MARTYRDOM
It may be that a good deal of the wisdom and philosophy of mankind
is born of grief and suffering. It is certain that a good deal of
philosophy came to Finn as the aftermath of that evening upon which
he retired, heart-broken, to the farthest corner of his cage, after
seeing the Master and the Mistress of the Kennels pass him without
a word or a glance. His mind did not deal in niceties. He did not
tell himself that if the Master had only guessed at his presence
there, all would have been different. He was conscious only of the
apparently brutal fact that the Master had walked past his cage and
ignored him; left him there in his horrible confinement. He bore no
malice, for there was not any malice in his nature; which is not at
all the same thing as saying that he was incapable of wreaking
vengeance or administering punishment. He simply was smitten to the
very heart with grief and sorrow. And so he lay, all through that
night, silent, sorrowful, and blind to his surroundings.
The natural result was that sleep came to him after a while, when
all was dark and silent, and the folk who had visited the circus,
like those who had entertained them, were in their beds. And this
sleep he badly needed. While he slept the burns on his muzzle and
ear were healing, the searing heat of his grief was subsiding, and
his body and nervous system were adapting themselves to his
situation, and recharging themselves after the great drain which
had been made upon them during the past couple of days.
When Killer's long, snarling yawn woke Finn in the morning he did
not fling himself against the partition which hid the tiger from
him. He did not even bark or snarl a defiant reply. He only bared
his white fangs in silence, and breathed somewhat harshly through
his nostrils, while the hair over his shoulders rose a little in
token of instinctive resentment. This comparatively mild
demonstration cost Finn a great deal less in the way of expenditure
of vitality than his previous day's reception of the tiger's
snarls; and left him by just so much the better fitted to cope with
other ordeals that lay before him.
If Finn had been a wild beast, his experience in the Southern Cross
Circus would have been a far less trying one for him than it was.
He would have learned early that the Professor was a practically
all-powerful tyrant, who had to be obeyed because he had the power
and the will to inflict great suffering upon those of the wild
kindred who refused him obedience. That he was a tyrant and an
enemy the wild creature would have accepted from the outset, as a
natural and an inevitable fact. In Finn's case the matter was far
otherwise. His instinct and inclination bade him regard a man as a
probable friend. Naturally, if the Professor had been aware of
this, he would never have approached Finn with a hot iron, and
their relations would have been quite different from the beginning.
As it was, or as Finn saw it, anyhow, the Professor had proved
himself a creature absolutely beyond the pale; a mad wild beast,
disguised as a man; a devil who met friendly advances with repeated
blows of a magic weapon, a stick made of fire, against which no
living thing might stand. Matey had seemed to Finn a mad man, and
one to be avoided. But Matey had not been a wild beast as well,
neither had he carried fire in his hand. The Professor was a far
more formidable and deadly creature. However he might disguise his
intentions, his purpose clearly was Finn's destruction. That was
how Finn saw it, and he acted accordingly; consistently, and not
from malice, but upon the dictates of common sense and
self-preservation, as he understood them.
Having said so much, it is hardly necessary to add that Finn
suffered greatly during the next few weeks of his life; for had not
the Professor sworn to make the Giant Wolf his obedient creature,
and a docile performer in the circus? That he never did. His boast
was never made good, though with a real wolf it might have been;
and again it almost certainly would have been, had he ever guessed
that Finn was not a wolf at all, but one of the most aristocratic
hounds and friends of man ever bred. But his failure cost Finn
dear, in pain, humiliation, fear, and suffering of diverse kinds.
The boss jeered at the Professor when the failure to tame Finn had
extended over a week; and that added greatly to the severity of
Finn's ordeal. The Professor was on his mettle; and now, while he
made no further spoken boasts, he swore to himself that he would
break the Giant Wolf's spirit or kill him. He never guessed that
his whole failure rested upon one initial mistake. To the wild
beast the red-hot iron bar was merely the terrible insignia of the
Professor's indubitable might and mastery; a very compelling
invitation to docility and respectful obedience. To Finn it
was not that at all; but merely terrible and unmistakable evidence
of basest treachery and malevolent madness. And it was largely with
the red-hot iron that the Professor sought to tame Finn, believing,
as he did, that this was necessary to his own, the Professor's,
preservation.
