Two Gentlemen and a Lady E-Book

Alexander Woollcott

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 57

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Dogs may be man's best friend, but every friendship is different. Prepare to meet Nicholas, a gregarious Airedale whose arrival in a moneyed Long Island home unleashes complete and total chaos throughout the neighbourhood. Verdun Belle, the lady of the title, is a silky-eared spaniel whose loyalty - and litter of puppies - rallies an entire American regiment fighting on the Western Front during the First World War. Then there's Egon, a large - very large - German Shepherd, accustomed to summering on the Côte d'Azur, and to managing the diaries and daily activities of his human charges, whether they want him to or not.This charmingly illustrated collection of three delightful stories, rediscovered after decades out of print, shows our canine companions in all their guises: comic, heroic, companionable.

Leseprobe

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To Neysa Moran McMein,

who was a warm personal friend of most of the characters in this book, it is hereby dedicated by

The Author

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Contents

Title PageDedicationThe Passing of NicholasThe Story of Verdun BelleMy Friend EgonYou may also enjoyAvailable and Coming Soon from Pushkin Press Copyright

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The Passing of Nicholas

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The Passing of Nicholas

Pleasant Lanes,Long IslandNovember twelfth

y Dear Arthur:

It will doubtless surprise you to receive a letter from me and indeed I suspect that when our generation passes on and its Lives and Letters begin to elbow Stevenson’s on the shelf, it will be learned with a publisher’s dismay that nowadays brothers communicate with each other only by wire. Of course I used to get news of mine from Mother, but I think it was one of the puzzling shadows on her declining years that she 14had to serve thus as a clearing house of information for her far flung family. Somehow she felt it was her fault that her three sons were not living together somewhere in inextricable fraternity.

I do hear from Laurence occasionally when something comes up about my investments—either of them. And then, as executor, he writes me annually, as he doubtless does you, inclosing a check which Madame dips into her home-made vocabulary to describe as “a mere pitifance.” Laurence’s almost surly notes, with their T. R. B./L. K. and their gratuitous “Dictated but not read,” always discomfit me.

Not that your own communications, though less formal, are any chummier. By exact count there have been two in the last three years. Of course personally I didn’t at all mind the levity of your telegram at the time of our marriage, though it did ruffle Madame a bit, for she seems to resent far more than I do any reference to me as a member of the Only Their Second Husbands Club. When she thinks about it at all, she really sets an immoderately large store by my little doctorate and my lectureship at Columbia. She was so entranced with all my scholastic trappings at Commencement that I suspect she thought I had been 15produced by Mr. Belasco. Her delight over the floridity of my academic hoods was tinged only by a visible regret that I had never gone in for science and so could not aspire to that hood which makes the chemistry men so closely resemble Chinese sunsets.

But I was a little abashed when I ventured to send you some stray opera seats and asked if you could use them and you replied “Yes—and others. A. K.” This seemed so terse and dismissive that I gave up. But now, preposterous as it may seem, I want something of you. I want a dog.

Not just any dog. I suppose I could buy any dog myself, though I wouldn’t know exactly how to go about it. I have considered the matter at some length from the other side of one of those windows which display the most amusing but the most baffling mass of turbulent puppies.

I wonder vaguely how anyone can say of such and such misshapen lump that it will eventually turn into a mastiff or a French poodle. So, suppressing a strong impulse to buy the whole windowful and watch developments, I turn away empty-leashed.16

What I want is a fine blooded animal, not necessarily full-grown but possibly able already to help about 17the premises and certainly already defined in character and general outline. I want a dog that will like me and hate strangers and serve as a watchdog. These suburbs seem like swarming anthills compared with the lonely old place where you and I were brought up, but, after all, our house is pretty much out of earshot and when I’m off lecturing fatuously at the other end of the country and Madame is resting here between tours, I should like to be able to think that she has a staunch and terrifying protector of some sort.

Besides, it would be pleasant to have at least one animal in this place that I could respect amid all the monstrous collection Madame has gradually acquired.… I will say that none of them represents her deliberate choice in domestic companions. She hasn’t wantonly gone out into the fields and caught them; she has merely caught them the way people catch colds. So when I decided to present her with a dog for her birthday, I made up my mind he should be expertly chosen. That explains this letter to you. You were the first person I thought of.

I’m not sure why I feel so convinced that the choice of a Government bond should be left to Laurence but the choice of a dog to you. The deference may 18derive from some school-yard memory. Or perhaps it’s merely because you live at an athletic club which I dimly picture as a group of horsey bachelors sitting around in thick-soled shoes and talking about the races at Louisville. Anyway, I leave it all to you for I am entirely vague about the various breeds. Only I beg you to be expeditious for I want him installed in full charge of the estate in time to welcome Madame when she returns from her tour. That will be in three weeks’ time. She has been having a tremendous success, as you may have read in the papers.

Your affectionate brother

David Kenderdine

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Pleasant Lanes,Long Island,November sixteenth

My Dear Arthur:

An Airedale sounds fine. I haven’t the faintest notion what one might be like and I didn’t know it was possible to pay $500 for a dog—that is, not for one you didn’t mean to exhibit at Madison Square Garden but just wanted for use around the place like a gardener. However, I’m quite willing and am inclosing a check for the amount. If I were Laurence, I would write “1 incl.” down in the corner, though what good it would do, I’m sure I don’t know.

I shan’t show your letter to Madame when she comes home. Of course, every one calls her that, not merely the servants and the stage-hands. I’m afraid 22she wouldn’t be at all amused at your little shaft shot in her direction. I do admit she is just the kind who would start a ménage