Chapter Eleven
Reading edition
The hound-pup was named Teddy. David called him that because, when he came loping out of the Sweeney kennel toward them, his lips tilted back in a flash of white teeth.
Teddy! Everything somehow tied up to the image that name made against the brain. Mark Milliken’s old slouch hat on a hall table when he came over for long-closeted interviews with the Old Gentleman. Dora Tarkington’s father’s ruddiness of complexion. The huge pair of eye-glasses in the optician’s window on High Street. The stuffed grouse on the oval plaque in Clara’s dining room. The drum Emma had sent him at Christmas. T-t-t-ted-d-d-d-d-dy! You learned to roll your sticks to that rhythm. T-t-t-ted-d-d-d-d-dy!
And now the little old hound-dog flashing across the Sweeney kennel yard. Showing his teeth. Batting his absurdly heavy paws by jumping up as high as Davey’s chest, his tongue dripping-wet, hanging out of the side of his mouth like a rag. If you were the sort of person who likes the trusting leap of a dog, it made you catch your breath, sort of. It did something more. It hurt a little somehow. Not exactly hurt—exactly, but—but kind of. It made you bat back a little too roughly. “Get away—you! Hey—get away, you!”
From that moment, however, Teddy was Dave’s, from his dripping-wet tongue to the wag of his tail. A funny old tail, shaped like a beckoning finger, and tipped with white. A curious mixture of Chesapeake retriever and spaniel, this fellow. Squat, long, low, short-haired, brown body, with rag ears and a sniffing, burrowing face.
A vociferous pup with an expression that yearned excitedly and an unquenchable eagerness that kept him wagging from the middle of his broad, low back to the tip-end of his tail.
The last of six, and Henry and Henriette were for holding off for the yield of a next litter. Strictly speaking, there were points to be desired in Teddy.
But too late. Dave and Teddy had already clapped eyes on each other.
It was a job, that night, in the face of admonitive orders from his mother to house Teddy in the cellar, to secretly lug him up to his room by way of the summer-kitchen, water-spout, and to bed with him.
Then, at midnight, didn’t Teddy begin to dig with his forepaws into the matting and yap so for the accustomed luxury of his straw bed at Sweeney’s kennel, that, finally, nothing would quiet him but to permit him to sit squat on Dave’s chest and doze off there.
For eleven years, except for scarlatina when David was nine, these two were never to fail to sleep together.[20]
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