Somewhere about the year 1560 this tranquil and beautiful country
was devastated by a plague which carried off hundreds of its sparse
inhabitants, and left many villages desolate. The legends of the
countryside tell of places in which no human life remained.
The people of Janenne, headed by the _doyen_, made a pilgrimage in
procession to the shrine of Our Lady of Lorette, and offered to strike a
bargain. They promised that if Janenne should be spared from the
plague they and their descendants for ever would each year repeat that
procession in honour of Our Lady of Lorette, and that once in seven
years they would appear under arms and fire a salvo. Whether in
consequence of this arrangement or not, Janenne escaped the plague, and
from that year to this the promised procession has never been forgotten.
In course of time it became less the local mode than it had been to
carry arms, and nowadays the great septennial procession can only be
gone through after a prodigious deal of drilling and preparation.
A week or two after my arrival the villagers began to train, under
the conduct of a stout military-looking personage, who had been in the
Belgian cavalry and _gendarmerie_, and was now in honourable
retirement from war’s alarms as a grocer. He traded under the name of
Dorn-Casart--the wife’s maiden name being tacked to his own, after the
manner of the country. This habit, by the way, gives a certain flavour
of aristocracy to the trading names over even the smallest shop windows.
‘Coqueline-Walhaert, _negotiant_,’ is the sign over the establishment
wherein a very infirm old woman sells centimes’ worth of sweetstuff to
the _jeunesse_ of Janenne, whilst her husband works at the quarries.
Monsieur Dorn is a man with a huge moustache, fat cheeks streaked with
scarlet lines on a bilious groundwork, and a voice raspy with much
Geneva and the habit of command. He rides with the unmistakable seat of
an old cavalry man, and his behaviour on horseback was a marked contrast
to that of the mounted contingent he drilled every day in the open
place in front of the hotel. His steed, artfully stimulated by the spur,
caracoled, danced, and lashed out with his hind feet, and Monsieur Dorn,
with one fist stuck against his own fat ribs, swayed to the motion with
admirable nonchalance. His voice, which has the barky tone inseparable
from military command, would ring about the square like the voice of a
commander-in-chief, and by the exercise of a practised imagination, I
could almost persuade myself that I stood face to face with the horrid
front of war.
When Monsieur Dorn was not drilling his brigade he was generally to be
found at the Café de la Regence, smoking a huge meerschaum with a cherry
wood stem and sipping Geneva. Even in this comparative retirement the
halo of his office clung about him, and seemed to hold men oflf from a
too familiar intercourse; but one afternoon I saw him unbending there.
He was nearly always accompanied by a dog, spotlessly white, the most
ladylike of her species I remember to have seen. Her jet-black beady
eyes and jet-black glittering nose set oflf the snowy whiteness of her
coat, and were in turn set off by it. She had a refined, coquettish,
mincing walk, which alone was enough to bespeak the agreeable sense she
had of her own charms. Perhaps a satiric observer of manners might
have thought her more like a lady’s-maid than a lady. A suggestion of
pertness in her beady eyes, and a certain superciliousness of bearing
were mingled with a coquetry not displeasing to one who surveyed her
from the human height. To look important is pretty generally to feel
important, but is, by no means, to be important. We discern this fact
with curious clearness when we look at other people, but it is nowhere
quite so evident as in what we call the brute creation. (As if we didn’t
belong to it!) Perhaps there are intelligences who look at us with just
such a pitying amusement and analysis--_our_ prosperous relatives, who
started earlier in the race of life than we did, and met with better
chances.
In spite of airs and graces, natural and acquired, Lil’s claims to
purity of race were small, though, like my older acquaintance, Schwartz,
she was more a broken-haired terrier than anything else. Schwartz was
simply and purely _bourgeois_. He had no airs and no pretensions; but
Lil, whatever her genuine claims may have been, was of another stamp and
fashion.
It was Lil who was the cause of Monsieur Dorn’s unbending. The fat old
_gendarme_ was putting her through a set of tricks, which she executed
with complete _aplomb_ and intelligence. There was nothing violent in
these exercises; nothing a dog of the best breeding in the world could
have felt to derogate from dignity. She was much petted and applauded
for her performances, and was rewarded by two or three lumps of sugar,
which she ate without any of the vulgar haste characteristic of most
dogs in their dealings with sweetmeats.
The language of the peasantry hereabouts is that same Walloon tongue
in which old Froissart wrote his _Chronicles_. It is little more
comprehensible to the average Frenchman than to the average Englishman,
but its vocabulary is restricted, and the people who talk it have
enriched (or corrupted) it with many words of French. When the loungers
in the _café_ began to talk, as they did presently, it amused me to
listen to this unknown tongue; and whenever I heard ‘_la procession_’
named, I enjoyed much the kind of refreshment Mr. Gargery experienced
when he encountered a J.O., Jo, in the course of his general reading.
