It was after dinner, an April evening, and Gissing slipped away from the
house for a stroll. He was afraid to stay in, because he knew that if he
did, Fuji would ask him again to fix the dishcloth rack in the kitchen.
Fuji was very short in stature, and could not reach up to the place
where the rack was screwed over the sink. Like all people whose minds
are very active, Gissing hated to attend to little details like this. It
was a weakness in his character. Fuji had asked him six times to fix the
rack, but Gissing always pretended to forget about it. To appease his
methodical butler he had written on a piece of paper FIX DISHCLOTH RACK
and pinned it on his dressing-table pincushion; but he paid no attention
to the memorandum.
He went out into a green April dusk. Down by the pond piped those
repeated treble whistlings: they still distressed him with a mysterious
unriddled summons, but Mike Terrier had told him that the secret of
respectability is to ignore whatever you don't understand. Careful
observation of this maxim had somewhat dulled the cry of that shrill
queer music. It now caused only a faint pain in his mind. Still, he
walked that way because the little meadow by the pond was agreeably soft
underfoot. Also, when he walked close beside the water the voices were
silent. That is worth noting, he said to himself. If you go directly at
the heart of a mystery, it ceases to be a mystery, and becomes only a
question of drainage. (Mr. Poodle had told him that if he had the pond
and swamp drained, the frog-song would not annoy him.) But to-night,
when the keen chirruping ceased, there was still another sound that did
not cease--a faint, appealing cry. It caused a prickling on his shoulder
blades, it made him both angry and tender. He pushed through the bushes.
In a little hollow were three small puppies, whining faintly. They were
cold and draggled with mud. Someone had left them there, evidently,
to perish. They were huddled close together; their eyes, a cloudy
unspeculative blue, were only just opened. “This is gruesome,” said
Gissing, pretending to be shocked. “Dear me, innocent pledges of sin, I
dare say. Well, there is only one thing to do.”
He picked them up carefully and carried them home.
“Quick, Fuji!” he said. “Warm some milk, some of the Grade A, and put a
little brandy in it. I'll get the spare-room bed ready.”
He rushed upstairs, wrapped the puppies in a blanket, and turned on the
electric heater to take the chill from the spare-room. The little pads
of their paws were ice-cold, and he filled the hot water bottle and held
it carefully to their twelve feet. Their pink stomachs throbbed, and at
first he feared they were dying. “They must not die!” he said fiercely.
“If they did, it would be a matter for the police, and no end of
trouble.”
Fuji came up with the milk, and looked very grave when he saw the muddy
footprints on the clean sheet.
“Now, Fuji,” said Gissing, “do you suppose they can lap, or will we have
to pour it down?”
In spite of his superior manner, Fuji was a good fellow in an emergency.
It was he who suggested the fountain-pen filler. They washed the ink
out of it, and used it to drip the hot brandy-and-milk down the puppies'
throats. Their noses, which had been icy, suddenly became very hot and
dry. Gissing feared a fever and thought their temperatures should be
taken.
“The only thermometer we have,” he said, “is the one on the porch, with
the mercury split in two. I don't suppose that would do. Have you a
clinical thermometer, Fuji?”
Fuji felt that his employer was making too much fuss over the matter.
“No, sir,” he said firmly. “They are quite all right. A good sleep will
revive them. They will be as fit as possible in the morning.”
Fuji went out into the garden to brush the mud from his neat white
jacket. His face was inscrutable. Gissing sat by the spare-room bed
until he was sure the puppies were sleeping correctly. He closed the
door so that Fuji would not hear him humming a lullaby. Three Blind Mice
was the only nursery song he could remember, and he sang it over and
over again.
When he tiptoed downstairs, Fuji had gone to bed. Gissing went into his
study, lit a pipe, and walked up and down, thinking. By and bye he wrote
two letters. One was to a bookseller in the city, asking him to send (at
once) one copy of Dr. Holt's book on the Care and Feeding of Children,
and a well-illustrated edition of Mother Goose. The other was to Mr.
Poodle, asking him to fix a date for the christening of Mr. Gissing's
three small nephews, who had come to live with him.
“It is lucky they are all boys,” said Gissing. “I would know nothing
about bringing up girls.”
“I suppose,” he added after a while, “that I shall have to raise Fuji's
wages.”
Then he went into the kitchen and fixed the dishcloth rack.
Before going to bed that night he took his usual walk around the house.
The sky was freckled with stars. It was generally his habit to make a
tour of his property toward midnight, to be sure everything was in good
order. He always looked into the ice-box, and admired the cleanliness
of Fuji's arrangements. The milk bottles were properly capped with their
round cardboard tops; the cheese was never put on the same rack with
the butter; the doors of the ice-box were carefully latched. Such
observations, and the slow twinkle of the fire in the range, deep down
under the curfew layer of coals, pleased him. In the cellar he peeped
into the garbage can, for it was always a satisfaction to assure himself
that Fuji did not waste anything that could be used. One of the laundry
tub taps was dripping, with a soft measured tinkle: he said to himself
that he really must have it attended to. All these domestic matters
seemed more significant than ever when he thought of youthful innocence
sleeping upstairs in the spare-room bed. His had been a selfish life
hitherto, he feared. These puppies were just what he needed to take him
out of himself.
Busy with these thoughts, he did not notice the ironical whistling
coming from the pond. He tasted the night air with cheerful
satisfaction. “At any rate, to-morrow will be a fine day,” he said.
