Chadsford Hall lay drowsing in the sunshine. Heat mist shimmered above the smooth lawns and the timbered terraces. The air was heavy with the lulling drone of insects. It was the most gracious hour of a summer afternoon, midway between lunch and tea when Nature kicks her shoes off and puts her feet up.
I was enjoying the shade of the cypress grove, near the rhododendrons, opposite the camelia glade. While sipping the contents of a tall, tinkly glass, and reviewing the latest acting-up of the social quality in the pages of The Independent, I was startled to hear a voice coming from a rhododendron that had until now remained speechless.
"Whatcha doin'?"
As soon as I regained my composure, if any, and restored calm to the mind, if it is a mind, I gave the offending shrub a stern look of censure. Wouldn't you? I saw that the bush was giving me the same. Not the bush in fact but something peering from it. It might have been a wood nymph for I couldn't see it clearly, but I thought not. As it happened, I was right.
"Sorry, sir," said the year-old Siamese kitten, the one I've named Lucy Lucille Lupe because Old Possum says that cats require three names. Ms Wonder tells me that Mr Possum had something entirely different in mind but So what is my comeback to that. I reserve the right to take the road less traveled sometimes. Napoleon, I believe, did the same.
"Didn't mean to startle you," said L. L. Lupe.
"Not at all," I said having immediately forgotten the annoyance I felt at being shaken from a pleasant semi-slumber of the afternoon because this Sarah Louise fosters a warm, soft spot in the center of my chest near the heart. "It's good to see you again."
She did a little dance, front paws moving two steps to the left and then two steps back to the right while the rear feet moved to a different rhythm entirely. I know this particular dance well, and I interpret it to mean, "I like you because you give me good things to eat but, oooh! you've got big feet and I'm so small." I'm not fluent in the language of dance, of course, I offer only the gist of meaning.
"Got something to eat?" she seemed to say.
"It's not dinner time," I said.
"What's that?" she said adding a new step to the dance.
"I'm stroking your back," I explained.
"Don't touch me please," she seemed to say.
"OK, if you don't like it," I said and I stopped immediately. Protocol is very important to cats because there was a time when they were worshiped as gods and they haven't forgotten it.
"If not today, then maybe tomorrow," I said.
"Don't think about tomorrow," she said.
"Yes, I read about that somewhere. Well, I don't mean to say it was about cats specifically. I think birds and lilies were mentioned."
"Birds! Love birds! Where are they? By the round, water bowl?"
"I don't see any bathing just now, but don't distract me, I'm trying to remember something I heard when I was just so high. Probably not much bigger than you."
"Me? You were never my size," she said.
"Where was I?" I said.
"Birds!" she said.
"Right, birds. The passage I'm trying to remember went something like this, Behold the birds, for they sow not, neither do they reap, something, something, something--and then, pay close attention because the big payoff is coming up--take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for itself. I'm paraphrasing of course."
"That's me," she said.
"I thought as much," I said and I was being sincere about it. These cats have never completely given up their wildness and it's my position that their popularity has something to do with a human being's desire to fondle a tiger.
She stretched her front legs out and bent the body into the stretch, with butt in the air and the tail pointing to the sky. She was luxurious. She was beautiful. She was so delightful that nothing else was required of her to be perfect in my esteem.
"Think I'll take a nap," she said and sauntered off toward the rhododendron.
I thought it sounded like a good idea and I decided to do the same. Perhaps I would dream of a perfect world, where no cat suffers from human malice, for as Robert Heinlein put it, "How we behave toward cats here below determines our status in heaven."
I like that. I keep it in mind always.