Thomasina - The Cat Who Thought She Was God Read online

  Perhaps Thomasina did not really have divine powers. Possibly she was only an ordinary cat. But it cannot be denied that she changed three lives in a near-miraculous manner . . .

  There was Andrew MacDhui, Scottish veterinarian, whose bristling manner matched his fiery beard. Dour and withdrawn since his wife’s death, he had little patience with wooing sick animals back to health and was said to be a wee bit too quick with the chloroform.

  There was Andrew’s seven-year-old daughter, who brought her ailing cat, Thomasina, to her father to be cured—only to be bitterly disappointed by Andrew’s hasty and unfeeling disposal of her beloved cat.

  And there was Lori—beautiful, “daft Lori,” whose gentle and mysterious powers of healing caused some of the villagers to call her a saint—or a witch.

  How Thomasina, taking full advantage of a cat’s nine lives, brought these three together is a story which may be enjoyed for its face-value excitement and whimsey, but in which the more discerning reader will find both trenchant allegory and spirit-lifting philosophy.

  Set in the rugged and picturesque Scottish highland, Paul Gallico’s latest and finest work, while it retains the elements of faith and enchantment which have long delighted his many devotees, is primarily a novel of romance, character, and high adventure. With superb artistry, the author of The Snow Goose and The Small Miracle blends fantasy and warm humanity into a poignant tale of the natural and the supernatural in

  the Enchanted Cat.

  Books by Paul Gallico

  FAREWELL TO SPORT

  ADVENTURES OF HIRAM HOLLIDAY

  THE SECRET FRONT

  THE SNOW GOOSE

  LOU GEHRIG—PRIDE OF THE YANKEES

  GOLF IS A NICE FRIENDLY GAME

  CONFESSIONS OF A STORY WRITER

  THE LONELY

  THE ABANDONED

  TRIAL BY TERROR

  THE SMALL MIRACLE

  THE FOOLISH IMMORTALS

  SNOWFLAKE

  LOVE OF SEVEN DOLLS

  All of the characters in this book

  are fictitious and any resemblance

  to actual persons, living or dead,

  is purely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 57-13018

  Copyright © 1957 by Paul Gallico

  Designed by Diana Klemin

  Cover and Frontispiece by Gioia Fiammenghi

  All Rights Reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  TO VIRGINIA

  T H O M A S I N A

  1

  Mr. Andrew MacDhui, veterinary surgeon, thrust his brick-red, bristling beard through the door of the waiting room adjacent to the surgery and looked with cold, hostile eyes upon the people seated there on the plain pine, yellow chairs with their pets on their laps or at their feet awaiting his attendance.

  Willie Bannock, his brisk, wiry man of all work in dispensary, office, and animal hospital had already gossiped a partial list of those present that morning to Mr. MacDhui, including his friend and next-door neighbor the minister, Angus Peddie. Mr. Peddie, of course, would be there with or because of his insufferable little pug dog, whose gastric disturbances were brought on by pampering and the feeding of forbidden sweets. Mr. MacDhui’s glance dropped to the narrow lap of the short-legged, round little clergyman, and for a moment his eye was caught up in the unhappy, milky one of the pug, rolled in his direction, filled with the misery of bellyache, and yet expressing a certain hope and longing as well. The animal had come to associate his visits to this place, the smells, and the huge man with the fur on his face with relief.

  The veterinary disentangled himself from the hypnotic eye and wished angrily that Peddie would follow his advice on feeding the animal and not be there wasting his time. He noted the rich builder’s wife from Glasgow on holiday with her rheumy little Yorkshire terrier, an animal he particularly detested, with its ridiculous velvet bow laced into its silken topknot. There was Mrs. Kinloch over the ears of her Siamese cat, which lay upon her knee, occasionally shaking its head and complaining in a raucous voice, and, too, there was Mr. Dobbie, the grocer, whose long and doleful countenance reflected that of his Scots terrier, who was suffering from the mange and looked as though a visit to the upholsterer would be more practical.

