Thomasina. Paul Gallico

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       CHAPTER ONE

      Mr Andrew MacDhui, veterinary surgeon, thrust his brick-red, bristling beard through the door of the waiting-room next to the surgery and looked with cold, hostile eyes upon the people seated there on the plain pine chairs with their pets on their laps or at their feet awaiting his attendance.

      Willie Bannock, his brisk, wiry man-of-all-work in surgery, dispensary, office and animal hospital, had already gossiped a partial list of those present that morning to Mr MacDhui and which included his friend and next-door neighbour, the Minister, Angus Peddie. Mr Peddie, of course, would be there with, or because of, his insufferable pug dog whose gastric disturbances were brought on by pampering and the feeding of forbidden sweets. Mr MacDhui’s glance dropped to the narrow lap of the short-legged, round little clergyman and for a moment his eye was caught up in the unhappy, milky one of the pug rolled in his direction, filled with the misery of belly-ache, and yet expressing a certain hope and longing as well. The animal had come to associate his visits to this place, the smells and the huge man with the fur on his face with relief.

      The veterinary disentangled himself from the hypnotic eye and wished angrily that Peddie would follow his advice on feeding the animal and not be there wasting his time. He noted the rich builder’s wife from Glasgow on holiday with her rheumy little Yorkshire terrier, an animal he particularly detested, with its ridiculous velvet bow laced into its silken top-knot. There was Mrs Kinloch over the ears of her Siamese cat which lay upon her knee, occasionally shaking its head and complaining in a raucous voice, and, too, there was Mr Dobbie, the grocer, whose long and doleful countenance reflected that of his Scots terrier who was suffering from the mange and looked as though a visit to the upholsterer would be more practical.

      There were half a dozen or so others, including a small boy, who he seemed to have seen somewhere before, and at the head of the line he recognised old, obese Mrs Laggan, proprietress of the newspaper and tobacco shop who, with her nondescript mongrel, Rabbie, his muzzle greyed, his eyes rheumy with age, was a landmark of Inveranoch and had been so for years.

      Mrs Laggan was a widow, and had been for the past twenty-five years of her seventy-odd. For the last fifteen of them, her dog, Rabbie, had been her only companion, and his bulk draped across the doorstep of Mrs Laggan’s shop was as familiar a figure to natives as well as visitors to the Highland town as that of the fat widow in her Paisley shawl. Since the doorstep was Rabbie’s place, nose between forepaws, eyes rolled upwards, customers of the widow Laggan had learned to step over him when entering and departing. It was said in the High Street that descendants of these clients were already born with this precaution bred into them.

      Mr MacDhui looked his patients over and the patients looked back at him with varying degrees of anxiety, hope, deference, or in some cases a return of the hostility that seemed to be written all over the well-marked features of his face, the high brow, the indignantly flaring red-tufted eyebrows, commanding blue eyes, strong nose, full and sometimes mocking lips, half seen through the bristle of red moustache and beard and the truculent and aggressive chin.

      His eyes and, above all, his manner always seemed cold and angry, perhaps because, it was said in Inveranoch, he was on the whole a cold and angry man.

      A widower of the stature and flamboyance of Mr Veterinary Surgeon MacDhui was subject enough for gossip in a Highland town the size of Inveranoch, in Argyll, where he had been in practice for only a little over eighteen months. By the nature of his profession he was a figure of importance there since he looked after not only the personal and private pets of the townspeople, but was responsible also for the health of the livestock raised in the outlying farms of the district, the herds of Angus cattle and black-faced sheep, pigs and fowl. In addition, he was the appointed veterinary of the district for the inspection of meat and milk and hygienic dairies as well.

      The gossips allowed that Andrew MacDhui was an honest, forthright and fair-dealing man, but, and this was the opinion of the strictly religiously inclined, a queer one to be dealing with God’s dumb creatures, since he appeared to have no love for animals, very little for man, and neither the inclination or the time for God. Whether or not he was an out and out unbeliever as many claimed, he certainly never was seen in Mr Peddie’s church, even though the two were known to be good friends. Others claimed that when his wife had died his heart had turned to stone, all but СКАЧАТЬ