ETCHINGS: COMFORT
(Edward Marshall: For Short Stories.)
She was not a pretty sight ... an old woman tottering under sixty years of poverty ... and now was the worst poverty of all. Her hand, which gathered a grimy plaid shawl at her throat, trembled ceaselessly from privation, and the vile liquor privation had brought. She was hungry; it seemed to her that she had never eaten. She was cold; it seemed to her that she had never known warmth.
She crept into a little hallway on the water front. The breeze from the river was not a strong one; but to her it was a hurricane. The drizzling rain hurt her. The minor tones of a bell from a ship at the near-by docks told that it was midnight. With inarticulate moans she crouched down in a corner, closing the door to keep out the wind and rain.
Something was in the corner, she felt it with her benumbed hands. It was soft and warm to her touch. A plaintive mew followed. The something was a cat. At first she rather resented its presence. Then she gathered it up in her arms and pressed it against the bosom of her ragged old dress. Here was a creature as miserable as she. It was only a cat, but she felt less lonely with it in her arms. When she had been a little girl she had had a pet kitten.
Each was cold—the cat and the woman—but each found some warmth in the other. The cat stopped mewing and the woman stopped moaning. The wind had shifted and the rain had ceased. The door swung open again and the moon hanging calmly beautiful among the clouds, shone through the tangle of masts and cordage and into the hallway.
The woman, crouched in the corner, held the cat as she would have held a child. By-and-by she began to rock slowly to and fro. The clouds drifted away, and the stars joined the moon in peeping through the door.
The woman’s eyes were closed and she was crooning an old-fashioned lullaby. The cat was very faintly purring and one of its paws rested on her bare neck. The moon sank slowly out of sight and new clouds obscured the stars.
When the policeman peered in the hallway just before daybreak, the woman and the cat were asleep.
And they are still sleeping.