A Little Dog Like You (1987)
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sutcliff_spaceA Little Dog Like You is a story of about 4000 words Sutcliff published in 1987, as a little illustrated book. It's about the efforts of a bereaved dog owner and her beloved chihuahua to be reunited in his next life. It has some clear autobiographical elements and purports to be true.
A few notes:
A LITTLE DOG LIKE YOU
This is a mostly true story. Parts of it I know are true, and parts of it I believe are true. It is about a dog called Pippin.
Pippin was a chihuahua; and he had a coat the colour of a wheat field just ripe for harvesting, and big dark eyes, and ears like huge pricked flower petals, and a tail that told the world all about his inmost feelings so that it was no good him pretending to feel brave or happy when he didn’t.
The woman he belonged to – or perhaps she belonged to him, or perhaps they just belonged to each other – would have liked to call him Sebastian, because she thought it was a beautiful name, and it had a golden sound to it. But of course she couldn’t.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she told herself, holding him against her neck while he blew warm onion-smelling puppy breath all over her face (he was just eight weeks old). “Sebastian is a big dog’s name; a big, valiant, noble dog’s name.” And there was no denying that the puppy was never going to be big or valiant, nor, despite his pedigree, which was long and had champions on both his mother’s side and his father’s, was he going to be in the least noble. So she called him Pippin.
But sometimes, as the years went by, she used to laugh and say to him, “Would you like to have been called Sebastian?” And Pippin would tell her with big dark eyes and a wildly wagging tail that he would, but that he quite understood about not being that sort of dog.
The trouble with Pippin was that he was afraid of so many things. Almost the first thing he could remember was being afraid of the long corridor that led down to the woman’s bedroom, Mommie’s bedroom, where he slept on her bed ever after. It was such a very long corridor, and so dark, like a tunnel that first bedtime, because of the light still on in the hall and the light shining out through he open bedroom door at the end of it. She had not thought about switching the light on in the corridor itself. He started out quite boldly down it, but halfway along he stopped. The light at the end was so far away, and when he looked back the light at that end seemed so far away too, but at least Mommie was standing there watching him; so he ran back to her crying, and had to be picked up and carried. He was afraid of loud noises and sudden movements, and other dogs, and anything that he had not seen before. He was afraid, above all, that Mommie would stop loving him, though she promised him over and over again that she would not.
In every other way she and Pippin understood each other beautifully. There was a chair in the sitting room with a velvet seat the colour of daffodils, and often Pippin would get onto it and stand up with his forepaws on the back, and Mommie would come up behind the chair and bend over and take his face between her hands and they would stand nose to nose, looking deep into each other’s eyes and having long talks together without any words.
Well, so the years went by and the years went by; not so very many of them, not quite nine, and then early in one November Pippin became ill, and more ill, and despite all Mommie’s care and the vet’s medicine, he died, and his little golden body was buried in the garden under the big old apple tree whose branches were drifted with white blossom in the spring. He had always loved to lie in its shelter, and over the years it had come to be called Pippin’s Appletree.
The woman was alone in the house and feeling very lonely, and also very strange. It was not the first time one of her dogs had died. But, however many dogs someone may have, and however well she may love them all, there is always one that stands tall among the rest, and for the woman, Pippin, because he had always been so afraid of everything and had always needed her so much, was that one. But each time that it had happened before, when Mike and Simba and Ben had gone, she had known that what she had to do was to open her arms wide and let them go free on a great wave of love to last them the journey and keep them from feeling lonely when they first got there. This time she felt quite different. This time she knew very clearly that the thing she had to do was to keep a kind of door open for Pippin to come back through if he could. She did not know if he would be able to, but she was quite sure that he wanted to.
So she got up and went to the chair with the daffodil-yellow seat, and leaned over the back, and imagined with all the power of imagining that was in her – which was a good deal, because she was a teller of stories – that Pippin was there, standing up with his paws on the back to talk to her; and she held her hands just the right distance apart, and imagined and imagined that Pippin’s loving little head with the big dark eyes and the ears like huge flower petals was between them and that they were looking deep into each other’s eyes just as they used to do.
And she said, “Darling little Pippin, if you want to come back, try. I’ll do all I can to keep the way open for you, but you’ll have to do your bit, too.” And she dropped a kiss between his imaginary ears.
Pippin was standing in a place full of light and joy and a kind of singing, and gazing up into the face of a man in a brown robe who was looking down at him.
