MEMOIRS OF A YELLOW DOG

I don't suppose it will knock any of you people off your perch to read

a contribution from an animal. Mr. Kipling and a good many others

have demonstrated the fact that animals can express themselves in

remunerative English, and no magazine goes to press nowadays without

an animal story in it, except the old-style monthlies that are still

running pictures of Bryan and the Mont Pelee horror.

But you needn't look for any stuck-up literature in my piece, such as

Bearoo, the bear, and Snakoo, the snake, and Tammanoo, the tiger, talk

in the jungle books. A yellow dog that's spent most of his life in a

cheap New York flat, sleeping in a corner on an old sateen underskirt

(the one she spilled port wine on at the Lady Longshoremen's banquet),

mustn't be expected to perform any tricks with the art of speech.

I was born a yellow pup; date, locality, pedigree and weight unknown.

The first thing I can recollect, an old woman had me in a basket

at Broadway and Twenty-third trying to sell me to a fat lady.

Old Mother Hubbard was boosting me to beat the band as a genuine

Pomeranian-Hambletonian-Red-Irish-Cochin-China-Stoke-Pogis fox

terrier. The fat lady chased a V around among the samples of gros grain

flannelette in her shopping bag till she cornered it, and gave up. From

that moment I was a pet--a mamma's own wootsey squidlums. Say, gentle

reader, did you ever have a 200-pound woman breathing a flavour of

Camembert cheese and Peau d'Espagne pick you up and wallop her nose all

over you, remarking all the time in an Emma Eames tone of voice: "Oh,

oo's um oodlum, doodlum, woodlum, toodlum, bitsy-witsy skoodlums?"

From a pedigreed yellow pup I grew up to be an anonymous yellow cur

looking like a cross between an Angora cat and a box of lemons. But my

mistress never tumbled. She thought that the two primeval pups that Noah

chased into the ark were but a collateral branch of my ancestors. It

took two policemen to keep her from entering me at the Madison Square

Garden for the Siberian bloodhound prize.

I'll tell you about that flat. The house was the ordinary thing in New

York, paved with Parian marble in the entrance hall and cobblestones

above the first floor. Our fiat was three--well, not flights--climbs up.

My mistress rented it unfurnished, and put in the regular things--1903

antique unholstered parlour set, oil chromo of geishas in a Harlem tea

house, rubber plant and husband.

By Sirius! there was a biped I felt sorry for. He was a little man with

sandy hair and whiskers a good deal like mine. Henpecked?--well, toucans

and flamingoes and pelicans all had their bills in him. He wiped the

dishes and listened to my mistress tell about the cheap, ragged things

the lady with the squirrel-skin coat on the second floor hung out on her

line to dry. And every evening while she was getting supper she made him

take me out on the end of a string for a walk.

If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone they'd never

marry. Laura Lean Jibbey, peanut brittle, a little almond cream on the

neck muscles, dishes unwashed, half an hour's talk with the iceman,

reading a package of old letters, a couple of pickles and two bottles of

malt extract, one hour peeking through a hole in the window shade into

the flat across the air-shaft--that's about all there is to it. Twenty

minutes before time for him to come home from work she straightens up

the house, fixes her rat so it won't show, and gets out a lot of sewing

for a ten-minute bluff.

I led a dog's life in that flat. 'Most all day I lay there in my corner

watching that fat woman kill time. I slept sometimes and had pipe dreams

about being out chasing cats into basements and growling at old ladies

with black mittens, as a dog was intended to do. Then she would pounce

upon me with a lot of that drivelling poodle palaver and kiss me on the

nose--but what could I do? A dog can't chew cloves.

I began to feel sorry for Hubby, dog my cats if I didn't. We looked so

much alike that people noticed it when we went out; so we shook the

streets that Morgan's cab drives down, and took to climbing the piles

of last December's snow on the streets where cheap people live.

One evening when we were thus promenading, and I was trying to look like

a prize St. Bernard, and the old man was trying to look like he wouldn't

have murdered the first organ-grinder he heard play Mendelssohn's

wedding-march, I looked up at him and said, in my way:

"What are you looking so sour about, you oakum trimmed lobster? She

don't kiss you. You don't have to sit on her lap and listen to talk

that would make the book of a musical comedy sound like the maxims of

Epictetus. You ought to be thankful you're not a dog. Brace up,

Benedick, and bid the blues begone."

