Lad: A Dog (11 page)

A guest started all the trouble—a guest who spent a week end at The Place and who loved dogs far better than he understood them. He made much of Lad, being loud-voiced in his admiration of the stately collie. Lad endured the caresses when he could not politely elude them.

“Say!” announced the guest just before he departed, “if I had a dog like Lad, I'd ‘show' him—at the big show at Madison Square, you know. It's booked for next month. Why not take a chance and exhibit him there? Think what it would mean to you people to have a Westminster blue ribbon the big dog had won! Why, you'd be as proud as Punch!”

It was a careless speech and well meant. No harm might have come from it, had not the Master the next day chanced upon an advance notice of the dog show in his morning paper. He read the press-agent's quarter-column proclamation. Then he remembered what the guest had said. The Mistress was called into consultation. And it was she, as ever, who cast the deciding vote.

“Lad is twice as beautiful as any collie we ever saw at the show,” she declared, “and not one of them is half as wise or good or
human
as he is. And—a blue ribbon is the greatest honor a dog can have, I suppose. It would be something to remember.”

After which, the Master wrote a letter to a friend who kept a show kennel of Airedales. He received this answer:

I don't pretend to know anything, professionally, about collies—Airedales being my specialty. But Lad is a beauty, as I remember him, and his pedigree shows a bunch of old-time champions. I'd risk it, if I were you. If you are in doubt and don't want to plunge, why not just enter him for the Novice class? That is a class for dogs that have never before been shown. It will cost you five dollars to enter him for a single class, like that. And in the Novice, he won't be up against any champions or other dogs that have already won prizes. That will make it easier. It isn't a grueling competition like the “Open” or even the “Limit.” If he wins as a Novice, you can enter him, another time, in something more important. I'm inclosing an application blank for you to fill out and send with your entrance fee, to the secretary. You'll find his address at the bottom of the blank. I'm showing four of my Airedales there—so we'll be neighbors.

Thus encouraged, the Master filled in the blank and sent it with a check. And in due time word was returned to him that “Sunnybank Lad” was formally entered for the Novice class, at the Westminster Kennel Club's annual show at Madison Square Garden.

By this time both the Mistress and the Master were infected with the most virulent type of the Show Germ. They talked of little else than the forthcoming Event. They read all the dog-show literature they could lay hands on.

As for Lad, he was mercifully ignorant of what was in store for him.

The Mistress had an inkling of his fated ordeal when she read the Kennel Club rule that no dog could be taken from the Garden, except at stated times, from the moment the show should begin, at ten o‘clock Wednesday morning, until the hour of its close, at ten o'clock Saturday night. For twelve hours a day—for four consecutive days—every entrant must be there. By paying a forfeit fee, dog owners might take their pets to some nearby hotel or stable, for the remainder of the night and early morning—a permission which, for obvious reasons, would not affect most dogs.

“But Lad's never been away from home a night in his life!” exclaimed the Mistress in dismay. “He'll be horribly lonely there, all that while—especially at night.”

By this time, with the mysterious foreknowledge of the best type of thoroughbred collie, Lad began to be aware that something unusual had crept into the atmosphere of The Place. It made him restless, but he did not associate it with himself—until the Mistress took to giving him daily baths and brushings.

Always she had brushed him once a day, to keep his shaggy coat fluffy and burnished; and the lake had supplied him with baths that made him as clean as any human. But never had he undergone such searching massage with comb and brush as was now his portion. Never had he known such soap-infested scrubbings as were now his daily fate, for the week preceding the show.

As a result of these ministrations his wavy fur was like spun silk in texture; and it stood out all over him like the hair of a Circassian beauty in a dime museum. The white chest and forepaws were like snow. And his sides and broad back and mighty shoulders shone like dark bronze.

He was magnificent—but he was miserable. He knew well enough, now, that he was in some way the center of all this unwonted stir and excitement which pervaded The Place. He loathed change of any sort—a thoroughbred collie being ever an ultraconservative. This particular change seemed to threaten his peace; also it kept his skin scraped with combs and his hair redolent of nasty-smelling soaps.

