The Dog It Was That Died Read online

  H. R. F. Keating

  The Dog It Was That Died

  This dog and man at first were friends;

  But when a pique began,

  The dog, to gain some private ends,

  Went mad and bit the man.

  The wound it seem’d both sore and sad

  To every Christian eye;

  And while they swore the dog was mad,

  They swore the man would die.

  But soon a wonder came to light,

  That show’d the rogues they lied,

  The man recover’d of the bite,

  The dog it was that died.

  –Oliver Goldsmith

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter One

  ‘Look,’ said the man who preferred to call himself Roger Farrar, ‘let’s call the whole thing off.’

  ‘No, I want to see him.’

  Eric Smith stating a preference. With quiet firmness.

  Roger looked at him with a smile. Eric on one of his hobby-horses again. Eric astride a theory, knees clamped to its side, whip-arm going like a flail, reins loose as all hell.

  ‘Okay,’ Roger said, ‘take your look at him if you must. But honestly the sensible thing would be to keep well clear. Suppose something went wrong. Suppose he recognized us. It’s all forgotten now, totally forgotten. We don’t want to start it up again.’

  He spoke from a sense of faintly exasperated duty. He knew it would be no use.

  Eric turned round to him and gripped him by the elbow. The expression of intense seriousness on the face beneath the cropped blond hair.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘the whole secret of dealing with an experience like that is to face it. This is a wonderful chance. We could square the whole thing up once and for all. Anything else is absolutely contraindicated.’

  Roger grinned.

  In spite of his underlying uneasiness.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I can see nothing will stop you. Where do we go? You’re the one who knows his way around here. This is only the second time I’ve been in the place.’

  He looked round him.

  The college square in the dead depths between the end of the summer term and the beginning of the autumn one. Cobblestones slowly heating up under the undisturbed impact of the August sun. Two or three grey pigeons slowly making their way round in lazy circles. The whitish stone of the tall elaborate campanile clear cut against the deep blue of the sky. The cool green of the wide rectangles of lawn inside their unswinging barriers of looped chains. The harmonious balance of the great buildings all round, stating without assertion their right to be exactly where they were.

  Alien.

  Roger Farrar’s face took on a faint look of withdrawal. This elaborate apparatus for living other people’s lives.

  ‘Up here then,’ said Eric Smith.

  Smith. The name that comes inevitably into your head when you have good reason for concealing the one on your birth certificate.

  They went up the flight of shallow steps leading to the portico of the building Eric had called the Theatre.

  ‘Through here,’ he said.

  He turned to his left inside the portico and pulled open a heavy little door almost lost in the shadows of the towering pillars. Roger followed him.

  After the patchwork brightness of the sunlight the darkness at first seemed almost absolute. But gradually Roger was able to make out the familiar crest of Eric’s short blond hair. He was beginning to climb a narrow flight of stairs. Obediently Roger followed, ducking his head to avoid the low ceiling at each turn.

  Almost at once he was bathed in a light sweat, sticky and irritating. Ahead of him Eric climbed swiftly. From some window up above them the summer light poured in, quietened and diffused. Eric showed no signs of resenting the stairs. But then he played squash or something. All part of those social activities which Roger had more than ever fought shy of since coming to Ireland.

  At the top of the stairs they came out on to a narrow landing, dusty and neglected.

  ‘We go through here,’ said Eric. ‘We’re almost certain to have the whole gallery to ourselves: this affair isn’t going to attract a crowd.’

  Roger went after him through a low archway – stooping with resentment – into the gallery.

  Long narrow wooden benches were raked steeply downwards. The ornamental stucco ceiling of the big hall was too near their heads and looked out of proportion. The elaborate gilt chandelier swinging in the centre showed too much of its mechanics.

  The scenery viewed from the wings.

  In the gloom of the gallery itself there was a sharp smell of dust.

  ‘I still think,’ Roger said, ‘that the affair oughtn’t to have attracted us.’

  Eric sat down on the rearmost bench, leaving a space for Roger beside him.

  ‘No one could see us in a million years,’ he said. ‘And it may be the last chance I’ll ever get of making any accurate diagnosis of the old bastard.’

  Roger sat down gingerly in the place Eric had left for him. His knees came unpleasantly close to his chin. The bones of his shins were pressed disagreeably hard against the sharp edge of the back rail of the bench in front.

  He decided to have a last try at doing something about Eric’s hobby-horse.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘what if your diagnosis is just the same as it was the last time we saw him, three years ago?’

  ‘But it won’t be,’ said Eric. ‘That’s the whole point. It can’t be. Over there he was the great Director. He ruled us. Look at the way we all called him the Bosun behind his back, a typical phobia.’

  His hands beginning to flick out the gestures as they always did when he was excited.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘this is where we’re going to get him into proportion.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want to get him into proportion: I want to get him into oblivion. The very thought of all that bloody bland stuff about the Institute of Human Relations, Leeds, makes me go hot under the collar.’

