Lone Sahib read the letter in five different fashions, and was beginning
a sixth interpretation when his bearer dashed in with the news that
there was a cat on the bed. Now if there was one thing that Lone Sahib
hated more than another, it was a cat. He scolded the bearer for not
turning it out of the house. The bearer said that he was afraid. All the
doors of the bedroom had been shut throughout the morning, and no _real_
cat could possibly have entered the room. He would prefer not to meddle
with the creature.
Lone Sahib entered the room gingerly, and there, on the pillow of his
bed, sprawled and whimpered a wee white kitten; not a jumpsome, frisky
little beast, but a slug-like crawler with its eyes barely opened and
its paws lacking strength or direction,—a kitten that ought to have been
in a basket with its mamma. Lone Sahib caught it by the scruff of its
neck, handed it over to the sweeper to be drowned, and fined the bearer
four annas.
That evening, as he was reading in his room, he fancied that he saw
something moving about on the hearth-rug, outside the circle of light
from his reading-lamp. When the thing began to myowl, he realised that
it was a kitten—a wee white kitten, nearly blind and very miserable. He
was seriously angry, and spoke bitterly to his bearer, who said that
there was no kitten in the room when he brought in the lamp, and _real_
kittens of tender age generally had mother-cats in attendance.
“If the Presence will go out into the verandah and listen,” said the
bearer, “he will hear no cats. How, therefore, can the kitten on the bed
and the kitten on the hearth-rug be real kittens?”
Lone Sahib went out to listen, and the bearer followed him, but there
was no sound of any one mewing for her children. He returned to his
room, having hurled the kitten down the hillside, and wrote out the
incidents of the day for the benefit of his co-religionists. Those
people were so absolutely free from superstition that they ascribed
anything a little out of the common to Agencies. As it was their
business to know all about the Agencies, they were on terms of almost
indecent familiarity with Manifestations of every kind. Their letters
dropped from the ceiling—un-stamped—and Spirits used to squatter up and
down their staircases all night; but they had never come into contact
with kittens. Lone Sahib wrote out the facts, noting the hour and the
minute, as every Psychical Observer is bound to do, and appending the
Englishman’s letter because it was the most mysterious document and
might have had a bearing upon anything in this world or the next. An
outsider would have translated all the tangle thus: “Look out! You
laughed at me once, and now I am going to make you sit up.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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