"Laurels and laughter and light,"
yet all those smiling elder faces, and not those only, have vanished
away.
Sigurd had his part in that fairest of our festivities, for an
impressionistic picture of him shines from the stanza that the Dryad
addressed to Joy-of-Life:
"This lady is always attended
By a golden and comet-y trail
Of light, speed, sound, fury all blended.
This lady is always attended
By a beautiful vision and splendid,
A flaunting and triumphing tail.
This lady is always attended
By a golden and comet-y trail."
A saucier dinner-card was mine:
"You see her start out all agog
For chapel, pursued by her dog.
You may think her a saint,
But he thinks she ain't,
When she sets him to guarding a frog."
A dagger affixed to this effusion called attention to a learned note:
"This is a scientific error: the beast should be _Bufo Lentiginosus_
not _Rana catesbiana_. Such errors are common in the best poetry."
As successive sorrows cast their shadows on our hearts, as the mothers
slipped away, as the Dryad was smitten down in her brightness, a star
fallen from midsummer sky, Sigurd proved himself a very comforter. The
sympathetic droop of his ears and decorum of his disconsolate brown
eyes in the first hush of mourning and, in the later loneliness, his
nuzzling head against the knee, touches of a pleading tongue on hand
and cheek, his insistence on an answering smile, a pat, a romp, his
conviction that, while sun and wind made holiday and the wood was full
of sticks to throw for Sigurd, it was natural to be glad, helped us
better than more formal consolations. Both solitude and society, both
ignorance and wisdom, he could press close to the hurt without
intrusion. Often when one or the other of us, forgetful of the work
upon the desk, had let the cloud creep over, Sigurd would rouse
himself, trot across to the fireplace, select from the basket a piece
of light kindling wood, and present it with the clear intimation that
it would be more true to love to cheer up Sigurd with a bit of play
than to lose the hour in grieving.
Rarely in his joyful life, and then but for a matter of days or weeks,
had we both been away from Sigurd. He hated to have either of us go. He
knew only too well the meaning of trunks and suitcases and always
stalked uneasily about the room, getting in the way as much as
possible, during the process of packing. When at last he saw these
objects of ill omen closed and carried downstairs, followed by one of
his mistresses in traveling garb, he would desperately take his stand
in the doorway and, planting his legs like principles, do his best to
bar her exit. For a few days he would be very restless, watchful,
anxious, keeping close to the mistress who stayed behind to question
her with troubled looks and entreat her not to abandon Sigurd; nor was
the missing all on his side. The summer of 1908 was so hot that our
gasping collie would tease his friends to fan him and, for the first
and only time, we had him shaved. His bright hair, duly cleansed, was
made up with corn-colored silk into a sofa-pillow and sent to
Joy-of-Life, then sojourning in strange places, now among the Mormons,
now on an Indian reservation, gathering material for her two vivid
volumes on the _Economic Beginnings of the Far West_; and she assured
him that his "yellow bunch of love" was a magical cure for a certain
ache beyond the ken of the doctors. But grievously abashed he was with
only the white waves of his ruff, his fore-pantalets and plumy tail
unprofaned by the shears, and his sufferings from mortification and
mosquitoes outwent all that he had endured from the heat. As his silky
under-vest grew long enough to curl, he reminded us of Cagnotte, the
supposed poodle bought for three-year-old Gautier by his nurse, on whom
the Paris dealers palmed off a cur sewed up in a jacket of lamb's wool.
On summer vacations our Volsung sometimes went up into New Hampshire
with one or both of us. He especially rejoiced in our cottage life on
Twin Lake, where Sigurd renewed his youth, pursuing
"the swallows o'er the meads
With scarce a slower flight."
Here he learned to scratch up his own bed in the pine needles and to
wash his stick at the edge of the lake after a game, though we never
quite succeeded, on account of his masculine prejudices, in teaching
him to wash his dinner-plate. There were drawbacks, however, about
these summer travels with Sigurd. His first concern, on arriving at a
new place, was to go the rounds of the neighborhood and knock over all
the dogs. Having thus established our popularity, he proceeded to make
himself at home, welcoming most affably the dog-owners who called to
complain of his exploits.
One summer he was with Joy-of-Life up in Franconia, where they loved to
climb the scenery, Sigurd taking immense satisfaction in his duties as
guide. "Find the path, boy," she would bid, and very proudly he would
run at a little distance before her, nosing out the way. It was on one
of these excursions that he came upon a scattered flock of sheep
and--hey presto!--was instantly transformed into a dog that we had
never known. Uttering a curious "Yep, yep, yep!" unlike any sound he
had ever been heard to make before, he sped away toward those
astonished sheep, rounded them up and drove them, much too fast for
their comfort, to the furthest limit of their sloping pasture, where
Joy-of-Life found him, panting in tremendous excitement, holding the
sheep, a woolly huddle, penned into an angle of the deep stone walls.
