so, as he grew older, and trying to part from each other we no longer
could, he ceased going to Scotland. But after that I often felt, and
especially when we heard guns, how the best and most secret instincts of
him were being stifled. But what was to be done? In that which was left
of a clay pigeon he would take not the faintest interest—the scent of
it was paltry. Yet always, even in his most cosseted and idle days,
he managed to preserve the grave preoccupation of one professionally
concerned with retrieving things that smell; and consoled himself
with pastimes such as cricket, which he played in a manner highly
specialised, following the ball up the moment it left the bowler's
hand, and sometimes retrieving it before it reached the batsman. When
remonstrated with, he would consider a little, hanging out a pink tongue
and looking rather too eagerly at the ball, then canter slowly out to a
sort of forward short leg. Why he always chose that particular position
it is difficult to say; possibly he could lurk there better than
anywhere else, the batsman's eye not being on him, and the bowler's not
too much. As a fieldsman he was perfect, but for an occasional
belief that he was not merely short leg, but slip, point, midoff, and
wicket-keep; and perhaps a tendency to make the ball a little “jubey.”
But he worked tremendously, watching every movement; for he knew the
game thoroughly, and seldom delayed it more than three minutes when he
secured the ball. And if that ball were really lost, then indeed he took
over the proceedings with an intensity and quiet vigour that destroyed
many shrubs, and the solemn satisfaction which comes from being in the
very centre of the stage.
But his most passionate delight was swimming in anything except the sea,
for which, with its unpleasant noise and habit of tasting salt, he had
little affection. I see him now, cleaving the Serpentine, with his
air of “the world well lost,” striving to reach my stick before it had
touched water. Being only a large spaniel, too small for mere heroism,
he saved no lives in the water but his own—and that, on one occasion,
before our very eyes, from a dark trout stream, which was trying to wash
him down into a black hole among the boulders.
The call of the wild-Spring running—whatever it is—that besets men and
dogs, seldom attained full mastery over him; but one could often see it
struggling against his devotion to the scent of us, and, watching that
dumb contest, I have time and again wondered how far this civilisation
of ours was justifiably imposed on him; how far the love for us that we
had so carefully implanted could ever replace in him the satisfaction of
his primitive wild yearnings: He was like a man, naturally polygamous,
married to one loved woman.
It was surely not for nothing that Rover is dog's most common name, and
would be ours, but for our too tenacious fear of losing something, to
admit, even to ourselves, that we are hankering. There was a man who
said: Strange that two such queerly opposite qualities as courage and
hypocrisy are the leading characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon! But is not
hypocrisy just a product of tenacity, which is again the lower part of
courage? Is not hypocrisy but an active sense of property in one's good
name, the clutching close of respectability at any price, the feeling
that one must not part, even at the cost of truth, with what he has
sweated so to gain? And so we Anglo-Saxons will not answer to the
name of Rover, and treat our dogs so that they, too, hardly know their
natures.
The history of his one wandering, for which no respectable reason can
be assigned, will never, of course, be known. It was in London, of
an October evening, when we were told he had slipped out and was not
anywhere. Then began those four distressful hours of searching for that
black needle in that blacker bundle of hay. Hours of real dismay and
suffering for it is suffering, indeed, to feel a loved thing swallowed
up in that hopeless haze of London streets. Stolen or run over? Which
was worst? The neighbouring police stations visited, the Dog's Home
notified, an order of five hundred “Lost Dog” bills placed in the
printer's hands, the streets patrolled! And then, in a lull snatched for
food, and still endeavouring to preserve some aspect of assurance, we
heard the bark which meant: “Here is a door I cannot open!” We hurried
forth, and there he was on the top doorstep—busy, unashamed, giving no
explanations, asking for his supper; and very shortly after him came
his five hundred “Lost Dog” bills. Long I sat looking at him that night
after my companion had gone up, thinking of the evening, some years
before, when there followed as that shadow of a spaniel who had been
lost for eleven days. And my heart turned over within me. But he! He was
asleep, for he knew not remorse.
