The Book of Susan: A Novel

by Lee Wilson Dodd

I nodded and turned away. . . . The door closed so quietly that I first knew when the latch ticked once how fortunately I was alone.

XIV

Maltby Phar was responsible for Togo; he had given him—a little black fluff-ball with shoe-button eyes—to Susan, about six months after she first came to live with me. Togo is a Chow; and a Chow is biologically classified as a dog. But if a Chow is a dog, then a Russian sable muff is a dish rag. Your Chow—black, smoke blue, or red—is a creation apart. He is to dogdom what Hillhouse Avenue is to Birch Street—the wrong end, bien entendu. His blood is so blue that his tongue is purple; and, like Susan's conception of Gertrude, he is a living confession of faith in the rightness of the right people, a living rebuke to the wrongness of the wrong; the right people being, of course, that master god or mistress goddess whom he worships, with their immediate entourage. No others need apply for even cursory notice, much less respect.

I am told they eat Chows in China, their native land. If they do, it must be from the motive that drove Plutarch's Athenian to vote the banishment of Aristides—ennui, to wit, kindling to rage; he had wearied to madness of hearing him always named "the Just." Back, too, in America—for I write from France—there will one day be proletarian reprisals against the Chow; for in the art of cutting one dead your Chow is supreme. He goes by you casually, on tiptoe, with the glazed eye of indifference. He sees you and does not see you—and will not. You may cluck, you may whistle, you may call; interest will not excite him, nor flattery move him; he passes; he "goes his unremembering way." But let him beware! If Americans are slow to anger, they are terrible when roused. I have frequently explained this to Togo—more for Susan's sake than his own—and been yawned at for my pains.

Personally, I have no complaint to make. In Togo's eyes I am one of the right people. He has always treated me with a certain tact, though with a certain reserve. Only to Susan does he prostrate himself with an almost mystical ecstasy of devotion. Only for her does his feathered tail-arc quiver, do his ears lie back, his calm ebon lips part in an unmistakably adoring smile. But there is much else, I admit, to be said for him; he never barks his deep menacing bark without cause; and as a mere objet d'art, when well combed, he is superb. Ming porcelains are nothing to him; he is perhaps the greatest decorative achievement of the unapproachably decorative East. . . .

But for Tumps, my peculiar legacy, I have nothing good to say and no apologies to offer. Like Calverley's parrot, he still lives—"he will not die." Tumps is a tomcat. And not only is he a tomcat, he is a hate-scarred noctivagant, owning but an ear and a half, and a poor third of tail. His design was botched at birth, and has since been degraded; his color is unpleasant; his expression is ferocious—and utterly sincere. He has no friends in the world but Susan and Sonia, and Sonia cannot safely keep him with her because of the children.

Out of the night he came, shortly after Togo's arrival; starved for once into submission and dragging himself across the garden terrace to Susan's feet. And she accepted this devil's gift, this household scourge. I never did, nor did Togo; but we were finally subdued by fear. Those baleful eyes cursing us from dim corners—Togo, Togo, shall we ever forget them! Separately or together, we have more than once failed to enter a dusky room, toward twilight, where those double phosphors burned from your couch corner or out from beneath my easy-chair.

But nothing would move Susan to give Tumps up so long as he cared to remain; and Tumps cared. Small wonder! Nursed back to health and rampageous vivacity, he soon mastered the neighborhood, peopled it with his ill-favored offspring, and wailed his obscene balladry to the moon. Hillhouse Avenue protested, en bloc. The Misses Carstairs, whose slumbers had more than once been postponed, and whose white Persian, Desdemona, had been debauched, threatened traps, poison and the law. Professor Emeritus Gillingwater attempted murder one night with a .22 rifle, but only succeeded in penetrating the glass roof of his neighbor's conservatory.

Susan was unmoved, defending her own; she would not listen to any plea, and she mocked at reprisals. Those were the early days of her coming, when I could not force myself to harsh measures; and happily Tumps, having lost some seven or eight lives, did with the years grow more sedate, though no more amiable. But the point is, he stayed—and, I repeat, lives to this hour on my distant, grudging bounty.

Such was the charge lightly laid upon me. . . .