“Why, Jeremy, where have you been? We’ve been looking for you everywhere. We were just going home.”
“Come on,” Jeremy growled. “It’s late.”
CHAPTER V
POODLE
I
I hate to confess it, but truth forces me—Hamlet was a snob. With other dogs. Not with humans. With humans you never could tell—he would cling to the one and cleave from the other without any apparent just reason. He loved the lamplighter of Orange Street, although he was a dirty, dishevelled rabbit of a man; he hated Aunt Amy, who was as decent and cleanly a spinster as England could provide. But with dogs he was a terrible snob. This, of course, he had no possible right to be, himself an absolute mongrel with at least five different breeds peeping now here, now there out of his peculiar body—nevertheless he did like a dog to be a gentleman, and openly said so. It may have been that there was in it more of the snobbery of the artist than of the social striver. What he wanted was to spend his time with dogs of intelligence, dogs with savoir faire, dogs of enterprise and ambition. What he could not abide was your mealy-mouthed, lick-spittle, creeping and crawling kind of dog. And he made his opinion very clear indeed.
Since his master’s return for the holidays and his own subsequent restoration to the upper part of the house, I am sorry to say that his conceit, already sufficiently large, was considerably swollen. His master was the most magnificent, stupendous, successful, all-knowing human to be found anywhere, and he was the favourite, best-beloved, most warmly-cherished object of that master’s affections. It followed then that he was a dog beyond all other dogs.
When he had been a kitchen dog he had affected a superiority that the other kitchen dogs of the neighbourhood had found quite intolerable.
He would talk to none of them, but would strut up and down inside the garden railings, looking with his melancholy, contemptuous eyes at those who invited him without, suffering himself to be lured neither by lust of food nor invitation to battle nor tender suggestions of love. When he became an upstairs dog again, the other upstairs dogs did not, of course, allow him to forget his recent status.
But Hamlet was not like other dogs; he had a humour and sarcasm, a gift of phrase, an enchanting cynicism which very few dogs were able to resist. He was out of doors now so frequently with Jeremy that he met dogs from quite distant parts of the town, and a little while before Christmas made friends with a fine, aristocratic fox-terrier who lived in one of the villas beyond the high school. This fox-terrier found Hamlet exactly the companion he desired, having himself a very pretty wit, but being lazy withal and liking others to make his jokes for him.
His name was Pompey, which, as he confided to Hamlet, was a silly name; but then his mistress was a silly woman, her only merit being that she adored him to madness. He had as fine a contempt for most of the other dogs of the world as Hamlet himself. It passed his comprehension that humans should wish to feed and pet such animals as he found on every side of him.