Sitting out on the lawn at tea with our friend and his retriever, we had
been discussing those massacres of the helpless which had of late
occurred, and wondering that they should have been committed by the
soldiery of so civilised a State, when, in a momentary pause of our
astonishment, our friend, who had been listening in silence, crumpling
the drooping soft ear of his dog, looked up and said, "The cause of
atrocities is generally the violence of Fear. Panic's at the back of
most crimes and follies."
Knowing that his philosophical statements were always the result of
concrete instance, and that he would not tell us what that instance was
if we asked him--such being his nature--we were careful not to agree.
He gave us a look out of those eyes of his, so like the eyes of a mild
eagle, and said abruptly: "What do you say to this then? . . . I was out
in the dog-days last year with this fellow of mine, looking for Osmunda,
and stayed some days in a village--never mind the name. Coming back one
evening from my tramp, I saw some boys stoning a mealy-coloured dog. I
went up and told the young devils to stop it. They only looked at me in
the injured way boys do, and one of them called out, 'It's mad, guv'nor!'
I told them to clear off, and they took to their heels. The dog followed
me. It was a young, leggy, mild looking mongrel, cross--I should
say--between a brown retriever and an Irish terrier. There was froth
about its lips, and its eyes were watery; it looked indeed as if it might
be in distemper. I was afraid of infection for this fellow of mine, and
whenever it came too close shooed it away, till at last it slunk off
altogether. Well, about nine o'clock, when I was settling down to write
by the open window of my sitting-room--still daylight, and very quiet and
warm--there began that most maddening sound, the barking of an unhappy
dog. I could do nothing with that continual 'Yap yap!' going on, and it
was too hot to shut the window; so I went out to see if I could stop it.
The men were all at the pub, and the women just finished with their
gossip; there was no sound at all but the continual barking of this dog,
somewhere away out in the fields. I travelled by ear across three
meadows, till I came on a hay-stack by a pool of water. There was the
dog sure enough--the same mealy-coloured mongrel, tied to a stake,
yapping, and making frantic little runs on a bit of rusty chain; whirling
round and round the stake, then standing quite still, and shivering. I
went up and spoke to it, but it backed into the hay-stack, and there it
stayed shrinking away from me, with its tongue hanging out. It had been
heavily struck by something on the head; the cheek was cut, one eye
half-closed, and an ear badly swollen. I tried to get hold of it, but
the poor thing was beside itself with fear. It snapped and flew round so
that I had to give it up, and sit down with this fellow here beside me,
to try and quiet it--a strange dog, you know, will generally form his
estimate of you from the way it sees you treat another dog. I had to sit
there quite half an hour before it would let me go up to it, pull the
stake out, and lead it away. The poor beast, though it was so feeble
from the blows it had received, was still half-frantic, and I didn't dare
to touch it; and all the time I took good care that this fellow here
didn't come too near. Then came the question what was to be done. There
was no vet, of course, and I'd no place to put it except my sitting-room,
which didn't belong to me. But, looking at its battered head, and its
half-mad eyes, I thought: 'No trusting you with these bumpkins; you'll
have to come in here for the night!' Well, I got it in, and heaped two or
three of those hairy little red rugs landladies are so fond of, up in a
corner; and got it on to them, and put down my bread and milk. But it
wouldn't eat--its sense of proportion was all gone, fairly destroyed by
terror. It lay there moaning, and every now and then it raised its head
with a 'yap' of sheer fright, dreadful to hear, and bit the air, as if
its enemies were on it again; and this fellow of mine lay in the opposite
corner, with his head on his paw, watching it. I sat up for a long time
with that poor beast, sick enough, and wondering how it had come to be
stoned and kicked and battered into this state; and next day I made it my
business to find out."
