The Story of Jennie- or the Abandoned (11 page)

They crept around the darkened portion of the pier to the stern of the Countess of Greenock, where, sure, enough, a small gangway led up from the dock to the head of a narrow companionway on the lower deck. And as Jennie had prophesied, there was no sailor on watch duty at either end, in fact there wasn't so much as a soul about.

'No time like the present,' said Jennie cheerfully, having inspected the set-up thoroughly. She took a few more cautious sniffs all around, and then, without further ado, trotted up the gangplank with Peter following her close behind.

ONCE aboard, Jennie's experience and knowledge of ships stood her in good stead. She called for the point-to-point method of procedure again, for she was particularly anxious not to encounter any humans before the ship had cast off, and while she herself could melt and blend with the shadows in corners and behind things, she was worried over the conspicuousness of Peter's snow-white coat. But she followed her nose and her instincts as well as her memory of the other steamships on which she had served, and soon was leading Peter down a narrow companionway that led to a small dining saloon and thence to the galley.

Tea was long since over, all of the crew and officers were on deck engaged with the cargo and preparations for leaving, and Jennie counted on finding that part of the ship deserted. She was right. The galley fires were out and there was no immediate sign of cook or scullery-man. Also no doors were shut anywhere, which gave Jennie further indication as to what kind of a craft it was, and she led him from the galley through the pantry to the small storeroom where the immediate supplies were kept. At the end of this room was a doorway, and a narrow iron staircase that descended to another passageway, on one side of which was the refrigeration room and on the other a large dry-stores enclosure where the ship's supplies in bulk were kept sacks of flour and beans and dried peas, tins of fruit and vegetables, boxes of biscuits, tea, coffee, etc.

The slatted door to this also stood wide open. It was dark, but an electric light burning far down the passageway shed sufficient light so that with their acute vision they soon accustomed themselves and could see their way about the boxes and cartons and barrels as well as though it were broad daylight.

And it was there in the storeroom, well concealed behind a case of tinned tomatoes, that Peter saw and missed his first mouse, revealing what might have been a fatal weakness in their plans. It had never dawned on him, and Jennie too had quite neglected to think about it and take into consideration that for all his looking like and appearing to be, and learning to behave like a cat, Peter had not the faintest idea how to go about the difficult and important business of catching a mouse.

Indeed, it was only through the lucky break that in the last moment more cargo arrived and the Countess of Greenock did not sail that night, nor the next night either, that they were able to remedy this deficiency at least partly, for superstition or no, a cat that proved itself wholly unable to catch marauding rodents might have received short shrift aboard such a craft.

The awkward discovery came when Jennie called his attention to the little scratching, nibbling sort of noise from the other side of the storeroom, whispering—`Ssh! Mouse! There he is over by the biscuit box. Let's see you get him.'

Peter concentrated, staring through the gloom, —and there indeed he was, just edging around the corner of the large tin marked HUNTLEY & PALMER LTD., READING, a long, greyish chap with a greedy face, impertinent whiskers and beady black eyes.

Peter was so anxious to show off to Jennie what he could do as a cat if given the chance, that he hardly even set himself to spring, or paused to measure the distance, the obstacles and the possible avenues of escape open to the mouse. Without a moment's thought or plan, he launched himself through the air in one terrific pounce, paws spread wide, jaws open to snatch him.

There was, of course, no mouse there when Peter landed.

And not only that, but his teeth clicked together on empty air, there was nothing beneath his paws and, in addition, having miscalculated his distance, or rather not calculated it at all, he gave himself a nasty knock on the head against the side of the tin box, all of which did not help the feeling that he had made a perfect fool of himself.

But while the mouse had saved itself momentarily, it also committed a fatal error by failing to dodge back behind the tin. Instead, gripped by panic, it emitted a squeak and went the other way, and the next instant, like a streak of furred lightning, Jennie had hurled herself through the air, her front paws, talons bared and extended, striking from side to side in a series of short, sharp, stunning hooks, even while she was in passage. The blows, as she landed, caught the mouse, knocking him first to one side, then back to the other, dazed and bewildered, then tossed him up in the air, batted him a couple before he came down, at which point Jennie seized him in her mouth and it was all over before Peter had even so much as recovered his balance as well as from his confusion.

