It was quite a new feeling for Old Grumpy to have anyone to care for but herself. She had been so long accustomed to get up in the morning with no thought except “What shall I eat?” or, “What shall I drink?” or, “How shall I be clothed?” that it was a curious and pleasant change for her to have even a kitten to care for. As day after day went by, and the kitten began to know her and to follow her, Old Grumpy’s love for it grew more and more.
The first day that it followed her into the court, it made quite a sensation among the neighbors. A boy, not knowing that it belonged to the old woman, and thinking that it was a strange cat that had come over the churchyard wall, was seizing it by the tail when Old Grumpy suddenly turned round on him and gave him a blow that sent him flying out of the court screaming. Then all the neighbors came out to see what the matter was, and stood still in astonishment as they watched Old Grumpy petting and fondling the kitten and looking wrathfully after the boy as he escaped into the street.
“What’s come to the old woman?” they exclaimed to each other as they shook their heads in amazement. “Who ever would have thought it?”
But old Joel was very scornful, quite as scornful as she had ever been of him.
“Such a creature!” he said. “A poor, miserable, bony, half-starved kitten! If it had been a cat—like mine”—and he glanced up at Tiger, who was sitting on his shoulder—“no one would have said anything about it. But a black and white kitten! Ugh!”
But Old Grumpy heeded them not. It was enough for her that she had found someone to love her. She made a soft bed for her kitten to lie on; she gave it the best she had in the house to eat; she bought a piece of blue ribbon, and tied it round its neck; and she talked to it, and stroked it, and petted it from morning till night. By degrees the kitten grew into a cat, and became soft and sleek, and well-fed, and a great contrast in every way to what it was when it had begged to be let into her room that winter’s morning, as the great church clock was striking eight. And as the kitten was growing into a cat, old Grumpy’s love for it was growing at the same time. The cat became the one thought of her life. From living so much alone, and from speaking so little to those around her, she spent all her time in talking to her cat; and, after a time, her cat began to talk to her, at least the old woman thought it did. And when she went to the shop at the top of the court to buy her tea and sugar, she would repeat in her strange, muttering way, half as if she were talking to herself, half as if she were talking to her neighbors, what her cat had said to her as it lay on her knee. It would tell her how comfortable it was, and how it loved her, and how glad it was she had taken it in. So the old woman said, and so she firmly believed. The neighbors often laughed at her, and made great fun of the idea of a cat talking; and old Joel said it clearly proved that she was mad, and ought to be taken to the “’sylum”; yet old Grumpy held to her tale in spite of everything that was said to her.
But one morning, when the old woman had been to the workhouse to fetch her weekly allowance of money and two loaves of bread, she came home to find trouble awaiting her.
The cat had disappeared. She had left it asleep in the chair by the fire, and she had locked her door. The door was still locked when she came back, but the cat was gone. She called it by all the many names she had given it. She hunted for it under her bed, in the dark closet by the fireside, and in every nook and corner of her room, but the cat was not to be seen.
Then she remembered the window. Yes, it was open! The cat must have jumped on the churchyard wall, and then down into the court. In great haste and with trembling steps the old woman went out, calling the cat again and again. Old Joel came out of his door and laughed; the neighbors stood at their doors and laughed; no one had seen it, no one had heard it, no one knew anything about it.
Having searched the court from end to end, Old Grumpy opened the iron gate of the churchyard, and hunted among the graves: sometimes stumbling over an old stone, sometimes sitting to rest on a crumbling monument, sometimes calling, sometimes searching, but never finding; so the old woman spent the greater part of the day. Then she wandered down the street, asking of every passer-by, walking down every court, calling for the cat at every turning. Still she did not find it. There came no answer to her calls.
Night came on, and still Old Grumpy wandered. She could not bear to lock her favorite out; she could not bear to think of the empty desolate room without it. So she walked on the greater part of the night, and her neighbors, as they woke from their dreams, still heard her cries for the cat, as she paced up and down the court. The next day she still searched; and the next, and the next; indeed, her whole life at that time became one long search, and when she came to her room, to eat or to sleep, it was only to make fresh plans for finding her cat.
But all these plans were fruitless. The cat never returned to its old friend. Whether it had strayed away, or had been stolen, whether the cat was faithless and had deserted her, or whether the neighbors had been treacherous, and had made away with the cat, Old Grumpy never could determine. But whatever had been the cause of her loss, the loss remained the same. The cat was gone, and it never came back again. The little dirty room was as empty and quiet as it had been before, and once more Old Grumpy had no one to think of but herself.
But the old woman was changed. She was no longer satisfied with the lonely, selfish life she was leading. She had known what it was to love, though she had only loved a cat; she had known what it was to be loved, although only by a cat. And the old hungry craving for love, which she had had as a child, came back to her strengthened a hundredfold.
As weeks went by, and she begun to despair of finding her cat, she began to look around, almost ravenously, for something or someone to love. She tried to make friends with the children of the court, but they had lived all their lives in such fear of her that they ran away when she called them and hid themselves when they saw her come out.
Then she would wander up and down the street, looking for other children, that she might kiss them as they went by. Sometimes she would stoop down and kiss a bright-eyed baby in a baby-carriage, whose nurse would look indignantly at the dirty old woman, and would smooth the child’s clothes, and shake out its cloak, and arrange its hat, and would hasten away from her. Sometimes she would kiss the forehead of a little girl who was on the way to school, and who would look, not indignantly, but curiously at her, wondering who she was, and where she came from. Sometimes she would stop a group of little children, walking out with an aunt or mother, who would ask Old Grumpy where she lived, but she would not answer them.
As the days went by, this craving to be loved grew stronger and stronger. The old woman’s brain, which had never been strong, began to be quite bewildered and troubled by it, and it was a sad sight to see her wandering up and down the court, muttering to herself over and over again, “Nobody loves me, nobody does! Nobody loves me, nobody does!”