"Because I've fixed up her love affairs in Putney."
"None of your dogs could possibly be as good as Mountjoy, and Mrs. Tudor-Smith is frightfully keen on the marriage."
This was a high card. Mountjoy belonged to some people a little further down Witchball Lane. He was an Alsatian of such ancient and aristocratic ancestry that Mrs. Tudor-Smith had been heard to declare that his genealogy went back even further than her own. She had paid as much as a hundred guineas for the privilege of possessing him. He gave, indeed, in his appearance and manners, so instant a conviction of the bluest of blood that it would have been both superfluous and impertinent to ask to see his pedigree. More like a lion than a dog, with his magnificent tawny coat and heavy ruff, he was often to be viewed in the grounds of the bungalow in which he resided, or just outside its gates, standing always in the classic attitude as though he had invented it. Perpetually posing, it seemed, for cameras that were his customary due and were doubtless somewhere about, he gave the impression not so much of looking up or down Witchball Lane as of gazing out over distant horizons. He had neither any objection nor any wish to be stroked; he accepted caresses from strangers in the aloof manner in which a king might receive tribute from his subjects; when he felt he had done his duty by the human race, he would stalk majestically back into the house; and if he had ever emitted any sound louder than a yawn I had not heard it, certainly nothing so coarse as a bark. But it was not on account of his nobility that he was more advantageous than my Putney dogs,—I was not greatly interested in the canine Debrett—, it was simply that his situation with regard to Tulip made everything far easier. To get one animal to the other was a matter of only a minute's walk; they were already on friendly terms and often in each other's company.
I hesitated. Cashing in on this, my cousin added:
"If you want a second string, Colonel Finch says you can have Gunner whenever you like."
During my weekends in Ferring I had met many of its dogs and their owners, and although Gunner was a far less impressive card than Mountjoy, he too was an Alsatian and therefore eligible for Tulip's hand. Gunner was an unlovable dog, as ill-favored as the hyena he somewhat resembled and of bad local character. His master, who doted on him, always averred that he was a positive lamb and would not hurt a fly, but his habit was to lie all day in the Colonel's porch on Ferring front and charge out like the Light Brigade at every dog that passed. Constant was the hot water into which Gunner got his master. It was the commonest thing, as one walked down the path by their bungalow, to hear the Colonel's dominating voice on the further side of the hedge assuring some other dog-lover, whose animal had just been stampeded into the sea, that it was only Gunner's little bit of fun. And, indeed, there may well have been some truth in this, for the Colonel's own sense of humor was of a similar cast, and since we are said to get like our pets, perhaps vice versa, master and dog may have grown to understand one another in an imitative kind of way. The very first time I met Colonel Finch, he gave Tulip an appraising look and rapped out at me:
"Hm! Pampered bitch, I can see! I bet she sleeps on your bed!"
Much taken aback by this unprovoked attack, I confessed apologetically:
"I'm afraid she does. It's wrong, I suppose. Where does Gunner sleep?"
"On the bed, of course!" roared the Colonel, delighted to have teased me so successfully. "The best bed in the house!"
But Tulip failed to take of Gunner's "little bit of fun" the tolerant view I took of his master's. Having received from him, as their first introduction, one of his famous broadsides before he perceived her sex and attempted to recover his mistake by a belated display of awkward gallantry, she never accorded him the condescension she showed to Mountjoy, and I did not therefore pin much hope on Colonel Finch's lamb. Nevertheless, with my resolutions now weakened—they needed little to undermine them, for, in truth, I was not looking forward to Tulip's next heat—I said:
"In any case, you've no idea of the difficulties. You couldn't cope."
"You're exaggerating," said my cousin. "If you can cope, so can I."
