CHAPTER VI
BEANIE LOSES HIS HOME
A week or two went by, and I was as happy as a king—maybe I’d better say a president, as kings don’t seem to be getting much fun out of life at present.
I had had many homes, many masters and mistresses, but never a master like this one. He just suited me. I often used to wonder what it was about him that made me like him so much. I had seen men just as handsome, just as amiable, just as lovable—there was something I could not explain about it. When he looked at me with his deep-set grey eyes, I felt that I could die for him. He was my man affinity. He understood me, and he never believed anything against me unless it was very fully proved, and then—he always forgave me.
His confidence in me made me want to be a better dog, and I stopped nipping Beanie on the sly, and gave up stealing Mrs. Granton’s gloves and chewing them up.
I didn’t like her, and she didn’t like me. What could you make of a woman who insisted upon being called “Clossie” instead of Claudia, which was her real name. Claudia has some dignity to it, but Clossie—it didn’t sound to me like a lady, and master just hated it, but he had to say it.
They didn’t get on very well together. I often heard the servants talking about it. Louis was for mistress, and the cook and the waitress and the girl who came to do mistress’s hair and finger-nails were for master.
“She’s a fraud,” said cook emphatically. “A woman her age ain’t got no business lazing in bed till all hours of the morning, and when she gets up, what does she do? Fools round, putting in time, and then travels down town and wastes money shopping, or goes to the theatre.”
“She don’t do nothing for nobody all day long,” the waitress would break in. “It’s self, self, self—do I look pretty—is my skin all right—am I getting old—bah! I’d like to give her a job scouring brasses.”
Then Louis would stand up for her. “The old man’s clever (I regret to say they usually called master the old man, and mistress Mrs. Putty-Face). Why don’t he make more of her? If she was my wife, I’d teach her things. Why don’t he point out things on the river when we’re motoring, and do he ever read to her of an evening?”
He never did, but the maids wouldn’t tell him this, so Louis, who was a French-American, speaking fairly good English with here and there a funny mistake, went on. “When I comes in for orders, there he sits glooming one side of the fire, she the other—the table a-tween them. Man and wife should be close up, and speaking by-times.”