THE CHARACTER OF QUOODLE
THERE lay about in Lord Ivywood’s numerous gardens, terraces, outhouses,
stable yards and similar places, a dog that came to be called by the
name of Quoodle. Lord Ivywood did not call him Quoodle. Lord Ivywood was
almost physically incapable of articulating such sounds. Lord Ivywood
did not care for dogs. He cared for the Cause of dogs, of course; and he
cared still more for his own intellectual self-respect and consistency.
He would never have permitted a dog in his house to be physically
ill-treated; nor, for that matter, a rat; nor, for that matter, even a
man. But if Quoodle was not physically ill-treated, he was at least
socially neglected, and Quoodle did not like it. For dogs care for
companionship more than for kindness itself.
Lord Ivywood would probably have sold the dog, but he consulted experts
(as he did on everything he didn’t understand and many things that he
did), and the impression he gathered from them was that the dog,
technically considered, would fetch very little; mostly, it seemed,
because of the mixture of qualities that it possessed. It was a sort of
mongrel bull-terrier, but with rather too much of the bull-dog; and this
fact seemed to weaken its price as much as it strengthened its jaw. His
Lordship also gained a hazy impression that the dog might have been
valuable as a watch-dog if it had not been able to follow game like a
pointer; and that even in the latter walk of life it would always be
discredited by an unfortunate talent for swimming as well as a
retriever. But Lord Ivywood’s impressions may very well have been
slightly confused, as he was probably thinking about the Black stone of
Mecca, or some such subject at the moment. The victim of this
entanglement of virtues, therefore, still lay about in the sunlight of
Ivywood, exhibiting no general result of that entanglement except the
most appalling ugliness.
Now Lady Joan Brett did appreciate dogs. It was the whole of her type
and a great deal of her tragedy that all that was natural in her was
still alive under all that was artificial; and she could smell hawthorn
or the sea as far off as a dog can smell his dinner. Like most
aristocrats she would carry cynicism almost to the suburbs of the city
of Satan; she was quite as irreligious as Lord Ivywood, or rather more.
She could be quite equally frigid or supercilious when she felt
inclined. And in the great social talent of being tired, she could beat
him any day of the week. But the difference remained in spite of her
sophistries and ambitions; that her elemental communications were not
cut, and his were. For her the sunrise was still the rising of a sun,
and not the turning on of a light by a convenient cosmic servant. For
her the Spring was really the Season in the country, and not merely the
Season in town. For her cocks and hens were natural appendages to an
English house; and not (as Lord Ivywood had proved to her from an
encyclopædia) animals of Indian origin, recently imported by Alexander
the Great. And so for her a dog was a dog, and not one of the higher
animals, nor one of the lower animals, nor something that had the
sacredness of life, nor something that ought to be muzzled, nor
something that ought not to be vivisected. She knew that in every
practical sense proper provision would be made for the dog; as, indeed,
provision was made for the yellow dogs in Constantinople by Abdul Hamid,
whose life Lord Ivywood was writing for the _Progressive Potentates_
series. Nor was she in the least sentimental about the dog or anxious to
turn him into a pet. It simply came natural to her in passing to rub all
his hair the wrong way and call him something which she instantly
forgot.
The man who was mowing the garden lawn looked up for a moment, for he
had never seen the dog behave in exactly that way before. Quoodle arose,
shook himself, and trotted on in front of the lady, leading her up an
iron side staircase, of which, as it happened, she had never made use
before. It was then, most probably, that she first took any special
notice of him; and her pleasure, like that which she took in the sublime
prophet from Turkey, was of a humorous character. For the complex
quadruped had retained the bow legs of the bull-dog; and, seen from
behind, reminded her ridiculously of a swaggering little Major waddling
down to his Club.