Upon one occasion--one brilliantly sunny morning of Finn's
martyrdom--it did dimly occur to the Professor that it might be the
hot iron which somehow stood between himself and the mastery of
Finn. Accordingly, he twisted some wire round the end of his quilt,
or cutting whip, and entered the cage without the iron, while Sam
stood outside with the brazier, ready to pass in the iron if that
should prove necessary. Finn absolutely mistrusted the man, of
course--he had suffered what he believed to be the man's insane
lust of cruelty for a fortnight now--but yet he saw that the iron
was not in the cage, and so he made no hostile demonstration; and
that was a notable concession on his part, for, of late, the
Professor's tactics, so far from taming him, had taught the
naturally gracious and kindly Wolfhound to fly at the man with
snapping jaws the instant he came within reach. Now the man moved
slowly, very slowly, nearer and nearer to Finn's corner, using
ingratiating words. When it seemed that he meant to come near
enough for touch, Finn decided that he would slip across the cage
to its opposite far corner in order to avoid the hated contact. He
did not snarl; he did not even uncover his fangs, for the fiery
instrument of torture was not there. He rose from his crouching
position, and of necessity that brought him a few inches nearer to
the Professor, before he could move toward the far side of the
cage.
"Would yer? Down, ye brute!" snarled the man, in his best
awe-inspiring tone. And in that instant the wire-bound rhinoceros-hide
whistled down across Finn's face, cutting him almost as painfully
as the hot iron was wont to sear him. He snarled ferociously. Down
came the lash again, and this time a loose end of wire stabbed the
corner of one of his eyes. The next instant saw the Professor flung
back at length against the bars of the cage; and in his face he
felt Finn's breath, and heard and saw the flashing, clashing gleam
of Finn's white fangs. Sam thrust the white-hot bar in, stabbing
Finn's neck with its hissing end. The Professor seized the bar and
beat Finn off with it; not for protection now, but in sheer, savage
anger. Then he withdrew from the cage, and seizing a long pole beat
Finn crushingly with that, through the bars, till his arms ached.
Meantime, Finn fought the pole like a mad thing; and the Professor,
unable to think of any other way of inflicting punishment upon the
untameable Giant Wolf, took his food from the basket and gave it to
Killer before Finn's eyes, leaving the Wolfhound to go empty for
the day.
[Illustration: The next instant saw the Professor flung back at
length against the bars of the cage.]
That was the result of the Professor's one attempt, according to
his lights, at humouring the Giant Wolf, by approaching him without
the iron. That also was a specimen of the kind of daily interviews
he had with Finn.
By this time the Wolfhound actually was a very fierce and savage
creature. But he was not at all like the magnificently raging
whirlwind of wrath which had aroused the boss's admiring wonder on
the day he first saw Finn. Killer might growl and snarl himself
hoarse now for all the notice Finn took of the great beast. Scarred
from nose to flank with burns, bruised and battered and aching in
every limb, Finn remained always curled in the darkest, farthest
corner of his cage now, roused only by the daily fight, the daily
torture, of his interviews with the Professor. At other times, as
the boss said bitterly, he might have been dead or a lap-dog, for
all the spectacle he offered to the curious who visited his cage.
All they saw was a coiled, iron-grey mass, and two burning black
eyes, with a glint of red in them, and a blood-coloured triangle in
their upper corners.