  He was hot under the collar. The seam of his shirt had begun to chafe. Recently he had had increasing difficulty in doing up his collar button.

  He stared gloomily down.

  The big hall was still and deserted. Enormous full-length portraits of bygone worthies stared solemnly across at each other. One of them looked like Queen Elizabeth.

  A beam of white sunlight came in at an angle through the arched windows at the far end and made a blinding patch of light on the dark wood of the panelling. On the platform under the windows a long row of chairs had been arranged stretching from side to side of the wide building. In the middle, advanced by about three feet, there was a small green baize-covered table with a carafe of water and a single tumbler on it. Down in the body of the hall four rows of chairs faced the platform. Evidently someone had decided officially that the attendance would not be large.

  Eric seemed to be cheerfully at his ease. He was sitting back – as far as the narrow bench would allow – and looking round with an air of excited expectancy.

  He nudged Roger.

  ‘That organ behind you was taken from a Spanish
ship at the battle of Vigo Bay,’ he said. ‘I persuaded a chum of mine here to play it for me once. I had a theory that its age would mellow the tone.’

  Roger was not in a mood to react very favourably.

  ‘The noise was excruciating,’ Eric said.

  Roger made an effort and turned his head in the direction Eric had indicated. But he found that it required more effort than he was prepared to expend to see the organ. He turned back.

  ‘Isn’t it time they were here?’ he said.

  Eric consulted his watch.

  ‘I grant you that it’s eleven exactly,’ he said. ‘But you’ve been over here long enough by now surely to know that time fetishism is extremely rare. They’ll appear in a minute or two. Don’t worry.’

  Roger stood up.

  ‘I’m going,’ he said. ‘I’m going while there’s still a chance.’

  Eric put a hand on his sleeve. Making no effort to conceal the look of bubbling excitement.

  ‘Surely,’ he said, ‘you’re not going to miss the presentation of the Sir Patrick Dun Medal?’

  Deeply shocked and grieved.

  Roger pulled his sleeve out of the light grasp.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I am.’

  He turned and stumbled over the corner of the bench in trying to get out. He cursed.

  ‘But it’s to Professor William Bosenwite, Director of the Institute for Human Relations, Leeds, and sometime Lecturer in Psychology at Queen’s University, Belfast,’ Eric said.

  Pained beyond belief.

  Roger bent down towards him.

  ‘I especially want to miss Professor William Bosenwite, otherwise known as the Bosun,’ he said.

  Eric looked wounded. Very wounded. Very, very wounded.

  ‘But listen, half the point of the experiment is to have a reasonable number of subjects. A single one is altogether insufficient. Why, I might get carried away by the excitement of the occasion and totally forget to observe my reactions.’

  Roger made a face at him.

  The temperature dropping.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘As usual, you win.’

  He sat down again.

  Eric spread his hands in a wide gesture of disclaimer.

  ‘But you’ll enjoy yourself,’ he said. ‘The ceremony is very interesting. Do you even know what it’s all about?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Very well then, I’ll explain it. The Sir Patrick Dun Medal – awarded in memory of the great Irish physician, who is commemorated in the Sir Patrick Dun Hospital – is presented triennially to any worker in the field of psychological medicine whom the committee wish to honour, provided that the recipient be of Irish nationality or that their work has been conducted wholly or partly in Ireland. I quote from today’s Irish Times.’

  ‘And they picked on the Bosun for Pete’s sake,’ Roger said. ‘If only they knew …’

  ‘Yes, well, of course, they don’t know,’ said Eric. ‘And the only people who are in a position to tell them would be you and me, and we have agreed in our own interests to be totally aphasic, have we not?’

  ‘I don’t even know what aphasic means.’

  ‘Really? You surprise me. I thought you were meant to be a words expert.’

  ‘I’m an expert in knowing how words get changed. That doesn’t mean I necessarily know what they all mean.’

  ‘No? Well, aphasic means having lost speech because of a cerebral affection. Silence, dumbness, keeping mum, that’s the prescription for us.’

  ‘And forcing our way into this tinpot ceremony is your idea of that?’ said Roger.

  ‘My dear chap,’ Eric said, ‘you’ve allowed yourself to become far too much of a recluse. You know, you haven’t a single real friend except that awful dog.’

  ‘He’s not an awful dog.’

  ‘Well, we won’t argue about that. Otherwise I might lose even the slender claim I have to be your only human friend. But where is the brute?’

  ‘Cuchulain happens to be shut up in the flat, poor devil. You can’t take a wolfhound everywhere.’

  ‘I should say not. You know, you ought to abandon him more often and come to affairs like this. They are very definitely indicated in your case – as a step towards seeing more of the world. Extreme solitude makes people of your type highly morbid.’

  Roger finally gave up.

  He looked down again into the body of the hall. A single person had entered and taken a seat in the foremost of the four rows of chairs facing the platform.

  ‘It would be nice, wouldn’t it,’ Eric said, ‘if no one else turned up. Splendidly prophylactic against any feeling of pride our friend the Bosun might develop.’

