Note 20 — Chapter Eleven
Reading edition
When Dave’s dog Teddy fell through a trap-door in the upper reaches of the Igrotte barn, where Dave had a secret reading-retreat in the hayloft, and landing on the upright prongs of a hay-fork, had to be chloroformed out of his misery, I think I have never seen so sick and blasted a face as my brother wore for weeks after. Some of that look was to remain. Not in expression so much as in the dawn of that later David to whom all pain was to be something as close to his own capacity for suffering as the nerves in his own body.
My brother Henry had the dog’s body stuffed by a taxidermist in Cleveland, Ohio. I confess that at first I questioned both the taste and the wisdom of this, until I saw the curiously comforting effect it seemed to have on the boy. Strange thing, but after the death of Teddy, I never heard my brother refer to him in any way, nor did he ever accept another pet, although dozens of them were offered and indeed sent to him, from the beginnings of his public life.
The stuffed Teddy, however, has always stood in every one of my brother’s offices, an unused pen-wiper dangling from his neck, as if to ward off the onus of any implication of sentimentality.