Barks and Purrs Part 7

I'm hungry. One doesn't hear the noise of plates in the next room. Isn't it dinner time?

TOBY-DOG, (_gets up, slowly stretches his forepaws and yawns, darting forth a heraldic tongue with curly end_) I don't know ... I'm hungry.

KIKI-THE-DEMURE

Where is She? How is it you're not at her heels?

TOBY-DOG, (_embarra.s.sed, nibbling his nails_)

She's in the garden I believe, picking up plums.

KIKI-THE-DEMURE

Those yellow b.a.l.l.s that rain about one's ears? I know them. You've seen her then? I bet She scolded you ... What have you been doing now?

TOBY-DOG, (_self-conscious, turning away his wrinkled, toad-like face_)

She told me to return to the house because--because I too, was eating plums.

KIKI-THE-DEMURE

She did well! You have depraved tastes--the tastes of men.

TOBY-DOG, (_offended_)

Say--no one ever sees me eating bad fish! And never, _never_ will I understand how you can go into such fits over a dead frog, or that herb.

KIKI-THE-DEMURE

Valerian.

TOBY-DOG

That's it, I guess ... An herb--is medicine, isn't it?

KIKI-THE-DEMURE

Medicine, indeed! Valerian ... but no _you_, can't understand ... I've seen Her laugh and go on, as I do over the valerian, after having emptied a gla.s.s of fetid wine that jumped dangerously too. As for the dead frog--so dead that it seems a bit of dry russia leather in the form of a frog--it's a sachet, impregnated with rare musk, with which I wish to scent my fur.

TOBY-DOG

Oh, you talk very well--but She always scolds and says that you smell bad after it, and He says the same thing.

KIKI-THE-DEMURE

They're nothing but Two-Paws, both of them. You, poor thing, belittle yourself by seeking to imitate them. You stand on your hind legs, wear a coat when it rains, eat plums--for shame!--and those big green b.a.l.l.s, the malicious trees let fall sometimes, when I'm pa.s.sing underneath.

TOBY-DOG

Apples?

KIKI-THE-DEMURE

Very likely. She picks one up and throws it down the path, crying: "Apple, Toby, apple," and you rush after, in unseemly fashion, gasping for breath, looking like a fool, your tongue and your eyes sticking out....

TOBY-DOG, (_scowling, head resting on his paws_)

One takes one's pleasures where one finds them.

KIKI-THE-DEMURE, (_yawning, shows his pointed teeth and his palate of pink velvet_)

I'm hungry. Dinner is surely late tonight. Suppose you look for Her?

TOBY-DOG

I daren't. She forbade it. She is down there in the hollow, with a big basket. The dew is falling and wetting her feet and the sun's going away. But you know how She is. She sits on the damp ground, looking ahead of her, as if She were asleep--or lies flat on her stomach, whistling and watching an ant in the gra.s.s ... She tears up a handful of wild thyme and smells it, or calls the tomt.i.ts and the jays--who never come to her by any chance. She takes a heavy watering pot and--ugh! it gives me the shivers--pours thousands of icy, silvery threads over the roses or into the hollows of those little stone troughs, 'way back in the woods. I always look in to see the head of a brindle-bull who comes to meet me and to drink up the pictures of the leaves, but She pulls me back by the collar with: "Toby, Toby, _that_ water is for the birds."

... Then She takes out her knife and opens nuts, fifty, a _hundred_ nuts, and forgets the time ... There's no end to the things She does.

KIKI-THE-DEMURE, (_slyly_)

And what do you do all that time?

TOBY-DOG

I--well--I just wait for her.

KIKI-THE-DEMURE

I admire you!

TOBY-DOG

Once in a while, squatting down, She eagerly scratches the earth, toils and sweats over it; then I jump 'round her, delighted to see her at something so useful and so familiar. But her feeble scent deceives her.

_I_ never smell mole, or shrew-mouse-of-the-rosy-paws, in the holes _She_ digs. And how explain her utter lack of purpose? Presently, falling back on her haunches, She brandishes a hairy-rooted herb and cries: "I have it, the jade!" I lie in the damp gra.s.s and tremble, or dig my nose (She calls it my snout) into the earth to get the complicated odors of it. ... When there are three or four scents all blended, all mixed together, can you distinguish that of the mole from that of the hare which pa.s.sed quickly, or the bird which rested there?

KIKI-THE-DEMURE

Certainly I can. My nose is highly educated. It's small, regular, wide between my eyes, delicate at the chamois-skin end of my nostrils; the lightest touch of a blade of gra.s.s, the shadow of smoke tickles and makes it sneeze. It doesn't bother about distinguishing the scent of moles from that of--hares, did you say? But it delights in the trace left by a cat in a hedge ... I've a charming nose. She calls it, "his pretty little nose of cotton velvet." Since my eyes opened on this world I've not known the day that someone has not uttered a truthful flattery on the subject of my nose. Now yours--is a rough-grained truffle. What makes you move it so ridiculously? At this very moment.

TOBY-DOG

I'm hungry and I don't hear the plates.

KIKI-THE-DEMURE

... your truffle of a nose works up and down and makes another wrinkle in your irregular mug.

TOBY-DOG