TULIP ENTERED HER heat on the first of March, and even I never envisaged the consequences that rapidly developed. Within a few days "Mon Repos" was in a state of siege. My cousin began by thinking this rather amusing, and sent me cheerful accounts of the "sweet" little Scotties and Sealyhams who had come to call. She found it less amusing when they accumulated and would not go away,— when the larger dogs took to scrambling over the white-washed wall in front, which, by repeated leapings against the winter jasmine that had been carefully trained to ornament it, they could just manage to do; when their smaller associates, not to be outdone and left behind, contrived to smash the flimsy latch of the gate by constant rattling at it, and all camped out all night, quarrelling and whining, among the Seven Dwarfs. Nor did she find it amusing when the other ladies of Ferring, deprived of and anxious about their pets who returned not home even for their dinners, called round to retrieve them, not once but every day and a number of times a day, in a progressively nastier frame of mind. The soft answer that turneth away wrath is no part of the diplomatic equipment women claim to possess,— my cousin was not one to be spoken to sharply without giving as good as she got. Very soon to the sound of Tulip's excited voice within and the replies of her devotees without was added a recurrent chorus of equally incontinent human voices raised in revilement and recrimination. And my cousin found it less amusing still when she tried to take Tulip for walks and fell into the error I had made of attempting to beat off her escort, which resulted not only in a more formidable incursion of enraged owners complaining that she had been seen ill-treating their pets, but, more affectingly, in her clothes and flesh getting torn. Before the first week was over, Tulip was not taken out at all; but now there was no lovely elevator to waft her out of sight, sound and scent of her admirers; good though she always was, no desirable and desiring bitch could be expected to behave with restraint in a small bungalow all the windows of which presented her with the spectacle of a dozen or so of her male friends awaiting her outside; she barked at them incessantly, hastening from window to window,— they barked back; then, like the siren, she would break into song; the expensive net curtains were soon all in tatters, and these, in the end, I had to replace.
I could not replace "Mon Repos" itself. By the close of the affair it is no exaggeration to say that it was practically wrecked. The walls still stood, of course; but what walls! A tepid rain had been falling for some time to add to the general melancholy of the scene, and their fresh white paint was liberally stippled with filthy paw marks where the excited creatures had tried to clamber in at the windows,— the pale blue paint of the doors, at which they had constantly knocked, was scratched and scored; the Seven Dwarfs were prostrate in a morass that had once been a neat grassy border. Siege became invasion. The back of the bungalow held out a little longer than the front; its garden was protected by a fence; but as Tulip's ready time approached and the frustrated besiegers realized that this was where she now took the sea air, they set about discovering its weak spots. This did not take long. By the time I was able to come down for my second visit during this period, to stay now and supervise the marriage, they had already forced their way in at several points, and my cousin was hysterically engaged in ejecting dogs of all shapes and sizes from dining room, sun parlor and even in the night from her bedroom.
Into the midst of this scene of chaos Mountjoy, at the appropriate moment, was introduced. Tulip had not seen much of him during her wooing week; the Tudor-Smiths had thought it undesirable that he should mix in such low company; she was pleased to see him now. As soon as he made his wishes clear she allowed him to mount her and stood quietly with her legs apart and her tail coiled away while he clasped her round the waist. But, for some reason he failed to achieve his purpose. His stabs, it looked to me standing beside them, did not quite reach her. After a little she disengaged herself, and assuming her play attitude, began to flirt in front of him. Bu
t he had graver ends in view. Again she stood, with lowered head and flattened ears, her gaze slanted back, apprehensively, I thought, to what he was doing behind. This time he appeared to have moved further forward, and now it did look as though he would succeed; but suddenly she gave a nervous cry and escaped from him once more. They tried again and again, the same thing always happened, whenever he seemed about to enter her she protested, as though she were still a virgin, and pulled herself free. And now it was quite upsetting to watch, his continual failure to consummate his desire and the consequent frustration of these two beautiful animals who wished to copulate and could not manage to do so. Nor could I see any way to help them, except to lubricate Tulip, which I did, for they seemed to be doing themselves all that could be done, except unite. It was, indeed, very moving, it was sorrow, to watch them trying to know each other and always failing, and it was touching to see Tulip give him chance after chance. But of course she was getting tired, she was panting; compared with him she was a small, slender creature, and it could not have been anything but burdensome for her to have the weight of his massive body upon her back and the clutch of his leonine arms about her waist. Yet, at the same time, he was as gentle with her as he could be; he took hold of he in a careful kind of way, or so it looked, maneuvering his arms tentatively upon her as though to get a purchase that did not grip her too hard; and sometimes, when she made a nervous movement or uttered an anxious cry, he would dismount and, going round to her head, put his nose to hers as if to say: "Are you all right?" But at last, in his own weariness, his jabs got wilder and wilder, quite wide of the mark; finally she would have no more to do with him and, whenever he approached her, drove him away.