Now and again, in the midst of the night, Finn would rise and go
down to the bars of his cage and stand there, motionless, for an
hour at a stretch, his scarred muzzle protruding between two bars,
his aching nostrils, hot and dry, drinking in the night air, his
eyes robbed of their resentful fire, and pitiably softened by the
great tears that stood in them. At the end of such an hour he would
sometimes begin to walk softly to and fro, inside the bars, the
four paces that his cage allowed him. Thus he would pad back and
forth silently for another hour, with tail curled toward his belly
and nose on a level with his knees, almost brushing the bars as he
passed them. He made no sound at all, even when the moon's silvery
light flooded his cage, or when Killer snarled in his sleep. But
always, before returning to his corner, he would systematically
test every bar at its base with teeth and paws; and then sigh, like
a very weary man, as he slouched despairingly back to his corner.
But, for all the glowering misery that possessed him by day and the
despair to which he would give rein by night, it was always with
dauntless ferocity that the tortured Wolfhound faced his enemy, the
Professor. Short of starving him to death, or killing him outright
with the iron bar, the Professor could see no way of making the
Giant Wolf cringe to him; he could devise no method of breaking
that fierce spirit, though he exhausted every kind of severity and
every sort of cruelty that his wide experience in the handling of
fierce animals could furnish. For any one who could have
comprehended the true inwardness of that situation, its tragedy
would have lain in the reflection that, had he but known it, Finn
could without difficulty have earned not alone ease and good
treatment, but high honours in the Southern Cross Circus. But Finn
had no means of guessing that the Professor merely desired to
master him, and to teach him to stand erect, or leap through a hoop
at the word of command. No sign of any such desire, that Finn could
possibly read, had been furnished. But, on the contrary, the one
thing made evident to the Wolfhound's understanding was that here
was a bloodthirsty man in a leather coat who desired to burn him to
death, when not engaged in beating him with a pole, or thrusting at
him viciously through the bars of his cage with a stick, or
slashing at him with a whip that cut through hair and skin. And, be
it remembered, that the hound who was faced with these, to him,
utterly gratuitous and senseless atrocities, was one who, if we
except the single occasion of his night with the dog-thief in
Sussex, had never known what it meant to face an angry man, or to
receive a blow from a man, angry or otherwise. It was small wonder
that Finn had only snarls and snapping jaws for the Professor. The
pity of it was that he could have avoided as much suffering if he
had only known what it was desired of him. The wonder of it was
that he faced the Professor day after day with such unfailing
courage, with a spirit which remained absolutely uncowed, though
the body which sheltered it could not present a single patch of the
bigness of a man's hand which was neither burned, nor bruised, nor
cut.
There came a day when, other matters occupying his attention, the
Professor did not trouble to pay one of his futile visits to Finn's
cage. Sam fed him as usual, when Killer was fed. (One of the
features of Finn's captivity, which, while in his confinement it
helped to injure his physical condition, also helped to make him
the more fierce, was the fact that his diet consisted exclusively
of raw meat.) Finn waited through the long day for the Professor,
steeling himself for the daily struggle and the daily suffering.
His body free of new pains he rested that night more thoroughly
than he had rested for a long time; and there were faint stirrings
of hope in his mind. Next morning the boss happened to walk past
the cages with the Professor, and when they came to Finn's place
the Professor said--
"I reckon I'll give that brute best, unless you'd like him killed.
I'll tackle that job for you with pleasure; but your Giant Wolf's
no good for the show."
"No, the joke's on me about the Giant Wolf," admitted the boss,
crossly. "Sam had me for fair, over him. Fifteen quid for a useless
pig like that! Why, he won't even stand up to make a show. The
brute's not worth his tucker, is he?"
"He is not. And, if you ask me, you'd better let me feed him to the
others, while there's any meat left on his bones. He's no good for
aught else, as I can see. The Tasmanian Devil was a lap-dog to him,
and he died before I could get him trained, you remember."
"H'm! Well, we'll see. We might get some fool to buy him. Anyway,
you'd better tell Sam to pry him round a bit somehow when the
show's opening. He looks all right when he gets a move on him, but
he ain't worth a hill o' beans lyin' curled up there in a corner.
How'd it do to get a dingo, and put it in there with him!"