Ah! and there was that other time, when it was reported to me, returning
home at night, that he had gone out to find me; and I went forth again,
disturbed, and whistling his special call to the empty fields. Suddenly
out of the darkness I heard a rushing, and he came furiously dashing
against my heels from he alone knew where he had been lurking and saying
to himself: I will not go in till he comes! I could not scold, there was
something too lyrical in the return of that live, lonely, rushing piece
of blackness through the blacker night. After all, the vagary was but a
variation in his practice when one was away at bed-time, of passionately
scratching up his bed in protest, till it resembled nothing; for, in
spite of his long and solemn face and the silkiness of his ears, there
was much in him yet of the cave bear—he dug graves on the smallest
provocations, in which he never buried anything. He was not a “clever”
dog; and guiltless of all tricks. Nor was he ever “shown.” We did not
even dream of subjecting him to this indignity. Was our dog a clown, a
hobby, a fad, a fashion, a feather in our caps that we should subject
him to periodic pennings in stuffy halls, that we should harry his
faithful soul with such tomfoolery? He never even heard us talk
about his lineage, deplore the length of his nose, or call him
“clever-looking.” We should have been ashamed to let him smell about us
the tar-brush of a sense of property, to let him think we looked on him
as an asset to earn us pelf or glory. We wished that there should be
between us the spirit that was between the sheep dog and that farmer,
who, when asked his dog's age, touched the old creature's head, and
answered thus: “Teresa” (his daughter) “was born in November, and this
one in August.” That sheep dog had seen eighteen years when the great
white day came for him, and his spirit passed away up, to cling with the
wood-smoke round the dark rafters of the kitchen where he had lain so
vast a time beside his master's boots. No, no! If a man does not soon
pass beyond the thought “By what shall this dog profit me?” into the
large state of simple gladness to be with dog, he shall never know the
very essence of that companion ship which depends not on the points of
dog, but on some strange and subtle mingling of mute spirits. For it is
by muteness that a dog becomes for one so utterly beyond value; with
him one is at peace, where words play no torturing tricks. When he just
sits, loving, and knows that he is being loved, those are the moments
that I think are precious to a dog; when, with his adoring soul coming
through his eyes, he feels that you are really thinking of him. But he
is touchingly tolerant of one's other occupations. The subject of these
memories always knew when one was too absorbed in work to be so close to
him as he thought proper; yet he never tried to hinder or distract,
or asked for attention. It dinged his mood, of course, so that the red
under his eyes and the folds of his crumply cheeks —which seemed to
speak of a touch of bloodhound introduced a long way back into his
breeding—drew deeper and more manifest. If he could have spoken at such
times, he would have said: “I have been a long time alone, and I cannot
always be asleep; but you know best, and I must not criticise.”
He did not at all mind one's being absorbed in other humans; he seemed
to enjoy the sounds of conversation lifting round him, and to know
when they were sensible. He could not, for instance, stand actors or
actresses giving readings of their parts, perceiving at once that the
same had no connection with the minds and real feelings of the speakers;
and, having wandered a little to show his disapproval, he would go to
the door and stare at it till it opened and let him out. Once or twice,
it is true, when an actor of large voice was declaiming an emotional
passage, he so far relented as to go up to him and pant in his face.
Music, too, made him restless, inclined to sigh, and to ask questions.
Sometimes, at its first sound, he would cross to the window and remain
there looking for Her. At others, he would simply go and lie on the loud
pedal, and we never could tell whether it was from sentiment, or because
he thought that in this way he heard less. At one special Nocturne
of Chopin's he always whimpered. He was, indeed, of rather Polish
temperament—very gay when he was gay, dark and brooding when he was not.
On the whole, perhaps his life was uneventful for so far-travelling
a dog, though it held its moments of eccentricity, as when he leaped
through the window of a four-wheeler into Kensington, or sat on a
Dartmoor adder. But that was fortunately of a Sunday afternoon—when
adder and all were torpid, so nothing happened, till a friend, who was
following, lifted him off the creature with his large boot.
If only one could have known more of his private life—more of his
relations with his own kind! I fancy he was always rather a dark dog to
them, having so many thoughts about us that he could not share with any
one, and being naturally fastidious, except with ladies, for whom he had
a chivalrous and catholic taste, so that they often turned and
snapped at him. He had, however, but one lasting love affair, for a
liver-coloured lass of our village, not quite of his own caste, but a
wholesome if somewhat elderly girl, with loving and sphinx-like eyes.
