Читать книгу The Dog Who Wouldn't Be - Farley Mowat - Страница 7

PROBABLY THE greatest indignity which Mutt ever experienced at our hands came about as a result of my father’s feeling for the English language. As a librarian, an author, and as a well-read man, he was a militant defender of the sanctity of the written and the spoken word, and when he encountered words that were being ill used, his anger knew no bounds.

North Americans being what they are, my father was often roused to fury. I have seen him turn his back upon one of the new nobles of our times—a prominent man of business—simply because the poor fellow remarked that he was about to immediatize the crafting of a new product. Father believed that this sort of jabberwocky was inexcusable, but what really irritated him beyond measure was the jargon of the advertising writers.

He felt so strongly about this that popular magazines were seldom allowed to enter our home. This was something of a hardship for Mother, but it was as nothing to the hardships both she and I suffered if, by mischance, my father found a copy of the Woman’s Boon Companion hidden under the cushions of the living-room couch. With the offending magazine in his hand, my father would take the floor and subject his captive audience to concentrated and vitriolic comment on the future facing a world that allowed such sabotage of all that he held dear.

These incidents were fortunately rare, yet they occurred from time to time when one of us grew careless. It was as the result of one such incident that Mutt came to suffer the blues.

It began on a spring evening in the second year of Mutt’s life. Mother had had visitors for tea that afternoon, and one of the ladies had brought with her a copy of a famous woman’s magazine which she neglected to take away again.

My father was restless that evening. He had forgotten to bring the usual armful of books home from the library. The mosquitoes were too avid to allow him to indulge in his favorite evening pastime of stalking dandelions in the back yard. He stayed in the house, pacing aimlessly about the living room until my mother could stand it no longer.

“For Heaven’s sake, stop prowling,” she said at last. “Sit down and read a magazine—there’s one behind my chair.”

She must have been completely preoccupied with her knitting when she spoke. It was seldom that my mother was so obtuse.

In my bedroom, where I was writing an essay on Champlain, I vaguely heard but did not heed her words. Mutt, asleep and dreaming at my feet, heard nothing. Neither of us was prepared for the anguished cry that rang through the house a few moments later. My father’s voice was noted for its parade-ground quality even when, as in this case, the words themselves seemed quite inscrutable.

“What the devil do the neighbors say when they see your dirty underwear?” he thundered.

Mutt woke so suddenly that he banged his head painfully against my desk. Champlain vanished from my thoughts, and I wracked my mind frantically for memories of guilty deeds connected with underwear. Then we heard mother’s voice, soothing and quiet, dispelling the echoes of the blast. My heartbeat returned to normal and my curiosity led me out into the hall to peer through the living-room door.

My father was pacing again, with a sergeant major’s tread. He was waving an open magazine in front of him and I caught a glimpse of a full-color, full-page advertisement which depicted an unspeakably dirty pair of drawers swinging like a flag of ill fame from a clothes-line. Running across the page in broad crimson letters was the mortifying accusation:

THESE MAY BE YOURS!

Mother was sitting quietly in her chair, but her lips were pursed. “Really, Angus!” she was saying. “Control yourself! After all, everyone has to live, and if that company can’t sell its bluing, how can it live?”

My father replied with a pungent, and what I took to be an appropriate, suggestion, but Mother ignored him.

“Perhaps it is a trifle vulgar,” she continued, “but it’s just intended to catch the reader’s attention; and it does, doesn’t it?”

There could be no doubt that it had caught my father’s attention.

“Well, then,” Mother concluded triumphantly, “you see?” It was the phrase with which she always clinched her arguments.

The magazine was quietly consigned to the incinerator the next morning, and Mother and I assumed that this particular storm had blown over. We were in error, but neither of us had much knowledge of the working of the subconscious. We never guessed that the incident was still festering in some deep and hidden recess of my father’s mind.

Summer drew on and the sloughs again grew dry and white; the young grain wizened and burned, and another season of drought was upon us. A film of dust hung continuously in the scorching air and we were never free of the gritty touch of it, except when we stripped off our clothing and went to soak in the bathtub. For Mutt there was no such relief. His long coat caught and trapped the dust until the hair became matted and discolored, assuming a jaundiced saffron hue, but he would not, in those early days, voluntarily turn to water to escape his misery.

He was a true son of the drought. I suppose that he had seen so little water in his first months of life that he had a right to be suspicious of it. At any rate he shied away from water in any quantity, as a cayoose shies from a rattlesnake. When we decided to force a bath upon him, he not only became argumentative and deaf, but if he could escape us, he would crawl under the garage floor, where he would remain without food or drink until we gave in and solemnly assured him that the bath was off.

