Lady and the Tramp: The Story of Two Dogs

  LADY AND THE TRAMP

  A Story of Two Dogs

  By Ward Greene

  CHAPTER ONE

  ONCE UPON A time – a time not so long ago but a time when most people still used gaslight and preferred horses and carriages to gasbuggies – there lived in a white and green house on a pleasant street a cocker spaniel named Lady.

  She lived with two humans named Jim Dear and Darling. At last, that was the only thing Lady ever heard them call each other. Sometimes, it is true, she heard Darling call him just “Jim” and sometimes she heard him say “Yes, Darling!” in a tone that made Lady quiver. But those times were not very often.

  Occasionally there was another human named Aunt Sarah but she really didn’t count. Aunt Sarah was the cloud in the sky, the distant thunder, the hobgoblin around the corner. She was the telephone that rang at the wrong moment, the letter that made Darling sigh, the mention that made Jim Dear growl. Aunt Sarah, in person or prospect, was bad news.

  Lady had met Aunt Sarah only once. Then she was a pair of large, buttoned boots and a voice that boomed, “So you still have that dreadful little dog!” Aunt Sarah loved cats. She owned two, but happily she didn’t bring them on that visit. Their names were Si and Am. Lady thought those were very odd names until she learned that Si and Am came from Siam, a place away off yonder.

  Lady was a present from Jim Dear to Darling on their first Christmas in the white and green house. She arrived in a hatbox. Quiet under all the wrappings, she heard Darling say, in a tone Lady recognized as not entirely sincere, “A new hat! Why, Jim dear, how sweet of you!” Then – pop! – the lid was off.

  Darling cried, “Jim dear, what an adorable puppy!” and now the tone was completely sincere.

  “Well, she’ll do till something nicer comes along,” said Jim Dear.

  Darling turned as pink as the small tongue that was kissing her. She put her present down and the puppy blinked at her and took two cautious steps.

  “Why, she’s a real little lady!” exclaimed Darling, and beginning then, Lady was Lady and the princess of the white and green house.

  It was a wonderful house. It wasn’t large but it was brand new and everything in it was new. The floors were so new and shiny that Lady slipped and slid on them. But when the rugs came, they were delightful to the paws. So was the furniture. It was soft – the beds, for instance – where it was supposed to be soft and it was not so soft – the man’s big leather chair – when a dog wanted a cool place to nap in hot weather.

  Lady felt that the house belonged to her and, indeed, it did. In the yard she had her own little house, which was called the kennel, and in the spare room she had her own small bed with her own real mattress. But she almost never went to the kennel; in time Darling kept her garden tools there.

  And only rarely did she sleep in the spare room; generally she slept on the foot of Darling’s bed or Jim Dear’s, dividing her love equally between them.

  They both loved Lady, for she was a well-behaved dog, and always neatly minded her p’s and q’s.

  They took her for walks regularly. She wore a red leash, and in wintertime a red blanket, and in rainy weather a red rubber jacket of which she was quite proud. Once Darling, when Lady had a cold, got her four little overshoes. But Lady looked so unhappy when she tried to trot in them that Darling laughed.

  “Here,” she said, when they got home, “you can chew them up”—and Lady did.

  “Well, they were her own shoes!” Darling defended herself when Jim Dear protested over such extravagance.

  Lady had never been allowed to chew shoes before. She thought it was great fun. But a few days later, when she chewed Darling’s silver slippers, she got spanked. It taught her a lesson: don’t chew things that belong to somebody else. She would be careful, she resolved, until she was given silver slippers of her own. But she never was.

  As a big treat on Saturdays or Sundays, Jim Dear and Darling took Lady for rides. She sat between them in the buggy from the livery stable, and barked only when they passed other dogs who were not riding and looked tired and jealous. Lady felt sorry for them and said so; she was very kind.

