Short Stories for Children Page 9

  She stayed a moment with hairbrush uplifted, her long lean arm at an angle with her head. On seeing this, Sam had instantly desisted from these motions. He had dropped to his fours again, and was now apparently composing himself for another nap. No; this too was a pretence; for presently as she watched, he turned restlessly about so that his whiskers were once again due south. His backward parts towards the window, he was now gazing fixedly in front of him out of a far from friendly face. Far indeed from friendly for a creature that had lived with her ever since he opened the eyes of his blind kittenhood.

  As if he had read her thoughts, Sam at that moment lifted his head to look at his mistress; she withdrew her eyes to the glass only in the nick of time, and when she turned from her toilet there sat he – so serene in appearance, so puss-like, so ordinary once more that Miss Chauncey could scarcely believe anything whatever had been amiss. Had her eyes deluded her – her glass? Was that peculiar motion of Sam’s forepaws (almost as if he were knitting), was that wide excited stare due only to the fact that he was catching what was, to her, an invisible fly?

  Miss Chauncey having now neatly arranged her ‘window-curtains’ – the sleek loops of hair she wore on either side her high forehead – glanced yet again out of the window. Nothing there but the silence of the Moor; nothing there but the faint pricking of a star as the evening darkened.

  Sam’s supper cream was waiting on the hearthrug in the parlour as usual that evening. The lamp was lit. The red blinds were drawn. The fire crackled in the grate. There they sat, these two; the walls of the four-cornered house beside the crossroads rising up above them like a huge oblong box under the immense starry sky that saucered in the wide darkness of the Moor.

  And while she sat so – with Sam there, seemingly fast asleep – Miss Chauncey was thinking. What had occurred in the bedroom that early evening had reminded her of other odd little bygone happenings. Trifles she had scarcely noticed, but which now returned clearly to memory. How often in the past, for example, Sam at this hour would be sitting as if fast asleep (as now), his paws tucked neatly in, looking very much like a stout alderman after his dinner. And then suddenly, without warning, as if a distant voice had called him, he would leap to his feet and run straight out of the room. And somewhere in the house – door ajar or window agape, he would find his egress and be up and away into the night. This had been a common thing to happen.

  Once, too, Miss Chauncey had found him squatting on his hindquarters on the window-ledge of a little room that had been entirely disused since, years ago, Cousin Milly had stayed at Post Houses when Miss Chauncey was a child of eight. She had cried out at sight of him, ‘You foolish Sam, you; come in, sir! You will be tumbling out of the window next!’ And she remembered as though it were yesterday that though at this he had stepped gingerly in at once from his dizzy perch, he had not looked at her. He had passed her without a sign.

  On moonlight evenings, too – why, you could never be sure where he was! You could never be sure from what errand he had returned. Was she sure indeed where he was on any night? The longer she reflected, the gloomier grew her doubts and misgivings. This night, at any rate, Miss Chauncey determined to keep watch. But she was not happy in doing so. She hated all manner of spying. They were old companions, Sam and she; and she, without him in bleak Post Houses, would be sadly desolate. She loved Sam dearly. Nonetheless, what she had witnessed that evening had stayed in her mind, and it would be wiser to know all that there was to be known, even if for Sam’s sake only.

  Now Miss Chauncey always slept with her bedroom door ajar. She had slept so ever since her nursery days. Being a rather timid little girl, she liked in those far-away times to hear the grown-up voices downstairs and the spoons and forks clinking. As for Sam, he always slept in his basket beside her fireplace. Every morning there he would be, though on some mornings Miss Chauncey’s eyes would open gently to find herself gazing steadily into his pale green ones as he stood on his hind paws, resting his front ones on her bedside, and looking into her face. ‘Time for breakfast, Sam?’ his mistress would murmur. And Sam would mew, as distantly almost as a seagull in the heights of the sky.

  To-night, however, Miss Chauncey only pretended to be asleep. It was difficult, however, to keep wholly awake, and she was all but drowsing off when there came a faint squeak from the hinge of her door, and she realized that Sam was gone out. After waiting a moment or two, she struck a match. Yes, there was his empty basket in the dark silent room, and presently from far away – from the steeple at Haggurdsdon Village – came the knolling of the hour.

