overtures to the animal had caused Kay’s note to slip from his fingers.
He picked it up and eyed Hash sternly. Amy, charmed by his recent
attentions, snuffled like water going down the waste pipe of a bath.
“Hash!” said Sam.
“’Ullo?”
“What the devil,” demanded Sam forcefully, “do you mean by chirruping at
Miss Derrick out of trees?”
“I only said oo-oo, Sam,” pleaded Mr. Todhunter.
“You said what?”
“Oo-oo!”
“What on earth did you want to say oo-oo for?”
Much voyaging on the high seas had given Hash’s cheeks the consistency
of teak, but at this point something resembling a blush played about
them.
“I thought it was the girl.”
“What girl?”
“The maid. Clara, ’er name is.”
“Well, why should you say oo-oo at her?”
Again that faint, fleeting blush coloured Hash’s face. Before Sam’s
revolted eyes he suddenly looked coy.
“Well, it’s like this, Sam: The ’ole thing ’ere is, we’re engaged.”
“What!”
“Engaged to be married.”
“Engaged!”
“Ah!” said Mr. Todhunter. And once more that repellent smirk rendered
his features hideous beyond even Nature’s liberal specifications
concerning them.
Sam sat down. This extraordinary confession had shaken him deeply.
“You’re engaged?”
“Ah!”
“But I thought you disliked women.”
“So I do--most of ’em.”
Another aspect of the matter struck Sam. His astonishment deepened.
“But how did you manage it so soon?”
“Soon?”
“You can’t have seen the girl more than about half a dozen times.”
Still another mysterious point about this romance presented itself to
Sam. He regarded the great lover with frank curiosity.
“And what was the attraction?” he asked. “That’s what I can’t
understand.”
“She’s a nice girl,” argued Hash.
“I don’t mean in her; I mean in you. What is there about you that could
make this misguided female commit such a rash act? If I were a girl, and
you begged me for one little rose from my hair, I wouldn’t give it to
you.”
“But----”
“No,” said Sam firmly, “it’s no use arguing; I just wouldn’t give it to
you. What did she see in you?”
“Oh, well----”
“It couldn’t have been your looks--we’ll dismiss that right away, of
course. It couldn’t have been your conversation or your intellect,
because you haven’t any. Then what was it?”
Mr. Todhunter smirked coyly.
“Oh, well, I’ve got a way with me, Sam--that’s how it is.”
“A way?”
“Ah!”
“What sort of way?”
“Oh, just a way.”
“Have you got it with you now?”
“Naturally I wouldn’t ’ave it with me now,” said Hash.
“You keep it for special occasions, eh? Well, you haven’t yet explained
how it all happened.”
Mr. Todhunter coughed.
“Well, it was like this, Sam: I see ’er in the garden, and I says
‘Ullo!’ and she says ‘Ullo!’ and then she come to the fence and then I
come to the fence, and she says ‘Ullo!’ and I says ‘Ullo!’ and then I
kiss her.”
Sam gaped.
“Didn’t she object?”
“Object? What would she want to object for? No, indeed! It seemed to
break what you might call the ice, and after that everything got kind of
nice and matey. And then one thing led to another--see what I mean?”
An aching sense of the injustice of things afflicted Sam.
“Well, it’s very strange,” he said.
“What’s strange?”
“I mean, I knew a man--a fellow--who--er--kissed a girl when he had only
just met her, and she was furious.”
“Ah,” said Hash, leaping instantly at a plausible solution, “but then ’e
was probably a chap with a face like Gawd-’elpus and hair growing out
of his ears. Naturally, no one wouldn’t like ’aving someone like that
kissing ’em.”
Sam went upstairs to bed. Before retiring, he looked at himself in the
mirror long and earnestly. He turned his head sideways so that the light
shone upon his ears. He was conscious of a strange despondency.
§ 3
Kay lay in bed, thinking. Ever and anon a little chuckle escaped her.
She was feeling curiously happy to-night. The world seemed to have
become all of a sudden interesting and amusing. An odd, uncontrollable
impulse urged her to sing.
She would not in any case have sung for long, for she was a considerate
girl, and the recollection would soon have come to her that there were
people hard by who were trying to get to sleep. But, as a matter of
fact, she sang only a mere bar or two, for even as she began, there came
a muffled banging on the wall--a petulant banging. Hash Todhunter loved
his Claire, but he was not prepared to put up with this sort of thing.
Three doughty buffets he dealt the wall with the heel of a number-eleven
shoe.
Kay sang no more. She turned out the light and lay in the darkness, her
face set.
