Number Eighteen was a big compartment1 or cage in the dog row, large enough with due comfort for a dozen Irish terriers like Michael. For Harris Collins was scientific. Dogs on vacation, boarding at the Cedarwild Animal School, were given every opportunity to recuperate2 from the hardships and wear and tear of from six months to a year and more on the road. It was for this reason that the school was so popular a boarding-place for performing animals when the owners were on vacation or out of “time.” Harris Collins kept his animals clean and comfortable and guarded from germ diseases. In short, he renovated3 them against their next trips out on vaudeville4 time or circus engagement.
To the left of Michael, in Number Seventeen, were five grotesquely5 clipped French poodles. Michael could not see them, save when he was being taken out or brought back, but he could smell them and hear them, and, in his loneliness, he even started a feud6 of snarling8 bickeringness with Pedro, the biggest of them who acted as clown in their turn. They were aristocrats9 among performing animals, and Michael’s feud with Pedro was not so much real as play-acted. Had he and Pedro been brought together they would have made friends in no time. But through the slow monotonous10 drag of the hours they developed a fictitious11 excitement and interest in mouthing their quarrel which each knew in his heart of hearts was no quarrel at all.
In Number Nineteen, on Michael’s right, was a sad and tragic12 company. They were mongrels, kept spotlessly and germicidally clean, who were unattached and untrained. They composed a sort of reserve of raw material, to be worked into established troupes13 when an extra one or a substitute was needed. This meant the hell of the arena15 where the training went on. Also, in spare moments, Collins, or his assistants, were for ever trying them out with all manner of tricks in the quest of special aptitudes16 on their parts. Thus, a mongrel semblance17 to a cooker spaniel of a dog was tried out for several days as a pony-rider who would leap through paper hoops18 from the pony’s back, and return upon the back again. After several falls and painful injuries, it was rejected for the feat19 and tried out as a plate-balancer. Failing in this, it was made into a see-saw dog who, for the rest of the turn, filled into the background of a troupe14 of twenty dogs.
Number Nineteen was a place of perpetual quarrelling and pain. Dogs, hurt in the training, licked their wounds, and moaned, or howled, or were irritable20 to excess on the slightest provocation21. Always, when a new dog entered—and this was a regular happening, for others were continually being taken away to hit the road—the cage was vexed22 with quarrels and battles, until the new dog, by fighting or by non resistance, had commanded or been taught its proper place.
Michael ignored the denizens23 of Number Nineteen. They could sniff24 and snarl7 belligerently25 across at him, but he took no notice, reserving his companionship for the play-acted and perennial26 quarrel with Pedro. Also, Michael was out in the arena more often and far longer hours than any of them.
“Trust Harry27 not to make a mistake on a dog,” was Collins’s judgment28; and constantly he strove to find in Michael what had made Del Mar29 declare him a ten strike and the limit.
Every indignity30, in the attempt to find out, was wreaked31 upon Michael. They tried him at hurdle-jumping, at walking on forelegs, at pony-riding, at forward flips33, and at clowning with other dogs. They tried him at waltzing, all his legs cord-fastened and dragged and jerked and slacked under him. They spiked35 his collar in some of the attempted tricks to keep him from lurching from side to side or from falling forward or backward. They used the whip and the rattan36 stick; and twisted his nose. They attempted to make a goal-keeper of him in a football game between two teams of pain-driven and pain-bitten mongrels. And they dragged him up ladders to make him dive into a tank of water.
Even they essayed to make him “loop the loop”—rushing him down an inclined trough at so high speed of his legs, accelerated by the slash37 of whips on his hindquarters, that, with such initial momentum39, had he put his heart and will into it, he could have successfully run up the inside of the loop, and across the inside of the top of it, back-downward, like a fly on the ceiling, and on and down and around and out of the loop. But he refused the will and the heart, and every time, when he was unable at the beginning to leap sideways out of the inclined trough, he fell grievously from the inside of the loop, bruising41 and injuring himself.
“It isn’t that I expect these things are what Harry had in mind,” Collins would say, for always he was training his assistants; “but that through them I may get a cue to his specially42, whatever in God’s name it is, that poor Harry must have known.”
Out of love, at the wish of his love-god, Steward43, Michael would have striven to learn these tricks and in most of them would have succeeded. But here at Cedarwild was no love, and his own thoroughbred nature made him stubbornly refuse to do under compulsion what he would gladly have done out of love. As a result, since Collins was no thoroughbred of a man, the clashes between them were for a time frequent and savage44. In this fighting Michael quickly learned he had no chance. He was always doomed45 to defeat. He was beaten by stereotyped46 formula before he began. Never once could he get his teeth into Collins or Johnny. He was too common-sensed to keep up the battling in which he would surely have broken his heart and his body and gone dumb mad. Instead, he retired47 into himself, became sullen48, undemonstrative, and, though he never cowered49 in defeat, and though he was always ready to snarl and bristle50 his hair in advertisement that inside he was himself and unconquered, he no longer burst out in furious anger.
After a time, scarcely ever trying him out on a new trick, the chain and Johnny were dispensed51 with, and with Collins he spent all Collins’s hours in the arena. He learned, by bitter lessons, that he must follow Collins around; and follow him he did, hating him perpetually and in his own body slowly and subtly poisoning himself by the juices of his glands52 that did not secrete53 and flow in quite their normal way because of the pressure put upon them by his hatred54.
The effect of this, on his body, was not perceptible. This was because of his splendid constitution and health. Wherefore, since the effect must be produced somewhere, it was his mind, or spirit, or nature, or brain, or processes of consciousness, that received it. He drew more and more within himself, became morose55, and brooded much. All of which was spiritually unhealthful. He, who had been so merry-hearted, even merrier-hearted than his brother Jerry, began to grow saturnine56, and peevish57, and ill-tempered. He no longer experienced impulses to play, to romp58 around, to run about. His body became as quiet and controlled as his brain. Human convicts, in prisons, attain59 this quietude. He could stand by the hour, to heel to Collins, uninterested, infinitely60 bored, while Collins tortured some mongrel creature into the performance of a trick.
And much of this torturing Michael witnessed. There were the greyhounds, the high-jumpers and wide-leapers. They were willing to do their best, but Collins and his assistants achieved the miracle, if miracle it may be called, of making them do better than their best. Their best was natural. Their better than best was unnatural61, and it killed some and shortened the lives of all. Rushed to the springboard and the leap, always, after the take-off, in mid-air, they had to encounter an assistant who stood underneath62, an extraordinarily63 long buggy-whip in hand, and lashed64 them vigorously. This made them leap from the springboard beyond their normal powers, hurting and straining and injuring them in their desperate attempt to escape the whip-lash, to beat the whip-lash in the air and be past ere it could catch their flying flanks and sting them like a scorpion65.
“Never will a jumping dog jump his hardest,” Collins told his assistants, “unless he’s made to. That’s your job. That’s the difference between the jumpers I turn out and some of these dub66 amateur-jumping outfits67 that fail to make good even on the bush circuits.”
Collins continually taught. A graduate from his school, an assistant who received from him a letter of recommendation, carried a high credential of a sheepskin into the trained-animal world.
“No dog walks naturally on its hind38 legs, much less on its forelegs,” Collins would say. “Dogs ain’t built that way. They have to be made to, that’s all. That’s the secret of all animal training. They have............