The next morning he was off before daybreak and, after an arduous
search, she found him again playing stern guardian to that same
embarrassed flock. If only the Lady of Cedar Hill had offered him the
lordship of a sheepfold instead of a cattle-barn, Sigurd would have
been Njal to the end of his days. But Joy-of-Life, afraid that the
ancestral Scotch conscience so suddenly awakened in him might not be to
the liking of the Franconia farmers, decided on an immediate return to
the Scarab.
Sigurd always detested train travel, and this time he barely escaped a
tragedy. The baggage car was so full that to him could be allotted only
a space the size of his body. Into that narrow cavity he was confined
by walls of trunks that towered on every side. Within an hour of Boston
an abrupt jolt threw the passengers forward in their seats. Beyond a
few bumps and bruises no harm was done and Joy-of-Life speedily made
her way forward through the disordered train, which had come to a
standstill, to the baggage-car. Here she found a scene of disastrous
confusion, trunks and valises pitched madly about, one baggageman
groaning with a broken arm, on which a doctor was already busy, and the
other bleeding from a cut across his forehead. For very shame she could
not speak of a collie until, under the doctor's directions, she had
washed and bound up that cut. It was her patient who mentioned Sigurd
first.
"By George, your dog!" he said. "He's down under that tumble of trunks
over there. Not a yelp from him. I'm afraid he hadn't a chance."
Brakemen had pushed in, by this time, and with ready sympathy undertook
to clear a way to the corner where Sigurd had been imprisoned. A
monster crate had fallen in such a way as to roof him over and, when
this was dragged aside, there crouched Sigurd, showing no physical
injury but utterly motionless, staring with blank eyes at his rescuers.
"Back broken," suggested one of the men.
But Joy-of-Life gave, though from pale lips, the glad, out-of-door
trill that Sigurd knew so well. He quivered and, with one tremendous
bound, cleared the intervening heap of baggage and reached her. She sat
on a portmanteau, with her arms about him, till they arrived at Boston,
and then led him down the platform and took him with her into a cab.
All the time Sigurd was strange, remote, moving like a body without a
spirit, unresponsive to all her attempts at comfort and cheer. But
during the long wait for her missing trunk, Sigurd suddenly brightened
up and tried to scrabble out of the window into the cab drawn up
alongside. It was occupied by a plump, elderly couple, who gleefully
pulled him in, and to them Sigurd at once began to tell, in eager
whines and pitiful whimpers, that hardly needed Joy-of-Life's
commentary, the story of his peril.
"Poor fellow! Poor beauty!" they crooned. "We know, we know. Our own
dear collie was killed in just such a mix-up twenty years ago. Your
collie knew that we would understand."
And Sigurd, restored in soul at last, licked their kind old faces and
retired to his own cab. By the time he reached home, he was so
completely himself again that he ate a hearty dinner and spent the
better part of the evening scratching up the straw in Sigurd's House to
see what treasures dogs and children might have stored there during his
absence.
In the scorching July of 1913 we both left Sigurd for a year. The poor
lad was so wretched with the heat that we hoped he might be less keenly
aware than usual of the packing; but he knew. I do not like to remember
the look in his eyes when, that last morning, he was brought up from
his retreat in the cellar for good-by. I turn from that memory to his
antics a few evenings earlier, when he had been out frisking with some
dog callers in the comparative cool. He woofed imperiously at the
screen door and, as soon as it was unlatched, dashed it open and came
tearing into the study to demand of me some service that I was slow to
comprehend.
"How dull you are to-night!" he grunted and, flouncing down beside me,
fell clumsily to work on a hind paw. Investigating, I found a long
thorn run up into the pad. It took me a minute or two to grip it and
pull it out, while Sigurd, wincing a little but with full confidence in
my surgery, waited as patiently as a boy when a ball game is on. When
the thorn was drawn, he gave one flying lick to his foot and another to
my hand--"Much obliged, but you might have been quicker about it"--and
bounded back to his play with puppy eagerness.
We had made all possible arrangements for his comfort, boarding him
still at his home where three of the household remained with the new
tenants, but he was no longer the Lord of the Scarab. We knew that he
would do his golden best and we hoped that in his own sweet wisdom he
would realize that love never goes away, but as he watched and searched
in vain, week after week and month after month, Sigurd drooped, and
grew deaf with listening for voices over sea. Old friends took him on
the short walks that sufficed him now and affectionate greetings met
him everywhere on campus and on street. He would often be seen napping
on one neighborly porch or another, for he dwelt more and more in the
dim land of "Nod, the shepherd," consorting with
"His blind old sheep-dog, Slumber-soon."
Housewife Honey-voice gave him true and tender care, and when, on a
zero night, she had to deny him the warmth of the Scarab and put him to
bed, well tucked up with rugs, in Sigurd's House, she would tell him,
for the strengthening of his spirit, that "even Jesus Christ slept in
the straw."
