could catch, bounded about the rooms, about three inches from the floor. Once a group of these mysterious balls illuminated a tree. The maid-servants were attacked by spirits in their sleep; one of them especially was troubled by demons. Her spinning-wheel turned of its own volition and her pillow circled as if on a pivot while she slept. In vain she sought relief from sorceresses, Shinto priests, yamabushi, and Buddhist priests; neither their charms nor their prayers assisted her. At last the master of the house saw a very old cat walking on his hind legs on the roof, with a towel belonging to tbe maid-servant bound round his head.® A slave brought down the cat with an arrow and the ® Pierre Loti found the following in a rare old Japanese hook: “line cer- taine nuit de chaque h'ver, les chats tiennent, dans quelque jard'tn hole, une grande assemblee qui se termine par une ronde generale au clair de lune.” Vient 95 The Tiger in the House house was no longer haunted. The animal was five shaku long and its tail was split (nekomata). The “ Mimi-bukuro ” (1815) introduces us to talking cats, which occur in other oriental and mediaeval tales. In 1795, it seems, a cat observed, “What a pity! ” when his master, the abbot of a monastery, frightened away some doves for which he had been lying in wait. The abbot seized tbe cat and threatened him in this manner: “ It is very strange that you, an animal, can speak. You can certainly transform your- self and haunt mankind. As you have spoken once you must speak again; otherwise I shall break tbe commandment to spare all living beings and kill you.” Whereupon puss re- plied in stately periods: “ We cats are not the only creatures who can speak; all creatures are able to do so when they are more than ten years old. When they reach the age of twenty- four or five they can also change themselves in a miraculous way but no cat ever reaches that age. A cat who is a cross between a fox and a cat can speak before the age of ten.” At the conclusion of this lesson in unnatural history the good abbot reported himself satisfied and gave the cat leave to remain in the monastery, but grimalkin took his departure with three ceremonious bows and was never seen again. So late as 1875 a man of Toulon informed Berenger-Feraud that one of his friends had owned a wizard cat who was ac- customed to take an active part in the evening conversation, at least when it was sufficiently interesting to keep him awake. His mistress consulted him before making plans, giving her reasons for taking one course or another, and she invariably followed the cat’s advice. The animal stated his preferences for meat or fish and was very indignant when his wishes were ensuite, continues Loti, cette clause adorable, que je recommande a I’altention de Jules Lemaitre et de tous ceux qtii sont assez affines pour comprendre le charme des chats: “Pour etre admis a cette reunion, tout chat est tenu de se procurer un fichu ou un mouchoir de soie dont il se coiffe pour danser.” “ Japoneries d’Automne,” p. 150. 96 A JAPANESE FANTASY From CliampHeury’s Les Chats The Cat and the Occult not respected. From time to time he disappeared for several days and the members of the household believed that he took human form during these absences. When he lay at the point of death he prayed that his body might be decently buried. His mistress not daring to inter him in a grave prepared for a human being, laid the coffin behind the cemetery wall adjac- ent to a Christian tomb and at the funeral the cat’s soul was recommended to the care of his Creator. The fabulists all ask the cat to speak and the Cheshire Cat in “ Alice in Won- derland ” is as epigrammatic as an Oscar Wilde duchess. “ If we had not in our intercourse with human beings acquired a certain contempt for speech we could all speak,” says Hinze the Tom Cat in Ludwig Tieck’s delightful play, Der Ges- tiefelte Kater. In the middle ages cats attended witches’ revels, went to the Sabbath, and frequently shared the fate of the witch, which was to be drowned or toasted alive. Many witches about to be burned confessed that they had often taken the shapes of cats, Chatte dans le ]our, la nuit elle est femme, and these confessions stimulated the persecution of the feline race. It must also be remembered that in the middle ages cats, like other animals were moral agents and could be sued or criminally tried. Trials of this sort were not rare. Again the Roman Church claimed full power to anathematize all animate and inanimate things. Doubtless these facts, added to the gleaming eyes and generally mysterious nature of the cat, her inexplicable disappearances and appearances, made it very easy for the judges to believe the witches’ confessions. “ What explanation can be given of the evil repute of our household friend the cat? ” asks Moncure Daniel Conway.’’ “ Is it derived by inheritance from its fierce ancestors of the ® “ Demonology and Devil-Lore.” 97 The Tiger in the House jungle? Was it first suggested by its horrible human-like, sleep-murdering caterwaulings at night? Or has it simply suffered from a theological curse on the cats said to draw the chariot of the goddess of beauty?” The sceptic Fon- tenelle told Moncrif that he had been brought up to believe that all the cats in town went to the Sabbath on the eve of Saint John’s day. Therefore the peasants, in order to rid the country of sorcerers, threw all the cats they could catch into the fire on this day. Cats play a part in the horrid masonic rites described by Dr. Bataille in his “ Le Diabfe au XIX Siecle.” The she-cat is one of a dozen animals to which Dante compares his demons. Mgr. Leon Maurin, once Arch- bishop at Port Luis in Mauritius, writes about the sacrifices of cats by devil-worshippers at midnight on the altars of rifled churches. The devil, himself, indeed, frequently borrowed the black robe of a cat, for bad cats are usually black, as good cats are usually white. The worthy Pere Bougeant writes: " Les betes ne sont qiie des diahles et a la tete de ces diables marclie le chat” Saint Dominique, when he preached of the devil, described him as a cat. The large green or topaze fixed eyes of the inky felines contributed to the stability of the legend. There were spectre-cats, ” familiars,” but most often the cat was the pythoness herself in animal form. We still celebrate the union of cats and witches on Hallowe’en. How were these cat demons raised? Cornelius Agrippa in his “Occult Philosophy” (1651) says that if “Coriander, smallage, henbane and hemlock be made a fume, spirits will presently come together, hence they are called the spirit herbs. Also it is said that a fume made of the root of herb sagapen with the juice of hemlock and henbane, and the herb tapsus barbatus, red sanders and black poppy make spirits and strange shapes appear. Moreover it is said that by certain fumes certain animals are gathered together. . . .” In the “ Con- jurers’ Magazine ” (1791) there is to be found a recipe “ to draw cats together and fascinate them ” : “ In the new moon, 98 The Cat and the Occult gather the herb Nepe, and dry it in the heat of the sun, when it is temperately hot. Gather vervain in the hour ^ and only expose it to the air while O is under the earth. Hang these together in a net, in a convenient place, and when one of them has scented it, her cry will soon call those about her that are within hearing; and they will rant and run about, leaping and capering to get at the net, which must be placed so that they cannot easily accomplish it, for they will certainly tear it to pieces.” There must be other recipes in the “ Grimorium Verum,” the ” Grimoire of Pope Honorius ” and the “ Grand Grimoire.” But when a witch wanted to transform herself into a cat she rubbed herself with a certain ointment. This art, along with that of polishing intaglios, seems to be lost. The Taigheirm was an infernal magical sacrifice of cats, the origin of which lies in remote pagan times, in rites dedicated to the subterranean gods, from whom particular gifts and benefits were solicited by nocturnal offerings. The word it- self, in Gaelic, signifies the invocation of the house. Through Christianity these sacrifices were modified and were offered now to the infernal powers, or as they were called in the Highlands and the Western Isles of Scotland, the Black-Cat Spirits. According to Horst’s “ Deuteroscopy ” black cats were in- dispensable to the incantation ceremony of the Taigheirm, and as will presently appear, plenty of black cats. These were dedicated to the gods of the lower world or later to the foul demons of Christianity. The midnight hour between Friday and Saturday was the authentic time for these horrible prac- tices and invocations to begin; the ceremony was protracted for four days and nights, during which period the operator was forbidden to sleep or to take nourishment. ” After the cats were dedicated to all the devils, and put into a magico-sympathetic condition by the shameful things done to them, and the agony occasioned them, one of them was at once put on the spit, and amid terrific bowlings, roasted 99 The Tiger in the House before a slow fire. The moment that the howls of one tor- tured cat ceased in death, another was put upon the spit, for a minute of interval must not continue if an agent would con- trol hell; and this must continue for four entire days and nights, if the exorcist could hold out, still longer, and even if till his physical powers were absolutely exhausted, he must do so. After a time infernal spirits appeared in the shape of black cats. There came continually more and more of these cats and their howling mingled with that of those roasting on the spit was terrific. Finally a cat of monstrous size appeared with dreadful threats. The gift of second sight was usually the recompense of the Taigheirm.” One of the last Taigheirm, according to Horst, was held in the middle of the seventeenth century in the Island of Mull. The spot is still marked where Allan Maclean, at that time the sacrificial priest, stood with his assistant, Lachlain Mac- lean. He continued his sacrifices to the fourth day when he was exhausted in mind and body and sank into a swoon. The infernal spirits appeared, some in the early progress of the sacrifices, in the shape of black cats. The first, glared at the sacrificers and cried, “ Lachlain Oer ” (Injurer of Cats). Allan, the chief operator, warned Lachlain that he must not waver but must keep the spit turning incessantly whatever he might see or hear. At the end of the second day a monster cat arrived with a horrid howl and assured Lachlain Oer that if he did not cease putting pussies on the spit before their largest brother arrived he would never see the face of God. John Gregorson Campbell in “ Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland” describes the Taigheirm as a “devil’s supper” and he says that tradition in the West Highlands makes mention of three instances of this per- formance, all of which are similar: Allan the cattle-lifter (Ailein nan creach) at Dail-a-chat (subsequently called The Cats’ Field) in Lochaber; Dun Lachlain in the big barn at Pennygoun in Mull; and the Children of Quithen, a small sept at Skye in a cave. The night of the day I first learned of the Taigheirm I dined with some friends who were also entertaining Seumas, Chief of Clann Fhearghuis of Stra-chur, who informed me that to the best of his knowledge the Taigheirm is still celebrated in the Highlands of Scotland. lOO The Cat and the Occult “ Bring on all the devils of hell and I will not stop until I have completed my work,” cried Lachlain. At the end of the fourth day a hlack cat with fire flaming from his eyes perched on the end of a beam in the roof of the barn and his howl could be heard quite across the straits of Mull into Morven. One is not surprised to learn that on the last day Allan was wholly exhausted by the apparitions and could only utter the word “ Prosperity ” before he became unconscious. But Lach- lain was still self-possessed and able to continue. He de- manded prosperity and wealth. Both got what they asked for. It might be added that men of such nerve should be able to get anything they wanted on earth. On his death bed Allan informed his friends that if he and Lachlain (who had died before him) had lived a little longer they would have driven Satan from his throne. When Allan’s funeral cortege reached the churchyard those persons endowed with second sight saw at some distance Lachlain Oer, standing fully armed at the head of a band of black cats, from which streamed the odour of brimstone. In some old French records an account is given of how a man buried a black cat at a spot where four cross-roads met. In the box with the cat he placed bread soaked in holy water and holy oil, sufficient to keep the animal alive for three days. His intention was to dig up his innocent victim, slay him, and make a girdle of his skin, by which means he expected to be able to transform himself into an animal and gain the gift of clairvoy- ance. Unfortunately for his projects, however, the buried puss was exhumed by hounds. The affair thus came to public knowledge and ended in the courts where the guilty man was condemmed for sorcery and probably subsequently burned at the stake. One of the mediaeval grimoires gives a curious recipe by means of which a sorcerer might make himself invisible, in which a black cat again is the central figure: “ Steal a black cat, buy a new pot, a mirror, a piece of flint, an agate, char- iot The Tiger in the House coal, and a tinder; draw water from a fountain at the exact hour of midnight; after that light your fire, put the cat in the pot, and hold the cover with the left hand without moving or looking behind you, whatever noise you may hear, and after it has boiled for twenty-four hours, always without moving or looking behind you, put the mess into a new dish, taking the meat and throwing it over the left shoulder, repeating these words: Accipe quod tihi do et nihil ampUiis. Then crunch the bones one after the other, under the teeth, from the left side, looking at yourself in the mirror, and walk backwards.” When Sir Walter Scott was a young man he went to see that curious being, the Black Dwarf, “ bowed David Ritchie,” in his den, a gloomy bit of hut. After they had sat together for a while the dwarf, glancing at Scott, asked, ” Man, ha’ ye ony poo’r? ” meaning of course, supernatural power. Scott disclaimed any gift of the sort. The dwarf then stretched his finger out to a corner, where for the first time Scott be- came aware that a green-eyed black cat was sitting, staring at him. As the dwarf extended his finger towards the cat he cried, “ He has poo’r,” and Scott admitted that a strange feeling of awe and terror crept over him. A century or two earlier bowed David and his cat would have broken on the wheel. In 1607 a witch bearing the name of Isobel Grierson was burned at the stake after having been accused and convicted of enter- ing the house of one Adam Clark in Prestonpans in, the like- ness of the man’s own pet cat and in the company of a mighty rabble of other cats, who by their noise frightened Adam, his wife, and their servant, the last-named being dragged up and down the stairs by the hair of her head, presumably by the devil in the shape of a black man. Isobel also visited the house of a certain Mr. Brown in the shape of a cat, but being called by name she vanished, not, however, before she had caused him to fall ill of a disease of which he afterwards died. And Alice Duke, alias Manning, of Wincanton in Somerset, who was tried in 1664 for witchcraft, confessed that her 102 The Cat and the Occult familiar visited her “ in the shape of a little cat of dunnish colour, which is as smooth as a want ” and that “ her familiar doth commonly suck her right breast about seven at night ” after which she fell into a kind of trance. Any book on witches will furnish a score of such examples and almost all of them give a long account of the famous Rutterkin case, which has likewise been retold so frequently in books about cats that I will not repeat it here. In a story called “ Ancient Sorceries ” Algernon Blackwood has utilized the theme in fiction.^^ Arthur Vezin, an Englishman travelling in France, descended with his bag at some way station intending to pass the night. As the train moved slowly away one of his com- panions in the compartment, a stranger, leaned out of the window and whispered into his ear a long sentence of which he was only able to catch the last few words, a cause de sonuneil et a cause de chats.” Vezin at once began to notice “ the extraordinary silence of the whole place. Positively the town was muffled. Although the streets were paved with cobbles the people moved about silently, softly, with padded feet, like cats. Nothing made noise. All was hushed, sub- dued, muted. The very voices were quiet, low-pitched like purring. Nothing clamorous, vehement, or emphatic seemed able to live in the drowsy atmosphere of soft dreaming that soothed this little hill-town into its sleep. It was like the woman at the inn — an outward repose screening intense Inner activity and purpose. Yet there was no sign of lethargy or sluggishness anywhere about It. The people were active and alert. Only a magical and uncanny softness lay over them like a spell.” Presently Vezin had the feeling that he was being spied upon and ” he began to see how it was that he was so cleverly watched yet without the appearance of It. The people did nothing directly. They behaved obliquely. . . . They looked at him from angles which naturally should have led their “ John Silence.” 103 The Tiger in the House sight In another direction altogether. Their movements were oblique, too, so far as these concerned himself. The straight, direct thing was not their way evidently. They did nothing obviously. If he entered a shop to buy, the woman walked instantly away and busied herself with something at the farther end of the counter, though answering at once when he spoke, shov/ing that she knew he was there and that this was only her way of attending to him. It was the fashion of the cat she followed. Even in the dining-room of the inn, the be- whiskered and courteous waiter, lithe and silent in all his movements, never seemed able to come straight to his table for an order or a dish. He came by zigzags, indirectly, vaguely, so that he appeared to be going to another table altogether, and only turned suddenly at the last moment, and was there beside him.” At length, the daughter of the keeper of the inn returned, a beautiful, panther-like creature; she brushed past Vezin in a dark hallway, with the touch of kitten’s fur, and awakened in him a most intense passion. And it was from her that he learned the secret of the town, the consecration of its folk to the ancient sorceries. He joined her and her mother In a wild but stealthily noiseless dance on the flagstones of the courtyard of the inn, and then In terror fled to his room, from whence he saw the inhabitants of the town In the guise of cats climbing from the windows, over the roofs, and leaping to the streets below. Rushing into the open he met the girl who cried: ” ‘ Transform, Transform! . . . Rub well your skin before you fly. Come ! Come with me to the Sabbath, to the madness of its furious delight, to the sweet abandonment of Its evil worship! See! the Great Ones are there, and the terrible Sacraments prepared. The throne is occupied. Anoint and come ! Anoint and come ! ’ She grew to the height of a tree beside him, leaping upon the wall with flaming eyes and hair strewn upon the night. He too began to change swiftly. Her hands touched the skin of his face and neck, streaking him with the burning salve that sent 104 The Cat and the Occult the old magic into his blood with the power before which fades all that is good. A wild roar came up to his ears from the heart of the wood, and the girl, when she heard it, leaped upon the wall in the frenzy of her wicked joy. ‘ Satan is there ! ’ she screamed, rushing upon him and striving to draw him with her to the edge of the wall. ‘ Satan has come ! The Sacra- ments call us! Come, with your dear apostate soul, and we will worship and dance till the moon dies and the world is for- gotten.’ ” In the old tales human beings frequently assumed the form of cats in order the better to carry on their turpitudes. The transformation was usually accomplished, as in Blackwood’s story, by the application of a magic salve. In these stories the phenomenon of repercussion is the most interesting feature. It was the belief that if you injured an animal inhabited by a witch spirit when she regained human form she still bore the marks of the injury. Variations of the belief in repercussion occur in the folk-tales of every language and evidence of re- percussion was frequently introduced at witches’ trials. A woodman whose dinner was stolen from him daily by a cat made many attempts to put an end to these depredations. At last, catching pussy in the act, he chopped off one of her paws, and when he returned home he observed, to his horror, that his wife had lost one of her hands. There is the similar tale of the Swabian soldier who used to visit the young woman to whom he was betrothed every evening when he was off duty. But on one occasion the girl warned him that he must never come to her on Friday because it was not convenient for her to see him then. His suspicions were accordingly aroused and the very next Friday night he set out for his sweetheart’s bouse. On the way a white cat dogged his steps and as the animal become importunate he drew his sword and slashed off one of her hind paws, whereupon she ran away. Arriving at the girl’s house he found her in bed and when he asked her what was the matter she gave a very confused reply. Noting I OS The Tiger in the House stains of blood on the white coverlet he drew it back and saw that his betrothed was bathed in blood for one of her feet had been chopped off. “ Witch ! ” he cried and left her. In three days she was dead.^^ There is further the history of the woman of Ceyreste whose children were always ailing, a state of affairs for which there was no natural way of accounting. A neighbour told her that she thought her mother-in-law might be responsible. “ She may be a witch.” The woman spoke to her husband and they determined to watch the cradles of their offspring. That very night observing a black cat crawling over the side of the baby’s crib, the man struck the animal a violent blow with a club. With a howl the beast sprang through the open window and vanished. The mother- in-law had been in the habit of paying daily visits to her son’s family but the next day she did not appear, nor yet the next. After a few days her son went to see her and found her in a bad temper with her hand bandaged. In response to his query as to why she had not come to his house as usual she replied in a rage: “ Look at the state of my fingers. What- ever should I come to your house for? If I had been struck by a hatchet instead of a stick my hand would have been cut off and I would have had nothing but a stump.” One more: the witches of Vernon in the shape of cats inhabited an ancient castle. Three or four men determined to pass the night in this castle; they were attacked by the cats and many wounds were exchanged. Afterwards the women returned to their human forms and were found to be suffering from corresponding gashes. It seems rather surprising that Arthur Machen has not touched upon the repercussion phenomenon in any of his mystic masterpieces. Again we must turn to Algernon Black- wood, this time to his story, “ The Empty Sleeve.” The 12 Ernst Meier; “ Deutsche Sagen, Sitten und Gebrauche aus Schwaben”; Stuttgart, 1852. 13 “ The London Magazine”; January 1911. 106 The Cat and the Occult violinist Hyman “ believed that there was some fluid portion of a man’s personality which could be projected to a distance, and even semimaterialized there. The ‘ astral body,’ he called it, or some such foolishness, claiming that it could appear in various forms, according to its owner’s desire, even in animal forms.” John Gilmer was awakened one night by a noise In the flat; seizing a Turkish sword from the wall he entered the sitting room where he saw a moving figure. The encounter and terror of both beings in the dark Is described, and as the creature, which John finally recognized as an enormous cat, fled, John struck it with his weapon, almost severing one of the front legs from the body. Months afterwards the Gilmers met Hyman wearing spectacles and a beard. William pointed out to his brother the difference. “ ‘ But didn’t you notice — ’ ‘What?’ ‘ He had an empty sleeve.’ ‘ Yes,’ said William. ‘ He’s lost an arm! ’ ” The supernatural plays a part in many other stories. On the twenty-sixth of March, 1782 (it is remarkable how many such miracles are carefully dated) a gentleman of wealth con- sulted Count Cagliostro, In an attempt to discover If his wife, who was young and beautiful, had been unfaithful to him. Cagliostro assured the anxious husband that the proof was a simple one and gave him a phial of liquid which he Instructed him to drink before going to bed. “ If your wife has broken her vows,” he added, “ you will be transformed into a cat.” The husband returned home and told his wife the whole story; she laughed at his credulity but he swallowed the draught and went to bed. Rising early, the lady left him sleeping, but later as he did not appear, went to seek him, when to her astonishment she found in his place a huge black cat. She screamed, called out her husband’s name, and finally knelt at the foot of the bed and begged for pardon, confessing that she had committed a sin with a handsome young soldier 107 The Tiger in the House who had cajoled her by means of tears and tales of heroic deeds to forget her marriage vows. A story known as “ The Devil’s Cat ” is current in North Germany: A peasant owned three beautiful cats. A neighbour begged one of these from him and obtained her. To accustom her to her new home he shut her up in the loft. At night, puss, popping her head out of the window, asked, “What shall I bring tonight?” “ Thou shalt bring mice,” answered the man. The cat set to work, casting all she caught on the floor till the loft was so full of dead mice that it was almost impossible to open the door and the man was employed the entire day in throwing them away by bushels. That night again the cat put her head through the window and asked, “ What shall I bring tonight? ” “ Thou shalt bring rye,” answered the farmer. In the morn- ing the loft was stacked with rye. The man now saw the true nature of the cat and carried her back to his neighbour, “ for had he given her work the third time he could never have gotten rid of her.” His mistake, of course, was in not asking for gold on the second night. It is her unusually fine nervous system, her electricity, which made the cat useful to the sorcerer, and this same nervous system, her extreme sensitiveness and susceptibility often en- able her to perform seeming miracles. In the year 1783 two cats belonging to a merchant of Messina warned him of the ap- proach of an earthquake. Before the first shock they tried to scratch their way through the floor of a room in which they were confined. Their master, observing their fruitless efforts, opened the door for them. At two other closed doors they continued to exhibit symptoms of frantic terror and when finally set at liberty they ran swiftly through the town and made for the open fields where they began to dig. The earth- quake destroyed the house they had left and several surround- ing it but the merchant who, filled with curiosity over the strange behaviour of the cats, had followed them, was saved. This story has a perfectly natural explanation: the extremely 108 The Cat and the Occult sensitive nervous organization of the cats was affected by the seismic disturbances long before they registered on the infinitely coarser nervous system of man, who if he ever pos- sessed these finer perceptions has almost completely lost them, except in isolated cases. Earthquakes do not occur with sufficient frequency to obtain much evidence in this direction, but cases in which cats have warned householders of fires, sometimes saving many lives thereby, are numberless. Cats have some uncanny fashion of reckoning time. A London barrister, one of the staff of a well-known provincial newspaper, told Lindsay that his cat was accustomed to meet him regularly on a certain road on his way home from his office. There is an infallible method by which you can test your own cat in this respect. Feed him regularly at a certain hour each day for a few weeks and thereafter, if you have no clock in the house, he will inform you himself when the hour arrives. Alexandre Dumas relates a story of a clair- voyant cat which goes even further.^^ His Mysouff used to accompany him from his home in the Rue de I’Ouest every morning as far as the Rue de Vaugirard and wait for him every evening at the same point. “ The curious thing was that, on such days as some chance circumstance or casual in- vitation tempted me to break my dutiful habits as a son and I was not going back to dine at home, Mysouff, though the door was opened for his exit as usual, positively refused to go out, and lay motionless on his cushion, in the posture of a serpent biting his own tail. It was quite different on days when I meant to return punctually. Then, if they forgot to open the door for him, Mysouff would scratch at it per- sistently with his claws till he got what he wanted.” When Avery Hopwood visits his country-house he is accustomed to take his cat with him in his automobile. Abelard sleeps peace- For a particularly good example see “Lady Jule” by Francis Wilson; “Ladies’ Home Journal”; November 1902. “ Mes Betes.” 109 The Tiger in the House fully during most of the journey, but invariably as the motor ascends a certain hill, a quarter of a mile from the house, he gets up and begins to stretch himself. Cats in many quarters of the globe are held responsible for the weather; they are actually said to make it good or bad. In other localities they are regarded as competent barometers. This is not strange when it is remembered that cats are extraordinarily sensitive to the changes of temperature, while by storms they are sometimes affected almost to the point of madness. Colette Willy, who has more delicately expressed the psychology of cats than almost any one else. In one of her dialogues called, “ I’Orage,” gives us what may very well be an accurate vision of a cat’s mind during a hot summer tempest. Kiki-la-Doucette is speaking to Toby-Chlen; “I have a headache. Do you not perceive under the nearly bare skin of my temples, under my bluish and transparent skin of an animal of fine breeding, the beating of my arteries? It is terrible ! Around my forehead my veins are like vipers in convulsions and I do not know what gnome is forging in my brain. O, be silent, or at least speak so softly that the cours- ing of my agitated blood will cover your words.” Again, “The storm is here. Gods! how I suffer! If I could only quit this skin and this fur which smother me, if I could only turn myself inside out, naked as a skinned mouse, towards the freshness ! O dog, you cannot see but I feel the sparks which crackle at the tip of each of my hairs. Do not come near me: I am about to send forth a bolt of blue flame. . . .” Pres- ently the dog describes her: “ You are changed. Cat! Your drawn figure is that of a starved creature, and your hair, like burnished metal here, ruffled there, gives you the pitiful ap- pearance of a weasel which has fallen Into oil.” And when the Lady approaches, Kiki mutters, “ If she touches me I will devour her.” Pierquin de Gembloux describes a different “ Sept Dialogues de Betes.” It “Traite de la Folie des Anlmaux.” I lO The Cat and the Occult reaction to the effect of a storm in which a surplus of electri- city in the air, a state of high electrical tension, sometimes produces hilarity, gaiety, noisiness, amounting occasionally to a kind of joyous mania, a morbid exuberance of animal spirits, especially in young cats. This strange behaviour of cats during atmospheric changes has disturbed the imaginations of many peoples at many times. If a cat tears at cushions or carpets or is generally uneasy she is said to be raising a wind. This superstition is still widely prevalent in seacoast towns, on Cape Cod and else- where. Idle terrors of this character all have for a basis the science of divination, which neglects no token, but from effects overlooked by the ignorant ascends through a sequence of interlinked causes. This science knows, for example, that atmospheric conditions which cause a dog to howl are fatal to certain sufferers, that the monotonous wheeling of ravens, who frequent localities of murder and execution, in the air means the presence of unburied bodies. The flight of other birds prognosticates a hard winter, while others are haru- spices of coming storms. It may even be stated categorically that the superstition that it is unlucky to walk under a ladder is based on an accident that has befallen some one who has done so. Perhaps the hod-carrier on the ladder has dropped a brick on his head. On that which the mystic discerns ignorance remarks and generalizes. The first sees useful warnings everywhere, the second is terrified by everything. As a matter of fact the cat with her superior nervous organism is conscious of the approach of the wind before man is and the condition of her fur alone will indicate weather changes to the careful observer. It Is a common notion that the weather will change if a cat sneezes, scratches the leg of a table, or sits with her tail to the fire. Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of the author of “ The Origin of Species,” in a poem, ” Signs of Foul Weather,” notes the behaviour of the cat at the approach of a storm. 1 1 1 The Tiger in the House Puss on the hearth, with velvet paws. Sits wiping o’er his whiskered jaws. “ She useth,” writes John Swan, in his “ Speculum Mundi ” (Cambridge, 1634), “therefore to wash her face with her feet, which she licketh and moiseneth with her tongue; and it is observed by some that if she put her feet beyond the crown of her head in this kind of washing, it is a sign of rain.” In his “ Hesperides ” Herrick refers to this belief: True calendars as pusses eare, IV asli t o’er to tell what change is neare. But there is another old English saying which has it that when the cat wipes her face over her ears it is a sign of fine weather and when a cat sits with her back towards the fire it is a sign of frost. Willsford remarks quaintly enough: “ Cats coveting the fire more than ordinary or licking their feet or trimming the hair of their heads and mustachios presages a storm.” There is something in the superstition assuredly. Moncrif noticed that cats opened or closed their fur accord- ing to the weather and I have observed that cats lick their fur more than ordinarily in an atmosphere surcharged with mois- ture, just as they dry themselves with their tongues when they get wet. But cats always wash their faces after dinner, fol- lowing the custom of the Romans rather than that of the Americans in this respect. A folk-tale has it that a cat caught a sparrow who observed, “ No gentleman eats before wash- ing his face.” The cat relinquished his hold on the bird to prove himself a gentleman and the sparrow flew away. Since that date cats have found it wiser to wash after dinner. They also wash themselves to sleep. “ Oh ! that all females made as good use of their tongues,” apostrophizes one Isobel Hill. If a cat’s washing indicates bad weather, failure to do so indicates a sick cat. “ The cat cleans her face with a look 1 12 MINETTE WASHES From a drawing by Gottfried Mind The Cat and the Occult of delight ” is the phrase of John Clare. My Feathers puts her paw over her crown rain or shine. Who has described the operation more delightfully than Leigh Hunt? “ Pussy . . . symbolically gives a twist of a yawn, and a lick to her whiskers. Now she proceeds to clean herself all over, having a just sense of the demands of her elegant person, — beginning judiciously with her paws, and fetching amazing tongues at her hind-hips. Anon, she scratches her neck with a foot of rapid delight; leaning her head towards it, and shutting her eyes, half to ac- commodate the action of the skin, and half to enjoy the luxury. She then rewards her paws with a few more touches; look at the action of her head and neck, how pleasing it is, the ears pointed forward, and the neck gently arching to and fro ! Finally she gives a sneeze, and another twist of mouth and whiskers, and then, curling her tail towards her front claws, settles herself on her hind quarters, in an attitude of bland meditation.” The cat’s relation to the weather is recognized in these United States, although different districts are not in agree- ment as to the meaning of the signs. In Eastern Kansas a cat washing her face before breakfast foretells rain; in New England a cat washes her face in the parlor before a shower; in Western Maine rain is assured if the cat scratches a fence. It is held also in Western Maine that when a cat is sharpening her claws the way her tail points shows the direction in which the wind will blow the next day. In Eastern Massachusetts the face of the washing cat points toward the direction from which the wind will blow. In New York and Pennsylvania the mere washing of the face signifies clear weather. If you see a cat looking out of the window you may be certain that it will storm soon, according to the inhabitants of Central Maine, where there must be continual storms because a cat in the house will spend half the day gazing, out of the window. The belief in Cambridge, Massachussetts, that if the fur shines II3 The Tiger in the House and looks glossy it is a sign that it will be pleasant the follow- ing day is credibled^ The belief held in Scilly Cove, Newfoundland, that a cat drowning in salt-water will bring on rain is directly in line with certain precepts of ceremonial magic. According to W. W. Skeat if a Malay woman puts an inverted earthen- ware pan upon her head and then, setting it on the ground, fills it with water and washes a cat in it till the animal is nearly drowned, heavy rain will certainly follow. In this per- formance the inverted bowl is intended to symbolize the vault of heaven. A similar custom prevails in Java where usually two cats are bathed, a male and a female. Sometimes the animals are carried in procession with music. In Batavia, also children carry cats around for this purpose. After duck- ing them in pools they release them. In Southern Celebes the inhabitants attempt to create a shower by carrying a cat tied in a sedan chair thrice around the parched fields, while they drench him with bamboo squirts. When the cat mews they cry, “ O Lord, let rain fall upon us! ” In a village of Su- matra to procure rain the women wade into the river, and splash one another. A black cat is thrown in and made to swim, and then is allowed to escape pursued by splashing women. Other superstitions surround the cat. “ In the eyes of the superstitious,” writes Mr. T. F. Thiselton Dyer, “ there is scarcely a movement of the cat which is not supposed to have some significance.” If a cat jumps over a coffin she must be killed or great misfortune is sure to follow. The Chinese be- lieve that a cat can cause the dead to rise in this manner. As this would frequently prove awkward to the heirs and assigns cats are kept as far as possible from dead people in China. In case, however, the accident occurs it becomes nec- 1® These examples are from Fanny D. Bergen’s “Animal and Plant Lore, collected from the oral tradition of English speaking people.” 19 “ Malay Magic.” The Cat and the Occult essary to swat the resurrected dead man with a broom where- upon he will become recumbent again. “ My name,” de- clares the sorrowful vampire in James Branch Cabell’s incom- parable “ Jurgen,” ” is Florimel, because my nature no less than my person was as beautiful as the flowers of the field and as sweet as the honey which the bees (who furnish us with such admirable examples of industry) get out of these flowers. But a sad misfortune changed all this. For I chanced one day to fall ill and die (which, of course, might happen to anyone), and as my funeral was leaving the house the cat jumped over my coffin. That was a terrible misfortune to be- fall a poor girl so generally respected, and in wide demand as a seamstress; though, even then, the worst might have been averted had not my sister-in-law been of what they call a humane disposition and foolishly attached to the cat. So they did not kill it, and I, of course, became a vampire.” Another superstition has it that if a cat jumps over a corpse the soul of the deceased enters its body. There is a reference to this superstition of the cat and the dead in ” Bleak House.” When Lady Dedlock’s miserable lover dies the doctor drives Krook’s cat out of the room. “ Don’t leave the cat there! ” he says. “That won’t do!” Lady Jane goes furtively downstairs, winding her lithe tail and licking her lips. In one of Ambrose Bierce’s horror stories a cat conceals her- self in a coffin and mangles the features of the corpse. But a superstition prevails in Devonshire that a cat will not remain in a house with an unburied corpse and stories are often told of cats, who, on the death of one of the inmates of a house, have disappeared and not returned until after the funeral. According to one authority in spiritualism (Elliott O’Donnell: “Animal Ghosts”) cats sceyit death, that is they smell the presence of the guiding spirit who has come to take the new soul away. “ Before a death in a house I have watched a cat gradually showing signs of uneasiness. It has moved 20 “John Mortonson’s Funeral” in “Can Such Things Be?” II5 The Tiger in the House from place to place, unable to settle in any one spot for any length of time, had frequent fits of shivering, gone to the door, sniffed the atmosphere, thrown back its head and mewed in a low, plaintive key, and shown the greatest reluctance to being alone in the dark.” In Germany the presence of a cat on the bed of a sick person means that death is approaching and to this day black cats are kept away from children’s cradles. There is a legend, indeed, to the effect that cats suck children’s breaths in their sleep, a silly legend as Harrison Weir has pointed out, for the jaw formation of the cat is not adapted for sucking purposes. The factual foundation for this belief is that cats, liking warm and luxurious places to lie, frequently creep into cradles and if the cat is big enough it may happen occasionally that a baby may be accidentally smothered. If a kitten comes to the house in the morning it is lucky; if in the evening it portends evil unless it stays to prevent it. In Scotland if a white cat enters the house it is regarded as a forerunner of sickness or trouble; if, however, a black cat enters it is regarded as a harbinger of good luck, and he who presumes to kill or drown the animal may expect ill luck for nine years. The sneezing of a cat on a wedding day is said to be a fortunate omen for the bride. In Lancashire it is re- garded as unlucky to allow a cat to die in the house; hence when they are ill they are usually drowned, which is certainly unlucky for the cats. It is likewise a Lancashire superstition that those who play with cats never enjoy good health. But the magnetism of the cat and her repose should have the most beneficial influence on human health. Louis Wain, whose word may be said to have some weight on this subject, offers the following evidence: “ I have found as a result of many years of inquiry and study, that people who keep cats and are in the habit of petting them, do not suffer from those petty ailments which all flesh is heir to. Rheumatism and nervous complaints are uncommon with them, and pussy’s lov- ers are of the sweetest temperament. I have often felt the 1 16 The Cat and the Occult benefit, after a long spell of mental effort, of having my cats sitting across my shoulders, or of half an hour’s chat with Peter.” Another English country superstition is that black cats will bring lovers to a girl. The rhyme goes as follows : Whenever the cat o’ the house is black, The lasses o’ lovers will have no lack, and another amusing folk-rhyme has it: Kiss the black cat. An ’twill make ye fat; Kiss the white one, ’Twill make ye lean. But what will happen if you kiss a tortoise-shell, a tabby, or a blue cat does not appear to be certain. These rhymes are to be found in Hone’s ‘‘ Every-Day Book ” which gives us fur- ther particulars about the strange customs of cats: In Devon- shire and Wiltshire it is believed that a May cat or, in other words, a cat born in the month of May, will never catch any rats or mice, but contrary to the wont of cats, will bring into the house snakes, and slow-worms, and other disagreeable reptiles. In Hungary there is a superstition that before a cat can become a good mouser he must be stolen. If a man with a cat’s hair on his clothing rides, his horse will perspire violently and will soon become exhausted. If the wind blows over a cat riding in a vehicle that too will weary the horse. There is a further superstition that on the death of a tom cat the life will depart from all his unborn progeny. The Japan- ese have a superstition that if you rub a bamboo brush on the back of a female she can conceive of herself. In Cumberland, England, it is believed that the hair of a cat if swallowed by a human being will turn into a kitten inside him. Cats in the Isle of Man have no tails; neither have those of the Bismarck Archipelago off the North Coast of New Guinea. I17 The Tiger in the House Natives sometimes eat cats and unscrupulous neighbours might steal a cat for a meal. Accordingly in the interest of the higher morality people remove this stumbling block from the path of their weaker brothers by docking their cats and keep- ing the severed portion in a secret place. If now a cat is stolen and eaten the lawful owner of the animal has It in his power to avenge the crime. He need only bury the piece of tail with certain spells in the ground and the thief will fall ill. If a South Slavonian has a mind to pilfer or steal at market, he has nothing to do but to burn a blind cat, and then throw a pinch of the ashes over the person with whom he Is higgling; after that he can take what he likes from the booth, and the owner will be none the wiser, having become as blind as the dead cat with whose ashes he has been sprinkled.^^ In the United States Fanny Bergen has collected numberless examples of these curious superstitions concerning cats. In New England it is bad luck to kill a cat. In Pennsylvania it is believed that if a farmer kills a cat some of his stock will die. Cats of three colours bring luck in Canada, Washington, and Eastern Kansas. Japanese sailors share this superstition. In Eastern Kansas the possession of a tortoise-shell is a surety against fire. In New England a “ smutty-nosed ” cat brings prosperity to its owner and in Maine a white cat brings poverty. In Massachussetts a double-pawed cat is a lucky omen but In New York a black and white cat Is sure to bring sickness to the family. The belief that it is bad luck to allow a black cat“^ to cross your 21 From Frazer’s “The Golden Bough.” 22 “ I slink away, being superstitious regarding cherry-coloured cats, step- ladders, and cross-eyed theatre managers,” writes James Huneker in “ Bedouins,” p. 142 . In a poem by Susan K. Phillips, the following lines occur; I’m no nvay superstitious as the person called our Mat, When he’d none sail %vith the herring fleet, ’cause he met old Susie’s cat. I18 The Cat and the Occult path is pretty general in the United States and elsewhere as well. But to be followed by a black cat signifies good luck in New England and Eastern Kansas. In Eastern New Eng- land you are sure to quarrel with any one to whom you have presented a cat. In Alabama if a cat washes her face in front of several persons the first she looks at will be the first to get married. In Eastern Kansas it is unlucky to move into a house where cats have been left by former occupants. Their owners should have killed the animals. In some parts of the United States it is considered bad luck to move a cat when the family moves; in other parts it is considered bad luck not to move the cat. In Ohio (Hamilton County) it is believed that a child who plays with a cat will become stupid. Cats go mad if allowed to eat too much meat or if they lie much before a fire, according to authorities who live in Brookline, Massachussetts. And in Maryland there is a superstition that if you shave off a cat’s whiskers you deprive him of his sense of smell ! The Negro superstitions concerning cats, connected as they are with ancient African voodoo worship and noxious paludal ceremonies, are extremely curious. One has it that in the tip of every cat’s tail are three hairs of the devil, which give the cat a tendency to prowl. Sandy Jenkins, the hero of James David Corrothers’s “ The Black Cat Club,” “ was dressed to kill; his linen was spotless; his clothing faultless; his cane, chrysanthemum, and patent leathers matchless,” and under one arm he carried his black cat, Mesmerizer, to hoodoo his enemies. In some verses, called “ De Black Cat Crossed his Tuck ” in this same book Mr. Corrothers epitomizes the Negro feeling about the animal. An old Negro named Sambo Lee was “ cotched ” by a Black Cat, and cursed. Sam lost his job, was bit by a policeman’s dog, beaten by the policeman, put in jail, quarreled with his wife’s mother, lost his “ lady- “ Animal and Plant Lore, collected from the oral tradition of English speaking people.” 