"The door of Death is made of gold,
That mortal eyes cannot behold."
--Blake's _Dedication to Queen Charlotte_.
We were slow to realize that Sigurd was having too many birthdays. That
guardian figure stretched out on the south porch just above the steps,
shining like an embodied welcome, had become a part of life itself.
Indeed, a caller, not famed for tact, after surveying our Volsung for
some time in silence, dropped the cryptic remark: "How much a dog comes
to look like the family!" Brightening our busy months with golden
glints of romp and mischief and caress, he kept his run of birthdays
like festivals which brought no warning with them.
They were celebrated with becoming pomp, with much-wrapped gifts that
he rejoiced to open himself and often with a yellow tea. As his taste
inclined to broad and simple effects, there would be a giant sunflower
in the center of the table, with strips of goldenrod emanating from it
like rays. The guests, his best-beloved of all ages and conditions,
would drink Sigurd's health in orangeade and feast in his honor on
sponge cake. From the day of Poor Ellen to that of Housewife
Honeyvoice, Amelia, a young and comely Irish Protestant, reigned in the
kitchen and made it her pride to celebrate Sigurd's anniversaries with
all due splendor, though even then she would not intermit the daily
scoldings to which she attributed his very gradual growth in grace. For
still he would run away at intervals and wallow in all iniquity. If the
prodigal returned by daylight and found us together, he would disport
himself at our feet in a brief agony of penitence. As he lay on his
back, writhing with remorse and apparently trying to clasp his paws in
supplication, we would reproach him, to the accompaniment of his hollow
groans, until our gravity would break down. Then he would cheerfully
scramble up and fetch us his latest rubber toy, with a coaxing
invitation to let bygones be bygones and have a frisk with Sigurd. If
he came home under cover of darkness, he would shamelessly go straight
to his own piazza corner, venting an indignant grunt, like an outraged
man of the house, if he found his supper soggy and his bed not made.
The birthday teas, though they brought so many of his friends across
the threshold, were not an unmixed joy to Sigurd. The flaunting bow of
new, stiff, yellow ribbon tickled his ears, until he had succeeded in
working it around, a rumpled knot, under his chin, and worse yet were
the wreaths of yellow wild flowers that the small fingers of some of
his child neighbors had woven for his neck. His share of his own
birthday cake, too, was more hygienically apportioned than he approved.
What is a speck of yellow frosting on a collie's long red tongue? But
Amelia saw to it that his birthday dinner was after his own
heart,--fresh corncake, rice and liver, while now and then some devoted
sophomore, even though the long vacation had put a thousand miles
between them, would send him a home-made chocolate cream as large as a
saucer, at which he was allowed only to sniff and nibble.
We may have noticed that Sigurd's girth was ampler and his bearing more
sedate than in his younger days, but still he was the first in every
frolic and almost as fleet as a deer. He roused one at the edge of the
woods one morning when he was out for an early airing with Joy-of-Life
and chased it across the meadows so fast and far that she was in dismay
lest he overtake the beautiful creature and pull it down. Even to the
last he would let no dog pass him. His frankest admirer and
fellow-runner through his sunset years was a simple-minded young collie
whom Sigurd would outwit by wheeling sharply, when he felt Sandy
gaining on him, and making off at right angles while the precipitate
pursuer sped on for some distance in the old direction. But the goal
was what Sigurd chose to make it, and Sandy, bewildered by these subtle
tactics, always believed himself outrun.
We had come to regard a walk without Sigurd as hardly a walk at all.
Perhaps we observed that he found the heat, which brought out his
tormenting eczema, a little harder to bear from summer to summer, but
our crisp, crackling winters revived him to all manner of puppy antics.
I remember, like a picture, one frosty afternoon, the evergreens
festooned with ice, while the leafless trees, struck by the level rays
of the western sun, glistened with rainbow crystals. Through this
enchanted world, as through the heart of a diamond, Joy-of-Life and
Sigurd were coming home. Sigurd, barking his glad music, was bounding
hither and thither over the sparkling crust, now trying to fulfill his
contract to keep all chickadees and nut-hatches, blue jays and juncos,
from alighting on the earth, and now convinced that at last the moment
had come when he was to realize his supreme ambition, inherited from
Ralph, and catch a crow. Their sardonic caws above his head, as they
flapped heavily from pine to pine, made him so furious that he would
pounce on their black, sliding shadows, while Joy-of-Life, her cheeks
apple-bright with the cold, laughed at him so merrily that he took it
for applause.
