Page 8 - Edgar Allan Poe

when I prepared to go home, the animal proved to be willing to accompany me. I let him do it, bending over once in a while, to caress him on the street. When he was at home he immediately domesticated and immediately became my wife's favorite. For my part, I soon began to find it highly obnoxious. This was a result that I certainly didn't expect, quite the opposite! What undoubtedly increased my hatred for the animal was to find out, the morning after having brought it home, that like Pluto it lacked an eye. That circumstance did nothing but make it dearer to my wife who, as I have already said, possessed to a high degree that humanity of feeling which had previously also been one of my characteristics and the source of my simplest and purest enjoyments. . However the cat's affection for me seemed to grow because of my aversion to him. He followed my steps with an obstinacy that would be difficult to make the reader understand. Every time I sat down, he would lie down under my chair or jump on my knees, covering me with his hated caresses. If I got up to walk, I put myself between my legs at the risk of falling for myself, or, stretching my clothes with its long, sharp claws, climbed up to my chest. In those moments I wanted to deal him with some mortal blow, but I held back, partly because of the memory of my first crime, and mainly - let me confess it immediately - for a real terror that the beast inspired me. This terror was not really a physical evil, but I wouldn't know how to define it otherwise. I am ashamed to confess it, yes, even in this cell of an evildoer I am ashamed to confess that the terror and horror inspired by that animal had increased from one of the most chimerical chimeras that it is possible to conceive. More than once my wife had called my attention to the character of that white spot which was the only visible difference between the strange beast and the one I had killed. The reader will remember that the stain, though large, on the beginning had been very undefined; but, to very slow degrees, to almost imperceptible degrees so that my reason for a long time strove to consider the thing as imaginary, the stain had taken a rigorous sharpness of contours. Now he represented an object that I shudder to name; and it was above all for this that I hated and I feared that monster, of which I would have been freed if I had dared: it represented a horrible thing, left, a gallows! Oh! lugubrious and terrible tool, a thing of horror and of crime, of agony, and of death! And now, I was really unhappy beyond all possible human misery. A brute beast, of whom I had scornfully killed the like, had to be a cause to me, a man made in the image of the most high God, of so much despair? Alas! Under the weight of such torments, the little good that had remained in me succumbed. The evil thoughts were my only companions, the darkest and most wicked, imaginable. The sadness of my habitual mood was exacerbated to the hatred of all things and of all humanity; my wife, who, alas, never complained, was the most patient victim of the sudden, frequent and indomitable outbursts of anger to which I now abandoned myself blindly.