  Once a week Lady had a bath. Being a spaniel, she loved water, though she might pretend she didn’t and hide when she saw the soap and brushes and heard the tub run. Jim Dear or Darling, depending on whose turn it was, would look for her under one of the beds. They would coax her out, they would bear her in their arms to the tub. Lady would tremble; that first plunge seemed terrifying.

  But once in, what sport! Whimpering, shaking, licking lather, barking, she enjoyed it as much as Jim Dear when he sang under his shower.

  Afterwards they combed her and brushed her till her coat sparkled. And every so often she paid a visit to something called the Pet Shop, where her nails were trimmed and her teeth cleaned. Lady was truly a beautiful spaniel then.

  “Do you blame us for being fond of her?” Jim Dear or Darling would say when they showed her off to guests.

  “You certainly treat her like a little princess,” the guests, who perhaps never owned dogs, would reply politely.

  Lady, snoozing at their feet, would wiggle an ear. She knew when she was being praised, but she tried to be modest.

  Lady’s food was carefully chosen.

  In the mornings she had cereal and milk and perhaps a raw egg. At night she had chopped meat. She learned, too, to eat “scraps,” which she loved especially because they came right off the plates of Jim Dear and Darling! She had dog-biscuits; she had bones. She had coffee, too, when Jim Dear and Darling had coffee, and ice-cream when there was ice-cream. The coffee might be only a sip, but the ice-cream was a whole dish for Lady alone and she could lick the other dishes besides. She loved ice-cream most of all.

  Maybe Lady had too many good things to eat. She got sick. Darling telephoned Jim Dear and Jim Dear telephoned back and pretty soon a man with a black bag arrived and gave Lady medicine and she threw up. She felt better then, but she was very much ashamed. Never again would she see a man with a black bag without a foreboding that something unpleasant was going to happen.

  “Too much rich stuff,” the man said. “Give her spinach and more bones.”

  Lady hated spinach. But she loved bones.

  They were knuckle bones, good to gnaw and tastier still after they were buried a week. In the yard, where she was careful not to disturb Darling’s flowers, Lady buried many fine bones.

  Sometimes, with Darling, she went in person to the butcher’s. When he would put her bone in a paper bag and hand it to her across the counter, Lady would seize the bag in her mouth and trot home before she touched the contents.

  One day there was a new butcher at the shop.

  “And a bone for the mutt?” he said after he had filled Darling’s order. Darling nodded coldly and Lady knew that something had displeased her.

  “The idea!” exclaimed Darling when they had gone out. “The idea of his calling you a mutt!”

  Lady didn’t know, then, what a mutt was except that it must be something pretty disgraceful.

  CHAPTER TWO

  NEXT DOOR TO Lady lived two other dogs. On one side was a bloodhound named Trusty and on the other a Scottie. His official name was Heather Lad O’Glencairn, but his family called him Jock McGinnis and “Jock” for short; you can’t get much shorter than that. These dogs were great friends and they both admired Lady.

  “I hope you’re going to like the neighborhood,” said Trusty soon after Lady moved in. “There are not many dogs hereabouts but they are all well bred. I believe in good breeding.”

  “Don’t let him scare you,” Jock McGinnis whispered to Lady. “Even though he’s a bloodhou
nd, he’s awfully good-natured. Why, he wouldn’t kill a flea.”

  Lady was awed. These were her first dogs and their conversation dazzled her. But she panted agreeably and they were charmed by her winsome looks and her eagerness to please.

  Trusty was considerably older than Lady. His size and his sad expression made him seem haughty. Actually he was not only good-natured but self-conscious because of his large ears and grateful for any attention. But he was almost too dignified to be much fun. On bright mornings, when the wind brought interesting smells from all directions and Lady was ready for a romp, Trusty preferred to lie in the sun and discuss pedigrees.

  “The moment I saw you,” he would tell Lady, his head on his paws and his red eyes fixed earnestly on her, “I knew you were a thoroughbred. The Spaniels, you know, descend from royalty. There was a King Charles, I believe. My own family is not so famous, but in our way we have contributed to the history of the country. Have I ever mentioned my father, Old Reliable?”

