Incredible Journey (2 page)

Longridge walked over to make amends for his thoughtlessness, but as he bent down to pat the dog the telephone rang so suddenly and shrilly in the quiet room that the cat jumped indignantly off the chair and the bull terrier started clumsily to his feet.

Longridge picked up the receiver, and presently the breathless voice of Mrs. Oakes was heard, accompanied by a high-pitched, whining note in the distance.

“Speak up, Mrs. Oakes—I can hardly hear you.”

“I can hardly hear you either,” said the breathless voice distantly. “There, is that better? I’m shouting now! What time are you leaving in the morning, Mr. Longridge? What’s that? Could you talk louder?”

“About seven o’clock. I want to get to Heron Lake before nightfall,” he shouted, noting with amusement the scandalized expression of the cat. “But there’s no need for you to be here at that time, Mrs. Oakes.”

“What’s that you said? Seven? Will it be all right if I don’t come in until about nine? My niece is coming on the early bus and I’d like to meet her. But I don’t like to leave the dogs alone too long.…”

“Of course you must meet her,” he answered, shouting really loudly now as the humming noise increased. “The dogs will be fine. I’ll take them out first thing in the morning, and—”

“Oh, thanks, Mr. Longridge—I’ll be there around nine without fail What’s that you said about the animals? (Oh, you pernickety, dratted old line!) Don’t you worry about them; Bert and me, we’ll see.… tell old Bodger … bringing marrow bone. Oh, wait till I give that operator a piece of my mi …”

But just as Longridge was gathering strength for
a last bellow into the mouthpiece the line went dead. He put the receiver back with relief and looked across the room at the old dog who had climbed stealthily into the armchair and sat lolling back against the cushions, his eyes half closed, awaiting the expected reproof. He addressed him with the proper degree of ferocity, telling him that he was a scoundrelly opportunist, a sybaritic barbarian, a disgrace to his upbringing and his ancestors, “AND”—and he paused in weighty emphasis—“a very
 … bad … dog!”

At these two dread words the terrier laid his ears flat against his skull, slanted his eyes back until they almost disappeared, then drew his lips back over his teeth in an apologetic grin, quivering the end of his disgraceful tail. His parody of sorrow brought its usual reprieve: the man laughed and patted the bony head, then enticed him down with the promise of a run.

So the old dog, who was a natural clown, slithered half off the chair and stood, with his hindquarters resting on the cushions, waving his tail and nudging the cat, who sat like an Egyptian statue, eyes half closed, head erect, then gave a throaty growl and patted at the pink and black bull-terrier nose. Then together they followed the man to the door, where the young dog waited to fall in behind the little procession. Longridge opened the door leading on to the garden, and the two dogs and the cat squeezed past his legs and into the cool night air. He stood under the trellised porch, quietly smoking his pipe,
and watched them for a while. Their nightly routine never varied—first the few minutes of separate local investigation, then the indefinable moment when all met again and paused before setting off together through the gap in the hedge at the bottom of the garden and into the fields and woods that lay beyond. He watched until they disappeared into the darkness (the white shape of the bull terrier showing up long after Longridge was unable to distinguish the other two), then knocked his pipe out against the stone step and re-entered the house. It would be half an hour or more before they returned.

Longridge and his brother owned a small cabin by the shores of remote Heron Lake, about two hundred miles away; and twice a year they spent two or three weeks there together, leading the life they loved: spending many hours ill companionable silence in their canoe, fishing in spring and hunting in the autumn. Usually he had simply locked up and left, leaving the key with Mrs. Oakes so that she could come in once or twice a week and keep the house warm and aired. However, now he had the animals to consider. He had thought of taking them all to a boarding kennel in the town, but Mrs. Oakes, who loved the assorted trio, had protested vigorously and assented that she herself would look after them “rather than have those poor dumb animals fretting themselves into a state in some kennel, and probably half starved into the bargain.” So it had been arranged that she and Bert would look after the
three animals. Bert would be working around the garden, anyway, so that they could be outside most of the time and Mrs. Oakes would feed them and keep her eye on them while she was working in the house.

When he had finished packing, Longridge went into the library to draw the curtains, and seeing the telephone he was reminded of Mrs. Oakes. He had forgotten to tell her to order some coffee and other things that he had taken from the store cupboard. He sat down at the desk and drew out a small memo pad.

Dear Mrs. Oakes
, he wrote,
Please order some more coffee and replace the canned food I’ve taken. I will be taking the dogs
(
and Tao too of course
!) … Here he came to the end of the small square of paper, and taking another piece he continued: … 
out for a run before I leave, and will give them something to eat, so don’t let our greedy white friend tell you he is starving! Don’t worry yourselves too much over them—I know they will be fine
.

He wrote the last few words with a smile, for the bull terrier had Mrs. Oakes completely in thrall and worked his advantage to the full. He left the pages on the desk under a glass paperweight; then opened the door in answer to a faint scratch. The old dog and the cat bounded in to greet him with their usual affection, bringing the fresh smell of the outdoors with them. The young dog followed more sedately and stood by, watching aloofly, as the other whipped his tail like a lash against the man’s legs,
while the cat pressed against him purring in a deep rumble; but he wagged his tail briefly and politely when the man patted him.

The cat walked into the library to curl up on the warm hearth. Later when the ashes grew cold he would move to the top of the radiator, and then, sometime in the middle of the night, he would steal upstairs and curl up beside the old dog. It was useless shutting the bedroom door, or any other door of the house for that matter, for the cat could open them all, latches or doorknobs. The only doors that defeated him were those with porcelain handles, for he found it impossible to get a purchase on the shiny surface with his long monkeylike paws.

