light there was too dim for us to make out anything but walls and heaps
of rusting scrap-iron cast away there and mouldering own. But trying to
pierce that darkness we became conscious, as it seemed, of innumerable
eyes gazing, not at us, but through the archway where we stood;
innumerable white eyeballs gleaming out of blackness. From behind us
came a little laugh. It floated past through the archway, toward those
eyes. Who was that? Who laughed in there? The old South itself—that
incredible, fine, lost soul! That “old-time” thing of old ideals,
blindfolded by its own history! That queer proud blend of simple
chivalry and tyranny, of piety and the abhorrent thing! Who was it
laughed there in the old slave-market —laughed at these white eyeballs
glaring from out of the blackness of their dark cattle-pen? What poor
departed soul in this House of Melancholy? But there was no ghost when
we turned to look—only our old guide with her sweet smile.
“Yes, suh. Here they all came—'twas the finest hotel—before the
war-time; old Southern families—buyin' an' sellin' their property. Yes,
ma'am, very interesting! This way! And here were the bells to all the
rooms. Broken, you see—all broken!”
And rather quickly we passed away, out of that “old-time place”; where
something had laughed, and the drip, drip, drip of water down the walls
was as the sound of a spirit grieving.
1912.
ROMANCE—THREE GLEAMS
On that New Year's morning when I drew up the blind it was still nearly
dark, but for the faintest pink flush glancing out there on the horizon
of black water. The far shore of the river's mouth was just soft dusk;
and the dim trees below me were in perfect stillness. There was no lap
of water. And then—I saw her, drifting in on the tide-the little ship,
passaging below me, a happy ghost. Like no thing of this world she came,
ending her flight, with sail-wings closing and her glowing lantern eyes.
There was I know not what of stealthy joy about her thus creeping in
to the unexpecting land. And I wished she would never pass, but go
on gliding by down there for ever with her dark ropes, and her bright
lanterns, and her mysterious felicity, so that I might have for ever
in my heart the blessed feeling she brought me, coming like this out of
that great mystery the sea. If only she need not change to solidity, but
ever be this visitor from the unknown, this sacred bird, telling with
her half-seen, trailing-down plume—sails the story of uncharted wonder.
If only I might go on trembling, as I was, with the rapture of all I did
not know and could not see, yet felt pressing against me and touching
my face with its lips! To think of her at anchor in cold light was like
flinging-to a door in the face of happiness. And just then she struck
her bell; the faint silvery far-down sound fled away before her, and
to every side, out into the utter hush, to discover echo. But nothing
answered, as if fearing to break the spell of her coming, to brush
with reality the dark sea dew from her sail-wings. But within me,
in response, there began the song of all unknown things; the song so
tenuous, so ecstatic, that seems to sweep and quiver across such thin
golden strings, and like an eager dream dies too soon. The song of the
secret-knowing wind that has peered through so great forests and over
such wild sea; blown on so many faces, and in the jungles of the grass
the song of all that the wind has seen and felt. The song of lives that
I should never live; of the loves that I should never love singlng to me
as though I should! And suddenly I felt that I could not bear my little
ship of dreams to grow hard and grey, her bright lanterns drowned in
the cold light, her dark ropes spidery and taut, her sea-wan sails all
furled, and she no more en chanted; and turning away I let fall the
curtain.
II.
Then what happens to the moon? She, who, shy and veiled, slips out
before dusk to take the air of heaven, wandering timidly among the
columned clouds, and fugitive from the staring of the sun; she, who,
when dusk has come, rules the sentient night with such chaste and icy
spell—whither and how does she retreat?
