Two Gentlemen and a Lady

by Alexander Woollcott

Genres: General Fiction; Animals; Classics

Synopsis

DOROTHY PARKER MEETS LADY AND THE TRAMP: 3 charming dog stories set in 1920s Jazz Age New York—back in print for the first time in decades

Featuring illustrations by America’s 1st female editorial cartoonist, whose comics career began before she even had the right to vote!

Dogs may be man’s best friend, but every friendship is different. Prepare to revisit the glamorous 1920s Jazz Age of The Great Gatsby and meet Nicholas, a gregarious Airedale Terrier whose arrival in a moneyed Long Island home unleashes complete and total chaos throughout the neighbourhood.

Verdun Belle, the lady of the title, is a silky-eared spaniel whose loyalty—and litter of puppies—rallies an entire American regiment fighting on the Western Front during World War I. Then there’s Egon, a very large German Shepherd, accustomed to summering on the Côte d’Azur, and to managing the diaries and daily activities of his human charges, whether they want him to or not. Ranging in tone from urbane irony to poignant sweetness, these are stories to make you smile at the antics of dogs, and guffaw at the even sillier antics of the people who love them.

This delightful collection of 3 stories (The Passing of Nicholas, The Story of Verdun Belle, My Friend Egon) by an Algonquin Round Table wit, rediscovered after decades out of print, shows our canine companions in all their guises: comic, heroic, companionable.

Don’t miss this delightful Jazz Age celebration of the eternal affection that exists between man and dog—even the naughtiest dog!

Release date: August 26, 2025

Publisher: Pushkin Press

Print pages: 112

Sample

MY DEAR ARTHUR:
It will doubtless surprise you to receive a letter from me and indeed I suspect that when our generation passes on and its Lives and Letters begin to elbow Stevenson’s on the shelf, it will be learned with a publisher’s dismay that nowadays brothers communicate with each other only by wire. Of course I used to get news of mine from Mother, but I think it was one of the puzzling shadows on her declining years that she had to serve thus as a clearing house of information for her far flung family. Somehow she felt it was her fault that her three sons were not living together somewhere in inextricable fraternity.

I do hear from Laurence occasionally when something comes up about my investments—either of them. And then, as executor, he writes me annually, as he doubtless does you, inclosing a check which Madame dips into her home-made vocabulary to describe as “a mere pitifance.” Laurence’s almost surly notes, with their T. R. B./L. K. and their gratuitous “Dictated but not read,” always discomfit me.

Not that your own communications, though less formal, are any chummier. By exact count there have been two in the last three years. Of course personally I didn’t at all mind the levity of your telegram at the time of our marriage, though it did ruffle Madame a bit, for she seems to resent far more than I do any reference to me as a member of the Only Their Second Husbands Club. When she thinks about it at all, she really sets an immoderately large store by my little doctorate and my lectureship at Columbia. She was so entranced with all my scholastic trappings at Commencement that I suspect she thought I had been produced by Mr. Belasco. Her delight over the floridity of my academic hoods was tinged only by a visible regret that I had never gone in for science and so could not aspire to that hood which makes the chemistry men so closely resemble Chinese sunsets.

But I was a little abashed when I ventured to send you some stray opera seats and asked if you could use them and you replied “Yes—and others. A. K.” This seemed so terse and dismissive that I gave up. But now, preposterous as it may seem, I want something of you. I want a dog.

Not just any dog. I suppose I could buy any dog myself, though I wouldn’t know exactly how to go about it. I have considered the matter at some length from the other side of one of those windows which display the most amusing but the most baffling mass of turbulent puppies.

I wonder vaguely how any one can say of such and such misshapen lump that it will eventually turn into a mastiff or a French poodle. So, suppressing a strong impulse to buy the whole windowful and watch developments, I turn away empty-leashed.

What I want is a fine blooded animal, not necessarily full-grown but possibly able already to help about the premises and certainly already defined in character and general outline. I want a dog that will like me and hate strangers and serve as a watchdog. These suburbs seem like swarming anthills compared with the lonely old place where you and I were brought up, but, after all, our house is pretty much out of earshot and when I’m off lecturing fatuously at the other end of the country and Madame is resting here between tours, I should like to be able to think that she has a staunch and terrifying protector of some sort.

Besides, it would be pleasant to have at least one animal in this place that I could respect amid all the monstrous collection Madame has gradually acquired.… I will say that none of them
represents her deliberate choice in domestic companions. She hasn’t wantonly gone out into the fields and caught them; she has merely caught them the way people catch colds. So when I decided to present her with a dog for her birthday, I made up my mind he should be expertly chosen. That explains this letter to you. You were the first person I thought of.

