SUBJECT TO VANITY

SUBJECT TO VANITY

Τῇ γὰρ ματαιότητι ἡ κτίσις ὑπετάγη, οὐχ ἑκοῡσα ἀλλὰ διὰ τὸν ὑποτάξαντα, ἐπ’ ἐλπίδι ὅτι καὶ αὐτὴ ἡ κτίσις ἐλευθερωθήσεται ἀπὸ τῆς δουλείας τῆς φθορᾶς εἰς τὴν ἐλευθερίαν τῆς δόξης τῶν τέκνων τοῦ θεοῦ.

SUBJECT TO VANITY

BY MARGARET BENSON

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR

NEW YORK DODD, MEAD, & COMPANY 1895

TO OUR BETH IN LOVE AND GRATITUDE FOR LIFELONG LOVE AND CARE

CONTENTS

I APOLOGIA PRO FELE MEA

WHY were cats created? I do not mean this as a sceptical question, doubtful of any end in their creation; no answer about adaptation and environment would be adequate, nor any statement of specific use. For with all the higher animals—that is to say, with all the animals one intimately knows—there is some beauty of intelligence, physique, or character which renders them, as one must necessarily believe they are, ends in themselves, not only means to the perfection of our very egotistic species. The dog, for instance, has at anyrate moral beauty, and the stag physical; but the cat, who so often loses her physical beauty after the first year of her life, and who slinks about with a weight of strange and secret care on her shoulders, what has she? Who ever knew a cat of really fine character, and yet why otherwise do they suffer such bitter experience? Not experience merely of pans and pots and cat-hunts, which only touch the physical cat; but of the real, keen, emotional suffering of the moral cat, fierce pangs of envy, and the burden of alienated affection? I think cats must be meant to be good rather than beautiful.

When Persis walked out of her travelling-basket, I thought that I had never seen so pretty a kitten. She was about as long as she was high, and as broad as she was long; her coat was of grey—or as this particular shade is called blue—and white, soft, long hair; and she had olive-yellow eyes. She would not have much to say to me just then; but when I came into the room, where she had been shut up in the evening, and saw the little, upright figure sitting on the table beside a lighted candle, which my nurse had set there in case she should feel lonely and unhappy in the dark, after a moment’s contemplation—for Persis is shortsighted—she jumped down and rushed to meet me.

She is very well-bred; of course her white is a mistake—she ought to be blue all over; but she has all the other signs of good breeding—long silky tufts in the inside of her paws; ears so beautifully feathered that all other cats’ ears look distressingly naked; a little, dark smudge on her pink nose, to show that she knew it ought to have been black; and now she is full grown, the most beautiful tail I have ever seen—“like a squirrel,” children say.

She was not called Persis at first, but Hafiz. The popular rendering of that as “Uffiz” was not very pretty; and while the salutation to “the beloved Persis” was being read in the second lesson one Sunday morning, it suddenly struck me that Persis would be a very nice and appropriate name for a Persian cat, and the name “took.”

Her manners mostly were charming, and with gracefulness like a well-born lady she would stretch one hand from her basket to greet one coming into the room. She was very affectionate; she would put her arms round my neck in a way I have never known any other cat do, not even her children. Like most other Persian cats, she would kiss me and lick my hand. She had, I will confess, one rude trick: when she was in a larky condition in the twilight, if she caught my eye, she would run, with her head turned round and the side of her face on the ground, all about the room, ending up by coming quite close to me, and jumping and clawing in the air. The position was ludicrous, her head twisted round, and her eyes fixed on mine so that she could not see what was in front of her, and ran sometimes into legs of tables and chairs; her nerves, too, in such a tense condition that if one startled her she would jump high into the air, and then flee into a corner. She always reminded one of the way in which a cockney street-boy makes faces if you catch his eye.

She was not always amiable, the one defect in her character was that she was liable to “strange fits of passion,” and would pass from play to anger on occasion without the slightest warning.

