My Dog Tulip (13 page)

It was a marvellous sight, to me very affecting; but I think that to anyone who did not know and love her as I did, it must have been a solemn and moving thing to see this beautiful animal, in the midst of the first labor of her life, performing upon herself, with no help but unerringly, as though directed by some divine wisdom, the delicate and complicated business of creation. I guessed now that she was thirsty. Quietly leaving the room, I warmed some milk for her. When I returned with the bowl she stretched her head eagerly forward. Kneeling in front of her, I held it to her while she lapped. She licked my hand and laid her head heavily back on the blanket.

Half an hour elapsed before her next delivery; then another sigh, another spasm, and her tail lifted to eject the fifth. She produced eight puppies at half-hourly intervals and was not done until evening fell. I sat with her in the darkened room throughout. It was a beautiful thing to have seen. When it was plain that she had finished I went and kissed her. She was quite wet. She allowed me to touch her babies. They were still blind. I took one up; she was frightened and gently nuzzled my hand as though to say “Take care!” But she had too much confidence in me to suppose that I would hurt them.

It was misplaced. In the bathroom, as soon as my common senses returned and I envisaged a future that contained eight extra dogs, I prepared a bucket of water and a flour sack weighted with such heavy objects as I could lay my hands on. Following the trends of Hindoo social philosophy and the information I had gleaned that bitches were more difficult to get rid of than dogs, I quickly decided that the female part of Tulip's progeny, if only I could identify it from its sketchy hieroglyphics and—a graver problem still—abstract it without her knowledge, had better be instantly liquidated. I had read somewhere that animals cannot count, and that a cat with four kittens in a burning house, having removed all four to safety, will always return to reassure herself that there is not one left. How could I distract proud Tulip's attention while I carried out my dark deed? Soon, no doubt, she would wish to relieve nature and my chance would come. Soon she did. But the great confidence I have said she reposed in me was not now evident. Suddenly vacating her box, she hurried out into the passageway as though making for my terrace, which was her customary latrine. This was only a few yards further on, but to reach it involved a right-angle turn and letting her box out of her sight. Was it for this reason that she made no attempt to reach it? Had she read, as my guilty conscience supposed, the fell purpose in my eyes? Or was it simply that after all the strain she had endured and the unusual diet of quantities of warm milk and eight placentae, she was incontinently taken short? At any rate, she went no further than the passage. Swivelling herself round there in the open doorway so that her box was under her observation throughout, she squatted down on my Chinese carpet and let fly from both orifices simultaneously. Having rapidly squirted out large pools of No. 1 and No. 2, she flew back into her box, rearranged her children at her breast and directed at me a look of sympathy over the skirting board. For the first time in her life she had deliberately fouled my flat. But I was not thinking of that as I mopped it all up. I was thinking how sadly bedraggled and thin she had appeared in the brief glimpse I had had of her.

The bucket and flour sack were fated not to be used, though looking back now over the years, it might have been better if they had been. Dear Miss Canvey, visiting soon afterwards with her scissors in search of dew-claws, said reprovingly:

“Why destroy any? They are nice puppies and she can easily manage the lot.”

What
she
could manage was not actually the question that had been troubling me; but we are always glad to receive even irrelevant advice against doing the reasonable things we do not want to do, just as we are apt to brush aside as insubstantial the most cogent arguments when we are already determined upon some wrong-headed course of action. The female and, as it turned out, most refractory part of Tulip's litter was therefore reprieved.