24 p^gg II9 The Tiger in the House lub,” was worsted at fisticuffs, was robbed, and spent three weeks In a hospital as a direct result of this curse. Den to de cunjah-man Sam sped. An dis am wliut de cunjah-man said: “ Black Cat am a pow’ful man; Ruinin’ mo’tals am his plan. Ole Satan an de ’Riginal Sin Am de daddy an mammy o’ him. He’s got nine hunderd an ninety-nine Vibes — Nineteen thousan an ninety-nine wibes — He’s kin to cholera an’ allied To smallpox on de mammy’s side. A n all de ebils on de earf Stahted at de Black Cat’s birf! — Jes’ stop an die right ivhah you’s at, Ef yo’ luck bin crossed by de ole Black Cat!” An den Sam read in history Dat a cat crossed Pharaoh by de see. An’ hurried him, as sho’s you bo’n. Too deep to heah ole Gabriel’s ho’nf A n dat de cat crossed Jonah once. An’ made him ack a regular dunce. Crossed Bonaparte at Waterloo, An’ got Jeems Blaine defeated too. "Oh, Laud a-mussy now on me!” Cried Sam, “an on dis history!” An’ den Sam went an killed de cat — Swo’e he’d make an end o’ dat; — Burried him in de light o’ de moon, Wid a rabbit’s foot an a silver spoon. But de Black Cat riz, an swallered him whole — Bunt his house an took his soul! The terrifying consequences of killing a cat are referred to again In a poem by Virginia Frazer Boyle: “ I Kilt er Cat”: These verses may be found on page 89 of Graham R. Tomson’s anthology, “ Concerning Cats.” 120 The Cat and the Occult Dars er shakiti an er achin’ ermongst dese ole bones. And I cries in de night wid de ’miseration moans. An I hears sumpin ’mawkin wid er solemn sorter groans — I kilt er cat! I feels an I knows dat dars sumpin ain right, ’Ca’se er black streek’s er ’pearing in de broad daylight. An de debbil he rid my chist all night — I kilt er cat! * * * * I wan ers res’less lack, all erbout frough de wood, Wid de rabbit jut fur comp’ny, but hit cain’t do any good. An dese ole feets cain’t be quiet, an dey wouldn ef dey could — I kilt er cat! ***** I droivns ’im in de water, but he sneakted out ergin. Den I feels dat I ’mittin er mos awful kind er sin. Fur I hangs ’im ’dout er chance an I cain’t furgit ’is grin — I kilt er cat! Hab mercy on dis darky, oh! I cain’t git shet er dat. Fur I sees de porten’s pintin des es shore’s I sees dis hat, Fs hoodooed wid de sperrit uv ole Jonas’s black cat — Fur I kilt dat cat! “ Wizard cats,” writes Frank Hamel, “ have been known to do serious harm to those against whom they have a grudge, and it is well to be sure, if you value your life, whether you are dealing with a real animal or a ‘ familiar ’ when you feel angry.” There is, for example, the very moral story of the young man of Radnorshire who threw a stone at a cat on his wedding day. His health began to fail at once and he fre- quently disappeared for weeks at a time. During these peri- ods the legend has it that he took feline form. After his death his soul entered a cat’s body and the animal prowled the district at night and struck terror into the hearts of naughty children. I2I The Tiger in the House Sailors are almost as superstitious as negroes about cats, but the superstition assumes a more favourable form. Evi- dence that the sailor loves puss may be gathered from the number of words used on board ship derived from the word cat. In certain sea-coast towns in England sailors’ wives keep black cats to protect their husbands at sea. The liveliness of a ship cat portends a wind and the drowning of a ship cat seems to be fatal for all on board as well as for the cat him- self. Japanese sailors regard three-coloured cats (black, white, and brown), as an excellent charm against spirits and are said to be unwilling to put to sea without one. A well known superstition has it that a cat will desert a ship about to start on its last voyage and there is evidence to show that sailors have refused to undertake voyages following the deser- tion of the ship’s cat.“® Charles Henry Ross in “ The Book of Cats ” quotes an anonymous author on the meaning of cat dreams. It is pos- sible that Dr. Freud might not agree with these conclusions at all points: “ If any one dreams that he hath encountered a cat or killed one, he will commit a thief to prison and prosecute him to the death, as the cat signifies a common thief. If he dreams that he eats the cat’s flesh he will have the goods of the thief who robbed him. If he dreams that he hath the skin then he will have all the thief’s goods. If any one dreams that he fought with a cat who scratched him sorely, that de- notes some sickness or affliction.” 28 On page 276 of “ Rabbits, Cats and Cavies,” C. H. Lane quotes the follow- ing story: “The morning before the recent accident to H. M. Destroyer Salmon, that vessel was lying alongside of H. M. S. Sturgeon. Upon the former vessel dwelt two cats, the special pets of the crew, and who had never been known to show the slightest inclination to leave the ship. But on this particular morning in spite of being chased by the crew and worried by the dogs, the cats never faltered in their determination to get off the Salmon and on to the Sturgeon. And when the first-named destroyer had weighed anchor for what was to prove the disastrous voyage, the cats made one last spring as the vessels separated, and landed on the deck of H. M. S. Sturgeon.” 122 The Cat and the Occult There are cat remedies : a cure for erysipelas was to cut off a cat’s ear (or to take three drops of blood drawn from a vein under the cat’s tail) and allow the blood to drop slowly on the affected part. The brain of a cat, taken in small doses, has been used as a love potion. Ben Jonson in his Masque of Queens, makes a witch sing thus: I, from the jawes of a gardener’s bitch. Did snatch these bones and then leapt the ditch; Yet went I back to the house againe. Killed the black cat and here is the brain. A nostrum for preserving the eyesight was to burn the head of a black cat to ashes and have a little dust blown into the eyes three times a day. A whitlow could be cured by placing the affected finger a quarter of an hour each day in a cat’s ear, and the foot of the wild cat was considered an excellent remedy for erysipelas and lameness. Cat’s grease was a useful com- modity but of no avail for magical or medicinal purposes un- less the cat made a voluntary offering of it. T. F. Thiselton Dyer, in “ English Folk-Lore,” quotes Hunt as follows: “ In Cornwall those little gatherings which come on children’s eye- lids, locally called ‘ whilks ’ and also ‘ warts ’ are cured by passing the tail of a black cat nine times over the place.” Of course Topsell in his quaint “History of Four-footed Beasts” (1658) has a good deal to say on this subject: “ Alsius prescribeth a fat Cat sod for the Gowt, first taking the fat, and anointing therewith the sick part, and then wetting wool or tow in the same, and binding it to the offending place. The liver of a Cat dryed and beat to powder is good against the stone: the dung of a female Cat with the claw of an Oul hanged about the neck of a man that hath had seven fits of a Quartain Ague, cureth the same: a powder made of the gall of a black Cat and the weight of a groat thereof taken and mingled with four crowns weight of Zambach, helpeth the convulsion and wr}'ness of the mouth: and if the gall of a Cat with the black dung of the same Cat, be burned in perfume under a woman travelling with a dead childe, it will cause it pres- ently to come forthe: and Pliny saith that if a pin, or thorn, or fish bone, stick in one’s mouth, let him rub the inside of it with a little cat’s dung, and it will easily come forth. Given to a woman suffering from the flux with a little Rozen 123 The Tiger in the House Possibly just here you may grin a little, sink comfortably into your chair, and reflect that the people of the United States are at least superior to such silly superstitions. No assump- tion could be more incorrect.”® Probably every one of these beliefs has been current in some part of America at one time or another. In certain parts of England there is credence put in the statement that a cat’s hair is indigestible and if one is swallowed death will ensue. It is possible that Americans do not entertain this legend but I can personally vouch for the fact that every boy I knew as a child in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, believed that a horse hair immersed in a tumbler of water would eventually turn into a snake. As for the wart cure, we learn through no less an authority than Mark Twain that such a belief existed along the banks of the Mississippi. When Huckleberry Finn enters the pages of “ Tom Saw- yer ” he carries a dead cat with him, and when Tom asks him “ what dead cats is good for ” Huck answers, “ cure warts with.” ” But say,”queries Tom, “ how do you cure ’em with dead cats? ” “ Why, you take your cat and go and get in the graveyard ’long about midnight when somebody that was wicked has been buried; and when it’s midnight a devil will come, or maybe and oil of Roses and it stayeth the humour; and for a Web in the eye of a horse, evening and morning blow in the powder of Cat’s dung and it shall be cured.” 28 There is really no panacea, mystical, moral, political, or physical, that Americans will not believe in. Moncure Daniel Conway gives the following examples in “Demonology and Devil-Lore”: “Dr. Dyer, an eminent physician of Chicago, Illinois, told me (1875) ttiat a case occurred in that city within his personal knowledge, where the body of a woman who had died of consumption was taken out of the grave and the lungs burned, under the belief that she was drawing after her in the grave some of her surviving relatives. In 1874, accord- ing to the ‘ Providence Journal,’ in the village of Peacedale, Rhode Island, Mr. William Rose dug up the body of his own daughter and burned her heart, under the belief that she was wasting away the lives of other members of his family.” A recent criminal trial in one of the Middle Western States brought out the fact that many an American pocket, even today, carries a silver bullet as a talisman against the witch-cat. 29 “ Tom Sawyer,” Chapter VI. 124 From a drawing by Grandville in Vie privee et publiqtie des animaux I The Cat and the Occult two or three, but you can’t see ’em, you can only hear some- thing like the wind, or maybe hear ’em talk; and when they’re taking that feller away, you heave your cat after ’em and say, ‘ Devil follow corpse, cat follow devil, warts follow cat. I’m done with ye!’ That’ll fetch any wart.” We no longer burn witches and we no longer, in groups, persecute cats. Indeed puss has settled down to a life of lux- ury and appreciation which she has not hitherto enjoyed since the days when she watched the temple altars of the Nile, near the catadupe, or strolled among the guests at the Sultan’s ban- quet. If she is no longer a god, at least she is still worshipped. But do not be mislead by these signs. We have forgotten the dark days but the cat remembers; the racial consciousness, the hereditary traits in cats are strong. And she will never forget her wild rides with witches, her appearances at the Sabbath, frequently attached to the belt of the pythoness, the use of her body as a casket for the soul of the sorceress, her persecu- tion. And today, for that reason, she is more in touch with what we call the supernatural than any other animal, including man. Wood^^ gives a case of a lady and her cat simultane- ously seeing and being variously affected mentally and physi- cally by a vision of an old wrinkled hag. The lady became the victim of a helpless fascination, of paralysis of mobility and In her book, already alluded to, Fanny Bergen gives a long list of examples of cat remedy superstitions which are credited in various parts of the United States. In Eastern Kansas the skin of a black cat worn in one’s clothing will cure rheumatism. In Somerset County, Maine, the blood of a black cat is used to cure shingles. In other parts of the United States it is believed that shingles may be cured by applying the freshly removed skin of a cat to the affected sur- face. A correspondent from Western New York wrote Mrs. Bergen in regard to this: “This is no hearsay matter with the writer, for in his boyhood he was afflicted with this disease and passed a night with the bloody skin of his fa- vourite pussy covering his left side and the pit of his stomach.” In Eastern Massachusetts this same cure is prescribed for hives, and in Salem, an old Negro was cured of consumption by this method. In Southern Illinois three hairs from the tip of a black cat’s tail are sufficient to cure a felon and in the South a sty may be cured by brushing it nine times with a black cat’s tail. 31 “ Man and Beast: Here and Hereafter,” p. 320. 125 The Tiger in the House speech, while the cat, on the contrary, made frantic efforts to escape. Perhaps this cat had had an unfortunate experience in some past life with the old hag; at any rate other cats have been known to entertain a vast liking for spiritualistic seances. Algernon Blackwood has written an astoundingly astute story on this theme, “ A Psychical Invasion,” in which he contrasts the effects of the presence of spirits on a cat and a dog. In an attempt to discover the causes of certain phe- nomena John Silence visits a house at midnight, accompanied by a dog and a cat. “ Cats in particular, he believed, were al- most continuously conscious of a larger field of vision, too detailed even for a photographic camera, and quite beyond the range of normal human organs. He had, further, ob- served that while dogs were usually terrified in the presence of such phenomena, cats on the other hand were soothed and satisfied. They welcomed manifestations as something be- 82 Elliott O’Donnell, in “Animal Ghosts”; William Rider and Son; London; 1913, speaks of similar experiences: “From endless experiments made in haunted houses, I have proved to my own satisfaction, at least, that the cat acts as a thoroughly reliable psychic barometer. The dog is sometimes unaware of the proximity of the Unknown. When the ghost materializes or in some other way demonstrates its advent, the dog, occasionally, is wholly undisturbed — the cat never. I have never yet had a cat with me that has not shown the most obvious signs of terror and uneasiness both before and during a superphysical manifestation.” Mr. O’Donnell not only believes that cats see ghosts; he also believes that they have them. If the curious reader will turn to his book, he may find therein descriptions of the cat-spectres who have returned to haunt the scenes where they have been tortured. Mr. O’Donnell even goes so far as to assert that there may be something in the superstition that occasionally a black tom cat is the devil in animal form. “ It would be idle, of course, to expect people in these unmeditative times to believe that there was ever the remotest truth underlying these so-called fantastic suppositions of the past; yet, according to reliable testimony, there are, at the present moment, many houses in England haunted by phantasms in the form of black cats, of so sinister and hostile an appearance, that one can only assume that unless they are the actual spirits of cats, earthbound through cruel and vicious propensities, they must be vice-ele- mentals, i. e. spirits that have never inhabited any material body, and which have either been generated by vicious thoughts, or else have been attracted to a spot by some crime or vicious act once perpetrated there.” *8 “John Silence.” 126 The Cat and the Occult longing to their own region.” The result of his experiment justified his faith. The dog, an unusually courageous collie, was terrified beyond belief by the presence of the spirits and lay whimpering in a corner, finally, indeed, losing his sight. But the cat I The doctor alone in the darkened room, with a low fire, waited he knew not what. ” Smoke . . . began to wash. But the washing, the doctor noted, was by no means its real purpose; it only used it to mask something else; it stopped at the most busy and furious moments and began to stare about the room. Its thoughts wandered absurdly. It peered intently at the curtains; at the shadowy corners; at empty space above; leaving its body in curiously awkward positions for whole minutes together.” The doctor at length fell asleep. Sometime later ” a soft touch on the cheek awoke him. Something was patting him. He sat up with a jerk, and found himself staring into a pair of brilliant eyes, half green, half black. Smoke’s face lay level with his own; and the cat had climbed up with his front paws upon his chest. The lamp had burned low and the fire was nearly out, yet Dr. Silence saw in a moment that the cat was in an excited state. It kneaded with its front paws into his chest, shifting from one to the other. He felt them prodding against him. It lifted a leg very carefully and patted his cheek gingerly. Its fur, he saw, was standing ridgewise upon its back; the ears were flattened back somewhat; the tail was switching sharply. The cat, of course, had awakened him with a purpose. . . . Two things he became aware of at once : one that Smoke, while excited, was pleasurably excited; the other, that the collie was no longer visible upon the mat at his feet. He had crept away to the corner of the wall farthest from the window, and lay watching the room with wide-open eyes, in which lurked plainly something of alarm. . . . Smoke had jumped down from the back of the arm-chair and now occupied the middle of the carpet, where, with tail erect and legs stiff as ramrods, it was steadily pacing backwards and forwards in a narrow 127 The Tiger in the House space, uttering, as it did so, those curious little guttural sounds of pleasure that only an animal of the feline species knows how to make expressive of supreme happiness. Its stiffened legs and arched back made It appear larger than usual, and the black visage wore a smile of beatific joy. Its eyes blazed magnificently; it was in an ecstasy. At the end of every few paces it turned sharply and stalked back again along the same line, padding softly, and purring like a roll of little muffled drums. It behaved precisely as though it were rubbing against the ankles of some one who remained invisible. A thrill ran down the doctor’s spine as he stood and stared. . . . For an Instant, as he watched It, the doctor was aware that a faint uneasiness stirred In the depths of his own being, focus- sing Itself for the moment upon this curious behaviour of the uncanny creature before him. There rose in him quite a new realization of the mystery connected with the whole feline tribe, but especially with that common member of It, the do- mestic cat — their hidden lives, their strange aloofness, their Incalculable subtlety. How utterly remote from anything that human beings understood lay the sources of their elusive ac- tivities. As he watched the Indescribable bearing of the little creature mincing along the strip of carpet under his eyes, coquetting with the powers of darkness, welcoming, maybe, some fearsome visitor, there stirred In his heart, a feeling strangely akin to awe. Its indifference to human kind. Its serene superiority to the obvious, struck him forcibly with fresh meaning; so remote, so Inaccessible seemed the secret purposes of its real life, so alien to the blundering honesty of other animals. Its absolute poise of bearing brought into his mind the opium-eater’s words that ‘ no dignity is perfect which does not at some point ally Itself with the mysterious.’ ” I do not remember that Hermes TrIsmegistus or Paracel- 34 Mr. Blackwood has treated this motive again in a more sentimental vein in his story, “ The Attic,” in the volume entitled “ Pan’s Garden.” 128 The Cat and the Occult sus mention the cat in their alchemystical formulae, but both of these philosophers sat at the feet of this animal, just as cer- tainly as later alchemists often found the presence of grimalkin convenient or his body necessary in preparing some mixture for the arcane cauldron. Probably the sylphs, gnomes, un- dines, and salamanders of the Comte de Gabalis were really white, black, silver, and orange pussies. But I do not think a magic system of divination by cats, ailuromancy it would be called, has yet been evolved. He keeps his secrets too closely to afford much aid to the hierophant. He retains those in- stincts of transcendental sensualism, those strange currents from the past, which man and even most of the other animals, especially the domestic animals, have exchanged for the in- ferior benefits of “ civilization.” He is in touch with the infinite and unknown; he remembers the cult of the Egyptians and the strange secrets of Babylon, the apozemical soups of the sorceress. He recognizes Wotan in the storm and Kat- schei in the dark of the night. In the flames he sees Loge and Aphrodite rises for him on the waves of every sea. Eros haunts his rooftops and Diana directs his hunting expedi- tions. Sekhet and Pasht sit in the temples of his imagination. All the gods, all the devils are his friends; he knows the fairies, the elves, and the kobolds, and stryge and vampires come when he calls. The rustling of the leaves tells him a story, warns him of a danger, and a flight of birds prophesies a fair day. The touch of a wall against his whisker presses a signal into his brain and the crackle of a dried fern under his padded paw is to him the threat of a black-handed camorra. He is Swed- enborgian and Pagan, Palladian and Kabbalist, Mohammedan and Jew. He walks on the sea with Christ and on the clouds with Buddha. He promenades in the poet’s brain. He un- derstands and salutes the pale petunia; the esoteric begonia is his brother. The ithyphallic rites of Heliogabolus are as familiar to him as the cruel diversions of Gille de Retz. He 129 The Tiger in the House learns the meaning of the Signs of the Zodiac, Solomon’s Sigil, the Tarot, the Ibimorphic and Serapian Triads, the Pantacles of the Planets, the Ten Commandments, and Science and Health while he is yet a kitten. Far from being the appren- tice of the Wizard, he is more often the Master. 130 Chapter Five: The Cat in Folklore Where the cat came from is a mystery; you may believe the Noah story if you like. Wood says that the Egyptian Fells maniculata is the grandfather of our household pet, while Lydekker ^ summons modern authorities to prove that this progenitor was the Kaffir Cat, a yellowish cat with tiger stripes. Fells lybica, which still roams about northeastern Africa, hunting at night and living in holes dug by other animals. Again, probably, for all of this is quite as uncertain as the Noah story, the Romans brought the Egyptian cat to England some time before the fifth century and there is a theory to the effect that our modern tabby is a cross be- tween this ancient animal and the British wild cat. This theory does not account for Persian and Angora cats at all as Egyptian cats were short-haired. A cat of Central Asia, popu- larly known as Pallas’s cat, is suspected of the ancestry of these more aristocratic beasts. As to the alluros of the Greeks, I have already intimated that current scholarly opinion, which, of course, is worth very little, has come to the conclusion that this was not a cat at all, but the snowy-breasted marten. Where the cat is going is equally a mystery. “ Every one is aware,” writes Mr. Andrew Lang, “ that a perfectly com- fortable, well-fed cat will occasionally come to his house and settle there, deserting a family by whom it is lamented, and to whom it could, if it chose, find its way back with ease. This conduct is a mystery which may lead us to infer that cats form a great secret society, and that they come and go in pursuance of some policy connected with education, or perhaps with iR. Lydekker: “The Pedigree of the Cat”; “Knowledge”; Vol. 20, p. 181; August 2, 1897. I3I The Tiger in the House witchcraft. We have known a cat to abandon his home for years. Once in six months he would return, and look about him with an air of some contempt. ‘ Such,’ he seemed to say, ‘ were my humble beginnings.’ ” It must be remembered that the cat is an oriental and all orientals are mysterious. There seems to be even a canon of feline etiquette which forbids two cats to meet and pass without some display of solemn formalities, reminiscent of greetings in the Orient where time is of no particular value. Even the derivation of the name of the cat is shrouded in darkness. From the Latin word felis we have extracted feline but the word cattus or catus came into use as late as the fourth century A. D. and is to be found first in the writ- ings of an agricultural author, Palladius, who recommends that puss be kept in artichoke gardens as a protection against rodents and moles. Evagrius Scholasticus, a later Greek church historian, uses the word catta. Isidorus derives cattus from cattare, meaning to see, in reference doubtless to the animal’s vigilance and watchfulness. On the other hand a writer in “ Notes and Queries ” declares that the only lan- guage, so far as he can ascertain, in which the word cat is significant is the Zend, in which the word gatu means a place, a particularly expressive word in this connection. His infer- ence is that Persia is the original home of the cat and he goes on to say that the cat was probably introduced from Persia, through Spain, into Europe because the Spanish word gato is almost identical with the Zend. The only flaws in this brill- iant philological reasoning are that the Spanish word is also almost identical with the late Latin and that Persian cats and European cats are two distinct breeds. Adolphe Pictet ^ de- rives catus from an African root: Arab, kitt^ plural kitdt; Syrian, kato; Nubian, kadiska, and in still other African tongues, kaddiska and gada. This ingenious etymologist fur- ther thinks that puss comes from an old Sanskrit word, puccha, *“Les Origines Indo-Europ6ene3 ou les Aryas Primitifs,” Paris, 1859. 132 From a photograph by Harriet V, Furness The Cat in Folklore piccha, meaning tall. There is a suggestion of this root in the Persian pushak; Afghan, pishik; Kurd, psig; Lithuanian, puize; Irish pus, feisag, fiseog, and feisahi. A still more in- genious pundit thinks that the French chat is an onomatope for the cat’s spitting. To come to more familiar tongues, in Dutch the word is kat; in Swedish, katt; Italian, gatto; Portuguese and Spanish gato; Polish, hot; Russian, hots; Turkish, ket'i; Welsh, cath; Cornish, hath; German, die Katze (a Frenchman deploring that chat is masculine in French, admires this choice of gen- der) ; Basque, catua; Armenian, kitta; Picardian, ca, co; Bur- gundian, chai; Catalonian, gat. The antique rituals in the Louvre give the Egyptian name as mau, mai, niaau.^ These and the Chinese word, mao, seem the most natural of all. In every language allusions to the cat are sprinkled as thickly as currants in a good fruit-cake. Many of these take the form of derivative words, the formation of a good half of which is as mysterious as puss herself. Others are metaphor- ical or proverbial, and have a bearing on the popular ideas, prejudices, and superstitions concerning the cat. Murray’s Oxford Dictionary devotes two full pages to cat and its de- rivative words; nor is the list in Murray by any means ex- haustive. Many of the following examples are from other sources. There are, to begin with, the sea-terms, which seem to offer cumulative evidence that the cat is a favourite marine animal. There is the cat-boat, which formerly was called merely the cat, and some students of folklore have tried to prove that this was the kind of cat Dick Whittington owned. The sig- nificance of catamaran, another variety of boat, which rights itself in a surf, is quite clear. The word is derived from the Italian, gatta marina, and is an allusion to the faculty the cat possesses of falling on his feet. Cat is also the name for a tackle or combination of pulleys used to suspend the anchor ® Some Egyptologists have read ckaou on certain monuments. 133 The Tiger in the House at the cat’s-head of a ship. Cat-harping is the name for a purchase of ropes employed to brace the shrouds in the lower masts behind their yards. The cat-fall is the rope employed upon the cat’s-head and the cat-hook is a large hook fitted to a cat-block, by which the anchor is raised to the cat’s-head. Two little holes astern, above the gun-room ports, are called cat-holes. A cat’s-paw is a particular turn in the bight of a rope made to work a tackle in and it is also the rippling on the water made by light air during a calm, which resembles the slight disturbance made in a pool when a cat delicately troubles the surface with his paw. Lastly there is the terrible cat-o-nine-tails. Folklorists have discovered cross references. “ How is it? ” asks David Fitzgerald, “ that we find the nine- tailed cat (a magical cat with no allusion to the scourge) in the legends of the Goban Saor? And a cat with ten tails in Scot- tish counting-out rhymes, and the phrase to ‘ whip the cat ’ for to work against, among the tailors of Crieff? ” Many plants are named after cats: cat-briar, an American- ism for smilax, which I offer to H. L. Mencken; cat-chop, which I have not identified; cat-haw, the fruit of the haw- * “ The Cat in Legend and Myth”; “Belgravia”; London; November 1885. “The Norwegian gorging cat (whose history we once heard well related by Mr. Ralston) swallows the man and wife (‘goodman’ and ‘goody’ in the trans- lator’s dialect), a number of animals, a wedding party, and a funeral train, and the sun and moon — all of which he disgorges as wonderfully as they are swallowed down . . .” continues Mr. Fitzgerald. “ In Ireland this same an- cient monster appeared in at least six forms. He is Kate Kearney’s cat, oldest of things (As old as Kate Kearney’s cat is an Irish proverb). He is the pro- verbial cat that ate the year. He is the dreadful cat o’ leasa. He is the piping cat, sculptured on ancient crosses, and figuring on tavern signs. He is the cat with two tails, cat with ten tails, cat with nine tails, of the Goban Saor. And he is the cat in (seven-leagued) boots. — The myth further appears among the Iroquois Indians in the shape of a two-headed serpent which devours the nation, all but one man and woman; slain, however, it rolls into a lake and disgorges them all. This two-headed dragon appears in Ireland as a bi-tailed cat, as the Cat of the Fort, cat a’ leasa, a colossal monster, circling the hill in a coil miles long. . . . The twy-tailed cat (Day and Night?) was sculptured at Holycross Abbey, Tipperary, and in the French chapel at Canterbury.” Angelo de Guber- 134 The Cat in Folklore thorne; cat-in-clover, blrd’s-foot trefoil; cat-keys, the fruit of the ash-tree; cat-sloe, the wild sloe; cat-succory, wild succory; cat’s-head, a variety of apple and also a fossil, cat-trail, the beloved valerian; cat-thyme, a species of teucrium which causes sneezing; cat-tree, spindle tree; the familiar cat-tails and catnip; catkins, imperfect flowers hanging from trees in the manner of a cat’s tail; cat’s-foot, an herb; and curiously enough, cat-whin or dog-rose 1 In American slang one old cat is a kind of primitive base- ball game. Letting the old cat die is to allow a swing to prove that there is no such phenomenon as perpetual motion. As the swing sags back and forth eight or nine times after you have stopped pushing it this phrase possibly has reference to the nine lives of the cat. Cattycornered, meaning diagon- ally opposite or across, has reference to the oblique move- ments of the cat. Scat is an interjection used to tell puss to make a speedy departure. Pussyfoot is a term derived from the cat’s padded paws and stealthy approach but no cat in the world would be in favour of prohibition of any variety. In English thieves’ slang cat signifies a lady’s muff. A kind of double tripod with six feet, intended to hold a plate before the fire and so constructed that in whatever position it is placed three of the legs rest on the ground is called a cat from the belief that however a cat may be thrown she always lands on her feet. The enemies of the feline race say “ as false as a cat ” and it is from this phrase that the terms cat’s gold and cat’s silver, the common names for mica on ac- natis, too, is infected with this familiar and somewhat silly method of trying to explain all folk-stories symbolically. In “ Zoological Mythology, or the Legends of Animals,” he gives it as his belief that the celebrated fable of the Kilkenny Cats may mean the mythological contest between night and twilight. God pity these men ! Moncure Daniel Conway (“Demonology and Devil-Lore”) refers to a similar legend: Thor, the Norse Hercules, once tried to lift a cat, as it seemed to him, off the ground, but it was the great mid-earth serpent which encircles the whole world. Thor succeeded in lifting one paw of the supposed cat. 135 The Tiger in the House count of its deceptive appearance, are derived. There are sea-cats, cat-fish, cat-birds, cat-squirrels, and cat-owls, or fly- ing cats. A French word for owl is chat-huant. Cat’s-eye is a well-known semi-precious stone. Cat’s purr is a thrill felt over the region of the heart in certain diseases. Cat’s tooth is white-lead ore from Ireland; cat-brain, a soil consisting of rough clay mixed with stones; cat-dirt a kind of clay. Cat- collops is cat-meat and the cat’s meat man, a familiar London figure, is frequently referred to as the pussy butcher. Cat- face is a mark in lumber wood; cat-ice, thin ice of a milky ap- pearance from under which the water has receded. Cat-nap is a short nap taken while sitting; cat-ladder a kind of ladder used on sloping roofs of houses; cat-steps, the projections of the stones in the slanting part of the gable; cat-pipe, an arti- ficial cat-call. Puss gentleman is eighteenth century for cata- mite. Kitty is a common poker term. Copy cat is a mis- nomer because cats never copy anybody. A common phrase for an unusual event is “ enough to make a cat laugh,” but the Cheshire Cat in “ Alice in Wonderland ” is not the only recorded example of a laughing cat. “ Enough to make a cat speak ” is a similar expression, but as I have pointed out in the preceding chapter, speaking cats are almost a com- monplace. Cat’s paw is a reference to a monkey’s idle jest. Salt-cat is a mess of coarse meal placed in a dove-cote to al- lure strangers. A cat’s walk is a little way and back. To jerk, shoot, or whip the cat means to vomit. Cat-harrow, Cat and Dog, Cat or Kit-Cat ® are games. It was once a trick of farmers to bring a cat to market in a bag and sell it for a suckling pig to the unwary. If the purchaser discovered the deception he let the cat out of the bag; if he did not he was said to have bought a pig in a poke. Both expressions have become proverbial. An island in the Bahama group is named Cat Island and Moncrif writes of the Cape of Cats. You ® Kit-Cat and Cat and Dog are described in William Carew Hazlitt’s “ Faiths and Folklore.” 136 The Cat in Folklore may have heard of the Catskills. An ancestor of mine, Der- rick Tennis Van Vechten,® was the founder of the extremely unimportant town in New York bearing that name. Cat was a movable pent-house used in the middle ages by be- siegers to protect themselves when approaching fortifications. It was also called a cat-house;'^ something else is called a cat-house in modern times, just as certain pretty ladies in London and Geisha girls in Japan are called cats. All languages are rich in cat proverbs, many of which ap- pear to have been the inventions of those who believe what Buffon and Noah Webster had to say about the animal. Many others have reference to the cat’s prowess and special instincts, a few to her grace and beauty. Plutarch, when in Egypt, heard the proverb. An overdressed lady is like a cat dressed in saffron. An old Chinese saying is, A lame cat is better than a swift horse when rats infest the palace. It is not the fleas of dogs that will make cats mew, is also Chi- nese. A Japanese proverb has it that A dog will remember a three days’ kindness three years while a cat will forget a three years’ kindness in three days. This may be regarded as a compliment to the intelligence of the cat. A Hindu say- ing is. If you want to know what a tiger is like, look at a cat; if you want to know what a thug is like, look at a butcher. I am inclined to agree with Lockwood Kipling that only the first half of this proverb is true. As cats are sometimes slung in a net in India, a proverb descriptive of sudden success is The cat is in luck; the net is torn. I was not so angry at the cat for stealing the butter as at her wagging her tail shows ® “ Catskill was settled about 1680 by Derrick Teunis Van Vechten”: Encyclo- pedia Americana; 1918; Vol. 6, p. 108. ’’ Morley Adams in his book, “ In the Footsteps of Borrow and Fitzgerald ” (p. 113), speaks of the Cat-House on the River Orwell: “This little lodge played an important part in the smuggling which took place hereabouts a cen- tury ago, the occupants, if report be true, being in league with the contraband men. When the ‘ coast was clear ’ a large stuffed cat was displayed in the win- dow, and when the preventative men were on the look-out the cat was taken away.” 137 The Tiger in the House that Hindu humanity is not so very different in some respects from European or American. Of a hypocrite the Hindu remarks: The cat, with mouse tails still hanging out of her mouth, says — ‘ Now I feel good, I will go on a pilgrimage to Mecca ! ’ The Indian cat miyaus; so one says to a child or a servant. What ! my own cat, and miyau at me 1 The cat does not catch mice for God is a priceless bit of wisdom. Even a cat is a lion in her own lair is said of mild-tempered people who fly into sudden rages. A cat’s moon is a Kash- miri expression for a sleepless night. It is also in Kashmir that they say. If cats had wings there would be no ducks in the lake. An Indian mother will say to an idle girl. Did the cat sneeze or what? A sneering proverb has it. In a learned house even the cat is learned. A sly man is said to look like a drowned cat; a live cat is said to be better than a dead tiger. It is easy to understand the meaning of The cowed cat allows even a mouse to bite its ears but did the thing ever happen?® John Hay” gives, A miawling cat takes no mice as a Span- ish proverb but, of course, this occurs in every language. Other Spanish proverbs are They whip the cat if our mistress does not spin; The mouse does not go away with a bellyful from the cat’s house; When the cats go away the mice grow saucy; Don’t turn the cat out of the house for being a thief (spoken of those who expect what is contrary to nature from servants) ; Let us see who will carry the cat to water; and The meat is on the hook because there is no cat. The Por- tuguese say: The cat is certainly friendly but it scratches. A charming Russian proverb says: The day is young, said the cat, remembering that he could wait. Plays of cat, tears of mice is also Russian. The cat will catch fish but he does not soil his paws is German. A delightful Italian saying is: Four things are necessary for a home: grain, a cock, a cat, and a wife. ® These examples arc from John Lockwood Kipling’s “ Beast and Man in India.” ® “ Castilian Days.” The Cat in Folklore The available examples of cat proverbs in English are so very numerous that I must content myself with giving only a few of them. Some of these are true folk-sayings; others have become popular through their appearance in plays and novels. Care will kill a cat. A muffled cat is no good mouser. The cat is out of kind that sweet milk will not lap. You can have no more of a cat than her skin, a proverb which does not take into account the French custom of using puss for rabbit stew.^*’ When the cat winketh little wots the mouse 1 ® As one of Raoul Gineste’s poems has it: . . . sur un feu doux, dans une casserole, Tes morceaux chanteront I’ultime barcarolle, Car I’homme est sans scrupule et le lapin est cher. “ A cat,” writes Browne, in his “ Natural History of Jamaica,” “ is a very dainty dish among the Negroes.” The Portuguese eat the cat, according to Darwin. The Abbe Lenoir informs us that the Chinese consider the cat excellent food and that in their provision shops enormous felines are hung up with their heads and tails on. They are bred on farms, secured by light chains, and fattened with the remains of the rice cooked for the family. Edward Topsell, who is as quotable as Bernard Shaw, and much more amusing, in his “ History of Four-Footed Beasts” (1658) writes: “It is reported that the flesh of Cats salted and sweet- ened hath power in it to draw wens from the body, and being warmed to cure the Hemmorhoids and pains in the reins and back, according to the Verse of Ursinus. In Spain and Gallia Norbon, they eat Cats, but first of all take away their head and tail, and hang the prepared flesh a night or two in the open cold air, to exhale the savour and poison of it, finding the flesh thereof almost a." sweet as a cony.” Topsell, however, does not approve of this practice: “The flesh of Cats can seldom be free from poison, by reason of their daily food, eat- ing Rats and Mice, Wrens and other birds which feed on poison, and above all the brain of the Cat is most venomous, for it being above all measure dry, stop- peth the animal spirits, that they cannot pass into the venticle, by reason thereof memory faileth, and the infected person falleth into a Phrenzie. The cure whereof may be this, take the water of sweet majoram with terra lemnia the wneight of a groat mingled together, and drink it twice a month, putting good store of spirits into all your meat to recreate the spirits withall, let him drink pure wine, wherein put the seed of Diamoschu. But a Cat doth as much harm with her venomous teeth, therefore to cure her biting, they prescribe a good diet, sometimes taking Honey, turpentine, and Oil of Roses melt together and laid to the wound with Centory; sometimes they wash the wound with the urine of a man, and lay to it the brains of some other beast and pure wine mingled both together. The hair also of a Cat being eaten unawares, stoppeth the artery and causeth suffocation: and I have heard that when a childe hath gotten the hair 139 The Tiger in the House what the cat thinketh. Fain would the cat eat fish but she is loth to wet her feet. The cat sees not the mouse ever. Though the cat winks awhile, yet sure she is not blind. The more you rub a cat on her back the higher she sets up her tail. Well might the cat wink when both her eyes were out. How can the cat help it if the maid be a fool? That that comes of a cat will catch mice. A cat may look at a king. An old cat laps as much as a young kitten. When the cat is away the mice will play. The cat knows whose lips she licks. Cry you mercy killed my cat (this was spoken of those who played tricks and then tried to escape punishment by beg- ging pardon). When candles are out all cats are grey. By biting and scratching cats and dogs come together. I’ll keep no more cats than will catch mice. A cat has nine lives and a woman has nine cats’ lives. Cats eat what hussies spare. In October not even a cat is to be found in London. A good wife and a good cat are best at home. A cat will never drown if she sees the shore. An ugly cat will have pretty kittens. The cat with the straw tail sitteth not before the fire. Cats hide their claws. The wandering cat gets many a rap. The cat is hungry when a crust contents her. He lives under the sign of the cat’s foot (his wife scratches him). A blate cat makes a proud mouse is a Scotch form of saying that a stupid or timid foe is not to be feared. A dead cat feels no cold. A piece of kid is worth two of cat. A scaulded cat fears cold water is a translation of the French Chat echaude craint V eau froide. As melancholy as a cat, or as melancholy as a gib- cat is a common pbrase in England. “ I am melancholy as a gib-cat or lugged bear,” says a Shakespearean character. of a Cat in his mouth, it hath so cloven and stuck to the place that it could not be gotten off again, and hath in that place bred either the wens or the King’s evill. To conclude this point it appeareth that this is a dangerous beast, and that therefore as for necessity we are constrained to nourish them for the sup- pressing of small vermin: so with a wary and discreet eye we must avoid their harms, making more account of their use than of their persons.” 140 The Cat in Folklore It should be explained that toms are called gib or ram-cats in Northern England. In Pepys’s Diary for November 29, 1667, for instance, you may read: “Our young gib-cat did leap down our stairs ... at two leaps.” To turn the cat in the pan is to reverse the order of things. Before the cat can lick her ear, of course, means never. Cats and carlins sit in the sun. Denham’s “Popular Sayings” (1846) gives Every day’s no yule; cast the cat a castock, which is to say spare no expense, bring another bottle of beer. In reference to the cat’s elusiveness an old saying has it: He bydes as fast as a cat bound with a sacer. He can hold the cat to the sun is said of a man of extreme daring. The French are quite as prolific as the English in proverbs referring to the cat. Note, for example, this charming aph- orism, which is entirely Parisian: The three animals that spend the most time over their toilet are cats, flies, and women. To run very swiftly without tiring oneself is courir comme iin chat maigre. Discordant music is line musique de chats. The sudden embarrassment which results in the loss of voice is caused by un chat dans la gorge. The equivalent English saying employs the humbler frog. A person who likes delicate things is friande comme chatte. He who writes illegibly ecrit comme un chat. Trying to inspire pity is faire la chatte moiiillee. To pass rapidly over a delicate situation, to skate on thin ice, to use the English parallel expression, is passer par-dessus comme chat sur braise. To look clean and yet not be clean is to be propre comme une ecuelle de chat. Vivre comme chien et chat has its exact equivalent in English. Gib or Gyb is an abbreviation of Gilbert; in Europe this frequently became Tybalt or Tybert, Tyb or Tib. Mercutio insults Tybalt on this score. “ Gibbe is the Icelandic gabba, to delude, and our gibber,” writes Moncure Daniel Con- way (“Demonology and Devil-lore”; Vol. II, p. 313). “It is the Gib cat of ‘ Reinicke Fuchs,’ and of the Romaunt of the Rose.’ In Gammer Gurton we read ‘ Hath no man gelded Gyb, her cat’; and in Henry IV, ‘ I am as melancholy as a gib cat.’ Another cat is called Inges, that is ignis, fire.” Another old Eng- lish name for the male cat was carl-cat, and boar-cat was not uncommon. I4I The Tiger in the House Dignitaries who wear fur on their costumes of ceremony are called chats fourres. To look surly is avoir une mine de chat fdche. Faire la chattemite is to effect humble, flatter- ing manners. If there is nobody present, il n y a pas un chat. If by weakness or negligence one permits oneself to be de- ceived, on laisse aller le chat au fromage. Le chat a faim quand il mange du pain is said of those who eat what does not altogether please them, but cats often like to eat bread, indeed sometimes prefer it to other food. To expose one- self to danger without taking precaution is prendre le chat sans mitaines. There are several French variations of this phrase, which also occurs in English, and probably in many other languages as well. On ne prend pas le chat sans moufles and Chat emmoufle ne prend pas souris are the most common. Gourmand comme un chat is said of gluttons. To torment an adversary is jouer comme le chat avec la souris. Of a dangerous or impossible situation one says C’est le nid d' une souris dans Voreille d’un chat. To watch everybody is avoir un oeil a la poele et 1’ autre au chat. Those who are always conciliating never jettent le chat au.x jambes de per- sonae. Jeter sa langiie au chat is to refuse to respond to an embarrassing question. Ache ter chat en poche is, of course, as English as it is French. One also says in French ache ter le chat pour le lievre, a pretty custom which I have already touched upon. La nuit tous les chats sont gris I have given in its English dress; in its French form it occurs in Beaumarchais’s Le Barhier de Seville. A hon chat, bon rat: for a good attack, good defence. As it is in the kitchen that the cat most frequently is scaulded one says Chat echaude ne revient pas en cuisine. The meaning of the following proverbs is quite obvious: Qui naquit chat court apres les souris; On ne saurait retenir le chat quand il a goute a la creme; Il fait le saint, il fait le chat; Qui vit avec les chats prendra gout aux souris; Les chats retombent toujours sur les pattes; Il ne faut pas faire passer tous les chats pour 142 IL NE FAUT PAS FAIRE PASSER TOUS LES CHATS POUR SORCIERS ” From a drawing by Grandvillc in J'ie privee et puhlique des animaux V r* \ I k.' - The Cat in Folklore sorciers; Quand les chats sont absents les sotiris dansent, which is our; When the cat’s away the mice will play; Faire tirer au chat les marrons du feu is a reference to the fable of the cat and the ape. Entendre hien chat sans qidon disc ininon is to have the wit to comprehend things quickly. According to a thirteenth century proverb La ou kas n’est, li souris se tient fiere. Faire de la houillie pour les chats is to be careless. To take French leave is emporter le chat. Avoir d’autres chats a fouetter is to have other fish to fry. Of something insignificant one says: II n’y a pas de quoi fouet- ter un chat. A ppeler un chat un chat has an English parallel. So has Ne reveillons pas le chat qui dort. Payer en chats et en rats is to pay in driblets. There are rhymed proverbs such as: C’est chasser le chat bien tard Quand il a mange le lard. A tard se repent le rat Quand par le col le tient le chat. Chat mioleur ne fut oncques grand chasseur. Non plus que sage homme grand cacqueteur. In the Temple of Liberty which Tiberius Gracchus erected in Rome, the goddess was represented holding a sceptre in one hand and a cap in the other, while at her feet reposed a cat, the symbol of freedom. “ The company of soldiers. Or dines Augustei, who marched under the command of the Colonel of Infantry, sub Magistro peditum, bore on their ‘ white ’ or ‘ silver ’ shield, a cat of the colour of the mineral prase, which is sinople, or sea-green. The cat is ‘ courant ’ and turns its head over its back. Another company of the 12 Felicien Rops’s motto, according to James Huneker, was “J’appelle un chat un chat.” “Promenades of an Impressionist,” p. 35 . 