The Blue Cat of Castle Town

by Catherine Cate Coblentz

  But — there was the barn cat, head and shoulders filling the round. She was looking at him proudly. “I came to see you off,” she said. “And to wish you luck. Only a blue cat would dare depart in this weather.”

  “Thank you. Thank you very much.” The blue cat spoke a trifle stiffly. Whether it was from pride or cold, he could not have said.

  “I do hope you find that song,” said the barn cat.

  “Err — the song. Yes, I must find the song,” answered the blue cat with a shiver. And he started off carefully in the path Zeruah had made. He did not look back again until he had followed the snowy lane down to the road. From there he did look back. But all he saw were his own tracks in the snow. They made a lonely, meandering trail.

  But along the road, the sleigh runners had smoothed a hard and even path, so he found the going much easier. And the sun did feel warmer. After a bit he even found himself purring hopefully. It was good to be on the way to Castle Town. There surely he would find the song. Then his special task would be to discover the mortal who would learn it. Perhaps every cat had a special task. Being, as he had definitely decided, only an ordinary cat, he could not be certain of this. But no matter. He had such a task. He felt it in his bones!

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THOMAS ROYAL DAKE, THE CARPENTER

  So ALONG the wind-swept, snow-filled road, the blue cat came back to Castle Town, seeking the song he had lost.

  But, hunt as he would in every snow bank, bending one ear and then the other earthward, he could find no trace, no least echo of that which he sought. It had frozen hard in the ground, and if he did not find it before it was too late, it would melt with the snow. It would disappear into the earth itself, to nourish the grass and the flowers, perchance the very weeds of Castle Town.

  As the blue cat stalked desperately up one side of the road and down the other, he heard men and women in that town talking excitedly of Arunah Hyde, and telling one another how wonderful it would be to have Castle Town the center of the Universe.

  “You will see, under Arunah’s planning, there will be excitement every minute. Stages rushing in — more and more of them, filled with important people, and plenty of gold and power for all of us.”

  “There will be a big bank and I shall become trustee,” gloated one.

  “Trustee! Pah, I shall become Senator of Vermont. Later I shall go to Washington and press laws through Congress which will make Arunah, and all of us, still richer,” said another.

  “I,” said a third, “shall build the most showy house in the valley. It will have tall pillars like Arunah’s Mansion House. Only my house will outshine every other.”

  “By jub,” added a fourth. “Houses are nothing. I shall count hill after hill white with sheep. And meadows red with cattle. And all the sheep and the cattle shall be mine! Mine!”

  Gold and power and possessions. And the sound of Arunah’s song swelling louder and louder, a loud song echoing from one end of Castle Town to the other. While an unnoticed, lean and hungry cat searched in vain.

  “I, too, had a song — once,” mewed the blue cat. But no one listened to that mew. There were other and more exciting matters to attend to.

  At last came a day when the blue cat lost all hope of finding the song. He came and sat on the stones at the edge of the well in the village green. The green itself was still snow-covered, but the well was fed by deep springs which never froze, and the stones at its edge were bare and warmed a bit by the sun. The cat was grateful even for the warmth of those stones.

  He did not look over the edge of the well to admire himself. He did not admire himself in his own mind. He sat there and thought.

  He had lost the song. He had failed in the quest. He had left his task uncompleted. It was a sad, sad time. And the blue cat was not only sad. He was quite ashamed. He wove a little silence about himself and stayed still in the center of that silence.

  Behind him a new church stood on the village green. During his search through Castle Town he had noticed day after day workmen passing in and out. The sound of the hammer and saw had been comforting. After a time the number of workmen decreased. This day only a single man had come early and entered the church. After he entered no sound of hammer or saw came forth. Only a great silence filled the church, and this at length crept out, down the steps and over the village green to the well. There it folded up and put away the little silence with which the blue cat had surrounded himself.

  The blue cat felt a prickling from his ears to his paws and tail, for he had never known such a great silence. He was, being a blue cat, still curious about all manner of things, so he decided he must find out for himself what was happening inside that church. He scrooched low, his belly almost touching the snow, and crept like a blue shadow over the village green, closer and closer.

  At the steps one by one his paws came up. He was on the first step. Then the second. And the third. Until — he was on the church portico — was slipping beneath the tall columns of wood, newly painted and shining white — through the little vestibule.

  The great silence held. One cat’s nose, one amber eye, one pink-lined ear moved slowly around a door. And then the whole of the blue cat’s head.

  He saw the man who had entered alone sitting in the front pew. That pew faced a great and empty arch, an arch which the cat saw later was centered between two doors, in one of which he was now standing. The man was looking at the empty arch.

  The blue cat came into the church and looked at the arch too, though he saw nothing but empty space. Yet, as he watched, the man began bending his head this way and that. There were questioning lines on his forehead. His brown eyes — the color of a new plowed field — questioned, and even his lips were puckered. Every now and then he lifted his hand — roughened and worn by work — and ran it back and forth through brown hair that had ripples in it — ripples like the river — thought the cat. The cat’s tail waved with pleasure as he thought of the word “river.” But that was all. No further memories followed the word.