  Miss Chauncey placed the dead end of the match in the saucer of her candlestick, and at that moment fancied she heard a faint whssh at her window, as of a sudden gust or scurry of wind, or the wings of a fast-flying bird – of a wild goose. It even reminded Miss Chauncey of half-forgotten Guy Fawkes days and of the sound the stick of a rocket makes as it slips down through the air – while its green and ruby lights die out in the immense vacancy above. Miss Chauncey gathered up her long legs in the bed, got up, drew on the blue flannel dressing-gown that always hung on her bedrail, and lifting back the blind an inch or two, looked out of the window.

  It was a high starry night; and a brightening in the sky above the roof seemed to betoken there must be a moon over the backward parts of the house. Even as she watched, a streak of pale silver descended swiftly out of the far spaces of the heavens, and fading into the darkness dwindled and vanished away. It was a meteorite; and at that very instant Miss Chauncey fancied she heard again a faint remote dwindling whssh in the air. Was that the meteorite too? Could she have been deceived? Was she being deceived in everything? She drew back.

  And then, as if in deliberate and defiant answer, out of the distance and from what appeared to be the extreme end of her long garden where grew a tangle of sloe bushes, there followed a prolonged and as if half-secret caterwaul: very low – contralto, one might say – Meearou-rou-rou-rou-rou!

  Heaven forbid! Was that Sam’s tongue? The caterwauling ceased. Yet still Miss Chauncey could not suppress a shudder. She knew Sam’s voice of old. But surely not that! Surely not that!

  Strange and immodest though it was to hear herself, too, in that solitary place calling out in the dead of night, she nevertheless at once opened the window and summoned Sam by name. There was no response. The trees and bushes of the garden stood motionless; their faint shadows on the ground revealing how small a moon was actually in the sky, and how low it hung towards its setting. The vague undulations of the Moor stretched into the distance. Not a light to be seen except those of the firmament. Again, and yet again, Miss Chauncey cried ‘Sam, Sam! Come away in! Come away in, sir, you bad creature!’ Not a sound. Not the least stir of leaf or blade of grass.

  When, after so broken a night, Miss Chauncey awoke a little late the next morning, the first thing her eyes beheld when she sat up in bed was Sam – couched as usual in his basket. It was a mystery, and an uneasy one. After supping up his morning bowl, he slept steadily on until noonday. This happened to be the day of the week when Miss Chauncey made bread. On and on she steadily kneaded the dough with her knuckled hands, glancing ever and again towards the motionless creature. With fingers clotted from the great earthenware bowl, she stood over him at last for a few moments, and eyed him closely.

  He was lying curled round with his whiskered face to one side towards the fire. And it seemed to Miss Chauncey that she had never noticed before that faint peculiar grin on his face. ‘Sam!’ she cried sharply. An eye instantly opened, wide and ferocious, as if a mouse had squeaked. He stared at her for an instant; then the lid narrowed. The gaze slunk away a little, but Sam began to purr.

  The truth of it is, all this was making Miss Chauncey exceedingly unhappy. Mr Cullings called that afternoon, with a basket of some fresh comely young sprats. ‘Them’ll wake his Royal Highness up,’ he said. ‘They’m fresh as daisies. Lor, m’m, what a Nero that beast be!’

  ‘Cats are strange creatures, Mr Cull
ings,’ replied Miss Chauncey reflectively; complacently supposing that Mr Cullings had misplaced an h and had meant to say, an hero. And Sam himself, with uplifted tail, and as if of the same opinion, was rubbing his head gently against her boot.

  Mr Cullings eyed her closely. ‘Why, yes, they be,’ he said. ‘What I says is is that as soon as they’re out of your sight, you are out of their mind. There’s no more gratitood nor affection in a cat than in a pump. Though so far as the pump is concerned, the gratitood should be on our side. I knew a family of cats once what fairly druv their mistress out of house and home.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t have a cat only a pet?’ said Miss Chauncey faintly; afraid to ask for further particulars of this peculiar occurrence.

  ‘Why, no, m’m,’ said the carrier. ‘As the Lord made ’em of they be. But I’ll be bound they could tell some knotty stories if they had a human tongue to their heads!’