143 The Tiger in the House same regiment, called ‘ the happy old men ’ {felices seniores) carried a demi-cat, red, on a buckler gules ; in parma punica diluciore, with its paws up, as if playing with some one. Under the same chief, a third cat passant, gules, with one eye and one ear, was carried by the soldiers qui Alpini vocabantur.” The Vandals and the Suevi carried a cat sable upon their armorial bearings, among the Greeks and Romans. The cat, indeed, plays no inconsiderable part in heraldry. The Burgundians used the device with the same significance of liberty and fearlessness and Clotilde, wife of Clovis the Burgundian, chose for her sigel a cat sable spring- ing at a mouse. Other noble houses were enamoured of the emblem. We need exhibit no surprise upon learning that the Katzen family’s azure shield flaunted a cat argent hold- ing a rat nor that the crest of the Della Gatta family of Naples bore a magnificent cat couchant. Two cats argent on an azure shield signified the Chetaldie family of Limoges and the motto of the Scotch Clann Chatain is “ Touch not the cat but (without) a glove.” The Chaffardon family bore on azure three cats, or two, full face in chief. The cognizance of Richard III was a boar, passant argent, whence the rhyme which cost William Collingborne his life: ispalliot: “ Le Vraye et Parfaicte Science des Armoires” (Paris, 1664). Seumas, Chief of Clann Fhearghuis of Stra-chur, informs me that the Clann a Chatain (Children of the Cats) is a great clann with six tribes. The Mackin- tosh of Mackintosh is Chief of this Clann. I am also indebted to Fhearghuis for a translation of a song about this Clann: The cats have come upon us, The cats have come upon us, The cats have come upon us. They have come upon us! To break in upon us. To lift the spoil. To steal the kine. To strike the steeds. To strip the meads. They have come! 144 The Cat in Folklore The Cat, the Rat, and hovel our Dogge, Rulen all England under an Hogge}^ Cervantes, it will be recalled, speaks of the “ ever victorious and never vanquished ” Timonel of Carcajona, Prince of New Biscay, whose shield bore a golden cat and the single word, “ Miau ” in honour of his lady, the lovely Miaulina, daughter of the Alfeniquen of the Algarve. More recently the tank corps of the American army carried on its machines huge black cats with snarling fangs and flashing electric green eyes and with the motto, “ Treat ’em rough I ” and the insignia of the Eighty-first division of the American Expeditionary Forces were wild cats. The men of this division, conscripts from North and South Carolina, Florida and Porto Rico, were the pioneers who Introduced the custom of divisional emblems into the American army. According to Col. Robert E. Wyllie of the General Staff, when the Eighty-first division arrived at Hoboken, the port of embarkation, every man was wearing the wild cat on his left shoulder. General Shanks, commander of the port, immediately Informed Washington army headquarters of the novel distinguishing mark of the Carolina wild cats and asked if the insignia were authorized. Before a negative reply reached General Shanks the division had sailed. When the Eighty-first landed in France the eyes of every doughboy in other divisions were focussed on the vicious feline and within the week the other divisions had invented similar insignia. So general, indeed, had the custom become that General Pershing realized that an order authoriz- ing the decorations must follow. This authorization, so far as I know, was not issued, but the Insignia were never prohibited and, as all who have seen the returning soldiers must know, they were eventually used by all divisions. It is no longer the general custom to name shops or to label A. R. Frey: “Sobriquets and Nicknames”; Ticknor and Co.; Boston; 1888. The cat was William Catesby, the dog, Lord Lovel. The Tiger in the House them with fantastic signboards but in the old days when such fashions were in vogue cat signs were as frequent as any others. A bookseller in London in 1612 called his shop The Cat and Parrot. Other shops, or inns, bore such quaint titles as Cat and Cage, Cat and Lion, Cat and Bagpipes, and Cat and Fiddle. The Catherine Wheel sign put up in honour of Catherine of Aragon, Queen of Henry VIII, was changed by the Puritans into Cat and Wheel ! An old English tavern was called the Salutation and Cat. This is as good as the Hotel of the Virgin Mary and the Prince of Wales, which I once visited on the Italian Riviera. The name was calcu- lated to capture both the Catholic and the English trade. Of the French signs. La Maison dii Chat qiii Pelote (used zy Balzac), Le Chat qui Peche, and above all, Le Chat Noir are the most common. The latter once served for restaurants or bakeries but latterly it has been identified with one of the most celebrated of the Paris cabarets. The cabaret itself has passed but the name still persists. Even in New York a restaurant carries it and so does a well-known magazine. Parisian shoe-makers frequently affected Le Chat Botte. Le Chat qui Fume is a charming name. One of Anatole France’s stories bears as its title the name of a little Parisian Cafe, Le Chat Maigre. An American dry-cleaning establish- ment uses a cat washing clothes for its trademark. The cat leaps through so many nursery rhymes in all tongues, native and exotic, that every child must know at least half a dozen of them. The following lines seem to have been pro- phetic: Jack Spratt Had a cat; It had but one ear; It went to buy butter. When butter was dear. This one is charmingly suggestive : 146 The Cat in Folklore Poor Dog Bright, Ran off with all his might. Because the cat was after him. Poor Dog Bright. Poor Cat Fright, Ran off with all her might. Because the dog was after her. Poor Cat Fright. Alphabetical nursery rhymes are always popular with mothers because they are considered semi-instructive. Variations of the following lines are numberless : A, B, C, tumble down D, The cat’s in the cupboard and can’t see me. A French version is: A, B, C, Le chat est alle Dans le neige; en retournant H avait les souliers tous blancs. Something like this occurs also in German, Yiddish, Russian, Patagonian, and early Australian, The rhyme beginning Hey, diddle, diddle. The cat and the fiddle. is as well known as anything in Shakespeare. Nor can there be many who have neglected to learn Ding, dong, bell. Pussy’s in the well. or Pussy cat. Pussy cat, where have you been? or The three little kittens, they lost their mittens. 147 The Tiger in the House This is a very pleasant ditty: Hey, my kitten, my kitten. Hey, my kitten, my deary; Such a sweet pet as this W as neither far nor neary. And this is philosophical and fatalistic: Pussy-cat ate the dumplings, the dumplhigs ; Pussy-cat ate the dumplings. Mamma stood by, and cried, “ Oh, fie! Why did you eat the dumplings?" In many other rhymes the cat is an important figure. For instance in the epic poem about the woman who wanted to get her pig over the stile it was the cat that killed the rat and in “ A frog he would a-wooing go,” A cat and her kittens came tumbling in. With a rowley powley, gammon and spinach. There is also the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built. The French rhymes, while often not so fantastic, are natu- rally lovelier. What could be more irresistible than Le chat sauta sur les souris, II les croqua toute la nuit. Gentil coquiqui. Coco des moustaches, mirlo joli, Gentil coquiqui. Here is another: Sur ma gouttiere un four fe vis JJn chat de bonne mine Qui, sans s’occuper des souris, Miaulait en sourdine. Ah! il m’en souviendra, 148 PRINCE DORUS AND THE ENCHANTED CAT From Prince Dorns by Charles Lamb: London; iSii The Cat in Folklore Du chat de ma voisine. LarirUj An old Mother Goose rhyme has it that Puss-cat Mew jumped over a coal; In her best petticoat burnt a great hole; Puss-cat Mew shan’t have any milk Till her best petticoat’s mended with silk. With this verse for his inspiration E. H. Knatchbull-Hugessen composed a fairy story, “ Puss-Cat Mew,” which is a mixture of familiar folklore elements: the ogres are the giants of Jack and the Beanstalk and Joe Brown, the miller’s son who is befriended in the magic forest by a tortoise-shell cat, who, of course, at the proper moment becomes a beautiful and marriageable young lady and the daughter of no less a per- sonage than the Queen of the Fairies, is easily recognizable. Still when I recently reread the story I again felt its charm and its thrill and the horrible man-eating ogres still inspired terror. There are so many folk-tales about cats that some enter- prising young man of the future may fill a large book with these alone. Very often the cat plays a cruel or reprehen- sible part in these stories but he never plays a stupid or foolish role. In one of La Fontaine’s fables, indeed, the cat outwits even the fox. He is seldom lacking in wit; indeed he may be regarded as the Till Eulenspiegel of the animal world. It is well to remember Andrew Lang’s casual remark that “ Ani- mals are always most intelligent when most depraved.” Of the stories “Puss in Boots’’^® is the most familiar; some form of this fable occurs in almost every language. Mr. Lang points out that it is a “ moral ” story in Russia, Sicily, among the Arabs, and at Zanzibar. In these countries the cat assists the man from motives of gratitude. In France, 1 ® Jules-Severin Caillot has written a pretty sequel to this tale: “La Chatte Blanche,” in “Contes apres les contes”; Plon-Nourrit; Paris; 1919. 149 The Tiger in the House Italy, India, and elsewhere it is an immoral story; the cat is a swindler and the Marquis de Carabas is his accomplice. Gaston de Paris is convinced that the Zanzibar version is the original. In this version the man Is ungrateful to the kind beast and awakes to find his prosperity a dream. “ The White Cat,” which the Comtesse D’Aulnoy gave to France in 1682 is a wholly pretty story In which the graceful feline with her pattes de velours is transformed Into a princess. Gelett Burgess has symbolized this theme In a novel bearing the name of the original sory. The tale of Dick Whittington and his cat has afforded scope for research work among the English folklorists and historians which still continues. W. R. S. Ralston writes In ” The Nine- teenth Century”: ‘‘There used to exist In the Mercers’ Hall a portrait of Whittington, dated 1536, in which a black- and-white cat figured at his left hand. A still existing por- trait by Reginald Elstrack, who flourished about 1590, rep- resents him with his hand resting on a cat. The story is told that the hand originally rested on a skull, but that In deference to public opinion a cat was substituted, which proves that the legend or the history had by that time completely spread. That is also proved by a reference to the cat legend in Hey- wood’s If Y oil Know Not Me, and by another In Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Newgate gaol was rebuilt by Whittington’s executors, and a statue, with a cat at his feet, is said to have been set up on the gate, and to have remained there until the fire of 1666. Moreover a piece of plate on which figured ‘ heraldic cats ’ was presented to the Mercers’ company in 1572; and In the house at Gloucester, which the Whittingtons occupied till 1460, there was dug up a stone, when repairs were made in 1862, on which In basso relievo, is represented the figure of a boy carrying in his arms a cat. The workmanship appears to be of the fifteenth cen- tury. This is all that can be said in favour of the legend. Aigalnst it, besides its Inherent improbability, may be called as ISO The Cat in Folklore witnesses many folk-tales, which at least suggest that the story is one of the commonplaces of fiction, capable of being associated with any historical or fictitious personage.” So some destroyers of our belief in Santa Claus assure us that Whittington’s cat was a boat, while others affirm that trading or buying and selling at a profit was called achat and probably pronounced ” acat ” in the fifteenth century. Moncrif relates an enchanting Hindu story, which, it would seem to me, has not been retold sufficiently often: At the court of Salamgam, King of the Indies, a Brahmin and a Peni- tent each boasted that he was the most virtuous. A trial was proposed and the Brahmin offered to ascend to the Heaven of Devendiren and return therefrom with the flower of the tree called Parisadam, only indigenous to that particular celestial realm. He made good his promise, returning with the blossom to the great astonishment of all the court with the exception of the Penitent, who refused to be impressed. ” My virtue is so great,” he asserted, ” that I can send my cat for the flower of Parisadam.” He was requested to do so and im- mediately the adorable Patripatan ascended to the skies in full view of the King and his nobles. Now, however. Fate interfered with the Penitent’s plans. The Heaven of Deven- diren was inhabited by forty-eight million goddesses who had for husbands one hundred and twenty-four gods of which Devendiren was the sovereign. Now the instant the favourite goddess of the King of the Gods set her eyes on Patripatan she made up her mind to keep him for her very own. Deven- diren, after he had listened to the cat, explained to the god- dess that Patripatan was awaited with impatience by the court of Salamgam, that the reputation of the Penitent was Among the analogues of the Whittington story may be mentioned the Brit- tany black cat who made silver; the Danish dog who barked money; and the gold-producing horse or, as in the Midas story, a ram or swine with fleece or bristles of gold. On page 43 of W. R. S. Ralston’s “Russian Folk-Tales” (Smith, Elder and Co., London, 1873) you may find a Russian story which is very similar. The Tiger in the House at stake, and that the greatest affront one could offer to a mortal was to steal his cat. The goddess listened inatten- tively to this argument and finally promised, as a special fa- vour to his godship, that she would return the beloved puss in three centuries. The court waited through this period without any other inconvenience than impatience because the Penitent by the power of his virtue was able to preserve everybody’s youth. When the time had elapsed the sky red- dened, and the cat appeared on a throne in a cloud of a thousand hues, bearing in his paws an entire branch of the tree of Parisadam. I believe the King awarded the croix de vertu to Patripatan. The only incredible part of the story is that the goddess should ever have permitted herself to be separated from a cat she had known and loved for three cen- turies. One of the Japanese fairy stories translated by Lafcadio Hearn is called “ The Boy Who Drew Cats.” This boy, the son of a poor farmer, had been sent to a priest, so that he might be trained as an acolyte. The child, however, refused to take an interest in his new studies and spent all his time drawing cats. The old priest, realizing that the boy’s talent was for art rather than for religion, sent him out into the world. In his wanderings the lad passed the night in a de- serted temple but before he went to sleep he could not resist painting cats on the naked white screens. In his dreams he heard shrieks and in the morning he awakened to find an enormous goblin-rat lying dead on the floor, while the whisk- ers and jaws of his painted cats were red with blood. An amusing Persian story tells of a long-sighted cat with fascinating eyes, long whiskers, and sharp teeth, who hunted like a lion in the city of Kerman. One day, perceiving the wine cellar of his house open, the cat walked in and caught a mouse. Thereafter he repented, went to the mosque, passed his paws over his face, poured water on his paws, and anointed himself as he had seen the faithful do at the hours 152 JAPANESE WOMEN AND CAT From a Japanese print by Mamaro in the collection of Arthur Davison Ficke The Cat in Folklore of prayer. He swore he would never kill another mouse, praised Allah, and began to weep. The mice heard of this oath and held a celebration; a few days later the king of the mice suggested that gifts be carried to this temperate cat. So the mice brought wine, mussels stuffed with rice, raisins, and pignolia nuts; melon seeds and lumps of cheese; little cakes iced with sugar; Indian shawls and cloaks. Upon the receipt of these presents the cat reasoned thus : “ I am re- warded for becoming a pious Mussulman. It is clear that Allah is appeased.” Then he sprang among the mice and killed a great number of them. The others went their way in sorrow. The king of the mice, when he heard of this un- warranted assault, declared war on the cats and three hundred and thirty thousand mice went forth, armed with swords, guns, and spears. The cats on horseback came out to meet them and the armies fell upon each other. So many cats and mice were killed that finally there was no ground for the horses to stand on. At length the king of the cats was cap- tured and condemned to execution. He was carried to the block, bound paw to paw, but he burst his fetters, darted here and there, seizing and slaying till the whole army of mice was routed and there was none left to oppose him. Gottfried Keller’s story of “ Spiegel, das Katzchen ” has a folk air and was probably not entirely the invention of the author. A certain wizard in a Swiss village, taking a walk one day, met a ram-cat looking very thin and miserable. He had been the favourite feline of a rich old gentlewoman, whose sudden death had left him without means of support. Now cat’s grease was an invaluable ingredient in certain magical preparations, but the thaumaturglcal condition prescribed that the cat must make a willing donation of it. The wizard saw his opportunity in the present situation. Spiegel was hungry and he offered him a month’s luxurious living in re- turn for his grease. The bargain was struck and the wizard In “Die Leute von SeldvTyla,” 1856. 153 The Tiger in the House fitted up an apartment as an artificial landscape with a little wood on a mountain and a little lake. Tiny roasted birds perched on the trees. Baked mice, seasoned with stuffing and larded with bacon, peered out of the mountain caves. Fish swam In the milk lake. Spiegel enjoyed himself but as he found himself getting very fat a ruse occurred to him. To- wards the end of the month he stopped eating and grew very thin again. He continued this procedure every time his waist line Increased In size until the wizard accused him of trying to escape from his bargain. It was on this day, and no other, that forcible feeding was Invented! But Spiegel was again inspired; he told the wizard that he knew where 10,000 florins were burled at the bottom of a well, waiting as the wedding portion of a man who could find a beautiful and penniless maiden. The story was false. The money existed but a curse lay upon It. The wizard, however, took Spiegel on a chain to the well, saw the gold bricks and believed In them, and released his prisoner. Now th? cat was the friend of an owl-companlon to an old hag; with the aid of a magic net these two contrived to seize the beldam and transform her Into a personable young lady. In this form she married the wizard at high noon as Is the respectable custom, but at night- fall she regained her rightful shape, so that he found himself possessed of a hag for a wife and a pot of cursed gold for a dowry. Spiegel, of course, lived happily ever after. Thomas A. Janvier found the following story among some old Mexican papers and printed It In “ Stories of Old New Spain”: “It was about the year 1540 that the Reverend Father Friar Francisco de Tembleque felt stirring In his heart a good desire (that, assuredly, God put there) to build an aqueduct by which the towns of Otumba and Zempoala should be supplied abundantly with water wholesome to drink — which at that time the people of these towns were compelled to bring from springs seven leagues away. And his plan was to make an aqueduct over all that distance, carrying it across 154 The Cat in Folklore three wide valleys on no less than one hundred and thirty-six arches, and making over the deepest of the valleys one arch so great that beneath it might pass (had there been any such thereabouts) a ship under full sail. And to this work the servant of God — for so Father Tembleque was called — set himself with a stout heart; and the Indians worked for him joyfully. And at the spot where the great arch was to be, in what then was a tangle of wooded wild land, he built a little chapel to the Glory of Our Lady of Belen, and close beside the chapel he made for himself a cell so narrow that scarcely was there room within it for him to lie down to sleep. “ And God showed his love to his servant by giving to dwell with him a grey cat, which every day from the wild woodland round about brought quails for his master’s sus- tenance; and in the season of rabbits, a rabbit. And between the servant of God and this cat there was much love. “ To Father Tembleque there came one day a stranger, who courteously, yet with a curious particularity, questioned him about the progress of the great work that he had in hand. For certain persons of the baser sort had said in the ears of the Viceroy that Father Tembleque was wasting his time and the substance of the church in striving to do an impossible thing; and this stranger really was an alcalde of the court, whom, that he might know the truth, the Viceroy had sent thus secretly to ask searching questions and to see for himself how the work went on. And as the two communed together, behold the cat came out of the wood to where they stood in talk and laid a rabbit at his master’s feet! “When said the servant of God: ‘ Brother Cat, a guest hath come to us, and therefore it is necessary that thou shalt bring me this day not one rabbit, but two.’ “ Hearing these words, the cat in due obedience, betook himself once more to the thicket. But the alcalde, thinking that this might be a trick that was put upon him, sent after 155 The Tiger in the House the cat to spy upon him one of his own servants. And the servant presently beheld a greater wonder. For in a mo- ment the cat met with another rabbitd*^ which he caught with- out any resistance at all on the creature’s part, and with it returned to his master again: thus plainly showing that all had been disposed thus by God. “ And the Senor Alcalde, being so substantially assured of the miracle, returned to the Viceroy and said, ‘ Though it seems to be impossible to bring the water by the way that Fa- ther Tembleque hath chosen, and though the work that he hath set himself to do seems to be beyond the power of man to ac- complish, yet assuredly will he succeed; for I have seen that which proves beyond a peradventure that God hath vouch- safed to him his all-powerful aid and he told to the Viceroy the whole of the miracle which through the cat had been wrought. Therefore did the Viceroy encourage Father Tem- bleque in his great work; and God’s blessing continuing upon it, in seventeen years’ time tbe aqueduct was finished — the very aqueduct through which the water comes to the towns of Otumba and Zempoala at the present day.” Doubtless many miraculous cat stories are to be found in Stories of cats who have fed families are not uncommon. There is, for instance, that of the ploughman who lived at the foot of the Orchils and his cat, Mysie. The ploughman had long been ill — his home was in poverty — when the doctor said the poor man would die if his strength was not kept up by stimulants and animal food. “ I put awa’ my marriage gown and ring to get him wine,” related the ploughman’s wife, “but we had naething in the house but milk and meal. Surely, sir, it was the Lord himself that put it into that cat’s head; for that same night she brought in a fine young rabbit, and laid it on tlie verra bed ; and the next night the same, and every night the same, for a month, whiles a rabbit and whiles a bird, till George was up, and going to his work as usual. But she never brought anything after that.” Agnes Repplier found a similar story in Watson’s Annals, which she quotes on page 237 of “ The Fireside Sphinx.” Found by Mr. Janvier in MS. of Fray Agustin de Vetancourt in the Meno- logio Franciscano, October 1, of his Teatro Mexicano (City of Mexico; 1698; folio) . 