"You might as well give him a mouse. He'd swaller it whole. He's
twice the size of a dingo."
"He sure is twice as sulky as any beast I ever saw. An' that blame
book-writin' chap from the city the other night said he reckoned
the Giant was a dog, an' not a wolf at all! Nice sociable sort of a
dog for a family gathering, I _don't_ think!"
"You should have asked the gent to go in his cage an' try 'im with
a bit of sugar. My bloomin' Colonial! He wouldn't have written any
more books."
And now, whenever the boss met Sam, he would "jolly" the young man
a bit, as he said, regarding the Giant Wolf as a bargain, and ask
what Sam had done with the fifteen pounds, and whether he had any
other cheap freaks to sell. Also, Sam's half-crown was docked from
his wages; and Sam, after all, had never laid claim to any bigness
of heart or philosophy of mind. He had long since spent the fifteen
pounds. The twenty-five shillings he had paid for Finn loomed
larger in his recollection now than the fifteen pounds he had
received; particularly after a dose of the boss's chaff.
"Why the blazes can't yer learn, an' work fer yer livin', ye ugly
great brute?" Sam would growl, as he threw Finn his daily portion
of flesh. And, more often than not, he would pick up a stake, and
thrust viciously at the Wolfhound, or strike at him as he crept
forward to snatch his meat. Thus, as poor Finn saw it, another of
the strange man-like beasts had gone mad, and was to be treated as
a dangerous enemy.
If the Professor had continued his daily attempts to cow Finn, as a
preliminary to training, he would have been likely to succeed at
about this time; for the Wolfhound was losing strength daily, and
though the fire of wrath and fierceness burned strongly when he saw
the leather-coated man, it had little to feed on now, and must soon
have died down under the hot bar and the wired whip. But the
Professor could not be expected to know this. He had had as many as
sixty futile struggles with Finn, and, as he thought, had only
stopped short of killing the Giant outright. But idleness, or some
other cause, did lead him to make one other attempt, on a hot
afternoon, just before the hour of tea and of dressing for the
evening show. Finn's fighting blood, inherited through long
centuries of unsmirched descent, made him put his best foot
foremost, and meet the Professor with a mien of most formidable
ferocity as soon as the red iron appeared. The Professor did not
know how near to breaking-point Finn's despair had reached. There
was little sign of it in the roaring fierceness with which he faced
the iron and whip. A wolf in such a case, with the cunning of the
wild, and without the life's experience of humans which made the
Professor's part so incredibly base, so gratuitously cruel and
treacherous to Finn, would have given in long before. Finn fought
with the courage of a brave man who has reached the last ditch, and
with the ferocity that came to him out of the ancient days in which
his warrior ancestors were never known either to give or to receive
quarter.
The Professor felt that this was a last attempt, and he did not
greatly care whether the great hound lived or died. The Giant Wolf
had defeated him as a trainer; but the Giant Wolf should never
forget the price paid for the defeat. It was a cruel onslaught. The
iron bit deep, and--it had been better for the Professor's
character development, better for his record as man, if he had left
Finn alone when he decided to make no further attempt at taming.
But men, too, have fierce, brutal passions, with less than the
simplicity of brutes, and more, far more, of the knowledge which
makes cruelty leave a permanent stain upon them. The Professor
himself was aching and sore when he flung passionately out from
Finn's cage and slammed the iron gate to; and as for Finn, I have
no words in which to explain how his poor body ached and was sore.
If the iron had been stone cold, Finn would still have been a
terribly badly beaten hound, when he staggered to his corner, after
this last visit from the mad beast-man in the leathern coat--so he
thought of the Professor, in that tumult of sinking flames which we
may call his mind. He lay in his corner, quivering and shuddering,
and did not even find the heart to lick his wounds till long hours
afterwards, when silence ruled in the field where the circus was
encamped that night.
This field was on the outskirts of a considerable township; the
twenty-second that Finn had visited with the Southern Cross Circus.
