Reflectively upturned from our door-sill
The cryptic countenances of the cats.
Frances Tatnall
But I shall always remember the President's dogs -
Julia Abbe
When I told the dog-owners and cat-owners of South Hadley that the title 'Speechless they Walk Beloved' was the name of a chapter about the campus pets, they asked me one question.
'Speechless?' asked the owners of dogs.
'Speechless?!' inquired the owners of cats - until little by little I began to think less highly of the title than I still think I ought to think. For by 'Speechless' I mean devoid of any diction that the Department of English would need to worry about. And the word 'walk' is here used in a scriptural sense, as in the phrase, 'Walk in the Law of the Lord.'
It is true, however, that the campus pets know how to express themselves. They have voices among them that the Department of Speech might easily classify as 'light,' 'medium,' and 'dark.' There was one extremely famous voice with a range that covered all three. At the preliminary tuning-up performance the voice was very light. As it worked into a more threatening recitatif, the timbre changed through all the middle keys. And when emotion deepened to the abyss of fury, the voice, like Lucifer's, was dark.
This was the voice of a long-departed but unforgotten cat named Deacon who used to live at the President's house. Deacon was a warrior who liked nocturnal raids. It is doubtful if Deacon ever fought in self-defense. The other cats knew his preparedness too well. Nor did he fight with any express ambitions toward world peace. He had two aims: conquest and martial music. As with bagpipes, his skirling was part of his war. The music came first, long-drawn-out, parlando, poramento, and conquest could wait. But whenever, especially of a moonlit night, the air was curdled with battle-cries from housetop or from fence, one could be sure that Deacon was in action.
On one of these Saturday night occasions, the visiting clergyman who was to preach at the College Chapel was lodged in a guest-room not far from Deacon's war-zone. The clergyman met Deacon on the campus next morning. Deacon was walking out, as a churchgoer might stroll down Fifth Avenue - his ear slightly notched by somebody's bite, but otherwise in correct society form. The clergyman gazed at Deacon, and Deacon gazed past the minister, unwinking, as a vestryman might look past the pulpit at the choir. Said the minister, 'Judging from what I heard last night, I know Deacon's favorite hymn.'
Those who were present begged to know what it was.
'Not a doubt about it,' said the minister. 'Deacon's favorite hymn is "Fight the Good Fight."'
Deacon's onlly rival in vocalization was Sammy, the Safford cat. Sammy was a yeoman, entrusted with a delicate duty for Safford Hall.
In Gibson Girl days, when all pictures of college women showed them cooking for 'spreads' with chafing-dishes and long-handled spoons, many an edible ingredient was kept in the rooms. This fact was learned by mice. It was learned by mice in Safford to such an extent one year that the Zoology Department was consulted. Doctor Clapp and Miss Turner had been told that if you catch a mouse unharmed and tie a bell to his neck, the other mice will be so afraid of him that they will leave the house. He will follow for company wherever they go, and they will then leave that place too. And so on. Along the order of the Piper of Hamelin procession, only driven instead of lured.
So a mouse was captured and fitted with bell and bridle, his harness so securely adjusted that he could not scrape it off. Doctor Clapp and Miss Turner then released the mouse in Safford basement and watched him scamper off, jingling, down through the long avenues of packing-boxes and trunks. He looked like some galloping steed for Cinderella's coach. Then the crowd in Safford waited to see if he would rout the other mice.
The only trouble was, it seemed to work the other way. The rest of the flock elected him their bellwether, and followed him with no little admiration wherever he went. At least that was what the students said. The basements of Safford and Porter connected, and he was heard leading his hosts in both buildings. At dead of night his little bell went everywhere, accompanied with a scurrying posse of little feet. Sometimes you would hear the bell ringing in the wall, not far from the head of your bed. It was like Tinker Bell in the play, except that the mouse did not carry a light.
Hastily it should be said that no mice inhabit Safford now. When I told the above tale to some students the other day, they exclaimed, 'Mice? Heavens, did they have mice?' Whereupon I felt like some Colonial goodwife who had just astonished the moderns by telling how minks and beavers and otters used to come up freely around the door. Times have changed. But in the ninteen-tens it had become evident that Safford could use a cat, and Samy was engaged.
Sammy was a giant creature largly white, with tiger-bars on his tail. Those clearly designed tiger-bars going round and round that tail annoyed three sophomore artists, who thought Sammy would look better all white. Perfidiously they lured him into false confidence one day, and as he dozed they took sharp embroidery scissors and trimmed out all the dark hairs in his stripes. They had supposed that the white fur would then close in, making an evenly furred surface of white on white, as would be the result if you cut dark tufts out of a fur rug. But so well had the artists done their work of cutting out dark hairs and dark hairs only, that the white stripes stood revealed in their true shapes, not like a string of little cylinders but like a string of cones. One exquisite little white fur cornucopia after another was strung along the tail - each cone with its pointed tip planted in the broad base of the cone next larger. The picture is hard to suggest in words, but perhaps the nearest one is likely to come to it is a string of little white fur hollyhocks, topped off with a tiny white thistle-blossom of soft fur. In short, the finished tail, when waved aloft, departed oddly from the pagoda principle, and was something to travel far to see.
