Lives of Two Cats by Pierre Loti - HTML preview

(XXIV)

THE burial of Pussy White, in the quiet courtyard, under the blue sky of June, in the full sunlight of two o’clock!

At the chosen place Sylvester dug the grave,—then stopped, looking at the bottom of the excavation, and stooping to pick up something that surprised him. “What is this,” said he, stirring the small white bones which he had discovered,—“a rabbit?”

The bones of an animal, indeed; those of my cat from Senegal, an old pussy, my companion in Africa, very much beloved long ago, that I had buried there a dozen years before, and then forgotten, in the abyss where beings and things that disappear forever accumulate. And while looking at these bones mingled with the earth, these tiny legs like white sticks, this collection still suggesting what was once the back and tail of an animal,—there arose before me, with an inclination to smile and a heavy heart-throb, a scene well-nigh forgotten, a certain occasion when I had seen this same posterior of a cat, clothed in agile muscles and in silky fur, fly before me comically, tail in air, in the very height of terror.

It was one day when, with the obstinacy natural to her race, she had climbed again on a piece of furniture twenty times forbidden, and had there broken a vase which I prized very highly. I had at first given her a cuff; then my temper rising, I followed it by a rather brutal kick. She, surprised only by the blow, realized by the succeeding kick that war was declared; it was then that she swiftly fled, her plumy tail in the air, and from her refuge beneath the sofa she turned around to give me a reproachful and distressed look, believing herself lost, betrayed, assassinated by him she loved, and to whose hands she had confided her fate; and as my eyes still were angry she uttered finally her cry of surrender, of hopeless despair, that peculiar and sinister cry of animals that realize themselves on the verge of death. All my anger vanished; I called her, caressed her, still trembling and panting, upon my knees. Oh! the last agonized cry of an animal, be it that of the ox, drawn down to the abattoir, even that of the miserable rat held between the teeth of a bull-dog; that hopeless appeal, addressed to no one, which seems a protest addressed to nature itself,—an appeal to an unknown, impersonal mercy, pervading all space.

Two or three bones sunken at the foot of a tree is all now remaining of the once cherished creature that I recall so living and so droll. And her flesh, her little person, her attachment to me, her intense terror on a certain occasion, her precipitate flight, her plaintive reproach, all finally that encompassed these bones,—has become a little earth. When the hole was sufficiently deep, I went upstairs where all that remained of our beautiful Angora lay rigid on the rose-colored lounge. And in descending with my light burden, I found, in the courtyard, my mother and Aunt Clara seated on a bench in the shade, assuming to be there by chance, and pretending to converse unconcernedly: that we should thus assemble expressly for this burial would seem rather ridiculous, and we perhaps should have smiled despite our grief.

There never glowed a brighter day; never was balmier silence, unbroken save by the hum of insects; the garden was in full bloom, the rose-trees white with their blossoms; the peace of the country brooded over the neighborhood, the martinets and swallows slept, the everlasting tortoise, most lively when the sun shone hotly, trotted aimlessly to and fro on the pavement. Everything was imbued with the melancholy of too tranquil skies, of a season too monotonous, of the oppression of noonday. Against the fresh green verdure, the dazzling brightness of color, the two similar robes of my mother and Aunt Clara formed two intensely black spots. Their silvery heads were bowed down as if somewhat weary of having seen and reseen so many times, almost eighty times, the deceitful renewal. Everything around them, trees, birds, insects, and flowers, seemed chanting the triumph of their perpetual resurrection, regardless of the fragile beings who listened, already agonized by the presage of their inevitable end.

“I WAS GLAD ... THAT SHE HAD NOT DIED ELSEWHERE”

I laid Pussy White in her grave, and the black and white fur disappeared under a falling mass of earth. I was glad that I had succeeded in keeping her in her last days with us, that she had not died elsewhere like the other; at least her body would decay in our courtyard, where for so long a period she had laid down the law for all cats of the neighborhood, where she had idled away the summer hours on the vine-covered wall, and where on winter nights, at her capricious hour for retiring, her name had resounded so many times in the silence, called by the failing voice of Aunt Clara.

It seemed to me that her death was the beginning of the end of the dwellers in our home; in my consciousness, this cat was bound like a long cherished plaything to the two well-beloved guardians of my hearthstone, seated there upon the bench, and to whom she had been a faithful companion in my absences afar. My sorrow was less for herself, inexplicable and uncertain little soul, than for her existence which had just finished. It was like ten years of our own life that we had buried there in the earth.