He surprised the people at the
Dogs' Home in Battersea by demanding a deaf retriever, and rejecting
every candidate that pricked up its ears. "I want a good, deaf,
slow-moving dog," he said. "A dog that doesn't put himself out for
things."

They displayed inconvenient curiosity; they declared a great scarcity of
deaf dogs.

"You see," they said, "dogs aren't deaf."

"Mine's got to be," said Bert. "I've HAD dogs that aren't deaf. All I
want. It's like this, you see--I sell gramophones. Naturally I got to
make 'em talk and tootle a bit to show 'em orf. Well, a dog that isn't
deaf doesn't like it--gets excited, smells round, barks, growls. That
upsets the customer. See? Then a dog that has his hearing fancies
things. Makes burglars out of passing tramps. Wants to fight every motor
that makes a whizz. All very well if you want livening up, but our place
is lively enough. I don't want a dog of that sort. I want a quiet dog."

In the end he got three in succession, but none of them turned out well.
The first strayed off into the infinite, heeding no appeals; the second
was killed in the night by a fruit motor-waggon which fled before Grubb
could get down; the third got itself entangled in the front wheel of a
passing cyclist, who came through the plate glass, and proved to be an
actor out of work and an undischarged bankrupt. He demanded compensation
for some fancied injury, would hear nothing of the valuable dog he had
killed or the window he had broken, obliged Grubb by sheer physical
obduracy to straighten his buckled front wheel, and pestered the
struggling firm with a series of inhumanly worded solicitor's letters.
Grubb answered them--stingingly, and put himself, Bert thought, in the
wrong.

Affairs got more and more exasperating and strained under these
pressures. The window was boarded up, and an unpleasant altercation
about their delay in repairing it with the new landlord, a Bun Hill
butcher--and a loud, bellowing, unreasonable person at that--served to
remind them of their unsettled troubles with the old. Things were at
this pitch when Bert bethought himself of creating a sort of debenture
capital in the business for the benefit of Tom. But, as I have said,
Tom had no enterprise in his composition. His idea of investment was the
stocking; he bribed his brother not to keep the offer open.

And then ill-luck made its last lunge at their crumbling business and
brought it to the ground.

2

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