`Oh dear,' Jennie said, dropping the mouse. `I hadn't thought of that. Of course you wouldn't know how. Why should you? But we shall be in a pretty pickle if we're caught here before you know something about it. And I don't know how much time we shall have. Still. ..'

Peter at last found his tongue and emitted a cry of anger and mortification. `Goodness,' he said, `isn't there anything I can do? Does EVERYTHING have to be learned?'

`It's practice, really,' Jennie explained. `Even we have to keep practising constantly. That, and while I hate to use the expression—"know-how." It's like everything else. You find there's a right way and a wrong way. The right way is to catch them with your paws, not your mouth, and of course the preparation is everything. Look here, I'll show you what I mean …'

Here she crouched down a few feet away from the dead mouse and then began a slow waggling of her hindquarters from side to side, gradually increasing the speed and shortening the distance of the waggle. `That's what you must try, to begin with,' she explained. 'We don't do that for fun, or because we're nervous, but to give ourselves motion. It's ever so much harder and less accurate to spring from a standing start than from a moving one. Try it now and see how much easier it is to take off than the other way.'

Peter's rear-end waggle was awkward at first, but he soon began to find the rhythm of it—it was almost like the `One to get set, two to make ready, and THREE to go' in foot-racing, except that this was even better because he found that what Jennie said was quite true and that the slight bit of motion did start him off the mark like an arrow.

Next he had to learn to move his paws so that, as he flew through the air and landed, they were striking left, right, with incredible speed, a feat that was much more difficult than it sounds since he could not use them to land on but had to bring up his hind part in time while lashing out with the front.

His second mouse he missed by a hair's breadth, due to over-anxiousness, but Jennie praised his paw– work and spring, criticizing only his judgment of distance and haste. `You rarely lose a mouse by waiting just a little longer,' she explained, `because a mouse has a one-track mind and will keep on doing what it started out to do provided it isn't disturbed, and if it is disturbed it will just sit there and quake so that you have all the time in the world really . . .'

But his third mouse Peter caught and killed, one-two-three, just like that. Jennie said that she could not have done it better herself, and when Peter made her a present of it she accepted it graciously and with evident pleasure and ate it. But the others they saved because Jennie said that when they came to be discovered it would be a good thing to have some samples of their type of work about them.

And so for the rest, Peter practised and hunted busily, and Jennie advised him to keep the mouse alive and in the air as long as possible, not to torture it, but to gain in skill and accuracy, and train his muscles to react swiftly at the slightest movement.

It was the second night before they sailed that Peter awoke to an uncomfortable feeling. There was a new and unpleasant odour in the storeroom, one that tended to make him a little sick. And suddenly from a far corner he saw glowing two evil-looking red eyes. Before he could stir, he sensed through his whiskers that Jennie was awake too, and for the first time using this means of communication with him so that there should not be a sound, she warned: `Rat! It is serious, Peter, and very dangerous. This is something I cannot teach you or help you with. You'll just have to watch me and try to learn as best you can. And above all now, whatever happens, don't move a muscle, don't stir, and don't make a sound, even if you want to. Now remember. I'm off.'

Through the shadowing gloom, Peter watched the stalk, his heart thumping in his chest, for this was different from the gay, almost lighthearted, hunt of mice. Jennie's entire approach and attitude was one of complete concentration, the carriage of her body, the expression of her head, flattened forward, the glitter in her eyes, and the slow, fluid, amazingly controlled movement of her body. There was a care, caution and deadly earnestness about her that Peter had never seen before, and his own throat felt dry and his skin and moustache twitched nervously. But he did his best to hold himself rigid and motionless as she had told him, lest some slip of his might bring her into trouble.