Silence fell upon San Rafael and Mon Repos. And then, from somewhere in
the recesses of the latter, a strange, bansheelike wailing began. Amy
was homesick.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
ACTIVITIES OF THE DOG AMY
The day that followed Mr. Braddock’s dinner party dawned on a world
shrouded in wet white fog. By eight o’clock, however, this had thinned
to a soft, pearly veil that hung clingingly to the tree tops and
lingered about the grass of the lawn in little spiderwebs of moisture.
And when Kay Derrick came out into the garden, a quarter of an hour
later, the September sun was already beginning to pierce the mist with
hints of a wonderful day to come.
It was the sort of morning which should have bred happiness and quiet
content, but Kay had waked in a mood of irritated hostility which fine
weather could not dispel. What had happened overnight had stung her to a
militant resentment, and sleep had not removed this.
Possibly this was because her sleep, like that of everyone else in the
neighbourhood, had been disturbed and intermittent. From midnight until
two in the morning the dog Amy had given a spirited imitation of ten
dogs being torn asunder by red-hot pincers. At two, Hash Todhunter had
risen reluctantly from his bed, and arming himself with the
number-eleven shoe mentioned in the previous chapter, had reasoned with
her. This had produced a brief respite, but by a quarter of three large
numbers of dogs were once more being massacred on the premises of Mon
Repos, that ill-named house.
At three, Sam went down; and being a young man who liked dogs and saw
their point of view, tried diplomacy. This took the shape of the remains
of a leg of mutton and it worked like a charm. Amy finished the leg of
mutton and fell into a surfeited slumber, and peace descended on
Burberry Road.
Kay paced the gravel path with hard feelings, which were not removed by
the appearance a few moments later of Sam, clad in flannels and a
sweater. Sam, his back to her and his face to the sun, began to fling
himself about in a forceful and hygienic manner; and Kay, interested in
spite of herself, came to the fence to watch him. She was angry with
him, for no girl likes to have her singing criticised by bangs upon the
wall; but nevertheless she could not entirely check a faint feeling of
approval as she watched him. A country-bred girl, Kay liked men to be
strong and of the open air; and Sam, whatever his moral defects, was a
fine physical specimen. He looked fit and hard and sinewy.
Presently, in the course of a complicated movement which involved
circular swinging from the waist, his eye fell upon her. He straightened
himself and came over to the fence, flushed and tousled and healthy.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning,” said Kay coldly. “I want to apologise, Mr. Shotter. I’m
afraid my singing disturbed you last night.”
“Good Lord!” said Sam. “Was that you? I thought it was the dog.”
“I stopped directly you banged on the wall.”
“I didn’t bang on any wall. It must have been Hash.”
“Hash?”
“Hash Todhunter, the man who cooks for me--and, oh, yes, who chirrups at
you out of trees. I got your note and spoke to him about it. He
explained that he had mistaken you for your maid, Claire. It’s rather a
romantic story. He’s engaged to her.”
“Engaged!”
“That’s just what I said when he told me, and in just that tone of
voice. I was surprised. I gather, however, that Hash is what you would
call a quick worker. He tells me he has a way with him. According to his
story, he kissed her, and after that everything was nice and matey.”
Kay flushed faintly.
“Oh!” she said.
“Yes,” said Sam.
There was a silence. The San Rafael kitten, which had been playing in
the grass, approached and rubbed a wet head against Kay’s ankle.
“Well, I must be going in,” said Kay. “Claire is in bed with one of her
neuralgic headaches and I have to cook my uncle’s breakfast.”
“Oh, no, really? Let me lend you Todhunter.”
“No, thanks.”
“Perhaps you’re wise. Apart from dry hash, he’s a rotten cook.”
“So is Claire.”
“Really? What a battle of giants it will be when they start cooking for
each other!”
“Yes.”
Kay stooped and tickled the kitten under the ear, then walked quickly
toward the house. The kitten, having subjected Sam to a long and
critical scrutiny, decided that he promised little entertainment to an
active-minded cat and galloped off in pursuit of a leaf. Sam sighed and
went in to have a bath.
Some little time later, the back door of Mon Repos opened from within as
if urged by some irresistible force, and the dog Amy came out to take
the morning air.
Dogs are creatures of swiftly changing moods. Only a few hours before,
Amy, in the grip of a dreadful depression caused by leaving the public
house where she had spent her girlhood--for, in case the fact is of
interest to anyone, Hash had bought her for five shillings from the
proprietor of the Blue Anchor at Tulse Hill--had been making the night
hideous with her lamentations. Like Rachel, she had mourned and would
not be comforted. But now, to judge from her manner and a certain
jauntiness in her walk, she had completely resigned herself to the life
of exile. She scratched the turf and sniffed the shrubs with the air of
a lady of property taking a stroll round her estates. And when Hash, who
did not easily forgive, flung an egg at her out of the kitchen window so
that it burst before her on the gravel, she ate the remains
lightheartedly, as one who feels that the day is beginning well.