  “I believe you have,” Lady would say, having heard the story of Old Reliable and his marvelous nose a number of times.

  “He never lost a trail,” Trusty would say in happy disregard of her sigh. “Once there were twelve escaped convicts—”

  With that he would be off on a yarn that was endless and, to Lady, always a little shocking, for she could not imagine dogs hunting humans.

  Once she interrupted, rather sharply for her, “Did you ever catch a convict yourself?”

  “No,” admitted Trusty and fell into a moody silence. In a few minutes he rumbled some excuse about getting a lap of water and left her. Lady felt that she had wounded him, but how grievously she did not discover until she mentioned the incident to Jock McGinnis.

  “Oh, you shouldn’t have asked him that!” exclaimed Jock, who usually cared little for other dogs’ feelings.

  “Why not?” asked Lady.

  “Don’t you know about Trusty? He suffers from asthma—no sense of smell. Most embarrassing for a bloodhound.”

  “Oh, dear!” moaned Lady. “I did put my paw in it, didn’t I?”

  But because of the circumstances there was little she could do to make it right except listen to Trusty’s stories. Often she listened until he bored her to sleep.

  Jock McGinnis was a dog of a different nature. Being small and lively, he frequently seemed as much younger than Lady as Trusty was older. She often felt, when Jock went tearing around after birds, and butterflies, and even blown bits of paper, that she was old enough to be his mother. She liked Jock, but she wished he wasn’t such a fidget. He had a temper, too, which got him into trouble with bigger dogs. Jock resented bigness, except for Trusty’s. Barking insults, he would dash to battle; always he lost. “I tripped,” he would say on his dirty, scuffed return. For he was as sensitive about his size as Trusty was about his nose.

  Lady didn’t approve of Jock’s fighting. But she was forgiving and patient with him just as she was with Trusty.

  These were the friends of Lady. So it was natural that she went to them with her worries when the great mystery began.

  At the outset it was no more than a voice. Or rather it was something missing from a voice of which it had always been a part. The voice was Darling’s. What Lady missed in it was love.

  Dogs, as everybody knows, are as sensitive as magnets. The slightest change in his master’s manner will not escape a dog. From her earliest puppyhood, whenever Jim Dear or Darling had scolded her, Lady cringed at the first word. They did not have to raise their voices or speak twice; she immediately begged forgiveness. Yet during the scoldings she had never missed the note of love under the rough tongue.

  She missed it now. At first she couldn’t believe it was not there. “I must have been inattentive, or there was a noise in the street,” she reproached herself. She listened wistfully for love when Darling spoke to her; she found the note again and again she lost it. Darling still loved her, but not all the time. That was pain enough. The mystery was that these bad hours for Lady appeared to have no reason that she could discover, it was as if Darling sometimes just forgot her.

  She tried not to grieve too much. Darling was absorbed by some worry of her own, no doubt. She would get over it and return to love.

  And then Jim Dear did a strange thing.

  It was his habit, when he came home at night, to whistle as soon as he turned the corner. The whistle was scarcely necessary, for Lady, who was as good at telling time as any farmer, would have been waiting on the steps since long before five. But the whistle was important; it was a bond, a sort of cheery code, between her and Jim Dear. Away Lady would rush; the gate clicked—“Hello, old girl!”—she was all over Jim Dear in a trice.

  On this night there was no whistle. She heard Jim Dear (no other footsteps like his), she smelled him. When the latch clicked, she was not far away. She leaped in joy.

  “Down, Lady!”—he was gone in a flash. Lady picked herself up from the tumble she had taken. She was too surprised to be hurt. Why, he had not even patted her! Bewildered but unshaken in her faith, she trotted after him.

  Jim Dear was so swift that he was in the living-room before her. He was bending over Darling, he had taken her in his arms where she sat reading.

  “Darling, are you all right?” Lady heard him cry.

  “Why, of course, Jim dear! Whatever’s the matter?”