_La procession_ was not merely the staple of the village talk, but the
warp and woof of it, and any intruding strand of foreign fancy was
cut short at the dips of him who strove to spin it into the web of
conversation. I myself ventured an inquiry or two, for all but the
most ignorant speak French of a sort. Monsieur Dorn accepted a glass of
_pequet_ at my request (a fire-water, for a dose of which one halfpenny
is charged, and upon which the unaccustomed stranger may intoxicate
himself madly at an outlay of five-pence), and the fat and stately old
fellow told me all about the origin and meaning of the pious form the
village was then preparing to fulfil. He made the kindest allowance
for my limited powers of speech, and bounteously fed my native sense of
retiring humility with patronage.
The door of the _café_ was open to the mild, fir-scented December air,
though a crackling fire burnt noisily in the thin-ribbed stove. Lil
made occasional excursions to the open doorway, looking out upon the
passers-by with a keen alertness. She had some time returned from one of
these inspections, and had curled herself at her master’s feet, when I
heard a singular and persistent tapping upon the unclothed floor, and
looking round caught sight of my friend Schwartz, who was making a
crouching and timid progress toward us, and was wagging his cropped tail
with such vehemence that it sounded on the boards like a light hammer
on a carpeted flooring. At first I fancied that he recognised me, and
I held out to him an encouraging hand, of which he took no notice. That
air of propitiatory humility which I had seen in him when we had first
encountered on Lorette was exaggerated to a slavish adulation. There
is no living creature but a dog who would not have been ashamed to
show such a mixture of transport and self-depreciation. He fawned, he
writhed, he rapped his tail upon the floor in a sustained _crescendo_.
The dumb heart had no language for its own delight and humility. Anybody
who takes pleasure in dogs has seen the _sort_ of thing scores
and scores of times. It was the quality of intensity which made it
remarkable in Schwartz.
Lil, for whom this display of joy and humbleness was made, was
altogether unmoved by it. She was not merely regardless of it, but
ostentatiously disdainful. She took a coquettish lady’s-maidish amble to
the door, passing Schwartz by the way, and yawned as she looked out upon
the street. Schwartz fawned after her to the door, and with a second
yawn she repassed him, and returned to lie at the feet of the fat old
_gendarme_. The absurd little drama of coquetry and worship went on
until the old fellow arose with a friendly _bon jour_, to me, and a
whistle to Lil, who followed him with a supercilious nose in the air.
The despised Schwartz stood a while, and then set out after her at a
ridiculous three-legged run, but before he had gone ten yards he stopped
short, looked after the retreating fair in silence, and then walked off
with a dispirited aspect in the opposite direction.
So far as I could tell, my shadowy enemy with the axe had taken himself
away for good and all, but I was so fearful of recalling him that I kept
altogether idle, and in other respects nursed and coddled myself with a
constant assiduity. But it is a hard thing for a man who has accustomed
himself to constant mental employment to go without it, and in the
absence of pens, ink, and paper, books and journals, the procession bade
fair to be a perfect godsend. Even when the inhabitants of the village
took to rising at four o’clock in the morning, and fanfaronaded with
ill-blown bugles, and flaring torches, and a dreadful untiring drum
about the street, I forbore to grumble, and when on Sundays they turned
out in a body after mass to see their own military section drilled in
the _Place_ of the Hotel de Ville, one bored valetudinarian welcomed
them heartily. The military section had got down uniforms from one of
the Brussels theatres,--busbies and helmets, and the gloriously comic
hats of the _garde civile_,--dragoon tunics, hussar jackets, infantry
shell-jackets, cavalry stable-jackets, foresters’ boots, dragoon
jack-boots, stage piratical boots with wide tops to fit the thigh that
drooped about the ankles,--trousers of every sort, from blue broadcloth,
gold-striped, to the homely fustian,--and a rare show they made.
They went fours right or fours left with a fine military jangle, and
sometimes went fours right and fours left at the same time, with results
disastrous to military order. Then it was good to see and hear the fat
Dorn as he caracoled in a field-marshal’s uniform, and barked his orders
at the disordered crowd like a field-marshal to the manner born.
Monsieur Dorn being thus gloriously lifted into the range of the public
eye, Lil seemed to take added airs of importance. I say _seemed_, but
that is only because of the foolish and ignorant habit into which I was
born and educated. Ever since I can remember, people have been telling
stories to prove that dogs have some sort of intelligence, as if--except
to the most stupid and the blindest--the thing had ever stood in need
of proof. There is nothing much more fatal to the apprehension of a fact
than the constant causeless repetition of it. And then the tales of
the intelligence of dogs are told as a general thing with a sort of
wide-eyed wonder, so that the dog’s very advocates contrive to impress
their readers with the belief that their commonplace bit of history is
remarkable.