156 The Cat in Folklore the archives of Negro folklore. I remember one which I have heard both Kitty Cheatham and Bert Williams tell. An itinerant Negro preacher, finding himself a long distance from the next farmhouse at an inconveniently late hour, decided to accommodate himself for the night in a deserted hut. He lighted a fire in the fireplace and settled down before it to read his Bible when suddenly a black kitten appeared. He caressed the animal and was indeed glad to have company for he began to recall a legend that the house was haunted. Presently a larger cat joined the kitten and the preacher was astonished to hear him remark, “ We cain’t do nothin’ till Martin gits here.” The old man, however, decided that his ears must have deceived him and continued to read his Bible aloud fervidly. Pretty soon along came a cat the size of a collie dog, who settled down on his haunches alongside the others. “ We cain’t do nothin’ till Martin gits here,” he remarked plaintively. The preacher’s knees shook and his kinky hair began to grow straighter, but he bent over tbe Holy Word and began to intone the lines. But the next ar- rival was a cat as big as a lion. He sat down with the others and his tone was an angry deep growl as he said, “ We cain’t do nothin’ till Martin gits here.” This was too much for the preacher who dropped his Bible and fled, shouting over bis shoulder, “ You tell Martin when he gits here dat I cain’t wait for him ! ” In Russia, according to Thiselton Dyer, the cat enjoys a better reputation among the people than she does in some other countries. There is a curious legend current about Mos- cow that when Lucifer once tried to creep back into Paradise, he assumed the form of a mouse. The dog and the cat were on guard at the gates, and the dog allowed the evil one to pass, but the cat pounced upon him and so defeated another treacherous attempt against human felicity. At any rate the Russian folk-tales in which puss plays 157 a The Tiger in the House prominent part are usually based on accurate observation of the animal’s traits. The following fable of Ivan Krilof cer- tainly epitomizes the spirit of the cat; A certain cook, rather more educated than his fellows, went from his kitchen one day to a neighbouring tavern, leav- ing his cat at home to protect his store of food from the mice. But on his return he found the floor strewn with the fragments of a pie and Vaska the cat crouching in a corner behind a vinegar barrel, purring with satisfaction, and busily engaged in disposing of a chicken. “Ah, glutton, ah, evil-doer!” exclaimed the reproachful cook. “ Are you not ashamed to be seen by these walls, let alone living witnesses? You, an honourable cat up to this time, one who might be pointed out as a model of discretion! And now, think of the disgrace ! Now, all the neighbours will say, ‘Vaska is a rogue; Vaska is a thief. Vaska must be kept out of the kitchen, even out of the courtyard, like a ravenous wolf from the sheepfold. He is corrupt; he is a pest, the plague of the neighbourhood.’ ” While the cook was delivering this discourse Vaska the cat ate the whole of the chicken. Chapter Six: The Cat and the Law From the epoch of the cat’s godhood down to the modern moment laws have been passed to protect the cat, laws which have demanded that man treat the cat in such and such a fashion. Egyptians cat-killers were punished by death. Diodorus writes of a brave Roman soldier who was the victim of this law. It is interesting to compare this extreme meas- ure with the old English common law which held both cats and dogs as “ no property, being base by nature,” but it is also well to remember that at one time in England larceny was punished by the death penalty. If a cat had been con- sidered property the theft of a puss would have led the thief to the block or the scaffold. The English “ Rule of Nuns ” issued in the early thirteenth century, forbade the holy wmmen to keep any beast but a cat. A canon of a date nearly a hun- dred years earlier forbade nuns, even abbesses, from wearing costlier skins than those of lambs and cats. The Welsh laws concerning domestic lions were formulated in the tenth cen- tury. In i8i8 a decree was issued at Ypres in Flanders for- bidding the throwing of pussies from high towers in com- memoration of a Christmas Spectacle. And today the So- ciety for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals endeavours to make the punishment fit the crime for anyone who maliciously mistreats a cat. But through the ages law-makers have wisely, it would seem, allowed puss to go more or less her own way, while restricting her master’s actions in regard to her. I say wisely, for it cannot be considered the part of wisdom to create laws which will not be obeyed, and I think I have made it fairly clear that the cat will not obey laws. A cat makes no attempt to gov- 159 The Tiger in the House ern other cats and he will not tolerate such an attempt on the part of man. While other animals are leashed and muzzled, barned and fenced in, puss wanders free. The unclean dojr is expelled from the mosque but grimalkin is welcomed there. She rubs her legs against the sultan’s guests at dinner and attends state banquets at the White House. ^ So she sits at the prelate’s table or by the humble farmer’s hearth, but by night she wanders the heath or the rooftop, to view, as one poet has ingeniously explained, the surrounding country! Even in the middle ages when it was quaintly held that animals were responsible for crimes” (I say quaintly because it is perfectly obvious that both the word and the idea are human inventions) and they were tried and condemned to death and to other punishments, including torture, the cat es- caped.^ In the list of these trials given by E. P. Evans there is not one single case in which a cat was the defendant. The cat appears, indeed, only in the testimony of these trials. Once, for instance, a sixteenth century French jurist, Bartho- lomew Chassenee, complained that his clients, some rats, were prevented from appearing in court at Autun, because of a stretch of cat country that they would be forced to cross on their journey. Modern lawyers will be glad to know that Chassenee successfully defended his rats. By virtue of the old Germanic law cats often appeared as witnesses at the trials of thieves and murderers.® 1 See “Slippers, the White House Cat,” by Jacob A. Riis: “Saint Nicholas”; January 1908. Theodore Roosevelt was not the first of our presidents to be a cat-lover. There was at least one other, Abraham Lincoln. - The middle ages cannot be held entirely responsible for these laws. It was incorporated into the Mosaic Law that an ox who killed a man was subject to death, just as if it had been a man who had murdered one of his fellows. See Exodus, XXI, 28: “ If an ox gore a man or a woman, that they die; then the ox shall be surely stoned, and his flesh shall not be eaten; but the owner of the ox shall be quit.” 3 As a witch’s companion she did not escape, but I have fully covered that point in a preceding chapter. “ The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals.” 5 Same work, p. 11. 160 The Cat and the Law In passing it is interesting to observe that St. Ives, the patron saint of lawyers is represented as accompanied by a cat. And here again, if it were necessary, we might invoke symbolism to explain the simple truth that holy men as well as devils found the cat the most attractive of animals. The profound wisdom, the concealed claws, the stealthy approach, and the final spring, all seem to typify the superior attorney. We should not be astonished, therefore, that Cardinal Wolsey placed his cat by his side while acting in his judicial capacity as Lord Chancellor. The most interesting laws concerning cats were formulated during the tenth century by Howel Dda, a King of South Wales, who, perceiving that the customs of his country were being violated, called the archbishops, the bishops, the nobles, and other chosen men to meet at Y ty Gwyn ar Dav with him. The whole of Lent was spent by this body in the pres- ence of the King in fasting and prayer; then Howel selected from the assembly twelve of the wisest men and adding to their number a doctor of laws, Blegywryd by name, com- mitted them to the task of examining, retaining, expounding, and abrogating the laws. When the work was completed Howel sanctioned it. Wales, however, was of considerable size and it was not long before local distinctions arose which resulted in the eventual formulation of three separate Codes, Venedotian, Dimetian, and Gwentian. It is from these Codes that the following curious passages relating to cats have been extracted. According to the Venedotian Code: The worth of a kit- ten from the night it is kittened until it shall open its eyes is a legal penny; and from that time until it shall kill mice, two legal pence; and after it shall kill mice, four legal pence; and so it shall always remain. The penny, at this period, was equal to the value of a lamb, a kid, a goose, or a hen; a cock or a gander was worth twopence, a sheep or a goat fourpence. The qualities of a cat, continues the Code, are to see, to hear, i6l The Tiger in the House to kill mice, to have her claws entire, to rear and not to de- vour her kittens, and if she be bought and be deficient in any of these qualities, let one third of her worth be returned. In the Dimetian and Gwentian Codes distinctions are drawn between cats and cats. The Dimetian Code says: The worth of a cat that is killed or stolen: its head is to be put downwards upon a clean, even floor, with its tail lifted up- wards, and thus suspended, whilst wheat is poured about it, until the tip of its tail be covered and that is to be its worth; lif the corn cannot be had, a milch sheep with her lamb and its wool is its value, if it be a cat which guards the King’s barn. The worth of a common cat is four legal pence. The Gwentian Code says: Whoever shall kill a cat that guards a house or a barn of the King or shall take it stealth- ily; it is to be held with its head to the ground and its tail up, the ground being swept and then clean wheat is to be poured about it until the tip of its tail be hidden: and that is its worth. Another cat is four legal pence in value. There seem to be obvious difficulties involved in the carry- ing out of this law. In the first place it would appear to be necessary to capture both the thief and the stolen cat. In the second place no self-respecting cat would permit herself to be suspended by the tail. She would scratch and bite and turn and twist and curl until it would be impossible to go through with the experiment unless she were dead and certainly the Welsh judges would not kill the King’s cat merely in order to punish her thief. Thirdly it would seem to be manifestly impossible to enforce this law if the King’s cat happened to be a tailless Manx cat. There are further laws: The Dimetian Code says : Who- ever shall sell a cat is to answer for her not going a cater- wauling every moon; and that she devour not her kittens; and that she have ears, eyes, teeth, and nails, and is a good mouser. The Gwentian Code provides that there shall be no Manx cats: The qualities of a cat are that it be perfect of 162 The Cat and the Law ear, perfect of eye, perfect of teeth, perfect of tall, perfect of claw, and without marks of fire; and that it kill mice well and that it shall not devour its kittens and that it be not caterwauling on every new moon. The importance of the cat to the community was recog- nized by these Welsh laws which provided that one cat was necessary to make a lawful hamlet together with nine buildings, one plough, one kiln, one churn, one bull, one cock, and one herdsman. The dog and the horse are not mentioned. Another interesting detail of the Dimetian Code relates to the separation of man and wife: the goods and chattels were to be divided but the husband took the cat if there was but one; if there were others they went to the wife. The stress laid on puss at this period, her comparatively high value, leads Pennant ® to the very credible conclusion that her importation must have been recent, as the animal breeds so rapidly that in a few years a dozen felines could populate a country. Notwithstanding the laws of Howel the question as to whether or not the cat is a property continues to be discussed in its legal aspects down to the present day. There seems to be difference of opinion in the matter and the judgments in law suits of this character seem to depend on whether or no the judge is a cat-lover. Fortunately most judges are cat- lovers. In 1865, Monsieur Richard, the juge de paix of Fontaine- bleau rendered a memorable decision. An inhabitant of the town, annoyed by cats who molested his garden, set traps and caught fifteen. The owners of the cats brought the man to trial. “ Considering,” said the learned judge in his opinion, “ that ® “ British Zoology.” ^ This phrase and such words as “ master,” “ mistress,” etc., which occur in this book are used purely for convenience. Of course no one ever owned a cat. 163 The Tiger in the House the law does not permit the individual to do justice to himself in his own person; “ That article 479 of the Penal Code, and Article 1385 of the Code Napoleon, recognize several kinds of cats, not- ably the wild cat, as a noxious animal for the destruction of which a reward Is granted, but that the domestic cat is not affected by these articles in the eyes of the legislator; “ That the domestic cat, not being a thing of nought {res niiUius), but the property of a master, ought to be protected by the law; “ That the utility of the cat as a destroyer of mischievous animals of the rodent kind being indisputable, equity demands the extension of Indulgence to an animal which is tolerated by the law; “ That even the domestic cat Is In some degree of a mixed nature, that Is to say, an animal always partly wild, and which must remain so ijy reason of its destiny and purpose. If it is to render those services which are expected from it; “ That although the law of 1790, art. 12 in fine, permits the killing of poultry, the assimilation of cats with these birds is by no means correct, since the fowl species are destined to be killed sooner or later, and that they can be kept In a man- ner under the hand of their owners, sub custodia, In a com- pletely enclosed and secure place, while this cannot be said of the cat, for It Is impossible to put that animal under lock and key, if it Is to obey the law of its nature; “ That the asserted right in certain cases of killing the dog, which is a dangerous animal and prompt to attack with- out being rabid, cannot be held to imply as a consequence the right to kill a cat, which is an animal not calculated to in- spire fear, and always ready to run away; “ That nothing in the law authorizes citizens to set traps, in order, by an appetizing bait, to entice the Innocent cats of an entire quarter as well as the guilty ones; 164 The Cat and the Law “That no one ought to do to the property {chose)o{ an- other that which he would not wish to have done to his own property; “That all goods being either movables {meiihles) or im- movables {immeuhles) according to article 516 of the Code Napoleon, it results therefrom that the cat, contrary to ar- ticle 128 of the same Code, is incontestably a movable (meuhle) protected by the law, and therefore that the own- ers of animals which are destroyed are entitled to claim the application of article 479, clause i, of the Penal Code, which punishes those who have voluntarily caused damage to the movable property of others.” ® A similar decision was rendered in the sheriff’s court at Perth, Scotland, in the late seventies. The cat had killed the plaintiff’s pigeon on a neighbour’s premises. The learned sheriff in his decision said: “ It was quite legitimate for the plaintiff to keep a pigeon, but just as much so for the defendant to keep a cat. The latter is more a domestic animal than a pigeon. But there are no obligations on the owner of a cat to restrain it to the house. The plaintiff’s plea is that the natural instinct of the feline race is to prey on birds as well as mice. So it was argued that the owner of the cat should prevent the pos- sibility of its coming into contact with its favourite sport. But it is equally true that the owner of a bird should ex- ercise similar precaution to prevent its coming within the range of a hostile race. If the defendant’s cat had tres- passed into the plaintiff’s house or aviary where the bird was secured, there might be ground for finding the owner of the cat liable for the consequences of its being at large. With parity of reason had the bird intruded itself upon the ter- ritory of the cat and there had been slain, there could have been no recourse because the owner of the bird should have prevented its escape. In the present case it appears that both ® This decision was afterwards disputed before the Correctional Tribunal. 165 The Tiger in the House the quadruped and the winged animal were in trespass on neu- tral territory. It was the duty of the plaintiff to take the guar- dianship of the bird said to be so valuable and therefore both owners are equally to blame and the case must be viewed as arising from natural law, for which neither owner without cidpa can be answerable. The defendant being at first not sympathetic with the loss of the plaintiff, but rather put him at defiance, and forced him to prove it was the defendant’s cat who slew his bird, the defendant will be acquitted but without costs.” ® In Maine it has been decided that the cat is a domestic animal within the jurisdiction of the statute which provides that “ any person may lawfully kill a dog which ... is found worrying, wounding, or killing any domestic animal, when said dog is outside of the inclosure or immediate care of its owner and keeper.” The plaintiff sued the defendant, al- leging that he had killed a valuable foxhound belonging to him, and the defendant replied that he had killed it because the dog was chasing and worrying his cat. The court held that this was sufficient justification and gave an exhaustive view of the law as to felines.^® Ingham cites a Canadian case in which the judge decided: “A person may have property in a cat and therefore an action will lie to recover damages for killing it. There may be circumstances under which it would be justifiable to kill a cat; but it is not justifiable to do “Harrison Weir (“Our Cats and All About Them,” p. 207) quotes an “Arti- cled Clerk” writing in “The Standard” with regard to the illegality of killing cats: “It is clearly laid down in ‘Addison on Torts,’ that a person is not justi- fied in killing his neighbour’s cat, which he finds on his land, unless the animal is in the act of doing some injurious act which can only be prevented by its slaughter. And it has been decided by the case of ‘ Townsend v. Watken,’ 9 last 277, that if a person sets on his lands a trap for foxes, and baits it with such strong-smelling meat as to attract his neighbour’s cat on to his land, to the trap, and such animal is thereby killed or injured, he is liable for the act, though he had no intention of doing it, and though the animal ought not to have been on his land.” i““The cat a ‘domestic animal’ and ‘property’”: “The American Law Re- view”; Vol. 49, p. 917. 166 The Cat and the Law so merely because it Is a trespasser, even though after game.” In another case the owner of a cat was not held liable to the owner of a canary bird killed by it, the court considering that cats to some extent “ may be regarded as still undomesticated and their predatory habits are but a remnant of their wild nature.” But an Attorney-General of the State of Maryland, evi- dently no fellnophile, handed down a decision which was a cruel blow to the owners of cats. A certain citizen of Bal- timore (I hope this was not Mencken) stole a fine maltese cat from a neighbour, who had him arrested for theft. When the case came up for trial the prisoner’s counsel entered the plea that It was impossible for any one to steal a cat, as that animal is not property, and that to take forcible possession of a feline, even though It be a pet and wear a ribbon and answer to its name, is not a legal offense. The astonishing judge held the argument to be good and the more astonishing Attorney-General, to whom the case was appealed, agreed with him. The latter in his formal opinion, declared that the cat Is really nothing but a wild animal, that It Is of no use to man, and that the taking of a cat without the owner’s consent is not an indictable offence. Since this extraordinary decision was rendered cat-owners with pussy-baskets have been seen leaving Baltimore on every train. Cats themselves, however, have as yet entered no objection to the decree, arguing doubtless that it stands to reason If a man steals you he wants you pretty badly and is therefore likely to give you more liver, fish, and other delectables than the man with whom you were living before. In Georgia it Is held to be libellous to say that a young lady said that her mama acted like a cat. Edgar Saltus has John H. Ingham: “The Law of Animals.” Gertrude B. Rolfe: “The Cat in Law”; “North American Review”; Vol. i6o, p. 251. 167 The Tiger in the House written variations on a similar theme in his story, “ The 7 'op of the Heap.” It is not an uncommon occurrence for cats to be left prop- erty by will. I shall presently discuss the case of Mad- emoiselle Dupuy. Lord Chesterfield left life pensions to his cats and their offspring. This sounds eternal. Others have done this. In fact every few months you may read of such a will In the public prints. It is the custom of relatives in such cases to attempt to break the wills, and in most instances they have been successful. But there is at least one case in which a notable cat charity has been preserved through sev- eral centuries. About 658 of the Hegira (A.D. 1280) the Sultan, El-Daher-Beybars, having a particular affection for cats, at his death bequeathed a garden known as Gheyt-el- Qouttah (the cat’s orchard), situated near his mosque out- side Cairo, for the support of needy cats. This garden has been sold and resold, but until at least a comparatively recent date and probably up to the present moment, the owner still continues to carry out the terms of the will. At the hour of afternoon prayer a daily distribution of refuse from the butchers’ stalls is made to the cats of the neighbourhood. “ At the usual hour, all the terraces in the vicinity of the Mehkemeh (outer court) are crowded with cats; they come jumping from house to house across the narrow streets of Cairo, in haste to secure their share; they slide down the walls, and glide Into the court, where, with astonishing tenacity and much growling, they dispute the scanty morsels of a meal sadly out of proportion to the number of guests. The old hands clear the food off in a moment; the youngsters and the new-comers, too timid to fight for their chance, are reduced to the humble expedient of licking the ground.” There are other ways in which cats figure in the law. Marine insurance does not cover damage done to cargo by the depredations of rats, but if the owner of the damaged IB “Purple and Fine Women.” M. Prisse d’Avennes. 168 The Cat and the Law goods can prove that the ship was sent to sea without a cat he can recover damages from the shipmaster. Again, according to English law, a ship found at sea with no living creature on hoard is considered a derelict and is forfeited to the Admi- ralty, the finders, or the King, but it has often happened that, from its hatred of facing the waves, a cat remaining on board has saved the vessel from being condemned. Periodically letters and editorials appear In the American newspapers concerning the advisability of licensing cats or in some way depriving them of their power of Increasing, or restraining their actions. In the bird journals hysterical gen- tlemen moan loudly over the destruction of feathered song- sters and demand that strong measures be taken as preventa- tlves. I am not at all sure that laws have not been passed In certain states limiting the freedom of puss. Nevertheless the cat preserves his liberty. As the learned judge of Fontainebleau remarked, you cannot restrain a cat without changing his nature; he might have added that you cannot change his nature. A cat will preserve his independ- ence at any cost, even that of his life. Recently an adven- turous tom climbed the switchboard of the lighting works of Cardiff, became entangled In the wires, and plunged the city In darkness. The effort cost him his life but he accom- plished his purpose. Therefore senators and representatives, who find no difficulty In fettering human-kind in a hundred ways, go very slowly in formulating laws regarding the cat. They know perfectly well that the cat will refuse to obey these laws. It Is amusing and delightful to observe this little animal escaping the onerous obligations of these United States, where a dog can only walk abroad on a chain with his jaw bandaged and a man is not permitted to raise a cup to his lips unless It contain lemonade or water, or to set pen to paper unless he scratches hieroglyphics that can be read with- out a blush by nasty-minded old gentlemen on the lookout for obscenity. 