The Plague Dogs (25 page)

"Often in the middle of the day, and always in the evenings, when my master had finished at this other house, we used to go for a walk. Sometimes it was just across the park, but other times we'd go into the woods or along the river, a long walk, chasing about after water-rats or grey squirrels, and my master used to throw sticks for me to fetch. Some days, every so often, he didn't go to the paper house at all, and unless he wanted to dig in the garden we'd go out walking for hours. And then sometimes at night, when we were in by the fire—he had a sort of flickering box he used to look at—

that was another thing I never really understood, but it must have been all right if he liked it—we used to hear the cats yowling, out in the garden, and I'd cock my ears and sit up, and he used to laugh and click his tongue; and then he'd get up and open the back door and out I'd go like a bang-whappy-teasel, wuff! wuff! and over the wall they'd go flying! O Snit's a good dog! Ho ho!

"We were always jolly and I don't know whatever my master would have done without me to carry up that paper in the mornings and fetch the sticks he threw and bark when people came to the door and chase the cats away. And I tell you, I wasn't like that miserable tyke next door, who used to scratch up the garden and overeat himself and refuse to come when he was called or do anything he was told. I've never been snobbish, but I wouldn't smell him down a ten-foot rat-hole. We managed things properly in our house. I used to be fed every evening when we got home for the night, and that was that, except for the morning biscuit and perhaps just a sort of favour-mouthful before we went anywhere in the car. I used to get brushed regularly and sometimes I had stuff put in my ears; and twice my master took me to be looked at by a whitecoat—a proper, decent whitecoat. In those days I never knew there was any other sort. I was never allowed to sit on chairs—only the bed, and that had a nice, rough, brown blanket across the bottom—my blanket, no one else's. I had my own chair. It was an old one, you know, but I made it a whole lot older. I fairly tore the seat out of it! I loved it. It smelt of me! I always used to come when I was called and do what I was told. That was because my master knew what he was doing—he sort of made you want to do what he wanted, somehow. You were glad to—you trusted him. If he thought a thing was all right, then it was. I remember once I hurt my paw—I couldn't put it to the ground, it was so painful, and all swollen up, too—and he put me up on the table and kept talking to me all the time—just quietly and kindly, you know—and he took hold of it and I was growling and curling my lip and he just kept on talking gently and then suddenly I—I—nipped him—I couldn't help it. But he took absolutely no notice at all—just kept on talking away, the same as before, and looking at my paw. I felt so ashamed of myself—fancy biting him!—and then he pulled a huge great thorn out of my pad and put some stuff on it—that was the first time I ever smelt that smell. I wasn't afraid of it in those days. "I'm not sure, but I think some of the other men, and the women too—

you know, the ones my master used to talk to; his friends, and the people who used to come to the paper house—I think they used to tease him a bit, sometimes, about not having a mate and about living by himself with just me and the grey-haired woman to look after him. Of course you can never really understand what they say to each other, but I've seen them pointing at me and laughing, and it was just an idea I got. My master didn't seem to mind. He used to scratch my ears and pat me and say I was a good dog and so on. When he picked up his stick and the lead I always knew we were going for a walk and I used to dance and jump all round the street-door and fairly bark the place down.

"There was only one person I didn't like and that was my master's sister. I knew she must be his sister, because she looked so much like him and she sort of smelt a bit like him too. Sometimes she used to come and stay at our house and when she did, oh liver and lights, didn't we catch it! You could tell from a sort of gritty softness in her voice—like—like charcoal biscuits strained through a doormat

—that she thought everything was all wrong. And I could never find my things—my ball or my bone or my old woolly rug under the stairs—because she used to tidy them all away. Once she pushed me hard

