“I’ll tell you how it was, Officer,” said the man, in a crisp, new tone. “We were settling a bet. O.K.?”
“O.K.,” said the cop. “Who win?” There was another pulsing silence.
“The lady bet,” said her husband, with dignity, as though he were explaining some important phase of industry to a newly hired clerk, “the lady bet that my eyes would shine like a cat’s do at night, if she came upon me suddenly close to the ground alongside the road. We had passed a cat, whose eyes gleamed. We had passed several persons, whose eyes did not gleam——”
“Simply because they were above the light and not under it,” said the lady. “A man’s eyes would gleam like a cat’s if people were ordinarily caught by headlights at the same angle as cats are.” The cop walked over to where he had left his motorcycle, picked it up, kicked the standard out, and wheeled it back.
“A cat’s eyes,” he said, “are different than yours and mine. Dogs, cats, skunks, it’s all the same. They can see in a dark room.”
“Not in a totally dark room,” said the lady.
“Yes, they can,” said the cop.
“No, they can’t; not if there is no light at all in the room, not if it’s absolutely black,” said the lady. “The question came up the other night; there was a professor there and he said there must be at least a ray of light, no matter how faint.”
“That may be,” said the cop, after a solemn pause, pulling at his gloves. “But people’s eyes don’t shine—I go along these roads every night an’ pass hunderds of cats and hunderds of people.”
“The people are never close to the ground,” said the lady.
“I was close to the ground,” said her husband.
“Look at it this way,” said the cop. “I’ve seen wildcats in trees at night and their eyes shine.”
“There you are!” said the lady’s husband. “That proves it.”
“I don’t see how,” said the lady. There was another silence.
“Because a wildcat in a tree’s eyes are higher than the level of a man’s,” said her husband. The cop may possibly have followed this, the lady obviously did not; neither one said anything. The cop got on his machine, raced his engine, seemed to be thinking about something, and throttled down. He turned to the man.
“Took ya glasses off so the headlights wouldn’t make ya glasses shine, huh?” he asked.
“That’s right,” said the man. The cop waved his hand, triumphantly, and roared away. “Smart guy,” said the man to his wife, irritably.
“I still don’t see where the wildcat proves anything,” said his wife. He drove off slowly.
“Look,” he said. “You claim that the whole thing depends on how low a cat’s eyes are; I——”
“I didn’t say that; I said it all depends on how high a man’s eyes . . .”
A Preface to Dogs
AS SOON as a wife presents her husband with a child, her capacity for worry becomes acuter: she hears more burglars, she smells more things burning, she begins to wonder, at the theatre or the dance, whether her husband left his service revolver in the nursery. This goes on for years and years. As the child grows older, the mother’s original major fear—that the child was exchanged for some other infant at the hospital—gives way to even more magnificent doubts and suspicions: she suspects that the child is not bright, she doubts that it will be happy, she is sure that it will become mixed up with the wrong sort of people.
This insistence of parents on dedicating their lives to their children is carried on year after year in the face of all that dogs have done, and are doing, to prove how much happier the parent-child relationship can become, if managed without sentiment, worry, or dedication. Of course, the theory that dogs have a saner family life than humans is an old one, and it was in order to ascertain whether the notion is pure legend or whether it is based on observable fact that I have for four years made a careful study of the family life of dogs. My conclusions entirely support the theory that dogs have a saner family life than people.
In the first place, the husband leaves on a woodchuck-hunting expedition just as soon as he can, which is very soon, and never comes back. He doesn’t write, makes no provision for the care or maintenance of his family, and is not liable to prosecution because he doesn’t. The wife doesn’t care where he is, never wonders if he is thinking about her, and although she may start at the slightest footstep, doesn’t do so because she is hoping against hope that it is he. No lady dog has ever been known to set her friends against her husband, or put detectives on his trail.