I came on her one morning—I surprised her. She was stealing into a
dark wintry wood, and five little stars were chasing her. She was
orange-hooded, a light-o'-love dismissed—unashamed and unfatigued,
having taken—all. And she was looking back with her almond eyes, across
her dark-ivory shoulder, at Night where he still lay drowned in the
sleep she had brought him. What a strange, slow, mocking look! So might
Aphrodite herself have looked back at some weary lover, remembering the
fire of his first embrace. Insatiate, smiling creature, slipping down
to the rim of the world to her bath in the sweet waters of dawn, whence
emerging, pure as a water lily, she would float in the cool sky till
evening came again! And just then she saw me looking, and hid behind a
holm-oak tree; but I could still see the gleam of one shoulder and her
long narrow eyes pursuing me. I went up to the tree and parted its dark
boughs to take her; but she had slipped behind another. I called to her
to stand, if only for one moment. But she smiled and went slip ping on,
and I ran thrusting through the wet bushes, leaping the fallen trunks.
The scent of rotting leaves disturbed by my feet leaped out into the
darkness, and birds, surprised, fluttered away. And still I ran—she
slipping ever further into the grove, and ever looking back at me. And I
thought: But I will catch you yet, you nymph of perdition! The wood will
soon be passed, you will have no cover then! And from her eyes, and the
scanty gleam of her flying limbs, I never looked away, not even when
I stumbled or ran against tree trunks in my blind haste. And at every
clearing I flew more furiously, thinking to seize all of her with my
gaze before she could cross the glade; but ever she found some little
low tree, some bush of birch ungrown, or the far top branches of the
next grove to screen her flying body and preserve allurement. And all
the time she was dipping, dipping to the rim of the world. And then I
tripped; but, as I rose, I saw that she had lingered for me; her long
sliding eyes were full, it seemed to me, of pity, as if she would
have liked for me to have enjoyed the sight of her. I stood still,
breathless, thinking that at last she would consent; but flinging back,
up into the air, one dark-ivory arm, she sighed and vanished. And the
breath of her sigh stirred all the birch-tree twigs just coloured with
the dawn. Long I stood in that thicket gazing at the spot where she had
leapt from me over the edge of the world-my heart quivering.
III.
We embarked on the estuary steamer that winter morning just as daylight
came full. The sun was on the wing scattering little white clouds, as an
eagle might scatter doves. They scurried up before him with their broken
feathers tipped and tinged with gold. In the air was a touch of frost,
and a smoky mist-drift clung here and there above the reeds, blurring
the shores of the lagoon so that we seemed to be steaming across
boundless water, till some clump of trees would fling its top out of the
fog, then fall back into whiteness.
And then, in that thick vapour, rounding I suppose some curve, we came
suddenly into we knew not what—all white and moving it was, as if the
mist were crazed; murmuring, too, with a sort of restless beating. We
seemed to be passing through a ghost—the ghost of all the life that had
sprung from this water and its shores; we seemed to have left reality,
to be travelling through live wonder.
And the fantastic thought sprang into my mind: I have died. This is
the voyage of my soul in the wild. I am in the final wilderness of
spirits—lost in the ghost robe that wraps the earth. There seemed in all
this white murmuration to be millions of tiny hands stretching out to
me, millions of whispering voices, of wistful eyes. I had no fear, but a
curious baked eagerness, the strangest feeling of having lost myself and
become part of this around me; exactly as if my own hands and voice and
eyes had left me and were groping, and whispering, and gazing out there
in the eeriness. I was no longer a man on an estuary steamer, but part
of sentient ghostliness. Nor did I feel unhappy; it seemed as though I
had never been anything but this Bedouin spirit wandering.
We passed through again into the stillness of plain mist, and all those
eerie sensations went, leaving nothing but curiosity to know what this
was that we had traversed. Then suddenly the sun came flaring out,
and we saw behind us thousands and thousands of white gulls dipping,
wheeling, brushing the water with their wings, bewitched with sun and
mist. That was all. And yet that white-winged legion through whom we had
ploughed our way were not, could never be, to me just gulls—there was
more than mere sun-glamour gilding their misty plumes; there was the
wizardry of my past wonder, the enchantment of romance.
1912.
MEMORIES
We set out to meet him at Waterloo Station on a dull day of February
—I, who had owned his impetuous mother, knowing a little what to expect,
while to my companion he would be all original. We stood there
waiting (for the Salisbury train was late), and wondering with a warm,
half-fearful eagerness what sort of new thread Life was going to twine
into our skein. I think our chief dread was that he might have light
eyes—those yellow Chinese eyes of the common, parti-coloured spaniel.