169 Chapter Seven: T’he Cat in the Theatre Actors, playwrights, singers in opera, managers of theatres, and stage-hands have as many superstitions as Italian peas- ants. I have known of a tenor who, because of the presence of a rival tenor in a stage box, would not go before the foot- lights in his great role of Tannhauser until he had performed a ludicrous and scatologic rite. An admirer once sent a hand- some and expensive peacock-feather fan to Madame Mod- jeska. Now birds in general and peacock-feathers in par- ticular are considered more portentous omens in the theatre than the simultaneous breaking of a mirror, sitting at table with thirteen, and facing the evil eye in any other plane of worldly existence. The gift arrived just prior to a perform- ance of Macbeth and the Polish actress refused to allow the curtain to ascend until the noble count, her husband, had with his own hands consigned the offending object to the flames of the theatre furnace. These are bad luck signs. Curiously, and perversely enough, the cat, who elsewhere often signifies the most dread disaster, is a harbinger of prosperity in the theatre. A black cat is preferred; indeed, the mere presence of a black cat is sufficient to insure the success of any playhouse or any play. However a cat of another colour will do. This superstition is so wide-spread that every theatre from the Comedie Francaise to the People’s Theatre on the New York Bowery entertains a cat, feeding her lavishly, and treating her with a respect and consideration which she seldom receives elsewhere save in the homes of cat-lovers. I myself have known a stage carpenter in the Apollo Theatre at Atlantic City to go to the butcher and spend his own money for fresh 170 The Cat in the Theatre liver with which he returned to feed the cat before he went off to his own dinner. The Cecile Sorels, the Maggie Clines, the Kay Laurels, who pass the portals of the stage-door, re- gard themselves as fortunate If the cat so much as looks at them when they come in. If the pampered feline goes so far as to condescend a caress, rubbing herself against an actor’s leg, that actor may be practically certain that David Belasco will send for him in the morning to sign a life-contract. Thus a kitten which playfully attached Itself to the trailing skirt of Florence Reed’s dress during a rehearsal of Seven Days is said to have been responsible for the subsequent success of that happy farce and the call-boy himself could have told you that Florence Reed would later become a star. After J. H. Mapleson had secured the lease of Her Majesty’s Theatre in London, he passed through the door of the Opera with but £2 in his pocket, his sole balance, but, he tells us In his “ Memoirs,” he was assured that there was no occasion for despair when the “ celebrated black cat of the theatre ” rubbed herself in the most friendly way against his knees. It was the custom of Augustin Daly, after his work was done, to wait near the gallery entrance of his theatre on Thirtieth Street for a Broadway car. One night in a snow-storm a poor kitten begged his attention with a wavering mew. He picked her up and carried her back to the theatre, where she grew into cathood. At the first New York performance of Henry Irving In Faust the theatre cat wandered out on the open stage during the first scene; undisturbed by the thunder and lightning, from the vantage point of a canvas rock, she regarded the action with dignity and decorum. Irving after- wards remarked that he had regarded the incident as a lucky omen. Naturally the presence of cats in theatres Is frequently re- sponsible for accidents. Puss, who Is at home where she Is at home, has a habit of strolling abstractedly across the stage at embarrassing moments. Sometimes she will sit through 171 The Tiger in the House a scene, staring critically at the actors, to the vast diversion of the customers, for the presence of a cat on the stage, de- spite the contradictory evidence of the Irving episode, will usually excite mirth in an audience, no matter what may be the predominant mood of the play. It has therefore become a general custom to appoint a deputy whose duty It is to lock puss up before the play begins. But this is not always practi- cable; sometimes, too, the squire may forget to carry out his instructions. There are certain theatre cats who make it a matter of honour never to cross the stage In front of the back drop when the curtain Is up and who even teach their kittens, with sundry cuffs and explanatory mews, to observe this rule. Nevertheless unexpected and unwelcome appear- ances of cats on the scene are not infrequent. Charles Sant- ley, in “ Student and Singer,” tells how a cat almost caused the failure of The Flying Dutchman at its first performance In London. Santley, as Vanderdecken, had just finished his opening scene and had leaned back against a rock while he waited for Daland to make his entrance, when he heard some one behind him hiss, “ Ts! Ts! ” Looking out of the corner of his eye he made out that a cat was stealthily crossing the stage. Instead of letting her go on one of the men In the boat was foolishly attempting to send her back, not a very easy thing to get a cat to do under any circumstances. Being very tame and knowing all the people In the theatre she stopped to see who was calling her. ” I was In dread,” writes Santley, “ for I knew that if the public saw her she would attract all their attention and the rest of the act would go for nothing. To my great joy the cat did not recognize the boatman, so went quietly off.” Rossini told Madame MarchesI that the climax of the terrible fiasco of The Barber of Seville at the initial performance was the unexpected appearance of a cat on the stage which turned the already booing and hissing audi- ence Into a howling mob of mirth and necessitated the ring- ing down of the curtain. This incident reminds me that rude 172 The Cat in the Theatre spectators sometimes express their displeasure by means of cat-calls. In the eighteenth century the cat-call was a small circular whistle, composed of two plates of tin with a hole in the centre, but more lately the small boy has learned to produce the hideous screech by placing two fingers in his mouth and whistling. The boy who has lost two front teeth’ is said to be better prepared by nature for making this noise. There have been occasions on which dead cats have been hurled at actors. Huckleberry Finn informs us that sixty- four dead cats were carried to the third performance of The Royal Nonesuch which, it will be remembered, was never given. But now and again puss has unexpectedly been a factor in the success of a play. Just before the curtain fell on the first act of a comedy at Wallack’s Theatre in New York the theatre cat walked slowly across the stage, set as a drawing- room, seated himself before the fireplace, and proceeded to wash himself. This realistic touch was very delightful and if David Belasco was in front he doubtless writhed in agonized envy that he had not introduced it into some play of his own. When the leading man and the leading woman appeared be- fore the curtain there were calls for the cat, and the biggest round of applause greeted Tom when he came out in the actress’s arms. The producer decided on the spot that the cat should become a permanent actor, but when he was called to rehearsal the next morning the results were not very satis- factory, He refused, indeed, to be made a party to any such nonsense. It was the property-boy who hit on the solu- tion: “ No cat ain’t damn fool enough to let itself be trained to do extra work. Lookin’ after rats and mice is Peter’s job and we got to make him do the stunt along that line.” Accordingly the boy held a live mouse by a cord tantalizingly near a hole in the fireplace and puss waited breathlessly each night until the end of the act when the mouse was released. On one occasion the mouse made an earlier escape and the 173 The Tiger in the House curtain came down with the leading woman screaming from a chair. The account of a similar incident I owe to Chan- ning Pollock: “ On the first night of The Little Gray Lady in New York I sat in the gallery and watched my play slowly fail. Not a single laugh during the whole first act! I have never seen a piece go so badly; It was flat, dead, and I prepared for the funeral. The scene of the second act was a backyard, with a fence, an alley, and an ashcan. At a certain point in the action, chosen It would seem with meticulous precision, the theatre cat bounded over the top of the fence, jumped down Into the ashcan and, finding it empty, jumped out again and walked down the alley off the stage. The house howled and roared with laughter and broke into applause; the audi- ence, indeed, had now been warmed Into an appreciative mood and thereafter followed the progress of the play with en- thusiasm. In the following performances, by the clever ruse of laying a trail of chopped meat along the proper route and releasing the cat at the proper moment, we were enabled to repeat this happy accident.” This kind of acting a cat Is not unwilling to perform, but he has been called upon to do much more on the stage. Now at home he Is a natural actor. The play of the kitten, the diversions of the grownup puss are invariably partly directed to a human audience. Indeed a feline who lives on amicable terms with men and women sleeps most of the time his friends are away. Canon Liddon’s famous cat loved to distract his distinguished prelate friend. He would jump upon a bust of Dr. Busby which stood on a bracket near the door, and balancing himself “ for one instant upon that severe and rev- erent brow, would take a flying leap to the mantelpiece and returning, would land with exquisite and unvarying accuracy on the bust, repeating this performance as often as his master desired. Liddon’s great amusement was to stand with his back to the bracket, and fling a biscuit at Dr. Busby’s head, the cat catching it dexterously, and without losing his pre- 174 THE CAT AND THE BALL OF THREAD From a drazoing by Stcinlen in Des Chats •M. f I /! V -*PI The Cat in the Theatre carious foothold.” ^ Wordsworth, in his description of a kitten at play, quite mistakes the nature of the artful little ball of fur when he asks: What would little Tabby care For the plaudits of the crotudf For what else would she care, indeed? But, away from home, or constrained, the cat has a natural timidity, a natural dignity, and a feeling which amounts to an absolute avers’on for the perfoiTnance of silly antics which other animals, such as seals and dogs, seem to enjoy, and which elephants can be taught to execute with facility if not with desire. The show- man’s task becomes a heavier one because of the feline char- acter. Animals who appear in the theatre or the circus are usually trained by being beaten or threatened with red-hot irons. In other words it is through their sense of fear that their co-operation is gained. But such tactics will be of no assistance to any one who wishes to train cats. A terrified cat will shrink and tremble but he will not jump through hoops. A cat who has been beaten will not creep up to lick the mountebank’s hand. Nevertheless a man who has won a cat’s confidence can, with patience and interminable perseverance, accomplish a good deal in this direction. The easiest method is to prolong or exaggerate natural characteristics. If a cat has a natural habit of sitting on h’s haunches and waving his paws in the air, it is a comparatively easy matter to teach him to do this upon demand. Feathers will lie for whole minutes perfectly still on her back in the palms of my hands with one paw, per- haps, pasted to my nose, but she will often refuse to be held in any ordinary way. It is very simple, of course, to teach a cat to live at peace with animals which usually form his prey and a collection of this kind in a cage impresses a simple public. Harrison Weir describes one such family whTh a showman 1 Agnes Repplier: “The Fireside Sphinx.” 175 The Tiger in the House exhibited in which starlings sat on puss’s head and blackbirds on his back while rabbits, white mice, rats and other such beasties thrived in the cage. The animals seemed contented and happy. At another London street corner Mr. Weir met a man who had trained cats and birds: “ The man takes a canary, opens the cat’s mouth, puts it in, takes it out, makes the cat, or cats, go up a short ladder and down another; then they are told to fight, and placed in front of each other; but fight they will not with their forepaws, so the master moves their paws for them, each looking away from the other.” Mr. Weir witnessed other performances at the Royal Aquar- ium, Westminster: “On each side of the stage there were cat kennels, from which the cats made their appearance on a given signal, ran across, on or over whatever was placed between, and disappeared quickly Into the opposite kennels. But about It all there was a decided air of timidity, and an eagerness to get the performance over. When the cats came out they were caressed and encouraged, which seemed to have a soothing effect, and I have a strong apprehension that they received some dainty morsel when they reached their destina- tion.” Other feats followed and the entertainment closed with an exhibition of tightrope walking in which the cats walked a rope on which white rats had been placed at inter- vals, without Injuring the rodents. “ A repetition of this feat was rendered a little more difficult by substituting for rats, which sat pretty quietly in one place, several white mice and small birds, which were more restless, and kept changing their positions. The cats re-crossed the rope, and passed over all these obstacles without even noticing the impediments In their way, with one or two exceptions, when they stopped, and cossetted one or more of the white rats, two of which rode triumphantly on the back of a large black cat.” Miss Wins- low " gives some account of Herr Techow’s performing felines, who walk on their front feet, jump through hoops of fire, 2 “ Concerning Cats,” p. 232. 176 The Cat in the Theatre and perform other unnatural acts to the great edification of vaudeville audiences. Herr Techow told Miss Winslow that high-strung, nervous cats have the best minds but that it is difficult to keep them interested in their work. “ A vagrant cat,” he continued, “ is the easiest to teach, the quickest to learn. Just as a street gamin gets his wits sharpened by his vagrant life, the stray, half-starved cat, forced to defend him- self from foes and to snatch his living where he can, has his perceptive faculties quickened and his brain-cells enlarged. I cannot teach a kitten. I take them from a year to two or three years old, and train them three years longer before it is safe to put them on the stage with confidence in their per- forming the tricks they may have mastered.” Performing cats, however, are seldom to be seen in circuses or vaudeville. They are most difficult to train, not because they are stupid but because they are too intelligent to be in- terested in such nonsense. A cat is never vulgar and this sort of thing undoubtedly strikes a cat as vulgar. As the cat will willingly die to preserve his independence he cannot, even when he has seemingly made the compromise with the showman, be depended upon to carry out instructions. Bear- ing on this point Miss Repplier ^ tells a particularly signifi- cant story of a cat she saw with a troupe of performing ani- mals at the Folies-Bergere in Paris: “ Her fellow actors, poodles, and monkeys, played their parts with relish and a sense of fun. The cat, a thing apart, condescended to leap twice through a hoop, and to balance herself very prettily on a large rubber ball. She then retired to the top of a ladder, made a deft and modest toilet, and composed herself for slumber. Twice the trainer spoke to her persuasively, but she paid no heed, and evinced no further interest in him, nor in his entertainment. Her time for con- descension was past. “ The next day I commented on the cat’s behaviour to * “ The Grocer’s Cat ” in “ Americans and Others.” 177 The Tiger in the House some friends who had also been to the Folies-Bergere on dif- ferent nights. ‘ But,’ said the first friend, ‘ the evening I went, that cat did wonderful things; came down the ladder on her ball, played the fiddle, and stood on her head.’ “ ‘ Really,’ said the second friend. ‘ Well the night 1 went she did nothing at all except cuff one of the monkeys that annoyed her. She just sat on the ladder and watched the performance. I presumed she was there by way of decoration.’ ” Cats have repeatedly been drawn into cinematograph representations with success, however. I remember an elabo- rate film which began with a cat killing a bird, not a very difficult thing to get a cat to do, and I have seen lovely white Persians, and delightfully amusing alley cats, frisk on and off the screen in this picture and that. Adolf Bolm has told me of an electrical drama entirely performed by a cat, a bear, and a fish. Occasionally a playwright has asked an actress to carry a cat, as dogs are often carried, on the stage. Avery Hop- wood wanted his Countess with a cat to meet his Sadie Love with a dog. But an attempt or two at rehearsals decided him that the project had best be abandoned. The theme of Eugene Walter’s play. The Assassin, was inherited blood-lust, and the audience learned that the girl-heroine was affected with the taint when she killed her pet kitten at the end of the second act. The murder was accomplished off stage and was indicated by the screams of the girl, like the crucifixion in Aphrodite, but in order to establish the idea of the kitten in the minds of the audience it was considered necessary to keep her on the stage during the whole act. The very youngest of kittens was secured for the purpose but even so it was no easy matter to hold her and Fania Marinoff, to *It is perhaps easier for a cat to train a man than for a man to train a cat. A cat who desires to live with human beings makes it his business to see that the so-called superior race behaves in the proper manner towards him. 178 The Cat in the Theatre whom the task fell, found it expedient to cut puss’s claws be- fore many rehearsals had taken place. The kitten was thoroughly jolly, good-natured, and happy on trains and in hotels, even in the dressing-room, but once the curtain had risen she was transformed into an animated fiend, whose one idea was escape. She struggled and often yowled and hold- ing the kitten became as firmly fixed in Miss Marinoft’s mind as any of her lines. At the end of Lady Gregory’s play. The Deliverer,^ the King’s Nurseling is thrown to the King’s cats: A loud mewing and screaming is heard. Dan s wife: What is that screeching? Malachi’s wife: It is the King’s cats calling for their food. Ard: Shove him over the steps to them. Malachi: Will you throw him to the King’s cats? Dan’s wife: A good thought. No one will recognize him. They’ll have the face ate off him ere morning. Ard’s wife: Throw him to the King’s cats! They screech again. Their shadow is seen on the steps. The King’s Nurseling is dragged into darkness. A louder screech is heard.^ Another stage cat is that in Chester Bailey Fernald’s one-act play. The Cat and the Cherub, which is not to be confused with the story with the same title. One-Two is a delightful character in the story, but in the play the cat becomes scarcely more than a name. There are occasions on which playwrights call upon actors to impersonate cats; the most notable example of this sort of drama is probably The Blue Bird. Maeterlinck, of course, is exclusively a dog-lover and the Cat does not come off very 5 “ Irish Folk-History Plays,” Second Series. ® There is an historical precedent for this scene. A certain King of Persia, having devastated Egypt and profaned the temples, committed the final outrage in killing the sacred bull. Apis. The Egyptians were revenged; they hacked his body to pieces, and fed the morsels to the sacred cats! 179 The Tiger in the House well; nor is his portrait cleverly drawn. The Cat is repre- sented as fawning on his human friends to gain his own ends, but do cats ever fawn? None that I have known do. On the other hand Hinze the Tom Cat in Ludwig Tieck’s Der Gestie- felte Kater is one of the most delightful and sympathetic cats to be found in all literature. This cat, almost white with a few black spots, is the wisest and wittiest personage in the com- edy, which purports to be a dramatic version of Puss in Boots. The piece is a mad fantastic satire on the German people, the German government, and even the play form itself. In Thomas Middleton’s The Witch, Hecate’s cat plays a con- siderable part in the incantation scenes. In his ballet. The Sleeping Beauty, Tschaikovsky introduces a short dance be- tween two cats in a scenic episode in which other heroes and heroines of the Perrault tales appear. Here, to the accom- paniment of spits and meows in the orchestra. Puss in Boots has an entirely apocryphal encounter with the White Cat. The mood of this divertissement is humorous and Adolf Bolm has told me that it is one of the most delightful scenes in the ballet when danced at Petrograd. When Anna Pavlowa presented a version of this work at the New York Hippodrome several seasons ago I think this pas de deux was omitted. How many pantomimes have been constructed on the subject of cats I cannot even begin to conjecture. J. R. Planche wrote one, I know, on the theme of the White Cat, and Dick Whittington and Puss in Boots must have been figured as frequently in the London Christmas lists as any other folk or fairy story heroes.”^ At the height of her rivalry with Taglioni, Fanny Elssler danced in a ballet called La Chatte Metamorphosee en Femme, ’’ It is interesting to know that Bernard Shaw’s extravagant farce, Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction, was suggested by a story told by the author to the children of William Archer about a cat who by mistake lapped up a saucer of plaster of Paris instead of milk, and thereupon became petrified and was used to prop up a door! i8o The Cat in the Theatre drawn by Coralli and Duveyrler from a vaudeville of the same title by Scribe and Melesville; the music was composed by a young winner of the prix de Rome, a forgotten Apollo named Montfort. There was much preliminary booming of this ballet; It was announced that, as the action passed In China, the costumes would be copied from authentic Canton models and the following paragraph went the round of the Paris journals: “Until recently, It Is said, Mile. Fanny Elssler had an unconquerable aversion for cats. Each of us has his bete noire; well, the hete noire of Fanny Elssler was a cat, even a white cat. The sight of a cat made her tremble, the mewing of a cat made her dash away on the points of her toes. But the love of art is like all love : it knows the way to triumph over fear; it knows how to vanquish the most sincere re- pugnances; and through devotion to her art, to give truth to her Impersonation, Mile. Elssler has had the courage to buy a little white cat, which is always with her. The perfidious animal Is always by ber side; and her beautiful enemy, for- getting her hate, asks inspiration of the feline, studies her graceful poses, ^ her light movements, her undulating walk, and even her defiant glare and Immobile stare; sometimes she still trembles, if by chance her hand encounters the white ermine-like fur; the woman remembers her infantile terrors, and her vanquished repugnance reawakens for a moment; but the artist recalls herself to her role, rids herself of her weak- ness, draws the pretty cat towards her and bravely caresses it. The repellent animal disappears from her eyes; she sees onlv ® Rouviere, the actor, writes Champfleury, was truly feline by nature, and was haunted by a desire to represent his sensations by the brush. He fell in with Carlin, the harlequin of the Italian stage, who lived surrounded by cats, whose “ pupil ” he declared himself to be. A picture by Rouviere explains certain movements of that actor, who was remarkable for his quick, strange, and caress- ing gestures in Hamlet. . . . Thus might be explained certain exceptional facul- ties of Rouviere’s, which, even after his death, might serve an instructive pur- pose. Those faculties were drawn from the living sources of nature, for it may be said that the contemplation of a cat is as valuable to an actor as a course at the Conservatoire. i8i The Tiger in the House her model; she dreams of the success she will owe to it; she hears the public applaud her and she realizes that her effort will be rewarded.” The ballet was not a great success. The vaudeville of Scribe had been stupidly adapted and the music was uninterest- ing. But Fanny’s performance was considered extraordinary. She played the role of a young Chinese Princess, in love with a student, who in turn adored his cat, L'eclat d’une langue vermeille Sur deux levres en velours noir. The young man was made to believe that by means of a magic cap he could change his beloved puss into a woman. He con- sented to the metamorphosis and the Princess took the place of the animal. She adopted the habits of cats,^'’ exaggerated their faults in order to make the young man an ailurophobe. She lapped milk from a bowl, made war on birds, played him a thousand tricks until the student was ready to take the Princess and let the cat go. All this, we learn, was carried through with astonishing effect by Fanny Elssler, who had really studied the manner of cats, captured their subtle walk, copied their gestures, their soft paw-blows, their fashion of 9 This priceless example of 1837 puffery, so like the efforts of many present day press agents, I take from Auguste Ehrhard’s charming book, “ Fanny Elssler.” 