To humans there was no odor at all in the naphtha soap with which the Mistress lathered the dog, and every visible atom of it was washed away at once with warm water. But a human's sense of smell, compared with the best type of collie's, is as a purblind puppy's power of sight in comparison to a hawk's.

All over the East, during these last days before the Show, hundreds of high-bred dogs were undergoing preparation for an exhibition which to the beholder is a delight—and which to many of the canine exhibits is a form of unremitting torture. To do justice to the Master and the Mistress, they had no idea—then—of this torture. Otherwise all the blue ribbons ever woven would not have tempted them to subject their beloved chum to it.

In some kennels Airedales were “plucked,” by hand, to rid them of the last vestige of the soft gray outer coat which is an Airedale's chief natural beauty—and no hair of which must be seen in a show. “Plucking” a dog is like pulling live hairs from a human head, so far as the sensation goes. But show traditions demand the anguish.

In other kennels, bull terriers' white coats were still further whitened by the harsh rubbing of pipe clay into the tender skin. Sensitive tails and still more sensitive ears were sandpapered, for the victims' greater beauty—and agony. Ear interiors, also, were shaved close with safety razors.

Murderous little “knife-combs” were tearing blithely away at collies' ear interiors and heads, to “barber” natural furriness into painful and unnatural trimness. Ears were “scrunched” until their wearers quivered with stark anguish —to impart the perfect tulip shape, ordained by fashion for collies.

And so on, through every breed to be exhibited—each to its own form of torment; torments compared to which Lad's gentle if bothersome brushing and bathing were a pure delight!

Few of these ruthlessly “prepared” dogs were personal pets. The bulk of them were “kennel dogs”—dogs bred and raised after the formula for raising and breeding prize hogs or chickens, and with little more of the individual element in it. The dogs were bred in a way to bring out certain arbitrary “points” which count in show judging, and which change from year to year.

Brain, fidelity, devotion, the
human
side of a dog—these were totally ignored in the effort to breed the perfect physical animal. The dogs were kept in kennel buildings and in wire “runs” like so many pedigreed cattle—looked after by paid attendants, and trained to do nothing but to be the best-looking of their kind, and to win ribbons. Some of them did not know their owners by sight—having been reared wholly by hirelings.

The body was everything; the heart, the mind, the namelessly delightful quality of the master-raised dog—these were nothing. Such traits do not win prizes at a bench show. Therefore fanciers, whose sole aim is to win ribbons and cups, do not bother to cultivate them. (All of this is extraneous, but may be worth your remembering, next time you go to a dog show.)

Early on the morning of the Show's first day, the Mistress and the Master set forth for town with Lad. They went in their little car, that the dog might not risk the dirt and cinders of a train.

Lad refused to eat a mouthful of the tempting breakfast set before him that day. He could not eat, when foreboding was hot in his throat. He had often ridden in the car. Usually he enjoyed the ride; but now he crawled rather than sprang into the tonneau. All the way up the drive, his great mournful eyes were turned back toward the house in dumb appeal. Every atom of spirit and gaiety and dash was gone from him. He knew he was being taken away from the sweet Place he loved, and that the car was whizzing him along toward some dreaded fate. His heart was sick within him.

To the born and bred show dog this is an everyday occurrence—painful, but inevitable. To a chum dog like Lad, it is heartbreaking. The big collie buried his head in the Mistress' lap and crouched hopelessly at her feet as the car chugged cityward.

A thoroughly unhappy dog is the most thoroughly unhappy thing on earth. All the adored Mistress' coaxings and pettings could not rouse Lad from his dull apathy of despair. This was the hour when he was wont to make his stately morning rounds of The Place, at the heels of one of his two deities. And now, instead, these deities were carrying him away to something direfully unpleasant. A lesser dog would have howled or would have struggled crazily to break away. Lad stood his ground like a furry martyr, and awaited his fate.

