CHAPTER VI
SALLY AND THE CLOCK
What Sally missed more than anything in her restricted life in the house was trees. There was something that was called a hat-tree in the hall, but it was a poor thing with no branches and merely a series of pegs, on which some garments hung at times. And in the parlor there was a very tall tree that Miss Harvey called a palm, that was no good for climbing purposes, because it was so slimsy. Sally could not see why Miss Winifred did not have an oak tree instead, for there were plenty of them around the Wild Wood and one of them would never be missed. If there had never been cats living here before, Sally could have understood it, but there had been so many living here. Her great-great-grandmother, Martha Furbush-Tailby, had lived here, and her great-grandfather, William Furbush-Tailby, had been born in the house. She should have supposed Miss Winifred would have wanted to make things comfortable for them.
Sally and Oxford Gray, Junior, took to climbing Elvira and Miss Harvey as a substitute for trees. They preferred Elvira when she was in a friendly mood because she was so much taller, but she occasionally made disrespectful remarks, and said such words as ‘You little rascals, you little villains, you’ve torn my apron.’ Miss Harvey, on the other hand, seemed to understand, and not to mind the sudden surprise of a kitten running up her dress and landing on her shoulder and then pulling a comb out of her hair.
‘The poor little dears, they have no trees to climb,’ she would say. ‘They’ll be all right as soon as they are so used to the house that they will not run away if we let them out.’
There was another thing Sally could not understand. It did not seem at all reasonable to her that on cold days in June, when the house felt damp, there was no fire in the furnace. She had learned that the registers were places where heat came up in the winter. But why not have a furnace fire in summer when it was cold? Certainly cats could run a house much better than people if they had the chance.
Although Miss Winifred had not been thoughtful enough to make mantelpieces wide enough for two kittens to walk there together, Sally did not by any means give up her desire to explore such delightful walks. In the kitchen the clock on a small shelf had a pointed roof and that in the dining-room had an ornament on top of it, but the parlor clock had a flat roof, so to speak, and Sally was sure it would be a grand place to sit and see the world from a high place, just as people saw it, for the top of the clock was only a little lower than Miss Harvey’s head. There were no candlesticks on this mantelpiece and the small ornaments were so placed as to leave plenty of room for a cat. There were two routes to the desired spot, one was by a low bookcase which could be reached by a chair, and the other, by the way of the piano. This Sally decided would be the best, for one of her favorite seats was the piano, which could be easily reached by a chair.
Miss Harvey was reading aloud to Miss Winifred at the time. She had found that Sally was such a good kitten and stepped so daintily that she let her go wherever she liked. So she climbed from a chair to the piano and then gave a leap to the mantelpiece, and then she got up on top of the clock. She found it a comfortable seat, and it was fine to be so high up, for she could look down on the heads of dear Miss Harvey and Miss Winifred, who really wasn’t a bad sort, except for her feet that were always getting in one’s way. The room looked very different now she was so high up. This must be the way it looked to people, with the rug very far off and no one noticing the table legs. She was in no hurry to get down from her high perch, so she sat there a long time washing her face.
‘Look at Sally!’ said Miss Harvey.
Miss Winifred put on her glasses.
Just then a singular thing happened that gave Sally a scare. Something inside the clock went off. She had heard clocks strike before, of course, but never when she was so near. It was the loudest thing she had ever heard. ‘One, two, three’—by this time the frightened Sally was off the clock and on the mantelpiece, preparing to give a flying leap to the piano, but her curiosity overcame her fear, and she looked behind the clock to see if she could find out where the noise came from. ‘Four, five, six’—by this time she was on the piano again. Would the thing never stop? Had she set something going by being on top of it? ‘Seven, eight.’ That was all. She hoped she had not ruined it. But of one thing she was sure. She would never try to view the world again from the top of the parlor clock.