She is the fiercest cat towards other animals that I have ever seen. While she was yet a tiny kitten, I brought up a large semi-Persian Tom cat to paint. The tiny kitten chased this big creature round and round the room; if he got under a chair, she got on it, and reached down a little menacing white paw to slap his face. He submitted meekly, until, in order to see what would happen at close quarters, I brought her quite near to him. She spit and swore at him, but thus brought to bay he knocked her over with a sounding box on each ear, and she fled under the table, where, with a tiny drop of blood on her face, she bemoaned herself and appealed for sympathy, the picture of a helpless, injured child. As for the other cat, once roused he went on growling and spitting all morning.

The only small quadruped I ever knew Persis not want to fight was a rabbit. Some children on the place had a tame rabbit which was very fond of cats. One day she met him out of doors. He saw her and came running to play with her; she looked with a horrified face for a moment then turned and fled; she must have thought him a deformed sort of cat; much as if children met a human being with huge pendent ears and an uncouth way of walking who wanted to come and play with them.

Persis was very musical. If one whistled to her she would come from any part of the room, creep up as near to one’s face as she could, purr loudly, lick one’s face in growing rapture; then, if the whistling continued, she got over-excited, and had to manifest excessive pleasure by biting. I am determined to tell a story which no one will believe, but which is none the less true, that three or four times she has been found standing on the music-stool and making dabs at the keys with her forepaws; she, of course, had discovered before that a piano would make a sound if walked on, and she not unfrequently practised in that manner, but these three or four times I looked up, being surprised at hearing the same note repeated, and found her standing as I have said. However, no one need believe that, and it is their own loss if they do not; and anyhow, now it is a matter of ancient history, for Persis lost all care for the æsthetic part of life when she had a family to bring up.

While she was still an independent lady she used to sleep in my room, chiefly on my bed. It was a difficult matter to arrange at first, because I did not want the kitten to sleep on my face, which was her constant aspiration. Consequently, when I put out the light and settled to sleep, placing her firmly at the end of the bed, a loud purr was heard, and a little dark form proceeded to march up, stamping her paws on the counterpane and drawing them out in rapturous expectation of a pleasant evening.

Finally we compromised: she was allowed to sleep half-way up, embracing my arm if she liked. But I was rather glad when this habit was broken, because she began not to leave me enough room. One of my brothers thought he would try her in his room one night, but he had broken rest; for first she made defiant runs at him from the end of the bed, then in the middle of the night he was waked up by a pitiful howling, of which he took no notice. Two hours later he was waked again by louder howling, and then discovered that the cat had got out of one of his windows, walked on a narrow moulding round to a shut window, and did not dare to go back again. She was so overjoyed at being taken in that she fell into the bath. After that she came on his bed.

But I am wandering from the point of my story. Before Persis’ kittens came she had some friends, but no rivals. She treated her friends in a rather severe manner at first. One of them was a fox-terrier, called Don. The first time she was introduced to him she nearly jumped out of her skin with swearing and spitting. When he went out of the room, she went round to all the places where he had been and spit at them afresh. She has a fine scent; if new people have been in the room she always goes round and smells the places where they have been. She smells every new dress I have. The meek Don, who could kill a strange cat as soon as look at it, submitted wonderfully to her whims; and when she flew at him, beside herself with passion because he was enjoying the coffee sugar at the bottom of a cup merely picked the cup up in his teeth and trotted off. But she soon got accustomed to him. And then, distressed at his appearance, tried to lick the black spots off his back; used stealthily to wash the inside of his ears, ready always to rain a shower of blows on his nose with the tips of her paws if he so much as turned round. Then she began to worship in a manner not common to cats; with the sincerest flattery, she used to lie at his feet in the same position that he was lying in; if, for instance, he was lying with his legs stretched straight out below him, she would lie with her back touching the tips of his toes and her legs stretched out in the same way—an unnatural position for a cat.