Sammy could have charged admission. Shunning publicity, he was keenly aware of his plight. For weeks until his tiger-stripes had grown again, he walked out only under cover of the campus shrubs. It was during this season of mortification that he developed his dark-voiced mew, which he ever afterward employed in response to any query. The ironic tone of his voice became so celebrated that everybody asked him questions for the pleasure of hearing his reply. Students deep in Sartor Resartus under Miss B. K. Young would meet Sammy in an ambush and would ask soulfully, 'Does Sammy believe in the Everlasting No?'
And Sammy would bitterly reply, 'Ah-WOW,' as who should say, 'And how!'
The only other dark-voiced animal-about-campus who was ever seriously inconvenienced by a clipping was Professor Mary Vance Young's great Saint Bernard named Don. Because Don was suffering with the hot weather one year, Miss Young decided to have him clipped partially, after the verisimilitude of a lion.
Now, a French poodle can carry off this form of trimming more naturally than can a venerable Saint Bernard. Don scarcely knew how to act. Always heretofore, whenever and wherever he had thrown himself down, he had had a shaggy fur rug-like foundation to rest on. Now he was taken aback, so to speak, by the discomfort of the world. When he went to a picnic supper he started to lie down in his favorite corner of the little grove. The twigs and pine-needles were unexpectedly prickly, and he got up at once, turning around to examine the planet reproachfully with the troubled expression that sits so nobly on the face of a Saint Bernard. Then he tried again elsewhere, tentatively, but found all the other pine-needles just as bad. Somebody in the party handed him a large sofa cushion. This he gratefully accepted and used it, as any elderly person might like to do at a picnic, whenever he settled down.
Don and his successor, Consuelo, were the largest dogs in our history. Next to them in size and in mellow baritone voices were the golden collies of the President's House, Azada Comstock's police dog, Professor Neilson's white setter Saxon, and Miss Hooker's Airedale, Rough.
Rough was a rowdy and a runaway, with a heart of gold. Saxon was a pure white spirit-dog, ineffably beautiful and refined. But he liked Rough and Rough liked him, and together in their youth they would run away. Hours later they would return in tatters, Saxon with his white curls full of burdocks, Rough with his stiff chin-whisker sculptured in mud. Miss Neilson and Miss Hooker used to telephone to each other and arrange not to let Rough and Saxon loose at the same time.
This meant that Rough had to stay indoors when Saxon went skating. This Saxon loved to do, drifting gracefully after his mistress as she practiced the Dutch Roll, or skimming across the lake with a crowd of girls who were playing snap the whip. Saxon was careful usually to stay where the skating was safe. But once, when he and Miss Neilson had been left alone on the pond at supper-time, Saxon miscalculated the ice near the boathouse bridge, and tumbled in. Professor Neilson flew to his rescue and broke through the ice herself. The water was just too deep for her to touch her feet to the bottom of the lake, and her skates made it difficult to swim. She caught the edge of the ice but it threatened to break off, and she did not dare to trust her weight upon it. Meanwhile Saxon was struggling just beyond her reach.
At this point a young man from the village chanced to be going across the bridge. He saw Miss Neilson in the water, but she looked so exactly her usual tranquil self, what you could see of her - her little fur hat just as it should be, her eyeglasses correctly adjusted, one gloved hand holding the ice while she reached with the other for Saxon, that the youth was dazed.
'Why - Miss Neilson!' gasped he from the bridge. 'What are you doing there? Are you drowning?'
'Not at all,' quoth Miss Neilson in her pleasant social manner. 'But I shall be very glad if you will pull my little dog out. He fell in.'
'I'm not in the least cold,' said Miss Neilson, treading ice-water. 'But it would be good of you to help my little dog.'
The parley might have gone on in this leisurely fashion indefinitely if the young man had not decided to take things into his own hands. First he pulled Miss Neilson respectfully but firmly out. Then he looked around for her dog. But Saxon had smashed his own way through the ice, and was clambering out shaking himself on shore.
Beautiful Saxon was the most spiritual of all our dogs, with the possible exception of Gordon Chalmers's Dominic, and Saxon's own successor, Brand. Dommy has gone to preside over another college, but Brand, the red setter, patronizes Junior Lunch in the post-office corridor and introduces himself to you gravely, if you are a newcomer, as you happen to pass him in Mary Lyon Hall. Rough is not here for him to play with, but he has a good friend named Tippy with whom he takes short afternoon strolls.
Tippy is a plump creature, who, if she hurries, is likely to get what the old Irishmen call 'out of poof.' Therefore Brand walks slowly beside her, gallantly, as a young archduke might promenade with an amiable dowager duchess at tea hour on the boulevards. All that Brand lacks on such occasions is a gardenia and a cane.