And each new minute of the train's tardiness increased our anxious
compassion: His first journey; his first separation from his mother;
this black two-months' baby! Then the train ran in, and we hastened to
look for him. “Have you a dog for us?”
“A dog! Not in this van. Ask the rearguard.”
“Have you a dog for us?”
“That's right. From Salisbury. Here's your wild beast, Sir!”
From behind a wooden crate we saw a long black muzzled nose poking round
at us, and heard a faint hoarse whimpering.
I remember my first thought:
“Isn't his nose too long?”
But to my companion's heart it went at once, because it was swollen from
crying and being pressed against things that he could not see through.
We took him out—soft, wobbly, tearful; set him down on his four, as yet
not quite simultaneous legs, and regarded him. Or, rather, my companion
did, having her head on one side, and a quavering smile; and I regarded
her, knowing that I should thereby get a truer impression of him.
He wandered a little round our legs, neither wagging his tail nor
licking at our hands; then he looked up, and my companion said: “He's an
angel!”
I was not so certain. He seemed hammer-headed, with no eyes at all, and
little connection between his head, his body, and his legs. His ears
were very long, as long as his poor nose; and gleaming down in the
blackness of him I could see the same white star that disgraced his
mother's chest.
Picking him up, we carried him to a four-wheeled cab, and took his
muzzle off. His little dark-brown eyes were resolutely fixed on
distance, and by his refusal to even smell the biscuits we had brought
to make him happy, we knew that the human being had not yet come into
a life that had contained so far only a mother, a wood-shed, and four
other soft, wobbly, black, hammer-headed angels, smelling of themselves,
and warmth, and wood shavings. It was pleasant to feel that to us
he would surrender an untouched love, that is, if he would surrender
anything. Suppose he did not take to us!
And just then something must have stirred in him, for he turned up his
swollen nose and stared at my companion, and a little later rubbed the
dry pinkness of his tongue against my thumb. In that look, and that
unconscious restless lick; he was trying hard to leave unhappiness
behind, trying hard to feel that these new creatures with stroking paws
and queer scents, were his mother; yet all the time he knew, I am sure,
that they were something bigger, more permanently, desperately, his. The
first sense of being owned, perhaps (who knows) of owning, had stirred
in him. He would never again be quite the same unconscious creature.
A little way from the end of our journey we got out and dismissed the
cab. He could not too soon know the scents and pavements of this London
where the chief of his life must pass. I can see now his first bumble
down that wide, back-water of a street, how continually and suddenly
he sat down to make sure of his own legs, how continually he lost our
heels. He showed us then in full perfection what was afterwards to be
an inconvenient—if endearing —characteristic: At any call or whistle
he would look in precisely the opposite direction. How many times all
through his life have I not seen him, at my whistle, start violently
and turn his tail to me, then, with nose thrown searchingly from side to
side, begin to canter toward the horizon.
In that first walk, we met, fortunately, but one vehicle, a brewer's
dray; he chose that moment to attend to the more serious affairs of
life, sitting quietly before the horses' feet and requiring to be
moved by hand. From the beginning he had his dignity, and was extremely
difficult to lift, owing to the length of his middle distance.
What strange feelings must have stirred in his little white soul when he
first smelled carpet! But it was all so strange to him that day —I doubt
if he felt more than I did when I first travelled to my private school,
reading “Tales of a Grandfather,” and plied with tracts and sherry by my
'father's man of business.
That night, indeed, for several nights, he slept with me, keeping me
too warm down my back, and waking me now and then with quaint sleepy
whimperings. Indeed, all through his life he flew a good deal in his
sleep, fighting dogs and seeing ghosts, running after rabbits and thrown
sticks; and to the last one never quite knew whether or no to rouse him
when his four black feet began to jerk and quiver. His dreams were like
our dreams, both good and bad; happy sometimes, sometimes tragic to
weeping point.
