‘You needn’t,’ said Lord Hugh. ‘You’ve only got to get some one to say to you, “Please leave off being a cat and be Maurice again,” and there you are.’
Maurice thought of Dr. Strongitharm’s. He also thought of the horror of his father when he should find Maurice gone, vanished, not to be traced. ‘He’ll be sorry, then,’ Maurice told himself, and to the cat he said, suddenly: —
‘Right – I’ll do it. What’s the word, again?’
‘ – ,’ said the cat.
‘ – ,’ said Maurice; and suddenly the table shot up to the height of a house, the walls to the height of tenement buildings, the pattern on the carpet became enormous, and Maurice found himself on all fours. He tried to stand up on his feet, but his shoulders were oddly heavy. He could only rear himself upright for a moment, and then fell heavily on his hands. He looked down at them; they seemed to have grown shorter and fatter, and were encased in black fur gloves. He felt a desire to walk on all fours – tried it – did it. It was very odd – the movement of the arms straight from the shoulder, more like the movement of the piston of an engine than anything Maurice could think of at that moment.
‘I am asleep,’ said Maurice – ‘I am dreaming this. I am dreaming I am a cat. I hope I dreamed that about the sardine-tin and Lord Hugh’s tail, and Dr. Strong’s.’
‘You didn’t,’ said a voice he knew and yet didn’t know, ‘and you aren’t dreaming this.’
‘Yes, I am,’ said Maurice; ‘and now I’m going to dream that I fight that beastly black cat, and give him the best licking he ever had in his life. Come on, Lord Hugh.’
A loud laugh answered him.
‘Excuse my smiling,’ said the voice he knew and didn’t know, ‘but don’t you see – you are Lord Hugh!’
A great hand picked Maurice up from the floor and held him in the air. He felt the position to be not only undignified but unsafe, and gave himself a shake of mingled relief and resentment when the hand set him down on the inky table-cloth.
‘You are Lord Hugh now, my dear Maurice,’ said the voice, and a huge face came quite close to his. It was his own face, as it would have seemed through a magnifying glass. And the voice – oh, horror! – the voice was his own voice – Maurice Basingstoke’s voice. Maurice shrank from the voice, and he would have liked to claw the face, but he had had no practice.
‘You are Lord Hugh,’ the voice repeated, ‘and I am Maurice. I like being Maurice. I am so large and strong. I could drown you in the water-butt, my poor cat – oh, so easily. No, don’t spit and swear. It’s bad manners – even in a cat.’
‘Maurice!’ shouted Mr. Basingstoke from between the door and the cab.
Maurice, from habit, leaped towards the door.
‘It’s no use your going,’ said the thing that looked like a giant reflection of Maurice; ‘it’s me he wants.’
‘But I didn’t agree to your being me.’
‘That’s poetry, even if it isn’t grammar,’ said the thing that looked like Maurice. ‘Why, my good cat, don’t you see that if you are I, I must be you? Otherwise we should interfere with time and space, upset the balance of power, and as likely as not destroy the solar system. Oh, yes – I’m you, right enough, and shall be, till some one tells you to change from Lord Hugh into Maurice. And now you’ve got to find some one to do it.’
(‘Maurice!’ thundered the voice of Mr. Basingstoke.)
‘That’ll be easy enough,’ said Maurice.
‘Think so?’ said the other.
‘But I sha’n’t try yet. I want to have some fun first. I shall catch heaps of mice!’
‘Think so? You forget that your whiskers are cut off – Maurice cut them. Without whiskers, how can you judge of the width of the places you go through? Take care you don’t get stuck in a hole that you can’t get out of or go in through, my good cat.’
‘Don’t call me a cat,’ said Maurice, and felt that his tail was growing thick and angry.
‘You are a cat, you know – and that little bit of temper that I see in your tail reminds me – ’
Maurice felt himself gripped round the middle, abruptly lifted, and carried swiftly through the air. The quickness of the movement made him giddy. The light went so quickly past him that it might as well have been darkness. He saw nothing, felt nothing, except a sort of long sea-sickness, and then suddenly he was not being moved. He could see now. He could feel. He was being held tight in a sort of vice – a vice covered with chequered cloth. It looked like the pattern, very much exaggerated, of his school knickerbockers. It was. He was being held between the hard, relentless knees of that creature that had once been Lord Hugh, and to whose tail he had tied a sardine-tin. Now he was Lord Hugh, and something was being tied to his tail. Something mysterious, terrible. Very well, he would show that he was not afraid of anything that could be attached to tails. The string rubbed his fur the wrong way – it was that that annoyed him, not the string itself; and as for what was at the end of the string, what could that matter to any sensible cat? Maurice was quite decided that he was – and would keep on being – a sensible cat.
The string, however, and the uncomfortable, tight position between those chequered knees – something or other was getting on his nerves.
‘Maurice!’ shouted his father below, and the be-catted Maurice bounded between the knees of the creature that wore his clothes and his looks.
‘Coming, father,’ this thing called, and sped away, leaving Maurice on the servant’s bed – under which Lord Hugh had taken refuge, with his tin-can, so short and yet so long a time ago. The stairs re-echoed to the loud boots which Maurice had never before thought loud; he had often, indeed, wondered that any one could object to them. He wondered now no longer.
He heard the front door slam. That thing had gone to Dr. Strongitharm’s. That was one comfort. Lord Hugh was a boy now; he would know what it was to be a boy. He, Maurice, was a cat, and he meant to taste fully all catty pleasures, from milk to mice. Meanwhile he was without mice or milk, and, unaccustomed as he was to a tail, he could not but feel that all was not right with his own. There was a feeling of weight, a feeling of discomfort, of positive terror. If he should move, what would that thing that was tied to his tail do? Rattle, of course. Oh, but he could not bear it if that thing rattled. Nonsense; it was only a sardine-tin. Yes, Maurice knew that. But all the same – if it did rattle! He moved his tail the least little soft inch. No sound. Perhaps really there wasn’t anything tied to his tail. But he couldn’t be sure unless he moved. But if he moved the thing would rattle, and if it rattled Maurice felt sure that he would expire or go mad. A mad cat. What a dreadful thing to be! Yet he couldn’t sit on that bed for ever, waiting, waiting, waiting for the dreadful thing to happen.
‘Oh, dear,’ sighed Maurice the cat. ‘I never knew what people meant by “afraid” before.’
His cat-heart was beating heavily against his furry side. His limbs were getting cramped – he must move. He did. And instantly the awful thing happened. The sardine-tin touched the iron of the bed-foot. It rattled.
‘Oh, I can’t bear it, I can’t,’ cried poor Maurice, in a heartrending meaow that echoed through the house. He leaped from the bed and tore through the door and down the stairs, and behind him came the most terrible thing in the world. People might call it a sardine-tin, but he knew better. It was the soul of all the fear that ever had been or ever could be. It rattled.
Maurice who was a cat flew down the stairs; down, down – the rattling horror followed. Oh, horrible! Down, down! At the foot of the stairs the horror, caught by something – a banister – a stair-rod – stopped. The string on Maurice’s tail tightened, his tail was jerked, he was stopped. But the noise