My Dog Tulip (5 page)

Tulip sometimes embarrasses me, too. She delivered herself once in front of a greengrocer's shop—and this on the way home from a long walk on Putney Common where she had already left as much as I supposed her to contain. But in the very entrance to the shop, whose stalls abutted on the sidewalk, she squatted again. I had made some purchases here in my time, and knew the grocer and his wife for a surly, disobliging couple. Fortunately they were both busy inside the shop, which was otherwise deserted. Hoping, therefore, that they would not observe Tulip, and intending, by putting distance between us, to disown her if they did, I hastened by, hissing at her to “Hurry up, for God's sake!” as I passed. Then a terrible thought struck me. If they did happen to notice her, might they not startle her out into the traffic by firing at her a potato or a sprout? I glanced back. Tulip had just finished and was following me; but at that very instant the man and his wife, perceiving the addition to their frontage, flew angrily out and caught my eye. Useless now to pretend ignorance, yet I continued on my way, affecting not to hear the accusations they hurled after me. Then my conscience smote me. This was cowardly and unchristian conduct. True they were horrid people, but no doubt they had their burdens like the rest of us, and Tulip's gift would not help to uplift their hearts to a sweeter view of life. It was rough on them, in short; and as soon as this noble thought occurred to me, I retraced my steps. The couple, who had now withdrawn into the interior, glowered at me over their barricades of vegetables.

“I'm sorry about my dog,” I said. “It's difficult to prevent such things happening, but if you'll give me some newspaper or a bucket of water and a brush, I'll clear it up for you.”

Neither of them made any reply to this courteous speech, but the man silently handed me some pieces of paper. Unfortunately, this was one of those periods when the state of Tulip's bowels was disquieting me, and I had no cause now, when I had an extra reason for desiring a change, for any of that jubilation recorded by General Bertrand on April 12, 1821. It took me some time to swab it up, but I was thorough. When at last I straightened myself, only the sour-faced wife was visible in the shop. It was now her turn to pretend not to catch my eye.

“Well, that's done,” I said cheerfully. Without a word she turned her back on me. “You could say ‘Thank you,'” I added mildly.

“Why should I?” she retorted, with a brief, contemptuous look.

Standing there with my hands full, I had an impulse to drop it all back on the pavement, but I restrained myself. Women are dangerous, especially women of the working class. It is always a mistake to ruffle them. They stop at nothing and they never let go. Like a
tricoteuse
of the French Revolution, this implacable lady would knit and gossip beside the guillotine as my head fell. But it was not for my own sake that I carried my good deed away. We passed here frequently upon our saunters, and I feared now that, to the greengrocer's wife, Tulip's death cries as, in dodging some vegetable missile, she went under a bus, would sound like music.

But as I have remarked, Tulip's intestines have a debit as well as a credit side, and while the latter is sometimes a vexation to others, the former can be a serious inconvenience to me. I am taking her away for a country visit, for example, and since we have a train to catch and a journey ahead of us it is imperative that she should get her business over before we start. But on such occasions attention to her natural needs seems as absent from her thought as it is urgently present in mine. Discomposed, perhaps, by the signs of something unusual afoot (she is perturbed by the sight of packing and will often unpack my things as fast as I put them in, even though I assure her that she is coming too), she fails to connect the Embankment, the ramp, or the churchyard with the ideas they normally suggest. Never mind, we still have the walk over the bridge to the railway station; no doubt the exercise will stimulate her. Not at all. We reach the station yard, but Tulip has still failed in her duty.

“Come on, Tulip,” I say, “get you does done, there's a good girl.”

She casts at me a jolly look but nothing more. A Victoria train rumbles over the railway bridge above our heads and draws into the station. I have left ample time for our connection, but we could have had this train if Tulip had cooperated. Far from that, however, she is now regarding me with the most irritating expectancy, as though it were me, not her, of whom something was required. There is nothing for it but to walk her round the station, and hitching my heavy rucksack more firmly onto my shoulders, we make the longish circuit. Tulip bounds blithely ahead.