The young dog padded off to his rug on the floor of the little back kitchen, and the bull terrier started up the steep stairs, and was already curled in his basket in the bedroom when Longridge himself came to bed. He opened one bright, slanted eye when he felt the old blanket being dropped over him, then pushed his head under the cover, awaiting the opportunity he knew would come later.

The man lay awake for a while, thinking about the days ahead and of the animals, for the sheer misery in the young dog’s eyes haunted him.

They had come to him, this odd and lovable trio, over eight months ago, from the home of an old and dear college friend. This friend, Jim Hunter, was an English professor in a small university about two hundred and fifty miles away. As the university owned one of the finest reference libraries in the
province, Longridge often stayed with him and was, in fact, godfather to the Hunters’ nine-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. He had been staying with them when the invitation came from an English university, asking the professor to deliver a series of lectures which would involve a stay in England of nearly nine months, and he had witnessed the tears of his goddaughter and the glum silence of her brother, Peter, when it was decided that their pets would have to be boarded out and the house rented to the reciprocal visiting professor.

Longridge was extremely fond of Elizabeth and Peter, and he could understand their feelings, remembering how much the companionship of a cocker spaniel had meant when he himself was a rather lonely child, and how he had grieved when he was first separated from it. Elizabeth was the self-appointed owner of the cat. She fed and brushed him, took him for walks, and he slept at the foot of her bed. Eleven-year-old Peter had been inseparable from the bull terrier ever since the small white puppy had arrived on Peter’s first birthday. In fact, the boy could not remember a day of his life when Bodger had not been part of it. The young dog belonged, in every sense of the word, heart and soul to their father, who had trained him since puppy-hood for hunting.

Now they were faced with the realization of separation, and in the appalled silence that followed the decision Longridge watched Elizabeth’s face screw up in the prelude to tears. Then he heard a voice,
which he recognized with astonishment to be his own, telling everybody not to worry, not to worry at all—he would take care of everything! Were not he and the animals already well known to one another? And had he not plenty of room, and a large garden? … Mrs. Oakes? Why, she would just love to have them! Everything would be simply wonderful! Before the family sailed they would bring the dogs and the cat over by car, see for themselves where they would sleep, write out a list of instructions, and he, personally, would love and cherish them until their return.

So one day the Hunter family had driven over and the pets had been left, with many tearful farewells from Elizabeth and last-minute instructions from Peter.

During the first few days Longridge had almost regretted his spontaneous offer: the terrier had languished in his basket, his long arched nose buried in the comfort of his paws, and one despairing, martyred eye haunting his every movement; and the cat had nearly driven him crazy with the incessant goatlike bleating and yowling of a suffering Siamese; the young dog had moped by the door and refused all food. But after a few days, won over perhaps by Mrs. Oakes’s sympathetic clucking and tempting morsels of food, they had seemed to resign themselves, and the cat and the old dog had settled in, very comfortably and happily, showing their adopted master a great deal of affection.

It was very apparent, however, how much the
old dog missed children. Longridge at first had wondered where he disappeared to some afternoons; he eventually found out that the terrier went to the playground of the little rural school, where he was a great favorite with the children, timing his appearance for recess. Knowing that the road was forbidden to him, because of his poor sight and habit of walking stolidly in the middle, he had found a short cut across the intervening fields.

But the young dog was very different. He had obviously never stopped pining for his own home and master; although he ate well and his coat was glossy with health, he never maintained anything but a dignified, unyielding distance. The man respected him for this, but it worried him that the dog never seemed to relax, and always appeared to be listening—longing and waiting for something far beyond the walls of the house or the fields beyond. Longridge was glad for the dog’s sake that the Hunters would be returning in about three weeks, but he knew that he would miss his adopted family. They had amused and entertained him more than he would have thought possible, over the months, and he realized tonight that the parting would be a real wrench. He did not like to think of the too quiet house that would be his again.

He slept at last, and the dreaming, curious moon peeped in at the window to throw shafts of pale light into the rooms and over each of the sleeping occupants. They woke the cat downstairs, who stretched and yawned, then leaped without visible
effort onto the window sill, his gleaming eyes, with their slight cast, wide open and enormous, and only the tip of his tail twitching as he sat motionless, staring into the garden. Presently he turned, and with a single graceful bound crossed to the desk; but for once he was careless, and his hind leg knocked the glass paperweight to the floor. He shook the offending leg vigorously, scattering the pages of Longridge’s note—sending one page off the desk into the air, where it caught the upward current of hot air from the wall register and sailed across the room to land in the fireplace. Here it slowly curled and browned, until nothing remained of the writing but the almost illegible signature at the bottom.

When the pale fingers of the moon reached over the young dog in the back kitchen he stirred in his uneasy sleep, then sat upright, his ears pricked—listening and listening for the sound that never came: the high, piercing whistle of his master that would have brought him bounding across the world if only his straining ears could hear it.

And lastly the moon peered into the upstairs bedroom, where the man lay sleeping on his side in a great fourposter bed; and curled against his back the elderly, comfort-loving white bull terrier slept in blissful, warm content.

T
HERE WAS
a slight mist when John Longridge rose early the following morning, having fought a losing battle for the middle of the bed with his uninvited bedfellow. He shaved and dressed quickly, watching the mist roll back over the fields and the early morning sun break through. It would be a perfect fall day, an Indian summer day, warm and mellow. Downstairs he found the animals waiting patiently by the door for their early morning run. He let them out, then cooked and ate his solitary breakfast. He was out in the driveway, loading up his car when the dogs and cat returned from the fields. He fetched some biscuits for them and they lay by the wall of the house in the early sun, watching him. He threw the last item into the back of the car, thankful that he had already packed the guns and hunting equipment before the Labrador had seen them, then walked over and patted the heads of his audience, one by one.