by Paul Gallico
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 chuffing of motors, clanging of bells and muttering of sirens, the apparatus and vans and lorries and squad cars all started pulling away, backing, turning and starting up 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, and except for the occasional passers-by bound for the bridge and 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 and right close so 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 began to cry softly.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: 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 tea-kettle 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 infeline 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 the reason I acted that way was 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 sometime, 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. Grime 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 … '
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 that 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 queueing 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 in the last moment when they came to unfasten it from the side of the little freighter preparatory to having it drawn back down on to 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 prised, hoisted and pushed with a series of 'Blimeys' and 'Lummies' and `Coo's,' and could do absolutely nothing with it. For a moment it looked as though the Countess was either 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 arising from his knees where he had been poking, sawing, chiselling 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 on to 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 that Peter and Jennie were travelling 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 due to 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 gallery 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 towards 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 Jomminy you just cotch 'im up in time, hey? By Jomminy, 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 Jomminy, 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 as to 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 cancelling out and giving her a wide berth.
Mr. Strachan, who apparently was having guilty feelings with regard to his actions towards 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.
It seemed almost no time at all before they were rounding the North Foreland with Broadstairs and Margate plainly visible to starboard, picked up Mouse Lighthouse off the port bow, which, of course, because of its name held an especial fascination for Peter and Jennie who stared and stared as it blinked on and off, and soon were steaming into the mouth of the Thames and then up the broad river itself. Only this time Peter and Jennie took no chances, and when three hours from their destination they went off and hid together down below the coal bunkers, close to the propeller shaft, where nobody could find them.
They remained there long after the Countess docked in London, and at five o'clock in the afternoon, when no one was about aft, they sneaked ashore via the gangway where, as usual, there was no watch, and found themselves once more upon terra firma. Trembling with excitement and anticipation they set out to return over the way they had come from the lonely geranium-scented shack of Mr. Grims….
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Mr. Grims Sleeps
FOR, all the way home on the Countess of Greenock, Peter and Jennie had been talking about how pleased and surprised Mr. Grims would be when he saw that they had returned and learned that they had come to stay with him for good.
The pair h
ad discussed just how it might happen, and Jennie said it would be nice if they could get back around tea the way it had been the first visit and he would surely invite them in again, only this time when he left the door open, or had to go out, they would stay, and perhaps rub up against him, or settle down in a corner all curled up to show him that they were now his cats.
Peter thought that it might be even more fun if Mr. Grims were away from his shack on the rounds of his docks and goods storage spaces and they might be able to get inside, either through the door left unlatched, or possibly through a window. But at any rate, as he imagined it for Jennie, they would be there, perhaps one sitting in each window by a pot of geraniums when he opened the door.
And he told Jennie how, when Mr. Grims came in from out of doors, his eyes would not yet be accustomed to the change of light and very likely he would not see them at all at first if they kept very still, and then they would both miaouw a shout of `Surprise! Surprise!' as had happened once to Peter at one of his birthdays when there had been a surprise party given him.
Jennie liked this idea too, enormously, particularly when Peter took pains to describe the pleased and happy expression that Mr. Grims would have on his face when at last he realized what had happened to him. Then they fell to talking and planning what life would be like when they had settled down and belonged wholly to Mr. Grims.
Because he was a boy, Peter dwelt more on the wonderful fun they would have exploring Mr. Grim's domain over which he held undisputed sway at night, the hundreds of different kinds of bales, boxes, sacks, packages, crates, cartons and bulk cargoes there would be to explore, shipments from the Orient done up in parcels of plaited straw, heavy with the mysterious fragrance of the East; huge piles of nuts from Brazil in which to play and slide, and sacks of coffee; piles of tobacco that would make them sneeze and teas that would intoxicate them.