Their children, alas, were not for this world, and soon departed.
Nor was he a fighting dog; but once attacked, he lacked a sense of
values, being unable to distinguish between dogs that he could beat
and dogs with whom he had “no earthly.” It was, in fact, as well to
interfere at once, especially in the matter of retrievers, for he never
forgot having in his youth been attacked by a retriever from behind. No,
he never forgot, and never forgave, an enemy. Only a month before that
day of which I cannot speak, being very old and ill, he engaged an Irish
terrier on whose impudence he had long had his eye, and routed him. And
how a battle cheered his spirit! He was certainly no Christian; but,
allowing for essential dog, he was very much a gentleman. And I do think
that most of us who live on this earth these days would rather leave it
with that label on us than the other. For to be a Christian, as Tolstoy
understood the word—and no one else in our time has had logic and love
of truth enough to give it coherent meaning—is (to be quite sincere) not
suited to men of Western blood. Whereas—to be a gentleman! It is a far
cry, but perhaps it can be done. In him, at all events, there was no
pettiness, no meanness, and no cruelty, and though he fell below his
ideal at times, this never altered the true look of his eyes, nor the
simple loyalty in his soul.
But what a crowd of memories come back, bringing with them the perfume
of fallen days! What delights and glamour, what long hours of effort,
discouragements, and secret fears did he not watch over —our black
familiar; and with the sight and scent and touch of him, deepen or
assuage! How many thousand walks did we not go together, so that we
still turn to see if he is following at his padding gait, attentive to
the invisible trails. Not the least hard thing to bear when they go from
us, these quiet friends, is that they carry away with them so many years
of our own lives. Yet, if they find warmth therein, who would grudge
them those years that they have so guarded? Nothing else of us can they
take to lie upon with outstretched paws and chin pressed to the ground;
and, whatever they take, be sure they have deserved.
Do they know, as we do, that their time must come? Yes, they know, at
rare moments. No other way can I interpret those pauses of his latter
life, when, propped on his forefeet, he would sit for long minutes quite
motionless—his head drooped, utterly withdrawn; then turn those eyes of
his and look at me. That look said more plainly than all words could:
“Yes, I know that I must go!” If we have spirits that persist—they have.
If we know after our departure, who we were they do. No one, I think,
who really longs for truth, can ever glibly say which it will be for dog
and man persistence or extinction of our consciousness. There is but one
thing certain—the childishness of fretting over that eternal question.
Whichever it be, it must be right, the only possible thing. He felt
that too, I know; but then, like his master, he was what is called a
pessimist.
My companion tells me that, since he left us, he has once come back. It
was Old Year's Night, and she was sad, when he came to her in visible
shape of his black body, passing round the dining-table from the
window-end, to his proper place beneath the table, at her feet. She saw
him quite clearly; she heard the padding tap-tap of his paws and very
toe-nails; she felt his warmth brushing hard against the front of her
skirt. She thought then that he would settle down upon her feet, but
something disturbed him, and he stood pausing, pressed against her, then
moved out toward where I generally sit, but was not sitting that night.
She saw him stand there, as if considering; then at some sound or laugh,
she became self-conscious, and slowly, very slowly, he was no longer
there. Had he some message, some counsel to give, something he would
say, that last night of the last year of all those he had watched over
us? Will he come back again?
No stone stands over where he lies. It is on our hearts that his life is
engraved.
1912.
FELICITY
When God is so good to the fields, of what use are words—those poor
husks of sentiment! There is no painting Felicity on the wing! No way of
bringing on to the canvas the flying glory of things! A single buttercup
of the twenty million in one field is worth all these dry symbols—that
can never body forth the very spirit of that froth of May breaking over
the hedges, the choir of birds and bees, the lost-travelling down of the
wind flowers, the white-throated swallows in their Odysseys. Just here
there are no skylarks, but what joy of song and leaf; of lanes lighted
with bright trees, the few oaks still golden brown, and the ashes still
spiritual! Only the blackbirds and thrushes can sing-up this day, and
cuckoos over the hill. The year has flown so fast that the apple-trees
have dropped nearly all their bloom, and in “long meadow” the “daggers”
are out early, beside the narrow bright streams. Orpheus sits there on a
stone, when nobody is by, and pipes to the ponies; and Pan can often
be seen dancing with his nymphs in the raised beech-grove where it is
always twilight, if you lie still enough against the far bank.