The dog and the iron stairway between them led her into a series of long
rooms, one opening into the other. They formed part of what she had
known in earlier days as the disused Wing of Ivywood House, which had
been neglected or shut up, probably because it bore some defacements
from the fancies of the mad ancestor, the memory of whom the present
Lord Ivywood did not think helpful to his own political career. But it
seemed to Joan that there were indications of a recent attempt to
rehabilitate the place. There was a pail of whitewash in one of the
empty rooms, a step-ladder in another, here and there a curtain rod, and
at last, in the fourth room a curtain. It hung all alone on the old
woodwork, but it was a very gorgeous curtain, being a kind of
orange-gold relieved with wavy bars of crimson, which somehow seemed to
suggest the very spirit and presence of serpents, though they had
neither eyes nor mouths among them.
In the next of the endless series of rooms she came upon a kind of
ottoman, striped with green and silver standing alone on the bare floor.
She sat down on it from a mixed motive of fatigue and of impudence, for
she dimly remembered a story which she had always thought one of the
funniest in the world, about a lady only partly initiated in Theosophy
who had been in the habit of resting on a similar object, only to
discover afterward that it was a Mahatma, covered with his eastern
garment and prostrate and rigid in ecstasy. She had no hopes of sitting
on a Mahatma herself, but the very thought of it made her laugh, because
it would make Lord Ivywood look such a fool. She was not sure whether
she liked or disliked Lord Ivywood, but she felt quite certain that it
would gratify her to make him look a fool. The moment she had sat down
on the ottoman, the dog, who had been trotting beside her, sat down
also, and on the edge of her skirt.
After a minute or two she rose (and the dog rose), and she looked yet
farther down that long perspective of large rooms, in which men like
Phillip Ivywood forget that they are only men. The next was more ornate
and the next yet more so; it was plain that the scheme of decoration
that was in progress had been started at the other end. She could now
see that the long lane ended in rooms that from afar off looked like the
end of a kaleidoscope, rooms like nests made only from humming birds or
palaces built of fixed fireworks. Out of this furnace of fragmentary
colours she saw Ivywood advancing toward her, with his black suit and
his white face accented by the contrast. His lips were moving, for he
was talking to himself, as many orators do. He did not seem to see her,
and she had to strangle a subconscious and utterly senseless cry, “He is
blind!”
The next moment he was welcoming her intrusion with the well-bred
surprise and rather worldly simplicity suitable to such a case, and Joan
fancied she understood why his face had seemed a little bleaker and
blinder than usual. It was by contrast. He was carrying clutched to his
forefinger, as his ancestors might have carried a falcon clutched to the
wrist, a small bright coloured semi-tropical bird, the expression of
whose head, neck and eye was the very opposite of his own. Joan thought
she had never seen a living creature with a head so lively and
insulting. Its provocative eye and pointed crest seemed to be offering
to fight fifty game-cocks. It was no wonder (she told herself) that by
the side of this gaudy gutter-snipe with feathers Ivywood’s
faint-coloured hair and frigid face looked like the hair and face of a
corpse walking.
“You’ll never know what this is,” said Ivywood, in his most charming
manner. “You’ve heard of him a hundred times and never had a notion of
what he was. This is the Bulbul.”
“I never knew,” replied Joan. “I am afraid I never cared. I always
thought it was something like a nightingale.”
“Ah, yes,” answered Ivywood, “but this is the real Bulbul peculiar to
the East, _Pycnonotus Hæmorrhous_. You are thinking of _Daulias
Golzii_.”
“I suppose I am,” replied Lady Joan with a faint smile. “It is an
obsession. When shall I not be thinking of Daulias Galsworthy? Was it
Galsworthy?” Then feeling quite touched by the soft austerity of her
companion’s face, she caressed the gaudy and pugnacious bird with one
finger and said, “It’s a dear little thing.”
The quadruped intimately called Quoodle did not approve of all this at
all. Like most dogs, he liked to be with human beings when they were
silent, and he extended a magnificent toleration to them as long as they
were talking to each other. But conversational attention paid to any
other animal at all remote from a mongrel bull-terrier wounded Mr.