For our own part, we tried not to think too much of our forsaken
collie, but up in Norway we heard dogs called by his name and even on
our housetop promenades in Seville we were reminded of his frolic grace
by a scalawag puppy on a neighboring flat roof, a gleeful little
gymnast whose joy it was to leap up and jerk the linen off the line.
Sigurd's friends and ours wrote to us of his welfare with a
cheerfulness that was apt to waver before the end of the paragraph.
"I met him on the campus yesterday," scribbled Nannikachee, "and when I
asked him where his professors were, he galloped all over the snow,
remembering you as juncos, and on second thought he reared up against
an oak and barked up into its branches to scare you out of your holes,
convinced that you had come to a bad end and been turned into
squirrels. Such are the workings of the mighty mind you two sillies
credit him with! He looked as round and yellow as a Thanksgiving
pumpkin, but there was something wistful about him, too."
On the twenty-third of May, within a month of our return, Sigurd died.
To all his losses had been added, that spring, the loss of College
Hall, through whose familiar corridors he had roamed as usual, always
seeking, one March afternoon, and which he found the next morning a
desolation of blackened walls and blowing ashes. If Sigurd could have
counted into the hundreds, he would have known that every girl was
safe, but if he could have read in the papers of the quiet self-control
with which, roused from their sleep to find the flames crackling about
them, they had steadily carried through their fire-drill, formed their
lines, waited for the word and gone out in perfect order, he would have
been no prouder of them than he always was. Of course his Wellesley
girls would behave like that.
Sigurd crowded with the rest of the college into close quarters, where
he was more than ever underfoot. On that languid twenty-second of May
he slept all day along the threshold of the improvised postoffice, and
the hurrying feet stepped over him with unreproaching care. But with
the arrival of the late afternoon mail, the postmistress, knowing the
rush that was to come, said kindly to him:
"Now, Sigurd, you must really go away."
He rose slowly and moved from door to door till he came to the office
of the Christian Association. Assured of Samaritan shelter here, he
finished his snooze on their one rescued rug, but arrived at home in
punctual time for his dinner, and that night it chanced to be the
dinner Sigurd liked best. Little Esther, who had a romp with him on his
arrival, said he "smiled all over when he smelt the liver cooking."
He scraped out his pan to the last crumb and then lay down in a
favorite burrow of loose, cool earth for a twilight revery. One of the
household, a new lover, invited him to take a stroll with her, but he
excused himself with a grateful rub of his head against her knees.
He slept in Sigurd's House, as usual, and started out soon after dawn,
as usual, to go for a splash in a brook not far away. An early riser,
intent on making up her count of birds, met him and reported that he
was trotting briskly and saluted her with "a sunny twinkle of his
tail." Across the road from the brook is a pleasant old homestead under
whose great trees Sigurd often took a morning nap before returning to
the Scarab. Its occupants looked from the window, as they were
dressing, and saw him lying at ease under a spreading evergreen. An
hour later, as they rose from breakfast, they observed that Sigurd had
not changed his posture and, going out to bid him good morning, found
him lifeless. There was no injury on his body nor any sign of pain or
struggle. He had made friends even with Death.
Did he, like the old hero Njal, "gentle and generous," foreknow his end
as he chose out this quiet, beautiful spot? "We will go to our bed,"
said Njal in the saga, "and lay us down. I have long been eager for
rest."
A grave was dug for Sigurd on the brow of Observatory Hill over which
he had so often sped in the splendor of his strength, and there, under
the pines, some score of his closest friends and ours gathered the
following morning. With the reading of dog poems and the dropping of
wild flowers they gave the still body, that was not Sigurd, back to
earth. Jack pressed close to his mistress, whose Wallace sleeps near
by, and whined as the box was lowered, while little Esther, beholding
for the first time a burial, broke into wild crying.
In the autumn I stood by the grave, on which the one dear Sister left
in The Orchard had planted violets and periwinkles from Laddie's mound,
and watched a kindly young workman set above it a low granite block
inscribed, "Sigurd--Our Golden Collie. 1902-1914." As I strewed the
stone with goldenrod and turned away, there echoed on the air ancient
words from the Greek Anthology, "Thou who passest on the path, if haply
thou dost mark this monument, laugh not, I pray thee, though it is a
dog's grave. Tears fell for me."
Sigurd would have been well content with the honors that his College
paid him,--an obituary notice written with tenderest sympathy, a
commemorative letter from his Class of 1911 and many a student elegy.
It shall be his own class poet who paints the final picture:
"A dancing collie and gay woodland sprite,
Philosopher, friend, playmate unto each,
Quiet in trial and charming in delight,
Without the doubtful benefit of speech.
* * * * *
"When snow was over earth and lake and sky,
How often where pale hemlock boughs bent low
Have we beheld his flying shape go by,
An arrow sped from an immortal bow!"