On the other hand, too, if Cyrus is not quite well (this very seldom happens), though he does not care for food, he does not, either, feel up to foreign travel, and, therefore, the knifesharpener may repose in its drawer. Indeed, there are advantages in having a greedy king that I had never suspected.…
As the months went on and Cyrus grew larger and longer-haired, he gradually, as befitted a king who had come to rule over men, renounced all connexion with other animals, especially cats. He used to lie perdu in a large flower-pot which he had overturned (ejecting the hydrangea with scuffles of backward-kicking hind legs), and watch for the appearance of his discarded race. If so much as an ear or a tail appeared on the frontier walls, he hurled himself, his face a mask of fury, at the intruder. The same ambush, I am sorry to say, served him as a butt for the destruction of sparrows. He did not kill them, but brought them indoors to the kitchen, and presented them, as a token of his prowess as a hunter, to the cook. Dogs, similarly, were not allowed, when he sat at the area gate. Once I saw, returning home from a few doors off, a brisk Irish terrier gambol down my area steps (Cyrus’s area steps, I mean), and quickened my pace, fearing for Cyrus, if he happened to be sitting there. He was sitting there, but I need not have been afraid, for before I had reached the house a prolonged and dismal yell rent the air, and an astonished Irish terrier shot up, as from a gun, through the area gate again with a wild and hunted expression. When I got there I found Cyrus seated on the top step calm and firm, delicately licking the end of his silvery paw.
Once only, as far as I remember, was Cyrus ever routed by anything with four legs, but that was not a question of lack of physical courage, but a collapse of nerves in the presence of a sort of hobgoblin, something altogether uncanny and elfin. For a visitor had brought inside her muff an atrocious little griffon, and Cyrus had leaped on to this lady’s knee and rather liked the muff. Then, from inside it, within an inch or two of Cyrus’s face, there looked out a half-fledged little head, of a new and nerveshattering type. Cyrus stared for one moment at this dreadful apparition, and then bolted inside the piano-ambush. The griffon thought this was the first manoeuvre in a game of play, so jumped down and sniffed round the entrance to the ambush. Panicstricken scufflings and movements came from within.… Then a diabolical thought struck me: Cyrus had never yet been in his ambush when the piano was played, and the griffon being stowed back again in the muff, for fear of accidents, I went very softly to the keys and played one loud chord. As the Irish terrier came out of the area gate, so came Cyrus out of his violated sanctuary.…
Cyrus was now just a year old; his kitten-coat had been altogether discarded; he already weighed eleven pounds, and he was clad from nose to tail-tip in his complete royal robes. His head was small, and looked even smaller framed in the magnificent ruff that curled outwards from below his chin. In colour he was like a smoky shadow, with two great topaz lights gleaming in the van; the tips of his paws were silvery, as if wood-ash smouldered whitely through the smoke. That year we enjoyed a summer of extraordinary heat, and Cyrus made the unique discovery about the refrigerator, a large tin box, like a safe, that stood in the scullery. The germ of the discovery, I am afraid, was a fluke, for he had snatched a steak of salmon from the tray which the fishmonger had most imprudently left on the area steps, and, with an instinct for secrecy which this unusual treasure-trove awoke in him, he bore it to the nearest dark place, which happened to be the refrigerator. Here he ate as much as it was wise to gobble at one sitting, and then, I must suppose, instead of going to sleep, he pondered. For days he had suffered from the excessive heat; his flower-pot ambush in the garden was unendurable, so also was his retreat under my bedclothes. But here was a far more agreeable temperature.… This is all the reconstruction of motive that I can give, and it is but guesswork. But day after day, while the heat lasted, Cyrus sat opposite the refrigerator and bolted into it whenever he found opportunity. The heat also increased his somnolence, and one morning, when he came up to breakfast with me, he fell asleep on the sofa before I had time to cut off the little offering of kidney which I had meant to be my homage. When I put it quite close to his nose he opened his mouth to receive it, but was again drowned in gulfs of sleep before he could masticate it. So it stuck out of the corner of his mouth like a cigarette. But eventually, I knew, he “would wake and remember and understand.”
And now Cyrus is two years old, and has reigned a year and ten months. I think he has completed his own education, and certainly he has cleared his frontiers of cats, and, I am afraid, his dominion of sparrows. One misguided bird this year built in a small bush in his garden. A series of distressing unfledged objects were presented to the cook.… He has appropriated the chair I was accustomed to use in my sitting-room, and he has torn open the new back-cloth that I had caused to be put on my piano. I dare say he was right about that, for there is no use in having an ambush if you cannot get into it. In other ways, too, I do not think he is strictly constitutional. But whenever I return to his kingdom after some absence, as soon as the door is open Cyrus runs down the steps to meet me (even as Puss-cat used to do) and makes a poker of his tail, and says “Ah-h-h-h.” That makes up for a good deal of what appears to be tyranny. And only this morning he gave me a large spider, precious and wonderful, and still faintly stirring.…
THE TRAGEDY OF OLIVER BOWMAN
Oliver Bowman was sitting opposite his sister aftei dinner, watching her cracking walnuts in her strong, firm hands. The wonder of it never failed: she put two walnuts in her palms, pressed her hands together as if in silent prayer, and then there was a great crash and pieces of walnut-shell flew about the table. It was a waste of energy, no doubt, since close beside her were the nut-crackers that gave the nut-eater so great a mechanical advantage; but then his sister had so much energy that it would have been not less ridiculous to accuse the sea of wasting energy because it broke in waves on the shore. Presently she would drink a couple of glasses of port and begin smoking in earnest.
“And then?” asked Oliver, who was exhibiting a fraternal interest in the way in which Alice had passed her day.
“Then I had tea at an A B C shop, and walked round the Park. Lovely day: you ought to have come out.”
“I had a little headache,” said Oliver. He spoke in a soft voice, which occasionally cracked and went into a high key, as when a boy’s voice is breaking. That had happened to him some fifteen years ago, since he was now thirty; but he had made a habit of dropping into falsetto tones, as being an engaging remnant of youthfulness.
“A good walk in the sun and wind would have made that better,” said his sister.
“But I don’t like the sun,” said he petulantly, “and you know I detest the wind.”
“What did you do, then?” she asked.
“I read a story by Conrad about a storm at sea. I quite felt as if I was going through it all without any of the inconveniences of it. That is the joy of a well-written book: it enlarges your experiences without paying you out for them.”
Alice dusted the fragments of walnut-shell from her fingers, poured out a glass of port, and lit a cigarette.
“I would sooner do any one thing myself than read about any twenty,” she observed. “I should hate to get my experiences secondhand, already digested for me, just as I should hate to wear secondhand clothes or eat peptonized food. They’ve got to be mine, and I’ve got to do them—I mean digest them—myself.”
Oliver refused port, and took a very little coffee with a good deal of hot milk in it.
“Considering Nature has been making men and women for so many million years, it’s odd how often she makes mistakes about them,” he said. “She constantly puts them into the wrong envelope: she puts a baby girl into a baby boy’s envelope, and a baby boy into a baby girl’s. You ought to have been a boy, Alice, and I ought to have been a