—banged me, really—with a broom, when I was asleep on the floor, and my master jumped up out of his chair and told her not to do that. But mostly he seemed almost afraid to say a word. I'm only guessing, again, but I believe she was cross with him for not having a mate and he sort of felt perhaps he ought to, but he didn't want to. If that's right, of course it would explain why she didn't like me. She hated me, Rowf. She used to try to pretend she didn't, but I could smell it all right and I used to act up and cower away from her so that other people must have thought she ill-treated me. Well, she did, really: and in the end—in the end— "Do you know, it's a funny thing; I knew my own name, of course, but I never knew my master's name. Perhaps he hadn't got one, any more than the tod; but I knew her name all right, because my master always used it so much. I'd smell her coming through the gate and then my master would look out of the window and he always used to laugh and say the same thing

—'Heercums Annie Mossity.' Sometimes I used to growl, but he didn't like that. He wouldn't let me treat her disrespectfully, even when she wasn't there. You had to behave properly to humans—all humans—in our house. But I always used to think that that name was too long and grand altogether for the likes of her, and to myself I always left out the 'Heercums' and thought of her as 'Annie Mossity'—

or just plain 'Mossity.' My master spoke sharply to me once for dancing about and wagging my tail when she was leaving and he was carrying her bag down to the door. I couldn't help it—I knew she was going and it couldn't be too soon for me. And when she'd gone there always used to be something extra nice that she wouldn't have allowed—the leavings of a cream trifle, or something like that.

"Now one day—one day—" Snitter paused, whining, and rubbed his maimed head against the straw. A gust of wind stirred an old sack hanging from a nail above their heads, so that it flapped slowly, like the wings of some great bird of prey. "One evening—it was very late last summer, almost autumn—we'd got back from the paper house. My master had taken his eye off me and I'd slipped out into the garden and gone to sleep in the sun, all among the rhododendron bushes by the gate. In summer they have great, pink flowers, you know, Rowf, half as big as your head, and the bees go buzzing in and out of them. This was a special place I had of my own—a sort of secret lair. I always felt very safe and happy there. It was sunset, I'd woken up and I was thinking about supper and feeling rather alert and active—the way you do when you're hungry, you know. And then, between the leaves, coming down the path, I heard footsteps and caught a glimpse of my master's yellow scarf. Sure enough, there he was going towards the gate, with a bit of paper in his hand. I knew what he was up to

—the big red bin game. I've told you how men are always playing about with bits of paper. You said they even used to do it while they were watching you in that tank. It's the same for them as sniffing things is for us. And the arrangements in the street are the same for them as they are for us—lamp-posts for dogs and bigger, round, red bins for the humans' paper. I've never been able to understand why some masters—not mine, thank goodness—didn't seem to like their dogs having a pee and a sniff round the dog-posts, when they do just the same themselves with the red bins. We're all creatures, after all, and they're only laying claim to territory and asserting themselves, same as we do. When a man goes out for a bit of a walk—in the evening, usually—he often takes a bit of paper with him—it's got his smell on it, you see—and pushes it into one of the big, red bins; and if he meets another man or woman doing the same, he generally talks to them for a bit and sort of sniffs about, just the same as we do.

"Anyway, I've told you how good my master was, and he had just as healthy an enjoyment of paper as ever a dog had for a sniff round a post. And sometimes when he got home from the paper house in the evening, he used to sit down and scratch about with even more paper, and then he'd go out and push it into the red bin up the road.

"Well, it was plain enough that that was what he was doing this evening. He nearly always used to call me to go with him, but I suppose he hadn't been able to find me anywhere about the place and thought it didn't matter as we'd be going for a longer walk later. Anyway, out through the gate he went.

So after a minute or two I thought, why not slip out after him and catch him up, just for fun—-you know, give him a bit of a surprise? So I waited till he'd turned the corner at the end of the street and then I came out of the rhododendrons and jumped right over the gate. I was pretty good at jumping. It was a trick my master had taught me. He used to call out, 'Hoop-la, sugar lump,1 and I'd jump clean over the table and get a lump of sugar for it. Well, anyhow, I jumped the gate and then I ran up the road and round the corner after him.

"The big red bin was on the other side of the road and you had to be rather careful crossing this particular road because of all the cars and lorries and things. Whenever my master took me with him he used to put me on a lead and he always used to cross the road at the same place, where it was painted black and white. I must have crossed there any number of times—we never crossed anywhere else. I saw him, in front of me, just coming up to it, swinging his stick, with the bit of paper in his hand, so I said to myself, 'Now to surprise him,' and I ran past him and out on to the black and white bit of road."

