of the powerful and lightning-like buffets of those terrible paws that had so quickly robbed him of his senses and laid him open for the final attack which but for a bit of luck might have finished him. Assuredly he too would steer clear of Dempsey, but to the tabby he said:
“Oh, he wasn’t so much. If I hadn’t been so tired from running—”
The tabby smiled enigmatically. “Running from what, laddie?”
But before Peter could reply, she said: “Never mind, I know how it is. When you first find yourself on your own, everything frightens you. And don’t think that everybody doesn’t run. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. By the way, what is your name?”
Peter told her. She said, “Hm … Mine’s Jennie. I’d like to hear your story. Care to tell it?”
Peter very much wanted to do so. But he found suddenly that he was a little timid because he was not at all sure how it would sound, and, even more important, whether the tabby would believe him and how she would take it. For it was certainly going to be a most odd tale.
BY AND LARGE, Peter made about as bad a beginning as could be when he said:
“I’m not really a cat, I’m a little boy. I mean actually, not so little. I’m eight.”
“You’re what?” Jennie gave a long, low growl, and her tail fluffed up to twice its size.
Peter could not imagine what he had said to make her angry, and he repeated hesitantly, “A boy—”
The tabby’s tail swelled another size larger and twitched nervously. Her eyes seemed to shoot sparks as she hissed: “I hate people!”
“Oh!” said Peter, for he was suddenly full of sympathy and understanding for the poor thin little tabby who had been so kind to him. “Somebody must have been horrible to you. But I love cats!”
Jennie looked mollified, and her tail began to subside. “Of course,” she said, “it’s just your imagination. I should have known. We’re always imagining things, like a leaf blowing in the wind being a mouse, or if there’s no leaf there at all, then we can imagine one, and when we’ve imagined it, go right on from there and imagine it isn’t a leaf at all but a mouse, or if we like, a whole lot of mice, and then we start pouncing on them. You just like to imagine that you’re a little boy, though what kind of a game you can make out of that I can’t see. Still—”
“Oh, please,” said Peter, interrupting. He could feel somehow that the tabby very much didn’t want him to be a boy, and yet, even at the risk of offending her, he knew that he must tell her the truth. “Please, I’m so sorry, but it is so. You must believe me. My name is Peter Brown, and I live in a flat with my mother and father and Nanny, in a house at Number 1A, Cavendish Mews. Or at least I did live there before—”
“Oh, come now,” protested Jennie, “don’t be silly. Anybody can see that you look like a cat, you feel like a cat, you smell like a cat, you purr like a cat, and you—” But here her voice trailed off into silence for a moment and her eyes grew wide again. “Oh dear,” she said then. “But there is something the matter. I’ve felt it all along. You don’t act like a cat—”
“Of course not,” Peter said, relieved that he might be believed at last.
But the tabby, her eyes growing wider and wider, wasn’t listening. She was going back over her acquaintance with Peter and enumerating the odd things that had happened since she had found him exhausted, wounded and half dead in the alley and had dragged him to her home, for what reason she did not know.
“You told off Dempsey, and right on his own premises, where he works. No sensible cat would have done that, no matter how brave. And besides, it’s against the rules.” She almost seemed to be ticking items off the end of her claws, though of course she wasn’t. “And then you didn’t want to eat mouse when you were literally starving – said you’d never had one, and then you ate it all up at one gobble, with never a thought that I might be hungry too. Not that I minded, but a real cat would never have done that. Oh, and then, of course – that’s what I was trying to remember! You ate mouse right on the silk counterpane where you’ve been sleeping, and you didn’t wash after you’d finished …”
Peter said, “Why should I? We always wash before eating. At least, Nanny always sends me into the bathroom and makes me clean my hands and face before sitting down to table.”
“Well, cats don’t!”declared Jennie decisively, “and it seems to me much the more sensible way. It’s after you’ve eaten you find yourself all greasy and sticky, with milk on your whiskers and gravy all over your fur if you’ve been in too much of a hurry. Oh dear!” she ended up. “That almost proves it. But I must say I’ve never heard of such a thing in all my life!”
Peter thought to himself, “She is good, and she has been kind to me, but she does love to chatter.” Aloud, he said, “If you would like me to tell you how it all happened, perhaps—”
“Yes, do, please,” said the tabby cat and settled herself more comfortably on the bed with her front paws tucked under her, “I should love to hear it.”
And so Peter began from the beginning and told her the whole story of what had happened to him.
Or rather he began away back before it began, really, and told her about his home in the Mews near the square and the little garden there inside the iron railings where Nanny took him to play every day after school when the weather was fine, and about his father who was a Colonel in the Guards and was away from home most of the time, first during the war when he was in Egypt and Italy, and then in France and Germany, and he hardly saw him at all, and then later in peacetime when he would come home now and then wearing a most beautiful uniform with blue trousers that had a red stripe down the side, except that as soon as he got into the house he went right into his room and changed it for an old brown tweed suit which wasn’t nearly as interesting or exciting.
Sometimes he stayed a little while for a chat or a romp with Peter, but usually he went off with Peter’s mother with golf clubs or fishing tackle in the car and they would stay away for days at a time. He would be left with only Cook and Nanny in the flat and it wasn’t much fun being alone, for even when he was with friends in the daytime, playing or visiting, it got very lonely at night without his father and mother. When they weren’t away on a trip together, they would dress up every evening and go out. And that was when he wished most that he had a cat of his own that would curl up at the foot of his bed, or cuddle, or play games just with him.
And he told the tabby all about his mother, how young and beautiful she was, so tall and slender, with light-coloured hair as soft as silk, that was the colour of the sunshine when it came in slantwise through the nursery window in the late afternoon, and how blue were her eyes and dark her lashes.
But particularly he remembered and told Jennie how good she smelled when she came in to say goodnight to him before going out for the evening, for when Peter’s father was away she was unhappy and bored and went off with friends a great deal seeking amusement.
It