The tall angel with wings like a golden pheasant’s who was in charge of the Pearly Gates while St. Peter was off duty for the afternoon, had sent for St. Francis, because he was having problems.
Pippin was explaining very clearly as he had already explained it several times: “Please, I’ve come in at the wrong gate. This isn’t the gate to my garden. Please, I’d like to go home now.”
“I’ve tried explaining,” said the angel, “but he simply doesn’t listen.”
The brown man sat down on his heels. There was a robin on his shoulder, and a mouse poked a small whiskery face out of the pocket of his robe. “This is Home,” he said very gently, “the Home all living creatures come back to at the right time. It’s a happy place; you’ll see.” He held out his right hand, and Pippin smelled it all over very carefully, beginning with the little finger and ending with the thumb. It smelled good, kind, and understanding – not the hand of a man who would keep a little dog from going home. His tail gave a small uncertain wag behind him, and he began again. He would only have to explain to this man and all would be well.
“Please, I don’t like it very much here. Please, I want to go home to my Mommie.”
“Poor little brother. It seems strange at first, but it gets better as you come further in. Come with me and see,” said the brown man.
The brown man had the kindest face, except for Mommie’s, that Pippin had ever seen, but it seemed that he was not so good at understanding, after all. The little dog’s tail trembled forlornly downward. But he stood his ground. “Please, I don’t want to come further in with you. Please, I want to go home to my Mommie.”
“I told you,” said the angel, aside to St. Francis.
The lines on the brown man’s face seemed to get deeper and somehow troubled. “You see, it’s really against the rules,” he said, “and even if it were not, it’s a long and perilous journey for such a little dog. I really don’t think – ”
Then Pippin began to get really frightened. They were not going to let him go. He would never get back to Mommie again. He – but in that moment a strange thing happened. The angel and the brown man and the wonderful singing light all faded; and as though he were in a dream, like the warm milky dreams of his first puppy days, he was in the sitting room at home and standing on the chair with the seat as yellow as daffodils, his fore-feet on the back, and Mommie’s face was close to his, and her hands were on either side of his face and she was saying something about finding the way home if he wanted to, something to do with keeping the way open for him. A promise. She dropped a kiss on his forehead. And then she was gone, and he was back in the beautiful but strange place with the brown man and the angel.
“But people – little dogs – do get back,” he said with a new certainty.
“Oh yes, they do; but not often so soon. Not until they have had a time, maybe a hundred earth-years or so, to rest and grow strong again. Stay with us for a while, Pippin; we need a little dog like you.”
“I don’t want a rest, and I’m very strong,” Pippin told him earnestly. “I only want to go – ” He stopped, and scratched behind one ear as he did when he was thinking something out or making room for a new idea. “My Mommie needs me more than you do. She won’t know how to manage without me there to look after her.”
The brown man looked at him for a long moment and then quite suddenly he seemed to make up his mind. “Sometimes rules can be – not broken, but maybe bent a little,” he said. And then, “Are yo brave enough for such a far journey?”
“It didn’t take long to get here,” Pippin said hopefully.
“It will take longer to get back.”
“Then, please, I’d like to start at once. Only I don’t quite remember the way.”
“That is the way,” said the brown man, pointing.
Pippin turned round eagerly; but where the gates that he came in by had been – gates that seemed to be spun of rainbows and morning mist – there was the mouth of a black tunnel.
It was much longer than the corridor to Mommie’s bedroom that had so frightened him when he was a puppy, so long that he could not see any end to it at all; and much, much darker.
“Couldn’t I go back the way I came?” he asked.
“No. You can only get back by starting again at the very beginning and being born into your world as a new puppy.”
“It’s very long,” said Pippin.
“Yes.”
“And very dark.”
“I asked you if you were brave enough.”
Pippin began to shiver.
“And I can’t even promise that you will find your Mommie again at the other end; though if you love each other enough, that will help.”
“I love my Mommie enough, and she loves me enough,” said Pippin staunchly. He looked up into the face of the brown man, and then into the dark mouth of the tunnel. He was shivering more and more, and very much afraid. But this was a different kind of afraid, and he never hesitated. “Good-bye, and thank you for having me,” he said politely. His Mommie, who was one of those foolish people who pretend that dogs can talk on earth as well as in heaven, had always told him to say “Good-bye, and thank you for having me” when she took him to visit people, and he remembered his manners.
He felt one finger of the brown man’s hand stroke the top of his head. “Good-bye, little valiant brother,” said the brown man’s voice, “God bless you.”
