Friday the Twenty-fourth
I was lazy last night, so both the ink-pot and its owner had a rest. Or perhaps it wasn’t so much laziness as wilful revolt against the monotony of work, for, after all, it’s not the ’unting as ’urts the ’osses, but the ’ammer, ’ammer, ’ammer on the ’ard old road! I loafed for a long time in a sort of sit-easy torpor, with Bobs’ head between my knees while Dinky-Dunk pored over descriptive catalogues about farm-tractors, for by hook or by crook we’ve got to have a tractor for Alabama Ranch.
“Bobs,” I said after studying my collie’s eyes for a good many minutes, “you are surely one grand old dog!”
Whereupon Bobs wagged his tail-stump with sleepy content. As I bent lower and stared closer into those humid eyes of his, it seemed as though I were staring down into a bottomless well, through a peep-hole into Infinity, so deep and wonderful was that eye, that dusky pool of love and trust. It was like seeing into the velvet-soft recesses of a soul. And I could stare into them without fear, just as Bobs could stare back without shame. That’s where dogs are slightly different from men. If I looked into a man’s eye like that he’d either rudely inquire just what the devil I was gaping at or he’d want to ask me out to supper in one of those Pompeian places where a bald-headed waiter serves lobsters in a chambre particulière.
But all I could see in the eye of my sedate old Bobs was love, love infinite and inarticulate, love too big ever to be put into words.
“Dinky-Dunk,” I said, interrupting my lord and master at his reading, “if God is really love, as the Good Book says, I don’t see why they ever started talking about the Lamb of God.”
“Why shouldn’t they?” asked Diddums, not much interested.
“Because lambs may be artless and innocent little things, but when you’ve got their innocence you’ve got about everything. They’re not the least bit intelligent, and they’re self-centered and self-immured. Now, with dogs it’s different. Dogs love you and guard you and ache to serve you.” And I couldn’t help stopping to think about the dogs I’d known and loved, the dogs who once meant so much in my life: Chinkie’s Bingo, with his big baptizing tongue and his momentary rainbow as he emerged from the water and shook himself with my stick still in his mouth; Timmie with his ineradicable hatred for cats; Maxie with all his tricks and his singsong of howls when the piano played; Schnider, with his mania for my slippers and undies, which he carried into most unexpected quarters; and Gyp, God bless him, who was so homely of face and form but so true blue in temper and trust.
“Life, to a dog,” I went on, “really means devotion to man, doesn’t it?”