OUR intimacy, founded on mutual loneliness, constantly increased. Weeks and months passed, on the never resting seas, while all remained the same in the obscure corner of the ship where Pussy had chosen her abode. For us men who sail the seas there are always the strong winds that buffet us, the starry nights on deck, and the goings on shore in foreign ports—always some event to break the monotony of sea life. She, on the contrary, knew nothing of the vast world over which her prison moved, nothing of her kindred, or of the sun, or of verdure, or of[29] shade. And, never going outside, she lived in the solitude of my narrow cabin; it was a glacial place at times when the door swung open to the fierce wind sweeping the decks; oftener it was a hot and stifling furnace, where Chinese incense burned before the expatriated idols as if in a Buddhist temple. For companions in her musings she had monsters in wood or bronze, fixed to the walls, and grinning with malicious laughter; in the midst of a mass of relics of things sacred in her country, pillaged from dwellings and temples, she wasted away, without air, among the silken hangings that she loved to tear with her restless little claws.
As soon as I entered my cabin she would come forward with her soft welcoming cry of joy, springing like a jack in the box from behind some curtain, desk, or chest. If by chance I seated myself to write, she very slyly, very tenderly, seeking protection and caresses, would softly take her place on my knees and follow the comings and goings of my pen,—sometimes effacing, with an unintentional stroke of her paw, lines of whose tenor she disapproved.
The shocks, the pitchings of the ship in rough weather, the noise of our cannon, gave her great terror: at these times, she threw herself against the walls, spun around like a mad creature, after which she would stop breathless, and hide herself in the darkest corner, with a terrified and sad expression.
Her cloistered youth resulted in an unnatural state of invalidism, becoming daily more and more pronounced. Her appetite continued normal, but she was emaciated, her face grew, if possible, more triangular, her ears pointed sharply and batlike, her large golden eyes sought mine with an air of distress, uncomfortably humanlike, or with questionings on the problem of life, perhaps equally troubling and far more unanswerable to her little intelligence than to my own.
She was very curious about outside matters, despite her unaccountable determination never to cross the threshold of my door, and never failed to examine with extreme attention any new object brought to our common lodging, probably giving her confused impressions of the foreign ports where our ship called. In India, for example, I remember she was once deeply interested, even to the total neglect of her breakfast, in a bouquet of fragrant orchids,—so extraordinary for her who had never known garden or forest, never seen other than the withered or dead flowers in my bronze vases. As an offset to her rough and discolored fur, which at first sight gave her a gutter-cat air, she was finely formed, and the least movement of her delicate paws was of patrician grace. While watching her, I sometimes fancied her some little enchanted princess, condemned by wicked fairies to share my solitude in this lowly guise; and I called to mind a story of the mother of the great Tchengiz-Khan, which an old Armenian priest of Constantinople, my teacher of the Turkish language, had given me to translate:
“The young princess Ulemalik-Kurekli, doomed before her birth to die if she beheld the light of day, lived shut up in an obscure dungeon. And she asked her servants: ‘Is this what they call the world? Tell me, is there anything else outside these walls? is this tower in something?’
“‘No, princess, this is not the world: that is outside and very much larger. And there are also things they call stars, that they call sun and they call moon.’
“‘Oh!’ replied Ulemalik, ‘let me die, but let me see them!’”
(VIII)