Memoirs of a Yellow Dog

I don't suppose it will surprise any of you to read a story written by an animal. Mr. Kipling and many others have shown that animals can express themselves in good English, and nowadays no magazine goes to press without an animal story, except the old-fashioned monthlies that still run pictures of Bryan and the Mont Pelée disaster.

But don't expect any high-flown literature in my piece, like the jungle books where Bearoo the bear, Snakoo the snake, and Tammanoo the tiger talk.

A yellow dog who has spent most of his life in a cheap New York flat, sleeping in a corner on an old satin underskirt (the one she spilled wine on at the Lady Longshoremen's banquet), can't be expected to perform tricks with the art of speech.

I was born a yellow pup; date, locality, pedigree, and weight unknown. The first thing I remember, an old woman had me in a basket on Broadway and Twenty-third Street, trying to sell me to a fat lady. She was boosting me to beat the band as a genuine Pomeranian-Hambletonian-Red-Irish-Cochin-China-Stoke-Pogis fox terrier. The fat lady chased a V through the samples in her shopping bag until she found it, and then gave up. From that moment I was a pet—a mamma's own precious darling. Say, gentle reader, did you ever have a 200-pound woman smelling of cheese and perfume pick you up and rub her nose all over you, cooing in a sugary voice: “Oh, who's a good little doggy, yes he is, yes he is?”

From a pedigreed yellow pup I grew up to be an anonymous yellow cur, looking like a cross between an Angora cat and a box of lemons. But my mistress never realized. She thought that the two first dogs that Noah took on the ark were just a side branch of my ancestors. It took two policemen to keep her from entering me in the dog show for the Siberian bloodhound prize.

Let me tell you about that flat. The house was the usual New York thing, with marble in the entryway and cobblestones above the first floor. Our flat was three—well, not flights—climbs up. My mistress rented it unfurnished and put in the regular things: a 1903 antique parlor set, an oil print of geishas in a Harlem tea house, a rubber plant, and a husband.

By Jupiter, there was a man I felt sorry for. He was a little fellow with sandy hair and whiskers a good deal like mine. Henpecked? Well, toucans and flamingos and pelicans all had their beaks in him. He dried the dishes and listened to my mistress tell about the cheap, ragged things that the lady in the squirrel coat on the second floor hung on her line to dry. And every evening while she made supper, she made him take me out on the end of a string for a walk.

If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone, they'd never marry. Laura Lean Jibbey, peanut brittle, a little cream on the neck muscles, dishes unwashed, half an hour's talk with the ice man, reading a pack of old letters, a couple of pickles, and two bottles of malt extract, one hour peeking through a hole in the window shade into the flat across the air shaft—that's about all there is to it. Twenty minutes before her husband comes home, she straightens up the house, fixes her hair so it doesn't show, and gets out a lot of sewing to look busy for ten minutes.

I led a dog's life in that flat. Most of the day I lay there in my corner watching that fat woman kill time. I slept sometimes and had daydreams about chasing cats into basements and growling at old ladies with black mittens, as a dog was meant to do. Then she would pounce on me with a lot of that silly, mushy talk and kiss me on the nose—but what could I do? A dog can't chew cloves to get rid of the taste.

I began to feel sorry for Hubby, dog my cats if I didn't. We looked so much alike that people noticed it when we went out; so we avoided the streets where fancy carriages drove and instead climbed over the piles of last December's snow on the streets where cheap people live.

One evening when we were taking our walk, and I was trying to look like a prize Saint Bernard, and the old man was trying to look like he wouldn't have killed the first organ grinder he heard play the wedding march, I looked up at him and said, in my own way:

“What are you looking so sour about, you old scaredy-cat? She doesn't kiss you. You don't have to sit on her lap and listen to talk that would make a musical comedy sound like words of wisdom. You should be thankful you're not a dog. Cheer up, old chap, and let the blues go.”

The husband looked down at me with almost human understanding in his face.