This same lack of sentimentality is carried out in the mother dog’s relationship to her young. For six weeks—but only six weeks—she looks after them religiously, feeds them (they come clothed), washes their ears, fights off cats, old women, and wasps that come nosing around, makes the bed, and rescues the puppies when they crawl under the floor boards of the barn or get lost in an old boot. She does all these things, however, without fuss, without that loud and elaborate show of solicitude and alarm which a woman displays in rendering some exaggerated service to her child.
At the end of six weeks, the mother dog ceases to lie awake at night harking for ominous sounds; the next morning she snarls at the puppies after breakfast, and routs them all out of the house. “This is forever,” she informs them, succinctly. “I have my own life to live, automobiles to chase, grocery boys’ shoes to snap at, rabbits to pursue. I can’t be washing and feeding a lot of big six-weeks-old dogs any longer. That phase is definitely over.” The family life is thus terminated, and the mother dismisses the children from her mind—frequently as many as eleven at one time—as easily as she did her husband. She is now free to devote herself to her career and to the novel and astonishing things of life.
In the case of one family of dogs that I observed, the mother, a large black dog with long ears and a keen zest for living, tempered only by an immoderate fear of toads and turtles, kicked ten puppies out of the house at the end of six weeks to the day—it was a Monday. Fortunately for my observations, the puppies had no place to go, since they hadn’t made any plans, and so they just hung around the barn, now and again trying to patch things up with their mother. She refused, however, to entertain any proposition leading to a resumption of home life, pointing out firmly that she was, by inclination, a chaser of bicycles and a hearth-fire watcher, both of which activities would be insupportably cluttered up by the presence of ten helpers. The bicycle-chasing field was over-crowded, anyway, she explained, and the hearth-fire-watching field even more so. “We could chase parades together,” suggested one of the dogs, but she refused to be touched, snarled, and drove him off.
It is only for a few weeks that the cast-off puppies make overtures to their mother in regard to the reestablishment of a home. At the end of that time, by some natural miracle that I am unable clearly to understand, the puppies suddenly one day don’t recognize their mother any more, and she doesn’t recognize them. It is as if they had never met, and is a fine idea, giving both parties a clean break and a chance for a fresh start. Once, some months after this particular family had broken up and the pups had been sold, one of them, named Liza, was brought back to “the old nest” for a visit. The mother dog of course didn’t recognize the puppy and promptly bit her in the hip. They had to be separated, each grumbling something about you never know what kind of dogs you’re going to meet. Here was no silly, affecting reunion, no sentimental tears, no bitter intimations of neglect, or forgetfulness, or desertion.
If a pup is not sold or given away, but is brought up in the same household with its mother, the two will fight bitterly, sometimes twenty or thirty times a day, for maybe a month. This is very trying to whoever owns the dogs, particularly if they are sentimentalists who grieve because mother and child don’t know each other. The condition finally clears up: the two dogs grow to tolerate each other and, beyond growling a little under their breath about how it takes all kinds of dogs to make up a world, get along fairly well together when th
eir paths cross. I know of one mother dog and her half-grown daughter who sometimes spend the whole day together hunting woodchucks, although they don’t speak. Their association is not sentimental, but practical, and is based on the fact that it is safer to hunt woodchucks in pairs than alone. These two dogs start out together in the morning, without a word, and come back together in the evening, when they part, without saying good night, whether they have had any luck or not. Avoidance of farewells, which are always stuffy and sometimes painful, is another thing in which it seems to me dogs have better sense than people.
Well, one day the daughter, a dog about ten months old, seemed, by some prank of nature which again I am unable clearly to understand, for a moment or two, to recognize her mother, after all those months of oblivion. The two had just started out after a fat woodchuck who lives in the orchard. Something got wrong with the daughter’s ear—a long, floppy ear. “Mother,” she said, “I wish you’d look at my ear.” Instantly the other dog bristled and growled. “I’m not your mother,” she said, “I’m a woodchuck-hunter.” The daughter grinned. “Well,” she said, just to show that there were no hard feelings, “that’s not my ear, it’s a motorman’s glove.”