  There were a half dozen or so others, including a small boy whom he seemed to have seen somewhere before, and at the head of the line he recognized old, obese Mrs. Laggan, proprietress of the newspaper and tobacco shop, who, with her aged, wheezing, nondescript, black mongrel, Rabbie, his muzzle grayed, his eyes rheumy with age, was a landmark of Inveranoch and seemingly had been so for years.

  Mrs. Laggan was a widow and had been for the past twenty-five years of her seventy-odd. For the last fifteen of them her dog Rabbie had been her only companion, and his fat form draped across the doorsill of Mrs. Laggan’s shop was as familiar a figure, to natives as well as visitors to the Highland town, as that of the fat widow in her Paisley shawl. Since the doorsill was Rabbie’s place, nose between forepaws, eyes rolled upward, clients of the widow Laggan had learned to step over Rabbie when entering and departing. It was said in the High Street that descendants of these clients were already born with this precaution bred into them.

  Mr. MacDhui looked his clients over and the clients looked back at him with varying degrees of anxiety, hope, deference, or in some cases a return of the hostility that seemed to be written all over the well-marked features of his face, the high brow, the indignantly flaring red-tufted eyebrows, commanding blue eyes, strong nose, full and sometimes mocking lips, half seen through the bristle of red mustache and beard and the truculent and aggressive chin.

  His eyes and, above all, his manner always seemed cold and angry, perhaps because, it was said in Inveranoch, he was on the whole a cold and angry man.

  A widower of the stature and flamboyance of Mr. Veterinary Surgeon MacDhui was subject enough for gossip in a Highland town the size of Inveranoch in Argyllshire, where he had been in practice for only a little over eighteen months. By the nature of his profession he was a figure of importance there, since he looked after not only the personal and private pets of the townspeople, but was responsible also for the health of the livestock raised in the outlying farms of the district, the herds of Angus cattle and black-faced sheep, pigs, and fowl. In addition, he was the appointed veterinary of the district for the inspection of meat and milk and sanitary husbandry as well.

  The gossips allowed that Andrew MacDhui was an honest, forthright, and fair-dealing man, but, and this was the opinion of the strictly religiously inclined, a queer one to be dealing with God’s dumb creatures, since he appeared to have no love for animals, very little for man, and neither the inclination nor time for God. Whether or not he was an out-and-out unbeliever, as many claimed, he certainly never was seen in Mr. Peddie’s church, even though the two were known to be good friends. Others claimed that when his wife had died his heart had turned to stone, all but the corner devoted to his love for his seven-year-old child Mary Ruadh, the one who was never seen without that ill-favored, queer-marked ginger cat she called Thomasina.

  Mind you, said the tattlers, no one denied that he was a good doctor for the beasties, and efficient. Quick to cure or kill, and a mite too handy with the chloroform rag, was the word that went around. Those who felt kindly toward him held that he was a humane man, not disposed to see a hopelessly sick animal suffer needlessly, while those who disliked him and his high-handed ways called him a hard, cruel man to whom the life of an animal was as nothing, and who was openly contemptuous of people who were sentimentally attached to their pets.

  And many of those who did
not encounter him professionally were inclined to the belief that there must be some good in the man else he would not have had the friendship and esteem of Mr. Angus Peddie, pastor and guide of the Presbyterian flock of Inveranoch. It was said that the minister, who had known MacDhui in their student days, had been largely instrumental in persuading his friend, upon the death of his wife Anne, to purchase the practice of Inveranoch’s retiring vet and move thither, leaving behind him the unhappy memories that had bedeviled him in Glasgow.

  Several of the inhabitants of Inveranoch remembered Mr. MacDhui’s late father John, himself a Glasgow veterinary, a dour, tyrannical old man with a strong religious bent, who, holding the purse strings, had compelled his son to follow in his footsteps. The story was that Andrew MacDhui had wished to study to become a surgeon in his youth but in the end had been compelled for financial reasons to yield to his father’s wishes and likewise become a veterinary.

  One of these inhabitants had once paid a visit to the gloomy old house in Dunear Street in Glasgow where for a time father and son practiced together until the old man died, and had nothing good to say about it, except that it was not much to wonder at that Mr. MacDhui had turned out as he had.

