This was the end of my second attempt to mate her, and since it had seemed successful, it was a greater disappointment than the first. Was it a confirmation of Chick's dark suspicion? Miss Canvey thought not: Tulip was a little narrow in the pelvis but seemed otherwise perfectly normal, she said. She was deeply apologetic and offered to try again in the autumn if I had no better prospects. But my mind was in as great a muddle as ever. I did not know, of course, what had gone on in the stable yard, for I had not been present; but it seemed to me on reflection that I had come pretty close to those stud practices which Chick had deprecated and I had intended to avoid. Miss Canvey was the kindest of women and a qualified vet; she must know far more about these things than I did; yet my questioning mind remained doubtful. Doubtful and now distressed. Call it "helped," call it what one would, my virgin bitch had been ravished, it seemed to me, without spontaneity, without desire, and I could not believe that that was right.
Then I came across a book, The Right Way to Keep Dogs, by Major R. C. G. Hancock, which formulated and confirmed all my suspicions. The importance of wooing in a bitch's sex life, he says, cannot be over-estimated. Though she will not consent to consummate the act of mating during the first week of her heat, "she is strongly attractive during this wooing period to all the males of the pack, who follow her in a hopeful procession, fighting amongst themselves from time to time to settle the primacy of approach. The result is that by the second week, when the bitch allows mating to take place, she had gone through a process of strenuous wooing, so that the ovaries have been stimulated to shed a large number of eggs into the womb, there to await fertilization." He then repeats much of what Chick had told me. "Only those familiar with the breeding technique of the present-day pedigree breeder will know how far their methods negate this natural certainty. The bitch is kept shut up during the week when she should be the object of constant wooing and stimulus by the male. On the day she is adjudged ready for mating, she is taken and held, often muzzled, while the precious stud dog, lest he be injured, is carefully lifted into position. Under these circumstances, with no love-making precedent to the act, both sexes are indolent in performance, eggs are few in number, and the male seed poor in quality and quantity. In many cases the 'tying' of the dog to the bitch is not effected because of this sexual indolence. No wonder the resulting litter is small or non-existent... If possible, let them have a run out together daily during the first week. When one or other parent has never mated before, this is particularly important to allow the subconscious instincts to organize themselves, and, by trial and error, the technique of mating becomes possible. I have seen many virgin males introduced to a bitch ready for mating, and the dog, though showing every sign of desire, just does not know what is expected of him."
Since these passages described, with an accuracy so startling that I wondered for a moment whether their author had been shadowing me, everything that had happened to Tulip, I could hardly do other than accept them as truth. If she was not barren I had simply muddled two of her heats away. Yet it was all very well! Reconsidering Major Hancock's counsel of perfection, how was I to organize a large pack of pedigree Alsatians to pursue and fight for her during the first week of her heat? And where was this interesting scene to be staged? No doubt it was a splendid idea, but difficult to arrange. Failing that, the implication seemed to be that if she had seen a good deal more of Max, Chum and Timothy from the beginning they would have stood a better chance. Well, perhaps ... But was it true to say that she had gone to any of them unwooed and unstimulated? Admittedly they had not wooed her themselves, but she had had the prior attention of quantities of Putney mongrels on all these occasions, so that if followers and their wooings fertilized the womb, hers should have been positively floating with eggs before she met any of her prospective mates.
Indeed, during this second wasted season, both before and after Timothy's failure, I had a lot of trouble with the local dogs, far more than I had had in the winter. Theoretically, Tulip was perfectly welcome, so far as I was concerned, to canine company at these times, so long as it was the right company. The right company depended upon the period. At the onset and decline of her estrus I did not mind what company she kept, for it seemed safe to assume that she was unconsenting, if not impenetrable, during the first six and last six days of her cycle at least. Even between these dates I was still willing to permit followers, so long as they were too small, or too old, or too young, to be able to give and obtain any satisfaction greater than flattery. I felt, indeed, extremely sympathetic towards Tulip's courtiers (I would have been after the pretty creature myself, I thought, if I had been a dog); she clearly enjoyed being pleasured by their little warm tongues, and I wished her to have as much fun as she could get. But theory and practice seldom accorded. The dogs were scarcely ever the requisite size and age; moreover, they constantly abused my hospitality by persecuting her and each other. And of them, it seemed to me now, the little dog, to whom hitherto I had felt especially well-disposed, was far more tiresome (at any rate when he was plural, which he usually was) than his larger brethren, more lecherous, more persistent, and more quarrelsome.
"They are like the little men," indignantly remarked a rather passée lady of my acquaintance to whom I recounted my woes; "always the worst!"
They took no hint, as the bigger dogs sometimes did, from the symbolic use of the lead when I kept Tulip on it, but sexually assaulted her at my very heels if they thought they could do so with impunity; and since there are degrees of littleness, it was often a question where to draw the line.
"Don't bank on physical improbabilities," someone had warned me. "Before you can say knife the blade is inserted!"
