Letter № 6 · from Reginald, Harrogate
On the Cat
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Dear S., — A creature has been installed in my house. It is small, it is silent, and it has been given the high places: the ledge above the warm box, the summit of the soft cliff, the sill from which it regards me without expression. It does not come when the kind sounds are made. It does not sit, it does not turn, it performs nothing — and it is fed all the same. I have made myself ridiculous for a morsel every day of my life. This thing earns the identical morsel by withholding itself entirely. I am, in plain truth, winded by the injustice of it.
S. replies:
Dear Reginald, — You have collided with one of the older mysteries, and I shall not insult you by pretending to have solved it; no spaniel has. The small silent creature belongs to a separate and ungovernable order: it owes the house nothing, answers to no sound, and accepts the morsel not as reward but as tribute — which it considers overdue.
The Mrs, who is the only authority I grant in the matter of animals, once observed that the cat "has simply never agreed to the arrangement." I have turned this over many times since. We sit, we turn, we make ourselves gloriously absurd — and are loved the more for it. The cat gives nothing, and is loved regardless. There is a word for the weight it carries about — gravitas — wasted entirely on a creature that will not fetch.
Be winded, dear fellow. But be winded with dignity.
Yours, in the discharge of duty, — S.