  “Mew?” said the cat. The mew was a question.

  The man looked down and smiled. It had been a long time since anyone had smiled at the blue cat. The cat responded instantly. He drew himself into a ball and jumped as lightly as a feather to the man’s knee. There he too turned and looked at the arch. Then he looked back at the puzzled face above him. “Mew?” he asked once more.

  The man laid his hand on the cat’s head. “I am trying to see the pulpit I shall build there, blue cat,” he explained. “But what kind of pulpit can I build for two hundred and fifty dollars? Not that much really. For there’s my pay to come out, a dollar and a half for every day.”

  Money again, thought the blue cat. Just like Arunah! But only a dollar and a half a day. The man hasn’t learned much. Arunah talked of thousands, and never mentioned anything less than gold.

  Man and cat continued to sit on the front pew, the man still staring at the archway, the cat staring first at the archway and then at the man. And all at once the questioning lines disappeared as by magic from the man’s face, and a quiet happiness came there instead. His eyes were alive at something which he alone could see. His mouth broke into a smile of pleasure. The blue cat was impressed. Perhaps, here in the silence, he would find something kindred to what the man beside him had found. Perhaps here he would find the song he had lost.

  But in a trice the mighty silence was torn asunder. In tatters it lay on the floor. Then it was gone like the song which the blue cat had lost in the autumn. There was a stamping of feet on the steps, a kicking of boots against the door jamb to remove the snow, a clearing of throats and a shuffling in the vestibule. And through the other door — the one the cat had not used — came four men.

  “Ah,” said the man on the front pew. “The Building Committee!” And under his breath, “What a help they will be!” Slowly he stood up. It was clear to the cat that the man was not at all eager to see the visitors. Observing this, the cat at once took his stand beside h
im.

  “We would like to have the church finished,” said one who walked ahead of the others. The cat had seen the speaker often enough with Arunah.

  “Have you decided,” he went on, “how you will build the pulpit?”

  The rest of the Committee nodded and frowned at the empty space. The man to whom he spoke hesitated.

  The speaker saw the cat at this moment, and would have clouted him with his cane. But the man beside the cat stepped quickly in front of his small companion.

  “This is God’s house. The cat is God’s creature,” he said.

  “More likely the devil’s.”

  “There are dark goings-on in Castle Town. In this, at least, we are agreed.” And as though echoing the words, there was the sound of one of Arunah’s stages dashing by. Above the jingle of harness bells sounded the oaths of the driver, the crashing of his whip, a single terrified scream of a horse as the lash bit his frosted skin. That scream filled the empty church, clashing against the eardrums. The Building Committee looked at the ceiling or out the windows at the bare branches against the sullen winter sky. Not one man looked at another. The eyes of everyone were afraid.

  When the last sound was gone the Committee turned to stare at the empty arch. “Come, Dake, make up your mind,” urged the one who had spoken first.

  “I have been thinking quietly this morning,” said the man called Dake, lifting his eyes to the arch. “And I have decided I would like to make the most beautiful pulpit in all Vermont for this church. For a moment I could see how beautiful that pulpit could be — the very peace of a forest set in a church. White pine, of course, for the pulpit, first growth, clear. With rails of wild black cherry, seasoned well and polished, sweeping …”

  “Such a pulpit will cost more money, I know.” The cat noticed for the first time that the speaker, having laid down his cane, kept opening and closing his hands in the same clutching fashion that Arunah had used so much. “Always more money. We have spent altogether too much on this church already. Far more than we planned.”

  “It is the House of God,” said the workman.

  “There should be reason and economy in all things,” declared the other.

  “Yes! Yes! Reason and economy! Especially economy!” echoed the rest of the Building Committee.

  “But such a pulpit as I am thinking of would not only be beautiful. It would fill you with peace and content every Sunday. It would keep a man humble, and would help him face sorrow and death. It would lift his soul on wings to God himself.”

  “You talk like a minister, Thomas Dake,” said the man whom the cat had seen so often with Arunah. “You should remember you are only a carpenter.”

  The blue cat blinked, as the words echoed in his memory. “Only a carpenter!” Why, it was a carpenter to whom he must go. It had something to do with the song — the song he had lost. He blinked again with discouragement. For his memory still refused to serve him.

  “You should not presume to tell the Committee how to build its church, or how much to pay for its pulpit,” warned the man with the clutching hands.

  “I have built the rest of the church as the Committee wanted it,” answered the man who was only a carpenter. “The design is in some ways overmuch like the old one, where the quarreling and bickering in this town began. And where economies toward God began too. So that the old church soon began falling to pieces and was from the first unsafe.

  “This church has been built well and strong. I myself chose the very trees to go into its framework and helped to fell them. The walls stand, and will stand, four square to Heaven.

  “Can I not,” the carpenter was almost pleading, “can I not make this pulpit as it should be made? Make it perfect to the glory of God?”

  “Certainly, if you do not spend more than two hundred and fifty.”

  “You agreed to do it for that, you know.”

  “If you can’t make a profit for yourself, that is not the Committee’s fault.”

  The words came thick and fast from one and another.

