The Story of Jennie- or the Abandoned (33 page)

The nurse leaned to him. She was wearing a shiny breastpin with a smooth, flat surface, and with a shock Peter saw himself in it. For he was not a cat any longer. HE WAS HIMSELF AGAIN!

Or at least he was half himself, for in the tiny mirror he had seen his face, and it was the face of Peter the boy. How frightening and confusing it all was, because while the features were as he used to be, he seemed to be still partly white cat about the head. And what was the meaning of the white paws on the counterpane?

The doctor bent closer and looked into his eyes in a kindly and searching fashion. Then he said: `He has passed it. He has come back. He is going to be all right now.' Peter heard his mother, who was standing just behind him, crying softly, thanking God and calling him darling over and over again.

All that part of it was true, then. His father was there too.

He was wearing his uniform and looking very grim and pale. He came over to the bed now and said to Peter: `I'm proud of you. You made a good fight, old man …'

Peter wondered how his father knew about his battle with Dempsey and how when beaten and nearly dead he, Peter, had rallied and turned the tables on his terrible opponent. Surely his father had not been there. How was one to know or understand anything?

Peter raised one of his paws, his left one, and saw to his intense surprise that there were not sharp, curved claws at the end of it, but instead, five pink fingers. In amazement he moved them and then touched the fur of his injured right limb. But it was not fur at all he was feeling. It was rather something stiff and harsh, the texture of which he remembered-or would remember in a moment….

And then it came to him. It was tightly wrapped bandage.

Now he knew for certain. He was cat no longer, anywhere. He was all boy. And then, rushing, tumbling, cascading like water when the sluice-gates are opened, everything seemed to come flooding back to him: Scotch Nanny, the morning in the Square, the striped tabby kitten sunning itself by the park, his running across the street and Nanny's shriek; then the grinding bump and thud of the accident. And thereupon Peter burst into tears and cried and cried most bitterly, as though his heart would break.

He wept for many reasons, none of which he wholly understood: for his parting from Jennie Baldrin and the world in which she lived, the sense of loss of a beloved companion, fright due to what had happened, his present plight of finding himself in cast and bandages, but mostly, perhaps, his tears were shed because it was his first encounter with that depth of human sadness that comes with waking from a dream of aching and throat-catching beauty to find it already fading and the dear partner thereof lost beyond recall. For this it seemed to him, now that he was returned once and for all, had been the true substance of Jennie, and the long figment through which they had adventured together so gallantly and tenderly was done, and he was never to see her again.

There was a kind of commotion, and through his tears Peter saw that Scotch Nanny had come into the hospital room and now approached his bedside holding something in her arms, something that moved and struggled there. It was a black-and-white cat, a young one, barely out of the kitten stage, with lean, stringy flanks, three white feet and one black, and a queer black smudge just above the muzzle of its black-and-white face as though it had just dipped its nose in the inkpot.

Nanny was bending over him and trying to put it beside him, saying: `There, ma puir, bonny jo. Dinna ye greet so. Look ye, this wee poussie baudron's for ye tae keep for your ain.'

But Peter only turned his head and cried-'Take it away! I don't want it. I want Jennie Baldrin. Jennie, Jennie! Jennie!' and he would not leave off crying.

His mother knelt at his bedside, took him to her breast and laid her cheek to his and held him there in her arms gently and lovingly while she whispered

`There, there, my darling. Don't cry so, my dearest. Who was it you wanted? Was there someone? Tell your mother. You are safe here, my Peter. Oh, so safe. There is nothing I will not try to do to make you happy if you will just get strong and well once more. There now, my darling, see—nothing hurts any more . . .' and she kissed his tearstained eyes.

And for Peter, for an instant, it seemed as though Jennie had returned and had kissed him over the eyes as she used to do, and again he was filled with an overpowering sense of her presence, somewhere, everywhere, the dear, tender, loving spirit, the essence of her that remained to fill the awful gap of his loss of her and for which he had wept so bitterly. Yes, now he was certain. Jennie was gone, the sweet companion of his adventures. Her physical presence, the soft, gentle, yet wiry little furred body, the white feet with their telltale black underpads confirming her superior ancestry, the lightning speed and graceful carriage, the small aristocratic head, her luminous eyes and the peculiarly endearing expression of her face, these things he saw and remembered for the last time before they faded away and vanished, and in their stead left something that was neither memory nor dream nor fantasy but only a wonderfully soothing sense of homecoming, well-being and happiness.