Who can believe in growing old, so long as we are wrapped in this cloak
of colour and wings and song; so long as this unimaginable vision is
here for us to gaze at—the soft-faced sheep about us, and the wool-bags
drying out along the fence, and great numbers of tiny ducks, so trustful
that the crows have taken several.
Blue is the colour of youth, and all the blue flowers have a “fey” look.
Everything seems young too young to work. There is but one thing busy,
a starling, fetching grubs for its little family, above my head—it must
take that flight at least two hundred times a day. The children should
be very fat.
When the sky is so happy, and the flowers so luminous, it does not seem
possible that the bright angels of this day shall pass into dark night,
that slowly these wings shall close, and the cuckoo praise himself to
sleep, mad midges dance-in the evening; the grass shiver with dew, wind
die, and no bird sing . . . .
Yet so it is. Day has gone—the song and glamour and swoop of wings.
Slowly, has passed the daily miracle. It is night. But Felicity has not
withdrawn; she has but changed her robe for silence, velvet, and the
pearl fan of the moon. Everything is sleeping, save only a single star,
and the pansies. Why they should be more wakeful than the other flowers,
I do not know. The expressions of their faces, if one bends down
into the dusk, are sweeter and more cunning than ever. They have some
compact, no doubt, in hand.
What a number of voices have given up the ghost to this night of but one
voice—the murmur of the stream out there in darkness!
With what religion all has been done! Not one buttercup open; the
yew-trees already with shadows flung down! No moths are abroad yet; it
is too early in the year for nightjars; and the owls are quiet. But who
shall say that in this silence, in this hovering wan light, in this air
bereft of wings, and of all scent save freshness, there is less of the
ineffable, less of that before which words are dumb?
It is strange how this tranquillity of night, that seems so final, is
inhabited, if one keeps still enough. A lamb is bleating out there on
the dim moor; a bird somewhere, a little one, about three fields away,
makes the sweetest kind of chirruping; some cows are still cropping.
There is a scent, too, underneath the freshness-sweet-brier, I think,
and our Dutch honeysuckle; nothing else could so delicately twine
itself with air. And even in this darkness the roses have colour, more
beautiful perhaps than ever. If colour be, as they say, but the effect
of light on various fibre, one may think of it as a tune, the song of
thanksgiving that each form puts forth, to sun and moon and stars and
fire. These moon-coloured roses are singing a most quiet song. I see all
of a sudden that there are many more stars beside that one so red and
watchful. The flown kite is there with its seven pale worlds; it has
adventured very high and far to-night-with a company of others remoter
still. . . .
This serenity of night! What could seem less likely ever more to move,
and change again to day? Surely now the world has found its long sleep;
and the pearly glimmer from the moon will last, and the precious silence
never again yield to clamour; the grape-bloom of this mystery never more
pale out into gold . . . .
And yet it is not so. The nightly miracle has passed. It is dawn. Faint
light has come. I am waiting for the first sound. The sky as yet is
like nothing but grey paper, with the shadows of wild geese passing.
The trees are phantoms. And then it comes—that first call of a bird,
startled at discovering day! Just one call—and now, here, there, on all
the trees, the sudden answers swelling, of that most sweet and careless
choir. Was irresponsibility ever so divine as this, of birds waking?
Then—saffron into the sky, and once more silence! What is it birds do
after the first Chorale? Think of their sins and business? Or just sleep
again? The trees are fast dropping unreality, and the cuckoos begin
calling. Colour is burning up in the flowers already; the dew smells of
them.
The miracle is ended, for the starling has begun its job; and the sun is
fretting those dark, busy wings with gold. Full day has come again. But
the face of it is a little strange, it is not like yesterday. Queer-to
think, no day is like to a day that's past and no night like a night
that's coming! Why, then, fear death, which is but night? Why care,
if next day have different face and spirit? The sun has lighted
buttercup-field now, the wind touches the lime-tree. Something passes
over me away up there.
It is Felicity on her wings!
1912.