Now her daughter, the image of Persis, will lie in the same way at Don’s feet; but I have never heard of any other cat doing it.

After this she became acquainted with a Gordon setter, and the obstinate curliness of Di’s hair gave Persis as much occupation as those black spots on Don’s back which never would come off. But she was jealous of none of these, she knew herself to be—as a cat—so infinitely superior to them. She was jealous of nobody and nothing until her kittens came.

There are certain great facts in life which nothing can prepare you for. No amount of reasoning, no previous imagination, will make you in the least able to calculate your feelings. Such must be the moment to very many when they realise that they will die; such is often the moment when people or creatures realise that there exists a little helpless living thing, theirs peculiarly, and yet not themselves. The change that her child can work in a grumbling, egotistical woman is incomprehensible,—could not have been argued by any logic; but far more surprising the event must be to a creature who does not know what is going to happen, cannot guess that her feelings will be moved in a totally new way, and could not realise beforehand that such an event might happen to her as it had to others. I tried to prepare Persis once; I gave her a stuffed kitten on a penwiper to play with. She looked at it with some interest, licked it a little, shook it, and left it; treated it much as a rather careless child treats her doll, but more amiably than she treated other animals. Nor could she dream that little bits of fur,—much like that to the outward eye,—endued with just enough life to tremble on their little weak legs, and utter tiny, plaintive shrieks, should rouse her to such a passionate emotion as to make her forget her own pressing bodily wants.

We know very little more than she did about it, we know just the bare fact that it always will be so, but why it should be so we know no more than she. Who understands the miracle by which an utterly selfish creature, whose natural instinct is to hate all other animals, and, indeed, only to tolerate human beings because it can make use of them, should be made to know and feel, in a short ten minutes’ space perhaps, an overpowering, passionate, protective love?

One morning Persis did not feel very well, in sign whereof she showed a decided intention to occupy my bed. She was sent down to an empty bedroom while a hamper of hay was being prepared for her; but when her invalid couch was ready she was nowhere to be found; a search discovered finally that she had put herself to bed in the room already, under the counterpane. Still, she was thinking of nobody but herself. Later in the morning I visited her,—when three little helpless, shapeless, furry things were moving about her, and Persis was not thinking of herself at all. One would not have believed an animal’s expression could change so much; the overwhelming surprise, the intense affection, were in her face as clearly as they could be in an human face; for the time her egotism had gone, she was not a cat, she was a mother. Formerly she had been shy of people, frightened of men; now, as one after another came in to see her kittens, she showed no fear, and, what was even more curious, no anger; she merely purred in pride and entire confidence.

They were wonderful kittens—two quite blue, one like its mother; their eyes were shut, their ears were flattened down over their faces,—they were little bodies which breathed and fed and grew.

But they did grow, and their ears stood up and their eyes opened,—dark and light blue,—and their heads got steadier, and in a month they were little square solid kittens, who with much difficulty could get out of the box in which they were placed. Getting out was a process which involved the fullest exercise of all mental and physical powers; for first they had to advance to the side, then one tiny paw and then another was put over the side, and the adventurer was for the time hung up by his shoulders. Then he worked himself on by the help of much kicking behind and clawing against the box, until the part outside was just heavier than the part inside, and with a scramble, and by the help of the centre of gravity, the whole kitten tumbled on to the floor. It was a grand triumph of mind over matter. And still Persis beamed on them, and on the world in general.

But as they grew began the first little rift within the lute. It was difficult to help it. I put it to you—could one carry three kittens and a cat about, like Henry III. of France, to exhibit to visitors. If it was a choice between exhibiting kittens and cat, visitors would surely prefer to see the kittens; and so it came to pass that the children were carried into the drawing-room and handed round, while in the empty schoolroom the “old” cat sat alone. It was only a couple of months since she had been shown to visitors herself. Sometimes I took her too, but that was not a great success, for everybody liked the kittens best.