He ceased to sleep with me the day we discovered that he was a perfect
little colony, whose settlers were of an active species which I have
never seen again. After that he had many beds, for circumstance
ordained that his life should be nomadic, and it is to this I trace that
philosophic indifference to place or property, which marked him out from
most of his own kind. He learned early that for a black dog with long
silky ears, a feathered tail, and head of great dignity, there was no
home whatsoever, away from those creatures with special scents, who took
liberties with his name, and alone of all created things were privileged
to smack him with a slipper. He would sleep anywhere, so long as it was
in their room, or so close outside it as to make no matter, for it was
with him a principle that what he did not smell did not exist. I would
I could hear again those long rubber-lipped snufflings of recognition
underneath the door, with which each morning he would regale and
reassure a spirit that grew with age more and more nervous and delicate
about this matter of propinquity! For he was a dog of fixed ideas,
things stamped on his mind were indelible; as, for example, his duty
toward cats, for whom he had really a perverse affection, which had led
to that first disastrous moment of his life, when he was brought up,
poor bewildered puppy, from a brief excursion to the kitchen, with one
eye closed and his cheek torn! He bore to his grave that jagged scratch
across the eye. It was in dread of a repetition of this tragedy that
he was instructed at the word “Cats” to rush forward with a special
“tow-row-rowing,” which he never used toward any other form of creature.
To the end he cherished a hope that he would reach the cat; but never
did; and if he had, we knew he would only have stood and wagged his
tail; but I well remember once, when he returned, important, from some
such sally, how dreadfully my companion startled a cat-loving friend by
murmuring in her most honeyed voice: “Well, my darling, have you been
killing pussies in the garden?”
His eye and nose were impeccable in their sense of form; indeed, he
was very English in that matter: People must be just so; things smell
properly; and affairs go on in the one right way. He could tolerate
neither creatures in ragged clothes, nor children on their hands and
knees, nor postmen, because, with their bags, they swelled-up on one
side, and carried lanterns on their stomachs. He would never let the
harmless creatures pass without religious barks. Naturally a believer in
authority and routine, and distrusting spiritual adventure, he yet had
curious fads that seemed to have nested in him, quite outside of all
principle. He would, for instance, follow neither carriages nor horses,
and if we tried to make him, at once left for home, where he would
sit with nose raised to Heaven, emitting through it a most lugubrious,
shrill noise. Then again, one must not place a stick, a slipper, a
glove, or anything with which he could play, upon one's head—since such
an action reduced him at once to frenzy. For so conservative a dog, his
environment was sadly anarchistic. He never complained in words of our
shifting habits, but curled his head round over his left paw and pressed
his chin very hard against the ground whenever he smelled packing. What
necessity, he seemed continually to be saying, what real necessity is
there for change of any kind whatever? Here we were all together, and
one day was like another, so that I knew where I was—and now you only
know what will happen next; and I—I can't tell you whether I shall be
with you when it happens! What strange, grieving minutes a dog passes
at such times in the underground of his subconsciousness, refusing
realisation, yet all the time only too well divining. Some careless
word, some unmuted compassion in voice, the stealthy wrapping of a pair
of boots, the unaccustomed shutting of a door that ought to be open, the
removal from a down-stair room of an object always there—one tiny thing,
and he knows for certain that he is not going too. He fights against the
knowledge just as we do against what we cannot bear; he gives up hope,
but not effort, protesting in the only way he knows of, and now and then
heaving a great sigh. Those sighs of a dog! They go to the heart so much
more deeply than the sighs of our own kind, because they are utterly
unintended, regardless of effect, emerging from one who, heaving them,
knows not that they have escaped him!
The words: “Yes—going too!” spoken in a certain tone, would call up in
his eyes a still-questioning half-happiness, and from his tail a quiet
flutter, but did not quite serve to put to rest either his doubt or his
feeling that it was all unnecessary—until the cab arrived. Then he would
pour himself out of door or window, and be found in the bottom of the
vehicle, looking severely away from an admiring cabman. Once settled on
our feet he travelled with philosophy, but no digestion.
