Raggety

by Mary Josephine White

Next morning I was sitting on the doorstep watching the robins busy among the rain of apple blossoms. I know I felt expectant: there was that delicious Spring hush of an awakening world, and one’s heart waited too.

Round the hedge that same little yellow dog trotted into my life. I called to him, “Raggety, Raggety, how do you do?” And he came straight to me, looked at me with sad questioning beautiful brown eyes, my eyes answered, and we knew each other. From that moment I belonged to him and he to me. He let me carry him to my room,—he was such a tiny thing, so little, so independent,—protesting with faint growls. I saw his neglected hair was matted, tangled, muddy, and that his nose was sore; his eyes alone preserved the beauty to which he had been born. Then I let him go but found from the gardener where he belonged. Where he came from no one knows but he himself and he has never told me a word about it.

This is all I could find out. Down in the poor little settlement under the hill, which we called “The Cabbage Patch” in memory of Mrs. Wiggs, there lived The Junkman with his wife, many children big and little, and an old white horse. Every Monday the man hitched the white horse to his peddler’s cart and drove back among the hills and the tiny villages and scattered farms. The cart was always filled on Mondays with new bright jingling tins, pots, pails, pans, with here and there a japanned tea-caddy or a bright blue wash basin for a touch of color. When the cart came back to town towards the end of the week,—the better the trade, the sooner it came,—all its glory had departed. No more shining pans, but instead great dingy bags of rags, the clank of old iron, and perhaps on the top of the heap a dilapidated baby-carriage, the cast-off things of life. The horse seemed older and wearier; the man more bent, more broken. Earlier that Spring, on his way down from the hills, The Junkman noticed a little dog trotting under the cart. Where he joined him he did not know, at what house he had seen him he could not remember, only that the little long-haired yellow dog had come down from the hill-farms with him, had followed the cart, did not leave him when he reached home, and had become a playmate to his children. Little tousled things the children were, tumbling over each other in the two rooms that were home to them. The little yellow dog shared their play, their food, their bed, until the day that he came up the hill to teach that stupid hound-puppy to run races.

Through the gardener’s helper I made a bargain with The Junkman. He was glad of the little extra money, even though the children were sorry to lose their gay good-natured playmate, and the little yellow dog became mine.

I shall never forget that first arrival. The gardener’s man (I always feel that the larger part of the little bargain money went into his pocket) came leading him proudly, with a rope heavy enough to have dragged a cow to market about that active liberty-loving fluffy neck, and reproaches stared from those brown eyes.

Then began a series of struggles, heartrending for the little dog and for his new mistress. He had to be washed, not once, but twice and thrice, yea, unto the fourthly, to get him clean and sweet and habitable and uninhabited. We emerged from the bath room, he a glaring, fiercely protesting bundle in a bath towel, I with flaming cheeks, weary back, and collar awry.

He mourned the loss of his little jolly tousled playmates, refused to eat, refused to be comforted. Then he persisted in returning to the Cabbage Patch at every opportunity, and this meant fees to the gardener’s helper, anxious waiting, and laborious cheerfulness when he, sulky and unwilling, returned.

Raggety Chooses

This went on for four or five days. Then one morning I took him on my lap and said, “Raggety dear, I don’t want you to stay with me unless you want to. I want you for my pleasure, but if it isn’t your pleasure too, you must go back to the Cabbage Patch. Here you will have love and care, plenty to eat, and the baths which you hate. There you will have the little children to play with, scraps to eat, perhaps be cold, and surely will be dirty, with little sore eyes and nose. But I won’t try to keep you if you want to go, you must choose for yourself.” Those sad rebellious eyes looked into mine, and with aching heart I put him down and made no attempt at shutting the doors that day and off he went to his little playmates. I did not know whether I should see him again. I waited through the day, but no Raggety. But quite late there came a gentle scratching at one of the long windows. You can imagine how I hastened to open it and in marched Master Raggety with a ridiculous air of possession, as much as to say, “Well, here I am, home again.” And the curious part of his choice was that it was final. He never again went back to the Patch, never even offered to go.

Of course, a very reasonable person, who does not understand dog nature, will say, “Why, The Junkman’s family drove him away, would not let him into the house, did not feed him; so after walking about for many hours, he decided to return to the place where he knew food and shelter waited for him.” But that does not, to my mind, explain why he never again wanted to return to The Junkman’s, why he seemed willing to leave his little playmates and a life of unwashed freedom. I believe that he really chose me, that he understood my talk of the morning, knew my affection, and that his own little heart responded.