"Thy faith is all the knowledge that thou hast."
--Jonson's _Epigrams_, XVIII.
Whatever may be thought of Sigurd's college career, there can be no
doubt that he careered through college. He was at the top of bliss in a
mad run over the campus. With streaming ruff and tail he would rush on
like Lelaps, the wild hound of Cephalus on the trail of the monstrous
fox sent by a slighted goddess to harass the Thebans and, like Lelaps
when the Olympians chose to make the chase eternal by turning both dog
and fox to stone, Sigurd would come to a sudden stop on the brow of a
hill, standing out against the sky like a collie statue poised for
running.
Joy-of-Life could cross the broad meadow almost as lightly and swiftly
as he and their morning pilgrimages to chapel were expeditions of high
glory. There were hundreds of girls abroad at that hour and often
Sigurd would wheel from the path and dash jubilantly toward any figure
that took his fancy, confident of welcome. But if the individual
chanced to be a new freshman, not yet acquainted with the college
dignitaries, she might meet his advances with fear or annoyance or a
still more cutting indifference. Then Sigurd would droop those
expectant ears of his and return with dignity to his forsaken comrade.
If his greeting were properly reciprocated, he would ramp joyously upon
his fellow student and prance about her, leaping to the height of her
shoulders in his ecstasy of good-will.
His favorite laboratory was Lake Waban. In the summer afternoons he
would tease to have us both escort him up for his swim and if on the
way we tried to part company, one or the other turning aside for a more
pressing errand, Sigurd would herd us with ancestral art, jumping upon
the deserter and gently pushing her back, or standing in the path to
block her progress, protesting all the while with coaxing whines, with
expostulary barks and with all manner of collie eloquence. If we
walked, on the other hand, close together, absorbed in talk, he would
jealously push in between us, as he often did when we were having a
fireside tete-a-tete or bidding each other good night. He wished us to
understand that Sigurd was the one to be loved and that all affections
not directed toward Sigurd were superfluous. But when we both accepted
his invitation to the lake, the three hundred acres of the college park
hardly sufficed for his antics. Curveting about us till he seemed to be
ten collies at once, flashing in ever widening circles over the level
and over the slopes, bounding upon us with a storm of gleeful sneezes,
he would lead the way to Sigurd's Tub, as he considered it. If some one
fell in with us and joined us on the walk, Sigurd, always of courteous
instinct, would drop back and follow demurely, or amuse himself at a
decorous distance by investigating holes, chasing squirrels and
striving with wild springs, scrambles, clawings, to climb the trees
from whose boughs they mocked his clumsy efforts. But how rejoiced he
would be when the interloper turned off! "There! Gone at last! Now we
_will_ have fun, all by ourselves!" Then he would cast about for some
doughty deed to do, longing to dazzle us by a prodigious feat of
strength and skill. If he could find a young tree that our too
efficient forestry had cut down he would drag it along, bite and break
away its branches, seize it by the middle and balance it in his mouth
as a long pole, constantly lifting his bright eyes to us for
admiration.
Once arrived at the lake, it was our duty to find sticks and fling them
out over the water to the extent of our strength, while Sigurd swam for
them, the farther the better. As he would gallantly splash up from the
shallows and, stick in mouth, climb the bushy bank, we had to run from
the mighty shaking with which, delivering the prize, he loved to give
us a shower-bath. After a few such plunges, Sigurd, while we rested on
the bank, would appropriate the green apron of Mother Earth for a
towel, rolling over and over on the turf to dry himself and completing
the process by scampers in the sun. He disliked being wet, for although
these swims in the lake ranked among his prime delights, at home he
always resented and resisted a bath and, on a showery day, would often
run in to the towel rack, pleading to be wiped dry, and would then
forthwith run out into the rain again. In our hottest weather he would
slip off alone in the early morning to that still lake all sweet with
water-lilies and would be gone for hours. A few times, in his younger
years, our anxiety took us by mid-day to the shore, whence we would see
a yellow head well out in the water. At our whistle, Sigurd would turn
and swim back to us with an air of surprise and pleasure as if he had
quite forgotten that such dear friends were to be found on land. The
outcome was not so happy when, tormented in his fur coat by the heat,
he had stolen off to one of his secret mire-pits and indulged in a cool
wallow. When he came home plastered and perfumed from head to tail, we
would greet him with exclamations of disgust, which brought the Byronic
melancholy into his eyes, hustle him off to the rocks behind the house,
fling pailfuls of warm water over him and do our best to scrape off his
pollutions. On one of these occasions, a college-girl lover and Wallace
raced him up to Waban and scrubbed and rinsed him until, so they said,
the entire lake had changed color.
