"All the sweet wavy
Beauty of Davy,"
or Winifred Letts' apostrophe to the debonair collie Scott, or Hilton
Brown's tenderest of farewells to his Scotch terrier, Hamish.
"In the nether spaces
Will the soul of a Little Black Dog despair?
Will the Quiet Folk scare him with shadow-faces?
And how will he tackle the Strange Beasts there?
Tail held high, I'll warrant, and bristling,
Marching stoutly if sore afraid,
Padding it steadily, softly whistling;--
That's how the Little Black Devil was made."
Sigurd lived too early to take part in the Free Verse controversy, but
he evinced an open mind on matters metrical in that he liked Lord
Byron's inscription for his Newfoundland Boatswain no better than Lord
Eldon's for his Newfoundland Caesar. It was Sir William Watson's famous
quatrain, _An Epitaph_, that affected him most keenly, because it
invited emphasis on the one word that always brought him springing to
his feet.
"His friends he loved. His fellest earthly foes
--Cats--I believe he did but feign to hate.
My hand will miss the insinuated nose,
Mine eyes the tail that wagged contempt at Fate."
As Sigurd was duly shown _Canis Major_ in the ethereal heavens, so was
he introduced to certain starry dogs that shine in the skies of English
poetry,--the pampered "smale houndes" of Chaucer's Prioress, King
Lear's elegant little "Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart," dear, clownish
Crab, and all that pack of rich-voiced hunting hounds whose "gallant
chiding" rings through Elizabethan literature. The boy Will Shakespeare
must often have hearkened to the hounds, "match'd in mouth like bells,"
coursing the Cotswolds, Silver and Belman and Sweetlips and Echo, their
heads hung "with ears that sweep away the morning dew," the "speed of
the cry" outrunning his "sense of hearing."
Sigurd was but mildly interested when we told him that in George
Eliot's novels there were over fifty dogs, ranging all the way from pug
to mastiff, nor did he care greatly for Dickens' dogs, not even
blundering, ill-favored, clumsy, "bullet-headed" Diogenes, Florence
Dombey's comforter, nor the bandy leader of Jerry's dancing troupe,
who, because of a lost half-penny, had to grind out Old Hundred on the
barrel-organ while his companions devoured their supper--and his; but
Scott's dogs, from fleet Lufra of _The Lady of the Lake_ to the Dandy
Dinmonts of _Guy Mannering_,--"There's auld Pepper and auld Mustard,
and young Pepper and young Mustard, and little Pepper and little
Mustard"--made him blink and prick up his ears. Thus encouraged, I
would tell him of Sir Walter's love for all his home dogs and most of
all for the tall stag-hound Maida; how Herrick wept for his spaniel
Tracy; how Southey grieved when his "poor old friend" Phillis, another
spaniel, was drowned; how Landor delighted in dogs from the boyhood
when he boxed with Captain behind the coach house door to the extreme
old age whose loneliness was solaced by two silky-coated Pomeranians,
first, in Bath, by the golden Pomero, who would bark an ecstatic
accompaniment to his master's tremendous explosions of laughter, and
then, in Florence, by Giallo, whose opinions on politics and letters
the snowy-bearded poet would quote with humorous respect; how Nero, a
Maltese fringy-paws, brightened the somber home of the Carlyles; and
how Pope's favorite dog was, as he bitterly suggests, not unlike
himself in being "a little one, a lean one, and none of the finest
shaped." If Sigurd seemed responsive, I might go on with accounts of
Mrs. Browning's Flush; of Hogg's Hector, "auld, towzy, trusty friend";
of Arnold's dachshunds, Geist, Max and Kaiser; of Gilder's Leo,
"Leo the shaggy, the lustrous, the giant, the gentle Newfoundland,"
of Lehman's "flop-eared" Rufus, and of Miss Letts' terrier Tim in his
"wheaten-colored coat."