Pippin put his tail up as though it were a flag and, still shivering, trotted forward into the dark.
The woman knew just as well as St. Francis did about the only way that Pippin could get back; and she was trying to work everything out and get it all clear in her head. She did not know, any more than anybody else in this world, how soon a baby’s soul comes into it, whether it is a human baby or a puppy or a hummingbird. Very likely in the very first moment that it begins inside its mother’s body. So she could not hope for it to be a puppy who was even begun inside its mother before the day that Pippin died. Today, November the tenth. That would mean late January before he was born, and then at least another eight weeks before he could possibly be old enough to leave his mother. A whole long lonely winter to be waited through, until the daffodils came out again.
But of course she would not be just waiting; there were plans that must be made, things that must be done, if she was going to have any chance of finding him when the time came.
Nest day she telephoned Miss Simpkins, the chihuahua breeder she had bought Pippin from. But the strange voice at the other end of the line told her that Miss Simpkins had got married and gone to live in New Zealand.
She went to the library and tool out a dog directory and began to telephone other breeders.
Mrs. Elliot said that she had two charming three-month-old puppies, and Miss Smith said she was planning to mate her dear little white bitch in May. (But I don’t think Pippin will wait till May, thought the woman. If he can come, he’ll come now.) And Mrs. Pettigrew said she hadn’t anything to offer herself, but she had lots of dog-breeder friends, and she would certainly keep her ears open. And when people say that, it means nothing at all, thought the woman; and she called a few more breeders, and none of them could help. So she settled down to wait for a while, because there was really nothing more that she could do for the present.
Christmas came, and the New Year, and then Candlemass, and though it was still the dark of the year, the world was beginning to wake up.
Pippin was still in the dark tunnel – but the tunnel was not there anymore, nothing was really there anymore. And then out of the nothingness there began to be a somethingness again. At first it was a kind of dream, like the warm milky dreams of his first puppy days, and the dream was still dark; and then there began to be a shadowy, blurred kind of light, and a voice was saying, “Oh look! The golden one has his eyes open!”
The woman brought in the first few chilly snowdrops from the garden, and put them in a little green glass bowl and set them on her window sill; and at dusk she put a lighted candle beside them as she always did at Candlemass. The candle flame reflected in the windowpane against the dusk looked as though there was a light outside in the snowy garden. And it made her think of putting a light in the window to guide someone home. And that made her think of Pippin. It never took very much to make her think of Pippin.
“He could be born by now,” she said to herself. “It’s time I was doing something. He can’t be more than a few days old, and they won’t sell him for weeks yet; but there’s always the risk that somebody else who is waiting for a puppy will buy him in advance, before I can find him!” She sat quiet for a while gazing into the fire and saying to herself very firmly, “I must not do anything stupid. I must not rush into buying a puppy just because I want it to be Pippin. That way I might miss him altogether if he does come.”
Then she got up and fetched her address book, where on a blank back page she had put the telephone numbers of all the breeders she had called nearly three months ago. She took it through to the hall, because sh did not want to switch on the sitting-room lamp and drown the candlelight, and began to go through the list.
She telephoned Miss Smith and Mrs. Elliot and all the rest, and none of them could help. She did not call Mrs. Pettigrew at all. I know she said she would keep her ears open and let me know, she thought, but she never has let me know. And, anyway, when people promise to keep their ears open nothing ever comes of it. And she went sadly back into the sitting-room. “I’ll think of something else tomorrow.”
Outside a full moon was rising, to shine on the sprinkling of snow that had fallen earlier in the day, and from the sitting room she found as she passed the window that she could see out into the deep blue garden quite well. Well enough to see that the reflection of the Candlemass candle flame seemed to be dancing among the lower branches of Pippin’s Appletree.
Something seemed to open with a small soft pop like a fuchsia bud inside the woman.
I will telephone Mrs. Pettigrew after all, she thought. It can’t do any harm. And she went back into the lighted hall.
She had written Mrs. Pettigrew’s number down so badly that it was quite hard to read. And her heart had begun to thump in a way that didn’t make it any easier. But holding the paper close to the lamp she managed to make it out. Making herself do it slowly and carefully, she dialed the number. It rang for a long time, and she was just about to give up when there was a click as somebody picked up the receiver, and a voice at the other end said, “Eve Pettigrew speaking.”
