Reflections on a Black Cat (In Memory of Pluto)

She is a very fine Cat; a very fine Cat indeed!  
Photo: SA / 2020

I.

Ever since she first wandered into the house and, subsequently, my affection, this beautiful black cat has brought something greater than good luck or prosperity; something that might even be described as a form of solace.

Indeed, I'm now of the view that angels have whiskers rather than wings. Or that even shape-shifting demons can bring us comfort and companionship in times of great distress, far exceeding the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere man.

II.

Of course, I'm not the first to have noticed this, or to have a particular fondness for satanic black cats. Samuel Johnson, for example, was very attached to his feline companion, Hodge, and Edgar Allan Poe also owned a sable-furred familiar, which he described as "one of the most remarkable black cats in the world - and that is saying much; for it will be remembered that black cats are all of them witches".*

Poe also wrote a very disturbing short story entitled 'The Black Cat' (1843), featuring a pussy called Pluto; "a remarkably large and beautiful animal, entirely black, and sagacious to an astonishing degree", who sadly has the misfortune of having a drunken madman for an owner ...**

One night, the latter - who is also the narrator of the tale - comes home pissed out of his head as always, and takes umbrage at the fact that the cat is avoiding him. He tries to grab hold of the terrified creature, but the latter bites him. And so the man takes out a knife and, with the kind of sadistic cruelty that shamefully characterises humanity, cuts out one of the cat's eyes:

"The fury of a demon [had] possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame [...] I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity."

From that moment on, the animal understandably flees in terror at his master's approach. At first, the man, who, prior to this incident, had been very close to his cat - "Pluto was my favorite pet and playmate. I alone fed him, and he attended me wherever I went about the house" - feels deep remorse and regrets his cruelty. But this feeling gives way to irritation and a spirit of perverseness:

"Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart - one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?" 
 
Thus, one day, in cold blood, he takes poor Pluto into the garden and hangs him from a tree; tears streaming from his eyes, and with the bitterest remorse eating at his heart; "because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin - a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it [...] even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God."

Strangely, that same night his house catches fire, forcing the man and his wife to flee. Returning the next day to examine the smoking ruins, he discovers an image of a gigantic cat with a rope around its neck imprinted on the single wall still standing.

Poe could, I think, have ended the story here. But he doesn't. Continuing the tale, the narrator tells us how, some time later, still feeling guilty and beginning to miss Pluto, he adopts a similar looking cat - it even has an eye missing. However, he soon regrets doing so, as the animal merely amplifies his feelings of guilt and bad conscience:

"I soon found a dislike to it arising within me. This was just the reverse of what I had anticipated; but - I know not how or why it was - its evident fondness for myself rather disgusted and annoyed. By slow degrees, these feelings of disgust and annoyance rose into the bitterness of hatred. I avoided the creature; a certain sense of shame, and the remembrance of my former deed of cruelty, preventing me from physically abusing it. I did not, for some weeks, strike, or otherwise violently ill use it; but gradually - very gradually - I came to look upon it with unutterable loathing, and to flee silently from its odious presence, as from the breath of a pestilence."

Then, one day, the cat gets under his feet causing him to nearly fall down the cellar stairs. Enraged, the man grabs an axe with the intention of killing Pluto 2. He is stopped from doing so by his wife - which is good for the cat, but bad for the woman, as, in vexed frustration and possessed by evil thoughts, he vents his murderous rage on her instead, burying the axe deep in her brain: "She fell dead upon the spot, without a groan."

He decides to conceal the body behind a brick wall in the cellar - "as the monks of the middle ages are recorded to have walled up their victims" -  rather than bury it in the garden, for example, and run the risk of being seen by nosy neighbours.

Unfortunately, in his haste to dispose of the body, he accidently entombs the cat and when the police come to investigate the woman's reported disappearance and search his house ... Well, you can guess what happens: a loud, inhuman wailing - "half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell" - gives the game away. Tearing down the wall, the police discover the rotting corpse of the wife and the howling black cat sitting atop the body. 

Poe's tale, then, is in part a revenge fable; the revenge of the feline object. And the narrator not only deserves his fate on the gallows, but to be denied his place in heaven which, as Robert A. Heinlein once remarked, is determined by how we behave toward cats here on earth ...


Notes

* Edgar Allan Poe, 'Instinct Versus Reason - A Black Cat', in Alexander's Weekly Messenger, vol. 4, number 5, (Jan 29, 1840), p. 2. Click here to read online.

** 'The Black Cat' was first published in the August 19, 1843, issue of The Saturday Evening Post. It can be found in vol. 2 of The Works of Edgar Allan Poe (The Raven Edition) and read online courtesy of Project Guttenberg: click here. 

For further reflections on the figure of the black cat, click here.