For a while Snitter said nothing, lying, with closed eyes, on the damp straw. Rowf waited silently, almost hoping that he would tell no more and thus, by desisting, perhaps avert or change what he knew must be some dreadful outcome. Who has not, as a sad story approaches its climax, found himself thinking in this way? The archons of Athens punished for lying the barber who first put about the news of the Syracusan disaster; for if he were treated as a liar, would it not follow that he must have been lying indeed, and therefore that it had never taken place?

After a time the moon, moving westward, shone directly upon the spot where the dogs lay. As though the light had broken in upon and put an end to Snitter's attempt to hide from the close of his story, he opened his eyes and went on. "I was about half-way over when I heard my master, behind me, shout, 'Snitter! Stop!' I always obeyed him, as I told you, and I stopped absolutely dead. And then—

then there came a dreadful, squealing noise on the road, and in the same moment my master ran out and grabbed me and threw me bodily right across into the opposite gutter; and as I fell I heard the lorry hit him—oh, what a terrible noise it made! I heard his head hit the road—if only I could ever forget it! His head on the road!

"There was glass all over the place. A piece cut my paw. A man got out of the lorry and people came running up—first one or two and then more and more. They picked my master up—his face was all covered with blood—no one took any notice of me. And then there was a bell ringing and a big white car came and men in blue clothes got out of it. I told you how my master used to talk to that bell in his room and I suppose they'd brought this other bell—it was a very loud one—to try to get him to talk: but he never did. He just lay still as death in the road. His eyes were shut and there was blood all over his clothes. They all knew—you could see they all knew. The lorry driver kept on shouting and crying—he was hardly more than a boy—and then a blue man saw me wandering about and grabbed me by the collar. The grey-haired woman with the apron had come—everyone from our street seemed to be there—and she put me on a lead and took me back to her house. She wasn't kind any more—she acted as though she hated me—they all did, they all did! She shut me up in the coal cellar, but I howled so much that in the end she let me out and left me in the kitchen.

"I can't remember it all, but I never saw my master again. I suppose they put him in the ground.

They do, you know. That's what they do. The next day Annie Mossity came. She stood in the kitchen doorway and just looked at me. I'll never forget it. You'd have thought anyone would have had a word for a dog as lost and miserable as I was. She said something to the grey-haired woman and then they shut the door and went away. And the next day she came back with a basket and put me in it and drove me off in her car—it wasn't our car, anyway; it smelt of her—and she took me a long way and then she gave me to the whitecoats. And I believe she took the trouble to do all that because she wanted something horrible to happen to me."

After a long time, Rowf asked, "Is that why you've so often told me you're falling?" Snitter made no reply and he went on, "It's a bad world for animals. You might just as well have fallen—out of the sky, I mean. There's no going back there, where you've come from, is there? Never. But at least it's over, Snitter. It can't happen again."

"It can—it does," whispered Snitter. "That's the dreadful thing. Men can do worse things than hurt you or starve you—they can change the world: we've seen that they can, you and I. But what I understand now is that they've done it through me. Annie Mossity—what she wanted to happen has happened. I don't know what she told the whitecoats to do, but I know now that everything bad comes out of my head, and that it happens again and again. That's where the bad things start and then they come out into the world, like maggots coming out of meat and changing into flies. When you and I got away from the whitecoats' place, we thought the men had taken all the houses and gardens away. But it was really I who destroyed them. The lorry driver that morning who threw stones at me—he knew who I was; and that man with the sheep-dogs—so did he. What happened to my master has happened again; the white bell-car—you said you actually saw it there, by the bridge. The man with the kind voice—the dark-faced man beside the car at the bridge—I killed him. I tell you, there isn't a world at all now except this wound in my head, and you're in there too, Rowf. I'm not going outside again—not any more. If I can die and stop it all, then I'll stay here and do that. But perhaps I've died already. Perhaps dying—perhaps even dying doesn't stop it."