In the autumn term Sigurd would take a special course in harvesting,
frisking through a neighboring orchard and playing ball with the
falling apples. The winter term he gave mainly to athletics and
dramatics. How bewildered he was that first snowy morning when he ran
out into a strange white ravine bounded by slippery walls and when,
desperately lunging over one of these, he felt himself floundering in a
drift! His first dubious venture on a crackling sheet of ice taxed his
puppy courage, too, but he persisted in his quivering progress across
our little Longfellow Pond and swaggered up the further side with his
jauntiest sporting air. In later years he enjoyed nothing better than
going skating with Lady Blanche, another member of our changeful
household, and on a stinging January morning he would outdo the
frolics, that Cowper smiled to watch, of the dog who
"with many a frisk
Wide scampering, snatches up the drifted snow
With ivory teeth, or ploughs it with his snout;
Then shakes his powder'd coat, and barks for joy."
As for dramatics, Sigurd loved to thrust his stick deep into a pile of
russet leaves or sparkling snow, and then pretend that he was a
sanguinary monster whose prey had escaped him, and dig and nose and
scrape and scatter and tear and shuffle with frenzied energy, rumbling
all the while growls of awful menace, until he had tossed it up to
seize and worry, display to the audience always requisite for these
performances, and then bury it again for a repetition of the melodrama.
When the winter storms kept him in, his surging vitality made him as
restless as an imprisoned wind. If the Cave of AEolus boasted a
housekeeper, she had our sympathy. All day long Sigurd would scoot and
spin about the little range of rooms that we liked to have quiet and
orderly, a very electric battery of mischief. He would pick quarrels
with the rugs, scatter the pile of newspapers and dance a scandalous
jig with that elderly, respectable Bostonian, _The Transcript_. He
would bump into a gracefully leaning broom and a meditative mop,
knocking their wooden wits together and bringing them to the floor with
what he considered a beautiful bang. He would stir up civil war on the
hearth till poker and tongs and dust-brush and bellows all set upon one
another with hideous clang of combat. At last we would toss over to
him, in desperation, an old pair of rubbers, and he would make love to
one and try to swallow the other, playing as many parts as Bottom
longed for, all the way from Pyramus to Lion.
A new stage was provided for him when the storm was over and we
undertook to shovel the drift off the piazza. He would instantly claim
the star role of rival shovel, pawing the powdery heaps with delirious
zest, or he would be the snow itself, ecstatically indignant at being
swept down the steps. He played thrilling tragi-comedies with bones,
too, especially with one monstrous knuckle that might have belonged to
the skeleton of Polyphemus, the prize of one of Sigurd's evening
prowls. It was a bitter cold midnight, but our happy rebel, sporting
with that giant joint, tossing it about in the snow, losing it on
purpose, catching its glimmer by grace of the moon and madly pouncing
on it once more, would not obey the bed-time whistle. He stretched
himself out, a saffron blotch on the white, and hugged his treasure,
crunching away persuasively to convince us that the clock was wrong and
it was still only dinner time. Our ignominious resort, in such a case,
was to fetch from a certain pantry box, the daily object of Sigurd's
supplicating sniffs, a piece of cake, and proceed to eat it, with
vulgar smack of ostentatious relish, in the doorway, under the electric
light. As ever, this stratagem brought our mutineer to terms. Giving
the bone a last affectionate lick, he came bounding into the hall in
time for the crumbs. But his high spirits were far from spent. Though
he consented to play Yellow Caterpillar, curling up in the blanketed
round clothes-basket which, for the winter, displaced his
Thunder-and-Lightning rug, he barked so often through the small hours,
in his dreams or out, that our slumbers were literally curtailed.
