ssness on us. It is
an animal with an almost boundless capacity for self-help. It can jump
up walls. It can climb trees. It can run, as the proverb says, like
"greased lightning." It is armed like an African chief. Yet it has
contrived to make itself a pampered pet, so that we are alarmed if it
attempts to follow us out of the gate into a world of dogs, and only
feel happy when it is purring--rolling on its back and purring as we
rub its Adam's apple--by the fireside. There is nothing that gives a
greater sense of comfort than the purring of a cat. It is the most
flattering music in nature. One feels, as one listens, like a humble
lover in a bad novel, who says: "You do, then, like me--a
little--after all?" The fact that a cat is not utterly miserable in
our presence always comes with the freshness and delight of a
surprise. The happiness of a crowing baby, newly introduced to us, may
be still more flattering, but a cat will get round people who cannot
tolerate babies.

It is all the more to be wondered at that a cat, which is such a
master of this conversational sort of music, should ever attempt any
other. There never was an animal less fit to be a singer. Someone--was
it Cowper?---has said that there are no really ugly voices in nature,
and that he could imagine that there was something to be said even for
the donkey's bray. I should have thought that the beautiful voices in
nature were few, and that most of them could be defended only on the
ground of some pleasant association. Humanity, at least, has been
unanimous in its condemnation of the cat as part of nature's chorus.
Poems have been written in praise of the corncrake as a singer, but
never of the cat. All the associations we have with cats have not
accustomed us to that discordant howl. It converts love itself into a
torment such as can be found only in the pages of a twentieth-century
novel. In it we hear the jungle decadent--the beast in dissolution,
but not yet civilised. When it rises at night outside the window, we
always explain to visitors: "No; that's not Peter. That's the cat next
door with the yellow eyes." The man who will not defend the honour of
his cat cannot be trusted to defend anything.

VI

MAY

May is chiefly remarkable for being the only month in which one does
not like cats. June, too, perhaps; but, after that, one does not mind
if the garden is full of cats. One likes to have a wild beast whose
movements, lazy as those