  Sam had ceased caressing his mistress’s foot, and was looking steadily at Mr Cullings, his hair roughed a little about the neck and shoulders. And the carrier looked back.

  ‘No, m’m. We wouldn’t keep ’em,’ he said at last, ‘if they was four times that size. Or, not for long!’

  Having watched Mr Cullings’s little cart bowl away into the distance, Miss Chauncey returned into the house, more disturbed than ever. Nor did her uneasiness abate when Sam refused even to sniff at his sprats. Instead, he crawled in under a low table in the kitchen, behind the old seaman’s chest in which Miss Chauncey kept her kindling wood. She fancied she heard his claws working in the wood now and again, and once he seemed to be expressing his natural feelings in what vulgar people with little sympathy for animals describe as ‘swearing’.

  Her caressing ‘Sam’s, at any rate, were all in vain. His only reply was a kind of sneeze which uncomfortably resembled ‘spitting’. Miss Chauncey’s feelings had already been hurt. It was now her mind that suffered. Something the carrier had said, or the way he had said it, or the peculiar look she had noticed on his face when he was returning Sam’s stare in the porch, haunted her thoughts. She was no longer young, was she becoming fanciful? Or must she indeed conclude that for weeks past Sam had been steadily circumventing her, or at any rate concealing his wanderings and his interests? What nonsense. Worse still: was she now so credulous as to believe that Sam had in actual fact been making signals – and secretly, behind her back – to some confederate that must either have been up in the sky, or in the moon!

  Whether or not, Miss Chauncey determined to keep a sharper eye on him. Their future was at stake. She would at least make sure that he did not leave the house that night. But then: Why not? she asked herself. Why shouldn’t the creature choose his own hour and season? Cats, like owls, see best in the dark. They go best a-mousing in the dark, and may prefer the dark for their private, social, and even public affairs. Post Houses, after all, was only rather more than two miles from Haggurdsdon Village, and there were cats there in plenty. Poor fellow, her own dumb human company must sometimes be dull enough!

  Such were Miss Chauncey’s reflections; and as if to reassure her, Sam himself at that moment serenely entered the room and leapt up on to the empty chair beside her tea-table. As if, too, to prove that he had thought better of his evil temper, or to insinuate that there had been nothing amiss between himself and Mr Cullings, he was licking his chops, and there was no mistaking the odour of fish which he brought in with him from his saucer.

  ‘So you have thought better of it, my boy?’ thought Miss Chauncey, though she did not utter the words aloud. And yet as she returned his steady feline gaze, she realized how difficult it was to read the intelligence behind those eyes. You might say that, Sam being only a cat, there was no meaning in them at all. But Miss Chauncey knew better. There could be meaning enough if such eyes had looked out of a human shape at her.

  Unfortunately, and almost as if Sam had overheard his mistress’s speculations regarding possible cat friends in the village, there came at that moment a faint wambling mew beneath the open window. In a flash Sam was out of his chair and over the window-ledge, and Miss Chauncey rose only just in time to see him in infuriated pursuit of a slim sleek tortoiseshell creature that had evidently come to Post Houses in hope of a friendlier reception, and was now fleeing in positive fear of its life.

  Sam returned from his chase as fresh as paint, and Miss Chauncey was horrified to detect – caught up between the claws of his right forefoot – a tuft or two of tortoiseshell fur, which, having composed himself by the fire, he promptly removed by licking.

  Still pondering on these disquieting events, Miss Chauncey took her usual evening walk in the garden. Candytuft and Virginia stock were seeding along the shell-lined path, and late roses were already beginning to blow on the high brick wall which shut off her narrow strip of land from the vast lap of the Moor. Having come to the end of the path, Miss Chauncey pushed on a little further than usual, to where the grasses grew more rampant, and where wild headlong weeds raised their heads beneath her few lichenous apple-trees. Still further down, for hers was a long, though narrow, garden – there grew straggling bushes of sloe and spiny whitethorn. These had blossomed indeed in the Moor’s bleak springs long before Post Houses had raised its chimney pots into the sky. Here, too, flourished a frowning drift of nettles – their sour odour haunting the air.

