NEFERT

(April 1914)

My lovely little cat Nefert, whom I had in Switzerland,
when I lived there with my mother during the last years of her
life, was gathered to the shades, some decade and a half ago, or
even twenty years ago. Shades? The familiar siren wails, just
as I am comfortably in bed. It is a horrible reminder and never
fails in its effect. Simply, the mind asks, is this my last
night on earth? Life did not seem so splendid in the lotus-
years after the last war, those "lost" years as many of the last
war generation, have come to call them. But now life has a new
occultation, a new phase; we want (through curiosity, through
some new-sensed will-to-live) to see around the corner; having
endured, more than a hundred violent raid-nights, (roughly
three hundred raids in all, they tell us, up to date) we want
some reward, I suppose for this endurance. We don't want to die
to-night. Not this way, not in the uncertainties, questioning,
will I be burnt to death? will I suffocate? will I fall through
my own floor? will my own wall fall on me? We ask ourselves
these questions, we don't dodge these possibilities. This way
madness lies or does not lie. The nightmare is outside.

Nefert is an Egyptian word and means beautiful. So beauty

2.

manifested in my dream in the form of my little cat, not much
more than a kitten. She is prowling about Bee's room and I
wrap her in a bright figured handkerchief, that I had bought in
Vienna, many years ago. I put her in a bag a friend brought me
from a cruise, and take her into the front room, where I leave
her under the piano, while I go out to the kitchen to get her
milk. I shake her out of the bag and am horrified and alarmed
to find that during my very short absence, she has had kittens.
Two perfectly marked tiny Siamese kittens sit on the Vienna
handkerchief, they have the perfect black martin-tanked mask of
the mother; this is frantically upsetting, somehow. I am terri-
bly distressed to think of my little cat having had these kittens.

This upsets me so much. Bee and the brilliantly intellectual
Elfrida come in. I try to communicate to them my feeling and
they are kind but only vaguely interested. They seem more inter-
ested in a card-game they are about to play. A game! I suppose,
in my dream, I am feeling that there is a gap in consciousness,
they are both brilliant and active, but I feel (I must feel, in
my dream) inferior, in some way. The backs of the cards have a
pattern of gallants in an old-fashioned garden. I seem to want
to make doubly sure that this is a game, that their life, (which
actually I admire and envy) is indicated on the back of the playing
cards as well by the cards themselves. I seem to want to stress

3.

the fact that all this brilliance that I so admire and this
success, is a game. They are playing a game with cards that have
a scene of light-hearted amusement on their backs. They do not
seem unsympathetic but I know they do not realize what a shock
this has been, my little cat has had kittens.