I
THE CAT-HOOD OF MAURICE

To have your hair cut is not painful, nor does it hurt to have your whiskers trimmed. But round wooden shoes, shaped like bowls, are not comfortable wear, however much it may amuse the onlooker to see you try to walk in them. If you have a nice fur coat like a company promoter’s, it is most annoying to be made to swim in it. And if you had a tail, surely it would be solely your own affair; that any one should tie a tin can to it would strike you as an unwarrantable impertinence – to say the least.

Yet it is difficult for an outsider to see these things from the point of view of both the persons concerned. To Maurice, scissors in hand, alive and earnest to snip, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to shorten the stiff whiskers of Lord Hugh Cecil by a generous inch. He did not understand how useful those whiskers were to Lord Hugh, both in sport and in the more serious business of getting a living. Also it amused Maurice to throw Lord Hugh into ponds, though Lord Hugh only once permitted this liberty. To put walnuts on Lord Hugh’s feet and then to watch him walk on ice was, in Maurice’s opinion, as good as a play. Lord Hugh was a very favourite cat, but Maurice was discreet, and Lord Hugh, except under violent suffering, was at that time anyhow, dumb.

But the empty sardine-tin attached to Lord Hugh’s tail and hind legs – this had a voice, and, rattling against stairs, banisters, and the legs of stricken furniture, it cried aloud for vengeance. Lord Hugh, suffering violently, added his voice, and this time the family heard. There was a chase, a chorus of ‘Poor pussy!’ and ‘Pussy, then!’ and the tail and the tin and Lord Hugh were caught under Jane’s bed. The tail and the tin acquiesced in their rescue. Lord Hugh did not. He fought, scratched, and bit. Jane carried the scars of that rescue for many a long week.

When all was calm Maurice was sought and, after some little natural delay, found – in the boot-cupboard.

‘Oh, Maurice!’ his mother almost sobbed, ‘how can you? What will your father say?’

Maurice thought he knew what his father would do.

‘Don’t you know,’ the mother went on, ‘how wrong it is to be cruel?’

‘I didn’t mean to be cruel,’ Maurice said. And, what is more, he spoke the truth. All the unwelcome attentions he had showered on Lord Hugh had not been exactly intended to hurt that stout veteran – only it was interesting to see what a cat would do if you threw it in the water, or cut its whiskers, or tied things to its tail.

‘Oh, but you must have meant to be cruel,’ said mother, ‘and you will have to be punished.’

‘I wish I hadn’t,’ said Maurice, from the heart.

‘So do I,’ said his mother, with a sigh; ‘but it isn’t the first time; you know you tied Lord Hugh up in a bag with the hedgehog only last Tuesday week. You’d better go to your room and think it over. I shall have to tell your father directly he comes home.’

Maurice went to his room and thought it over. And the more he thought the more he hated Lord Hugh. Why couldn’t the beastly cat have held his tongue and sat still? That, at the time would have been a disappointment, but now Maurice wished it had happened. He sat on the edge of his bed and savagely kicked the edge of the green Kidderminster carpet, and hated the cat.

He hadn’t meant to be cruel; he was sure he hadn’t; he wouldn’t have pinched the cat’s feet or squeezed its tail in the door, or pulled its whiskers, or poured hot water on it. He felt himself ill-used, and knew that he would feel still more so after the inevitable interview with his father.

But that interview did not take the immediately painful form expected by Maurice. His father did not say, ‘Now I will show you what it feels like to be hurt.’ Maurice had braced himself for that, and was looking beyond it to the calm of forgiveness which should follow the storm in which he should so unwillingly take part. No; his father was already calm and reasonable – with a dreadful calm, a terrifying reason.

‘Look here, my boy,’ he said. ‘This cruelty to dumb animals must be checked – severely checked.’

‘I didn’t mean to be cruel,’ said Maurice.

‘Evil,’ said Mr. Basingstoke, for such was Maurice’s surname, ‘is wrought by want of thought as well as want of heart. What about your putting the hen in the oven?’

‘You know,’ said Maurice, pale but determined, ‘you know I only wanted to help her to get her eggs hatched quickly. It says in “Fowls for Food and Fancy” that heat hatches eggs.’

‘But she hadn’t any eggs,’ said Mr. Basingstoke.

‘But she soon would have,’ urged Maurice. ‘I thought a stitch in time – ’

‘That,’ said his father, ‘is the sort of thing that you must learn not to think.’

‘I’ll try,’ said Maurice, miserably hoping for the best.

‘I intend that you shall,’ said Mr. Basingstoke. ‘This afternoon you go to Dr. Strongitharm’s for the remaining week of term. If I find any more cruelty taking place during the holidays you will go there permanently. You can go and get ready.’

‘Oh, father, please not,’ was all Maurice found to say.