Rebuked into silence, he gnawed his leash in two, tipped over his
basket and settled himself for a morning snooze on the forbidden
lounge.
It is obvious that Sigurd was not a model of virtue. We did not want
him so much better than ourselves. "That dog would be improved by a
good licking," said Joy-of-Life's visiting elder brother. But with all
respect for elder brothers--my own had nearly hanged Sigurd by an
ingenious contrivance of ropes and loops designed to enable me to
unleash him on a summer morning from my sleeping balcony--we decided
that we would rather have our collie with all his frolic imperfections
on his head than cowed into slavish obedience. Only once when, hardly
out of puppyhood, he dashed from my side, as we were walking decorously
on the sidewalk, and danced backward on his hind legs in front of a
dodging automobile, out-barking its distracted horn, did I attempt to
whip him. He had barely escaped with life and limb and, determined to
impress him, for his own safety, with his wrong-doing, I caught him by
the collar, doubled the leash which I still carried but had almost
ceased to use, and began to beat him with it about the head. Sigurd's
astonished yelp was answered in an instant from the side street where
dwelt the Sisters and, like a white knight of chivalry, Laddie came
charging out, thrusting himself between us, leaping upon me and
demanding, with a wrath seldom seen in his gentle eyes, that I stop
maltreating his twin.
Of course the brothers took the chance to run away together. It was
slushy going and when Sigurd came home at seven o'clock, so tired that
he could hardly drag one muddy foot after another, he was in shocking
trim, his white hose and shirt-front soaked to a disreputable gray. It
was unlucky, for his amateur dramatics were to be crowned that evening
by a public part on the college stage. He was to be Faithful Dog,
watching beside his master,--a forgotten hero of the Revolution,--as
that gallant young lieutenant slept away the hour before daybreak, when
he was to be executed as a spy. At a low whistle of the rescuer beneath
the window, Faithful Dog was to arouse his master by placing a wary paw
upon the sleeper's breast and, when the lieutenant had made good his
escape, remain behind to face the angry guard and be shot extremely
dead in his master's place. Sigurd had thrown himself into this noble
role with enthusiasm and rehearsed it several times with distinguished
success.
An escort of sophomores had been waiting for him in an agony of
impatience and, when he at last arrived, there could be no thought of
dinner or a nap. Sigurd was hustled down to the laundry, put through
merciless ablutions and rushed off to the college barn, our impromptu
theater, in the snug little vehicle that our liveryman called his
"coop." Three or four girls were sardined in with him, flourishing
towels and doing their best to scrub him dry on the way. But it was a
ruffled, soapsudsy and excessively drowsy Faithful Dog that trotted out
upon the stage, yawned in the face of the rapturous greeting of his
congregated friends, the Barn Swallows, jumped up on the prison cot,
never meant for him, and rolled himself into a solid slumber-ball,
refusing to wake, not even so much as blink, from first to last of the
drama. With natural presence of mind, an essential quality in spies,
the hero soliloquized to the audience that his Faithful Dog had been
drugged, evoking a round of applause at which Sigurd dreamily flapped
his tail.
One role that he never could be induced to play was that of Dandy. One
Sunday afternoon, when he came limping in with his feet all cut and
sore from a morning frisk over rough ice, I dressed them in discarded
white kid gloves, tying each firmly round the ankle, and started out
with Sigurd for a call on the Dryad. But our sturdy Viking resented
such dudish apparel and would flump down, at brief intervals, on the
crusted drifts and tug away at that detested frippery with the result
that, on his arrival, only the paw he thrust out at his amused hostess
was still elegant in a tatter of white kid.