The woman began to babble as she always did at important moments. “Oh, Mrs. Pettigrew, I’m sure you won’t remember me, of course not why should you? But I rang you up nearly three months ago asking about a puppy – it had to be a puppy whose mother was not mated before the tenth of November – ”
There was a pleased squeal at the other end of the line. “He’s born!” said Mrs. Pettigrew. “A week last Wednesday. His mother belongs to a friend of mine over at Harvingdon. Mated just the day you said! I would have called you, but I lost your name and telephone number. ‘Never mind,’ I said to myself, ‘don’t worry, she’ll be in touch.’”
Inside the woman there was a long lovely silence. “Have you seen him?” she said at last. “What is he like?”
“Well, they all look like little rats at this stage, don’t they, dear? He’s golden with white paws and a little white streak on the top of his head.”
“Are his eyes open yet?” the woman asked, very gently.
“He opened them today! Look, dear, I must go, I’m in the middle of getting supper. I’ll give you my friend’s telephone number. Appleton’s her name. Call her and ask her anything more you want to know.”
But the woman did not call at once. She went back into the sitting room and sat down looking into the fire and listening to the silence inside herself.
I wish he hadn’t got those white bits, she thought. Please, God, please let him be Pippin.
On a day of sunshine and high March winds with daffodils dancing in wayside gardens, the woman drove over to Harvingdon. It was quite a long drive, and all the way she was so frightened that her hands gripped the wheel much too tight, and twice people honked at her because she was really driving rather badly.
From time to time she stole a quick glance at the box with a nest of old cardigans in the bottom of it, on the passenger seat beside her. How can I possibly tell, when he’s only eight weeks old? she thought. What if I can’t tell? What if we don’t even like each other? If I just don’t know – well, I suppose I have room for two little dogs; but if I know it’s not him, and we don’t like each other? – And I shall have to have him because Mrs. Appleton has been keeping him for me. It’s a crazy idea; it was crazy all along; I should have had more sense –
She took a corner much too wide and had to pull over hard to avoid a school bus coming the other way. The school bus honked at her. That made three.
She was coming to the edge of the town, now, and she pulled up to look at the slip of paper with Mrs. Appleton’s address on it and directions for getting there: “Brown Tiles, 7 Old School Road. Take the first turn at the traffic circle by the Green Dragon, then right by the Express Garage and under the railway bridge – ”
She took a deep breath and started off again.
She found Old School Road, she found Number 7. She walked up the path and rang the bell.
The door opened, and a grey-haired woman wearing an apron with dogs printed on it, over a pink jumper and skirt, appeared smiling in the opening.
“Mrs. Appleton?” said the woman. “I’ve come to see – ”
“You’ve come to collect the puppy,” said Mrs. Appleton. “Do come in. Oh, you poor dear, did you have a bad journey? You look as if you could do with a cup of tea. I’ve got the kettle on.”
“Thank you,” said the woman, “but I’d rather see the puppy first.”
“Of course. Tea afterwards. They’re in here.” Mrs. Appleton opened the door of a back room.
Almost the only thing in the room was a large dog basket. And in the dog basket a little honey-coloured chihuahua bitch sat looking alertly toward the door, while around her four squirming puppies thrust against her, demanding milk.
One of them was black, and two were black and gold, and one was gold all over, the colour of a wheat field at harvest time except for four white paws and a streak on his forehead as though somebody had stroked him there, very gently, with the tip of one finger, and left a trace of light behind.
Pippin found himself looking up into a face he seemed to know. Just for a moment he only seemed to know it, like something out of a dream. And then he knew it better than anything else in the whole wide world.
Mommie!
He left his litter-mother without a backward glance, and set out, wading through his squirming and whimpering brothers and sisters, toward the hands that were coming to meet him. It seemed a long way, but he had a vague idea that it was only the last bit of a much longer journey that he had made quite recently.
The woman had knelt down beside the basket. She had taken him up and was holding his little wriggling body against her neck while he nuzzled into her, blowing warm onion-smelling puppy breath over her face.
She dropped a kiss on the little white streak on his forehead: “Hello, Sebastian,” she said.
A few notes:
- Sutcliff owned several chihuahuas over the years, among other breeds. According to her godson Anthony Lawton's blog, in 1988 she had Sebastian ('Basty') and Barny (who I suspect was the Barnaby to whom the book is dedicated.) Mike, Simba, and Ben, named in the story, were also previous dogs of hers.
