Four-and-thirty years ago Bob Ainslie and I were coming up Infirmary
Street from the Edinburgh High School, our heads together, and our
arms intertwisted, as only lovers and boys know how, or why.
[Footnote 19: From "Rab and His Friends."]
When we got to the top of the street, and turned north, we espied a
crowd at the Tron Church. "A dog fight!" shouted Bob, and was off; and
so was I, both of us all but praying that it might not be over before
we got up! And is not this boy-nature? and human nature too? and don't
we all wish a house on fire not to be out before we see it? Dogs like
fighting; old Isaac says they "delight" in it, and for the best of all
reasons; and boys are not cruel because they like to see the fight.
They see three of the great cardinal virtues of dog or man--courage,
endurance, and skill--in intense action. This is very different from a
love of making dogs fight, and enjoying, and aggravating, and making
gain by their pluck. A boy, be he ever so fond himself of fighting,
if he be a good boy, hates and despises all this, but he would have
run off with Bob and me fast enough; it is a natural, and a not wicked
interest, that all boys and men have in witnessing intense energy in
action.
Does any curious and finely ignorant woman wish to know how Bob's eye
at a glance announced a dog fight to his brain? He did not, he could
not see the dogs fighting; it was a flash of an inference, a rapid
induction. The crowd round a couple of dogs fighting is a crowd
masculine mainly, with an occasional active, compassionate woman,
fluttering wildly round the outside, and using her tongue and her
hands freely upon the men, as so many "brutes"; it is a crowd annular,
compact, and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its
heads all bent downward and inward to one common focus.
Well, Bob and I are up, and find it is not over; a small,
thoroughbred, white bull-terrier is busy throttling a large shepherd's
dog, unaccustomed to war, but not to be trifled with. They are hard at
it; the scientific little fellow doing his work in great style, his
pastoral enemy fighting wildly, but with the sharpest of teeth and a
great courage. Science and breeding, however, soon had their own; the
Game Chicken, as the premature Bob called him, working his way up,
took his final grip of poor Yarrow's throat--and he lay gasping and
done for. His master, a brown, handsome, big young shepherd from
Tweedsmuir, would have liked to have knocked down any man, would
"drink up Esil, or eat a crocodile," for that part, if he had a
chance: it was no use kicking the little dog; that would only make
him hold the closer. Many were the means shouted out in mouthfuls, of
the best possible ways of ending it. "Water!" but there was none near,
and many cried for it who might have got it from the well at
Blackfriars Wynd. "Bite the tail!" and a large, vague, benevolent,
middle-aged man, more desirous than wise, with some struggle got the
bushy end of Yarrow's tail into his ample mouth, and bit it with all
his might. This was more than enough for the much-enduring,
much-perspiring shepherd, who, with a gleam of joy over his broad
visage, delivered a terrific facer upon our large, benevolent,
middle-aged friend--who went down like a shot.
Still the Chicken holds; death not far off. "Snuff! a pinch of snuff!"
observed a calm, highly-drest young buck, with an eyeglass in his eye.
"Snuff, indeed!" growled the angry crowd, affronted and glaring.
"Snuff! a pinch of snuff!" again observes the buck, but with more
urgency; whereon were produced several open boxes, and from a mull
which may have been at Culloden, he took a pinch, knelt down, and
presented it to the nose of the Chicken. The laws of physiology and of
snuff take their course; the Chicken sneezes, and Yarrow is free!
The young pastoral giant stalks off with Yarrow in his
arms--comforting him.
But the bull terrier's blood is up, and his soul unsatisfied; he grips
the first dog he meets, and discovering she is not a dog, in Homeric
phrase, he makes a brief sort of _amende_, and is off. The boys, with
Bob and me at their head, are after him: down Niddry Street he goes
bent on mischief; up the Cowgate like an arrow--Bob and I, and our
small men panting behind.
There, under the single arch of the South Bridge, is a huge mastiff,
sauntering down the middle of the causeway, as if with his hands in
his pockets; he is old, gray, brindled, as big as a little Highland
bull, and has the Shakespearean dewlaps shaking as he goes.
The Chicken makes straight at him and fastens on his throat. To our
astonishment, the great creature does nothing but stand still, hold
himself up and roar--yes, roar; a long, serious, remonstrative roar.
How is this? Bob and I are up to them. _He is muzzled!_ The bailies
had proclaimed a general muzzling, and his master, studying strength
and economy mainly, had encompassed his huge jaws in a home-made
apparatus constructed out of the leather of some ancient _breechin_.
His mouth was open as far as it could be; his lips curled up in
rage--a sort of terrible grin; his teeth gleaming, ready, from out the
darkness; the strap across his mouth tense as a bowstring; his whole
frame stiff with indignation and surprize; his roar asking us all
round, "Did you ever see the like of this?" He looked a statue of
anger and astonishment done in Aberdeen granite.
We soon had a crowd; the Chicken held on. "A knife!" cried Bob; and a
cobbler gave him his knife: you know the kind of knife, worn away
obliquely to a point, and always keen. I put its edge to the tense
leather; it ran before it; and then!--one sudden jerk of that enormous
head, a sort of dirty mist about his mouth, no noise--and the bright
and fierce little fellow is dropt, limp and dead. A solemn pause;
this was more than any of us had bargained for. I turned the little
fellow over, and saw he was quite dead; the mastiff had taken him by
the small of the back like a rat, and broken it.
He looked down at his victim appeased, ashamed, and amazed; snuffed
him all over, stared at him, and taking a sudden thought, turned round
and trotted off. Bob took the dead dog up and said, "John, we'll bury
him after tea." "Yes," said I, and was off after the mastiff. He made
up the Cowgate at rapid swing; he had forgotten some engagement. He
turned up the Candlemaker Row, and stopt at the Harrow Inn.
There was a carrier's cart ready to start, and a keen, thin,
impatient, black-a-vised little man, his hand at his gray horse's
head, looking about angrily for something.
"Rab, ye thief!" said he, aiming a kick at my great friend, who drew
cringing up, and avoiding the heavy shoe with more agility than
dignity, and, watching his master's eye, slunk dismayed under the
cart--his ears down, and as much as he had of tail down too.
What a man this must be--thought I--to whom my tremendous hero turns
tail! The carrier saw the muzzle hanging, cut and useless, from his
neck, and I eagerly told him the story, which Bob and I always
thought, and still think, Homer or King David or Sir Walter alone were
worthy to rehearse. The severe little man was mitigated, and
condescended to say, "Rab, my man, puir Rabbie"--whereupon the stump
of a tail rose up, the ears were cocked, the eyes filled, and were
comforted; the two friends were reconciled. "Hupp!" and a stroke of
the whip were given to Jess; and off went the three.
Bob and I buried the Game Chicken that night (we had not much of a
tea) in the back green of his house in Melville Street, No. 17, with
considerable gravity and silence; and being at the time in the
"Iliad," and, like all boys, Trojans, we called him Hector, of
course.