Not the least difficult part of the bath was the devising of a plan whereby Mutt might be lured, all unsuspecting, into the basement where the laundry tubs stood waiting. This problem required a different solution each time, for Mutt had a long memory, and his bath suspicions were easily aroused. On one occasion we released a live gopher in the cellar and then, encountering it “unexpectedly,” called upon Mutt to slay it. This worked once.

The bath itself was a severe ordeal to all who were involved. During the earlier attempts we wore raincoats, sou’westers, and rubber boots, but we found these inadequate. Later we wore only simple breechclouts. Mutt never gave up, and he would sometimes go to incredible lengths to cheat the tub. Once he snatched a piece of naphtha soap out of my hand and swallowed it, whether accidentally or not I do not know. He began frothing almost immediately, and we curtailed the bath and called the veterinary.

The veterinary was a middle-aged and unimaginative man whose practice was largely limited to healing boils on horses and hard udders on cows. He refused to believe that Mutt had voluntarily swallowed soap, and he left in something of a huff. Mutt took advantage of the hullabaloo to vanish. He returned twenty-four hours later looking pale and emaciated—having proved the emetic efficacy of naphtha soap beyond all question.

The decision to bathe Mutt was never lightly made, and we tended to postpone it as long as possible. He was long overdue for a cleansing when, in late July, I went away to spend a few days at a friend’s cottage on Lake Manitou.

I enjoyed myself at Manitou, which is one of the saltiest of the west’s salt sloughs. My friend and I spent most of our days trying to swim, despite the fact that the saline content of the water was so high that it was impossible to sink deep enough to reach a point of balance. We slithered about on the surface, acquiring painful sunburns and bad cases of salt-water itch.

I was in a carefree and happy mood when, on Monday morning, I arrived back in Saskatoon. I came up the front walk of our house whistling for Mutt and bearing a present for him—a dead gopher that we had picked up on the road home. He did not respond to my whistle. A little uneasily I pushed through the front door and found Mother sitting on the chesterfield, looking deeply distressed. She stood up when she saw me and clutched me to her bosom.

“Oh, darling,” she cried, “your poor, poor dog! Oh, your poor, poor dog!”

A lethal apprehension overwhelmed me. I stiffened in her arms. “What’s the matter with him?” I demanded.

Mother released me and looked into my eyes. “Be brave, darling,” she said. “You’d better see him for yourself. He’s under the garage.”

I was already on my way.

Mutt’s grotto under the garage was his private sanctuary, and it could be reached only through a narrow burrow. I got down on my hands and knees and peered into the gloom. As my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I could discern a vague but Muttlike shape. He was curled up in the farthest recess, his head half hidden by his tail, but with one eye exposed and glaring balefully out of the murk. He did not seem to be seriously damaged and I ordered him to emerge.

He did not move.

In the end I had to crawl into the burrow, grasp him firmly by the tail, and drag him out by brute force. And then I was so startled by his appearance that I released my grip and he scuttled back to cover.

Mutt was no longer a black and white dog, or even a black and yellow one. He was a vivid black and blue. Those sections of his coat that had once been white were now of an unearthly ultra-marine shade. The effect was ghastly, particularly about the head, for even his nose and muzzle were bright blue.

Mutt’s transformation had taken place the day I left for Manitou. He was indignant and annoyed that he had been left behind, and for the rest of that day he sulked. When no one gave him the sympathy he felt was due him, he left the house, and he did not return home until evening. His return was notable.

Somewhere out on the broad prairie to the east of town he found the means with which to revenge himself upon humanity. He found a dead horse in that most satisfactory state of decomposition which best lends itself to being rolled upon. Mutt rolled with diligence.

He arrived home at a little after nine o’clock, and no doubt he trusted to the dusk to conceal him until he could reach his grotto. He was caught unawares when father leaped upon him from ambush. He made a frantic effort to escape and succeeded briefly, only to be trapped in the back yard. Squalling bitterly, he was at last dragged into the basement. The doors were closed and locked and the laundry tubs were filled.

Father has never been willing to describe in any detail the events that followed, but Mother—although she did not actually descend into the basement herself—was able to give me a reasonably circumstantial account. It must have been an epic struggle. It lasted almost three hours and the sounds and smells of battle reached Mother, via the hot-air registers, without appreciable diminution. She told me that both my father and Mutt had become hoarse and silent by the end of the second hour, but that the sounds of water sluicing violently back and forth over the basement floor testified clearly that the struggle was not yet at an end.

It was nearly midnight before Father appeared alone at the head of the cellar stairs. He was stripped to the buff, and close to exhaustion. After a stiff drink and a bath of his own, he went to bed without so much as hinting to Mother of the dreadful things that had happened on the dank battleground downstairs.