- Sutcliff believed in reincarnation, or at least wanted to believe in it, as she mentioned in her autobiography and in several interviews. Relatedly or not, her maternal grandmother was apparently a theosophist, part of the late 19th-century syncretic religion founded by Madame Blavatsky, that helped to popularize the concept of reincarnation in the modern West.
- Sutcliff had a sideline in short stories throughout her career, but until the mid-1980s they all had historical settings. Of her last five – The Roundabout Horse, A Little Dog Like You, Little Hound Found, Chess-Dream in a Garden, and The Minstrel and the Dragon Pup – three had modern settings and four had fantasy themes. A Little Dog Like You is not a full-blown picture-book like the others, but it has small black-and-white illustrations by Jane Johnson.
A LITTLE DOG LIKE YOU
This is a mostly true story. Parts of it I know are true, and parts of it I believe are true. It is about a dog called Pippin.
Pippin was a chihuahua; and he had a coat the colour of a wheat field just ripe for harvesting, and big dark eyes, and ears like huge pricked flower petals, and a tail that told the world all about his inmost feelings so that it was no good him pretending to feel brave or happy when he didn’t.
The woman he belonged to – or perhaps she belonged to him, or perhaps they just belonged to each other – would have liked to call him Sebastian, because she thought it was a beautiful name, and it had a golden sound to it. But of course she couldn’t.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she told herself, holding him against her neck while he blew warm onion-smelling puppy breath all over her face (he was just eight weeks old). “Sebastian is a big dog’s name; a big, valiant, noble dog’s name.” And there was no denying that the puppy was never going to be big or valiant, nor, despite his pedigree, which was long and had champions on both his mother’s side and his father’s, was he going to be in the least noble. So she called him Pippin.
But sometimes, as the years went by, she used to laugh and say to him, “Would you like to have been called Sebastian?” And Pippin would tell her with big dark eyes and a wildly wagging tail that he would, but that he quite understood about not being that sort of dog.
The trouble with Pippin was that he was afraid of so many things. Almost the first thing he could remember was being afraid of the long corridor that led down to the woman’s bedroom, Mommie’s bedroom, where he slept on her bed ever after. It was such a very long corridor, and so dark, like a tunnel that first bedtime, because of the light still on in the hall and the light shining out through he open bedroom door at the end of it. She had not thought about switching the light on in the corridor itself. He started out quite boldly down it, but halfway along he stopped. The light at the end was so far away, and when he looked back the light at that end seemed so far away too, but at least Mommie was standing there watching him; so he ran back to her crying, and had to be picked up and carried. He was afraid of loud noises and sudden movements, and other dogs, and anything that he had not seen before. He was afraid, above all, that Mommie would stop loving him, though she promised him over and over again that she would not.
In every other way she and Pippin understood each other beautifully. There was a chair in the sitting room with a velvet seat the colour of daffodils, and often Pippin would get onto it and stand up with his forepaws on the back, and Mommie would come up behind the chair and bend over and take his face between her hands and they would stand nose to nose, looking deep into each other’s eyes and having long talks together without any words.
Well, so the years went by and the years went by; not so very many of them, not quite nine, and then early in one November Pippin became ill, and more ill, and despite all Mommie’s care and the vet’s medicine, he died, and his little golden body was buried in the garden under the big old apple tree whose branches were drifted with white blossom in the spring. He had always loved to lie in its shelter, and over the years it had come to be called Pippin’s Appletree.
The woman was alone in the house and feeling very lonely, and also very strange. It was not the first time one of her dogs had died. But, however many dogs someone may have, and however well she may love them all, there is always one that stands tall among the rest, and for the woman, Pippin, because he had always been so afraid of everything and had always needed her so much, was that one. But each time that it had happened before, when Mike and Simba and Ben had gone, she had known that what she had to do was to open her arms wide and let them go free on a great wave of love to last them the journey and keep them from feeling lonely when they first got there. This time she felt quite different. This time she knew very clearly that the thing she had to do was to keep a kind of door open for Pippin to come back through if he could. She did not know if he would be able to, but she was quite sure that he wanted to.
So she got up and went to the chair with the daffodil-yellow seat, and leaned over the back, and imagined with all the power of imagining that was in her – which was a good deal, because she was a teller of stories – that Pippin was there, standing up with his paws on the back to talk to her; and she held her hands just the right distance apart, and imagined and imagined that Pippin’s loving little head with the big dark eyes and the ears like huge flower petals was between them and that they were looking deep into each other’s eyes just as they used to do.