  Mr. Peddie had known MacDhui’s father as a psalm-singing old hypocrite in whose home God served merely as an auxiliary policeman. Whatever seemed healthy or fun, old John MacDhui’s God was against, and Andrew MacDhui had grown up first hating Him and then denying Him . . . The tragedy of the loss of his wife Anne, when his daughter, Mary Ruadh, was only three, had confirmed him in his bitterness.

  His scrutiny completed, MacDhui now pointed his beard at old, fat Mrs. Laggan and jerked with his head in the direction of his office. She gave a little bleat of fright, picked Rabbie up out of her lap, and arose painfully, holding him in her arms, where he lay on his back, forepaws bent limply, watery eyes revolving. He resembled an overstuffed black and gray porker and he wheezed at every breath like a catarrhal old man snoring.

  Mr. Angus Peddie pulled in his feet to let her by and gave her a warm, cherubic smile of encouragement, for he was the very opposite of the figure that a dour Scots churchman is supposed to resemble. He was short, inclined to stoutness, sweet-natured, and extraordinarily vital. He had a round, dimpled face and mischievous eyes and smile, which, however, could instantly express the deepest sympathy, penetrating understanding, and concern.

  Peddie’s pug dog, who, as well as suffering from chronic indigestion, staggered under the name of Fin de Siècle, an indication of the kind of humor one might be expected to encounter in the large Peddie family, lay likewise wheezing in the ministers lap. Peddie lifted him into a sitting position so that he could better see Mrs. Laggan and her sick dog go by. He said, “That’s Mrs. Laggan’s Rabbie, Fin. The poor wee thing isn’t feeling well just now.” The rolling eyes of the two dogs met for a moment in melancholy exchange.

  Mrs. Laggan followed Mr. MacDhui into the examining room of the surgery and deposited Rabbie on his back upon the long, white-enameled examining table, where he remained, his forepaws still limp and his breath coming in difficult gasps.

  The veterinarian lifted the lip of the animal, glanced at its teeth, pulled down its eyelids, and placed one hand for a moment upon its heaving belly. “How old is this dog?” he asked.

  Mrs. Laggan, traditionally dressed as became a respectable widow, in rusty black with a Paisley shawl over her shoulders, seemed to shrink inside her clothes. “Fifteen years and a bit,” she replied. “Well, fourteen, since he’s been grown from the wee pup he was the day I got him,” she added, as though by quickly subtracting a year from his age she might lure fate into permitting him to remain a year longer. Fifteen was very old for a dog. With fourteen there was always hope they might live to be fifteen, like Mrs. Campbell’s old sheep dog, which was actually going on sixteen.

  The veterinarian nodded, glanced perfunctorily at the dog again, and said, “He ought to be put out of his misery. You can see how bad his asthma is. He can hardly breathe.” He picked the dog up and set him on his feet on the floor, where he promptly collapsed onto his belly with his chin flat on the floor and his eyes turned up adoringly to the person of Mrs. Laggan. “Or walk,” concluded MacDhui.

  The widow had many chins. Fear set them all to quivering. “Put him away? Put the puir beastie to death? But whatever should I do then when he’s all I’ve got in this world? We’ve been together for fifteen years now, and me a lonely widow for twenty-five. What would I do without Rabbie?”

  “Get another dog,” MacDhui replied. “It shouldn’t be difficult. The village is full of them.”

  “Och, how can ye speak so? It would no’ be Rabbie. Can ye not be giving him a wee bit o’ medicine to tide him over until he gets well? He’s been a very healthy dog.”

  Animals, reflected Mr. MacDhui, were never a problem; it was the sentimentality of their owners that created all the difficulties. “The dog must die soon,” he said. “He is very old and very ill. Anyone with half an eye can see that his life has become a burden to him and that he is suffering. If I gave him some medicine, you would be back here within a fortnight. It might prolong his life for a month, at the most six months. I am a busy man,” he concluded, but then added more gently, “It would be kinder to make an end to him.”

  The quivering of her chins now had spread to her small mouth, as Mrs. Laggan looked fearfully into the day that would be without Rabbie; no one to talk to, no one to whose breathing she would hearken whilest she had her evening cup of tea, or lay in bed at night. She said what came into her head, but not what was bursting her heart. “The coostomers who come to my shop will miss Rabbie sore if he’s no’ there for them to be stepping over.” But she was meaning, “I’m an old woman. I have not many days left myself. I am lonely. The dog has been my companion and my comfort for so long. He and I know one another’s ways so well.”