  It was in this forlorn spot that – just like Robinson Crusoe, before her – Miss Chauncey was suddenly brought to a standstill by the appearance of what might be nothing other than a footprint in the mould. But not only this. A few inches away there showed what might be the mark of a walking-cane or even of something stouter and heavier – a crutch. Could she be deceived? The footprint, it was true, was of a peculiar kind. ‘A queer shoe that!’ thought Miss Chauncey. Could the resemblance be accidental? Was it a footprint?

  Miss Chauncey glanced furtively across the bushes towards the house. It loomed gaunt and forbidding in the moorland dusk. And she fancied she could see, though the evening light might be deluding her, the cowering shape of Sam looking out at her from the kitchen window. To be watched! To be herself spied upon – and watched!

  But then, of course, Sam was always watching her. What oddity was there in that? Where else would his sprats come from, his cream, his saucer of milk, his bowl of fresh well-water? Nevertheless, Miss Chauncey returned to her parlour gravely discomposed.

  It was an uncommonly calm evening, and as she went from room to room locking the windows, she noticed there was already a moon in the sky. She eyed it with misgiving. And at last bedtime came; and when Sam, as usual, after a lick or two, had composed himself in his basket, Miss Chauncey, holding the key almost challengingly within view, deliberately locked her own bedroom door.

  When she awoke next morning Sam was asleep in his basket as usual, and during the daytime he kept pretty closely to the house. So, too, on the Wednesday and the Thursday. It was not until the following Friday that having occasion to go into an upper bedroom that had no fireplace, and being followed as usual by Sam, Miss Chauncey detected the faint rank smell of soot in the room. No chimney, and a smell of soot! She turned rapidly on her companion: he had already left the room.

  And when that afternoon she discovered a black sooty smear upon her own patchwork quilt, she realized not only that her suspicions had been justified, but that for the first time in his life Sam had deliberately laid himself down there in her absence. At this act of sheer defiance she was no longer so much hurt as exceedingly angry. There could be no doubt. Sam was now openly defying her. No two companions could share a house on such terms as these. He must be taught a lesson.

  That evening, in full sight of the creature, having locked her bedroom door, she stuffed a large piece of mattress ticking into the mouth of her chimney and pulled down the register. Having watched these proceedings, Sam rose from his basket, and, with an easy spring, leapt up on to the dressing-table. Beyond the window, the Moor lay almost as bright as day. Ignoring Miss Chauncey, the creatur
e crouched there, steadily and sullenly staring into the empty skies, for a vast gulf of them was visible from where he sat.

  Miss Chauncey proceeded to make her toilet for the night, trying in vain to pretend that she was entirely uninterested in what the animal was at. A faint sound – not exactly mewings or growlings – but a kind of low inward caterwauling, hardly audible, was proceeding from his throat. But whatever these sounds might imply, Sam himself can have been the only listener. There was not a sign of movement at the window or in the world without. And then Miss Chauncey promptly drew down the blind. At this Sam at once raised his paw for all the world as if he were about to protest, and then, apparently thinking better of it, he pretended instead that the action had been only for the purpose of beginning his nightly wash.

  Long after her candle had been extinguished, Miss Chauncey lay listening. Every stir and movement in the quiet darkness could be easily understood. First there came a furtive footing and tapping at the register of the fireplace, so clearly showing what was happening that Miss Chauncey could positively see in her imagination Sam on the hearthstone, erecting himself there upon his hind legs, vainly attempting to push the obstacle back.

  This being in vain, he appeared to have dropped back on to his fours. There came a pause. Had he given up his intention? No: now he was at the door, pawing, gently scratching. Then a leap, even, towards the latch: but only one – the door was locked. Retiring from the door, he now sprang lightly again on to the dressing-table. What now was he at? By covertly raising her head a little from her pillow, Miss Chauncey could see him with paw thrust out, gently drawing back the blind from the moon-flooded window-pane. And even while she listened and watched, she heard yet again – and yet again – the faint whssh as of a wild swan cleaving the air; and then what might have been the night-cry of a bird, but which to Miss Chauncey’s ears resembled a thin shrill pealing cackle of laughter. At this Sam hastily turned from the window, and without the least attempt at concealment pounced clean from the dressing-table on to the lower rail of her bed.