Yet change was busy about our collie, who welcomed no changes but loved
his world exactly as it was. We sold the first home and moved into a
more spacious one that we had built on a strip of untamed land hard by.
Then a street came, and more houses, and quietly the wildwood drew away
from us. Within our own bounds, at least, we strove to keep the forest
growth in its own careless beauty, but never a man stepped on the
place, brother or guest or gardener or state warden or whosoever, but,
driven by the deep instinct of the pioneer, he must needs go stealthily
forth with ax or saw or shears and lay about him in our happy tangle.
The worst of it was that we had to appear grateful.
Sigurd accepted his new abode with but a passing bewilderment. Racing
up from the train on his return from a summer in the mountains with
Joy-of-Life, he was whistled into the Scarab while yet too utterly
absorbed in the rapture of his greetings to heed where he was. After a
little he looked about him in obvious surprise and perplexity and set
out at once on a tour of investigation, trotting from cellar to attic,
nosing into the closets and under the shelves, sniffing at the familiar
desks and bookcases and recognizing with a wag his own chair and rug.
As soon as might be he was out of doors, examining porches and paths.
Then he crossed the intervening bit of wilderness, granite ledge matted
over with the red-berried kinnikinic, and woofed for admittance at his
accustomed door. He was kindly received and allowed to go about as he
liked, upstairs and downstairs and into my lord's chamber, but the
furniture was not his furniture, the smells were not his smells, and
within ten minutes he had quitted those rooms, scene of so many puppy
exploits, to enter them no more. He knew the difference between house
and home.
Yet our new holding did not seem to Sigurd nor to us entirely natural
until he had cut one of his unfortunate paws on a broken bottle left by
the carpenters as a souvenir and had strewn steps and driveway and lawn
with shreds of cotton bandages and adhesive plaster. "When is a clutter
not a clutter?" asked my mother, and answered her own conundrum: "When
Sigurd does it."
In a snug corner against the south wall of the Scarab stood a massive
and elegant erection, with gable roof and olive-green door, that only
the unsophisticated called a kennel. It was "Sigurd's House," and as
such he accepted it, counting its artistically shingled walls and heavy
layers of sheathing paper no more than his just deserts. He delighted
in its deep bed of fresh straw which tickled him most agreeably as he
rolled over and over in it. He found it an exciting by-play, too, to
dash in with stick or bone and lose it under his bedding, which he
would proceed to scratch up with all the fury of a New England matron
in housecleaning time. Then he would come swaggering out with the air
of duty done, shaking his own skin. Sigurd's House was such a palace
that the children of the neighborhood liked to play in it, but our
collie deemed this high trespass and, from the screened study porch,
would roar indignant protest when five or six chubby tots, with that
saucy black spaniel, Curly, would all squeeze in together.
To the Scarab came new friends for Sigurd with new caresses, to which
he always made cordial and courteous response. Amelia crossed the ocean
to a waiting bridegroom and a happy home of her own, but Housewife
Honey-voice, with her little Esther, petted Sigurd even more devotedly.
Sigurd's only difficulty with Housewife Honey-voice, the only shadow on
their sympathy, arose from the delicacy of her appetite by which she
was inclined, at first, to measure his. When her enthusiasm and
culinary skill persuaded the family to go on a vegetable diet, Sigurd
gave us clearly to understand that we need not count him in. And when I
came home, one evening, from a week's motor trip, Sigurd barely waited
for his customary chant of welcome before gripping my dress and leading
me to the refrigerator.
"Hasn't Sigurd had his dinner yet?"
"Why, yes, an hour ago."
"Nonsense, boy! You're not hungry. Nobody is hungry just after dinner."
"What a whopper!" sighed Sigurd, as he pattered after me back to the
study.
No sooner had I turned my attention to the accumulation of letters on
my desk than again Sigurd pulled gently, yet with determination, at my
skirt and insisted on a second promenade to the refrigerator.
"He really is hungry. How much have you been giving him for dinner?"
But when I saw the measure, I heaped his plate, while he eagerly
watched the process, waving his tail in triumph, but hurrying once
across the kitchen to snuggle his head against the knee of Housewife
Honey-voice, looking up at her with those comprehending, trustful eyes
that said:
"You didn't _mean_ to starve dear Sigurd, and now that you know how big
my hollow is, it will be all right forever."
