desperate. He deliberately upset the ink – most of it rolled over the table-cloth and fell pattering on the carpet, but with what was left he wrote quite plainly, across the map: —
‘Please tell Lord Hugh to stop being a cat and be Mau rice again.’
‘There!’ he said; ‘they can’t make any mistake about that.’ They didn’t. But they made a mistake about who had done it, and Mabel was deprived of jam with her supper bread.
Her assurance that some naughty boy must have come through the window and done it while she was not there convinced nobody, and, indeed, the window was shut and bolted.
Maurice, wild with indignation, did not mend matters by seizing the opportunity of a few minutes’ solitude to write: —
‘It was not Mabel it was Maur ice I mean Lord Hugh,’
because when that was seen Mabel was instantly sent to bed.
‘It’s not fair!’ cried Maurice.
‘My dear,’ said Maurice’s father, ‘if that cat goes on mewing to this extent you’ll have to get rid of it.’
Maurice said not another word. It was bad enough to be a cat, but to be a cat that was ‘got rid of’! He knew how people got rid of cats. In a stricken silence he left the room and slunk up the stairs – he dared not mew again, even at the door of Mabel’s room. But when Jane went in to put Mabel’s light out Maurice crept in too, and in the dark tried with stifled mews and purrs to explain to Mabel how sorry he was. Mabel stroked him and he went to sleep, his last waking thought amazement at the blindness that had once made him call her a silly little kid.
If you have ever been a cat you will understand something of what Maurice endured during the dreadful days that followed. If you have not, I can never make you understand fully. There was the affair of the fishmonger’s tray balanced on the wall by the back door – the delicious curled-up whiting; Maurice knew as well as you do that one mustn’t steal fish out of other people’s trays, but the cat that he was didn’t know. There was an inward struggle – and Maurice was beaten by the cat-nature. Later he was beaten by the cook.
Then there was that very painful incident with the butcher’s dog, the flight across gardens, the safety of the plum tree gained only just in time.
And, worst of all, despair took hold of him, for he saw that nothing he could do would make any one say those simple words that would release him. He had hoped that Mabel might at last be made to understand, but the ink had failed him; she did not understand his subdued mewings, and when he got the cardboard letters and made the same sentence with them Mabel only thought it was that naughty boy who came through locked windows. Somehow he could not spell before any one – his nerves were not what they had been. His brain now gave him no new ideas. He felt that he was really growing like a cat in his mind. His interest in his meals grew beyond even what it had been when they were a schoolboy’s meals. He hunted mice with growing enthusiasm, though the loss of his whiskers to measure narrow places with made hunting difficult.
He grew expert in bird-stalking, and often got quite near to a bird before it flew away, laughing at him. But all the time, in his heart, he was very, very miserable. And so the week went by.
Maurice in his cat shape dreaded more and more the time when Lord Hugh in the boy shape should come back from Dr. Strongitharm’s. He knew – who better? – exactly the kind of things boys do to cats, and he trembled to the end of his handsome half-Persian tail.
And then the boy came home from Dr. Strongitharm’s, and at the first sound of his boots in the hall Maurice in the cat’s body fled with silent haste to hide in the boot-cupboard.
Here, ten minutes later, the boy that had come back from Dr. Strongitharm’s found him.
Maurice fluffed up his tail and unsheathed his claws. Whatever this boy was going to do to him Maurice meant to resist, and his resistance should hurt the boy as much as possible. I am sorry to say Maurice swore softly among the boots, but cat-swearing is not really wrong.
‘Come out, you old duffer,’ said Lord Hugh in the boy shape of Maurice. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’
‘I’ll see to that,’ said Maurice, backing into the corner, all teeth and claws.
‘Oh, I’ve had such a time!’ said Lord Hugh. ‘It’s no use, you know, old chap; I can see where you are by your green eyes. My word, they do shine. I’ve been caned and shut up in a dark room and given thousands of lines to write out.’
‘I’ve been beaten, too, if you come to that,’ mewed Maurice. ‘Besides the butcher’s dog.’
It was an intense relief to speak to some one who could understand his mews.
‘Well, I suppose it’s Pax for the future,’ said Lord Hugh; ‘if you won’t come out, you won’t. Please leave off being a cat and be Maurice again.’
And instantly Maurice, amid a heap of goloshes and old tennis bats, felt with a swelling heart that he was no longer a cat. No more of those undignified four legs, those tiresome pointed ears, so difficult to wash, that furry coat, that contemptible tail, and that terrible inability to express all one’s feelings in two words – ‘mew’ and ‘purr.’
He scrambled out of the cupboard, and the boots and goloshes fell off him like spray off a bather.
He stood upright in those very chequered knickerbockers that were so terrible when their knees held one vice-like, while things were tied to one’s tail. He was face to face with another boy, exactly like himself.
‘You haven’t changed, then – but there can’t be two Maurices.’
‘There sha’n’t be; not if I know it,’ said the other boy; ‘a boy’s life’s a dog’s life. Quick, before any one comes.’
‘Quick what?’ asked Maurice.
‘Why tell me to leave off being a boy, and to be Lord Hugh Cecil again.’
Maurice told him at once. And at once the boy was gone, and there was Lord Hugh in his own shape, purring politely, yet with a watchful eye on Maurice’s movements.
‘Oh, you needn’t be afraid, old chap. It’s Pax right enough,’ Maurice murmured in the ear of Lord Hugh. And Lord Hugh, arching his back under Maurice’s stroking hand, replied with a purrrr-meaow that spoke volumes.
‘Oh, Maurice, here you are. It is nice of you to be nice to Lord Hugh, when it was because of him you – ’
‘He’s a good old chap,’ said Maurice, carelessly. ‘And you’re not half a bad old girl. See?’
Mabel almost wept for joy at this magnificent compliment, and Lord Hugh himself took on a more happy and confident air.
Please dismiss any fears which you may entertain that after this Maurice became a model boy. He didn’t. But he was much nicer than before. The conversation which he overheard when he was a cat makes him more patient with his father and mother. And he is almost always nice to Mabel, for he cannot forget all that she was to him when he wore the shape of Lord Hugh. His father attributes all the improvement in his son’s character to that week at Dr. Strongitharm’s – which, as you know, Maurice never had. Lord Hugh’s character is unchanged. Cats learn slowly and with difficulty.
Only Maurice and Lord Hugh know the truth
