The Story of Jennie- or the Abandoned Read Online Free PDF

particularly when he thought of the powerful and lightning-like buffets of those terrible paws that had so quickly robbed him of his senses and laid him open for the final attack which but for a bit of luck might have finished him. Assuredly he too would steer clear of Dempsey, but to the tabby he said:
    ‘Oh, he wasn't so much. If I hadn't been so tired from running.’
    The tabby smiled enigmatically. ‘Running from what, laddie?’
    But before Peter could reply, she said: ‘Never mind, I know how it is. When you first find yourself on your own, everything frightens you. And don't think that everybody doesn't run. It's nothing to be ashamed of. By the way, what is your name?’
    Peter told her. She said, ‘Hm … Mine's Jennie. I'd like to hear your story. Care to tell it?’
    Peter very much wanted to do so. But he found suddenly that he was a little timid because he was not at all sure how it would sound, and, even more important, whether the tabby would believe him and how she would take it. For it was certainly going to be a most odd tale.
     

CHAPTER FOUR: A Story is Told
    BY and large, Peter made about as bad a beginning as could be when he said
    ‘I'm not really a cat, I'm a little boy. I mean actually, not so little, I'm eight.’
    ‘You're a what?’ Jennie gave a long, low growl, and her tail fluffed up to twice its size.
    Peter could not imagine what he had said to make her angry, and he repeated hesitantly, ‘boy.’
    The tabby's tail swelled another size larger and twitched nervously. Her eyes seemed to shoot sparks as she hissed: ‘I hate people!’
    ‘Oh!’ said Peter, for he was suddenly full of sympathy and understanding for the poor thin little tabby who had been so kind to him. ‘Somebody must have been horrible to you. But I love cats!’
    Jennie looked mollified, and her tail began to subside. ‘Of course,' she said, `it's just your imagination. I should have known. We're always imagining things, like a leaf blowing in the wind being a mouse, or if there's no leaf there at all, then we can imagine one, and then we've imagined it, go right on from there and imagine it isn't a leaf at all but a mouse, or if we like, a whole lot of mice, and then we start pouncing on them. You just like to imagine that you're a little boy, though what kind of a game you can make out of that I can't see. still.,
    ‘Oh, please,’ said Peter, interrupting. He could feel somehow that the tabby very much didn't want him to be a boy, and yet, even at the risk of offending her, he knew that he must tell her the truth. ‘Please, I'm so sorry, but it is so. You must believe me. My name is Peter Brown, and I live in a flat with my mother and father and Nanny, in a house at No. 1A, Cavendish Mews. Or at least I did live there before.’
    ‘Oh, come now,’ protested Jennie, ‘don't be silly. Anybody can see that you look like a cat, you feel like a cat, you smell like a cat, you purr like a cat, and you..' But here her voice trailed off into silence for a moment and her eyes grew wide again. ‘Oh dear,' she said then. ‘But there is something the matter. I've felt it all along. You don't act like a cat..’
    ‘Of course not,’ Peter said, relieved that he might be believed at last.
    But the tabby, her eyes growing wider and wider, wasn't listening. She was going back over her acquaintance with Peter and enumerating the odd things that had happened since she had found him exhausted, wounded and half dead in the alley and had dragged him to her home, for what reason she did not know.
    ‘You told off Dempsey, and right on his own premises, where he works. No sensible cat would have done that, no matter how brave. And besides, it's against the rules.’ She almost seemed to be ticking the items off of the ends of her claws, though of course she wasn't. ‘And then you didn't want to eat mouse when you were literally starving.said you'd never had one, and then you ate it all up at one gobble, with never a thought