Every autumn a new horde of freshmen fell in love with him and visiting
alumnae embraced him in mid-campus. Toward the Freshman Twins, who
gladdened the Scarab one year, he conducted himself like a sophomore,
humoring their childish ways, guiding them through the college
labyrinth, serving as a towel for their homesick tears and partaking
freely of their consoling fudge, but all with a comical air of
condescension. He was himself accustomed to the best society, even
seniors. Our gracious college president made him welcome to her
veranda, as she sat at tea among her roses; a beloved frequenter of the
Scarab, Hoops-of-Steel, though clinging to her preference for boys,
accorded him a true if tempered friendship; and even Scholar Carol, our
fifteenth-century historian, who affected the fireside sphinx and had
named a particularly gallant kitten Eddy IV, counted him only a little
lower than a cat. As for the children on our hill, they hugged him to
the limit of endurance. His warmest admirer among them was Wee-wee, a
rosy bunch of unweariable energy, who, when she came to us of an
afternoon in order to give her exhausted parents a brief respite, would
wear out the entire family as, one by one, we undertook to amuse her,
and would finally fling herself upon Sigurd, riding on his back,
rolling him over and over and examining his paws with an envious
admiration that broke forth in the remark: "Wen I'm old and big like
Sigurd, maybe I'll have feet on _my_ hands."
For two lively years a brace of graduate students, Cherub and Seraph,
folded their wings beneath the Scarab rooftree. Cherub was a bit
afraid, at first, of "that bouncing yellow elephant," but Seraph
instantly became Sigurd's very pink of playmates. Every morning they
would start off early for the college library, scampering across the
landscape at a rate that sent the sparrows fluttering from their path
like so many irregular verbs. Between the meadow and the campus is a
perilous stretch of railway tracks and trolley tracks, and here Sigurd
would assume full charge of his companion. If the whistle of an engine,
as they drew near the crossing, cut the air, Sigurd would leap upon her
and, with his paws upon her breast, hold her back until the train had
hurtled by, when he would lead her triumphantly across under the
trailing plume of smoke. Every autumnal Sunday they spent hours
together in the woods, from which the Seraph would bring home gentians,
wych-hazel and a lyric, and Sigurd a ruff all tangled up with burrs.
Winter did not daunt their zeal. They formed themselves into a rescue
expedition and saved from the frost all manner of wild-flower roots,
which the Seraph arranged in rows of pots placed on boards stretched
from a little table in her room to her south window. Alas for sweet
Saint Charity! There came a day when Sigurd, wishing to study the
scenery to verify a suspicion of a dog burglar after his treasure-trove
of bones, sprang up and struck his forefeet on the edge of the nearest
board with such violence that the whole structure came crashing down,
enveloping him in a flying ruin of pots and plants and earth and water.
He did not stay to help the Seraph clear up the landslide, but
remembered a pressing engagement in the remotest corner of the attic.
Through December these happy comrades explored the fringes of the
forest for glowing vines to serve as Christmas decorations, and in the
whirling snowstorms of a peculiarly ferocious little February they
would come romping home, two white objects plunging through the drifts,
looking like Peary and one of his huskies just back from the North
Pole. Joy-of-Life had been in Egypt that winter, seeking health after a
grave illness, but she came again with April, more welcome than the
spring. Sigurd bounded to her shoulders in ecstasy of greeting, his
coat ruddy in the sun. He shone more than ever with a supreme content
as he sat erect between us while we motored through the miracle of May,
under red-budded maples and oaks whose baby leaves, while the orioles
shouted to them to hurry up, where trembling from misty pink to golden
green. He did not care to run with the machine, however slowly it was
driven, but saved his energies for the long rambles with the Seraph, as
she went questing for anemone and dogwood, bellwort, violets,
columbine, lady slippers and all
"our shining little sisters
Of the forest and the fields."
As the days grew warmer, he would forget the admonitions of previous
springs and all his good resolutions, and take a roll, now and then, to
Sister Jane's wrath and anguish, in a bed of jonquils or yellow tulips,
claiming that their color made them his by royal right. When we scolded
him, he took refuge with the Seraph, though even she was causing him
bitter annoyance, as June and Commencement drew near, by her attentions
to a fuzzy puppy, Puck, whom she visited almost daily at collie kennels
two miles away. He was a prize puppy and it disgusted Sigurd beyond
barks to see the fuss we all made over certain dog-show awards that
Puck gave the Seraph to bring home, a green ribbon not worth the
chewing and an _empty_ cut-glass vase. When Puck, on the eve of
Seraph's departure, was himself brought to the Scarab and a journeying
basket was equipped for him, Sigurd sulked in the shabby depths of his
dear old chair. All the small folk of our neighborhood flocked in to
pat Puppy Ki-yi, as Joy-of-Life and I privily dubbed our guest, but
only Wee-wee, whose own name for the mite was "Minister--Ittle Teeny
Minister, coz he stan's on his back legs an' jiggles his arms an'
pweaches at us," divined Sigurd's jealous misery. She snuggled down in
the chair beside him, hugging the yellow ball into which he had rolled
himself and solicitously explaining that "Minister is the best 'ittle
dog, and Sigurd is the best gweat _big_ dog," but the Volsung did not
care for a divided homage and shook his ears at all puppy worshipers.
