The Abandoned, page 15
This time it was two of the bridge-maintenance men who had fitted themselves out with their climbing shoes, grappling hooks, safety webs, sliding belts, gloves, helmets, sacks, and ropes. Ready at last, each simultaneously placed his foot in one of the girders of the twin steel pillars and, as though at a given signal started their ascent together to the accompaniment of a faint cheer.
First one would be leading in what developed into a race upwards, and then the other. Soon the sporting members in the crowd began to shout encouragement and lay bets at the same time: “Go to it, Bill! Ye’ve got him, Tam! A little more leg there, Tammas lad! Odds on Bill reaches the white ’un afore Tam climbs to the little puss. Three to two Tam’s first down with hisn’. Bravo, Tam! Well climbed, Bill! Hooray!”
“We’re saved!” Peter called down joyously to Jennie. “This time they’re going to make it.”
“Oh dear, oh dear,” Jennie lamented. “I just know I’m going to bite and scratch when he comes and I won’t mean to. That’s the kind of thing that gives cats a bad name, and we can’t help it. I’m nothing but a bundle of nerves and hysteria right now, and I suppose that wretched airplane will be along to take the picture just at the moment I have my hooks entangled in Tam’s hair. No, no, no! Let go! I won’t come! Mmmmfff!”
This last was a kind of strangled protest and muffled cry as Tammas appeared on the girder alongside her, snapped on his safety belt to free his hands, plucked her spitting, growling, clawing, and fighting from her perch, and popped her into his bag.
Peter was just about to cry out to her: “Be brave, Jennie!” when Bill had him by the scruff of the neck. Into the sack he went and down they started.
It was a horrible sensation inside the sack, dark and stifling, coupled with the awful motion of the descent, but Peter was more worried about how poor Jennie must be taking it than any discomfort he himself was experiencing. It was soon over, however, and the increasing volume of ringing cheers made it obvious they were approaching the ground, and then at last, amid shouts and cries of congratulation, he was let out of the bag to see Jennie quivering in Tam’s grasp while he was held by Bill. Policemen, firemen, and citizens crowded around, the men grinning and the women cooing: “Oh, the pretties! Isn’t the little one sweet? Up there all the night, the poor things. Wonder who they belong to. . . .”
Peter would have been delighted to have been the center of such attention if he had not been so concerned about Jennie, who even now that she was safe and sound continued to reveal the most miserable and unhappy expression upon her countenance, even as photographers arrived to take more pictures and a reporter interviewed both Tam and Bill, asking them what it felt like to be up there hundreds of feet above the heads of everyone, risking their lives for the sake of two stray cats. Tam said: “Ah didn’ feel nowt but ’er digging of ’er claws into me ’ide,” while Bill declared modestly: “Aw, it was naethin’.”
But the adventure was drawing to a close, for the firemen had packed up their ladders and lowered the water tower, the utilities maintenance wagons had cranked down their platforms, and now with a great grinding and roaring and chuffling of motors, clanging of bells, and muttering of sirens the apparatus and vans and lorries and squad cars all started pulling away, backing, turning, with a good deal of advice from the spectators.
Tam and Bill, once the pictures had all been taken, dropped Jennie and Peter to the ground, where they crouched close to the stone abutment to keep from being trampled on, climbed aboard their equipment truck, and drove away. And as fast as the crowd had gathered, now it began as quickly to melt. With all the excitement over, people returned to their business. Now and then one would stop to reach over and pat Peter on the head, or give Jennie a chuck under the chin and say: “Feeling better now, eh, puss?” or “Pretty lucky they got you down from there, old man,” and then on they would go. Now that the suspense was over and they were safely down, no one thought to offer them something to eat, a drink, or shelter, and in a few minutes all the thousands of people had vanished. Except for the occasional passers-by bound for the bridge, who, being latecomers, did not even know what had happened and therefore paid no attention to the two cats squatting on the walk beneath the shelter of the arch, Peter and Jennie were left quite to themselves.
“Goodness,” said Peter, “but that was exciting.”
