By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, March 14, 1936.
“March,” said Jimmie Frise, “is the most miserable month of the year.”
“Especially,” I contributed, “the middle of March. Because by the end of March you can smell April.”
“March,” went on Jim, “is like three o’clock of the morning of the year.”
“All my friends who are bums,” I stated, “tell me March is a terribly hard month for them. They can’t make a touch. Not a touch. It is as if, in March, people have come to the end of their kindness.”
“It’s like that hour,” continued Jim, “before the beginning of the dawn.”
“Well, I know that hour,” I cried. “For two years in the war I saw every dawn. Winter, summer, storm, or fine. I saw the dawn. In the trenches we stood to arms, every man jack, cook, bugler and all, at one hour before the dawn. And there we stood, millions of us, all nations, friend and foe, in league-long lines, hushed, waiting, watching, tense.”
“It was the hour of attack,” said Jim.
“Like some queer, pagan, ghastly worshippers, we stood,” I recited, “in those foul ditches looking up at the black and dreadful sky. Little winds moaned. It was cold, with a ghostly cold. It was the hour before the first cock crew. The hour when bones rise out of the ground in a danse macabre. And all around us were bones. Bones of our comrades, our companions, of only yesterday.”
“You know dawns,” admitted Jim.
“Aye,” I said. “I have no love for the hour before the dawn nor for the month of March.”
“The ancients said,” declared Jimmie, “that March was the season of disasters.”
“So it would be,” I explained, “because the blood in us is running cold and thin after the long winter. Our hearts are colder, our emotions checked and sluggish. Wars might start in March, massacres, pogroms. The best instincts of humanity are mere stubble by March.”
“And in September, at their full flower and fruit,” said Jim. “Ah, how I love September.”
“I love June,” I admitted. “June, about the sixth.”
“Let us watch our step this month,” said Jim, who was at the steering wheel, and we were nearly home. “Let us tip off our friends to be watchful. Let us try to be kind and friendly. Let us try consciously to inject a little warmth of heart into life in this exhausted and embittered season.”
“Maybe we could see a bum any minute,” I agreed. “I’ve got a dime1. It would be nice to just pull up beside the curb and open the door and suddenly toss a bum a dime.”
“You’ve got the idea,” said Jim.
We drove along. How dirty the streets, with their foul shoals of ice and snow in the shelter of the houses all along the south side of the streets. The old tin cans, papers gummed into the slush and ice of a whole winter. The untidiness of March, the usedness, the second-handness.
The Little Brown Dog
A lady in her house dress was standing out on the sidewalk and as we passed her I saw she was weeping. Her face was screwed up and she was huddling her arms about her, clutching her elbows in her palms.
“Whoa, Jim,” I commanded. “What’s the matter here?”
Jim backed the car. I leaped out and hurried to the lady.
“My little dog,” she wept. “She’s gone. I can’t find her anywhere. I’ve been in all the yards. Not a sign.”
And she stopped speaking because her voice had gone up into only a squeak.
“Ma’am,” I said, “we’ll help you find your dog. What kind of a dog was it?”
“A little brown dog,” wept the lady.
“What breed, ma’am?” I asked.
“I forget,” said the lady, biting her lips. “A little brown dog. A dear little one.”
“Pekingese?” I inquired. “Pomeranian?”
“No, no,” wept the lady. “A little brown one, about like that. O-ho! I have had her six years and she never disappeared before.”
“A lady dog, ma’am?” I inquired.
“Yes, her name is Dollie.”
“We’ll drive around the block,” I comforted her. “We’ll find her. She hasn’t been gone long?”
“About half an hour,” the lady squeaked, wiping her nose in a small ball of hanky.
“We’ll get her in no time,” I assured her, starting for the car.
“What is it?” asked Jim eagerly.
“She’s lost her dog.” I explained, “so I said we’d drive around a block or two and find it for her.”
“Well,” said Jim, starting the car, “it isn’t exactly a disaster or a massacre. But after all it is the month of March.”
“It’s a small brown dog,” I informed Jim.
So we drove around a block, slowly, looking in all the side drives and stopping at each turn to look up and down all vistas. There were plenty of dogs. But no little brown ones. When we came past the lady again, she was still standing hugging her arms around her and looking down side drives and calling, “Dollie, Dollie,” in a high, anxious voice.