And she said, “Darling little Pippin, if you want to come back, try. I’ll do all I can to keep the way open for you, but you’ll have to do your bit, too.” And she dropped a kiss between his imaginary ears.
Pippin was standing in a place full of light and joy and a kind of singing, and gazing up into the face of a man in a brown robe who was looking down at him.
The tall angel with wings like a golden pheasant’s who was in charge of the Pearly Gates while St. Peter was off duty for the afternoon, had sent for St. Francis, because he was having problems.
Pippin was explaining very clearly as he had already explained it several times: “Please, I’ve come in at the wrong gate. This isn’t the gate to my garden. Please, I’d like to go home now.”
“I’ve tried explaining,” said the angel, “but he simply doesn’t listen.”
The brown man sat down on his heels. There was a robin on his shoulder, and a mouse poked a small whiskery face out of the pocket of his robe. “This is Home,” he said very gently, “the Home all living creatures come back to at the right time. It’s a happy place; you’ll see.” He held out his right hand, and Pippin smelled it all over very carefully, beginning with the little finger and ending with the thumb. It smelled good, kind, and understanding – not the hand of a man who would keep a little dog from going home. His tail gave a small uncertain wag behind him, and he began again. He would only have to explain to this man and all would be well.
“Please, I don’t like it very much here. Please, I want to go home to my Mommie.”
“Poor little brother. It seems strange at first, but it gets better as you come further in. Come with me and see,” said the brown man.
The brown man had the kindest face, except for Mommie’s, that Pippin had ever seen, but it seemed that he was not so good at understanding, after all. The little dog’s tail trembled forlornly downward. But he stood his ground. “Please, I don’t want to come further in with you. Please, I want to go home to my Mommie.”
“I told you,” said the angel, aside to St. Francis.
The lines on the brown man’s face seemed to get deeper and somehow troubled. “You see, it’s really against the rules,” he said, “and even if it were not, it’s a long and perilous journey for such a little dog. I really don’t think – ”
Then Pippin began to get really frightened. They were not going to let him go. He would never get back to Mommie again. He – but in that moment a strange thing happened. The angel and the brown man and the wonderful singing light all faded; and as though he were in a dream, like the warm milky dreams of his first puppy days, he was in the sitting room at home and standing on the chair with the seat as yellow as daffodils, his fore-feet on the back, and Mommie’s face was close to his, and her hands were on either side of his face and she was saying something about finding the way home if he wanted to, something to do with keeping the way open for him. A promise. She dropped a kiss on his forehead. And then she was gone, and he was back in the beautiful but strange place with the brown man and the angel.
“But people – little dogs – do get back,” he said with a new certainty.
“Oh yes, they do; but not often so soon. Not until they have had a time, maybe a hundred earth-years or so, to rest and grow strong again. Stay with us for a while, Pippin; we need a little dog like you.”
“I don’t want a rest, and I’m very strong,” Pippin told him earnestly. “I only want to go – ” He stopped, and scratched behind one ear as he did when he was thinking something out or making room for a new idea. “My Mommie needs me more than you do. She won’t know how to manage without me there to look after her.”
The brown man looked at him for a long moment and then quite suddenly he seemed to make up his mind. “Sometimes rules can be – not broken, but maybe bent a little,” he said. And then, “Are yo brave enough for such a far journey?”
“It didn’t take long to get here,” Pippin said hopefully.
“It will take longer to get back.”
“Then, please, I’d like to start at once. Only I don’t quite remember the way.”
“That is the way,” said the brown man, pointing.
Pippin turned round eagerly; but where the gates that he came in by had been – gates that seemed to be spun of rainbows and morning mist – there was the mouth of a black tunnel.
It was much longer than the corridor to Mommie’s bedroom that had so frightened him when he was a puppy, so long that he could not see any end to it at all; and much, much darker.
“Couldn’t I go back the way I came?” he asked.
“No. You can only get back by starting again at the very beginning and being born into your world as a new puppy.”
“It’s very long,” said Pippin.
“Yes.”
“And very dark.”
“I asked you if you were brave enough.”
Pippin began to shiver.
“And I can’t even promise that you will find your Mommie again at the other end; though if you love each other enough, that will help.”