In an hour or so the ride ended. The car drew up at Madison Square—beside the huge yellowish building, arcaded and Diana-capped, which goes by the name of “Garden” and which is as nearly historic as any landmark in feverish New York is permitted to be.

Ever since the car had entered Manhattan Island, unhappy Lad's nostrils had been aquiver with a million new and troublous odors. Now, as the car halted, these myriad strange smells were lost in one—an all-pervasive scent of dog. To a human, out there in the street, the scent was not observable. To a dog it was overwhelming.

Lad, at the Master's word, stepped down from the tonneau onto the sidewalk. He stood there, dazedly sniffing. The plangent roar of the city was painful to his ears, which had always been attuned to the deep silences of forest and lake. And through this din he caught the muffled noise of the chorused barks and howls of many of his own kind.

The racket that bursts so deafeningly on humans as they enter the Garden, during a dog show, was wholly audible to Lad out in the street itself. And, as instinct or scent makes a hog flinch at going into a slaughterhouse, so the gallant dog's spirit quailed for a moment as he followed the Mistress and the Master into the building.

A man who is at all familiar with the ways of dogs can tell at once whether a dog's bark denotes cheer or anger or terror or grief or curiosity. To such a man a bark is as expressive of meanings as are the inflections of a human voice. To another dog these meanings are far more intelligible. And in the timbre of the multiple barks and yells that now assailed his ears, Lad read nothing to allay his own fears.

He was the hero of a half-dozen hard-won fights. He had once risked his life to save life. He had attacked tramps and peddlers and other stick-wielding invaders who had strayed into the grounds of The Place. Yet the tiniest semblance of fear now crept into his heart.

He looked up at the Mistress, a world of sorrowing appeal in his eyes. At her gentle touch on his head and at a whisper of her loved voice, he moved onward at her side with no further hesitation. If these, his gods, were leading him to death, he would not question their right to do it, but would follow on as befitted a good soldier.

Through a doorway they went. At a wicket a yawning veterinary glanced uninterestedly at Lad. As the dog had no outward and glaring signs of disease, the vet did not so much as touch him, but with a nod suffered him to pass. The vet was paid to inspect all dogs as they entered the show. Perhaps some of them were turned back by him, perhaps not; but after this, as after many another show, scores of kennels were swept by distemper and by other canine maladies, scores of deaths followed. That is one of the risks a dog exhibitor must take—or rather that his luckless dogs must take—in spite of the fees paid to yawning veterinaries to bar out sick entrants.

As Lad passed in through the doorway, he halted involuntarily in dismay. Dogs—dogs—DOGS! More than two thousand of them, from Great Dane to toy terrier, benched in row after row throughout the vast floor space of the Garden! Lad had never known there were so many dogs on earth.

Fully five hundred of them were barking or howling. The hideous volume of sound swelled to the Garden's vaulted roof and echoed back again like innumerable hammer blows upon the eardrum.

The Mistress stood holding Lad's chain and softly caressing the bewildered dog, while the Master went to make inquiries. Lad pressed his shaggy body closer to her knee for refuge, as he gazed blinkingly around him.

In the Garden's center were several large inclosures of wire and reddish wood. Inside each inclosure were a table, a chair and a movable platform. The platform was some six inches high and four feet square. At corners of these “judging rings” were blackboards on which the classes next to be inspected were chalked up.

All around the central space were alleys, on each side of which were lines of raised “benches,” two feet from the ground. The benches were carpeted with straw and were divided off by high wire partitions into compartments about three feet in area. Each compartment was to be the abiding place of some unfortunate dog for the next four days and nights. By short chains the dogs were bound into these open-fronted cells.

The chains left their wearers just leeway enough to stand up or lie down or to move to the various limits of the tiny space. In front of some of the compartments a wire barrier was fastened. This meant that the occupant was savage—in other words, that under the four-day strain he was likely to resent the stares or pokes or ticklings or promiscuous alien pattings of fifty thousand curious visitors.