THE PUP-DOG

MODERN ESSAYS AND STORIES

THE FAMILIAR ESSAY

By ROBERT PALFREY UTTER

(1875—). Associate Professor of English in the University of California. He taught for a time at Harvard and also at Amherst. He is a delightful essayist, and contributes frequently to various magazines.

The writer of a familiar essay selects any subject in which he is interested. Sometimes the more trifling the subject seems to be, the more delightful is the essay. Trifles, in fact, make up life, and around them center many of our deepest interests. The very charm of the familiar essay lies in its ability to call attention to the value of trifles,—to the little things in life, to little events, and to all the odds and ends of human interests.The familiar essay is nothing more than happy talk that gives us, as it were, a walk or a chat with one who has a keen mind, a ready wit, and a pleasant spirit.The Pup-Dogis an unusually excellent illustration of the familiar essay. We all love him,—the pup-dog,—the good friend about whom Mr. Utter has written so amusingly, so understandingly, and so sympathetically. As we read we can see the dog jumping and hear him barking; we laugh at his antics; we are, in fact, taking a walk with Mr. Utter while he talks to us about his dog,—or our dog.

The familiar essay is nothing more than happy talk that gives us, as it were, a walk or a chat with one who has a keen mind, a ready wit, and a pleasant spirit.

The Pup-Dogis an unusually excellent illustration of the familiar essay. We all love him,—the pup-dog,—the good friend about whom Mr. Utter has written so amusingly, so understandingly, and so sympathetically. As we read we can see the dog jumping and hear him barking; we laugh at his antics; we are, in fact, taking a walk with Mr. Utter while he talks to us about his dog,—or our dog.

Any dog is a pup-dog so long as he prefers a rat, dead or alive, to chocolate fudge, a moldy bone to sponge cake, a fight with a woodchuck to hanging round the tea-table for sweet biscuit. Of course he will show traits of age as years advance, but usually they are physical traits, not emotional. For the most part dogs’ affections burn warmly, and their love of life and experience brightly, while life lasts. They remain young, as poets do. Every dog is a pup-dog, but some are more so than others.

Most so of all is the Irish terrier. To me he stands as thearchetype of the dog, and the doggier a dog is, the better I like him. I love the collie; none better. I have lived with him, and ranged the hills with him in every kind of weather, and you can hardly tell me a story of his loyalty and intelligence that I cannot go you one better. But the collie is a gentleman. He has risen from the ranks, to be sure, but he is every inch the gentleman, and just now I am speaking of dogs. The terrier is every inch a dog, and the Irish is the terrierpar excellence.

The man who mistakes him for an Airedale, as many do, is one who does not know an Irishman from a Scot. The Airedale has a touch of the national dourness; I believe that he is a Calvinist at heart, with a severe sense of personal responsibility. The Irish terrier can atone vicariously or not at all for his light-hearted sins. The Airedale takes his romance and his fighting as seriously as anAlan Breck. The Irish terrier has all the imagination and humor of his race; he has a rollicking air; he is whimsical, warm-hearted, jaunty, and has the gift of blarney. He loves a scrimmage better than his dinner, but he bears no malice.

His fellest earthly foes,Cats, he does but affect to hate.

The terrier family is primarily a jolly, good-natured crowd whose business it is to dig into the lairs of burrowing creatures and fight them at narrow quarters. The signal for the fight is the attack on the intrusive nose. You can read this family history in the pup-dog's treatment of the cat. The cat of his own household with whom he is brought up he rallies with good-humored banter, but he is less likely to hurt her than she him. He will take her with him on his morning round of neighborhood garbage-pails, and even warm her kittens on his back as he lies in the square of sunshine on the kitchen floor, till they begin to knead their tiny claws into him in a futile search for nourishment; then he shakes them patiently off and seeks rest elsewhere. He will chase any cat as long as she will run; if she refuses to run, he will dance round her and bark, trying to get up a game. “Be a sport!” he tauntsher. “Take a chance!” But if she claws his nose, she treads on the tail of his coat, and no Irish gentleman will stand for that.