“I love my Mommie enough, and she loves me enough,” said Pippin staunchly. He looked up into the face of the brown man, and then into the dark mouth of the tunnel. He was shivering more and more, and very much afraid. But this was a different kind of afraid, and he never hesitated. “Good-bye, and thank you for having me,” he said politely. His Mommie, who was one of those foolish people who pretend that dogs can talk on earth as well as in heaven, had always told him to say “Good-bye, and thank you for having me” when she took him to visit people, and he remembered his manners.
He felt one finger of the brown man’s hand stroke the top of his head. “Good-bye, little valiant brother,” said the brown man’s voice, “God bless you.”
Pippin put his tail up as though it were a flag and, still shivering, trotted forward into the dark.
The woman knew just as well as St. Francis did about the only way that Pippin could get back; and she was trying to work everything out and get it all clear in her head. She did not know, any more than anybody else in this world, how soon a baby’s soul comes into it, whether it is a human baby or a puppy or a hummingbird. Very likely in the very first moment that it begins inside its mother’s body. So she could not hope for it to be a puppy who was even begun inside its mother before the day that Pippin died. Today, November the tenth. That would mean late January before he was born, and then at least another eight weeks before he could possibly be old enough to leave his mother. A whole long lonely winter to be waited through, until the daffodils came out again.
But of course she would not be just waiting; there were plans that must be made, things that must be done, if she was going to have any chance of finding him when the time came.
Nest day she telephoned Miss Simpkins, the chihuahua breeder she had bought Pippin from. But the strange voice at the other end of the line told her that Miss Simpkins had got married and gone to live in New Zealand.
She went to the library and tool out a dog directory and began to telephone other breeders.
Mrs. Elliot said that she had two charming three-month-old puppies, and Miss Smith said she was planning to mate her dear little white bitch in May. (But I don’t think Pippin will wait till May, thought the woman. If he can come, he’ll come now.) And Mrs. Pettigrew said she hadn’t anything to offer herself, but she had lots of dog-breeder friends, and she would certainly keep her ears open. And when people say that, it means nothing at all, thought the woman; and she called a few more breeders, and none of them could help. So she settled down to wait for a while, because there was really nothing more that she could do for the present.
Christmas came, and the New Year, and then Candlemass, and though it was still the dark of the year, the world was beginning to wake up.
Pippin was still in the dark tunnel – but the tunnel was not there anymore, nothing was really there anymore. And then out of the nothingness there began to be a somethingness again. At first it was a kind of dream, like the warm milky dreams of his first puppy days, and the dream was still dark; and then there began to be a shadowy, blurred kind of light, and a voice was saying, “Oh look! The golden one has his eyes open!”
The woman brought in the first few chilly snowdrops from the garden, and put them in a little green glass bowl and set them on her window sill; and at dusk she put a lighted candle beside them as she always did at Candlemass. The candle flame reflected in the windowpane against the dusk looked as though there was a light outside in the snowy garden. And it made her think of putting a light in the window to guide someone home. And that made her think of Pippin. It never took very much to make her think of Pippin.
“He could be born by now,” she said to herself. “It’s time I was doing something. He can’t be more than a few days old, and they won’t sell him for weeks yet; but there’s always the risk that somebody else who is waiting for a puppy will buy him in advance, before I can find him!” She sat quiet for a while gazing into the fire and saying to herself very firmly, “I must not do anything stupid. I must not rush into buying a puppy just because I want it to be Pippin. That way I might miss him altogether if he does come.”
Then she got up and fetched her address book, where on a blank back page she had put the telephone numbers of all the breeders she had called nearly three months ago. She took it through to the hall, because sh did not want to switch on the sitting-room lamp and drown the candlelight, and began to go through the list.
She telephoned Miss Smith and Mrs. Elliot and all the rest, and none of them could help. She did not call Mrs. Pettigrew at all. I know she said she would keep her ears open and let me know, she thought, but she never has let me know. And, anyway, when people promise to keep their ears open nothing ever comes of it. And she went sadly back into the sitting-room. “I’ll think of something else tomorrow.”
Outside a full moon was rising, to shine on the sprinkling of snow that had fallen earlier in the day, and from the sitting room she found as she passed the window that she could see out into the deep blue garden quite well. Well enough to see that the reflection of the Candlemass candle flame seemed to be dancing among the lower branches of Pippin’s Appletree.
Something seemed to open with a small soft pop like a fuchsia bud inside the woman.
I will telephone Mrs. Pettigrew after all, she thought. It can’t do any harm. And she went back into the lighted hall.