I waved reassuringly to her and called out the window:
“We’ll do a couple more blocks.”
And she said “Thank you” heart brokenly.
“Curious,” I said, as we turned to circle another block, “the way some women love a dog. Almost like a child.”
“Lots of men go kind of crazy over a dog, too,” said Jim.
We saw wirehairs and spaniels, police dogs and Bostons, but no little brown dogs. Then we saw a small brown spaniel, and slowed up, but it was named Joe, as a little boy told us. He hadn’t seen any dog you would call Dollie around.
In the distance we saw a flock of dogs romping on the street, so we drove away up and studied them. But there were no little brown dogs there either. Just to be sure I called “Dollie” out the window, but none of them looked at us. They were busy.
“Aw, let’s go home,” said Jim.
“There you go,” I said. “March has got you, too. We can do a couple more blocks without doing ourselves any harm, and think of the decent thing we would do if we could restore that lady her dog.”
“All right,” said Jim, and we turned another way and made a circle of two more blocks. We saw setters and terriers and Scotties; we saw a great big black Newfoundland and a dachshund, but no little brown lady dog.
Seized By the Collar
“Listen,” said Jim, “a dog always turns up. Let’s go on home, rather than go back and tell the poor woman we saw no sign of her pup. It will be kinder to leave her thinking we are still chasing all over creation looking for it than to turn up and say we haven’t seen it in ten blocks.”
“I suppose,” I confessed. “But it is a pretty Marchy trick just the same. I bet if this was June we’d keep on looking.”
“Forget it,” said Jim, and steered for home.
But hardly had we got into our stride before there, trotting down the sidewalk on little twinkling feet, with a plume of a tail curled back over her back, was the cutest little brown you ever did see.
“Dollie,” I hailed merrily.
And the little creature halted, wheeled, set its head on one side and looked up at us brightly. “Hello, Dollie.” I said warmly.
“Pick her up,” said Jim.
So I got out and went to Dollie. But Dollie, with large bug eyes pointing in two opposite directions and with a look of constitutional alarm in both of them, started to waddle off on her mincing tiny feet. I followed, coaxingly.
“H’yuh, h’yuh,” I wheedled, “Pfft, sktch, sktch, h’yuh, Dollie.”
Jim coasted slowly alongside of us.
“Jim,” I said quietly, “park and come and help me. She is naturally timid. She’s lost and nervous. We’ll have to corner her.”
So Jim, with a loud sigh, parked the car, got out and joined me. Dollie had halted at a side drive and was looking back suspiciously at us.
We walked casually closer. I turned in the side drive just as she did. I ran and got ahead of her and, spreading my arms wide, cut off her retreat while Jim, dashing from behind, swept Dollie up in his arms, and we walked out the drive.
“Nice Dollie,” I soothed, patting the head of the little gold-fishy looking dog, who wriggled and yapped in a silly little voice.
We tossed her in the back seat and got aboard. As Jim drove off, I thought I heard a shout, and looked back, and saw a man looking out the front door of the house we had been alongside. I naturally supposed that he was perhaps curious at what we had been doing in his side drive. But there was no use stopping and going back, just to satisfy idle curiosity.
We drove five blocks back to where the lady lived. But she was not in sight when we slowed up.
“Toot your horn a few times,” I said, “and I’ll try this house here, where she was in front of.”
Another lady answered the door. No, she said, there was no dog lost there. So I tried the houses next door, both sides.
“Would you know of a lady, a neighbor,” I asked at these houses, when they said they had no dog lost, “who would have lost a little brown dog?”
They thought, and looked up at the sky and put their fingers on their teeth, but couldn’t think of any such lady.
“Maybe,” called Jim, above Dollie’s loud and angry yapping, “she lives across the road. Try a couple of houses on this other side.”
So I was just asking at the third house when a car came up with a rush, pulled in just ahead of Jim’s car, and a man in his shirt sleeves leaped out and tore around at Jimmie. I heard loud shouting between them and hurried across. The stout, dark, shirt-sleeved man had Dollie in his arms and was standing with one foot inside Jim’s car, shaking his huge fist under Jim’s nose.