Lest Sigurd should get the impression that the globe was populated
chiefly by poets, Joy-of-Life would strike in with anecdotes of the
little dogs that frisked about Frederick the Great, and Charles II, the
Merry Monarch, and tell how Edward VII's last pet, Caesar, a fox
terrier, trotted mournfully in the funeral procession behind Kildare,
the royal charger; or she would "unmuzzle her wisdom" to the point of
declaring that the kings of Babylon and Nineveh had their favorite
hunting hounds with tails curled up over the back and collars wrought
in the form of leafy wreaths. She would inform Sigurd, who took it
flippantly, that solemn burial honors had been paid to dogs in ancient
times, that the Egyptians held them sacred and religiously embalmed
their bodies, and that many a Celtic chief and Norland viking lies more
quiet beneath his cairn because his noblest deerhound slumbers at his
feet. Or perhaps she would relate, for our collie's ethical guidance,
celebrated deeds of hero dogs. Sigurd would grunt and grumble in
sympathy with her deep tones as she chanted the famous ballad of Beth
Gelert, that "peerless hound" whose fidelity cost him his life, or of
the twice-sung terrier, haunter of Helvellyn, who for three months kept
watch beside her master's body at the foot of the fatal precipice.
Sigurd did not care for Wordsworth as much as Wordsworth would have
cared for him, but he loved Little Music, striving in vain to save her
fellow Dart under whose speed the river-ice had broken.
On one of those fortunate evenings when we had the Dryad with us,
Sigurd would listen with waxing incredulity to legends of King Arthur's
hound Cavall, whose paw left its print on British rock; of Merlin's
demon dog, black with red ears, akin to the little black dog that
danced about Faustus, sending out flying flames from its feet; of
Fingal's Bran and his last chase after the enchanted snow-white hart;
and of Tristram's faithful Hodain, who licked the dregs from the cup of
love which the knight and Queen Iseult had quaffed together. Sigurd was
frankly skeptical about those
"Half a hundred good ban-dogs"
of Fountains Abbey, who, whistled to his help by the fighting friar,
gave Robin Hood and his archers not a little trouble.
"Two dogs at once to Robin Hood did go,
T'one behind, the other before;
Robin Hood's mantle of Lincoln green
Off from his back they tore.
"And whether his men shot east or west,
Or they shot north or south,
The curtal dogs, so taught they were,
They caught the arrows in their mouth."
But Petit-Crin, the fairy dog from Avalon that Tristram gave to Iseult,
was more than any honest collie could endure.
"No tongue could tell the marvel of it; 'twas of such wondrous fashion
that no man might say of what color it was. If one looked on the
breast, and saw naught else, one had said 'twas white as snow, yet its
thighs were greener than clover, and its sides, one red as scarlet, the
other more yellow than saffron. Its under parts were even as azure,
while above 'twas mingled, so that no one color might be distinguished;
'twas neither green nor red, white nor black, yellow nor blue, and yet
there was somewhat of all these therein; 'twas a fair purple brown. And
if one saw this strange creation of Avalon against the lie of the hair
there would be no man wise enough to tell its color, so manifold and
changing were its hues.
"Around its neck was a golden chain, and therefrom hung a bell, which
rang so sweet and clear when it began to chime Tristram forgot his
sadness and his sorrow, and the longing for Iseult that lay heavy at
his heart. So sweet was the tone of the bell that no man heard it but
he straightway forgat all that aforetime had troubled him.
"Tristram hearkened, and gazed on this wondrous marvel; he took note of
the dog and the bell, the changing colors of the hair, and the sweet
sound of the chimes; and it seemed to him that the marvel of the dog
was greater than that of the music which rang in his ears, and banished
all thought of sorrow.
"He stretched forth his hand and stroked the dog, and it seemed to him
that he handled the softest silk, so fine and so smooth was the hair to
his touch. And the dog neither growled, nor barked, nor showed any sign
of ill temper, however one might play with it; nor, as the tale goes,
was it ever seen to eat or to drink."
At this point, Sigurd rose, shook himself and stalked out to the
kitchen. He could bear a great deal from his pedantic mistresses, but
there were limits. Satiated with history and literature, he proposed to
relax his mind by a turn at psychology.
From Cecilia's successor, Ellen, Sigurd was taking a brief but vivid
course in psychics. To be sure, a _bona fide_ professor in that field
dwelt near us, her high-picketed fence enclosing a baker's dozen of
spaniels. It was understood, to the awe of the community, that by their
aid she investigated certain dark corners of her shadowy subject;
but Sigurd, embarrassed by the attentions thrust upon him by the
grandmother of the spaniel family, rested content with his unacademic
tutor.