  “Yes, yes, Mrs. Laggan, no doubt. But you must make up your mind, for I have other patients waiting.”

  Mrs. Laggan looked uneasily to the big, vital man with the red mustache and beard. “I suppose I should no’ be selfish if puir Rabbie is suffering . . .”

  Mr. MacDhui did not reply, but sat waiting.

  Life without Rabbie—the once cold nose pressed against her hand, the edge of pink tongue that protruded when he was contemplative, his great sigh of contentment when he was fed full—but above all his presence; Rabbie always within sight, sound, or touch. Old dogs must die; old people must die. She was minded to plead for the bit of medicine, for another month, a week, a day more with Rabbie, but she was rushed and nervous and fearful. And so she said, “Ye would be very gentle with him—”

  MacDhui sighed with impatient relief. “He will not feel a thing, I assure you.” He arose. “I think you are doing what is right, Mrs. Laggan.”

  “Very well then. Make away with him. What will it be I’ll be owing you?”

  The veterinarian had a moment’s pang brought on by the sight of the trembling lips and chins and cursed himself for it. “There will be no charge,” he said curtly.

  The widow Laggan regained sudden control of her face and her dignity, though her eyes were wet. “I’ll be paying for your services—”

  “Two shillings then—”

  She paid out of a small black purse, setting the florin onto his desk with a snap that caused Rabbie to prick up his graying ears for a moment. Without another glance at her oldest and dearest friend, Mrs. Laggan made for the door. She held herself as proudly and erectly as she could, for she would not be a fat old woman dissolving into grief before this hard man. She bore up to pass through and close it behind her.

  Thin women in sorrow have both the faces and figures for bleakness and woe, but there is nothing quite as futile and shaking as the aspect of a fat woman in affliction. The small mouth unable to form into the classic lines of tragedy can but purse and quiver. Grief is bowed, but fat keeps the stout woman’s curves constant, except that the flesh suddenly grays and looks as thou
gh the juices of life had gone out of it for all its roundness.

  When the widow Laggan emerged from the surgery and entered the waiting room once more, all eyes were turned upon her, and the Reverend Peddie recognized the symptoms at once and got up and went to her, crying, “Oh dear— Don’t say that something ill has befallen Rabbie. Is he to remain in hospital?” And then he echoed the prior remarks of the widow. “Why, whatever would the town do without the presence of Rabbie across the sill?”

  Safe within the circle of her own people, Mrs. Laggan could let the tears flow freely as she told of the sentence passed upon her friend. “Th’ doctor said ’twould be better if he were to be put away just now. Och, why must those we love always go and we remain behind? Twill no’ be the same any more wi’out Rabbie. I doubt not I’ll be following him soon and ’twill be a’ for the best.” She dabbed at her eyes with a cotton handkerchief and essayed a smile. “Do ye remember how Rabbie wud block the door and all the gentry would raise up their knees to pass ower him?”

  It was so small a thing that had happened, yet the waiting-room was stiff with the tragedy of it, and Mr. Peddie felt the horror clamped like a hand about his heart, squeezing that member until it felt in some similar measure the pain that was oppressing the widow Laggan. Mr. Peddie had one of those awful moments, to which he was prone, when he could not decide what it was that God would wish him to do, what God Himself would do, were He to stand there with them all in the presence of the agony of the widow Laggan.

  For to Mr. Angus Peddie there was neither gloom nor sourness nor melancholy about either the God or the religion he served. Creation and the world created, along with the Creator, was a perpetual joy to him, and his mission seemed to be to see that his flock appreciated and was properly grateful for all the wonders and beauties of nature, man, and beast as well as the great and marvelous unexplained mysteries of the universe. He did not try to explain God, the Father, or the Son, but worked to help his people love and enjoy Him. A man of unusual tolerance and breadth of vision, he believed that man could deny God for a time, but not forever, since God was so manifest in everything that lived and breathed, in things both animate and inanimate, that He was universal and hence undeniable.