My Dog Tulip Read Online Free PDF Page A

already in process of being delegated to a housekeeper, lately engaged for the purpose. Had I made a ghastly mistake? Was I now about to lose my Tulip, that savage lover and protector whom Miss Canvey had striven so hard to preserve for me intact? Should I find myself soon with Miss Canvey’s Tulip, that reduced, spiritless, abject creature, anybody’s stroke, while my housekeeper enjoyed the fierce flattery of mine? That this obsessive fear haunted my life for many months was proof enough how well Miss Canvey had sized me up. But—she would be the first to rejoice—she had not sized up Tulip. Indeed, how should human beings suspect in the lower beasts those noblest virtues which they themselves attain only in the realms of fiction? Tulip was incorruptible. She was constant. It mattered not who fed, flattered, or befriended her, or for how long; her allegiance never wavered; she had given her heart to me in the beginning, and mine, and mine only, it was to remain forever.
    Miss Canvey therefore underrated her, and it was left to Mr. Brasenose of Brighton to whom I next had recourse for veterinary aid—Tulip’s nails needed cutting—to imply that she had overrated her too. Mr. Brasenose was a cheerful young man who whistled while he worked, who continued to whistle, indeed, throughout Tulip’s customary hostilities, and when I had recited to him Miss Canvey’s magic formula, which I had learnt by heart, all he said was:
    â€œOh, I shouldn’t bother to go. I expect Tulip would prefer you to stay.”
    This was so far from being an aspect of the matter that had occurred to me, that it needed a moment or two to take it in; by the time I had focused it and, as it seemed to me, its total and reckless wrongheadedness, he had got his clippers out and was saying, “Just hoist her on the table, will you?” in so casual a manner, as though she were a sack, that I found myself complying. The operation was not performed without difficulty; Mrs. Brasenose, indeed, had to be summoned by her husband from an inner apartment to help me prop Tulip up on the table and retrieve those various portions of her anatomy which, like the fringes of a jelly on too small a plate, kept escaping over the edge; but at any rate it was performed, by the merrily trilling vet, and with as little concern for Tulip’s protests and struggles as if he had been cutting the nails of a mouse.
    Thus opened another chapter of Tulip’s medical history, and the last; although I continued faithfully to repeat my formula to all the vets we subsequently visited, none of them paid to it the least attention. This strange heedlessness upset me at first; not on their account, of course; if they chose to ignore Miss Canvey’s advice, that was their lookout; but was it fair to Tulip to impose on her this additional strain of worrying about me when she had trouble enough of her own? Upon reflection, however, I was less sure; since the ruling passion of her life was to keep me always in her eye, might she not actually prefer me to stay?
    Moreover, this new chapter, I gradually perceived had one considerable advantage; it shed light upon the problem that had embarrassed my public life with Tulip from the start and which Miss Canvey had deliberately left unexplored: What was my Tulip really like? How far, in my presence, would she go? It turned out that she was Miss Canvey’s Tulip—that is to say “as good as gold.” This was what I had always believed, and what Miss Canvey herself had seemed to confirm when she said that she saw at a glance that Tulip was a “good girl”—leaving, however, unclear in my mind to what lengths, in Miss Canvey’s philosophy, a good girl might be permitted to go in defense of her man, or her horse.
    Tulip was a good girl; but as I went on hoisting her up on to one surgery table after another and supporting her there while the vets took swabs of her womb, or,