Similar are his tactics with human creatures. First he tries a small bluff to see if he can start anything. If his victim shows signs of fear, he redoubles his effort, his tail the while signaling huge delight at his success. If the victim shows fight, he may develop the attack in earnest. The victim who shows either fear or fight betrays complete ignorance of dog nature, for the initial bluff is always naïvely transparent; the pup-dog may have a poker face, but his tail is a rank traitor. A nest of yellow-jackets in a hole in the ground challenges his every instinct. He cocks his ear at the subterranean buzzing, tries a little tentative excavation with cautious paw. Soon one of the inmates scores on the tip of his nose, and war is declared in earnest. There are leaping attacks with clashing of teeth, and wildly gyrating rear-guard actions. Custom cannot stale the charm of the spot; all summer, so long as there is a wing stirring, hornets shall be hot i' the mouth.

The degree of youth which the pup-dog attains and holds is that of the human male of eleven or twelve years. He nurses an inextinguishable quarrel with the hair-brush. His hatred of the formal bath is chronic, but he will paddle delightedly in any casual water out of doors, regardless of temperatures and seasons. At home he will sometimes scoff at plain, wholesome food, but to the public he gives the impression that his family systematically starve him, and his dietetic experiments often have weird and disastrous results. You can never count on his behavior except on formal occasions, when you know to a certainty that he will disgrace you. His curiosity is equaled only by his adroitness in getting out of awkward situations into which it plunges him. His love of play is unquenchable by weariness or hunger; there is no time when the sight of a ball will not rouse him to clamorous activity.

For fine clothes he has a satiric contempt, and will almost invariably manage to land a dirty footprint on white waist-coator “ice-cream pants” in the first five minutes of their immaculacy. He is one hundred per cent. motor-minded; when he is “stung with the splendor of a sudden thought,” he springs to immediate action. In the absence of any ideas he relaxes and sleeps with the abandon of a jute door-mat.

Dog meets dog as boy meets boy, with assertions of superiority, challenge, perhaps fight, followed by friendship and play. No wonder that with pup-boys the pup-dog is so completely at one; his code is their code, and whither they go he goes—except to school. With September come the dull days for him. No more the hordes of pirates and bandits with bandanas and peaked hats, belts stuck full of dirks and “ottermaticks,” sweep up and down the sidewalk on bicycles in open defiance of the law, raiding lawns and gardens, scattering shrieking tea-parties of little girls and dolls, haling them aboard the lugger in the next lot and holding them for fabulous ransom. There is always some one who will pay it with an imposing check signed “Theodore Wilson Roosevelt Woodrow Rockefeller.” He prances with flopping ears beside the flying wheels, crouches in ambush, gives tongue in the raid, flies at the victims and tears their frocks, mounts guard in the cave, and shares the bandits' last cookie.

But when the pirates become orderly citizens, his day begins after school and ends with supper. With his paws on the window-sill, his nose making misty spots on the glass, he watches them as they march away in the morning, then he makes a perfunctory round of the neighborhood, inspecting garbage-pails and unwary cats. After that there is nothing to do but relax in the September sunshine and exist in a coma till the pirates return and resume their normal functions, except for his routine attempt to intimidate the postman and the iceman. Perhaps he might succeed some happy day; who knows?

The pup-dog in the open is the best of companions; his exuberant vitality and unquenchable zest for things in general give him endless variety. There are times, perhaps, when yousee little of him; he uses you as a mobile base of operations, and runs an epicycloidal course with you as moving center, showing only a flash of his tail on one horizon or the flop of his ears on the other. You hear his wild cries of excitement when he starts a squirrel or a rabbit. By rare luck you may be called in time to referee a fight with a woodchuck, or once in a happy dog's age you may see him, a khaki streak through the underbrush, in pursuit of a fox.