"Poor Ellen," as she invariably called herself, was a small, wiry,
nut-brown Irish woman, whose gray hair rose erect, as if just
affrighted by pouke or pixy, from above a constantly wrinkling forehead
and a pair of snapping jet eyes. She must have been on the borders of
insanity, if not across, when she came to us. She was a furious worker,
cycloning about the house with mop and broom at all hours and not
hesitating to upbraid the college president herself, most benign and
punctilious of ladies, if her boots brought one speck of mud into "Poor
Ellen's clane hall." Her chief pride, however, was in her frugality, as
we discovered to our dismay on her second afternoon, when, as it often
happily chanced, the Dryad, then living on the campus, dropped in for a
call and consented to remain for dinner.
It was a simple matter, in our informal way of life, to call back from
the piazza through the hall to the figure setting the table in the
dining room:
"Lay another plate, please, Ellen. Our friend stays to dine with us."
But the wail that succeeded nearly slew our friend by throwing her into
an agony of suppressed laughter.
"Mother of God! Isn't that the burning shame! And me maning the three
chops should do us all!"
Ellen had been with us but a few days, though the house was already so
scoured and polished that we scarcely dared set foot on our own floors,
when a prolonged season of sultry weather broke in a tremendous
thunderstorm. These thunderstorms were always a challenge to Sigurd's
valor. At the first crash he would pluckily make for the porch, where,
flinging up his head, he would cast back one defiant bark to that
Superdog in the skies; then, scared by his own audacity, he would
usually bolt upstairs and take refuge under a bed. But this time he
fled, with the second shattering peal, to Ellen, who was rocking
herself, a crouching, huddled figure, to and fro on the cellar stairs,
screaming in a weird, blood-curdling chant:
"Mercy of God! Poor Ellen belaves in God the Father and in the Holy
Mother of God and in all the blissid saints of heaven. Oh, grace of
Mary! Poor Ellen belaves in thim all. Good Lord, you never kilt Poor
Ellen yet and you wouldn't be after doing it now whin her bones be old
and her heart a nest of sorrows. The Lord look down in pity on the
poor."
With Sigurd hugged tight, Ellen's shrieks gradually sank into sob and
moan, and from that hour he was her one confidante and comrade. Not
even in him would she allow the least untidiness, but would fly to meet
him at the threshold, picking up each paw in turn and manicuring it in
her apron, and would insist, despite our remonstrances, in squatting
down outside the back door and feeding his dinner to him, bit by bit,
lest "Gobble-mouth" drop crumbs and gravy on "Poor Ellen's clane
gravel."
Sigurd found this fellowship at his meals so entrancing that he would
eat even baked beans from Ellen's lean brown fingers and would take
advantage of her society to get twice as much dinner as was good for
him. When his dish was empty and polished bright, under Ellen's
approving eye, by his circling tongue, he would promenade dolefully
about the kitchen, peering with an air of deep dejection into coal hod
and wood basket, as if he were starved to a diet of cinders and
kindlings, well aware that behind his back Ellen was heaping his dish
anew. Her excess of thrift, from which our own table suffered, was
never brought to bear on Sigurd.
As he ate, she would tell him long stories of her childhood in hungry
Ireland and of her hard, bewildered, wandering life in the Land of
Promise. Only once was I guilty of pausing by the kitchen door to
listen.
"It was the place afore this, Darlint, or maybe the place afore that,
or maybe another, that Old Goldtooth wedded my widow woman and took her
to New York for the shows. He'd been drinking more than a drop the day
and he says, 'Let's bring Poor Ellen along, for the fun of it. You can
lend her your second-best bonnet, for there's money to buy more in New
York.' But it wasn't her second-best, nor yet her third, the comical
thing she set on me. To a hotel in New York he took us and a grand feed
he gave us. Thin off to the show they wint, and he put a newspaper in
my hand, and opened up at a page with niver a picture on it, and he
told me to sit there like a lady and read about Boarding Houses. So
there was Poor Ellen all that avening, and long it was as a rosary of
nights, holding up that paper, with the quare letters, all sizes,
dancing over it, and reading about Boarding Houses. But whin they came
back--O Darlint, the saints defind us!--he told me it was about the
Borden Murder I'd been reading, not Boarding Houses at all, and Poor
Ellen not sensing a scratch of it, or sure she'd been scared into a
fit. Don't let thim tache you to read their books, Darlint, for sure
there's no knowing what the black words might be saying."