Mutt spent the balance of the night outside, under the front porch. He was evidently too fatigued even to give vent to his vexation by an immediate return to the dead horse—although he probably had this in mind for the morrow.

But when dawn came, not even the lure of the horse was sufficient to make him forgo his usual morning routine.

It had long been his unvarying habit to spend the hours between dawn and breakfast time going his rounds through the back alleys in the neighborhood. He had a regular route, and he seldom deviated from it. There were certain garbage cans that he never missed, and there were, of course, a number of important telephone poles that had to be attended to. His path used to take him down the alleyway between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, thence to the head of the New Bridge, and finally to the rear premises of the restaurants and grocery stores in the neighborhood of the Five Corners. Returning home, he would proceed along the main thoroughfare, inspecting fireplugs en route. By the time he started home, there would usually be a good number of people on the streets, bound across the river to their places of work. Mutt had no intimation of disaster on this particular morning until he joined the throng of south-bound workers.

Mother had no warning either until, at a quarter to eight, the telephone rang. Mother answered it and an irate female voice shouted in her ear, “You people should be put in jail! You’ll see if it’s so funny when I put the law onto you!” The receiver at the other end went down with a crash, and Mother went back to making breakfast. She was always phlegmatic in the early hours, and she assumed that this threatening tirade was simply the result of a wrong number. She actually smiled as she told Father about it over the breakfast table. She was still smiling when the police arrived.

There were two constables, and they were pleasant and polite when Mother answered the door. One of them explained that some “crank” had telephoned the station to report that the Mowats had painted their dog. The policemen were embarrassed, and they hastened to explain that it was the law that all such complaints had to be investigated, no matter how ridiculous they might seem. If Mother would assure them, simply for form’s sake, they said, that her dog was still his natural color, they would gladly depart. Mother at once gave them the requisite assurance, but, feeling somewhat puzzled, she hastened to the dining room to tell my father about it.

Father had vanished. He had not even finished his morning coffee. The sound of Eardlie grunting and snorting in the back alley showed that he was departing in haste.

Mother shrugged her shoulders, and began carrying the dishes out to the kitchen. At that moment Mutt scratched on the screen door. She went to let him in.

Mutt scurried into the house, with his head held low and a look of abject misery about him. He must have had a singularly bad time of it on the crowded street. He fled directly to my room, and vanished under the bed.

Father was not yet at his office when Mother phoned the library. She left an agitated message that he was to return home at once, and then she called the veterinary.

Unfortunately it was the same one who had been called in when Mutt ate the naphtha soap. He came again—but with a hard glint of suspicion in his eye.

Mother met him at the door and rushed him into the bedroom. The two of them tried to persuade Mutt to come out from under the bed. Mutt refused. Eventually the veterinary had to crawl under the bed after him—but he did this with a very poor grace.

When he emerged he was momentarily beyond speech. Mother misinterpreted his silence as a measure of the gravity of Mutt’s condition. She pressed the doctor for his diagnosis. She was not prepared for the tirade he loosed upon her. He forgot all professional standards. When he left the house he was bitterly vowing that he would give up medicine and return to the wheat farm that had spawned him. He was so angry that he quite forgot the bill.

Mother had by now put up with quite enough for one morning, and she was in no condition to be further trifled with when, a few minutes later, Father came cautiously through the back door. He was almost as abject as Mutt had been. He saw the look in my mother’s eye and tried to forestall her.

“I swear I didn’t even guess it would do that,” he explained hastily. “Surely it will wash out?” There was a pleading note in his voice.

The light of a belated understanding began to dawn on Mother. She fixed her husband with her most baleful glare.

“Will what wash out?” she demanded, leaving Father with no room for further evasion.

“The bluing,” said my father humbly.

It was little wonder that Mother was distressed by the time I returned from my holiday. The telephone had rung almost incessantly for three days. Some of the callers were jovial—and these were undoubtedly the hardest to bear. Others were vindictive. Fortunately the reporters from the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix were friends of my father’s and, with a notable restraint, they denied themselves the opportunity for a journalistic field day. Nevertheless, there were not many people in Saskatoon who did not know of, and who did not have opinions about, the Mowats and their bright blue dog.

By the time I arrived home Father had become very touchy about the whole affair, and it was dangerous to question him too closely. Nevertheless, I finally dared to ask him how much bluing he had actually used.

“Just a smidgen,” he replied shortly. “Just enough to take that damned yellow tint out of his fur!”

I do not know exactly how much a “smidgen” is, but I do know that when Mother asked me to clean the clogged basement drain a few days later, I removed from it a wad of paper wrappers from at least ten cubes of bluing. Some of them may, of course, have been there for some time.