For a month she was the perfect mother. Enchanting to watch in her concern for and pride in her offspring, she tirelessly cleaned up after them, swabbing their little posteriors when they defecated or piddled—in itself a non-stop task—and eating up all their excreta. It was wonderfully pretty to see her reclining there, while her children scrambled and pushed for her teats, looking down maternally at them with her great ears cocked forward, nosing among them the moment she smelt the odor of ordure, sorting out the guilty one, rolling it over onto its back with her sharp black nose and, disregarding its protesting squeals, vigorously licking its parts until they were clean. In spite of her vigilance, however, the blanket on which they lay soon got drenched, and I would change it for her daily, removing the puppies in a basin to some temporary abode, an event that always put her in a great taking. Twice a day too, on Miss Canvey's instructions, I took her for a short walk to afford her a brief respite from nursing. She came when I called her, though reluctantly, barking her anxiety all the way down in the elevator: two or three hundred yards along the Embankment were as far as she would ever go. Halting then in a resolute manner, she would challenge me to take another step; I would turn, and home she would hasten as fast as she could without actually deserting me, looking back at me all the time as though to say “How you lag!”, fly up the stairs (she could wait for no elevator), scratch impatiently at the door (I could not be quick enough with my keys), and race down the passage to rejoin her infants.

Then she began to get bored. Their rapidly increasing size and insatiable appetites put a strain on her of course; when they added to all this the growth of little pricking teeth she started to abdicate. Suddenly, while the now quite hefty children fought and elbowed each other aside to get at her most rewarding teats, she would rise to her feet and, with three of four of them who had got a better grip than the rest suspended like straphangers beneath her, emit one of those noisy, cavernous yawns that Alsatians are so good at, disembarrass herself of her encumbrances with a stretch and a shake, vault lightly out of the box and retire to the divan in my sitting-room for a peaceful doze, leaving a chorus of shrill dismay behind her. With the onset of her boredom came the onset of my own, for the less she fed them the more I had to. Also they began to wish to see the world and the skirting board no longer contained them. Clambering upon each other's backs in the middle of the night, they would fall headlong over the edge and set up a plaintive, incessant wailing until I woke and returned them to the fold. Soon afterwards they would do it again. All creatures have different characters and it is reasonable to suppose that some will be smarter than others; two of the four little bitches in Tulip's family were the first to climb out of the box and the most persistent in doing so. With lack of sleep my temper began to fray. Converting my small dining room into a pen by removing the carpet and tacking chicken wire to the legs of the furniture, I transferred my guests to that. It was no time before, still led by the two little bitches, they were dragging down or burrowing under these barriers too. Their third and last arena was my open-air terrace, where my double concern was to rig up contraptions which would prevent them from reentering the flat or crawling between the balusters of the balustrade to fall sixty feet into the road below. These contraptions, too, they seemed endlessly bent on demolishing. They were charming whimsical little creatures; they were also positively maddening, and exasperated me to such an extent that I sometimes gave them a cuff for disobedience and made them squeak, which was both an unkind and a useless thing to do, for they could not know what obedience was. Tulip, on these occasions, would hurry out from her
dolce far niente
to see what was afoot; she had practically abandoned them, but still took a proprietary interest in their welfare.

Also in their food. On Miss Canvey's instructions I was now wearing myself out supplying the hungry stomachs with four meals a day, mixing milk dishes, where there was no milk, 
[2]
out of babies' milk powder (procured on false pretenses from various chemists) and Robinson's Patent Oats or Barley. Tulip, who had her daily pound of horse-flesh, would come yawning and stretching from her repose and gently insert her own head among those of her children. Naturally a few laps of her large tongue sufficed to scoop up most of the warm liquid before her jostling brood (who got actually into the dish in their anxiety and paddled about) had managed to suck more than a drop from the rapidly sinking surface. Soon a soldier diet was prescribed, trenchers of carefully boned fish or minced raw horse-meat, mixed with wheat flakes and broken rusk … .

As they ate they grew; as they grew they waxed more eloquent. They began to growl and to utter little barks as they lurched about the terrace on their unsteady legs in that apparently purposeful but ultimately disastrous way drunks move, squabbling, playing tug-of-war and pulling one another's tails. Tulip herself would have a game with them when she felt disposed, plant her large paws on them like a cat with a mouse, or race up and down the terrace in front of them, while they fell over themselves in their blundering efforts to imitate her. This delighted them, and when she retired into the flat they would follow. The barrier I had erected in the door-way was high, but they constantly contrived to surmount it. After their occupation of the dining room the place had looked like a stable, and smelt like one; urine and excreta had soaked through all the protective layers of paper I had put down and glued them to the linoleum. Much work with a scrubbing brush and disinfectant was needed to restore the room to its original function. Now that the carpet was back they could not be readmitted. They could not be kept out.