But although this is the only outpouring of Ellen's confidence to
Sigurd at which I played eavesdropper, too often her mad screeches
would bring us pell-mell into the kitchen where we would find the two
of them wrought to a state of highest excitement. Once Sigurd, lying at
full length, was squeezing a hollow rubber ball between his lips,
making it emit harrowing squeaks that Ellen, hopping grotesquely up and
down, identified as the cries of an imprisoned banshee. Another time
she had one arm clasped about Sigurd's neck and with the other hand was
pounding her little alarm clock on the floor, entreating him, "Bite the
feaver whin it jumps out, Darlint. A year ago by this clock it was that
Poor Ellen had the feaver and died and she has been in the Fire ever
since."
Again we heard sounds of scuffling and struggle, punctuated by
desperate screams from Ellen and furious barks from Sigurd. The kitchen
was in a whirlwind, but Ellen was presently calmed enough to explain to
us in terrified gasps that the demons were trying to drag her away from
the throne of God and that she had set Sigurd on her tormentors. Our
gallant collie evidently drove off the fiends, for Ellen's passion of
resistance suddenly ceased and, sinking to the floor, she hid her
convulsed face in Sigurd's ruff, wailing, "But next time they'll get
me. Poor Ellen! Poor Ellen! It's a sore and sorry life she's had, and
to come to the Pain in the end!"
On the last night of Ellen's stay with us,--for we had arranged,
without telling her, to have the crazy old creature transferred to the
office of a friendly physician, where her prowess with the
scrubbing-brush would be appreciated and her mental peculiarities be
under wise and humane observation--an ear-splitting yell once more
summoned us post-haste to the kitchen. Sigurd, erect on rigid legs, was
staring with an uncanny fixity of gaze on vacancy, while Ellen, on her
knees, wringing her hands above her head, was alternately abjuring him
and Heaven.
"O Darlint, is it my death ye're after seeing now? Is it Poor Ellen
with the candles at head and feet? Och, let me go! I lave this house
to-night. It's not Poor Ellen will bide with a dog does be looking at
her own ghost."
"Nonsense, Ellen!" protested Joy-of-Life, interposing her strong,
wholesome presence between the distracted old woman and the outside
door. "There are no ghosts here. Sigurd is only looking at the wall.
Perhaps he heard a rat or a mouse in there."
"_Ouch!_" shrilled Ellen, dodging out of the door in a fresh paroxysm
of fright. "Rats and mice is it! Rats and mice do be the black spirits
come to gnaw out our brains. And here they've come for Poor Ellen's
wits. They chase Poor Ellen wherever she goes. But she'll give thim the
slip on the morrow."
While Joy-of-Life brought Ellen in, quieted her with malted milk and
sent her to bed, I puzzled over Sigurd, whose staring eyes and
bristling hair still gave evidence of something we could not discern.
Other observers of dog conduct have testified to occurrences of this
kind, as, very recently, the master of a red cocker spaniel (Walter E.
Carr in _The Story of Five Dogs_) and from far antiquity the Arabs, who
hold that a dog can see the wings of the Angel of Death hovering over
the one for whom Azrael has been sent.
Ellen came down in the morning, still determined on departure and
entirely content with the place we had secured for her. All that day
through she was her most cleanly, thrifty and cheerful self. Nothing
would do but she must sweep the whole house from attic to cellar,
especially scouring her own room until it was pure enough for Diana.
Pleased with the bustle of packing and getting off, evidently an
habitual state of things with Poor Ellen, she graced her farewell with
a flourish of economical courtesies. She presented Joy-of-Life with a
banana which she had blarneyed from our Italian fruit-vender, and gave
me a little jar of cream, begged or bullied from the milkman in the
early dawn. As for Sigurd, she made him a square foot of his favorite
corn bread and hung a Catholic medal to his collar. She went off in the
best of humor, greatly set up by her own cleverness in having been able
to make, so cheaply, such suitable good-by gifts. When the expressman
came for her shabby, bulging bag, she treated him to such a nice little
luncheon of cookies and lemonade that he offered her a ride to the
station. From the driver's lofty seat she waved us a queenly adieu,
calling back: "The Lord loves Poor Ellen, after all." Sigurd ran with
the wagon as far as the corner. The last we saw of his psychic
instructor, she was kissing her workworn hands to him and shrilling
back endearments.