It was true that nothing hurt any more, nothing at all, anywhere, not even the loss of Jennie Baldrin, for it seemed as though he had found her once and for all and would never again be wholly without her, now that she was all about him in the gentle, loving pressure of his mother's arms cradling him to her, the velvet of her fragrant cheek against his, the expression of her face and the soft touch of her lips to his eyelids.

And then a most strange thing happened, though perhaps not so strange at all when one considers. The black-and-white kitten in Nanny's arms, and which he had rejected, gave a little cry, and Peter heard her and understood.

He understood, and he knew-oh, not what she was actually saying, for with his return to being a boy all knowledge of the language of cats had been wiped from his memory as though it had never existed. But he recognized the wistful melody of the plaintive little mew, the cry of the waif, the stray, the unloved and the homeless that he had come to know so well. It was the forlorn and lonely heart begging to be taken to his own, there to be warmed and cherished.

In it, he felt, was contained all of the misery, hurt and longing he seemed to have known for so long, and, for a moment, harsh, vivid memories of things that had happened to him and places where he had been during his illness came back for the last time.

It was as though it was crying to him to be saved from those very terrors he had left behind him, the appalling fear engendered by finding oneself one small, helpless object loosed in a gigantic and overpowering world, the desperate hunger and thirst that surpassed any other, the yearning and the need to belong, to be loved, to be surpassingly important to someone. Hers was the call of the loneliness of the rejected, the outcast of the granite heart of the unheeding city.

For that instant, all the sights and sounds and smells were there again, the filthy cobbled streets, the running gutters, the terrifying shouts and cries and street noises, the crash and clatter of things being hurled at one, and the dreadful blind panic of endlessly fleeing. It was as though the cry of the waif had made it possible just once more for him to peer through the closing door into that other world he had left for ever, to see the shadowy four-footed figures slipping soundlessly from cover to cover in the streets of the hard city, standing on hind legs outlined against the faint silver cylinder of some dustbin to scavenge for a meal, or licking their wounds and sores in the shelter of a deserted ruin. And then it was gone. The door shut and he could see no more.

Again Peter heard the plaintive note of the black-and-white kitten, but now it no longer evoked the dark phantasms. It only went directly to his core. Why, why had he ever rejected her the first time? He could not seem even to remember that now as he focused his attention on the forlorn little animal. He felt only that he must have her now, that he loved her already.

'Oh, Nanny, give her to me, please. I want her …'

Nanny came back and placed the cat on his bed. She crawled at once on to Peter's chest, placed her head beneath his chin, as so many cats were to do all through Peter's later life, as though they knew and understood him at once as one of their own. And there it cuddled and started so loud and contented a purr that it seemed to shake the whole bed.

Peter lifted the good arm that he could still use and with the fingers that emerged from the ends of the bandage he gently stroked the kitten's head, rubbed the side of her cheek and scratched her under the chin, as though seemingly by instinct he knew all the things to do and places to touch to make a cat the most pleased and comforted.

The nondescript black-and-white purred louder and longer and more ecstatically, and moved her little body even closer and more lovingly to his neck and face in complete and worshipful surrender.

Peter's mother said: `Why she's a darling. What will you call her?'

Peter thought for a moment, searching his mind for what to call her. Surely there was something he had once heard or thought of should he ever have a cat, a name with which he had been so familiar and had known almost as well as his own.

He looked at his mother and then at the little stray again, and nothing, not so much as a faint echo, came welling up out of the past to aid him. Now he was not even sure that he ever had known a name.

But with the closing of the door had come a wonderful sense of peace and security. Behind it were locked all the dark terrors conjured up by his fantasies and his fears. He was afraid of nothing any longer, not the strange hospital room in which he found himself, or the dull ache of his injuries, or loneliness, or anything. It was as though during the long hours that he had been asleep and dreamed the dream that he could no longer remember, they had taken fear away from him and he could never again experience it in the same form as before. He felt that never in his life had he been quite so happy.

At last he said, speaking from the innocence and comfort that filled him now, `Oh, Mummy! Isn't she sweet! Look how she loves me. I shall call her Smudgie because of the black spot on her nose. And please, may she sleep with me?'

And he smiled up at all the people crowded around his bed.