The matrimonial mishap looked down at me with almost canine intelligence

in his face.

"Why, doggie," says he, "good doggie. You almost look like you could

speak. What is it, doggie--Cats?"

Cats! Could speak!

But, of course, he couldn't understand. Humans were denied the speech of

animals. The only common ground of communication upon which dogs and men

can get together is in fiction.

In the flat across the hall from us lived a lady with a black-and-tan

terrier. Her husband strung it and took it out every evening, but he

always came home cheerful and whistling. One day I touched noses with

the black-and-tan in the hall, and I struck him for an elucidation.

"See, here, Wiggle-and-Skip," I says, "you know that it ain't the nature

of a real man to play dry nurse to a dog in public. I never saw one

leashed to a bow-wow yet that didn't look like he'd like to lick every

other man that looked at him. But your boss comes in every day as perky

and set up as an amateur prestidigitator doing the egg trick. How does

he do it? Don't tell me he likes it."

"Him?" says the black-and-tan. "Why, he uses Nature's Own Remedy. He

gets spifflicated. At first when we go out he's as shy as the man on the

steamer who would rather play pedro when they make 'em all jackpots. By

the time we've been in eight saloons he don't care whether the thing on

the end of his line is a dog or a catfish. I've lost two inches of my

tail trying to sidestep those swinging doors."

The pointer I got from that terrier--vaudeville please copy--set me to

thinking.

One evening about 6 o'clock my mistress ordered him to get busy and do

the ozone act for Lovey. I have concealed it until now, but that is what

she called me. The black-and-tan was called "Tweetness." I consider

that I have the bulge on him as far as you could chase a rabbit. Still

"Lovey" is something of a nomenclatural tin can on the tail of one's

self respect.

At a quiet place on a safe street I tightened the line of my custodian

in front of an attractive, refined saloon. I made a dead-ahead scramble

for the doors, whining like a dog in the press despatches that lets the

family know that little Alice is bogged while gathering lilies in the

brook.

"Why, darn my eyes," says the old man, with a grin; "darn my eyes if the

saffron-coloured son of a seltzer lemonade ain't asking me in to take

a drink. Lemme see--how long's it been since I saved shoe leather by

keeping one foot on the foot-rest? I believe I'll--"

I knew I had him. Hot Scotches he took, sitting at a table. For an hour

he kept the Campbells coming. I sat by his side rapping for the waiter

with my tail, and eating free lunch such as mamma in her flat never

equalled with her homemade truck bought at a delicatessen store eight

minutes before papa comes home.

When the products of Scotland were all exhausted except the rye bread

the old man unwound me from the table leg and played me outside like a

fisherman plays a salmon. Out there he took off my collar and threw it

into the street.

"Poor doggie," says he; "good doggie. She shan't kiss you any more. 'S a

darned shame. Good doggie, go away and get run over by a street car and

be happy."

I refused to leave. I leaped and frisked around the old man's legs happy

as a pug on a rug.

"You old flea-headed woodchuck-chaser," I said to him--"you moon-baying,

rabbit-pointing, egg-stealing old beagle, can't you see that I don't

want to leave you? Can't you see that we're both Pups in the Wood and

the missis is the cruel uncle after you with the dish towel and me with

the flea liniment and a pink bow to tie on my tail. Why not cut that all

out and be pards forever more?"

Maybe you'll say he didn't understand--maybe he didn't. But he kind of

got a grip on the Hot Scotches, and stood still for a minute, thinking.

"Doggie," says he, finally, "we don't live more than a dozen lives on

this earth, and very few of us live to be more than 300. If I ever see

that flat any more I'm a flat, and if you do you're flatter; and that's

no flattery. I'm offering 60 to 1 that Westward Ho wins out by the

length of a dachshund."

There was no string, but I frolicked along with my master to the

Twenty-third street ferry. And the cats on the route saw reason to give

thanks that prehensile claws had been given them.

On the Jersey side my master said to a stranger who stood eating a

currant bun:

"Me and my doggie, we are bound for the Rocky Mountains."

But what pleased me most was when my old man pulled both of my ears

until I howled, and said:

"You common, monkey-headed, rat-tailed, sulphur-coloured son of a door

mat, do you know what I'm going to call you?"

I thought of "Lovey," and I whined dolefully.

"I'm going to call you 'Pete,'" says my master; and if I'd had five

tails I couldn't have done enough wagging to do justice to the occasion.

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 744