Quoodle in his most sensitive and gentlemanly feelings. He emitted a
faint growl. Joan, with all the instincts that were in her, bent down
and pulled his hair about once more, and felt the instant necessity of
diverting the general admiration from _Pycnonotus Hæmorrhous_. She
turned it to the decoration at the end of the refurnished wing; for they
had already come to the last of the long suite of rooms, which ended in
some unfinished but exquisite panelling in white and coloured woods,
inlaid in the oriental manner. At one corner the whole corridor ended by
curving into a round turret chamber overlooking the landscape; and which
Joan, who had known the house in childhood, was sure was an innovation.
On the other hand a black gap, still left in the lower left-hand corner
of the oriental woodwork, suddenly reminded her of something she had
forgotten.
“Surely,” she said (after much mere æsthetic ecstasy), “there used to be
a staircase there, leading to the old kitchen garden, or the old chapel
or something.”
Ivywood nodded gravely. “Yes,” he said, “it did lead to the ruins of a
Mediæval Chapel, as you say. The truth is it led to several things that
I cannot altogether consider a credit to the family in these days. All
that scandal and joking about the unsuccessful tunnel (your mother may
have told you of it), well, it did us no good in the County, I’m afraid;
so as it’s a mere scrap of land bordering on the sea, I’ve fenced it off
and let it grow wild. But I’m boarding up the end of the room here for
quite another reason. I want you to come and see it.”
He led her into the round corner turret in which the new architecture
ended, and Joan, with her thirst for the beautiful, could not stifle a
certain thrill of beatitude at the prospect. Five open windows of a
light and exquisite Saracenic outline looked out over the bronze and
copper and purple of the Autumn parks and forests to the peacock colours
of the sea. There was neither house nor living thing in sight, and,
familiar as she had been with that coast, she knew she was looking out
from a new angle of vision on a new landscape of Ivywood.
“You can write sonnets?” said Ivywood with something more like emotion
in his voice than she had ever heard in it. “What comes first into your
mind with these open windows?”
“I know what you mean,” said Joan after a silence. “The same hath
oft....”
“Yes,” he said. “That is how I felt ... of perilous seas in fairy lands
forlorn.”
There was another silence and the dog sniffed round and round the
circular turret chamber.
“I want it to be like that,” said Ivywood in a low and singularly moved
intonation. “I want this to be the end of the house. I want this to be
the end of the world. Don’t you feel that is the real beauty of all this
eastern art; that it is coloured like the edges of things, like the
little clouds of morning and the islands of the blest? Do you know,” and
he lowered his voice yet more, “it has the power over me of making me
feel as if I were myself absent and distant; some oriental traveller who
was lost and for whom men were looking. When I see that greenish lemon
yellow enamel there let into the white, I feel that I am standing
thousands of leagues from where I stand.”
“You are right,” said Joan, looking at him with some wonder, “I have
felt like that myself.”
“This art,” went on Ivywood as in a dream, “does indeed take the wings
of the morning and abide in the uttermost parts of the sea. They say it
contains no form of life, but surely we can read its alphabet as easily
as the red hieroglyphics of sunrise and sunset which are on the fringes
of the robe of God.”
“I never heard you talk like that before,” said the lady, and again
stroked the vivid violet feathers of the small eastern bird.
Mr. Quoodle could stand it no longer. He had evidently formed a very low
opinion of the turret chamber and of oriental art generally, but seeing
Joan’s attention once more transferred to his rival, he trotted out into
the longer room, and finding the gap in the woodwork which was soon to
be boarded up, but which still opened on an old dark staircase, he went
“galumphing” down the stairs.
Lord Ivywood gently placed the bird on the girl’s own finger, and went
to one of the open windows, leaning out a little.
“Look here,” he said, “doesn’t this express what we both feel? Isn’t
this the sort of fairy-tale house that ought to hang on the last wall of
the world?”
And he motioned her to the window-sill, just outside which hung the
bird’s empty cage, beautifully wrought in brass or some of the yellow
metals.
“Why that is the best of all!” cried Lady Joan. “It makes one feel as if
it really were the Arabian Nights. As if this were a tower of the
gigantic Genii with turrets up to the moon; and this were an enchanted
Prince caged in a golden palace suspended by the evening star.”
