But if it was so and he was back with them again, how were they able to recognize him when he was not Peter at all, but a cat? It was certain that he had not changed, because now that he was looking about and had somewhat accustomed himself to the light he could see his white forelegs and paws on the counterpane. It was all so very confusing.
He was still a cat, then, but somehow they seemed to have found him and brought him to wherever he was and put him to bed, and his mother knew him again and was crying over him. Sudden panic gripped him. Where was Jennie Baldrin? Why had they not brought her too? Or was this vision of his mother's face gazing down at him only a part of another dream from which he would awake to find Jennie once more at his side? If this was a fantasy, it was a most vivid one, for Peter felt two of the tears falling from her eyes strike gently on his cheek. He shut his eyes quickly again to give the dream a chance to change and bring his Jennie back to him.
This time the mists were only grey and luminous, and nowhere could he find Jennie. But then a curious thing happened to him. He was unable to see through the pale void in which momentarily he seemed to be suspended, nor was it penetrated by any sound. And yet all of it and him as well appeared suddenly to be permeated with Jennie Baldrin. He could not find her face or form, or any longer hear her voice, and yet, unseen, unheard, she was so strongly felt that it was almost as though the greyness enveloping him was Jennie, or she a part of it, that he was somehow inside of her and then again it would appear to him that Jennie was all locked away within himself. For a moment he gave himself up to the enthralling sweetness of the emotion. Jennie . . Jennie….
But the other dream would persist, and when he returned to it again by opening his eyes once more he saw that strangers were bending over him, a woman in starchy white with a white cap on her head and a man in a linen coat. Why, it must be a doctor and a nurse. This seemed quite clear. He had been injured in his fight with Dempsey, and of course they were attending him. He remembered now. He could not move his left hind leg, or front right paw, because Dempsey had bitten them through and broken them.
The nurse leaned to him. She was wearing a shiny breastpin with a smooth, flat surface, and with a shock Peter saw himself in it. For he was not a cat any longer. HE WAS HIMSELF AGAIN!
Or at least he was half himself, for in the tiny mirror he had seen his face, and it was the face of Peter the boy. How frightening and confusing it all was, because while the features were as he used to be, he seemed to be still partly white cat about the head. And what was the meaning of the white paws on the counterpane?
The doctor bent closer and looked into his eyes in a kindly and searching fashion. Then he said: `He has passed it. He has come back. He is going to be all right now.' Peter heard his mother, who was standing just behind him, crying softly, thanking God and calling him darling over and over again.
All that part of it was true, then. His father was there too.
He was wearing his uniform and looking very grim and pale. He came over to the bed now and said to Peter: `I'm proud of you. You made a good fight, old man …'
Peter wondered how his father knew about his battle with Dempsey and how when beaten and nearly dead he, Peter, had rallied and turned the tables on his terrible opponent. Surely his father had not been there. How was one to know or understand anything?
Peter raised one of his paws, his left one, and saw to his intense surprise that there were not sharp, curved claws at the end of it, but instead, five pink fingers. In amazement he moved them and then touched the fur of his injured right limb. But it was not fur at all he was feeling. It was rather something stiff and harsh, the texture of which he remembered-or would remember in a moment….
And then it came to him. It was tightly wrapped bandage.
Now he knew for certain. He was cat no longer, anywhere. He was all boy. And then, rushing, tumbling, cascading like water when the sluice-gates are opened, everything seemed to come flooding back to him: Scotch Nanny, the morning in the Square, the striped tabby kitten sunning itself by the park, his running across the street and Nanny's shriek; then the grinding bump and thud of the accident. And thereupon Peter burst into tears and cried and cried most bitterly, as though his heart would break.
He wept for many reasons, none of which he wholly understood: for his parting from Jennie Baldrin and the world in which she lived, the sense of loss of a beloved companion, fright due to what had happened, his present plight of finding himself in cast and bandages, but mostly, perhaps, his tears were shed because it was his first encounter with that depth of human sadness that comes with waking from a dream of aching and throat-catching beauty to find it already fading and the dear partner thereof lost beyond recall. For this it seemed to him, now that he was returned once and for all, had been the true substance of Jennie, and the long figment through which they had adventured together so gallantly and tenderly was done, and he was never to see her again.
There was a kind of commotion, and through his tears Peter saw that Scotch Nanny had come into the hospital room and now approached his bedside holding something in her arms, something that moved and struggled there. It was a black-and-white cat, a young one, barely out of the kitten stage, with lean, stringy flanks, three white feet and one black, and a queer black smudge just above the muzzle of its black-and-white face as though it had just dipped its nose in the inkpot.
Nanny was bending over him and trying to put it beside him, saying: `There, ma puir, bonny jo. Dinna ye greet so. Look ye, this wee poussie baudron's for ye tae keep for your ain.'
But Peter only turned his head and cried-'Take it away! I don't want it. I want Jennie Baldrin. Jennie, Jennie! Jennie!' and he would not leave off crying.
His mother knelt at his bedside, took him to her breast and laid her cheek to his and held him there in her arms gently and lovingly while she whispered
`There, there, my darling. Don't cry so, my dearest. Who was it you wanted? Was there someone? Tell your mother. You are safe here, my Peter. Oh, so safe. There is nothing I will not try to do to make you happy if you will just get strong and well once more. There now, my darling, see—nothing hurts any more . . .' and she kissed his tearstained eyes.
And for Peter, for an instant, it seemed as though Jennie had returned and had kissed him over the eyes as she used to do, and again he was filled with an overpowering sense of her presence, somewhere, everywhere, the dear, tender, loving spirit, the essence of her that remained to fill the awful gap of his loss of her and for which he had wept so bitterly. Yes, now he was certain. Jennie was gone, the sweet companion of his adventures. Her physical presence, the soft, gentle, yet wiry little furred body, the white feet with their telltale black underpads confirming her superior ancestry, the lightning speed and graceful carriage, the small aristocratic head, her luminous eyes and the peculiarly endearing expression of her face, these things he saw and remembered for the last time before they faded away and vanished, and in their stead left something that was neither memory nor dream nor fantasy but only a wonderfully soothing sense of homecoming, well-being and happiness.
It was true that nothing hurt any more, nothing at all, anywhere, not even the loss of Jennie Baldrin, for it seemed as though he had found her once and for all and would never again be wholly without her, now that she was all about him in the gentle, loving pressure of his mother's arms cradling him to her, the velvet of her fragrant cheek against his, the expression of her face and the soft touch of her lips to his eyelids.