‘I’m sorry, my boy,’ said his father, much more kindly; ‘it’s all for your own good, and it’s as painful to me as it is to you – remember that. The cab will be here at four. Go and put your things together, and Jane shall pack for you.’

So the box was packed. Mabel, Maurice’s kiddy sister, cried over everything as it was put in. It was a very wet day.

‘If it had been any school but old Strong’s,’ she sobbed.

She and her brother knew that school well: its windows, dulled with wire blinds, its big alarm bell, the high walls of its grounds, bristling with spikes, the iron gates, always locked, through which gloomy boys, imprisoned, scowled on a free world. Dr. Strongitharm’s was a school ‘for backward and difficult boys.’ Need I say more?

Well, there was no help for it. The box was packed, the cab was at the door. The farewells had been said. Maurice determined that he wouldn’t cry and he didn’t, which gave him the one touch of pride and joy that such a scene could yield. Then at the last moment, just as father had one leg in the cab, the Taxes called. Father went back into the house to write a cheque. Mother and Mabel had retired in tears. Maurice used the reprieve to go back after his postage-stamp album. Already he was planning how to impress the other boys at old Strong’s, and his was really a very fair collection. He ran up into the schoolroom, expecting to find it empty. But some one was there: Lord Hugh, in the very middle of the ink-stained table-cloth.

‘You brute,’ said Maurice; ‘you know jolly well I’m going away, or you wouldn’t be here.’ And, indeed, the room had never, somehow, been a favourite of Lord Hugh’s.

‘Meaow,’ said Lord Hugh.

‘Mew!’ said Maurice, with scorn. ‘That’s what you always say. All that fuss about a jolly little sardine-tin. Any one would have thought you’d be only too glad to have it to play with. I wonder how you’d like being a boy? Lickings, and lessons, and impots, and sent back from breakfast to wash your ears. You wash yours anywhere – I wonder what they’d say to me if I washed my ears on the drawing-room hearthrug?’

‘Meaow,’ said Lord Hugh, and washed an ear, as though he were showing off.

‘Mew,’ said Maurice again; ‘that’s all you can say.’

‘Oh, no, it isn’t,’ said Lord Hugh, and stopped his ear-washing.

‘I say!’ said Maurice in awestruck tones.

‘If you think cats have such a jolly time,’ said Lord Hugh, ‘why not be a cat?’

‘I would if I could,’ said Maurice, ‘and fight you – ’

‘Thank you,’ said Lord Hugh.

‘But I can’t,’ said Maurice.

‘Oh, yes, you can,’ said Lord Hugh. ‘You’ve only got to say the word.’

‘What word?’

Lord Hugh told him the word; but I will not tell you, for fear you should say it by accident and then be sorry.

‘And if I say that, I shall turn into a cat?’

‘Of course,’ said the cat.

‘Oh, yes, I see,’ said Maurice. ‘But I’m not taking any, thanks. I don’t want to be a cat for always.’

‘You needn’t,’ said Lord Hugh. ‘You’ve only got to get some one to say to you, “Please leave off being a cat and be Maurice again,” and there you are.’

Maurice thought of Dr. Strongitharm’s. He also thought of the horror of his father when he should find Maurice gone, vanished, not to be traced. ‘He’ll be sorry, then,’ Maurice told himself, and to the cat he said, suddenly: —

‘Right – I’ll do it. What’s the word, again?’

‘ – ,’ said the cat.

‘ – ,’ said Maurice; and suddenly the table shot up to the height of a house, the walls to the height of tenement buildings, the pattern on the carpet became enormous, and Maurice found himself on all fours. He tried to stand up on his feet, but his shoulders were oddly heavy. He could only rear himself upright for a moment, and then fell heavily on his hands. He looked down at them; they seemed to have grown shorter and fatter, and were encased in black fur gloves. He felt a desire to walk on all fours – tried it – did it. It was very odd – the movement of the arms straight from the shoulder, more like the movement of the piston of an engine than anything Maurice could think of at that moment.

‘I am asleep,’ said Maurice – ‘I am dreaming this. I am dreaming I am a cat. I hope I dreamed that about the sardine-tin and Lord Hugh’s tail, and Dr. Strong’s.’

‘You didn’t,’ said a voice he knew and yet didn’t know, ‘and you aren’t dreaming this.’

‘Yes, I am,’ said Maurice; ‘and now I’m going to dream that I fight that beastly black cat, and give him the best licking he ever had in his life. Come on, Lord Hugh.’

A loud laugh answered him.

‘Excuse my smiling,’ said the voice he knew and didn’t know, ‘but don’t you see – you are Lord Hugh!’

A great hand picked Maurice up from the floor and held him in the air. He felt the position to be not only undignified but unsafe, and gave himself a shake of mingled relief and resentment when the hand set him down on the inky table-cloth.