The only flaw in the scheme of things seemed to her to consist in a
lack of society. By nature sociable, she yearned for company, and for
some minutes roamed the garden in quest of it. She found a snail under a
laurel bush, but snails are reserved creatures, self-centred and
occupied with their own affairs, and this one cut Amy dead, retreating
into its shell with a frigid aloofness which made anything in the nature
of camaraderie out of the question.
She returned to the path, and became interested in the wooden structure
that ran along it. Rearing herself up to a majestic height and placing
her paws on this, she looked over and immediately experienced all the
emotions of stout Balboa when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific.
It is not indeed, too much to say that Amy at that moment felt like some
watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken; for not only
was there a complete new world on the other side of this wooden
structure but on the grass in the middle of it was a fascinating kitten
running round in circles after its tail.
Amy had seen enough. She would have preferred another dog to chat with;
but failing that, a kitten made an admirable substitute. She adored
kittens. At the Blue Anchor there had been seven, all intimate friends
of hers, who looked upon her body as a recreation ground and her massive
tail as a perpetual object of the chase. With a heave of her powerful
hind legs, she hoisted herself over the fence and, descending on the
other side like the delivery of half a ton of coal, bounded at the
kitten, full of good feeling. And the kitten, after one brief, shocked
stare, charged madly at the fence and scrambled up it into the branches
of the tree from which Hash Todhunter had done his recent chirruping.
Amy came to the foot of the tree and looked up, perplexed. She could
make nothing of this. It is not given to dogs any more than to men to
see themselves as others see them, and it never occurred to her for an
instant that there was in her appearance anything that might be alarming
to a high-strung young cat. But a dog cannot have a bloodhound-Airedale
father and a Great Dane-Labrador mother without acquiring a certain
physique. The kitten, peering down through the branches, congratulated
itself on a narrow escape from death and climbed higher. And at this
point Kay came out into the garden.
“Hullo, dog,” said Kay. “What are you doing here?”
Amy was glad to see Kay. She was a shortsighted dog and took her for the
daughter of the host of the Blue Boar who had been wont to give her her
meals. She left the tree and galloped toward her. And Kay, who had been
brought up with dogs from childhood and knew the correct procedure to be
observed when meeting a strange one, welcomed her becomingly. Hash,
hurrying out on observing Amy leap the fence, found himself a witness of
what practically amounted to a feast of reason and a flow of soul. That
is to say, Amy was lying restfully on her back with her legs in the air
and Kay was thumping her chest.
“I hope the dog is not annoying you, lady,” said Hash in his best
_preux-chevalier_ manner.
Kay looked up and perceived the man who had chirruped at her from the
tree. Having contracted to marry into San Rafael, he had ceased to be
an alien and had become something in the nature of one of the family; so
she smiled amiably at him, conscious the while of a passing wonder that
Claire’s heart should have been ensnared by one who, whatever his
merits, was notably deficient in conventional good looks.
“Not at all, thank you,” she said. “Is he your dog?”
“She,” corrected Hash. “Yes, miss.”
“She’s a nice dog.”
“Yes, miss,” said Hash, but with little heartiness.
“I hope she won’t frighten my kitten, though. It’s out in the garden
somewhere. I can hear it mewing.”
Amy could hear the mewing too; and still hopeful that an understanding
might be reached, she at once proceeded to the tree and endeavoured to
jump to the top of it. In this enterprise she fell short by some fifty
feet, but she jumped high enough to send the kitten scrambling into the
upper branches.
“Oh!” cried Kay, appreciating the situation.
Hash also appreciated the situation; and being a man of deeds rather
than words, vaulted over the fence and kicked Amy in the lower ribs.
Amy, her womanly feelings wounded, shot back into her own garden, where
she stood looking plaintively on with her forepaws on the fence.
Treatment like this was novel to her, for at the Blue Anchor she had
been something of a popular pet; and it seemed to her that she had
fallen among tough citizens. She expressed a not unnatural pique by
throwing her head back and uttering a loud, moaning cry like an ocean
liner in a fog. Hearing which, the kitten, which had been in two minds
about risking a descent, climbed higher.
“What shall we do?” said Kay.