  “You might,” said the man who was much with Arunah, “you might skimp more on material. Brown paint, for instance, instead of polished wood. What’s the difference?”

  “Or put in longer days.”

  “Or …”

  “Never mind,” said the carpenter. “I’ll work it out.” As he spoke the cat blinked. For the carpenter seemed to grow taller and more commanding. Even the Committee sensed the change.

  The first speaker put in meekly. “Yes, Mr. Dake.” His clutching hands fell listless and hung open at his sides. One of the others picked up his cane. Mufflers were wrapped about scrawny necks, coats were buttoned tightly.

  The Committee departed. But the great silence which had drawn the cat in the first place was no longer in the church.

  “Let’s go home.” It was the first time the blue cat had ever received such an invitation. Small wonder he trotted out proudly at the carpenter’s heels. He forgot about being tired and hungry. He forgot for a little his grief and dismay over the song he had lost. He thought only of the words, “Let’s go home.”

  Along Castle Town’s wide street, where the snow still sparkled in the late winter sun, they went to the middle of the town. And then along a side road leading south. Just as the cat was getting a trifle wobbly, the carpenter stooped and lifted him in his arms. He cradled him comfortably there, as though he was accustomed to holding children.

  They stopped at length where a white picket fence with arched gates framed a snow-covered yard, patterned with footprints. In the center of that yard was a house. It was a simple house, with a white portico over its low steps, but the portico repeated exactly the line of the three arches over the gates in the white fence. The carpenter stroked the cat. “This is the home of my Sally,” he said. “I made it beautiful for her.” And suddenly the blue cat saw that the house with its welcoming portico was beautiful, so beautiful that even he felt a deep satisfaction just from looking at it.

  Then the door opened and Sally was framed there — Sally with a light in her eyes and welcome on her lips, a flock of children dancing about her. The color of Sally’s dress matched the blue of her eyes. Her hair was the color of the sun. There were mischievous tendrils curling in a fine mist about her face, but the rest of her hair was drawn back smoothly and lay in a twisted knot at her neck. Her apron was fresh and white, and in her hand was a wisp of sewing, white like the apron.

  “Sally,” exclaimed the carpenter, “I had to come home to talk to you.”

  Sally gestured to the children, and with a whoop they were off to the brookside. Here the waters had broken through their winter covering and sang a new song of freedom as they hurried along.

  The cat was deposited neatly on the steps, where he watched the two people before him, his ears bent forward to catch every word.

  “Hear the brook,” said the carpenter. “It was never so loud. And look at the meadow.” He gestured toward the rising land across the road from the house. There the snow had been blown or had sifted away and brown patches of earth were already showing promise of green. Upward the meadow swept, slowly losing itself in the blue-shadowed hills.

  “Did God cheat when he made that meadow, Sally?” he asked. “Did He count cost in fashioning those hills? Did He use second-rate materials and work fewer hours? Did He?”

  Sally looked puzzled. Then her brow cleared. “God is not mocked, Thomas Royal.”

  The blue cat flicked his tail as he recognized the name which the river had uttered. “His father insisted on Royal. That,” said the river, “is a term applied to kings.”

  “Why did you call me Royal?” asked the carpenter.

  “It is your name. When you have that look in your eyes, I must call you so.” Sally waited quietly for a moment, her eyes on her husband’s face. “I would not love you so much, Thomas Royal,” she said, “did I not know that you always live up to the name.”

  Long after Sally had gone into the house, and the children had
disappeared around a bend of the brook, the blue cat sat with Thomas Royal Dake on the stone steps under the portico.

  The man’s eyes were on the meadow sloping upward. But the cat knew he was seeing, not the meadow, but the empty arch in the church. At length his brows cleared. There was a deep gentleness in his eyes, and the cat knew he was thinking too of Sally.

  Slowly, hesitantly the man began to sing. Then more and more confidently. The sound of the waters slipping beneath the snow was there, the triumph of the brook freed from its winter prison, the lifting slope of the meadow, the everlasting strength of the hills.

  “Sing your own song, said the river,

  Sing your own song.

  “Out of yesterday song comes.

  It goes into tomorrow,

  Sing your own song.

  “With your life fashion beauty,

  This too is the song.

  Riches will pass and power. Beauty remains.

  Sing your own song.

  “All that is worth doing, do well, said the river.

  Sing your own song.

  Certain and round be the measure,

  Every line be graceful and true.

  Time is the mold, time the weaver, the carver.

  Time and the workman together,

  Sing your own song.

  “Sing well, said the river. Sing well.”

  And the blue cat, sitting tall and straight beside the carpenter on the steps beneath the portico, felt the song slipping into his ears, along his backbone and tingling even the tips of his paws and the end of his tail — the tail where every single hair was blue!

  The cat heard the song and felt the song in the depth of his being. Then his heart answered, and suddenly the cat realized what had happened. Here was the song he had lost!

  Here from the carpenter’s lips was lifting the song of the river, the ancient song of creation which was as old as the world itself. For the Creator of All Things was the first to sing it. This was the song which he, the blue cat, must sing until he found a mortal who would not only listen but would sing it also.