“Come on, Tulip, be a sport. Shitsy-witsy, you know.”

If she knows she gives no sign. I observe in the roadway a magnificent specimen of the very thing I want and draw her attention to it. She piddles on it. Now we are back at the station yard. Another train rumbles overhead. I begin to get anxious and therefore cross.

“Tulip! Pull yourself together!”

She puts on her frog face. That is to say she compresses her jaws so that her face looks rather flat and her lips pout out all round. I know this face well. It is her teasing one and means she is going to provoke me. Usually it amuses me. It does not amuse me now.

“Don't be tiresome, Tulip! I'll give you a bang!”

She barks at me, retreating a little; then seizes me playfully by the foot. There is nothing for it but to circumambulate the station again, and resignedly I hitch my load higher up my back. Round the station we go, Tulip staring at me as though I have taken leave of my senses. I glance at my watch. Time is passing if nothing else. I call her to me and massage her, her back, her stomach, squeeze her indeed. She enjoys this and becomes flirtatious. Maddening dog! Whatever possessed me to possess her! It will be a miracle now if we catch our train. Worn out before the journey has begun, I sit down on a wall at last and stare moodily at her … .

But I fear I may be presenting her in an inconsiderate, even insensitive, light, and that will not do. She too has her feelings, and now that I have put the human point of view it is proper to attend to hers, and to make, also, a few brief observations on what are commonly regarded as the insanitary habits of dogs, whose manners, on the whole, seem to me admirable.

Like many other animals, adult dogs have an instinct for what may be called a comfortable and cleanly modesty over the particular bodily function I have been discussing, and some of my country friends tell me that their dogs evince a scrupulosity as strict as our own in their desire to perform it in seclusion. But to a town dog the outside world is too difficult a problem. Opportunities for privacy are rare, and though Tulip may often be seen to take advantage of them when they appear to offer, as when she turns through an open gate into someone's front garden, peace and quiet are seldom the reward she reaps. Whatever choice for modesty she makes, in short, is pretty sure to be wrong; she even earned a rebuke once for using a public lavatory, and not on the grounds that it was a Gentlemen's. She had followed me down into it, and was taking no greater advantage of the place than to micturate a little in the stall beside my own, when the attendant rushed out and shooed her away.

“I've got to bucket that over now!” he complained bitterly. “They're not allowed down 'ere, gov.”

It is scarcely to be wondered at, therefore, that in the course of years her sensibilities should have become blunted. But she has them still, and they are more easily perceived indoors.

I have no grounds or garden into which she may retire and conceal herself behind a rhododendron bush. All I can offer her is an open-air terrace, and this, she knows, is at her disposal for any purpose whatever. But perhaps because she also knows that I sometimes sit on it myself, she only uses it for the major function when she cannot wait. And then she always comes to tell me. I may be shaving in the bathroom, when Tulip will suddenly arrive with the air of one who has grave tidings to impart, and move around me in a bashful manner, trying to catch my eye. I know at once what her news is and allow myself to be led out to inspect it. Then I get a pail of water and sluice it away, while she looks on with manifest satisfaction.

If canine feces are objectionable to the human race, they are rejected by dogs as well. This may seem an overstatement to those people who observe, with pained disapproval, the ways dogs greet each other in the street, and put upon such behavior a perverse and unhygienic construction. But what the animals are investigating here is that secretion of the anal glands to which I have already referred, the scent of which provides them with information. 
[2]
Whatever perversity there may be in this matter is exhibited by people themselves when, in their endeavor to impose their own standards of conduct upon their dogs, they prevent them from smelling one another's bottoms.