CONCERNING LETTERS
A NOVELIST'S ALLEGORY
Once upon a time the Prince of Felicitas had occasion to set forth on a
journey. It was a late autumn evening with few pale stars and a moon
no larger than the paring of a finger-nail. And as he rode through the
purlieus of his city, the white mane of his amber-coloured steed was all
that he could clearly see in the dusk of the high streets. His way led
through a quarter but little known to him, and he was surprised to find
that his horse, instead of ambling forward with his customary gentle
vigour, stepped carefully from side to side, stopping now and then
to curve his neck and prick his ears —as though at some thing of fear
unseen in the darkness; while on either hand creatures could be heard
rustling and scuttling, and little cold draughts as of wings fanned the
rider's cheeks.
The Prince at last turned in his saddle, but so great was the darkness
that he could not even see his escort.
“What is the name of this street?” he said.
“Sire, it is called the Vita Publica.”
“It is very dark.” Even as he spoke his horse staggered, but, recovering
its foothold with an effort, stood trembling violently. Nor could all
the incitements of its master induce the beast again to move forward.
“Is there no one with a lanthorn in this street?” asked the Prince.
His attendants began forthwith to call out loudly for any one who had
a lanthorn. Now, it chanced that an old man sleeping in a hovel on a
pallet of straw was, awakened by these cries. When he heard that it was
the Prince of Felicitas himself, he came hastily, carrying his lanthorn,
and stood trembling beside the Prince's horse. It was so dark that the
Prince could not see him.
“Light your lanthorn, old man,” he said.
The old man laboriously lit his lanthorn. Its pale rays fled out on
either hand; beautiful but grim was the vision they disclosed. Tall
houses, fair court-yards, and a palm grown garden; in front of the
Prince's horse a deep cesspool, on whose jagged edges the good
beast's hoofs were planted; and, as far as the glimmer of the lanthorn
stretched, both ways down the rutted street, paving stones displaced,
and smooth tesselated marble; pools of mud, the hanging fruit of an
orange tree, and dark, scurrying shapes of monstrous rats bolting across
from house to house. The old man held the lanthorn higher; and instantly
bats flying against it would have beaten out the light but for the thin
protection of its horn sides.
The Prince sat still upon his horse, looking first at the rutted space
that he had traversed and then at the rutted space before him.
“Without a light,” he said, “this thoroughfare is dangerous. What is
your name, old man?”
“My name is Cethru,” replied the aged churl.
“Cethru!” said the Prince. “Let it be your duty henceforth to walk with
your lanthorn up and down this street all night and every night,”—and
he looked at Cethru: “Do you understand, old man, what it is you have to
do?”
The old man answered in a voice that trembled like a rusty flute:
“Aye, aye!—to walk up and down and hold my lanthorn so that folk can see
where they be going.”
The Prince gathered up his reins; but the old man, lurching forward,
touched his stirrup.
“How long be I to go on wi' thiccy job?”
“Until you die!”
Cethru held up his lanthorn, and they could see his long, thin face,
like a sandwich of dried leather, jerk and quiver, and his thin grey
hairs flutter in the draught of the bats' wings circling round the
light.
“'Twill be main hard!” he groaned; “an' my lanthorn's nowt but a poor
thing.”
With a high look, the Prince of Felicitas bent and touched the old man's
forehead.
“Until you die, old man,” he repeated; and bidding his followers to
light torches from Cethru's lanthorn, he rode on down the twisting
street. The clatter of the horses' hoofs died out in the night, and the
scuttling and the rustling of the rats and the whispers of the bats'
wings were heard again.
Cethru, left alone in the dark thoroughfare, sighed heavily; then,
spitting on his hands, he tightened the old girdle round his loins,
and slinging the lanthorn on his staff, held it up to the level of his
waist, and began to make his way along the street. His progress was but
slow, for he had many times to stop and rekindle the flame within his
lanthorn, which the bats' wings, his own stumbles, and the jostlings of
footpads or of revellers returning home, were for ever extinguishing. In
traversing that long street he spent half the night, and half the night
in traversing it back again. The saffron swan of dawn, slow swimming up
the sky-river between the high roof-banks, bent her neck down through
the dark air-water to look at him staggering below her, with his still
smoking wick. No sooner did Cethru see that sunlit bird, than with a
great sigh of joy he sat him down, and at once fell asleep.