t. Then they opened. He crawled
feebly on the floor after Jane, or hung on to her little breasts,
pressing out the milk with his clever paws. Then Jerry got older.
Sometimes he went mad and became a bat or a bird, and flew up the
drawing-room curtains as if his legs were wings.

Nicky said that Jerry could turn himself into anything he pleased; a
hawk, an owl, a dove, a Himalayan bear, a snake, a flying squirrel, a
monkey, a rabbit, a panther, and a little black lamb of God.

Jerry was a cat now; he was two years old.

Jerry's fixed idea seemed to be that he was a very young cat, and that
he must be nursed continually, and that nobody but Nicky must nurse him.
Mr. Parsons found that Nicky made surprising progress in his Latin and
Greek that year. What had baffled Mr. Parsons up till now had been
Nicky's incapacity for sitting still. But he would sit still enough when
Jerry was on his knee, pressed tight between the edge of the desk and
Nicky's stomach, so that knowledge entered into Nicky through Jerry when
there was no other way.

Nicky would even sit still in the open air to watch Jerry as he stalked
bees in the grass, or played by himself, over and over again, his own
enchanted game. He always played it in the same way. He started from the
same clump in the border, to run in one long careening curve across the
grass; at the same spot in the lawn he bounded sideways and gave the
same little barking grunt and dashed off into the bushes. When you tried
to catch him midway he stood on his hind legs and bowed to you
slantwise, waving his forepaws, or rushed like lightning up the tree of
Heaven, and climbed into the highest branches and clung there, looking
down at you. His yellow eyes shone through the green leaves; they
quivered; they played; they mocked you with some challenge, some charm,
secret and divine and savage.

"The soul of Nicky is in that cat," Frances said.

Jerry knew that he was Nicky's cat. When other people caught him he
scrabbled over their shoulders with his claws and got away from them.
When Nicky caught him he lay quiet and heavy in his arms, pressing down
and spreading his soft body. Nicky's sense of touch had been hardened by
violent impacts and collisions, by experiments with jack-knives and saws
and chisels and gouges, and by struggling with the material of his
everlasting inventions. Through communion with Jerry it became tender
and sensitive again. It delighted in the cat's throbbing purr