Sigurd believed in elective courses rather than required. There were
certain things that, as a matter of principle, he persistently refused
to learn. Though by nature a dig, as my sister's flower-beds too often
testified, not her most fervent remonstrances could convince him that
bulbs and bones should not be planted together. His general attitude
toward education was not unique. He had "come to college for the life."
From the narrow paths of learning he bounded off in pursuit of a
"well-rounded development." His social engagements were numerous and
pressing. Often he had not time, between afternoon tea in one dormitory
and a birthday spread in another, to scamper home for the plain
parenthesis of a dog-biscuit dinner. Sometimes we would hear our
truant, in the small hours, drop down upon the porch with a thud of
utter exhaustion, and would learn by degrees, during the next day or
two, that he had gone with a botany or geology class on a long morning
tramp, played hare and hounds with one of the athletic teams all the
afternoon and paraded the town till midnight with a serenading party.
Often in the spring weather we would not set eyes on him for two days
running, or might, perhaps, catch a passing glimpse of our collie
standing expectant on the stone wall by the East Lodge, watching the
stream of girls and waiting for his next invitation. He would dutifully
greet us with a bark and a caper and, if we were driving, jump down to
follow the carriage, but if one of his student chums came tripping
along and threw her arms about him, showering kisses on his sunny head,
Sigurd would flourish his tail in rapturous response and off the two
would race to "Math." or "Lit." or "Chem." or "Comp." or whatever other
branch of knowledge Young America cannot spare breath to pronounce.
We would often see him lying impartially across the knees of a group of
girls studying together in some green nook, his plume waving in the
faces clustered over Horace or Livy. He had nothing but admiration for
such guileless renderings as "The swift hunter pursuing the leper" or
"He landed his boats in the sea," and the harder these latter-day
Humanists hugged him, the more he sneezed and yawned in a very
embarrassment of joy, though when, absorbed in subjunctives, they
pinched his silky ears a trifle too hard, he would quietly withdraw and
hunt up a stick for them to throw for Sigurd. Not all his mates were
wise in their good-will. They would pick up and toss, for him to chase
and worry, rough-broken, splintery pieces of painted board or anything
that came handy, and presently a lugubrious dog would appear before his
family, laying at our feet, perhaps, a well-licked strip of picket
fence, and lifting for our ministrations a bleeding mouth, where the
red was mingled with a stain of sickly green.
Sigurd took all manner of liberties even with seniors. At home, though
he would gaze into the refrigerator with deep interest, he never
ventured to insert so much as his nose, and though a dish of candies
might be standing on a low table easily in reach, he merely looked and
waggled. Only once, on a Tophet-hot afternoon, while a guest, absorbed
in talk, sat oblivious of the plate of ice-cream melting on her knee,
did Sigurd slip in his craving tongue and accelerate the process. But
with the college girls he knew no such restraints. He was familiar with
all their chafing-dish corners and, entering by any door he found ajar,
he would help himself to a lunch of fudge and wafers before looking
about to choose the softest heap of couch cushions for his nap. When a
cut foot made walking painful, he would prevail upon the girls to carry
him, great fellow that he was, and we would sometimes come upon him
dangling across a slender hand-chair, while his panting bearers
struggled up the hill to College Hall. On seeing us, he would scramble
down and sheepishly make off with an exaggerated limp. Once we chanced
on a group of freshmen holding a picnic party with King Sigurd
enthroned on a mossy log in the center, his gilt-paper crown tipped
rakishly over one eye. He delighted in picnics, cross-country walks,
the May-day frolic on the campus, and constantly imperiled his life by
frisking about on tennis court, golf links and archery fields. The
girls would use him as a postman, sending him from one to another with
notes, not always delivered, swinging from his collar, and he often
appeared at the door of a college fair or other festivity wearing the
ticket which some lavish chum had bought for him. He was about the
college grounds and buildings so much that we feared he might become a
nuisance, as well as depart from the few principles of collie conduct
we had labored to instill. Much to his indignation, therefore, we made
him address to the students, through the columns of our little college
weekly,