“Shut up!” bellowed Hash. “Not you, miss,” he hastened to add with a
gallant smirk. “I was speaking to the dog.” He found a clod of earth and
flung it peevishly at Amy, who wrinkled her forehead thoughtfully as it
flew by, but made no move. Amy’s whole attitude now was that of one who
has got a front-row seat and means to keep it. “The ’ole thing ’ere,”
explained Hash, “is that that there cat is scared to come down, bein’
frightened of this ’ere dog.”
And having cleared up what might otherwise have remained a permanent
mystery, he plucked a blade of grass and chewed reflectively.
“I wonder,” said Kay, with an ingratiating smile, “if you would mind
climbing up and getting her.”
Hash stared at her amazedly. Her smile, which was wont to have so much
effect on so many people, left him cold. It was the silliest suggestion
he had ever heard in his life.
“Me?” he said, marvelling. “You mean me?”
“Yes.”
“Climb up this ’ere tree and fetch that there cat?”
“Yes.”
“Lady,” said Hash, “do you think I’m an acrobat or something?”
Kay bit her lips. Then, looking over the fence, she observed Sam
approaching.
“Anything wrong?” said Sam.
Kay regarded him with mixed feelings. She had an uneasy foreboding that
it might be injudicious to put herself under an obligation to a young
man so obviously belonging to the class of those who, given an inch,
take an ell. On the other hand, the kitten, mewing piteously, had
plainly got itself into a situation from which only skilled assistance
could release it. She eyed Sam doubtfully.
“Your dog has frightened my kitten up the tree,” she said.
A wave of emotion poured over Sam. Only yesterday he had been correcting
the proofs of a short story designed for a forthcoming issue of Pyke’s
_Home Companion_--_Celia’s Airman_, by Louise G. Boffin--and had curled
his lip with superior masculine scorn at what had seemed to him the
naïve sentimentality of its central theme. Celia had quarrelled with her
lover, a young wing commander in the air force, and they had become
reconciled owing to the latter saving her canary. In a mad moment in
which his critical faculties must have been completely blurred, Sam had
thought the situation far-fetched; but now he offered up a silent
apology to Miss Boffin, realising that it was from the sheer, stark
facts of life that she had drawn her inspiration.
“You want her brought down?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Leave it to me,” said Sam. “Leave it absolutely to me--leave the whole
thing entirely and completely to me.”
“It’s awfully good of you.”
“Not at all,” said Sam tenderly. “There is nothing I wouldn’t do for
you--nothing. I was saying to myself only just now----”
“I shouldn’t,” said Hash heavily. “Only go breaking your neck. What we
ought to do ’ere is to stand under the tree and chirrup.”
Sam frowned.
“You appear to me, Hash,” he said with some severity, “to think that
your mission in life is to chirrup. If you devoted half the time to work
that you do to practicing your chirruping, Mon Repos would be a better
and a sweeter place.”
He hoisted himself into the tree and began to climb rapidly. So much
progress did he make that when, a few moments later, Kay called to him,
he could not distinguish her words. He scrambled down again.
“What did you say?” he asked.
“I only said take care,” said Kay.
“Oh!” said Sam.
He resumed his climb. Hash followed him with a pessimistic eye.
“A cousin of mine broke two ribs playing this sort of silly game,” he
said moodily. “Light-haired feller named George Turner. Had a job
pruning the ellums on a gentleman’s place down Chigwell way. Two ribs he
broke, besides a number of contusions.”
He was aggrieved to find that Kay was not giving that attention to the
story which its drama and human interest deserved.
“Two ribs,” he repeated in a louder voice. “Also cuts, scratches and
contusions. Ellums are treacherous things. You think the branches is all
right, but lean your weight on ’em and they snap. That’s an ellum he’s
climbing now.”
“Oh, be quiet!” said Kay nervously. She was following Sam’s movements as
tensely as ever Celia followed her airman’s. It did look horribly
dangerous, what he was doing.
“The proper thing we ought to have done ’ere was to have took a blanket
and a ladder and a pole and to have held the blanket spread out and
climbed the ladder and prodded at that there cat with the pole, same as
they do at fires,” said Hash, casting an unwarrantable slur on the
humane methods of the fire brigade.
“Oh, well done!” cried Kay.
Sam was now operating in the topmost branches, and the kitten, not being
able to retreat farther, had just come within reach of his groping hand.
Having regarded him suspiciously for some moments and registered a
formal protest against the proceedings by making a noise like an
exploding soda-water bottle, it now allowed itself to be picked up and
buttoned into his coat.
“Splendid!” shouted Kay.
“What?” bellowed Sam, peering down.