The next day it rained. But Gissing was too busy to think about the
weather. Every hour or so during the night he had gone into the spare
room to listen attentively to the breathing of the puppies, to pull the
blanket over them, and feel their noses. It seemed to him that they
were perspiring a little, and he was worried lest they catch cold. His
morning sleep (it had always been his comfortable habit to lie abed a
trifle late) was interrupted about seven o'clock by a lively clamour
across the hall. The puppies were awake, perfectly restored, and while
they were too young to make their wants intelligible, they plainly
expected some attention. He gave them a pair of old slippers to play
with, and proceeded to his own toilet.
As he was bathing them, after breakfast, he tried to enlist Fuji's
enthusiasm. “Did you ever see such fat rascals?” he said. “I wonder if
we ought to trim their tails? How pink their stomachs are, and how pink
and delightful between their toes! You hold these two while I dry
the other. No, not that way! Hold them so you support their spines. A
puppy's back is very delicate: you can't be too careful. We'll have to
do things in a rough-and-ready way until Dr. Holt's book comes. After
that we can be scientific.”
Fuji did not seem very keen. Presently, in spite of the rain, he was
dispatched to the village department store to choose three small cribs
and a multitude of safety pins. “Plenty of safety pins is the idea,”
said Gissing. “With enough safety pins handy, children are easy to
manage.”
As soon as the puppies were bestowed on the porch, in the sunshine, for
their morning nap, he telephoned to the local paperhanger.
“I want you” (he said) “to come up as soon as you can with some nice
samples of nursery wallpaper. A lively Mother Goose pattern would do
very well.” He had already decided to change the spare room into a
nursery. He telephoned the carpenter to make a gate for the top of the
stairs. He was so busy that he did not even have time to think of his
pipe, or the morning paper. At last, just before lunch, he found a
breathing space. He sat down in the study to rest his legs, and looked
for the Times. It was not in its usual place on his reading table. At
that moment the puppies woke up, and he ran out to attend them. He would
have been distressed if he had known that Fuji had the paper in the
kitchen, and was studying the HELP WANTED columns.
A great deal of interest was aroused in the neighbourhood by the arrival
of Gissing's nephews, as he called them. Several of the ladies, who had
ignored him hitherto, called, in his absence, and left extra cards. This
implied (he supposed, though he was not closely versed in such niceties
of society) that there was a Mrs. Gissing, and he was annoyed, for he
felt certain they knew he was a bachelor. But the children were a source
of nothing but pride to him. They grew with astounding rapidity, ate
their food without coaxing, rarely cried at night, and gave him much
amusement by their naive ways. He was too occupied to be troubled with
introspection. Indeed, his well-ordered home was very different from
before. The trim lawn, in spite of his zealous efforts, was constantly
littered with toys. In sheer mischief the youngsters got into his
wardrobe and chewed off the tails of his evening dress coat. But he
felt a satisfying dignity and happiness in his new status as head of a
family.
What worried him most was the fear that Fuji would complain of this
sudden addition to his duties. The butler's face was rather an enigma,
particularly at meal times, when Gissing sat at the dinner table
surrounded by the three puppies in their high chairs, with a spindrift
of milk and prune-juice spattering generously as the youngsters plied
their spoons. Fuji had arranged a series of scuppers, made of oilcloth,
underneath the chairs; but in spite of this the dining-room rug, after a
meal, looked much as the desert place must have after the feeding of
the multitude. Fuji, who was pensive, recalled the five loaves and two
fishes that produced twelve baskets of fragments. The vacuum cleaner got
clogged by a surfeit of crumbs.
Gissing saw that it would be a race between heart and head. If Fuji's
heart should become entangled (that is, if the innocent charms of the
children should engage his affections before his reason convinced him
that the situation was now too arduous), there was some hope. He tried
to ease the problem also by mental suggestion. “It is really remarkable”
(he said to Fuji) “that children should give one so little trouble.”
As he made this remark, he was speeding hotly to and fro between the
bathroom and the nursery, trying to get one tucked in bed and another
undressed, while the third was lashing the tub into soapy foam. Fuji
made his habitual response, “Very good, sir.” But one fears that he
detected some insincerity, for the next day, which was Sunday, he gave
notice. This generally happens on a Sunday, because the papers publish
more Help Wanted advertisements then than on any other day.
“I'm sorry, sir,” he said. “But when I took this place there was nothing
said about three children.”
This was unreasonable of Fuji. It is very rare to have everything
explained beforehand. When Adam and Eve were put into the Garden of
Eden, there was nothing said about the serpent.
However, Gissing did not believe in entreating a servant to stay. He
offered to give Fuji a raise, but the butler was still determined to
leave.
“My senses are very delicate,” he said. “I really cannot stand
the--well, the aroma exhaled by those three children when they have had
a warm bath.”
“What nonsense!” cried Gissing. “The smell of wet, healthy puppies?
Nothing is more agreeable. You are cold-blooded: I don't believe you are
fond of puppies. Think of their wobbly black noses. Consider how pink is
the little cleft between their toes and the main cushion of their feet.
Their ears are like silk. Inside their upper jaws are parallel black
ridges, most remarkable. I never realized before how beautifully and
carefully we are made. I am surprised that you should be so indifferent
to these things.”
There was a moisture in Fuji's eyes, but he left at the end of the week.