|When I turned the key in the door and entered the cottage, I missed a
familiar sound. It was the “thump, thump, thump,” of a tail on the floor
at the foot of the stairs. I turned on the light. Yes, the place
was vacant. Chum had gone, and he would not return. I knew that the
veterinary must have called, pronounced his case hopeless, and taken him
away, and that I should hear no more his “welcome home!” at midnight. No
matter what the labours of the day had been or how profound his sleep,
he never failed to give me a cheer with the stump of his tail and to
blink his eyes sleepily as I gave him “Good dog” and a pat on the head.
Then with a huge sigh of content he would lapse back into slumber,
satisfied that the last duty of the day was done, and that all was well
with the world for the night. Now he has lapsed into sleep altogether.
I think that instead of going into the beech woods this morning I will
pay my old friend a little tribute at parting. It will ease my mind, and
in any case I should find the woods lonely to-day, for it was there that
I enjoyed his companionship most. And it was there, I think, that he
enjoyed my companionship most also. He was a little particular with whom
he went, and I fancy he preferred me to anybody. Children he declined to
go with, unless they were accompanied by a responsible grown-up person.
It was not that he did not love children. When little Peggy returned
after a longish absence his transports of joy knew no bounds. He would
leap round and round in wild circles culminating in an embrace that sent
her to the floor. For he was a big fellow, and was rather like Scott's
schoolmaster who, when he knocked young Scott down, apologised, and
explained that “he didn't know his own strength.”
But when he went into the woods Chum liked an equal to go with, and
I was the man for his money. He knew my favourite paths through the
woodlands, and flashed hither and thither to his familiar haunts, his
reddish-brown coat gleaming through the trees like an oriflamme of Pan,
and his head down to the ground like a hound on the trail. For there
was more than a hint of the hound in his varied composition. What he was
precisely no one ever could tell me. Even the veterinary gave him up.
His fine liquid brown eyes and eloquent eyebrows were pure Airedale, but
he had a nobler head than any Airedale I have known. There was a strain
of the Irish terrier in him, too, but the glory of his smooth ruddy coat
was all his own. And all his own, too, were his honest, simple heart and
his genius for friendship.
There was no cunning about the fellow, and I fancy that in dogdom he
was reckoned something of a fool. You could always tell when he had
been sleeping in the armchair that was forbidden to him by the look of
grotesque criminality that he wore. For he had an acute sense of sin,
and he was too ingenuous for concealment. He was as sentimental as a
schoolgirl, and could put as much emotion into the play of his wonderful
eyebrows as any actor that ever walked the stage. In temperament, he was
something of a pacifist. He would strike, but only under compulsion, and
when he passed the Great Dane down in the valley he was a spectacle of
abject surrender and slinking humbleness. His self-pity under pain was
ludicrous, and he exploited it as openly as a beggar exploits his sores.
You had but to speak sympathetically to him, to show any concern about
his affliction, whatever it might chance to be, and he would limp off to
the forbidden armchair with the confidence of a convalescent entitled
to any good thing that was going. And there he would lie curled up and
watchful, his eyes blinking with mingled joy at the unaccustomed luxury
and pity for the misfortune that was the source of that joy. He had the
qualities of a rather impressionable child. Scold him and he sank into
an unspeakable abyss of misery; pat him or only change the tone of your
voice and all the world was young and full of singing birds again.
He was, I fear, a snob. He had not that haughty aloofness from his kind,
that suggestion of being someone in particular which afflicts the Chow.
For him a dog was a dog whatever his pedigree, his coat, his breed, or
his colour. But in his relations to the human family he revealed more
than a little of the spirit of the flunkey. “A man's a man, for a'
that,” was not his creed. He discriminated between the people who came
to the front door and the people who came to the side door. To the
former he was systematically civil; to the latter he was frankly
hostile. “The poor in a loomp is bad,” was his fixed principle, and any
one carrying a basket, wearing an apron, clothed in a uniform was _ipso
facto_ suspect. He held, in short, to the servile philosophy of
clothes as firmly as any waiter at the Ritz or any footman in Mayfair.
Familiarity never altered his convictions. No amount of correction
affected his stubborn dislike of postmen. They offended him in many
ways. They wore uniforms; they came, nevertheless, to the front door;
they knocked with a challenging violence that revolted his sense of
propriety. In the end, the burden of their insults was too much for
him. He took a sample out of a postman's pair of trousers. Perhaps that
incident was not unconnected with his passing.
One day he limped into the garden, dragging his hindlegs painfully.
Whether he had been run over by a motor-car or had fallen back in
leaping a stile--he could take a gate with the grace of a swallow--or
had had a crack across the back with a pole we never knew. Perhaps the
latter, for he had enemies, and I am bound to say deserved to have them,
for he was a disobedient fellow, and would go where he was not wanted.
But whatever the cause he just wilted away at the hindquarters, and all
the veterinary's art was in vain. The magic word that called him to
the revels in his native woods--for he had come to us as a pup from a
cottage in the heart of the woodland country--no longer made him tense
as a drawn bow. He saw the cows in the paddock without indignation, and
left his bone unregarded. He made one or two efforts to follow me up the
hill to the woods, but at the corner of the lane turned back, crept into
the house, and lay under the table as if desiring only to forget and to
be forgotten. Now he is gone, and I am astonished to find how large a
place he filled in the circle of my friendships. If the Indian's dream
of the happy hunting ground is true, I fancy I shall find Chum there
waiting to scour the woods with me as of old.
[Illustration: 0120]
[Illustration: 0121]