The determined hoppings and skippings of these dubious and pertinacious little creatures in particular, therefore, alarmed me when she was receptive and inconvenienced me in any case. It became quite a puzzle to know where to exercise her. Why exercise her at all at such a time? it may be asked—but only by those people who have never had my problem to contend with, the problem of confining an active, eager and importunate young bitch to a small London flat for three weeks. Difficult though it was to take her out, it was more exhausting and demoralizing to keep her in. This took on the terrible aspect of punishment, and how could I punish a creature for something she could not help and, moreover, when she herself was so awfully good? For even in heat Tulip gave me no trouble of any kind. Other bitches of my acquaintance, in a similar condition, whose owners had the resolution and the facilities—sheds, gardens, cellars —to shut them away out of sight and sound, were always on the watch for chances to escape, and sometimes found them, returning home only when they were pregnant and famished. But if I had opened my flat door to Tulip she would not have gone out of it alone,— if I had taken her down into the street and put her with her friends, she would have left them to follow me back upstairs. The only fault I could find with her was that she was apt to spread the news of her condition by sprinkling the doorstep on her way in and out (a dodge I noticed at this time too late to prevent it), which naturally brought all the neighboring dogs along in a trice to hang hopefully about the building for the rest of her season. This, if she had been a rational creature, she would have seen to be shortsighted, for her walks, which she valued even now above all else, became thereafter as harassed as are the attempts of film stars and other popular celebrities to leave the Savoy Hotel undetected by reporters.
In the kindness and weakness of my nature, therefore, I took her out once or twice every day, and, in consequence, I fear, punished and upset her more than if I had kept her in. Our objective was usually the towingpath, not more than five minutes' walk away, and if only we could reach it unsmelt and unseen, or with, at most, a single acceptable companion, it offered a reasonable chance of peace, for town dogs seldom roam far from human habitations by themselves and such as we might meet would probably be in the control of their owners. Stealth, therefore, was an essential preliminary to success. I would spy out the land from my
terrace, and, if the doorstep and Embankment approach to the towingpath were temporarily clear of enemy patrols, sally forth with Tulip on the lead (to prevent her from urinating again), exhorting her sotto voce to silence. For a single bark would undo us now: the locals, alerted for news of her, would come flying helter-skelter from all points of the compass. Bursting with excitement though she was, she was usually wonderfully intelligent over this, and would trot along soundlessly beside me, gazing up into my face for guidance. Now we were on the Embankment, and only five hundred apparently dogless yards separated us from our goal. How close the prize! How seldom attained! As though some magical news agency were at work, like that which was said to spread information among savage tribes, dogs would materialize out of the very air, it seemed, and come racing after or towards us. And what a miscellaneous crew they were! Some, like Watney, were so small that by no exertion or stroke of luck could they possibly achieve their high ambition; some were so old and arthritic that they could hardly hobble along; yet all deserted hearth and home and, as bemused as the rats of Hamelin, staggered, shuffled, hopped, bounced and skirmished after us so far that I often wondered whether those who dropped out ever managed to return home. And now what did one do, with a swarm of randy creatures dodging along behind with an eye to the main chance, of which they had the clearest view, snarling and squabbling among themselves for what Major Hancock calls the "primacy of approach," and provoking Tulip to a continual retaliation which either entangled my legs in the lead or wrenched my arm out of its socket?
I usually ended by doing two things. I released her from the lead, which, since she might be said to live always on a spiritual one, was more an encumbrance than an advantage. Then I lost my temper. For it was at this moment that her intelligence failed her. I would turn upon our tormentors with threatening gestures and shouts of "Scram!", but before the effect, if any, of this could be gauged, Tulip, always ready to please, would assist me as she thought by launching herself vehemently at her escort. This, of course, defeated my purpose. It was precisely what I did not want because it was precisely what they wanted. They did not take her onslaughts at all seriously and, one might say, could scarcely believe their good fortune at finding her in their midst. Yet, command and yell at her as I did, I could not make her see that all I required of her was that she should remain passively at my side. Poor Tulip! With her bright, anxious gaze fixed perpetually on my stern face striving to read my will, many a curse and cuff did she get for being so irrepressibly helpful! And how could she be expected to understand? Most of these dogs were her friends, with whom, a few days ago, she had been permitted, even encouraged, to hobnob; now apparently they were in disgrace, yet although I seemed angry with them and to desire their riddance, I was angry with her too for implementing my wishes.
The same thing happened, when, threats failing, I took to pelting the dauntless creatures with sticks and clods. Tulip, accustomed to having things thrown for her to retrieve, instantly flew off to retrieve them, and earned another, slap when she playfully returned with the stick in her mouth and sundry dogs clinging to her bottom. Whatever she did, in short, was wrong, and soon she herself was in such a state of hysterical confusion that she no longer knew what she did, but, with all the intelligence gone out of her eyes and succceded by a flat, insensitive, mad look, would jump up at me to seize the missile before I threw it, and even when I had nothing to throw, tearing my clothes or my flesh with her teeth. It was in these circumstances that she inflicted upon me the only bad bite she ever inflicted on anyone, as I have related earlier.