  “Well, I got to thinking—you alone all day—and going out with that dog—you might trip—anything might happen; I—I guess I’m pretty silly.”

  He sounded silly, and Darling almost angry.

  “You certainly are! If this is the way you’re going to behave all the time, I’m going to Aunt Sarah’s!”

  “Heaven forbid!” said Jim Dear.

  “Then don’t be a goose! Sit down and I’ll get your supper and for goodness’ sake, pat Lady. She’s dying for attention.”

  Lady was. She got it. But not before the knowledge had cut deep that Jim Dear had not loved her—not in their sacred moment at the gate; not when he said “that dog.” Several days later she timidly consulted Trusty and Jock McGinnis.

  “And that isn’t all,” she concluded while they listened with solemn interest, for both were well aware of Lady’s place in her household and how unusual was the state of affairs she described. “There are other things going on that I don’t understand.”

  “What things?” demanded Jock.

  “They are making over my room.” Lady hesitated; she was shy about discussing intimate details. “They have taken away my bed and put it in the kennel. They’ve gotten a lot of other furniture,”

  The two dogs looked at each other and looked away. They were wondering where Lady was sleeping now but they were too polite to ask.

  “Of course,” added Lady, “I never slept in the spare room anyway. But it’s very odd. The new furniture is odd.”

  “How—odd?” said Jock.

  “Well,” said Lady, “it’s not unlike their other furniture except for one thing—it’s littler.”

  Trusty lifted his huge ears and wrinkled his forehead.

  “What else have you noticed?” he inquired.

  “There was trouble this morning, though I’m not sure it had anything to do with the mystery. But she was so excited when I picked it up—she all but pounced on me—”

  Lady stopped. She was remembering the time she chewed the silver slippers and how different today was, as if she had picked up something twice as precious. But she hated confessing an old naughtiness in order to explain.

  “Go on,” said Jock.

  “Well,” she said, “I found it on the floor and began to play with it—”

  “Haven’t we all?” encouraged Trusty.

  “— and suddenly she screamed. She fairly snatched it from my mouth. Honestly, I was frightened!”

  “But what was it?” insisted Jock, his curiosity burning.

  “It was her knitting. It was like,” said Lady, “a little sock.”

  The others stared at
her. Trusty broke the silence.

  “Do you suppose,” he pondered in his deep bass, “your lady is going to have a—have a—”

  He hesitated and managed a sneeze.

  “A bairn!” burst out Jock McGinnis.

  “A bairn?” repeated Lady.

  “He means a baby,” confessed T usty.

  “And what,” said Lady, “is a baby?”

  Trusty pondered. “They yell a lot,” he said at last.

  “They’re very soft,” said Jock. “But they break easily. Even humans must be careful with them. You’ll not be allowed to play with it!”

  “What else?” asked Lady.

  “Well,” said Trusty, “personally I don’t like their smell.” He stared at her defiantly and she knew he was bluffing a little.

  “But I still don’t understand,” said Lady plaintively. “Are babies mostly like dogs or mostly like humans?”

  The two older dogs exchanged glances; they realized they were not getting babies across to Lady, and maybe they were not giving babies a break.

  “They’re certainly not like dogs,” said Jock. “No tails.”

  “More like humans,” agreed Trusty, “but considerably smaller.”

  “But everybody says they’re very sweet,” both dogs said.

  At that moment, before she could ask more, a shrill whistle brought Lady, Jock and Trusty to their all-fours, noses up, ears cocked, tails tilted.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THEY HAD been talking on the sidewalk in front of Trusty’s home, too absorbed to notice passersby. It was noon. No master would be about for hours. Yet plainly the whistle was a masterly pipe. They looked around. Not a man was visible, only another dog who had loped up and now danced a few feet away.

  He was a stranger and on sight Lady shrank, for he was like no other dog of her acquaintance— neither small nor large, of no recognizable breed, not dirty yet certainly not washed. He simply looked, to her, rough. His only badge, a healthy red tongue, waved like a flag in the friendliest of grins.