“Sir.” I protested, coming up.
“You,” he yelled. “You little dog-thief. I’ve got you both, eh?”
With his free hand, his fist hand, he seized me roughly by the overcoat collar and gave me a shake.
“Pardon me,” I said. “Pardon me, my man.”
“I’ll my man you,” he yelled. He was one of those stout dark men with black, sort of bloodshot eyes, who are usually retired around fifty years of age, and like to be in shirtsleeves, and mostly you see them working around their houses, putting up pergolas or making stone terraces.
Looking For a Lady
So I just let him hold my collar. I have found that if you just let a man hold your collar, he gets tired of it in a minute.
“No fines for you,” continued the man, and people were coming to their front doors, and home-goers were pausing on the sidewalk. “I’ve been watching out for you for weeks. This is three times you have stolen my dog.”
I heard an ominous mutter from the gathering spectators, and two or three men walked nearer.
“Dog thieves,” announced the coatless-man, giving me another swing by the collar and taking kick at Jim’s shins in the car. “You know the racket? Steal a dog and then collect the reward. Look at them! Well dressed, with a car, even if it is an old junk heap.”
“Just a moment,” shouted Jim. “We were helping a lady find her dog.”
“Oho,” roared our captor. “Listen to that for a tale.”
“I was just looking for the lady when you came along,” I informed him.
“Looking for the lady,” yelled he. “You were in the very act of trying to snatch another dog here when I came along.”
“I was calling from door to door to try to find the lady,” I declared.
“From door to door?” screamed the man. “Looking for a lady? You were helping her find a dog?”
“We saw her standing on the street, right along here,” I protested anxiously; “she was crying, and we said we’d help her find her dog. From her description…”
“Haw, haw,” bellowed the man, smiling fiercely around at the half a dozen spectators now closing rather tightly around us. “Haw, haw, they saw a lady crying on the street! Haw, haw! Gentlemen, what will we do with them? I see you are all dog lovers. Do we wait here and hand them over to the police, who will let them off on suspended sentence or something? Or…?”
And he grinned fiendishly around the circle of faces.
“Or,” he roared, “will we all take a kick at them that will be a lesson to these kind of birds never to show their ugly mugs in this neighborhood again? Hey?”
“A good idea,” muttered everybody, “that’s the stuff, deal with it, community spirit, that’s the stuff.”
Strange how a crowd – even a crowd of your own good neighbors – is always on the side of the accuser in a case like this. Around us, not a friendly eye showed. As far as these seven or eight gentlemen and ladies were concerned, every word our accuser had to say was true. Any dogs I have ever talked to have told me the greatest fear a dog has is to be down. A dog must keep his feet. For the instant it down, in a fight, every dog is against it. It is the same with humans. Accuse, and every eye narrows against the accused.
“Jim,” I said, quietly, “say something amusing and friendly. Don’t argue. Be witty. Attract a smile.”
But inch by inch and step by step, the kindly home-going citizens were edging closer, forming a ring around us, closing in for the kill.
And just as I felt fresh hands take hold of my collar, I heard Jim yell:
“There she is!”
And along the street, with a little brown dog in her arms, came our lady, weeping no more, but with her face radiant and her head up.
“That’s the woman,” I shouted. “Ask her, ask her!”
The lady came up and, on seeing us, announced gladly that we were two gentlemen who had offered to help her find her dog.
“I found her,” she added. “I found her playing along at the corner. The darling.”
And she kissed it.
Hands fell away from us. But faces did not relax. In fact, the man in the shirt-sleeves still scowled suspiciously at us.
“Well,” he grunted through his nose. “Maybe so. Maybe so. But I still don’t like your looks. I still think it was just a frame-up. If any more dogs are lost in this neighborhood…”
And h shoved out his jaw at us, menacingly. And mutters and mumbles from the rest of the neighbors accompanied me as I got back into the car.
“Thank you, all the same,” called the lady with the little brown dog.
“Don’t mention it, ma’am,” I assured her.
So we continued our way home.
“March,” said Jim, snapping his teeth. “I guess the less you do in March, the better.”
Editor’s Notes: This story was repeated on March 18, 1944 as “No Love for March”.
- Ten cents in 1936 would be $2.20 in 2025. ↩︎
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