The Private Life of Mr. Bidwell
FROM where she was sitting, Mrs. Bidwell could not see her husband, but she had a curious feeling of tension: she knew he was up to something.
“What are you doing, George?” she demanded, her eyes still on her book.
“Mm?”
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Pahhhhh-h-h,” said Mr. Bidwell, in a long, pleasurable exhale. “I was holding my breath.”
Mrs. Bidwell twisted creakingly in her chair and looked at him; he was sitting behind her in his favorite place under the parchment lamp with the street scene of old New York on it. “I was just holding my breath,” he said again.
“Well, please don’t do it,” said Mrs. Bidwell, and went back to her book. There was silence for five minutes.
“George!” said Mrs. Bidwell.
“Bwaaaaaa,” said Mr. Bidwell. “What?”
“Will you please stop that?” she said. “It makes me nervous.”
“I don’t see how that bothers you,” he said. “Can’t I breathe?”
“You can breathe without holding your breath like a goop,” said Mrs. Bidwell. “Goop” was a word that she was fond of using; she rather lazily applied it to everything. It annoyed Mr. Bidwell.
“Deep breathing,” said Mr. Bidwell, in the impatient tone he used when explaining anything to his wife, “is good exercise. You ought to take more exercise.”
“Well, please don’t do it around me,” said Mrs. Bidwell, turning again to the pages of Mr. Galsworthy.
At the Cowans’ party, a week later, the room was full of chattering people when Mrs. Bidwell, who was talking to Lida Carroll, suddenly turned around as if she had been summoned. In a chair in a far corner of the room, Mr. Bidwell was holding his breath. His chest was expanded, his chin drawn in; there was a strange stare in his eyes, and his face was slightly empurpled. Mrs. Bidwell moved into the line of his vision and gave him a sharp, penetrating look. He deflated slowly and looked away.
Later, in the car, after they had driven in silence a mile or more on the way home, Mrs. Bidwell said, “It seems to me you might at least have the kindness not to hold your breath in other people’s houses.”
“I wasn’t hurting anybody,” said Mr. Bidwell.
“You looked silly!” said his wife. “You looked perfectly crazy!” She was driving and she began to speed up, as she always did when excited or angry. “What do you suppose people thought—you sitting there all swelled up, with your eyes popping out?”
“I wasn’t all swelled up,” he said, angrily.
“You looked like a goop,” she said. The car slowed down, sighed, and came to a complete, despondent stop.
“We’re out of gas,” said Mrs. Bidwell. It was bitterly cold and nastily sleeting. Mr. Bidwell took a long, deep breath.
The breathing situation in the Bidwell family reached a critical point when Mr. Bidwell began to inhale in his sleep, slowly, and exhale with a protracted, growling “woooooooo.” Mrs. Bidwell, ordinarily a sound sleeper (except on nights when she was sure burglars were getting in), would wake up and reach over and shake her husband. “George!” she would say.
“Hawwwwww,” Mr. Bidwell would say, thickly. “Wahs maa nah, hm?”
After he had turned over and gone back to sleep, Mrs. Bidwell would lie awake, thinking.
One morning at breakfast she said, “George, I’m not going to put up with this another day. If you can’t stop blowing up like a grampus, I’m going to leave you.” There was a slight, quick lift in Mr. Bidwell’s heart, but he tried to look surprised and hurt.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s not talk about it.”
Mrs. Bidwell buttered another piece of toast. She described to him the way he sounded in his sleep. He read the paper.
With considerable effort, Mr. Bidwell kept from inflating his chest for about a week, but one night at the McNallys’ he hit on the idea of seeing how many seconds he could hold his breath. He was rather bored by the McNallys’ party, anyway. He began timing himself with his wrist-watch in a remote corner of the living-room. Mrs. Bidwell, who was in the kitchen talking children and clothes with Bea McNally, left her abruptly and slipped back into the living-room. She stood quietly behind her husband’s chair. He knew she was there, and tried to let out his breath imperceptibly.
