THE PERFECT DOG
Hilary sat long in the sun, watching the pale bright waters and many
well-bred ducks circling about the shrubs, searching with their round,
bright eyes for worms. Between the bench where he was sitting and the
spiked iron railings people passed continually--men, women, children
of all kinds. Every now and then a duck would stop and cast her knowing
glance at these creatures, as though comparing the condition of their
forms and plumage with her own. 'If I had had the breeding of you,'
she seemed to say, 'I could have made a better fist of it than that. A
worse-looking lot of ducks, take you all round. I never wish to see!'
And with a quick but heavy movement of her shoulders, she would turn
away and join her fellows.
Hilary, however, got small distraction from the ducks. The situation
gradually developing was something of a dilemma to a man better
acquainted with ideas than facts, with the trimming of words than with
the shaping of events. He turned a queer, perplexed, almost quizzical
eye on it. Stephen had irritated him profoundly. He had such a way
of pettifying things! Yet, in truth, the affair would seem ridiculous
enough to an ordinary observer. What would a man of sound common sense,
like Mr. Purcey, think of it? Why not, as Stephen had suggested, drop
it? Here, however, Hilary approached the marshy ground of feeling.
To give up befriending a helpless girl the moment he found himself
personally menaced was exceedingly distasteful. But would she be
friendless? Were there not, in Stephen's words, a hundred things he did
not know about her? Had she not other resources? Had she not a story?
But here, too, he was hampered by his delicacy: one did not pry into the
private lives of others!
The matter, too, was hopelessly complicated by the domestic troubles of
the Hughs family. No conscientious man--and whatever Hilary lacked,
no one ever accused him of a lack of conscience--could put aside that
aspect of the case.
Wandering among these reflections were his thoughts about Bianca. She
was his wife. However he might feel towards her now, whatever their
relations, he must not put her in a false position. Far from wishing
to hurt her, he desired to preserve her, and everyone, from trouble and
annoyance. He had told Stephen that his interest in the girl was purely
protective. But since the night when, leaning out into the moonlight, he
heard the waggons coming in to Covent Garden Market, a strange feeling
had possessed him--the sensation of a man who lies, with a touch of
fever on him, listening to the thrum of distant music--sensuous, not
unpleasurable.
Those who saw him sitting there so quietly, with his face resting on his
hand, imagined, no doubt, that he was wrestling with some deep, abstract
proposition, some great thought to be given to mankind; for there was
that about Hilary which forced everyone to connect him instantly with
the humaner arts.
The sun began to leave the long pale waters.
A nursemaid and two children came and sat down beside him. Then it was
that, underneath his seat, Miranda found what she had been looking
for all her life. It had no smell, made no movement, was pale-grey in
colour, like herself. It had no hair that she could find; its tail
was like her own; it took no liberties, was silent, had no passions,
committed her to nothing. Standing a few inches from its head, closer
than she had ever been of her free will to any dog, she smelt its
smellessness with a long, delicious snuffling, wrinkling up the skin on
her forehead, and through her upturned eyes her little moonlight soul
looked forth. 'How unlike you are,' she seemed to say, 'to all the other
dogs I know! I would love to live with you. Shall I ever find a dog like
you again? “The latest-sterilised cloth--see white label underneath:
4s. 3d.!”' Suddenly she slithered out her slender grey-pink tongue and
licked its nose. The creature moved a little way and stopped. Miranda
saw that it had wheels. She lay down close to it, for she knew it was
the perfect dog.
Hilary watched the little moonlight lady lying vigilant, affectionate,
beside this perfect dog, who could not hurt her. She panted slightly,
and her tongue showed between her lips. Presently behind his seat he saw
another idyll. A thin white spaniel had come running up. She lay down in
the grass quite close, and three other dogs who followed, sat and looked
at her. A poor, dirty little thing she was, who seemed as if she had not
seen a home for days. Her tongue lolled out, she panted piteously, and
had no collar. Every now and then she turned her eyes, but though they
were so tired and desperate, there was a gleam in them. 'For all its
thirst and hunger and exhaustion, this is life!' they seemed to say. The
three dogs, panting too, and watching till it should be her pleasure to
begin to run again, seemed with their moist, loving eyes to echo: 'This
is life!'
Because of this idyll, people near were moving on.
And suddenly the thin white spaniel rose, and, like a little harried
ghost, slipped on amongst the trees, and the three dogs followed her.