The wicked red eyes were glowing like two hot coals now, and Peter's acute hearing could make out the nasty sniffling noises of the rat and the dry scrabbling of its toes on the store room floor. Jennie had gone quite flat now, and was crawling along the boards on her belly. She stopped and held herself long and rigid for a moment, her eyes intent upon her prey, measuring, measuring. . .

Then, inch by inch, she began to draw herself up into a little ball of fur-covered steel muscles for the spring. The rat was broadside to her. She took only two waggles, one to the left, one to the right, and then she was in the air, aimed at the flank of the rat.

But lightning-fast as she was, the rodent seemed to be even faster, for his head came around over his shoulder and his white teeth were bared in a wicked, slashing movement—and Peter wanted to shout to his friend: 'Jennie, LOOK OUT!' but just in time he remembered her admonition under no circumstances to make a sound, and choked it down.

And then he saw what seemed to him to be a miracle, for launched as she was and in mid-air, Jennie saw the swift movement of the rat and, swifter herself, avoided the sharp, ripping teeth and making a turn in the air, a kind of half-twist such as Peter had seen the high divers do in the pool at Wembley one summer, she landed on the back of the rat and immediately sank her teeth in its spine, just below the head.

Then followed a dreadful moment of banging and slamming and scraping and squealing, and the sharp snick of teeth as the rat snapped viciously and fought to escape while Jennie hung on for dear life, her jaws clamping deeper and deeper, until there was a sharp click and the next moment the rat hung limp and paralysed and a few seconds later it was all over.

Jennie came away from it a little shaken and agitated, saying, `Phew! Filthy, sickening beasts! I hate rats—next to people. … They're all unclean and diseased, and if you let them bite you anywhere, then you get sick, for their teeth are all poisoned, and sometimes you die from it. I'm always afraid of that …'

Peter said with deep sincerity, 'Jennie, I think you are the bravest and most wonderful person—I mean cat—I ever saw. Nobody could have done that the way you did.'

For once Jennie did not preen herself or parade before Peter, for she was worried now since it was she who had coaxed him into this adventure. She said: `That's just it, Peter. We can't practise and learn on the rats the way we did on the mice, because it's too dangerous. One mistake and, well—I don't want it to happen. I can show you the twist, because you have to know how to do it to avoid that slash of theirs, but the spring, the distance, the timing, and above all just the exact place to bite them behind the neck to get at their spines—well, you must do it one hundred per cent, right when the time comes, and that's all there is. If you get them too high on the head they can kick loose or even shake you off. Some of the big fellows weigh almost as much as you do, and if you seize them too far down the back they can turn their heads and cut you.'

`But how will I learn, then?' Peter asked.

`Let me handle them for the time being,' she replied, `and watch me closely each time I kill one. You'll be learning something. Then if, and when, the moment comes when you have to do it yourself, you'll either do it right the first time and never forget it thereafter, or—' Jennie did not finish the sentence but instead went into the washing routine, and Peter felt a little cold chill run down his spine.

When they were finally discovered it was some seven hours after sailing, as the Countess of Greenock was thumping her slow, plodding way down the broad reaches of the Thames Estuary. When the cook, an oddly triangular-shaped Jamaican negro by the name of Mealie, came into the storeroom for some tinned corned beef, they had a bag of eight mice and three rats lined up in lieu of references and transportation. Three of the mice were Peter's, and he felt inordinately proud of them and wished there could have been some way whereby he might have had his name on them, like autographing a book perhaps—'Caught by Peter Brown, Storeroom, Countess of Greenock, April 15th, 1949.'

The negro grinned widely, increasing the triangular effect, for his face and head were narrower at the top than at the bottom, and said: `By Jominy, dat good. Hit pays to hodvertise. I tell dat to Coptain,' and forthwith went up on to the bridge, taking Jennie's and Peter's samples with him. It was the kind of a ship where the cook did go up on to the bridge if he felt like having a word with the captain. There he told him the story of finding the two stowaways, and then added: `But by Jominy they pay possage already. Look you dat!' and unrolling his apron showed him the fruits of their industry.