The authorities had refused to allow the boss to come closer in,
and so one side of his camping-place was walled by virgin bush; a
dense tract of blue-gum and iron-bark stretching, almost as far as
the eye could reach, to the foot-hills of a gaunt mountain range.
For a mile or so from the circus camp the trees had all been
ring-barked a couple of seasons or more before this time, with the
result that they were now the very haggard skeletons of mighty
trees, naked for the most part, their white bones open to all the
winds of heaven, but here and there sporting a ghastly kind of
drapery, remnants of their grave-clothes as it might be, in the
shape of long hanging streamers of dead bark, which moaned and
rustled eerily in the night breezes. High above the tattered
grave-clothes of their lifeless trunks, the knotted, tortured-looking
arms and fingers of the trees groped painfully after the life that
had fled their neighbourhood.
Finn could just see the ghostly extremities of these spectral trees
over the top of the main tent as he lay crouched in his corner,
after devoting an hour to the licking of his sores. Presently, an
almost full moon rose among the trees' fleshless limbs, and painted
their nakedness in more than ever ghostly guise. It was then that
Finn rose, painfully and slowly, to his feet, and moved, like an
old, old man, across the floor of his cage to the bars, the bars
that were of an inky blackness in that silvery light. For almost an
hour this great hound, this tortured prince of a kingly race, stood
sadly there, staring out at the moonlight between the bars of his
prison; and for almost an hour, big clear drops kept forming in his
black eyes and trickling along his scarred muzzle, till they
pattered down upon the floor of the cage. If he had ever heard of
such a thing as suicide, it may be that his soul would have known
the final humiliation of self-destruction that night. But there is
something that strikes a balance, as well in a Wolfhound's life as
a man's life.
Near as Finn was to the limit of his endurance, his brave spirit
lived within him yet, and he did not forego the nightly habit he
had formed long since of trying the bars that made him a prisoner.
It is possible that there never was a much more pathetically
forlorn hope than that which animated this sorely racked prisoner
when he felt his bars. But if the iron of them had entered into his
soul, then it had made for endurance. The process was not made
easier by the existence of Finn's latest wounds. Both his fore-legs
and his muzzle had suffered severely under the iron that day; and
it was with these that he now tested his bars, slowly,
conscientiously, and with painful thoroughness, from the bar
nearest Killer's cage to that at the end of the gate of his own,
which closed on to the partition of the native bears' division. It
was the bottom of the bars that Finn always tried, where they
entered the floor of the cage. He took each between his teeth and
pushed and pulled; sometimes pushing or pulling with his paws as
well. And the result, on this night of bright moonlight and great
pain, was as it had always been. The iron did not change.
[Illustration: Was lost in the shadow of the main tent.]
Having reached the end of his task, Finn sat erect on his haunches
for it may have been a quarter of an hour, gazing out at the risen
moon, which sailed serenely now, high above the praying hands of
the skeleton trees. Certainly, Finn's spirit was near to
breaking-point. He rose, meaning to seek his corner again, as after so
many other futile testings of his bars; but something moved him first
to look out as far as he could, over the tent-top, to the great world
beyond. Sore though his body was, he rose erect upon his hind-feet,
placed his fore-feet against the upper half of the gate, and only
narrowly escaped falling forward through the gate to the ground
beneath. In his passion the Professor had slammed the barred gate
to as usual and, in flinging himself angrily off from the place,
had omitted to slip the two thick bolts which normally held it
secure. The gate fitted closely, and was rusty, besides; so that
Finn's jaws, tugging at its extreme foot, and upon this particular
occasion less strongly no doubt than usual, had not shifted it. But
his weight pressing against the upper half was quite another
matter; and now the gate stood wide open before him.
For an instant, Finn's heart swelled within him, so sharply, and so
greatly, that a little whine burst from him, and it seemed he was
unable to move. So the sight of the open gate, giving upon the
silent open night, affected the Wolfhound. In the next instant he
dropped quietly to the earth, and was lost in the inky shadow of
the main tent.
[Illustration]