  The solitary member of the audience was a man of about sixty with a thatch of greyish hair brushed to the side in a single heavy sweep. He wore glasses. They looked as if they were horn-rimmed, though it was difficult to tell along the length of the big, bare hall. He was wearing a pair of flannel trousers, shapeless and baggy, and a dark blue jacket with a white stripe in it, evidently once the top half of a formal suit. Each of the side pockets was bulged and distorted by a book.

  Roger turned to Eric.

  ‘You know everybody in Dublin,’ he said. ‘Who is that chap?’

  ‘My dear fellow, don’t be so aggressive. Just because I didn’t cut myself off from all human society when we fled from the wicked shores of England, it doesn’t mean that I’m some sort of gossip writer or something. I don’t know everybody. I don’t have the least idea who the chappie is.’

  A door at the side of the dais opened and a college porter in blue frock coat and black jockey cap entered. He went deferentially across to the table, moved the carafe an inch nearer the tumbler and went out again.

  ‘Things are beginning to warm up,’ Eric said.

  He rubbed his hands eagerly together.

  Roger shifted his knees round to the side.

  ‘It’s about time something happened,’ he said.

  ‘My good chap, you mustn’t be impatient. For one thing it makes you miss the finer points of the game. Have you considered that single tumbler, for instance? There’s going to be some nice skirmishing around that with any luck. If any one of the committee feel their status is higher than the Bosun’s – and after all as far as they’re concerned he’s only the head of some English institution which never seems to publish any results – they’ll make a grab for the tumbler and help themselves. The greater the academic eminence, you know, the greater the need to ingest a glass of stale –’

  He broke off as the door on the dais opened again and a man in academic gown and cap poked his head round and looked carefully over the whole theatre. Roger leant farther back into the shadows.

  ‘That’s McKenna,’ said Eric, ‘Professor of Psychological Statistics at the College of Surgeons. He’s due to make the presentation.’

  Professor McKenna withdrew his head. The faint sound of voices came to them. There was a note of querulousness.

  Eric’s eyes gleamed.

  ‘There seems to have been a misunderstanding,’ he said.

  Then suddenly Professor McKenna came in again, and this time he was escorting the Bosun.

  Roger looked at the familiar figure, now encased in a gown of pitchy black. The enormous balloon head with the scanty pale gold hair and the deep pinky red complexion gave as ever the impression that blood was being pumped in at high pressure by an unrelenting machine. The body beneath looked like a series of linked balloons beneath the balloon of the head – a huge one for the trunk, a series of sausage-shaped ones for the arms and legs, even a cluster of bloated chipolatas for the fingers.

  In spite of himself Roger leant forward to try and see if the top trouser button was open as it almost always had been at Leeds. Certainly the occasional visit of a junior Minister to the Institute had not been considered important enough to warrant sacrificing comfort to dignity. For the Prime Minister the concession had been made. Roger could not remember what had happened when senior Ministe
rs called.

  He turned to Eric to ask.

  Eric’s face was totally white. His hands were gripping the bar of the bench in front of them with trembling force.

  Chapter Two

  Suddenly Professor McKenna’s tight-lipped Ulster voice came to them loud and clear. By some trick of acoustics in the almost deserted theatre they might have been standing within a few feet of him rather than crouching in the shadows at the back of the gallery thirty or forty yards away.

  ‘Take a pew, take a pew, Bosenwite. Our host appears unaccountably delayed, but that’s no reason why we should be uncomfortable.’

  Turning to the door they had just come through he called:

  ‘Come along you others. We’ll wait here for Meredith. We might as well have somewhere to sit.’

  Eric Smith, as he called himself in Ireland, was still sitting staring at the huge bloated figure of Bosenwite. Roger decided to break the trance.

  ‘Meredith?’ he said sharply in Eric’s ear, ‘who’s Meredith?’

  Eric turned to him.

  ‘Uh?’ he whispered.

  ‘I asked who Meredith is?’

  ‘Meredith?’

  ‘Yes, didn’t you hear that fellow McKenna say they were going to wait for Meredith? Who is he?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t hear. I was miles away. Meredith. That’ll be “Wendish” Meredith, who has the chair of Slavonic languages here at Trinity. He’s called “Wendish” because he’s the world authority on that particular sub-language. I suppose he’s presiding today because he’s a senior fellow. No doubt everybody else is away.’

  Half a dozen other men in academic dress had come on to the platform. A desultory conversation was going on and it had become difficult to distinguish individual strands.

  Eric still looked very pale, although he was not as statue-still as he had been when he had first seen the Bosun.

  ‘I see our audience still numbers one,’ Roger said.

  Eric made no reply.

  ‘You know,’ Roger continued, ‘I’ve a nasty feeling the Bosun knew perfectly well that this somewhat farcical element was likely to be predominant when he accepted this invitation. It’s just the sort of thing that would appeal to his perverted sense of humour. You wouldn’t find him going to some crowded, conventional honorary degree giving at Oxford or Cambridge, would you?’