But from Jennie there issued only a long, deep sigh. She was still far from a happy little bundle of fur crouched down hard by the great stone abutment where two nights before their terrifying experience had begun. Peter looked at her curiously. “Jennie,” he said, “aren’t you glad that it all turned out so well and we were rescued and everything?”
Jennie bent her large, liquid eyes upon him, and Peter noticed that they seemed to be almost on the verge of tears again and that she had rarely looked so desperately appealing.
“Oh, Peter,” she moaned, “I’ve never been so miserable or unhappy in all my life. I’ve made such an awful mess of things.”
“Jennie dear!” Peter went over to her and sat down next to her, so close that his flank touched hers in a comforting way. “What is wrong? Won’t you tell me? Something has been upsetting and worrying you for so long.”
She gave herself two quick licks to get a grip on herself and crowded close to him. “I don’t know what I should do without you, Peter. You have been such a comfort to me. It’s true. I have something dreadfully important to tell you about changing my mind, but I feel like such a fool. That’s why I haven’t told you before. But now I’ve been thinking about it for days, and after everything that happened I can’t hold it back any longer.”
“Yes, Jennie,” Peter coaxed sympathetically, wondering what on earth it could be. “What is it—”
“You promise you won’t be angry with me?”
“I promise, Jennie.”
“Peter,” Jennie said, “I want to go back and live with Mr. Grims,” and then, pushing quite close to him, she began to cry softly.
JENNIE MAKES A CONFESSION
PETER LOOKED at Jennie as though he could hardly believe his ears.
“Jennie! Do you really mean it? We could go and live with Mr. Grims? Oh, I’d love to.”
Jennie stopped crying and put her head down close to Peter’s side, where it was half hidden from him so that he could not see how upset and ashamed she was.
“Oh, Peter,” Jennie said in a low, soft voice, “then you’re not angry with me?”
“Angry with you, Jennie? But of course not. I liked Mr. Grims enormously, he was so cheerful and jolly and kind, and all the flowers in his little house and the way the teakettle sang on the stove, and his offering to share everything he had with us. And besides he seemed to be so awfully lonely.”
“Peter—don’t,” Jennie wailed, interrupting him. “I can’t bear it. It’s been on my conscience ever since we left him. It was a dreadful thing I did. Old people are always so very much more alone than anyone else in the world. I’ll never forget the way he looked, standing there in the doorway, kind of lost and bent, calling to us and begging us to come back. It nearly broke my heart.”
“But, Jennie,” Peter said, “you were angry with me when I said the same thing after we ran away. You remember I said I felt like a rotter.”
“My Peter, of course I was,” Jennie said, still hiding her head, “because you were right and I knew you were. I was being mean and nasty and unfeline and hard and just hateful. And you were being sweet and kind and natural and wanting to do what was right, and of course it made me look and feel all the more horrid. That was why I made you come away with me to Glasgow.”
Peter felt quite confused now and said: “But I thought you said you wanted to see your relatives and where you were born and—”
Jennie’s head came up with a toss and she said: “Oh, bother my relatives. You saw what that one was like we happened to meet. And I suppose I have literally thousands of them up here who don’t care any more about me than I do about them. But I thought if we went off on a little trip together, it would take your mind off Mr. Grims and what I had done and—oh dear, I guess what I really thought is that it would take my mind off it. I was running away from having been a perfect pig.”
She leaned a little closer to Peter and continued with her confession. “And of course I couldn’t get away at all. Wherever I was and wherever I went, down in the storeroom with you, up in the forecastle in the dark, waiting for a rat, I’d see him again and the expression on his face when he was begging for us to come back, and even during the biggest noises I would keep hearing his voice and remembering how I had behaved and repaid his hospitality. And then I tried to tell myself that I acted that way because of what Buff had done to me. Then I would hear you saying that she couldn’t have done that to me, that something must have happened, that it wasn’t her fault, and I would have the most awful feeling that perhaps you were right and I had been wrong all the time, and maybe she had come back there looking for me some time, perhaps the next day even, and how she would have cried when she didn’t find me.”