“Why, doggie,” he said, “good doggie. You almost look like you could speak. What is it, doggie—cats?”

Cats! Could speak!

But of course he couldn't understand. Humans were not given the language of animals. The only common ground on which dogs and men can talk together is in fiction.

In the flat across the hall lived a lady with a black-and-tan terrier. Her husband took it out every evening, but he always came home cheerful and whistling. One day I touched noses with the black-and-tan in the hall, and I asked him for an explanation.

“See here, Wiggle-and-Skip,” I said, “you know it's not natural for a real man to be a nursemaid to a dog in public. I've never seen a man with a dog on a leash who didn't look like he'd like to bite every other man who looked at him. But your master comes in every day as cheerful and confident as a magician doing an egg trick. How does he do it? Don't tell me he likes it.”

“Him?” said the black-and-tan. “Why, he uses Nature's Own Remedy. He gets drunk. At first when we go out he's as shy as a man who'd rather play cards when they make them all have jackpots. By the time we've been in eight bars, he doesn't care whether the thing on the end of his leash is a dog or a catfish. I've lost two inches of my tail trying to dodge those swinging doors.”

The idea I got from that terrier—vaudeville, please copy—set me to thinking.

One evening about six o'clock my mistress ordered him to get busy and take me out for a walk. I have kept it a secret until now, but she called me “Lovey.” The black-and-tan was called “Tweetness.” I think I have the advantage over him in that respect, as far as you could chase a rabbit. Still, “Lovey” is something of a label on the tail of one's self-respect.

At a quiet place on a safe street, I pulled my keeper to a stop in front of an attractive, refined saloon. I made a beeline for the doors, whining like a dog in the news reports that tells the family that little Alice is stuck while picking flowers in the brook.

“Why, I'll be darned,” said the old man, with a grin, “darn my eyes if the yellow son of a lemonade isn't asking me in to take a drink. Let me see—how long is it since I saved shoe leather by keeping one foot on the rail? I think I'll—”

I knew I had him. He took hot scotches, sitting at a table. For an hour he kept the waiters busy. I sat by his side, tapping the floor with my tail for the waiter, and eating free snacks such as my mistress in her flat could never match with the cheap food she bought at the deli just before my master came home.

When the Scotch was all gone except the rye bread, the old man untangled me from the table leg and played me outside like a fisherman plays a salmon. Out there he took off my collar and threw it into the street.

“Poor doggie,” he said, “good doggie. She won't kiss you anymore. It's a shame. Good doggie, go away and get run over by a streetcar and be happy.”

I refused to leave. I leaped and frisked around the old man's legs, happy as a dog on a rug.

“You old flea-bitten rabbit-chaser,” I said to him, “you old howling, egg-stealing beagle, can't you see I don't want to leave you? Can't you see we're both lost puppies and the missus is the cruel uncle who wants to catch you with a dish towel and me with flea medicine and a pink bow on my tail? Why not forget all that and be partners forever?”

Maybe you'll say he didn't understand—maybe he didn't. But he had a grip on the hot scotches, and he stood still for a minute, thinking.

“Doggie,” he said finally, “we don't live more than a dozen lives on this earth, and very few of us live to be more than 300. If I ever see that flat again, I'm a fool, and if you do, you're even more of a fool; and that's no flattery.

I'm betting sixty to one that we get out of here by the length of a dachshund.”

There was no string, but I frolicked along with my master to the Twenty-third Street ferry. And the cats on the way had reason to be thankful they had sharp claws.

On the Jersey side, my master said to a stranger who was eating a currant bun:

“Me and my doggie, we are bound for the Rocky Mountains.”

But what pleased me most was when my old man pulled both my ears until I howled, and said:

“You common, monkey-headed, rat-tailed, sulfur-colored son of a doormat, do you know what I'm going to call you?”

I thought of "Lovey" and whined unhappily.

"I'm going to call you 'Pete'," said my master; and if I'd had five tails, I couldn't have done enough wagging to show how happy I was.