was an elegant cat, mostly white, with a fine tabby patch on her back, and worthy of better treatment.
All three welcomed Kathleen with delight. She fed them generously, knew Romulus and Remus apart from the first, and gave Tibbles all the affection she wanted. Then Sirius came. Kathleen still fed the cats generously, but that was all Sirius would let her do. The day Sirius found Tibbles sitting on Kathleen’s knee was the first time he barked. Yapping in a furious soprano, he flung himself at Kathleen and managed to get his front paws almost above her kneecaps. Tibbles arose and spat. Her paw shot out, once, twice, three times, before Sirius could remove himself. He was lucky not to lose an eye. But he continued to bark and Tibbles, very ruffled, escaped on to the sideboard, furious and swearing revenge.
“Oh Leo!” Kathleen said reproachfully. “That’s not kind. Why shouldn’t she sit on my knee?”
Sirius did not understand the question, but he was determined that Tibbles should sit on Kathleen’s knee only over his dead body. Kathleen was his. The trouble was, he could not trust Kathleen to remember this. Kathleen was kind to all living things. She fed birds, rescued mice from the cats, and tried to grow flowers in a row of cracked cups on her bedroom windowsill. Sirius slept in Kathleen’s bedroom, at first in the basket, then on the end of her bed when the basket grew uncomfortably tight. Kathleen would sit up in bed, with a book open in front of her, and talk to him for hours on end. Sirius could not understand what she was saying, but he darkly suspected she was telling him of her abounding love for all creatures.
One night, when it was spitting with rain, Romulus forgot about Sirius and came in through Kathleen’s bedroom window to spend the night on her bed as he had done before Sirius came. That was the first time Sirius really growled. He leapt up rumbling. Romulus growled too and fled helter-skelter, knocking over Kathleen’s flower-cups as he went.
“You mustn’t, Leo,” said Kathleen. “He’s allowed to. Now look what you’ve made him do!” She was so miserable about her broken flowers that Sirius had to lick her face.
After that, Sirius knew the cats were putting their heads together to get revenge. He did not care. He knew they were clever, Tibbles especially, but he was not in the least afraid of them. He was at least twice their size by now and still growing. His paws, as Kathleen remarked, were as big as teacups, and he was getting some splendid new teeth. Robin, who was always reading books about dogs, told Kathleen that Leo was certainly half Labrador. But what the other half of him was, neither of them could conjecture. Sirius’s unusually glossy coat was a wavy golden-cream, except for the two red-brown patches, foxy red, one over each ear. Then there were those queer green eyes.
“Red Setter, perhaps?” Robin said doubtfully. “He’s got those feathery bits at the backs of his legs.”
“Mongrel,” said Basil. “His father was a white rat and his mother was a fox.”
“Vixen,” Robin corrected him.
“I thought you’d agree,” said Basil.
Kathleen, who seldom argued with Basil, said nothing and went away upstairs to make the beds, with Sirius trotting after. “I think you’re really a Griffin,” she said. “Look.” She opened the door of Duffie’s wardrobe so that Sirius could see himself in the long mirror.
Sirius did not make the mistake of thinking it was another dog. He did not even go round the back of the mirror to see how his reflection got there. He simply sat himself down and looked, which impressed Kathleen very much. “You are intelligent!” she said.
Sirius met his own strange eyes. He had no means of knowing they were unusual, but, all the same, just for a moment, he seemed to be looking at immeasurable distances down inside those eyes. There he saw people and places so different from Duffie’s bedroom that they were almost inconceivable. That was only for an instant. After that, they were only the green eyes of a fat curly puppy. Annoyed by something he could not understand, Sirius yawned like a crocodile, showing all his splendid new teeth.
“Come, come!” said Kathleen laughing. “You’re not that boring!”
Those splendid teeth had Sirius in trouble the next day. The urge was on him to chew. And chew and chew. He chewed his basket into a kind of grass skirt. Then he went on to the hearthrug. Kathleen tore the hearthrug out of his mouth and gave him an old shoe, imploring him not to chew anything else but that. Sirius munched it threadbare in half an hour and looked round for something else. Basil had left a box of fossils on the floor. Sirius selected a piece of petrified wood out of it, propped it between his front paws, and was settling down to some glorious gritty grating when Basil found him. Basil kicked him, rolling and howling, across the room.
“Stinking Rat! Do that again and I’ll kill you!”
Sirius dared not move. He wagged his tail apologetically and looked round for something else to bite on. Nicely within reach trailed a black chewy wire from a shelf above. He had his head up and the wire across the corners of his mouth in an ecstasy of chew, when Robin descended on him and put a stop to that.
“Kathleen! He’s eaten the telephone wire now!”
“I’ll go and buy a rubber bone,” said Kathleen. She went out. Robin, rapidly and furtively, dreading Duffie coming, wrapped black sticky tape round the telephone wire. Basil was anxiously making sure none of his fossils had been eaten.
No one attended to Sirius, crouched under the sideboard. He lay there, nose on paws, and there it came to him what it was he really wanted to chew. The ideal thing. With a little ticker-tack of claws, he crept to the door and up the stairs. He nosed open the door of the main bedroom without difficulty and, with a little more trouble, succeeded in opening the wardrobe too. Inside were shoes – long large leather shoes, with laces and thick chewable soles. Sirius selected the juiciest and took it under the bed to enjoy in peace.
The thunderous voice found him there and chased him round the house with a walking stick. Duffie spoke long and coldly. Kathleen wept. Robin tried to explain about teething. Basil jeered. And throughout, Tibbles sat thoughtfully on the sideboard, giving the inside of her left front leg little hasty licks, like a cat seized with an idea. Sirius saw her. To show his contempt and to soothe his feelings, he went into the kitchen and ate the cats’ supper. Then he lay down glumly to gnaw the unsatisfactory rubber thing Kathleen had bought him.
“That settles it,” said Duffie. “That Creature is not going to spend all day in the house when you go back to school. He’s going to be tied up in the yard.”
“Yes. Yes, all right,” Kathleen said humbly. “I’ll take him for walks when I get home. I’ll start getting him used to it today.”
She had bought something else besides the bone. There was a red jingly strap, which she buckled round Sirius’s neck. He did not like it. It was tight and it itched. But, twist as he might, he could not get it off. Then Kathleen hitched another strap with a loop at one end to the red one and, to his great delight, opened the side door on the outside world, where he had never been before.
Sirius set off down the side of the house in a delighted rush. He was brought up short with a jerk and a jingle. Something seemed to be pulling his neck. He strained. He dragged. He made hoarse choking-noises to show Kathleen what was wrong. He stood on his hind legs to be free.
“No, Leo,” said Kathleen. “You mustn’t pull.”
But he went on pulling. The indignity was too much. He was not a slave, or a prisoner. He was Sirius. He was a free luminary and a high effulgent. He
