usurps the place he thinks is his by right. Or perhaps it was the same inborn cruelty, the same impish impulse to inflict suffering on a helpless dumb creature, which I have observed in other boys.
Anyway, with or without reason, I hated this self-complacent, supercilious animal that looked at me out of topaz eyes, with a look that seemed to see through and beyond me, as if I did not exist.
I hated her with a hatred that could be satisfied only with her death, and I thought and brooded for hours, that should have been devoted to my studies, of ways and means to bring this death about.
I must be fair to myself, Toi Wah hated me too. I could sense it as I sat by my grandmother’s chair before the fire and looked across at Toi Wah, who lay in a chair on the opposite side. At such times I would always catch her watching me out of half-closed eyes, stealthily, furtively, never off her guard.
If she lay in my grandmother’s lap and I leaned over to stroke her beautiful yellow fur, I could feel her actually shrink from my hand, and she would never purr, as she always did when my grandmother stroked her.
Sometimes I would hold her on my lap and pretend that I loved her. But as I stroked her, my hands would itch and twitch with the desire to clinch my hand in her satiny skin, and with the other hand choke her until she died.
My desire to kill would become so over-powering that my breath would become hurried, my heart would beat almost to suffocation and my face would flush.
Usually my grandmother, noticing my reddened face would glance up over her spectacles, from the book she was reading and say, "What ail you, Robert? You look flushed and feverish. Perhaps the room is too warm for you. Put Toi Wah down and run out in the air for a while."
I would take Toi Wah then, and, holding her as tightly as I dared, and with my teeth clenched to restrain myself, I would put her on her cushion and go out.
My grandfather had brought Toi Wah, a little yellow, fluffy, amber-eyed kitten, home with him in his ship from that mysterious land washed by the Yellow Sea.
And with Toi Wah had come a strange tale of her taking, stolen from an old Buddhist Monastery garden nestling among age-old pines beside the Grand Canal of China.
About her neck was a beautifully-wrought collar of flexible gold, with a dragon engraved along its length, together with many Chinese characters and set with stones of Topaz and Jade. The collar was made so as to allow for expansion as the need arose, so that Toi Wah was never without her collar from her kittenhood to adult age. In fact, the collar could not be loosened without injury to the metal.
One day I descended into the kitchen with the cat in my arms and showed Charlie, our Chinese cook, who had sailed the Seven Seas with my grandfather, the collar about her neck.
The old Chinaman stared until his eyes started from his head, all the time making queer little noises in his throat. He rubbed his eyes and put on his great horn spectacles and stared again, muttering to himself.
"What is it, Charlie?" I asked, surprised at the old man, who was usually so stoically calm.
"These velly gleat words," he said at last, shaking his head cryptically. "Words no good flo you. Words good for velly gleat cat; Gland Lama cat."
"But what do the words say?" I urged.
He mooned over the inscription for a long time, fingering the collar lovingly, while Toi Wah lay passively in my arms and looked at him.
"He say what I no can say good in English," he explained at last. "He say, 'Death no can do, no can die,' See? When Gland Lama cat wear this colla', no can die, No can be kill him—just change flom cat to some other thing; monkey—tiger—hoss—maybe man—next time," he concluded vaguely.
"He say, 'Love me, I love you, hate me, I hate you.' No can say good in English what Chinese say. See?"
And with this I had to be content for the time. Now I know the characters engraved on Toi Wah’s collar referred to a quotation from the seventh book of Buddha, which, freely translated, reads as follows:
"That which is alive hath known death, and that which lives can never die, Death is not; there is only a changing from shape to shape, from life to life.
"Mayhap the despised animal, walking in the dust of the road, was one time King of Ind, or the consort of Ghengis Khan.
"Do me no harm. Protect me, O Man, and I will protect thee. Feed me, O Man, and I will feed thee. Love me, O Man, and I will love thee. Hate me, and I will hate thee. Slay me, and I will slay thee.
"We be brothers, O Man, thou and I, from life to life, from death to death, until Nirvana be won."
If I had only known then, and stayed my hand, I would not now be haunted by this yellow terror that peers out at me from the dark; that follows after me with softly padding feet; never nearer, never receding, until. . . .
Toi Wah was mated with another Tartar cat of high degree, and became the mother of a kitten.
And such a mother! Only the hard heart made cruel by fear would remain unsoftened by the great cat’s untiring devotion to her kitten.
Everywhere she went she carried it in her mouth; never leaving it alone for a moment, seeming to sense its danger from me; an abnormal, hated cat!
However, she seemed to relent even toward me if I happened to pass her chair when she was nursing the little creature,
At such times she would lay stretching out her legs, opening and shutting her great paws in a sort of ecstasy, purring her utter content. She would look up at me, maternal pride and joy glowing in her yellow eyes, soft and lustrous now, the hate and suspicion of me crowded out by mother love.
"Look!" she seemed to say. "Look at this wonderful thing I have created out of my body! Do you not love it?"
I did not love it, No! On the contrary, it intensified my hate by adding another object to it.
My grandmother added fuel to the fire by sending me out to the shops to buy delicacies for Toi Wah and her kitten; liverwurst and catnip for the mother, milk and cream for the kitten.
"Robert, my son," she would say to me, all unaware of my hatred, "Do you know we have quite a royal family with us? These wonderful cats are descended in an unbroken line from the cats of the Royal Household of Ghengis Khan. The records were kept in the Buddhist Monastery from which Toi Wah came."
"How did Grandfather get her?" I asked.
"Do not ask me, child," the old lady smiled. "He told me only that he stole her in a spirit of bravado from the garden of this ancient Buddhist Monastery when egged on to do so by his friends. They were spending an idle week exploring the ancient towns along the Grand Canal of China, and were attracted by the beautiful Tartar cats in this garden. It seemed the Buddhist Monks reared these cats as a sort of religious duty.
