Northward, along the leeward coast of Malaita, the _Ariel_ worked her
leisurely way, threading the colour-riotous lagoon that lay between the
shore-reefs and outer-reefs, daring passages so narrow and coral-patched
that Captain Winters averred each day added a thousand grey hairs to his
head, and dropping anchor off every walled inlet of the outer reef and
every mangrove swamp of the mainland that looked promising of cannibal
life. For Harley and Villa Kennan were in no hurry. So long as the way
was interesting, they dared not how long it proved from anywhere to
anywhere.
During this time Jerry learned a new name for himself--or, rather, an
entire series of names for himself. This was because of an aversion on
Harley Kennan's part against renaming a named thing.
"A name he must have had," he argued to Villa. "Haggin must have named
him before he sailed on the _Arangi_. Therefore, nameless he must be
until we get back to Tulagi and find out his real name."
"What's in a name?" Villa had begun to tease.
"Everything," her husband retorted. "Think of yourself, shipwrecked,
called by your rescuers 'Mrs. Riggs,' or 'Mademoiselle de Maupin,' or
just plain 'Topsy.' And think of me being called 'Benedict Arnold,' or '
Judas,' or . . . or . . . 'Haman.' No, keep him nameless, until we find
out his original name."
"Must call him something," she objected. "Can't think of him without
thinking something."
"Then call him many names, but never the same name twice. Call him 'Dog'
to-day, and 'Mister Dog' to-morrow, and the next day something else."
So it was, more by tone and emphasis and context of situation than by
anything else, that Jerry came hazily to identify himself with names such
as: Dog, Mister Dog, Adventurer, Strong Useful One, Sing Song Silly,
Noname, and Quivering Love-Heart. These were a few of the many names
lavished on him by Villa. Harley, in turn, addressed him as: Man-Dog,
Incorruptible One, Brass Tacks, Then Some, Sin of Gold, South Sea Satrap,
Nimrod, Young Nick, and Lion-Slayer. In brief, the man and woman
competed with each other to name him most without naming him ever the
same. And Jerry, less by sound and syllable than by what of their hearts
vibrated in their throats, soon learned to know himself by any name they
chose to address to him. He no longer thought of himself as Jerry, but,
instead, as any sound that sounded nice or was love-sounded.
His great disappointment (if "disappointment" may be considered to
describe an unconsciousness of failure to realize the expected) was in
the matter of language. No one on board, not even Harley and Villa,
talked Nalasu's talk. All Jerry's large vocabulary, all his proficiency
in the use of it, which would have set him apart as a marvel beyond all
other dogs in the mastery of speech, was wasted on those of the _Ariel_.
They did not speak, much less guess, the existence of the whiff-whuff
shorthand language which Nalasu had taught him, and which, Nalasu dead,
Jerry alone knew of all living creatures in the world.
In vain Jerry tried it on the lady-god. Sitting squatted on his
haunches, his head bowed forward and held between her hands, he would
talk and talk and elicit never a responsive word from her. With tiny
whines and thin whimperings, with whiffs and whuffs and growly sorts of
noises down in his throat, he would try to tell her somewhat of his tale.
She was all meltingness of sympathy; she would hold her ear so near to
the articulate mouth of him as almost to drown him in the flowing
fragrance of her hair; and yet her brain told her nothing of what he
uttered, although her heart surely sensed his intent.
"Bless me, Husband-Man!" she would cry out. "The Dog is talking. I know
he is talking. He is telling me all about himself. The story of his
life is mine, could I but understand. It's right here pouring into my
miserable inadequate ears, only I can't catch it."
Harley was sceptical, but her woman's intuition guessed aright.
"I know it!" she would assure her husband. "I tell you he could tell the
tale of all his adventures if only we had understanding. No other dog
has ever talked this way to me. There's a tale there. I feel its
touches. Sometimes almost do I know he is telling of joy, of love, of
high elation, and combat. Again, it is indignation, hurt of outrage,
despair and sadness."
"Naturally," Harley agreed quietly. "A white man's dog, adrift among the
anthropophagi of Malaita, would experience all such sensations and, just
as naturally, a white man's woman, a Wife-Woman, a dear, delightful Villa
Kennan woman, can of herself imagine such a dog's experiences and deem
his silly noises a recital of them, failing to recognize them as
projections of her own delicious, sensitive, sympathetic self. The song
of the sea from the lips of the shell--Pshaw! The song oneself makes of
the sea and puts into the shell."
"Just the same--"
"Always the same," he gallantly cut her off. "Always right, especially
when most wrong. Not in navigation, of course, nor in affairs such as
the multiplication table, where the brass tacks of reality stud the way
of one's ship among the rocks and shoals of the sea; but right, truth
beyond truth to truth higher than truth, namely, intuitional truth."
"Now you are laughing at me with your superior man-wisdom," she retorted.
"But I know--" she paused for the strength of words she needed, and words
forsook her, so that her quick sweeping gesture of hand-touch to heart
named authority that overrode all speech.
"We agree--I salute," he laughed gaily. "It was just precisely what I
was saying. Our hearts can talk our heads down almost any time, and,
best all, our hearts are always right despite the statistic that they are
mostly wrong."
Harley Kennan did not believe, and never did believe, his wife's report
of the tales Jerry told. And through all his days to the last one of
them, he considered the whole matter a pleasant fancy, all poesy of
sentiment, on Villa's part.
