The Conservative (Lovecraft)/July 1923/Felis
Felis
A Prose Poem
By Frank Belknap Long, Jun.
Oh, how delightful it is to stroke the sinuous hair of felicitous cats. Long, long ago I discovered that these happy creatures know more than Adam our father because they have never been tempted by the evil one, have never eaten of the forbidden fruit and have never fallen. I know that in their great, tearless, seductive eyes there lurk sinister secrets, preincarnate hieroglyphics which only the gods can fathom, secrets and signs which portend nothing but evil for man. And they are immortal; you cannot kill them. When the tiny sphere which certain weary seers have agreed to call the earth, for lack of a better name, shall have permitted itself to become cold through sheer ennui there shall yet remain the cats. They are immortal and shall live always, even as the old stone gods, even as the voluptuous Venus, even as the albine and implacable Oelphic Apollo. Long have I studied them, and I have become, in a degree, their slave. They have begun to exercise an unholy fascination over me and have even stolen into my dreams, into the secret chambers of my fancy. I shall always see them now whenever I dream, large, and sinewy and soft with prismatic eyes, scintillating eyes, vacillating eyes, eyes green and blue, and pale, washed-out yellow, like the mournful orbs of the melancholy Kakue bird of Paraguay who possesses the immortal soul of a negress. And in my dreams they climb over my arms and legs and purr and whine disconsolately. And when I reach out, fascinated, and smooth their long fur I experience a joy at once profound and awful——because their fur is soft and burns my fingers. There is something outré about their fur. I have seen great waste places entirely inhabited by cats. I have seen cats of all colors, of all shades, of all hues, and of every shape and size. I have seen skeleton cats and cats with elephantiasis and deformed and misshapen and dwarfed cats. I have seen cats that could talk and cats that could laugh and, yes, I have actually seen a cat who could dance. But whenever I dream of cats I see the spiced mummy of some august Pharaoh, or a skeleton rider carrying a scythe riding furiously around an ever widening circle or a radiant corpse swinging gracefully under a cloudless blue sky. When I walk the streets of our great cities I am haunted by cats. I see them everywhere, behind the smooth glass of costly limousines, on street corners, in the languid eyes of woman, by deserted waterfronts, in the smoke of a man’s pipe, on top of tall buildings, down dark and unfrequented alleys, and in the pale yellow light of the city’s gas lamps. Some day I shall drown in a sea of cats. I shall go down, smothered by their embraces, feeling their warm breath upon my face, gazing into their large eyes, hearing in my ears their soft purring. I shall sink lazily down through oceans of fur, between myriads of claws, clutching innumerable tails and I shall surrender my wretched soul to the selfish and insatiable god of felines.