I think no dog was ever more indifferent to an outside world of human
creatures; yet few dogs have made more conquests—especially among
strange women, through whom, however, he had a habit of looking—very
discouraging. He had, natheless, one or two particular friends, such as
him to whom this book is dedicated, and a few persons whom he knew he
had seen before, but, broadly speaking, there were in his world of men,
only his mistress, and—the almighty.
Each August, till he was six, he was sent for health, and the
assuagement of his hereditary instincts, up to a Scotch shooting, where
he carried many birds in a very tender manner. Once he was compelled by
Fate to remain there nearly a year; and we went up ourselves to fetch
him home. Down the long avenue toward the keeper's cottage we walked: It
was high autumn; there had been frost already, for the ground was
fine with red and yellow leaves; and presently we saw himself coming;
professionally questing among those leaves, and preceding his dear
keeper with the businesslike self-containment of a sportsman; not too
fat, glossy as a raven's wing, swinging his ears and sporran like a
little Highlander. We approached him silently. Suddenly his nose went up
from its imagined trail, and he came rushing at our legs. From him, as
a garment drops from a man, dropped all his strange soberness; he became
in a single instant one fluttering eagerness. He leaped from life to
life in one bound, without hesitation, without regret. Not one sigh, not
one look back, not the faintest token of gratitude or regret at leaving
those good people who had tended him for a whole year, buttered oat-cake
for him, allowed him to choose each night exactly where he would sleep.
No, he just marched out beside us, as close as ever he could get,
drawing us on in spirit, and not even attending to the scents, until the
lodge gates were passed.
It was strictly in accordance with the perversity of things, and
something in the nature of calamity that he had not been ours one year,
when there came over me a dreadful but overmastering aversion from
killing those birds and creatures of which he was so fond as soon as
they were dead. And so I never knew him as a sportsman; for during that
first year he was only an unbroken puppy, tied to my waist for fear
of accidents, and carefully pulling me off every shot. They tell me he
developed a lovely nose and perfect mouth, large enough to hold gingerly
the biggest hare. I well believe it, remembering the qualities of his
mother, whose character, however, in stability he far surpassed. But, as
he grew every year more devoted to dead grouse and birds and rabbits, I
liked them more and more alive; it was the only real breach between us,
and we kept it out of sight. Ah! well; it is consoling to reflect that
I should infallibly have ruined his sporting qualities, lacking that
peculiar habit of meaning what one says, so necessary to keep dogs
virtuous. But surely to have had him with me, quivering and alert,
with his solemn, eager face, would have given a new joy to those crisp
mornings when the hope of wings coming to the gun makes poignant in the
sports man as nothing else will, an almost sensual love of Nature, a
fierce delight in the soft glow of leaves, in the white birch stems and
tracery of sparse twigs against blue sky, in the scents of sap and grass
and gum and heather flowers; stivers the hair of him with keenness for
interpreting each sound, and fills the very fern or moss he kneels on,
the very trunk he leans against, with strange vibration.
Slowly Fate prepares for each of us the religion that lies coiled in our
most secret nerves; with such we cannot trifle, we do not even try! But
how shall a man grudge any one sensations he has so keenly felt? Let
such as have never known those curious delights, uphold the hand of
horror—for me there can be no such luxury. If I could, I would still
perhaps be knowing them; but when once the joy of life in those winged
and furry things has knocked at the very portals of one's spirit, the
thought that by pressing a little iron twig one will rive that joy
out of their vitals, is too hard to bear. Call it aestheticism,
squeamishness, namby-pamby sentimentalism, what you will it is stronger
than oneself!
Yes, after one had once watched with an eye that did not merely see, the
thirsty gaping of a slowly dying bird, or a rabbit dragging a broken leg
to a hole where he would lie for hours thinking of the fern to which he
should never more come forth—after that, there was always the following
little matter of arithmetic: Given, that all those who had been shooting
were “good-fair” shots—which, Heaven knew, they never were—they yet
missed one at least in four, and did not miss it very much; so that if
seventy-five things were slain, there were also twenty-five that had
been fired at, and, of those twenty-five, twelve and a half had “gotten
it” somewhere in their bodies, and would “likely” die at their great
leisure.