Then the Seraph disappeared, as all his student lovers, one after
another, would disappear. Letters came back to him and gifts, but he
could not puzzle out what these had to do with the dancing playmate no
longer to be found on hillside or by lake. Nor could he foresee the day
when that ridiculous Puck, grown into a noble collie, would in his turn
sorely miss the Seraph, who had sailed away, on the ship that bore
another of Sigurd's most devoted Wellesley lassies, to France. There
were dogs on that ship, Professor Peggy and her scarred comrades,
veterans of war, that had been sent over, like wounded French officers,
to instruct, and were now returning to duty at the front. But Puck, too
old for the Red Cross training, was left behind, sniffing up and down
the garden paths in patient search for his dainty mistress, who,
arrayed in gas-mask and trench-helmet, was serving from a battered
camionette hot coffee and cocoa to our boys in khaki just behind the
trenches.
In the Orchard, too, the venerable Cousin for whom Sigurd since
puppyhood had cherished a romantic attachment, the white-haired
inamorata whom he would run to meet with his most grotesque waggle, was
no longer to be found in the familiar nooks from which Laddie had long
since disappeared. And now that the all-beloved Elder Sister lay
mortally ill, Sigurd pattered over day after day to look in at the
sickroom and invite a stroking from the delicate hand that would rest
so languidly upon his lifted head. Sometimes he carried her a yellow
chrysanthemum or a cluster of cream-colored tea-roses tied to his
collar. And when she had passed to Paradise through brain-wandering
memories of Italy, as through a vestibule of beauty, Sigurd coaxed long
at the closed door, whining softly, calling to his friend, troubled by
the silence but incredulous of death.
Because of their vanishing ways, Sigurd had early come to look on
college girls in general as an inconstant factor in life and accepted
their attentions with the casual air of a confirmed old bachelor, but
his faithfulness to his friends of riper age never wavered. Even to the
last he always raised for the Lady of Cedar Hill his rapturous lyric
cry, though it would sometimes embarrass him by breaking into a hoarse
and husky squeak. He had special ways with each of us. He kept one
piquant game for my mother, who, while he wagged his tail in ever
wilder circles at her, would wag her _Congregationalist_ in exact
mockery at him, until he would make a maddened leap and snatch that
sacred sheet from her hand.
But he was gentle with old people, even in his frolics, and from the
first had felt a certain responsibility for their safety. Joy-of-Life
had left him late one afternoon, while he was still a youngster, to
guard her mother's nap on the piazza couch, but a white flash of
Laddie, temptation incarnate, at the foot of the hill, had sent him
careering off into the gloaming. Rising hurriedly to call him back,
confused by the sudden waking, his charge had missed her footing in the
dusk and fallen down the steps. Her first clear consciousness was of
Sigurd standing over her, licking her face and hands with a penitent
tongue, nor would he leave her all that evening, lying on the edge of
her dress as she sat and trotting close beside her whenever she crossed
the room. And when, touched by his concern, she bent to him and said:
"I wasn't really hurt, and Sigurd was a good dog to come back," he
joyously flopped over on his spine and presented his snowy shirt-front
for a forgiving pat.
A household dear to Sigurd was that in which two of our college
professors, long retired, dwelt in sisterly affection. He bore himself
with the utmost discretion there, as if aware of a dignity and
fragility beyond the wont of households. The classicist, whose Greek
precision of accent gave beauty to her least remark, would introduce
Sigurd to callers from abroad as "one of our most distinguished
citizens," while the botanist, prisoned in a hooded chair on
wheels,--ah, the feet that had so often and so lightly carried her in a
day over twenty miles and more of the green earth she loved!--liked to
have him escort her on her pathetic airings. He was not with her, but
attending his own family on a drive one day, when we saw in the village
square before us a sudden commotion, people running from all sides
toward that familiar little carriage, which, rashly left standing at
the edge of the curb with its hood open toward the wind, had been
overset, so that the poor lady, strapped to the seat, was standing on
her bonnet. Sigurd reached her first of all and when, shocked by the
jar into a momentary oblivion, she looked up, "it was," she afterward
said, "right into the kindest, most reassuring brown eyes in the
world," for Sigurd's head was drooping close above her own and all the
help that a collie could give beamed in his friendly gaze.