“I said splendid!” roared Kay.
“The lady said splendid!” yelled Hash, in a voice strengthened by long
practice in announcing dinner in the midst of hurricanes. He turned to
Kay with a mournful shaking of the head, his bearing that of the man who
has tried to put a brave face on the matter, but feels the uselessness
of affecting further optimism. “It’s now that’s the dangerous part,
miss,” he said. “The coming down, what I mean. I don’t say the climbing
up of one of these ’ere ellums is safe--not what you would call safe;
but it’s when you’re coming down that the nasty accidents occur. My
cousin was coming down when he broke his two ribs and got all them
contusions. George Turner his name was--a light-haired feller, and he
broke two ribs and had to have seven stitches sewed in him.”
“Oh!” cried Kay.
“Ah!” said Hash.
He spoke with something of the smug self-satisfaction of the prophet
whose predicted disasters come off as per schedule. Half-way down the
tree, Sam, like Mr. Turner, had found proof of the treachery of ellums.
He had rested his weight on a branch which looked solid, felt solid and
should have been solid, and it had snapped under him. For one breathless
moment he seemed to be about to shoot down like Lucifer, then he
snatched at another bough and checked his fall.
This time the bough held. It was as if the elm, having played its
practical joke and failed, had become discouraged. Hash, with something
of the feelings of a spectator in the gallery at a melodrama who sees
the big scene fall flat, watched his friend and employer reach the
lowest branch and drop safely to the ground. The record of George Turner
still remained a mark for other climbers to shoot at.
Kay was not a girl who wept easily, but she felt strangely close to
tears. She removed the agitated kitten from Sam’s coat and put it on the
grass, where it immediately made another spirited attempt to climb the
tree. Foiled in this, it raced for the coal cellar and disappeared from
the social life of San Rafael until late in the afternoon.
“Your poor hands!” said Kay.
Sam regarded his palms with some surprise. In the excitement of the
recent passage he had been unaware of injury.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Only skinned a little.”
Hash would have none of this airy indifference.
“Ah,” he said, “and the next thing you know you’ll be getting dirt into
’em and going down with lockjaw. I had an uncle what got dirt into a cut
’and, and three days later we were buying our blacks for him.”
“Oh!” gasped Kay.
“Two and a half, really,” said Hash. “Because he expired toward
evening.”
“I’ll run and get a sponge and a basin,” said Kay in agitation.
“That’s awfully good of you,” said Sam. Oh, woman, he felt, in our hours
of ease uncertain, coy and hard to please; when pain and anguish rack
the brow, a ministering angel thou. And he nearly said as much.
“You don’t want to do that, miss,” said Hash. “Much simpler for him to
come indoors and put ’em under the tap.”
“Perhaps that would be better,” agreed Kay.
Sam regarded his practical-minded subordinate with something of the
injured loathing which his cooking had occasionally caused to appear on
the faces of dainty feeders in the fo’c’sle of the _Araminta_.
“This isn’t your busy day, Hash, I take it?” he said coldly.
“Pardon?”
“I said, you seem to be taking life pretty easily. Why don’t you do a
little work sometimes? If you imagine you’re a lily of the field, look
in the glass and adjust that impression.”
Hash drew himself up, wounded.
“I’m only stayin’ ’ere to ’elp and encourage,” he said stiffly. “Now
that what I might call the peril is over, there’s nothing to keep me.”
“Nothing,” agreed Sam cordially.
“I’ll be going.”
“You know your way,” said Sam. He turned to Kay. “Hash is an ass,” he
said. “Put them under the tap, indeed! These hands need careful
dressing.”
“Perhaps they do,” Kay agreed.
“They most certainly do.”
“Shall we go in then?”
“Without delay,” said Sam.
“There,” said Kay, some ten minutes later. “I think that will be all
right.”
The finest efforts of the most skilful surgeon could not have evoked
more enthusiasm from her patient. Sam regarded his bathed and
sticking-plastered hands with an admiration that was almost ecstatic.
“You’ve had training in this sort of thing,” he said.
“No.”
“You’ve never been a nurse?”
“Never.”
“Then,” said Sam, “it is pure genius. It is just one of those cases of
an amazing natural gift. You’ve probably saved my life. Oh, yes, you
have! Remember what Hash said about lockjaw.”
“But I thought you thought Hash was an ass.”
“In many ways, yes,” said Sam. “But on some points he has a certain
rugged common sense. He----”
“Won’t you be awfully late for the office?”
“For the what? Oh! Well, yes, I suppose I ought to be going there. But
I’ve got to have breakfast first.”