Peter felt sorry for Jennie, but in a way he was relieved too, for this was beginning to be like the old Jennie again, who loved to talk and talk and explain, and besides he was terribly happy about her wanting to go back to Mr. Grims.
“And then,” Jennie continued, having drawn a deep full breath and taken one desultory lick at her side, “when I fell overboard I thought that it was the punishment being visited upon me for all my sins and that I deserved to be made an end of, and so when I found myself in the water I didn’t much care any more and didn’t really try very hard to keep up because I knew the ship would never turn around and come back to pick me up. Then you came to me and it was too much to bear because I knew that I was to be the cause of your end too. After that I didn’t remember anything more until I found myself in Mr. Strachan’s cabin and you were washing me. But then and there I resolved to go back and live with Mr. Grims and try to make him happy and keep him company, because I knew that until I did I would never have another peaceful moment.”
“I know,” Peter said. “I thought about him a lot myself.”
“And then I was ashamed in front of you, Peter,” Jennie said, “so very ashamed that I didn’t know when or where or how to begin to tell you about wanting to go back. When we got marooned up there I kept thinking if we ever got down alive I would tell you at once and then perhaps I would stop leading you into such awful trouble and dangers—”
Peter interrupted: “Yes, but we always get out of them.”
“Some time we won’t,” Jennie said grimly. “The humans have made up a sort of supposedly funny saying that a cat has nine lives, which is of course utter nonsense. You are entitled to just so many narrow escapes in your life and then the next time you are going to catch it. I don’t want there to be any next time. If we can find some way to get back to London, soon—”
“Jennie!” Peter cried excitedly. “Why not now—right away, if it isn’t too late?”
“What do you mean, Peter?”
“Why, the Countess of Greenock. I could see her when we were up on the tower. She was still there this morning with a lot of black smoke coming out of her smokestack the way it was the day we went aboard her in London. She’ll be going back again. Maybe if we hurry we won’t be too late and can catch her before she sails.”
Jennie gave a great sigh and pressed close to Peter for a moment. “Oh dear,” she said, “it’s so good to have a male about who knows what to do.” Then she leaped to her feet. “Come on, Peter, let’s run. She might be casting off any second.”
Away they went then, tossing rules and ordinary feline discretions to the winds, not bothering to take cover or employ the point-to-point system, but bounding, leaping, flying over obstacles, with not only the speed and agility of cats, but with that extra something which is lent to the limbs and the feet when a great weight has been lifted from the spirit.
Under the Railway and George V bridges they charged, past the steamboat wharf where passengers were queuing for trips to Greenock and Gourock and Inverary and Ardrishaig, down the busy Broomielaw, with ships loading freight and cargo for all sorts of interesting places, but not an instant did they linger now, for they knew that when the black smoke belched from her funnel, the Countess might depart any second.
On to the quay they flew, along the Clyde, Cheapside, and Piccadilly, and sure enough, there a hundred yards ahead of them was the Countess of Greenock pouring forth her soft-coal cloud, which ceased for a moment and was replaced by a squirt of white steam that curled around her stack like a feather and they heard her hooter go.
“Oh,” cried Peter, “she’s leaving. Faster, faster, Jennie. All you’ve got.” And they both flattened their ears back, let their tails streamline straight out behind them, and fairly ate up the yards, a white blur and a dark-brown one. How they ran!
And, at that, they would have been too late if the crew of the Countess had not managed to get the gangplank stuck at the last moment when they came to unfasten it from the side of the little freighter preparatory to having it drawn back down onto the dock.
Mr. Box, the carpenter, had had to be summoned with his tools, his hammers and chisels and sledges, saws and wrenches and drills and augers, ratchets and levers; and he grew red in the face and beat at it and pried, hoisted, and pushed with a series of “Blimey’s” and “Lummie’s” and “Coo’s,” and could do absolutely nothing with it. For a moment it looked as though the Countess either was bound to the pier by the gangplank for the rest of her life or would have to sail with it sticking out of her side.