She had written Mrs. Pettigrew’s number down so badly that it was quite hard to read. And her heart had begun to thump in a way that didn’t make it any easier. But holding the paper close to the lamp she managed to make it out. Making herself do it slowly and carefully, she dialed the number. It rang for a long time, and she was just about to give up when there was a click as somebody picked up the receiver, and a voice at the other end said, “Eve Pettigrew speaking.”
The woman began to babble as she always did at important moments. “Oh, Mrs. Pettigrew, I’m sure you won’t remember me, of course not why should you? But I rang you up nearly three months ago asking about a puppy – it had to be a puppy whose mother was not mated before the tenth of November – ”
There was a pleased squeal at the other end of the line. “He’s born!” said Mrs. Pettigrew. “A week last Wednesday. His mother belongs to a friend of mine over at Harvingdon. Mated just the day you said! I would have called you, but I lost your name and telephone number. ‘Never mind,’ I said to myself, ‘don’t worry, she’ll be in touch.’”
Inside the woman there was a long lovely silence. “Have you seen him?” she said at last. “What is he like?”
“Well, they all look like little rats at this stage, don’t they, dear? He’s golden with white paws and a little white streak on the top of his head.”
“Are his eyes open yet?” the woman asked, very gently.
“He opened them today! Look, dear, I must go, I’m in the middle of getting supper. I’ll give you my friend’s telephone number. Appleton’s her name. Call her and ask her anything more you want to know.”
But the woman did not call at once. She went back into the sitting room and sat down looking into the fire and listening to the silence inside herself.
I wish he hadn’t got those white bits, she thought. Please, God, please let him be Pippin.
On a day of sunshine and high March winds with daffodils dancing in wayside gardens, the woman drove over to Harvingdon. It was quite a long drive, and all the way she was so frightened that her hands gripped the wheel much too tight, and twice people honked at her because she was really driving rather badly.
From time to time she stole a quick glance at the box with a nest of old cardigans in the bottom of it, on the passenger seat beside her. How can I possibly tell, when he’s only eight weeks old? she thought. What if I can’t tell? What if we don’t even like each other? If I just don’t know – well, I suppose I have room for two little dogs; but if I know it’s not him, and we don’t like each other? – And I shall have to have him because Mrs. Appleton has been keeping him for me. It’s a crazy idea; it was crazy all along; I should have had more sense –
She took a corner much too wide and had to pull over hard to avoid a school bus coming the other way. The school bus honked at her. That made three.
She was coming to the edge of the town, now, and she pulled up to look at the slip of paper with Mrs. Appleton’s address on it and directions for getting there: “Brown Tiles, 7 Old School Road. Take the first turn at the traffic circle by the Green Dragon, then right by the Express Garage and under the railway bridge – ”
She took a deep breath and started off again.
She found Old School Road, she found Number 7. She walked up the path and rang the bell.
The door opened, and a grey-haired woman wearing an apron with dogs printed on it, over a pink jumper and skirt, appeared smiling in the opening.
“Mrs. Appleton?” said the woman. “I’ve come to see – ”
“You’ve come to collect the puppy,” said Mrs. Appleton. “Do come in. Oh, you poor dear, did you have a bad journey? You look as if you could do with a cup of tea. I’ve got the kettle on.”
“Thank you,” said the woman, “but I’d rather see the puppy first.”
“Of course. Tea afterwards. They’re in here.” Mrs. Appleton opened the door of a back room.
Almost the only thing in the room was a large dog basket. And in the dog basket a little honey-coloured chihuahua bitch sat looking alertly toward the door, while around her four squirming puppies thrust against her, demanding milk.
One of them was black, and two were black and gold, and one was gold all over, the colour of a wheat field at harvest time except for four white paws and a streak on his forehead as though somebody had stroked him there, very gently, with the tip of one finger, and left a trace of light behind.
Pippin found himself looking up into a face he seemed to know. Just for a moment he only seemed to know it, like something out of a dream. And then he knew it better than anything else in the whole wide world.
Mommie!
He left his litter-mother without a backward glance, and set out, wading through his squirming and whimpering brothers and sisters, toward the hands that were coming to meet him. It seemed a long way, but he had a vague idea that it was only the last bit of a much longer journey that he had made quite recently.
The woman had knelt down beside the basket. She had taken him up and was holding his little wriggling body against her neck while he nuzzled into her, blowing warm onion-smelling puppy breath over her face.
She dropped a kiss on the little white streak on his forehead: “Hello, Sebastian,” she said.