I’m not sure why I feel so convinced that the choice of a Government bond should be left to Laurence but the choice of a dog to you. The deference may derive from some school-yard memory. Or perhaps it’s merely because you live at an athletic club which I dimly picture as a group of horsey bachelors sitting around in thick-soled shoes and talking about the races at Louisville. Anyway, I leave it all to you for I am entirely vague about the various breeds. Only I beg you to be expeditious for I want him installed in full charge of the estate in time to welcome Madame when she returns from her tour. That will be in three weeks’ time. She has been having a tremendous success, as you may have read in the papers.
Your affectionate brother
DAVID KENDERDINE

Pleasant Lanes,
Long Island,
November sixteenth


MY DEAR ARTHUR:
An Airedale sounds fine. I haven’t the faintest notion what one might be like and I didn’t know it was possible to pay $500 for a dog—that is, not for one you didn’t mean to exhibit at Madison Square Garden but just wanted for use around the place like a gardener. However, I’m quite willing and am inclosing a check for the amount. If I were Laurence, I would write “1 incl.” down in the corner, though what good it would do, I’m sure I don’t know.

I shan’t show your letter to Madame when she comes home. Of course, every one calls her that, not merely the servants and the stage-hands. I’m afraid she wouldn’t be at all amused at your little shaft shot in her direction. I do admit she is just the kind who would start a ménage and end with a menagerie. But what you don’t realize is that she has splendor, which is far rarer and far more delightful than common sense. What you don’t understand is that for me, just living with her is a continuously exciting adventure. You’ve had adventures all your life and so, when you marry, it will be to some one placid and tranquil. I’ve had nothing but tranquillity since the day I was born and now I shall have excitement as long as I live. Here I was this afternoon, scheduled for some work among my books on mediaeval poisons, but all I could do was just sit and conjure up the vision of her return, her radiant return, with her arms full of flowers and handbags and her heavy-laden maid struggling after and that absurd How Cum yip-yipping in her wake.

How Cum is part of her menagerie. It IS a menagerie. There is just this one dog—Madame swears he’s a dog—who usually goes with her on her travels and is fed, I should imagine, from her make-up box. He is, I am told, a Pekingese. He was finally named How Cum after a strong minority report submitted by me in favor of his being called Ah Gwan. As far as I can see, How Cum simply does not cerebrate at all, though there is just the trace of malicious, sagacious premeditation in the way he invariably flings himself roguishly on my croquet ball and pushes it out of position. I hadn’t meant to mention that I have taken up croquet—but there, the damage is done and anyway, there’s no reason why, at your age, you should give up a lifelong habit of laughing at me.

Every one seems to have these celestial absurdities and what puzzles me is where they come
from or rather where they were when we were young and those stertorous pugs were sliding off the laps of all American aunts. The pugs have vanished and somehow these Pekingese have come out of space to take their place. Surely no one would seriously pretend there were two of them on the Ark. That would, I think, be carrying a little too far the modern tendency to belittle the past. Perhaps they sneaked out when John Hay ordered the Open Door but I am more inclined to the theory that they sprang full-grown from the brow of some Burbank of the kennels. I’m sure How Cum was made in a retort, by crossing a muff and a chrysanthemum.

Then there’s Gooseberry. Gooseberry is a cat, a practically perfect Persian; a soft, gray beauty with no human affections to speak of. He is dignified and full of years, for Madame got him long before she acquired me. He is incapable of emotion, or was until How Cum came, when he developed an unmistakable aversion, a fine disdain which makes quite a bond between us. [image as in original] I think it is How Cum’s hobbledehoy, rattle-pated lack of restraint which offends Gooseberry so deeply. It’s just well-bred disapproval that you see expressed in every uprising hair on Gooseberry’s body as he looks down from the piano on the meaningless antics which fill How Cum’s empty life. [image as in original] Poor How Cum, he has no memory at all and as Gooseberry has no heart, he comes to grief every day. It is only because he has been away now on tour for several weeks that his usually unguarded nose will have a chance to heal.

Our birds aren’t much. There’s a cheap little Sixth Avenue canary given to Madame by some admirer. Her name is Toot Sweet. Then there’s a hoarse and despondent old parrot with an insulting laugh whom Madame named Mr. Benchley in a moment of pique. We have two very handsome and patrician but unresponsive goldfish named Hamilton and Stuyvesant respectively, for reasons which I suppose must be obvious. Then there’s Charley Young.

Charley Young is a cat—a lean, black-and-white desperado from Chinatown. Madame was motoring down there last spring in an effort to show some southern visitors the sights of the city. I suppose it was really her gracious way of being rude to them—the mere assumption that they would enjoy such a tour. The car was worming its way in gingerly fashion through the crowded streets when this gaunt and alarming creature sprang on the running board and stayed there. I started to shoo him off but Madame intervened in real agitation. I gathered that his advent, or perhaps the manner of it, had some superstitious significance to her. The people of the theater are full of such ancient pangs and panic. At all events, she ceremoniously installed him out here where Gooseberry has ignored him utterly and where Mr. Benchley destroys his afternoon naps by calling him in a voice most seductively like Madame’s. I can’t say I blame him for going out a good deal.

Mrs. Lorrequer, our next-door neighbor, insists that Charley Young has ruined her young Tabby, but I have tried to explain to her delicately that long since we had forehandedly taken the conventional steps to render impossible any such social complications.

You can see over what a helpless world your Airedale will be expected to rule. I shall call him Nicholas after President Butler, who has a somewhat similar position at Columbia.
Your affectionate brother
DAVID KENDERDINE

Pleasant Lanes,
Long Island,
November twenty-seventh