Our Parliament of Pets can never be properly convened in memory without its affable little sergeant-at-arms, Dish-Mop. Dish-Mop was a white poodle with a bushy head of crisp Mark Twainish hair, and a social sense that made friends for him wherever he went. He had a civilized name and a comfort home in the village, but everybody, including Dish-Mop himself, was a little vague about these. His college coterie had dubbed him Dish-Mop, and the name fitted him so well that even Miss Woolley knew about it. Whenever she met the long poodle on a campus path, she would incline her head graciously and say, 'Good morning, Dish-Mop,' with the same stately inflection that she always gives to other people's names.
Once Hugh Walpole met Dish-Mop in the post-office corridor. Mr. Walpole had been lecturing to the College. Dish-Mop had been fishing in the pond and was more or less covered with duckweed. But his social graces failed hiim never. With a quick appreciation of the caliber of our guest, Dish-Mop sat up promptly in the corridor and waved first one delighted paw and then the other at the author of Rogue Herries and The Duchess of Wrexe. Mr. Walpole said that Dish-Mop was quite the dirtiest and quite the most charming little dog he ever met.
On state occasions Dish-Mop would be scrubbed to a powder-puff whiteness and decorated with a bow of ribbon in the class colors of whichever team he was mascoteering at the time. There was never any trouble about catching him for the game. He would have been there anyway. In fact, Dish-Mop was quite our easiest campus animal to 'call' - not even excepting Cinderella, the Saintonge cat, who comes when you whistle 'Vive l'Amour.'
Probably Miss Woolley's own favorite dog story is the episode about Lord Wellesley, a golden collie who knew how to ring the presidential doorbell. One afternoon Miss Woolley happened to be alone in the house. Wellesley was patrolling the grounds and it was about time for him to ask to come in. Presently the doorbell rang in Wellesley's own vigorous way. Miss Woolley was occupied and decided to let him ring. But at the second prolonged peal of the bell, she took pity on him, went to the door, threw it wide open, saying, 'Come in, old man -' and it was not Lord Wellesley at all, but one of our former Trustees.
Sometimes it seems that a beloved animal who is the friend, not only of his owners but of a community, takes on an extra personality. Certainly this has been true of Margaret Ball's yellow cats, Punch and Hilary, and of the agile sculpturesque cats of Florence Foss. These cats have been provided with a special stone stairway up which they run from the gardens into the fields beyond. When the slope of that garden was being planted, the young man who was doing the grading had been instructed not to block up the hole under the fence through which the cats went out to the field. The young man decided not only to follow directions but to improve upon them. With choice geological specimens left over from the rock-garden he built a midget stone stairway up the slope to the hole in the fence. Then he called the owners of the garden to admire.
The only question was whether the cats would use the stairs. While the matter was being discussed, along across the garden came Mr. Punch Ball on his way to the great open spaces. Everybody stood aside; the owners watched with beating hearts - and up went Mr. Punch as if the stairs had been there since the world began. A four-footed animal on a stairway is usually funny, but Punch took the treads with all the suavity of a marquis going up the grand stairway from the garden of Versailles. That cat staircase has now been set about with plantings of violas and mosses and ground pink, and every spring, as in 'Enchanted April,' the flowers 'pour' their colors down at eithe rside. The quartz in the stonework glistens in the sun, and the yellow cat and the big gray cat go pacing up and down.
A mental picture of Cat Descending the Staircase will always hang in our picture gallery - and so will the picture of Dog on Gangplank that was staged once upon a time at Lower Lake.
The students were giving an old play about Noah's Ark. Spectators were assembled on the slope above the pond. A 'practicable' Ark had been constructed, and the cast of characters was putting the passengers on. Mrs. Noah, sitting near the brink with her spinning-wheel, refused to budge. She did not believe in a world storm. Immovable except for her spinning she sat until her sons came and carried her aboard, spinning-wheel and all. Then Noah and his sons finished putting the stuffed animals on, two by two, trotting them up the gangplank, some of them quite famous stuffed animals borrowed for the day.
Meanwhile a strange dog sat on the bank watching the show. He was the sort of dog, of the kind that Samuel Purchas calls 'a prick-ear'd cur of a mean bigness.' With his head on one side he surveyed the stuffed animals going up the gangplank. And when the last one had been hoisted aboard, down to the lakeside trotted the little strange dog, and up the gangplank as if he had been rehearsing for weeks, and into the Ark.
If samples of all the other animals were being saved, he was going to represent a species too.
The delight of the audience at that little lone dog's performance was in keeping with the appeal that any confiding dog or cat can make to a crowd away from home. There is a quality of unexpected domesticity about it - perhaps a reminiscence of the pets of childhood - as well as the usual response of imaginative human beings to the creatures next in line.
Down through the years goes the procession of our dogs and cats. They have no speech nor language, yet they know how to appeal to us. They know how to tell us that they love us. They can say how glad they are to see us, and how happy they would be to go for a walk with us, or to have us stroke their fur. The only drawback about our love for them is this: that sometimes, all too soon, they know how to say good-bye.