‘You are Lord Hugh now, my dear Maurice,’ said the voice, and a huge face came quite close to his. It was his own face, as it would have seemed through a magnifying glass. And the voice – oh, horror! – the voice was his own voice – Maurice Basingstoke’s voice. Maurice shrank from the voice, and he would have liked to claw the face, but he had had no practice.

‘You are Lord Hugh,’ the voice repeated, ‘and I am Maurice. I like being Maurice. I am so large and strong. I could drown you in the water-butt, my poor cat – oh, so easily. No, don’t spit and swear. It’s bad manners – even in a cat.’

‘Maurice!’ shouted Mr. Basingstoke from between the door and the cab.

Maurice, from habit, leaped towards the door.

‘It’s no use your going,’ said the thing that looked like a giant reflection of Maurice; ‘it’s me he wants.’

‘But I didn’t agree to your being me.’

‘That’s poetry, even if it isn’t grammar,’ said the thing that looked like Maurice. ‘Why, my good cat, don’t you see that if you are I, I must be you? Otherwise we should interfere with time and space, upset the balance of power, and as likely as not destroy the solar system. Oh, yes – I’m you, right enough, and shall be, till some one tells you to change from Lord Hugh into Maurice. And now you’ve got to find some one to do it.’

(‘Maurice!’ thundered the voice of Mr. Basingstoke.)

‘That’ll be easy enough,’ said Maurice.

‘Think so?’ said the other.

‘But I sha’n’t try yet. I want to have some fun first. I shall catch heaps of mice!’

‘Think so? You forget that your whiskers are cut off – Maurice cut them. Without whiskers, how can you judge of the width of the places you go through? Take care you don’t get stuck in a hole that you can’t get out of or go in through, my good cat.’

‘Don’t call me a cat,’ said Maurice, and felt that his tail was growing thick and angry.

‘You are a cat, you know – and that little bit of temper that I see in your tail reminds me – ’

Maurice felt himself gripped round the middle, abruptly lifted, and carried swiftly through the air. The quickness of the movement made him giddy. The light went so quickly past him that it might as well have been darkness. He saw nothing, felt nothing, except a sort of long sea-sickness, and then suddenly he was not being moved. He could see now. He could feel. He was being held tight in a sort of vice – a vice covered with chequered cloth. It looked like the pattern, very much exaggerated, of his school knickerbockers. It was. He was being held between the hard, relentless knees of that creature that had once been Lord Hugh, and to whose tail he had tied a sardine-tin. Now he was Lord Hugh, and something was being tied to his tail. Something mysterious, terrible. Very well, he would show that he was not afraid of anything that could be attached to tails. The string rubbed his fur the wrong way – it was that that annoyed him, not the string itself; and as for what was at the end of the string, what could that matter to any sensible cat? Maurice was quite decided that he was – and would keep on being – a sensible cat.

The string, however, and the uncomfortable, tight position between those chequered knees – something or other was getting on his nerves.

‘Maurice!’ shouted his father below, and the be-catted Maurice bounded between the knees of the creature that wore his clothes and his looks.

‘Coming, father,’ this thing called, and sped away, leaving Maurice on the servant’s bed – under which Lord Hugh had taken refuge, with his tin-can, so short and yet so long a time ago. The stairs re-echoed to the loud boots which Maurice had never before thought loud; he had often, indeed, wondered that any one could object to them. He wondered now no longer.

He heard the front door slam. That thing had gone to Dr. Strongitharm’s. That was one comfort. Lord Hugh was a boy now; he would know what it was to be a boy. He, Maurice, was a cat, and he meant to taste fully all catty pleasures, from milk to mice. Meanwhile he was without mice or milk, and, unaccustomed as he was to a tail, he could not but feel that all was not right with his own. There was a feeling of weight, a feeling of discomfort, of positive terror. If he should move, what would that thing that was tied to his tail do? Rattle, of course. Oh, but he could not bear it if that thing rattled. Nonsense; it was only a sardine-tin. Yes, Maurice knew that. But all the same – if it did rattle! He moved his tail the least little soft inch. No sound. Perhaps really there wasn’t anything tied to his tail. But he couldn’t be sure unless he moved. But if he moved the thing would rattle, and if it rattled Maurice felt sure that he would expire or go mad. A mad cat. What a dreadful thing to be! Yet he couldn’t sit on that bed for ever, waiting, waiting, waiting for the dreadful thing to happen.

‘Oh, dear,’ sighed Maurice the cat. ‘I never knew what people meant by “afraid” before.’

His cat-heart was beating heavily against his furry side. His limbs were getting cramped – he must move. He did. And instantly the awful thing happened. The sardine-tin touched the iron of the bed-foot. It rattled.