Something stirred in her dim but teeming subconsciousness, something
like a chill or change like that by which we half know that weather has
altered, or distant and unnoticed music suddenly ceased.
“Where is the dog?” she asked suddenly.
Ivywood turned with a mild, grey eye.
“Was there a dog here?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Lady Joan Brett, and gave him back the bird, which he
restored carefully to its cage.
* * * * *
The dog after whom she inquired had in truth trundled down a dark,
winding staircase and turned into the daylight, into a part of the
garden he had never seen before; nor, indeed, had anybody else for some
time past. It was altogether tangled and overgrown with weeds, and the
only trace of human handiwork, the wreck of an old Gothic Chapel, stood
waist high in numberless nettles and soiled with crawling fungoids. Most
of these merely discoloured the grey crumbling stone with shades of
bronze or brown; but some of them, particularly on the side farthest
from the house, were of orange or purple tints almost bright enough for
Lord Ivywood’s oriental decoration. Some fanciful eyes that fell on the
place afterward found something like an allegory in those graven and
broken saints or archangels feeding such fiery and ephemeral parasites
as those toadstools like blood or gold. But Mr. Quoodle had never set
himself up as an allegorist, and he merely trotted deeper and deeper
into the grey-green English jungle. He grumbled very much at the
thistles and nettles, much as a city man will grumble at the jostling of
a crowd. But he continued to press forward, with his nose near the
ground, as if he had already smelt something that interested him. And,
indeed, he had smelt something in which a dog, except on special
occasions, is much more interested than he is in dogs. Breaking through
a last barrier of high and hoary purple thistles he came out on a
semicircle of somewhat clearer ground, dotted with slender trees, and
having, by way of back scene, the brown brick arch of an old tunnel. The
tunnel was boarded up with a very irregular fence or mask made of motley
wooden lathes, and looked, somehow, rather like a pantomime cottage. In
front of this a sturdy man in very shabby shooting clothes was standing
attending to a battered old frying-pan which he held over a rather
irregular flame which, small as it was, smelt strongly of burnt rum. In
the frying-pan, and also on the top of a cask or barrel that served for
a table hard by, were a number of the grey, brown, and even orange fungi
which were plastered over the stone angels and dragons of the fallen
chapel.
“Hullo, old man,” said the person in the shooting jacket with
tranquillity and without looking up from his cooking. “Come to pay us a
visit? Come along then.” He flashed one glance at the dog and returned
to the frying pan. “If your tail were two inches shorter, you’d be worth
a hundred pounds. Had any breakfast?”
The dog trotted across to him and began nosing and sniffing round his
dilapidated leather gaiters. The man did not interrupt his cookery, on
which his eyes were fixed and both his hands were busy; but he crooked
his knee and foot so as to caress the quadruped in a nerve under the
angle of the jaw, the stimulation of which (as some men of science have
held) is for a dog what a good cigar is for a man. At the same moment a
huge voice like on ogre’s came from within the masked tunnel, calling
out, “And who are ye talking to?”
A very crooked kind of window in the upper part of the pantomime cottage
burst open and an enormous head, with erect, startling, and almost
scarlet hair and blue eyes as big as a bullfrog’s, was thrust out above
the scene.
“Hump,” cried the ogre. “Me moral counsels have been thrown away. In the
last week I’ve sung you fourteen and a half songs of me own composition;
instead of which you go about stealing dogs. You’re following in the
path of Parson Whats-his-name in every way, I’m afraid.”
“No,” said the man with the frying pan, impartially, “Parson Whitelady
struck a very good path for doubling on Pebblewick, that I was glad to
follow. But I think he was quite silly to steal dogs. He was young and
brought up pious. I know too much about dogs to steal one.”
“Well,” asked the large red-haired man, “and how do you get a dog like
that?”
“I let him steal me,” said the person stirring the pan. And indeed the
dog was sitting erect and even arrogant at his feet, as if he was a
watch-dog at a high salary, and had been there before the building of
the tunnel.
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