Miss Canvey had impressed upon me that they must continue my guests for at least eight weeks, until they were weaned. I was not anxious to detain them for a moment longer, and had been canvassing their charms throughout the district ever since they were born. Miss Canvey also said that I could get two or three pounds apiece for them; but I was not in need of money and thought I should be rid of them quicker if I gave them away. This may have been true, but it was mistaken policy for another reason, I fear, for people are apt to accept gifts too readily and value them less than purchases. At any rate I soon had a list of a dozen applicants for free puppies and, though I made few promises, considered the future secure. Tulip's local fame had helped me. She was well known and much admired. So eager, indeed, were some of my applicants to possess the offspring of so faithful and intelligent a bitch that, although they knew them to be mongrels, they quite pestered me for them, calling round at the flat from week to week to remind me of their claims. Any child of hers, they said, must surely be as wonderful as she.

Such flattering enthusiasm naturally disposed me kindly toward these petitioners. But before the gruelling eight weeks had dragged themselves out, something else had happened: I had developed a conscience. Much as I longed to be rid of the puppies, my feelings had become involved with them all individually, even, indeed particularly, with the two naughty little bitches, and as I watched upon my terrace the unfolding of these affectionate, helpless lives, and saw them adventuring, in ever-widening circles, into a life which they clearly thought positively smashing, my sense of responsibility towards them increased and became a discomfort to me. To “find them homes,” as I had phrased it to myself, began to seem a totally inadequate description of my duty. I perceived that their whole future, their health and happiness, depended entirely upon me. Their lives were in my hands.

Many of my applicants were working-class people; my ambitions rose to a higher aim. Money, time, physical energy: Tulip's upkeep cost me all these in considerable quantities, and although I was not foolish enough to suppose that they constituted in themselves a guarantee of canine happiness, they might be thought to lay a hopeful foundation for it. They were none of them, it seemed to me, properties that the working classes had to spare or to speak of. Mental energy too: if I had learnt anything of dogs during my life with Tulip, it was that little is known about them, and I was always persevering after practical information. That little is known about them is not surprising; it is only within living memory that veterinary attention—previously confined to horses, cows and sheep—has been turned towards them. The homely, and often hair-raising, witchcraft that preceded their scientific study is still cherished in many an obstinate, uneducated mind. Even, in the beginning, I was mortified to find, in my own. One of the first things I recollected when I took charge of Tulip was that the family dogs, in my boyhood days, had always had a stick of sulphur in their drinking bowls. A prime necessity, of course. I hurried out and bought one. After it had been submerged in Tulip's bowl for a year it took on a grubby look and I decided to renew it. “What do you want it for?” asked the chandler to whom I applied. Surprised by his ignorance, I explained. “Have it by all means,” said he, “but since sulphur is insoluble in water you could spend your money in better ways.”

Then there were many people who seemed to regard the dog as a purely utilitarian object, a protector for the home or a plaything for the kids. I had by now acquired a lively respect for canine qualities of heart and head, and did not wish to condemn Tulip's children to either of these fates. And the love of adolescent girls, whose virginal wombs maternally throb at the sight of a puppy, with which they grow quickly bored when it is puppy no more: that was another pitfall I intended to avoid. I therefore hoped to put the creatures out among adult, educated and prosperous people who had a personal feeling for dogs and the kind of lives they like to lead, a reasonable knowledge of their care and premises suitable for keeping them. But my hopes were not realized. I had a number of such persons on my list, two of whom, indeed, had already called and selected the puppies they wanted; but on various excuses they all let me down, and at a late hour when I could no longer wait to prosecute my search. For my landlord had intervened; someone in my block of flats, understandably disturbed by Tulip's parental agitations, had reported my activities; I had been told to get my animals, or myself, out of the place at once. In the event, my conditions, such as they were, had to be abandoned; the puppies went one by one to whomsoever would take them, after an only perfunctory investigation of the recipients' views and circumstances, or none at all.