19 In the “Century Magazine” for April 1891, Allan McLane Hamilton pub- lished a story called “ Herr von Striempfell’s Experiment,” in which a scientist transplanted the brain of a cat into that of a beautiful, sensible, and dignified woman who, after her convalescence underwent a remarkable change, acquiring feline characteristics of a familiar kind. At a formal dinner one evening she dived from her chair into the corner and caught a mouse between her teeth! Finally she died slowly and with the greatest difficulty, bearing out the nine lives superstition. In his “Recollections of an Alienist” (1916), Dr. Hamilton remarks (p. 232) : “Many years ago I wrote ... a short tale . . . which by some people was taken in dead earnest. . . . Strange to say this led to serious experimentation and I have heard of occasions when the brain grafting was actually tried with apparent success, but let us hope with no transfer of objec- tionable peculiarities.” 182 The Cat in the Theatre stretching themselves. “ The suppleness,” said a writer in the “ Courrier des Theatres,” ” the elegant softness, the velvet agility, the spiritual vivacity, the comic expression, full of taste and charm, employed by Mile. Fanny captivated the spectators until they believed that they had witnessed a play, whereas they had only seen a ravishing actress.” I have already spoken of Mademoiselle Deshoulieres’s tragedy to be enacted by her mother’s cat and her lovers. Moncrif has inserted in his book a quaint engraving of a fantastic performance of this piece. Mirny, Grisette, Mar- muse, and Cafar in costumes of the Louis XIV epoch stalk the rooftops on their hind legs, while common cats, clothed only in fur, sedately watch the performance from various points of vantage. Cupid with his bow presides over this charming scene. This perhaps was the last play written entirely for cats until Colette Willy’s Sept Dialogues de Betes appeared in the early twentieth century, over two hundred years later. And, of course, Madame Willy’s work is not devoted entirely to cats! No one has written about animals with more sympathetic understanding than Colette. Pierre Loti is a careful and sensitive observer but he writes about cats objec- tively. Colette treats them subjectively, tries to put herself under their skins, makes them, indeed, speak for themselves. This method, of course, has obvious difficulties, the main one In Ward McAllister’s “ Society As I Have Found It,” in the description of the ball given in honour of Lady Mandeville’s visit to New York, the author writes (p. 354) : “The most remarkable costume, and one spoken of to this day, was that of a cat; the dress being of cats’ tails, and white cats’ heads and a bell with ‘ Puss ’ on it in large letters.” 12 H. C. Bunner wrote a child’s operetta called “Three Little Kittens of the Land of Pie,” but although it is founded on the familiar nursery rhyme of the “three little kittens who lost their mittens,” and although all the characters are cats. King Thomas the First, Head of the House of Grimalkin, Ringtail, Kitcat, Prince Tortoiseshell of Caterwaulia, Prince Spot of Bacquephensia, Prince Vel- vet of Miaouwa, Princesses Kitty, Malta, and Angora, there is not a line of the dialogue or the lyrics which suggests cat psychologj' or is even intended to. The Tiger in the House being the avoidance of sentimentality, but any one who reads this book, and both lovers of cats and dogs will enjoy It, will see how well she has succeeded. These dialogues, in the form of a series of short one-act plays, between a cat, Klkl-la-Dou- cette, and a dog, Toby-Chien, although dated 1905, in psycho- logical content are similar to certain phases of the modern Russian drama. Often, instead of conversing, each animal proceeds to relate his own thoughts, to think aloud. These thoughts are natural, but significant, and, of course, amusing. The book was written. Indeed, " pour amuser Willy ” Oc- casionally He and She, the human companions of the animals, appear but as subordinate figures and they are always seen from the point of view of the cat and the dog. The result Is something very fine, something very near finished art. In the opening dialogue KIki explains her position quite neatly: “Neither the Two-footed Ones, nor you, compre- hend the egoism of cats. . . . They christen thus, higglety- pigglety, the instinct of self-preservation, the chaste reserve, the dignity, the fatiguing self-denial, which comes to us from the impossibility of being understood by them. Dog of little distinction, but devoid of favouritism, do you understand me better? The cat is a guest and not a plaything. Truly I do not know In what times we live ! The Two-footed Ones, He and She, have they alone the right to be sad, to be gay, to lick the plates, to complain, to be capricious? I too have my ca- prices, my griefs, my irregular appetites, my hours of dreamy retreat In which I withdraw from the world. . . There, indeed. Is the whole psychology of the cat in a single speech. A little later, when the dog asks her if she has not a secret under- standing with Him, she reveals a little more of her soul: “ An understanding . . . yes. Secret and chaste and pro- found. He rarely speaks, and scratches the paper with a sound like the scratching of mice. It is to Him that I have given my avaricious heart, my precious Cat heart. And He, without words, has given me His. The exchange has made 184 LA MORT DE COCHON, TRAGEDIE From an engraving in Moncrif’s Les Chats The Cat in the Theatre me happy and reserved, and sometimes with that capricious and dominating instinct which makes us the rivals of women, I try my power on Him. For Him, when we are alone, the diabolical pointed ears which presage a bound on the paper which he scratches! For Him the tap-tap-tap of the tam- bourining paws through the pens and scattered letters. For Him, also, the persistent mewing which demands liberty, ‘ The Hymn to the Doorknob,’ he smilingly observes, or ‘ The Plaint of the Sequestered.’ But for Him also the tender contemplation of my inspiring eyes, which weigh on his bent head until he looks at me and there results a shock of souls so foreseen and so soft that I close my lids in exquisite shame. . . . She . . . moves too much, often bullies me, fans me in the air, holding my paws two by two, insists on caressing me, laughs at me, imitates my voice too well. . . .” Toby-Chien complains that sometimes when they are play- ing together the cat treats him like a stranger. “ Could not this be called a bad disposition?” he asks. “No,” answers the cat, “ a disposition only. A Cat’s disposition. It is in such irritating moments that I feel, beyond doubt, the humiliat- ing situation in which I and the rest of my race live. I can re- call the time when hierophants in long tunics of linen spoke to us on bended knees, and listened timidly to our sung speech. Remember, Dog, that we have not changed. Perhaps there are days when my racial consciousness is more dominant, when everything justly offends me, a brusque gesture, a gross laugh, the sound of a door closing, your odour, your inconceivable audacity in touching me, in surrounding me with your circular bounds. . . .” There is much more of this delicately felt psychology; the effect of heat, cold, hunger, movement, a storm . . . even death, on the cat is discussed, all of this wrapped in a rather subtle French which does not lend itself very gracefully to translation. In the last dialogue of all, there is an amusing and sudden descent to bedroom farce, a veritable Georges Feydeau comedv 185 The Tiger in the House of ithyphallic manners, in which a visiting toy-dog is the pro- tagonist. This little lady proves very attractive to Toby who is about to complete an easy seduction when the miniature one catching sight of the outraged Kiki sitting atop the piano and regarding the scene with a very natural horror, yelps, “ A tiger, a tiger, help!” and rushes shrieking from the room. It may be remarked just here that the cat, although a pas- sionate lover, is both modest and subtle. Dogs conduct their amours with little regard for public decency but a cat makes love at night in shady groves, sanctified by the natural odours of the warm earth, or in the hidden recesses of gabled roofs. There is no dialogue in the book more characteristic, more delicious than the scene on the train. He and She are on their way to the country. Toby is loose in the compartment; Kiki, of course, has been carried in a basket. She is released at the dinner hour so that she may enjoy her chicken bone. But soon there is to be a change of cars; how is Kiki to be gotten back into the basket? He and She discuss this question until the cat, having completed an elaborate Roman after-dinner toilet, arches her back, spreads her claws in front of her, descends into the basket and sinks into mysterious slumber! This incident is a perfect example of the charming perversity of the cat. i86 Chapter Eight: The Cat in Music Vous qui ne sauez pas ce vaut la musique, Venez-vous en ouir le concert manifique Et les airs rauissants que iaprens aux Matous. Puisque ma belle voix ren ces bestes docilles, Je ne scaur ois manquer de vous instruire tous Ni de vous esclairsir les nottes difftciles. In “ The Question of our Speech,” Mr. Henry James, who is usually precise and careful in his statements of fact, has permitted himself to say, ” It is easier to overlook any ques- tion of speech than to trouble about it, but then it is also easier to snort or to neigh, to growl or to ‘ meow,’ than to articulate and intonate.” I do not know how difficult it may be to neigh or to growl or even to snort. I have never tried to make any of these sounds, but I have no confidence in my power to do so. About ” meowing,” however, I am not at all unenlightened and I could assure Mr. James, were he yet alive, that the vocalization of a cat is not so simple a matter as apparently he takes it to be. Felic, indeed, may be re- garded as a language. Why should felines have voices and ears if they cannot speak? ^‘L’ existence des organes,’' writes Voltaire " entraine tout natureUement celle de leurs fonctions. . . . L’idee que les animaux ont tous les organes du sentiment pour ne point sentir est une contradiction ridicule.” Pierquin de Gembloux expresses the theory that originally men and animals spoke a similar language. Men have expanded their mode of speech, while the animals retain their original tongues. “ Between some sounds peculiar to certain animals and other sounds peculiar to the idioms of certain nations — dead or The Tiger in the House alive — there is very often evident a greater analogy, a more profound resemblance, a more indisputable affinity, than one really finds, three quarters of the time, between certain French words, for example, and their Latin progenitors.” ^ Dupont de Nemours, a student of animals and their peculiarities, de- clared that while the dog used only vowel sounds, the cat in her language made use of at least six consonants, M, N, G, H, V, and F. It seems obvious to me that P, R, S, and T may be added as necessary purring and spitting consonants; the H is produced, of course, by the rapid expulsion of the breath following this very Magyar explosion of expletives, the cat’s method of cursing.- I have never heard a cat use a V and I would like more information on this point. “ Animals,” writes the ingenious de Nemours, “ have very few needs and desires. These needs are imperious and these desires strong. Their expression is therefore marked, but the ideas are not numerous and the dictionary short; the grammar more than simple, very few nouns, nearly twice as many adjectives, the verb nearly always taken for granted; some interjections which, as M. de Tracy has very well proved, are entire phrases in a single word: no other parts of discourse.” Cats do not abuse the use of words as men do. They only use them for great moments, to express love, hunger, pain, pleasure, danger, etc. Naturally then their language is extremely poignant. Whatever else it may be, and whether you like it or not, the cat language is musical; in her conversation, casual or pas- sionate, pussy produces tone. As Firestone has it in Middle- ton’s play. The JVitch, The cat sings a brave treble in her own language. 1 “ Idiomologie des Animaux, ou locherches historiques, anatomiques, physi- ologiques, philologiques, et glossologiques sur le langage des betes;” Paris; 1844. 2 If anything else were needed to prove the superiority of cats, this would be the final touch. The cat is the only animal save man, that knows how to swear, and in this department only a lumber-jack or a successful opera-singer can equal him. 188 The Cat in Music Moncrif found her voice “ belle et grande,” but the ailuro- phobic Ronsard wrote, Le chat cria un miauleux effroy. Whatever else may be said of the cat’s voice, no one can accuse this musician of plagiarism; her music is her own. Champfleury counted sixty-three notes in the mewing of cats, although he admitted that it took an accurate ear and a great deal of practice to distinguish them. On the other hand we have the testimony of the Abbe Galiani who could only discern twenty notes in the most elaborate mewing, but he found that these constituted a complete vocabulary, as no cat ever uses the same phrase except to express the same sentiment. Any one who has lived on friendly terms with a cat must be aware of the justness of this opinion; as Pierquin de Gembloux puts it, “ Cliaque passion a sa note speciale.” Recall the trill-like purr ending in its chromatic upward run which accompanies amatory emotion in the female, the shrill cry of fright or anger, the wail of hunger, the polite but peremptory request to be let in or out, Willy’s “ Hymn to the Doorknob,” the demand for water, which no adequate auditor will confuse with the demand for food, and the quiet purr of contentment, which, of course, is quite different from the kettle-drum purr of vio- lent pleasure.^ Any one who has lived on amicable terms with a cat will have no difficulty in understanding so much of her language; an interested observer may pick up much more. 3 Charles Darwin in his “Expression of Emotions” writes: “Cats use their voices much as a means of expression, and they utter under various emotions and desires, at least six or seven different sounds. The purr of satisfaction which is made during both inspiration and expiration, is one of the most curious. The puma, cheetah, and ocelot likewise purr; but the tiger, when pleased, ‘ emits a peculiar short snuffle, accompanied by the closure of the eyelids.’ It is said that the lion, jaguar, and leopard do not purr.” Madame Michelet invented several words for different kinds of purring, in French called “ ronron ” : monrrons, monrons, mou-ous, mrrr: “ Les Chats,” P. 25. She also invented a verb to express spitting (op. cit., P. XXVII). Moncrif (“Les Chats,” P. 55) quotes an extraordinary dialogue by M. 189 The Tiger in the House For instance, my Feathers gives vent to what I call her “ hunt- ing cry ” just before a leap at the window pane after a fly. This sound is sib to the faint creaking of a rusty hinge. The Abbe GalianI distinguished betw'een the male and female voices, the tenor and soprano cats, and he also discovered that two sequestered pussies attended to their love-making in si- lence, which naturally led to the deduction that the long notes and growls of the alley fences and rooftops were calls to the foe, jealousies, bickerings, alarums and excursions, rather than amorous cries. What Pennant calls “ a piteous, squalling, jarring lover ” then is the jealous male about to dispose of a rival. Others say that the gelded cat has a special cry of his own which gives him a place alongside the male sopranos of the eighteenth century. A cat, of course, cannot afford to make many concessions to man, but she finds It possible and convenient to understand the meaning of a few human words Hauterot, which should be read aloud to make its complete effect. The scene is near the fireplace in the kitchen. La Chatte, voyant iourner la hroche, et se debarbouillant: C’a est bon. Le Matou, appercevant la Chatte, et s’approchant avec un air timide: Ne fait-on rien ceans? La Chatte, ne lu'i jettant qti’un demi regard: Ohn. Le Matou, d’un ton passionne: Ne fait-on rien ceans? La Chatte, d’un ton de pudeur: Oh que nenni. Le Matou, pique: Je m’en revas done. La Chatte, se radoucissant: Nenni. Le Matou, affectant de s’eloigner: Je m’en revas done. La Chatte, d’un air honteux: Montez la-haut, plus haut, Montez la-haut. Ensemble, courant sur I’escalier: Montons la-haut. Montons 1^-haut! 190 The Cat in Music like “ dinner and “ meat.” I can throw these words into the middle of a sentence in conversation in any tone of voice and Feathers will come bounding to the ice-chest where she knows her meat is kept. “ If you say ‘ Hallelujah ’ to a cat, it will excite no fixed set of fibres in connection with any other set and the cat will exhibit none of the phenomena of consciousness,” writes Samuel Butler. “ But if you say ‘ M-e-e-at,’ the cat will be there in a moment, for the due connection between the sets of fibres has been established.” The cat seldom suffers from aphonia but well-bred cats make but few sounds. Occasionally to signify their inten- tions they open their mmuths but do not speak. Faute de mew, they resort to gestures, a matter which I have discussed in a previous chapter. A thousand years or so before Christ the Egyptians associ- ated the cat with music, utilizing the graceful head and figure of the beloved animal in the decoration of the sistra. The sistrum consisted of a frame of bronze or brass, into which three or four metal bars were loosely inserted, so as to pro- duce a jingling noise when the instrument was shaken. Oc- casionally a few metal rings were strung on the bars to in- crease the sound and very often the top of the frame was ornamented with the figure of a cat. The instrument was used by women in performances of religious ceremonies and its Egyptian name, Carl EngeH tells us, was seshesh. Mon- crif offers readers of ” Les Chats ” several curious engrav- ings of these sistra on which cats are carved in various charm- ing attitudes. There is another engraving in this book of a statue of the cat god holding the sistrum in such a manner that he indicates that he knows how to use it. “ Why does this not prove a connection between instruments of music and cats?” asks Moncrif. “The organization of cats is musical; they are capable of giving many modulations to their * “ The Music of the Most Ancient Nations”: William Reeves; London. The instrument is used by the ballet in the first act of Aida. I9I The Tiger in the House voices and in the different passions which occupy them they use diverse tones.” They no instrument use ever. Each is his own flute and viol; All their noses trumpets are Bellies, drums, and no denial. They in chorus raise their voices. In one general intermezzo. Playing fugues, as if by Bach, Or by Guido of Arezzo. Wild the symphonies they’re singing, hike capriccios of Beethoven Or by Berlioz, who’s excelled By their strains so interwoven.^ The discovery of a fresco depicting a cat sitting calmly be- fore a sistrum and a goblet led Moncrif into further disserta- tion which is worthy of reproduction if for nothing else than the stupendously enlightened theory of musical criticism which it introduces. This theory, exploited as it was in a “ grave- ment frivole” book on cats, published in 1727, was probably not taken very seriously by Moncrif’s contemporaries; there is no reason to believe, indeed, that it was taken very seriously by Moncrif himself, but it was to pop up again two hundred years later as one of the principal tenets of a certain school. The combination of cat, sistrum, and goblet, Moncrif takes as proof that cats were admitted to Egyptian banquets and that they frequently sang there. Her purrs and mews so evenly kept time. She purred in metre and she mewed in rhymel^ ® Heinrich Heine: “Mimi”; translated by Edgar Alfred Bowring. ® Joseph Green: “A Poet’s Lamentation for the Loss of his Cat.” 192 The Cat in Music “ Doubtless,” writes the French savant, “ the enemies of cats will insist that cats cannot sing, they can only caterwaul. We will content ourselves by retorting that what seems to be mewing in the cats of today proves nothing regarding the cats of antiquity, arts being subject to great revolutions; we add, with all possible discretion, that the dissonances of which these enemies complain, only indicate a lack of knowledge and taste on their part. . . . Modern music is limited to a cer- tain division of sounds which we call tones and semitones and we ourselves are limited enough to believe that this same division is all that can be called music; therefore we have the injustice to exclude bellowing, mewing, whinneying sounds of which the intervals and relations, perhaps admirable of their kind, are beyond our understanding, because they go beyond the limits in w'hich we are restrained. The Egyptians, no doubt, were more enlightened; they had really studied the music of animals; they knew that a sound could neither be true nor false, and that nearly always it appears to be either one or the other only because we have the habit of judging an assemblage of sounds immediately as harmony or dissonance; they knew, for example, whether the cat used our scale or whether she availed herself of the tones between the half tones, which would make a prodigious difference between their music and ours; they appreciated in a chorus of toms or in a recitative, the simple or more perverted modulations, the light- ness of the passages, the softness of the sounds or their pierc- ing quality, from which, perhaps, they derived their pleasure. That this music seems to us a confused sound, a charivari, is only the effect of our ignorance, a lack of delicacy in our organs, of justice and discernment. The music of the peoples of Asia appears to us at least ridiculous. On their side they find no common sense in ours. We believe reciprocally to ^ This phrase occurs almost word for word in Busoni’s “ A New Esthetic of Music ” ! 193 The Tiger in the House hear only mewing; thus each nation, so to speak, is the cat to the other I ” ® Nearly a hundred years ago William Gardiner published a curious book entitled “ The Music of Nature ” in which evi- dently it was his intention to prove that the sounds of art are derived from the sounds of nature. The work is provided with many tables of examples which Mr. Gardiner has taken down in barnyard and forest, and two examples of cat cries are given. These, however, are not very convincing as they are necessarily expressed in the tempered scale. Any one who has listened to a cat practising vocalises will have no ® Hiddigeigei, the Tom Cat, speaks similar words in Scheffel’s “ Der Trompe- ter von Sakkingen ” (translation of Jessie Beck and Louise Lorimer) ; William Blackwood and Sons; Edinburgh; 1893; P. 99): None the less, ’tis ours to suffer That