At last you hear the drumming of his feet on the road behind you; he shoots past before he can shift gears, wheels, and lands a running jump on your diaphragm by way of reporting present for duty. Thereafter he sticks a little closer, popping out into the road or showing his tousled face through the leaves at intervals of two or three hundred yards to make sure that you are still on the planet. Then you may enjoy his indefatigable industry in counting with his nose, his tail quivering with delight, the chinks of old stone walls. You may light your pipe and sit by for an hour as he energetically follows his family tradition in digging under an old stump, shooting the sand out behind with kangaroo strokes, tugging at the roots with his teeth, and pausing from time to time to grin at you with a yard of pink tongue completely surrounded by leaf mold. You may admire his zeal as inspector of chipmunks, mice, frogs, grasshoppers, crickets, and such small deer. Anything that lives and tries to get away from him is fair game except chickens. If round the turn of the road he plumps into a hen convention, memories of bitter humiliations surge up within him, and he blushes, and turns his face aside. Other dogs he meets with tentative growling, bristling, and tail-wagging, by way of asserting that he will take them on any terms they like; fight or frolic, it is all one to him.

You cannot win his allegiance by feeding him, though he always has his bit of blarney ready for the cook. He loves all members of the family with nice discrimination for their weaknesses: the pup-boy who cannot resist an invitation to romp; the pup-girl who cannot withstand begging blandishmentsof nose and paw, but will subvert discipline and share food with him whenever and wherever she has it. He will welcome with leapings and gyrations any one of them after a day's absence or an hour's, but his whole-souled allegiance is to the head of the house; his is the one voice that speaks with authority; his the first welcome always when the family returns in a group. That loyalty, burning bright and true to the last spark of life, that unfailing welcome on which a man can count more surely than on any human love—indeed, there is no secret in a man's love for a dog, however we may wonder at the dog's love for the man. Let Argos and Ulysses[1]stand as the type of it, though to me it lacks something of the ideal, not in the image of the dog, but in the conduct of the man. Were I disguised for peril of my life, and my dog, after the wanderings and dangers of many years, lifted his head and knew me and then died, I think no craft could withhold my feelings from betraying me.

“Dogs know their friends,” we say, as if there were mystery in the knowledge. The password of the fraternity is not hidden; you may hear it anywhere. It was spoken at my own hearth when the pup-dog, wet with autumn rain, thrust himself between my guest and the andirons and began to steam. My guest checked my remonstrance. “Don't disturb him on my account, you know. I rather like the smell of a wet dog,” he added apologetically. The word revealed a background that made the speaker at once and forever my guest-friend. In it I saw boy and dog in rain and snow on wet trails, their camp in narrow shelter, where they snuggle together with all in common that they have of food and warmth. He who shared his boyhood with a pup-dog will always share whatever is his with members of the fraternity. He will value the wagging of a stubby tail above all dog-show points and parlor tricks. He will not be rash to chide affectionate importunity, nor to set for his dog higher standards than heupholds for himself. Do you never nurse a grouch and express it in appropriate language? Do you never take direct action when your feelings get away with you? When the like befalls the pup-dog, have ready for him such sympathy as he has always ready for you in your moods. Treat him as an equal, and you will get from him human and imperfect results.

You will never know exactly what your pup-dog gets from you; he tries wistfully to tell you, but leaves you still wondering. But you may have from him a share of his perennial puphood, and you do well to accept it gratefully whenever he offers it. Take it when it comes, though the moment seem inopportune. You may be roused just as you settle for a nap by a moist nose thrust into your hand, two rough brown paws on the edge of your bunk, a pair of bright eyes peering through a jute fringe. Up he comes, steps over you, and settles down between you and the wall with a sigh. Then, if you shut your eyes, you will find that you are not far from that place up on the hill—the big rock and the two oaks—where the pup-boy that used to be you used to snuggle down with that first old pup-dog you ever had.

1. My Dog11. Cats2. Lap Dogs12. Kittens3. Police Dogs13. Rabbits4. Hounds14. Mice5. Shepherd Dogs15. Squirrels6. Boston Bulls16. Horses7. Great Danes17. Robins8. Newfoundland Dogs18. Sea Gulls9. Greyhounds19. Cows10. Stray Dogs20. Fish

Select for your subject some animal with which you are intimately familiar, and in which you are especially and sympathetically interested. Write about that animal in such a way that you will bring to the surface its most humorous qualities and its most admirable qualities. Give a great number of details concerning the animal's habits, but give those details in a gossipy manner. Use quotations, if you can, or make allusions to books. Make all your work emphasize goodness. Make your closing paragraph your most effective paragraph,—one that will appeal to sentiment.

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