Of course there are clever dogs and dull dogs, just as there are
sages and idiots, but any dog who was not a fool would have known and
recognised his master’s splendour and importance if he had belonged
at this epoch to Monsieur Dorn. Lil saw him sitting up there in vivid
colours, heard him shouting in a voice of authority, and saw people
answer to that voice There was not a Christian in the crowd who had a
better understanding of the situation. To see her running in and out
amongst the horses’ feet, ordering the sham dragoons and hussars about
in her own language, was to know she understood the thing, and had
invested herself with some of her master’s glory. Wherever she went,
in and out and about, Schwartz, with his meek spikes raging in all
directions, followed, close at heel. Almost everybody has seen the loud
aggressive swaggering boy with the meek admiring small boy in his train.
The small boy glorifies the other in his mind, setting him on a level
with Three-Fingered Jack, or Goliath’s conqueror, and the aggressive
boy, feeling rather than understanding the other’s reverence, does his
best to look as if he deserved it. To see Lil swagger and to hear her
bark, and to see the foolish humble Schwartz follow her, admiring her,
believing in her, utterly borne away by her insolent pretence that the
whole show was got up by her orders--to observe this was to see one half
the world in little.
On other days Lil was as other dogs, except, perhaps, to the
love-blinded eyes of Schwartz, but on Sundays, so long as the drills
for the procession lasted, the field was all her own. One or two of
her companions, carried away by her example, dared to run amongst
the horses’ feet and bark. They were promptly kicked into the ring of
spectators, and Lil was left alone in her glory. Of course it all went
with his own confiding nature, and the state of complete slavery in
which he lived, to persuade Schwartz of her greatness. She deserves at
least that one truth should be admitted. She never gave her admirer
the least encouragement so far as I could see. She never in a chance
encounter in the street paused to exchange good-morrow. She never so
much as turned a head in his direction. She tolerated his presence
and that was all. But wherever she went he shadowed her. He was not
obtrusive, but was content to keep at heel, and to be permitted to
admire. I have seen him sit for half an hour on a doorstep, a canine
monument of patience, waiting for her to come out, and I have seen her
travel about the _Place_ in apparently purposeless zigzags and circles
for the mere pride and vanity of knowing how closely he would follow her
least reasonable movements.
A week or two before the grand event came off there was a prodigious
excitement in Janenne. An idea, originating in the military spirit of
Monsieur Dorn, had been industriously put about, a subscription had been
set on foot for it, a committee had been appointed to superintend its
working, and now the glorious fancy was actually translated into fact.
The procession was to be supplemented by artillery, and now here was a
time-eaten old gun, mounted on a worm-eaten old carriage, and trailed in
harness of rope by two stalwart Flemish horses. Here also was gunpowder
enough to wreck the village, and the Janennois, who for a moral people
have a most astounding love of noise, were out at earliest dawn of light
on Sunday morning to see the gun fired. The first firing was supposed to
be an experiment, and everybody was warned to a safe distance when the
gun was loaded, whilst Monsieur Dorn arranged a train of powder, and set
a slow match in connection with it. When the bang came and the old iron
stood the strain everybody went wild with joy, and even Monsieur Dorn
himself was so carried away by the general enthusiasm that he tested
the piece all morning. It was finally discovered that the powder
was exhausted, and the hat had to be sent round again for a new
subscription.
The annual procession is far and away the greatest event of the year
at Janenne, and the septennial procession would of itself be enough to
satisfy any resident in the village that he had lived if he had but seen
it once. Nobody dreamed of spoiling the procession for the sake of a
cart-load or so of gunpowder, and the hat was soon filled. Next Sunday
Janenne enjoyed a new series of experiments on the big gun, and what
with the banging of the drum, and the blowing of the bugle, and the
flaming of torches in the dark morning, and the banging of the big gun
from dawn till noon, and the clatter and glitter of the drill in the
after part of the short winter day, the atmosphere of the village was
altogether warlike.
The big gun gave Lil an added claim on the veneration of her admirer. On
the morning of the second firing she came demurely down to the field in
which the artillery experiments were conducted, with an air of knowing
all about it, and Schwartz, as usual, pursued her. The gun was sponged
and loaded, and the charge was rammed home under Monsieur Dorn’s
supervision, Lil standing gravely by, and Schwartz grovelling in her
neighbourhood. Then the old _gendarme_ himself primed the piece,
and taking a torch from a boy who stood near him applied it to the
touch-hole. Out at the muzzle sprang the answering flame and roar,
and away went Schwartz as if he had been projected by the force of
the powder. Panic declared itself in every hair, and his usual foolish
three-legged amble was exchanged for a pace like that of a greyhound. He
had gone but a hundred yards at most, when reason resumed her seat. He
stopped and turned, and after a little pause came back with an evident
shamefacedness. Lil had stood her ground without the slightest sign of
fear, and when Schwartz returned she took to looking so triumphantly,
and superintended the subsequent operations with so much authority, that
I am profoundly convinced of her intent to persuade her slavish follower
that this was some new and astonishing form of bark of which she alone
possessed the secret.
Schwartz was most probably willing to believe anything she told him. It
is the way of some natures to confide, and it is the way of others to
presume upon their confidence.