Short Fiction - P. G. Wodehouse (top ten ebook reader txt) 📗

so much about the country from Fred that I had always wanted to go there. Fred used to go off on a motor-bicycle sometimes to spend the night with his father in Kent, and once he brought back a squirrel with him, which I thought was for me to eat, but mother said no. “The first thing a dog has to learn,” mother used often to say, “is that the whole world wasn’t created for him to eat.”

It was quite dark when we got to the country, but the man seemed to know where to go. He pulled at my rope, and we began to walk along a road with no people in it at all. We walked on and on, but it was all so new to me that I forgot how tired I was. I could feel my mind broadening with every step I took.

Every now and then we would pass a very big house, which looked as if it was empty, but I knew that there was a caretaker inside, because of Fred’s father. These big houses belong to very rich people, but they don’t want to live in them till the summer, so they put in caretakers, and the caretakers have a dog to keep off burglars. I wondered if that was what I had been brought here for.

“Are you going to be a caretaker?” I asked the man.

“Shut up,” he said.

So I shut up.

After we had been walking a long time, we came to a cottage. A man came out. My man seemed to know him, for he called him Bill. I was quite surprised to see the man was not at all shy with Bill. They seemed very friendly.

“Is that him?” said Bill, looking at me.

“Bought him this afternoon,” said the man.

“Well,” said Bill, “he’s ugly enough. He looks fierce. If you want a dog, he’s the sort of dog you want. But what do you want one for? It seems to me it’s a lot of trouble to take, when there’s no need of any trouble at all. Why not do what I’ve always wanted to do? What’s wrong with just fixing the dog, same as it’s always done, and walking in and helping yourself?”

“I’ll tell you what’s wrong,” said the man. “To start with, you can’t get at the dog to fix him except by day, when they let him out. At night he’s shut up inside the house. And suppose you do fix him during the day what happens then? Either the bloke gets another before night, or else he sits up all night with a gun. It isn’t like as if these blokes was ordinary blokes. They’re down here to look after the house. That’s their job, and they don’t take any chances.”

It was the longest speech I had ever heard the man make, and it seemed to impress Bill. He was quite humble.

“I didn’t think of that,” he said. “We’d best start in to train this tyke at once.”

Mother often used to say, when I went on about wanting to go out into the world and see life, “You’ll be sorry when you do. The world isn’t all bones and liver.” And I hadn’t been living with the man and Bill in their cottage long before I found out how right she was.

It was the man’s shyness that made all the trouble. It seemed as if he hated to be taken notice of.

It started on my very first night at the cottage. I had fallen asleep in the kitchen, tired out after all the excitement of the day and the long walks I had had, when something woke me with a start. It was somebody scratching at the window, trying to get in.

Well, I ask you, I ask any dog, what would you have done in my place? Ever since I was old enough to listen, mother had told me over and over again what I must do in a case like this. It is the A.B.C. of a dog’s education. “If you are in a room and you hear anyone trying to get in,” mother used to say, “bark. It may be someone who has business there, or it may not. Bark first, and inquire afterwards. Dogs were made to be heard and not seen.”

I lifted my head and yelled. I have a good, deep voice, due to a hound strain in my pedigree, and at the public house, when there was a full moon, I have often had people leaning out of the windows and saying things all down the street. I took a deep breath and let it go.

“Man!” I shouted. “Bill! Man! Come quick! Here’s a burglar getting in!”

Then somebody struck a light, and it was the man himself. He had come in through the window.

He picked up a stick, and he walloped me. I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t see where I had done the wrong thing. But he was the boss, so there was nothing to be said.

If you’ll believe me, that same thing happened every night. Every single night! And sometimes twice or three times before morning. And every time I would bark my loudest and the man would strike a light and wallop me. The thing was baffling. I couldn’t possibly have mistaken what mother had said to me. She said it too often for that. Bark! Bark! Bark! It was the main plank of her whole system of education. And yet, here I was, getting walloped every night for doing it.

I thought it out till my head ached, and finally I got it right. I began to see that mother’s outlook was narrow. No doubt, living with a man like master at the public house, a man without a trace of shyness in his composition, barking was all right. But circumstances alter cases. I belonged to a man who was a mass of nerves, who got the jumps if you spoke to him. What I had to do was to