The Story of Jennie- or the Abandoned Read Free

‘It's only another stray, a big white tom. Where do they all come from? You never get a minute's rest with their yowling and caterwauling. Ah there! Boo! Scat! Shoo! Go 'way!'
    The boy who delivered the evening newspapers came by on his bicycle, and hearing the shouting to scare away the cat outside the door decided to assist him in the hope of earning a tip.
    He rode his bicycle straight at Peter, crying, 'Oi! Garn! Scat! Get along there!' and then, leaning from the saddle, struck Peter across the back with a folded-up newspaper. Peter ran blindly from this assault, and a moment later, with a roar and a rumble, something enormous and seemingly as big as a house went by on wheels, throwing up a curling wave of muddy water that struck him in the flank as he scampered down the Mews into Cavendish Square, soaking right through his fur to the skin underneath.
    He had not yet had time even to look about him and see what kind of a world this was into which he had been so rudely and suddenly catapulted. It was like none he had ever encountered before, and it struck terror to his heart.
    It was a place that seemed to consist wholly of blind feet clad in heavy boots or clicking high heels, and supplied with legs that rose up out of them and vanished into the dark, rainy night above, all rushing hither and thither, unseeing and unheeding. Equally blind but infinitely more dangerous were wheels of enormous size that whizzed, rumbled or thundered by always in twos, one behind the other. To be caught beneath one of those meant to be squashed flatter than the leopard-skin rug in their living-room.
    Not that the feet weren't of sufficient danger to one in the situation in which Peter now found himself, cowering on the wet, glistening pavement of the square, standing on all fours, and not quite ten inches high. Eyeless, and thus unable to see where they were going, the shoes came slashing and hurtling by from all directions, and no pair at the same pace.
    One of them stepped on his tail, and a new and agonizing pain he had never felt before shot through Peter and forced an angry and terrified scream from his throat. The foot that had done this performed an odd kind of slithering and sliding dance with its partner for a moment, while down from the darkness above thundered a voice: `Dash the beast! I might have broken my neck over him. Go on! Clear out of here before somebody hurts himself!'
    And the partner foot leaped from the pavement and flung itself at Peter's ribs and shoulders where it landed a numbing blow.
    In sheer terror Peter began to run now, without knowing where he was going or what the end was to be.
    It seemed as though suddenly all London had become his enemy, and everything that formerly had been so friendly, interesting and exciting, the sounds, the smells, the gleam of lights from the shop windows, the voices of people and the rush and bustle of traffic in the streets all added to the panic that began to grip him.
    For while he knew that he still thought and felt like and was Peter, yet he was no longer the old Peter he used to know who went about on two legs and was tall enough to be able to reach things down from over the fireplace without standing on tiptoes. Oh no. That Peter was gone and in his place was one who was running on all fours, his ears thrown back and flattened against his head, his tail standing straight out behind him, dashing wildly, hardly looking or knowing where he was going through the rain swept streets of London.
    Already he was far from his own neighbourhood or anything that might have looked familiar, and racing now through brightly lighted and crowded thoroughfares, now through pitch-black alleys and crooked lanes. Everything was terrifying to him and filled him with fear.
    There was, for instance, the dreadful business of the rain.
    When Peter had been a boy he had loved the rain and had been happiest when he had been out in it. He liked the feel of it on his cheeks and on his hair, the