And then a most strange thing happened, though perhaps not so strange at all when one considers. The black-and-white kitten in Nanny's arms, and which he had rejected, gave a little cry, and Peter heard her and understood.
He understood, and he knew-oh, not what she was actually saying, for with his return to being a boy all knowledge of the language of cats had been wiped from his memory as though it had never existed. But he recognized the wistful melody of the plaintive little mew, the cry of the waif, the stray, the unloved and the homeless that he had come to know so well. It was the forlorn and lonely heart begging to be taken to his own, there to be warmed and cherished.
In it, he felt, was contained all of the misery, hurt and longing he seemed to have known for so long, and, for a moment, harsh, vivid memories of things that had happened to him and places where he had been during his illness came back for the last time.
It was as though it was crying to him to be saved from those very terrors he had left behind him, the appalling fear engendered by finding oneself one small, helpless object loosed in a gigantic and overpowering world, the desperate hunger and thirst that surpassed any other, the yearning and the need to belong, to be loved, to be surpassingly important to someone. Hers was the call of the loneliness of the rejected, the outcast of the granite heart of the unheeding city.
For that instant, all the sights and sounds and smells were there again, the filthy cobbled streets, the running gutters, the terrifying shouts and cries and street noises, the crash and clatter of things being hurled at one, and the dreadful blind panic of endlessly fleeing. It was as though the cry of the waif had made it possible just once more for him to peer through the closing door into that other world he had left for ever, to see the shadowy four-footed figures slipping soundlessly from cover to cover in the streets of the hard city, standing on hind legs outlined against the faint silver cylinder of some dustbin to scavenge for a meal, or licking their wounds and sores in the shelter of a deserted ruin. And then it was gone. The door shut and he could see no more.
Again Peter heard the plaintive note of the black-and-white kitten, but now it no longer evoked the dark phantasms. It only went directly to his core. Why, why had he ever rejected her the first time? He could not seem even to remember that now as he focused his attention on the forlorn little animal. He felt only that he must have her now, that he loved her already.
'Oh, Nanny, give her to me, please. I want her …'
Nanny came back and placed the cat on his bed. She crawled at once on to Peter's chest, placed her head beneath his chin, as so many cats were to do all through Peter's later life, as though they knew and understood him at once as one of their own. And there it cuddled and started so loud and contented a purr that it seemed to shake the whole bed.
Peter lifted the good arm that he could still use and with the fingers that emerged from the ends of the bandage he gently stroked the kitten's head, rubbed the side of her cheek and scratched her under the chin, as though seemingly by instinct he knew all the things to do and places to touch to make a cat the most pleased and comforted.
The nondescript black-and-white purred louder and longer and more ecstatically, and moved her little body even closer and more lovingly to his neck and face in complete and worshipful surrender.
Peter's mother said: `Why she's a darling. What will you call her?'
Peter thought for a moment, searching his mind for what to call her. Surely there was something he had once heard or thought of should he ever have a cat, a name with which he had been so familiar and had known almost as well as his own.
He looked at his mother and then at the little stray again, and nothing, not so much as a faint echo, came welling up out of the past to aid him. Now he was not even sure that he ever had known a name.
But with the closing of the door had come a wonderful sense of peace and security. Behind it were locked all the dark terrors conjured up by his fantasies and his fears. He was afraid of nothing any longer, not the strange hospital room in which he found himself, or the dull ache of his injuries, or loneliness, or anything. It was as though during the long hours that he had been asleep and dreamed the dream that he could no longer remember, they had taken fear away from him and he could never again experience it in the same form as before. He felt that never in his life had he been quite so happy.
At last he said, speaking from the innocence and comfort that filled him now, `Oh, Mummy! Isn't she sweet! Look how she loves me. I shall call her Smudgie because of the black spot on her nose. And please, may she sleep with me?'
And he smiled up at all the people crowded around his bed.