Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog Read Online Free Page B

passionately fond of dogs. He kept the finest kennels in the entire province. He had racing dogs and hunting dogs and gundogs. He once bought a puppy for a thousand rubles, that’s the kind of reckless man he was. But he still felt that all this was not enough, and he began to dream of producing some special new breed, something absolutely new. He frittered away all the rest of his life on this project. He called the breed the ‘white Russian bulldog.’ It is a different color from an ordinary bulldog, as white as milk all over, and has a very distinct flatness of profile (I have forgotten the special term that dog-lovers use for it), and it is quite exceptionally slack-lipped—that is, its lips are droopy. But the most important feature, the real point of all this, is that while it is white all over, its right ear has to be brown. I don’t recall what the meaning of that is—something to do with a helmet…I think that when Apollon Nikolaevich served in the Horse Guards, it was the custom in his squadron to wear one’s helmet cocked slightly to one side. So the ear represents that daredevil attitude. Ah, yes, I forgot, they also have to be extremely slobbery—I don’t know what practical purpose that serves. All in all, as ugly a monster as you are likely to find anywhere. Apollon Nikolaevich proceeded as follows. He requested every bulldog-owning noble house in Russia not to drown the degenerate albino pups as they usually do, but send them immediately to Major-General Tatishchev, and he would pay good money for the rejects. White bulldog pups, especially pups with a brown right ear, are very rare. I don’t remember how rare, although I heard it many times from my uncle, and from my aunt…perhaps one in every hundred litters. Well, anyway, Apollon Nikolaevich collected these little freaks and bred them. The pups mostly came out as usual, reddish-brown, but sometimes there were white ones, too, with brown ears, and now they were more frequent—say, one in every ten litters. Again he selected those and bred them, and took care that they were as slack-lipped and slobbery as possible. A particular difficulty arose, of course, with that thrice-cursed ear. A very large number of pups had to be culled. And so on and on, generation after generation. By the time my uncle passed away, he had made a great deal of progress toward his dream, but even so he was still only halfway there, so to speak. As he was dying, he entrusted the completion of the work that he had begun to his wife. And Marya Afanasievna was an absolute treasure as a wife. She had made the change from high-society charmer to mother and commander’s wife and later to lady of the manor in stride. All with absolute sincerity and with a willing heart. Such was the womanly talent granted to her by God. If her husband had not given her any instructions to carry out on his deathbed, she would probably have withered away; she would never have coped with her grief. But as it is she has been a widow for twenty years now and is still strong, active, and cheerful. She talks about dogs all the time and thinks about absolutely nothing else. I have reproached her for her excessive passion and enthusiasm, upbraided her—but she does not listen. One day, as a joke, I teased her: ‘Aunty, what if Lucifer himself should suddenly appear and demand your Christian soul in exchange for a pure white breed, would you give it to him?’ ‘Lord bless you, Misha,’ she replied, ‘what nonsense is that you’re talking?’ And then she suddenly fell silent and started thinking about it. I tell you, Pelagia, this is no joking matter. But in any case, she continued her deceased husband’s work breeding the Russian white bulldog and was actually rather successful at it, especially along the lines of droopiness, slobberiness, and flatness of profile. But things did not go so well for her with the ear. Until just recently she had only accumulated three absolutely ideal male dogs. An