Hints of age began to appear, reluctant though we were to recognize
them, in Sigurd himself,--an inclination toward longer and longer naps
in his own disreputable chair, an increasing resentment of sweeping
days and housecleaning, and a tendency, long after a swollen ear or a
sharp attack of eczema was cured and Sigurd, settling his chin on his
paws, had dismissed Dr. Vet with a low, majestic sweep of tail, to
continue to claim the lazy privileges of an invalid. Sometimes his
stiffening limbs failed to fold themselves with the old comfort into
the hollow of his chair, and he would look up to us in puzzled appeal.
He was a handsome collie still, but his manners had grown more reserved
and his bearing more stately. He was no longer excited by Commencement
festivities, though he would stroll up to take a look at the Tree Day
dances and saunter into the Garden Party, accepting the embraces of old
friends and new with an amiability only slightly tinged with boredom.
But he loved more and more to bask in the sun on the south porch or to
dream, his legs tied into his favorite bowknot, in front of the study
fireplace, where Joy-of-Life's annual barrel of Christmas driftwood
made the flames look like little rainbows on a holiday.
He was almost ten years old when he was run over by an automobile.
Except for a bruised paw he did not seem to be hurt, for he crouched so
flat in the road that the machine merely scraped his back, but his
nerves were severely shaken. When we came home that noon, he greeted us
with a prolonged, strange howl, unlike anything that we had ever heard
from him before, and for weeks would not venture out upon the roads
without one of us to serve as bodyguard, wheedling until we had to drop
our books and devise some respectable excuse for a walk. Left behind at
a Greek Letter Society House one evening, he refused to start off for
home alone--the bold ranger of a thousand midnights--and his indulgent
girl hostesses telephoned for a carriage, so that Sigurd came proudly
driving up to his front door in a hack. He so enjoyed the extra petting
that came with any mischance that he affected, when it occurred to him,
this terror long after it had faded out, just as he would in running
tuck up an injured foot, when he happened to think of it, weeks after
it was healed, and hop plaintively on three legs until the sight of a
cat or a squirrel made him forget all about it.
Sigurd had several promising sons in the village, and one of these we
would gladly have adopted had not our delight in its puppy graces
nearly broken his jealous old heart. So we let it go to other admirers
and presently lost all trace of his golden scions. But one day, when I
was walking with him, a winsome little lad came up and, touching his
cap, asked shyly if he might stroke Sigurd, "for he's the papa of my
dog Trusty that died." Poor Trusty was a victim of distemper, and the
child softly told us all about it, his arms about the neck of Sigurd,
who put on an appropriate expression of bereavement.
The burden of the years brought its own compensation. Instead of the
darkling escapades that used to distract and worry us, Sigurd became
the best of company, in the depths of a winter night. Joy-of-Life was
the lark of the household, and I the owl, so our self-appointed
caretaker, after seeing her early to bed, would come downstairs again
to lie close against my feet, inviting confidences. When I became too
absorbed in my task to answer his remarks, he would still hold forth in
a broken conversational grumble, contented, for reply, with the
crackling of the fire and the scratching of a pen.
Nor was Sigurd the only one of our blithe fellowship for whom Time was
quietly setting up milestones along the changing road. He was still in
his prime when, on a date of gleaming memory, the Dryad gave at
Norumbega Hall a birthday party for my mother, a party musical with our
Poet's own sweet and roguish songs, not only in honor of
"her who graciously
With each soft year younger grows,
As the earth with every rose,"
but in merry greeting of each of the other guests. The white-crowned
mother of Joy-of-Life was there, and the mother of the College
Reconciler,
"Who, over and over
(The Lady from Dover),
Turns thistles to clover."
The spirited hostess of Norumbega, a bright-eyed little grandmother
immensely proud of that distinction, sat opposite the presiding Dryad,
and beside my mother was her Mount Holyoke classmate of the heroic days
of Mary Lyon, our gentle Librarian Emeritus, so modest from her long
maidenhood that she was distressed at the infant art of aviation,
fearing that one could no longer brush one's hair in a dressing-sacque
free from the peril of a man swooping down from the clouds to peep in
at the window.