Now what to do I did not know. Who would have supposed that mating a bitch could be so baffling a problem? Perhaps, in spite of her coiling tail, she was not ready. I set them together the following day, and the day after, only to watch them go through the same agonizing performance. And now it was her twelfth day. Was there truly something wrong with her, or was I muddling away her third heat like the others? I sent for the local vet. Next morning he came and stood with me while the animals repeated their futile and exhausting antics.
"It's the dog's fault," he said. "He can't draw."
This term had to be explained to me. It meant that his foreskin was too tight to enable him to unsheathe, a disability that could have been corrected when he was a puppy. Besides this, the vet announced after examining him, which Mountjoy permitted with extraordinary dignity, he was a "rig" dog, that is to say he had an undescended testicle, a not uncommon thing, said the vet, and a serious disqualification in mating, since it was heritable. It is scarcely necessary to add that neither of these terms, nor any of this information, is mentioned in the dog books, at least in none that I have ever come across.
Mountjoy's owners themselves, who had never offered him a wife before, were totally ignorant of these facts, if facts they were, and therefore of the corollary that their noble and expensive beast was relatively worthless.
There was nothing now to be done but to phone Colonel Finch. In the late afternoon Tulip was hustled into a taxi and conveyed to Gunner. Of the outcome of this I never was in doubt and was not therefore disappointed. She would have nothing to do with him at all. He was willing, she was not; it was the bully's turn to be bullied, and when the Colonel decided that his positive lamb had had enough, Tulip reentered her taxi and was driven back to "Mon Repos."
Dusk was now falling. I restored her to the ravaged garden, and it was while I stood with her there, gazing in despair at this exquisite creature in the midst of her desire, that the dog-next-door emerged through what remained of the fence. He had often intruded before, as often been ejected. Now he hung there in the failing light, half in, half out of the garden, his attention fixed warily upon me, a disreputable, dirty mongrel, Dusty by name, in whom Scottish sheep-dog predominated. I returned the stare of the disconcertingly dissimilar eyes, one brown, one pale blue, of this ragamuffin with whom it had always amused Tulip to play, and knew that my intervention was at end. I smiled at him.
"Well, there you are, old girl," I said. "Take it or leave it. It's up to you."
She at once went to greet him. Dusty was emboldened to come right in. There was a coquettish scamper. She stood for him. He was too small to manage. She obligingly squatted, and suddenly, without a sound, they collapsed on the grass in a heap. It was charming. They lay there together, their paws all mixed up, resting upon each other's bodies. They were panting. But they looked wonderfully pretty and comfortable—until Tulip thought she would like to get up, and found she could not. She tried to rise. The weight of Dusty's body, united with her own, dragged her back. She looked round in consternation. Then she began to struggle. I called to her soothingly to lie still, but she wanted to come over to me and could not, and her dismay turned to panic. With a convulsive movement she regained her feet and began to pull Dusty, who was upside down, along the lawn, trying from time to time to rid herself of her incubus by giving it a nip. The unfortunate Dusty, now on his back, now on his side, his little legs scrabbling wildly about in their efforts to find a foothold, at length managed, by a kind of somersault, to obtain it. This advantage, however, was not won without loss, for his exertion turned him completely round, so that, still attached to Tulip, he was now bottom to bottom with her and was hauled along in this even more uncomfortable and abject posture, his hindquarters off the ground, his head down and his tongue hanging out. Tulip gazed at me in horror and appeal. Heavens! I thought, this is love! These are the pleasures of sex! As distressed as they, I hastened over to them, persuaded Tulip to lie down again for poor Dusty's sake, and sat beside them to caress and calm them. It was a full half-hour before detumescence occurred [It could have been longer.] and Nature released Dusty, who instantly fled home through the gap in the fence and was seen no more. As for Tulip, her relief, her joy, her gratitude (she seemed to think it was I who had saved her), were spectacular. It was more as though she had been freed from some dire situation of peril than from the embraces of love.