Our friend paused, scanned us a little angrily, and then went on: "It had
made its first appearance, it seems, following a bicyclist. There are
men, you know--save the mark--who, when their beasts get ill or too
expensive, jump on their bicycles and take them for a quick run, taking
care never to look behind them. When they get back home they say:
'Hallo! where's Fido?' Fido is nowhere, and there's an end! Well, this
poor puppy gave up just as it got to our village; and, roaming shout in
search of water, attached itself to a farm labourer. The man with
excellent intentions--as he told me himself--tried to take hold of it,
but too abruptly, so that it was startled, and snapped at him. Whereon
he kicked it for a dangerous cur, and it went drifting back toward the
village, and fell in with the boys coming home from school. It thought,
no doubt, that they were going to kick it too, and nipped one of them who
took it by the collar. Thereupon they hullabalooed and stoned it down the
road to where I found them. Then I put in my little bit of torture, and
drove it away, through fear of infection to my own dog. After that it
seems to have fallen in with a man who told me: 'Well, you see, he came
sneakin' round my house, with the children playin', and snapped at them
when they went to stroke him, so that they came running in to their
mother, an' she' called to me in a fine takin' about a mad dog. I ran out
with a shovel and gave 'im one, and drove him out. I'm sorry if he
wasn't mad, he looked it right enough; you can't be too careful with
strange dogs.' Its next acquaintance was an old stone-breaker, a very
decent sort. 'Well! you see,' the old man explained to me, 'the dog came
smellin' round my stones, an' it wouldn' come near, an' it wouldn' go
away; it was all froth and blood about the jaw, and its eyes glared green
at me. I thought to meself, bein' the dog-days--I don't like the look o'
you, you look funny! So I took a stone, an' got it here, just on the
ear; an' it fell over. And I thought to meself: Well, you've got to
finish it, or it'll go bitin' somebody, for sure! But when I come to it
with my hammer, the dog it got up--an' you know how it is when there's
somethin' you've 'alf killed, and you feel sorry, and yet you feel you
must finish it, an' you hit at it blind, you hit at it agen an' agen.
The poor thing, it wriggled and snapped, an' I was terrified it'd bite
me, an' some'ow it got away."' Again our friend paused, and this time we
dared not look at him.
"The next hospitality it was shown," he went on presently, "was by a
farmer, who, seeing it all bloody, drove it off, thinking it had been
digging up a lamb that he'd just buried. The poor homeless beast came
sneaking back, so he told his men to get rid of it. Well, they got hold
of it somehow--there was a hole in its neck that looked as if they'd used
a pitchfork--and, mortally afraid of its biting them, but not liking, as
they told me, to drown it, for fear the owner might come on them, they
got a stake and a chain, and fastened it up, and left it in the water by
the hay-stack where I found it. I had some conversation with that
farmer. 'That's right,' he said, 'but who was to know? I couldn't have
my sheep worried. The brute had blood on his muzzle. These curs do a
lot of harm when they've once been blooded. You can't run risks."' Our
friend cut viciously at a dandelion with his stick. "Run risks!" he
broke out suddenly: "That was it from beginning to end of that poor
beast's sufferings, fear! From that fellow on the bicycle, afraid of the
worry and expense, as soon as it showed signs of distemper, to myself and
the man with the pitch fork--not one of us, I daresay, would have gone
out of our way to do it--a harm. But we felt fear, and so by the law of
self-preservation, or what ever you like--it all began, till there the
poor thing was, with a battered head and a hole in its neck, ravenous
with hunger, and too distraught even to lap my bread and milk. Yes, and
there's something uncanny about a suffering animal--we sat watching it,
and again we were afraid, looking at its eyes and the way it bit the air.
Fear! It's the black godmother of all damnable things!"
Our friend bent down, crumpling and crumpling at his dog's ears. We,
too, gazed at the ground, thinking of, that poor lost puppy, and the
horrible inevitability of all that happens, seeing men are what they are;
thinking of all the foul doings in the world, whose black godmother is
Fear.
"And what became of the poor dog?" one of us asked at last.
"When," said our friend slowly, "I'd had my fill of watching, I covered
it with a rug, took this fellow away with me, and went to bed. There was
nothing else to do. At dawn I was awakened by three dreadful cries--not
like a dog's at all. I hurried down. There was the poor beast--wriggled
out from under the rug-stretched on its side, dead. This fellow of mine
had followed me in, and he went and sat down by the body. When I spoke
to him he just looked round, and wagged his tail along the ground, but
would not come away; and there he sat till it was buried, very
interested, but not sorry at all."
Our friend was silent, looking angrily at something in the distance.
And we, too, were silent, seeing in spirit that vigil of early morning:
The thin, lifeless, sandy-coloured body, stretched on those red mats; and
this black creature--now lying at our feet--propped on its haunches like
the dog in "The Death of Procris," patient, curious, ungrieved, staring
down at it with his bright, interested eyes.
1912.
End of Project Gutenberg's Inn of Tranquility and Other Essays,
by John Galsworthy