When we said, somewhat indignantly, that cats didn't frighten horses, she said ours did. She said he lurked in the grass until the first one had gone by, then dashed out into the road and pranced along behind him. It looked, she said, almost as if he was imitating the horse – though that of course was ridiculous. The first horse was all right because he couldn't see the cat; the ones behind, she said – and we could quite see her point – nearly had hysterics.
We saw to it that after that Solomon did his imitations from the hall window when the riding school went by. Unfortunately, while it was easy enough to tell when they were coming – what with the trampling of hoofs and instructions to people to watch their knees or keep their eyes on their elbows they made, according to Father Adams, more noise than the ruddy Campbells – solitary riders were different. Sometimes we were in time to stop Trigger the Second following his latest idol down the lane. More often the first we knew that a horse had passed that way was when once again Solomon was missing.
It was very worrying. Sometimes it would be a couple of hours or more before he came plodding back on his long thin legs, looking rather sheepish and trying to slip through the gate so that he could pretend he'd been there all the time. We tried everything we could think of, short of a cage, to curb this latest craze. We even bought some goldfish, seeing it was things that moved he liked, and set up a special tank for him in the sitting room.
Sheba and Charles thought they were wonderful. They sat in front of the tank for ages goggling like a couple of tennis fans as the fish flipped and glided lazily through the water. Solomon, however, when he found there was no way in at the top or sides and that they didn't run away when he looked at them, lost interest and slipped silently out. Charles was too intent on the fish to see him go, or to notice the lone, red-coated rider clopping up the lane; and I was in the kitchen. The first I knew of his latest escapade was when the 'phone rang and a farmer from the other end of the valley said he didn't know whether I knew it but that black-faced cat of ours had just gone by following one of the huntsmen. He was going it well, he said, stepping it out like a proper little Arab. But the horse was a kicker with a red ribbon on its tail and he didn't…
I didn't wait to hear any more. I dropped the 'phone and ran. When I caught up with them Solomon was still, unknown to the rider, following doggedly along behind that pair of wicked-looking hoofs. The huntsman stared in admiration as I picked him up. Plucky little devil, he said, to have followed all that way. Ought to have been a horse himself.
He didn't know me, of course, or Solomon from Adam. He looked a little alarmed when, holding old Bat Ears firmly by the scruff of his neck, I said it was a remark like that which started all this horse business in the first place.
FOURTEEN
The Great Pheasant Mystery
There was a time when our garden was practically a naturalist's paradise. Jackdaws nested in our chimney. If during the breeding season we never got a wink of sleep after daybreak, what with first the parents getting up and talking to one another and later on four or five youngsters hissing non-stop for breakfast only a brick's width from our ears – what, as Charles said, was that compared with the sight of a black feathered rear sticking trustfully out of our chimney pot while its owner fed the offspring underneath?
Thrushes, bursting with confidence, banged their snails on our path till it sounded like a blacksmith's and looked like a cockle-stall at Southend. Blackbirds, joining us for meals on the lawn and heaving worms out of the ground like lengths of elastic, put more visitors off their food than we could count. One year – just, according to my grandmother, to show how Mother Nature trusted us – we even had a baby cuckoo on our doorstep. Every morning when I opened the front door it was squatting on the porch, close up to the milk-bottle. We never knew why – unless it was lonely and thought the bottle was another cuckoo. It never attempted to get at the milk and as soon as I brought the bottle indoors it flapped and fluttered round to the back where it sat all day on a heap of stones, watching us stolidly through the kitchen window.
Even when it was being fed by a depressed-looking hedge-sparrow that soon had to hover in mid-air to get anywhere near that cavernous mouth it still watched us. We were jolly glad when it grew up and went off to Africa. My grandmother, bitterly disappointed because we wouldn't let her rear it at home – it reminded her of Gladstone, she said, and Aunt Louisa could easily have fed it – said we didn't deserve the trust of innocent little creatures. Charles said innocent little creatures be blowed – the way that damned thing had watched his every move for weeks he felt so furtive he expected to be arrested by Scotland Yard every time he set foot outside the door.
It was interesting all the same. What with the cuckoo, the robin that used to come in and perch on a chair while we ate and the woodpecker that went a bit queer in the head and started pecking a hole in a nearby telegraph pole in the middle of winter – we watched that entranced for days until somebody told the Post Office about it and they came out and tacked a metal plate over the hole – we saw ourselves as budding Ludwig Kochs. And then we had the cats.
After that the sensible birds gave the cottage a wide berth. Any time they had to fly over our territory when the cats were about they zoomed smartly up at the front gate and flew over at ceiling height until they reached the back. The jackdaws persevered for a while but even they gave up when Sheba climbed the chimney stack one day and looked meaningly at them through the cowl. The only bird that came near us when the cats were about – and he disappeared pretty smartly when Sheba looked round the corner – was the blackbird who used to play with Solomon. At least the blackbird was playing, as birds sometimes do – flying low over Solly's head as he crossed the lawn, uttering mocking little cries and perching enticingly on the wall. Solly wasn't. He went after him like a Wimbledon champion, leaping spectacularly through the air with his paws going in all directions.
That, actually, was where the blackbird made his mistake. He had obviously watched Solomon hunting mice in the garden and summed him up as a blockhead who couldn't catch anything. He hadn't seen him indoors, practising with ping-pong balls and flies. Solomon with a ping-pong ball was a joy to watch. Sheba had what Charles loftily described as a typically female way of trying to catch things. When we threw a ball in the air for her she leapt hazily towards it, waved her paws and missed. It was surprising when you considered her prowess with mice – no less surprising than the fact that Solomon, who couldn't catch anything on the ground to save his life, could shoot through the air like an arrow and field anything we threw between his front paws while still in flight.
It was his only talent and he made the most of it. When we wouldn't throw balls for him, or rolled-up silver paper, he went round swatting flies. It was a little disturbing to have a cat continually sailing through the air as if he were Anton Dolin, particularly since he invariably came down again like a bomb, but it got rid of the flies. It also – though the blackbird didn't know it then – made it rather dangerous for little birds to make fun of him. One day, after a particularly good practice with a meat-fly, Solomon went out, leapt smartly into the air, and fielded two feathers out of old Smart-Alec's tail.