“I see you,” she said, in a low, cold tone. Mr. Bidwell jumped up.
“Why don’t you let me alone?” he demanded.
“Will you please lower your voice?” she said, smiling so that if anyone were looking he wouldn’t think the Bidwells were arguing.
“I’m getting pretty damned tired of this,” said Bidwell in a low voice.
“You’ve ruined my evening!” she whispered.
“You’ve ruined mine, too!” he whispered back. They knifed each other, from head to stomach, with their eyes.
“Sitting here like a goop, holding your breath,” said Mrs. Bidwell. “People will think you are an idiot.” She laughed, turning to greet a lady who was approaching them.
Mr. Bidwell sat in his office the next afternoon, a black, moist afternoon, tapping a pencil on his desk, and scowling. “All right, then, get out, get out!” he muttered. “What do I care?” He was visualizing the scene when Mrs. Bidwell would walk out on him. After going through it several times, he returned to his work, feeling vaguely contented. He made up his mind to breathe any way he wanted to, no matter what she did. And, having come to this decision, he oddly enough, and quite without effort, lost interest in holding his breath.
Everything went rather smoothly at the Bidwells’ for a month or so. Mr. Bidwell didn’t do anything to annoy his wife beyond leaving his razor on her dressing-table and forgetting to turn out the hall light when he went to bed. Then there came the night of the Bentons’ party.
Mr. Bidwell, bored as usual, was sitting in a far corner of the room, breathing normally. His wife was talking animatedly with Beth Williamson about negligees. Suddenly her voice slowed and an uneasy look came into her eyes: George was up to something. She turned around and sought him out. To anyone but Mrs. Bidwell he must have seemed like any husband sitting in a chair. But his wife’s lips set tightly. She walked casually over to him.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
“Hm?” he said, looking at her vacantly.
“What are you doing?” she demanded, again. He gave her a harsh, venomous look, which she returned.
“I’m multiplying numbers in my head,” he said, slowly and evenly, “if you must know.” In the prolonged, probing examination that they silently, without moving any muscles save those of their eyes, gave each other, it became solidly, frozenly apparent to both of them that the end of their endurance had arrived. The curious bond that held them together snapped—rather more easil
y than either had supposed was possible. That night, while undressing for bed, Mr. Bidwell calmly multiplied numbers in his head. Mrs. Bidwell stared coldly at him for a few moments, holding a stocking in her hand; she didn’t bother to berate him. He paid no attention to her. The thing was simply over.
George Bidwell lives alone now (his wife remarried). He never goes to parties any more, and his old circle of friends rarely sees him. The last time that any of them did see him, he was walking along a country road with the halting, uncertain gait of a blind man: he was trying to see how many steps he could take without opening his eyes.
Mr. Preble Gets Rid of His Wife
MR. PREBLE was a plump middle-aged lawyer in Scarsdale. He used to kid with his stenographer about running away with him. “Let’s run away together,” he would say, during a pause in dictation. “All righty,” she would say.
One rainy Monday afternoon, Mr. Preble was more serious about it than usual.
“Let’s run away together,” said Mr. Preble.
“All righty,” said his stenographer. Mr. Preble jingled the keys in his pocket and looked out the window.
“My wife would be glad to get rid of me,” he said.
“Would she give you a divorce?” asked the stenographer.
“I don’t suppose so,” he said. The stenographer laughed.
“You’d have to get rid of your wife,” she said.
Mr. Preble was unusually silent at dinner that night. About half an hour after coffee, he spoke without looking up from his paper.
“Let’s go down in the cellar,” Mr. Preble said to his wife.
“What for?” she said, not looking up from her book.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “We never go down in the cellar any more. The way we used to.”
“We never did go down in the cellar that I remember,” said Mrs. Preble. “I could rest easy the balance of my life if I never went down in the cellar.” Mr. Preble was silent for several minutes.