At this point Mr. Box wholly lost his temper, and rising from his knees, where he had been poking, sawing, chiseling, and prising, he aimed a violent and vicious kick at the offending gangway, which landed squarely on it and caused it to come loose quite easily, showing that that was what it had wanted all along, though the damage to Mr. Box’s boot and toe was later assessed as considerable.
“There you are, lads!” he shouted to the navvies waiting down on the dock. “Haul away!”
And haul away they did at the precise moment that Peter and Jennie came whipping onto the pier and up the gangway. There was already a gap of several yards between the end of the gangway and the side of the ship, but at the speed at which Peter and Jennie were traveling, it was as nothing and they flew across the space like a couple of furred birds and landed kerplump on Mr. Box’s chest, knocking him flat on his back, since he was off balance anyway at the time, because he was hopping around on one foot.
“Blimey!” groaned Mr. Box. “Oh, blimey! They’re back!”
And back indeed they were on the iron deck of the dear, messy, smelly Countess. Everything was just the same as when they had left it, and in a way it was just like home. From the cabin of Captain Sourlies came the tinkle, crash, and clatter of breaking glass and crockery. Mr. Strachan was on the bridge, in charge, his blue cap set well back on his brick-red curls so that it was not at all difficult to see the still visible remains of what must have been the father of all black eyes. From the galley aft came drifting the mournful strains of Mealie’s voice as he rendered in song a lament upon leaving. Mr. Carluke was just emerging from his cabin, the fingers of his right hand pointed and cocked like a pistol and his left swinging and manipulating an imaginary lariat.
And the crew, under Angus, who was roaring up by the steam winch for’ard, was making a beautiful, beautiful mess of the departure, casting off the wrong ropes and cables, making other wrong ones fast, turning things off when they ought to be turning them on, tripping over chains, coming near to letting the anchor go, permitting the Countess to get her stern caught in the tide so that she almost sideswiped an excursion boat bound for the Isle of Man, causing her captain to say a few words, and thus with the hooter hooting, black smoke pouring from her, and close to complete chaos reigning on board, she managed to cast off, back out into the Clyde, and eventually set a course down the river and toward the open sea once more.
Peter and Jennie did not linger, but went right on aft to see Mealie, who welcomed them with a shout, after which he punched a hole in a fresh can of evaporated milk, cut some cold lamb off a joint in the larder, and invited them to dine with a “By Jominy, you just cotch ’im up in time, hey? By Jominy, you hungry, good and some. You bring possage money again, hey?” and he roared with laughter. “How mony rots and mouses for one ticket? I think you hokay. By Jominy, you want more lomb? How much you can hold? I give you what you got. . .” and he proceeded to cut them some more and eventually, still laughing, turned the bone over to them, which Peter and Jennie, each at one end, gnawed contentedly in the first good meal they had had since they had quit the ship.
The return trip to London was without incident and was spent mostly in eating, sleeping, resting, and sunning since there was little work for them to do. Word had got about in Glasgow about the reign of terror that had been in effect aboard the Countess, no doubt spread by some lone survivor, and the rat and mouse population left her strictly alone, those ashore scheduled for a trip aboard her canceling out and giving her a wide berth.
Mr. Strachan, who apparently was having guilt feelings with regard to his actions toward Peter and Jennie and what had taken place, treated them rather diffidently and appeared to be avoiding them almost as though he were afraid that someone might find out from the two where, how, and why he had acquired the black eye, but Mr. Carluke became very friendly to both, scratching under their chins and rubbing their heads, and Peter and Jennie used to spend hours in his cabin watching him prepare a new work for Pipshaw’s Western Rider Stories, something he was calling “Rootin Tootin Roger of Rabbit Gulch.” Roger shot his enemies with a pistol over his shoulder by looking into a mirror, thus taking them completely by surprise. Peter explained all this carefully to Jennie as Mr. Carluke acted it out in front of his shaving mirror, and she was just as impressed as Peter.