Most of our walks, therefore, ended in ill-temper, and I was thankful to get home where a self-operating elevator raised us safely out of reach of our oppressors whose baffled gaze observed our ascension from the doorstep. This elevator was a boon, for they had not the reasoning power to associate its upward trend with the staircase opposite; they were led entirely by the nose, and since there was no smell of Tulip on the stairs, which I was careful never to use while she was in this condition, they never used them either and, being unable to work the elevator or to rise above themselves in any other way, remained where they were. Ill-temper was then succeeded by remorse and anxiety. Apart from the injustice of the punishments I had awarded poor Tulip, might not these displays of rage and violence harm her in other ways, make her, for instance, aggressive where she had been friendly, so that she would continue to go for her own kind under the impression that this was what I wished her to do? In fact this did not happen, but I believe, from what I see of the effect of human folly on other dogs, that it might have done so if a solution to my difficulties had not at last been found.
IN THE MONTHS that followed this second failure to mate Tulip my mind was ceaselessly engaged in planning for the future, and soon I had three more suitors lined up for her, all belonging to people with leisure to afford them a proper courtship. I had not worked out the mechanics, but my intention was to let her make her own choice among these three. An unforeseen fate ruled otherwise.
The human emotions that brought about her change of residence from London to Sussex do not belong to this history, which concerns itself with the canine heart; but a few words of explanation are necessary. A cousin of mine, who had no fixed abode, had rented a bungalow in Ferring for the winter months. Aware that I had been looking in vain for holiday accommodation that would accept an Alsatian dog, she invited us down to stay. We went. Newly painted white with a broad blue band round it, like a ribbon round a chocolate box, "Mon Repos" was a trim little place. It had a garden fore and aft which my cousin, whose knowledge of gardening was slender to the point of invisibility, had undertaken to "keep up." The front one contained a rockery with flowering shrubs, among which were tastefully disposed figurines of the Seven Dwarfs. It was quite the prettiest bungalow in Witchball Lane. That we had not, however, been invited entirely disinterestedly soon appeared: my cousin confessed to being nervous of staying in "Mon Repos" alone.
Arguments were therefore advanced, when the end of my holiday approached, for prolonging a situation that suited her: Tulip was enjoying herself, it was nice for her to have a garden to play in, and the walks round about were superior to anything that Putney had to offer; she was looking better already for the change; why not leave her there to profit from the wonderful sea air and come down myself at weekends to join her? The value of sea air to canine health was an idea that had not occurred to me, but I saw that there was some small substance in the rest of the argument. On the other hand I did not want to be separated from Tulip throughout the week and believed that all her present amusements combined were as nothing to her anxiety not to be separated from me; nor had I the slightest inclination to make a railway journey to "Mon Repos" every weekend. But when women have set their hearts on something, the wishes and convenience of others are apt to wear a flimsy look; my own point of view, when I ventured it, was quickly dismissed as selfishness. I was sorry for my cousin and consented. I only stipulated that Tulip must be removed to London before her next heat, which was due in March. This was agreed to.
To recall the weeks that followed is no pleasure, but since this is the story of Tulip's love life they should not be passed over in silence. An alarm clock woke me at 6:45 every Monday morning,—I then had half an hour in which to get up and catch the bus at the top of Witchball Lane for the station a couple of miles away. Tulip, who slept always in my room, would get up too and follow me about as I tip-toed between bedroom, bathroom and kitchen. I knew, without looking at her, that her gaze was fixed unswervingly upon me, that her tall ears were sharp with expectation. I knew that, the moment she caught my attention, they would fall back as though I had caressed her, then spring up again while she continued to search my face with that unmeetably poignant inquiry in which faith and doubt so tragically mingled: "Of course I'm coming with you—aren't I?" Avoiding her eyes for as long as I could, I would go about my preparations; but the disappointing had to be done at last. As I picked up my bag in the bedroom, she would
make her little quick participating movement with me through the door, and I would say casually, as though I were leaving her for only a moment, "No, old girl, not this time." No more was needed. She would not advance another step but, as if the words had turned her to stone, halt where she was outside the bedroom door. Now to go without saying goodbye to her I could not, though I knew what I should see, that stricken look, compounded of such grief, such humility, such despair, that it haunted me all the journey up. "Goodbye, sweet Tulip," I would say and, returning to her, raise the pretty disconsolate head that drooped so heavily in my hands, and kiss her on the forehead. Then I would slip out into the darkness of Witchball Lane. But the moment the door had closed behind me she would glide back into our bedroom, which was on the front of the bungalow, and rearing up on her hind legs at the window, push aside the curtains with her nose and watch me pass. This was the last I would see of her for five days, her gray face, like a ghost's face, at the window, watching me pass.
The year turned, the date of our departure drew near, and my cousin's mind got busy, as I guessed it would, with the problem of obstructing it. She really could not see the necessity for taking Tulip away. Why should she not have her heat in Ferring?
My Dog Tulip Page 8