THE FOLLOWING DAY I removed her to London and the haven of my flat. The house agent of "Mon Repos" had been apprised of our activities and was belatedly on the warpath. Even my cousin had had enough. A car was summoned to take us to the station. When all was ready for immediate departure—the engine running, the car door open—I emerged from the ruined bungalow with Tulip on the lead and ran the gauntlet of dogs down the garden path. We rushed into the car, slammed the door, and were off. But the frenzied animals were not so easily balked. They pursued us in a pack so far down the country lanes that, though their number gradually diminished, I was suddenly terrified that the more pertinacious would gain the station and invade the train. If there had been any comedy in the situation ever, it was no longer present; the scene had the quality of nightmare. But the car outstripped them all at last and we got safely away.
FRUITS OF LABOR
TULIP WAS NOT a barren bitch. Three weeks after the events described I walked her over to Miss Canvey, who pronounced her pregnant. The tiny buds of her babes could already be felt in her womb. They were not Dusty's only gift to her. A persistent vaginal discharge, slight but noticeable, of a whitish color, also developed. Another visit to Miss Canvey was made. The discharge was politely termed a "catarrh" due to an infection (recalling Dusty's raffish appearance I was not greatly surprised); though not considered dangerous to health, it had to be cleared up in case it miscarried the litter. Pills were provided and treacherously conveyed into Tulip's interior in pieces of meat. They did not work and were changed to bougies—hard, thin and pointed suppositories, two inches long, like half a short pencil—which I was told to insert into the vagina as far as my finger would go, so that they should not pop out again. Many a sorry struggle between Tulip and myself took place over these objects. Whenever she saw a bougie approaching she tucked her tail firmly between her legs and sought refuge on the bed, her back to the wall. From her piercing
cries a few seconds later, anyone would have thought that I was doing her a mortal injury—and I began to wonder if I was. A third visit to Miss Canvey seemed advisable.
"Miss Canvey, I'm awfully sorry to bother you again, but where exactly is the vagina?"
"Forward and upwards," said Miss Canvey briefly. "Downwards leads to the bladder." A furrow appeared on her brow. "But I don't think you can be reaching that," she added.
The struggles were resumed, with a little more confidence on my side, though none on Tulip's, but no bougies that I ever managed to insert stayed in for long. Flexible now but intact, they were discovered a minute or two later on carpet or bed, and attempts to reinsert them in their wobbly and slippery condition never succeeded though often made. Eventually my nerve failed me and I begged Miss Canvey to put them in for me, which she did with enviable dexterity.
Apart from this unforeseen complication, little change was required to be made in Tulip's daily life. She was to be prevented from executing continuous rolls on the grass (which was not, in fact, a trick of hers), for the reason that a bitch's womb hangs in two lobes, like a medieval purse, and half the litter forms in each. The act of rolling, therefore, might cause the two lobes to intertwine and throttle each other. [A theory regarded by later veterinary opinion as fanciful.] Later on, when she got heavier, she was not to be asked to climb high steps, such as the steps of buses. Sixty-three days was the normal period of gestation, and bitches were said to be clocklike in their punctuality. She was therefore due to whelp on May 16.
As soon as the fact of her pregnancy was established my course of action became clear. Hitherto, the difficulties of allowing her to whelp in my flat had seemed insuperable; I had, indeed, been looking for a country kennel to which I could send her for her confinement. But from the beginning of my relationship with this enchanting beast I had more than once perceived that impossibilities tended to vanish as they were approached, and I knew now that I could not abandon her to strangers at this crisis of her life. Also I was immensely curious to see what happened.
My Dog Tulip Page 9