Dogs read the world through their noses and write their history in urine. Urine is another and highly complex source of social information; it is a language, a code, by means of which they not only express their feelings and emotions, but communicate with and appraise each other. Tulip is particularly instructive in this matter when she is in season, for on these occasions she has numerous callers who leave the marks of their attention round the front door. On her way in and out she reads, with her long black nose, these superimposed stains, and the care with which she studies them is so meticulous that she gives the impression of actually identifying her acquaintances and friends.

She has two kinds of urination, Necessity and Social. Different stances are usually, though not invariably, adopted for each. In necessity she squats squarely and abruptly, right down on her shins, her hind legs forming a kind of dam against the stream that gushes out from behind; her tail curves up like a scimitar; her expression is complacent. For social urination, which is mostly preceded by the act of smelling, she seldom squats, but balances herself on one hind leg, the other being withdrawn or cocked up in the air. The reason for this seems obvious; she is watering some special thing and wishes to avoid touching it. It may also be that in this attitude she can more accurately bestow her drops. Often they are merely drops, a single token drop will do, for the social flow is less copious. The expression on her face is business-like, as though she were signing a check.

She attends socially to a wide range of objects. The commonest group are the droppings, both liquid and solid, of other animals. Fresh horse dung has a special attraction for her and is always liberally sprayed. Then she sprinkles any food that has been thrown about—buns, bones, fish, bread, vomit—unless it is food she wishes to eat. Dead and decaying animals are carefully attended to. There are advanced stages of decay, when flesh turns into a kind of tallow, which affect her so deeply that urination appears to be an inadequate expression of her feelings. Try as she may she cannot lift her leg, and tottering round the object in a swooning way would prostrate herself upon it if the meddling voice of authority did not intervene. One day there was a human corpse, which had been fished out of the river, lying under a tarpaulin by the water's edge awaiting an ambulance to take it away, and Tulip approached it with that air of shrinking curiosity that dogs often evince towards large, draped, motionless objects in the road, such as sacks or bundles. She had never seen a human corpse before, and I should have been interested to observe how she behaved to it, but there were other spectators standing by and I thought it wiser to call her off. Human beings are so arrogant. They think nothing of chopping off the head of some dead animal, a calf or a pig, twisting its features into a ludicrous grimace, so that it appears to be grinning, winking, or licking its cold lips, and displaying it in a shop window as a comic advertisement of its own flesh. But any supposed indignity to
their
dead would be a very different matter, though whatever statement Tulip had made on this occasion would at any rate have had the merit of being serious.

She drips also upon drains, disinfectants and detergents (in a street of doorsteps it is generally the one most recently scoured that she selects), and pieces of newspaper. Once she spared a few drops for a heap of socks and shoes left on the foreshore of the river by some rowing men who had gone sculling. Following her antics with the utmost curiosity, I used to wonder what on earth she was up to. I saw that, excepting perhaps for the newspapers, unless something savory had been wrapped up in them or she was moved by printers' ink, all these objects had a quality in common, smell; even so, why did she pee on them? It could not be because other dogs had done so before her, for that only pushed the question further back: who began, and why? Nor did I think she was staking a personal claim; nothing in her subsequent behavior suggested appropriation. I came to the conclusion that she was simply expressing an appreciative interest; she was endorsing these delectable things with her signature, much as we underline a book we are reading.

Tulip has no scruple about wetting herself with her urine, and does so every morning when she visits my terrace: an event, incidentally, which she never troubles to report. If I wish to inform myself about it I can easily do so by feeling her hind legs, a piece of intimacy which she perfectly understands and which always amuses us both. Nor does she seem to mind other dogs wetting her, for it happens that, when she is easing herself on the Embankment below, some local dog, excited perhaps by the fresh scent of her glandular discharge, may lift his leg over her rump as she squats. But as I have already shown, she takes elaborate care not to soil herself with her feces, and displays a similar distaste for those of other adult dogs. Though she may venture an extremely cautious inquiring sniff at such things that lie in her path, she will then give them a markedly wide and disdainful berth; if she should happen to tread in one by accident, she flickers her foot and limps as though she had gone lame.