Barks and Purrs | Page 9

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 balls, the malicious trees let fall sometimes, when I'm passing 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 grass ... She tears up a handful of wild thyme and smells it, or calls the tomtits 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 grass 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 passed 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 grass, 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
She always says, "his square muzzle, his wrinkled truffle," so tenderly and so lovingly!
KIKI-THE-DEMURE
... And you think of nothing but eating.
TOBY-DOG
It's your empty stomach that scolds and complains and wants to quarrel with me.
KIKI-THE-DEMURE
I've a charming stomach.
TOBY-DOG
But no, it's your nose that's charming. You just said so.
KIKI-THE-DEMURE
My stomach too. There's none more fastidious, more whimsical, stronger and at the same time more delicate. It digests the bones of sole, but meat that's the least bit tainted literally turns it.
TOBY-DOG
Literally's the word. You have active indigestion.
KIKI-THE-DEMURE
Yes, the whole house is affected by it. From the very first qualms I'm in terrible distress; the earth gives way under me, my eyes dilate, I hurriedly swallow quantities of salty saliva; involuntary, ventriloquial cries escape me, my sides bulge out--
TOBY-DOG, (disgusted)
I say, if it's all the same to you, tell me the rest after dinner.
KIKI-THE-DEMURE
I'm hungry. Where can He be?
TOBY-DOG
He's there, in his study, scratching paper.
KIKI-THE-DEMURE
He's always doing that. It's a game. Two-Paws play