But Jerry, four-legged, smooth-coated, Irish terrier that he was, had the
gift of tongues. If he could not teach languages, at least he could
learn languages. Without effort, and quickly, practically with no
teaching, he began picking up the language of the _Ariel_. Unfortunately,
it was not a whiff-whuff, dog-possible language such as Nalasu had
invented. While Jerry came to understand much that was spoken on the
_Ariel_, he could speak none of it. Three names, at least, he had for
the lady-god: "Villa," "Wife-Woman," "Missis Kennan," for so he heard her
variously called. But he could not so call her. This was god-language
entire, which only gods could talk. It was unlike the language of
Nalasu's devising, which had been a compromise between god-talk and dog-
talk, so that a god and a dog could talk in the common medium.
In the same way he learned many names for the one-man god: "Mister
Kennan," "Harley," "Captain Kennan," and "Skipper." Only in the intimacy
of the three of them alone did Jerry hear him called: "Husband-Man," "My
Man," "Patient One," "Dear Man," "Lover," and "This Woman's Delight." But
in no way could Jerry utter these names in address of the one-man nor the
many names in address of the one-woman. Yet on a quiet night with no
wind among the trees, often and often had he whispered to Nalasu, by
whiff-whuff of name, from a hundred feet away.
One day, bending over him, her hair (drying from a salt-water swim)
flying about him, the one-woman, her two hands holding his head and jowls
so that his ribbon of kissing tongue just missed her nose in the empty
air, sang to him: "'Don't know what to call him, but he's mighty lak' a
rose!'"
On another day she repeated this, at the same time singing most of the
song to him softly in his ear. In the midst of it Jerry surprised her.
Equally true might be the statement that he surprised himself. Never,
had he consciously done such a thing before. And he did it without
volition. He never intended to do it. For that matter, the very thing
he did was what mastered him into doing it. No more than could he
refrain from shaking the water from his back after a swim, or from
kicking in his sleep when his feet were tickled, could he have avoided
doing this imperative thing.
As her voice, in the song, made soft vibrations in his ears, it seemed to
him that she grew dim and vague before him, and that somehow, under the
soft searching prod of her song, he was otherwhere. So much was he
otherwhere that he did the surprising thing. He sat down abruptly,
almost cataleptically, drew his head away from the clutch of her hands
and out of the entanglement of her hair, and, his nose thrust upward at
an angle of forty-five degrees, he began to quiver and to breathe audibly
in rhythm to the rhythm of her singing. With a quick jerk,
cataleptically, his nose pointed to the zenith, his mouth opened, and a
flood of sound poured forth, running swiftly upward in crescendo and
slowly falling as it died away.
This howl was the beginning, and it led to the calling him "Sing Song
Silly." For Villa Kennan was quick to seize upon the howling her singing
induced and to develop it. Never did he hang back when she sat down,
extended her welcoming hands to him, and invited: "Come on, Sing Song
Silly." He would come to her, sit down with the loved fragrance of her
hair in his nostrils, lay the side of his head against hers, point his
nose past her ear, and almost immediately follow her when she began her
low singing. Minor strains were especially provocative in getting him
started, and, once started, he would sing with her as long as she wished.
Singing it truly was. Apt in all ways of speech, he quickly learned to
soften and subdue his howl till it was mellow and golden. Even could he
manage it to die away almost to a whisper, and to rise and fall,
accelerate and retard, in obedience to her own voice and in accord with
it.
Jerry enjoyed the singing much in the same way the opium eater enjoys his
dreams. For dream he did, vaguely and indistinctly, eyes wide open and
awake, the lady-god's hair in a faint-scented cloud about him, her voice
mourning with his, his consciousness drowning in the dreams of
otherwhereness that came to him of the singing and that was the singing.
Memories of pain were his, but of pain so long forgotten that it was no
longer pain. Rather did it permeate him with a delicious sadness, and
lift him away and out of the _Ariel_ (lying at anchor in some coral
lagoon) to that unreal place of Otherwhere.
For visions were his at such times. In the cold bleakness of night, it
would seem he sat on a bare hill and raised his howl to the stars, while
out of the dark, from far away, would drift to him an answering howl. And
other howls, near and far, would drift along until the night was vocal
with his kind. His kind it was. Without knowing it he _knew_ it, this
camaraderie of the land of Otherwhere.
Nalasu, in teaching him the whiff-whuff language, deliberately had gone
into the intelligence of him; but Villa, unwitting of what she was doing,
went into the heart of him, and into the heart of his heredity, touching
the profoundest chords of ancient memories and making them respond.
As instance: dim shapes and shadowy forms would sometimes appear to him
out of the night, and as they flitted spectrally past he would hear, as
in a dream, the hunting cries of the pack; and, as his pulse quickened,
his own hunting instinct would rouse until his controlled soft-howling in
the song broke into eager whinings. His head would lower out of the
entanglement of the woman's hair; his feet would begin making restless,
spasmodic movements as if running; and Presto, in a flash, he would be
out and away, across the face of time, out of reality and into the dream,
himself running in the midst of those shadowy forms in the hunting
fellowship of the pack.
And as men have ever desired the dust of the poppy and the juice of the
hemp, so Jerry desired the joys that were his when Villa Kennan opened
her arms to him, embraced him with her hair, and sang him across time and
space into the dream of his ancient kind.
Not always, however, were such experiences his when they sang together.
Usually, unaccompanied by visions, he knew no more than vaguenesses of
sensations, sadly sweet, ghosts of memories that they were. At other
times, incited by such sadness, images of Skipper and Mister Haggin would
throng his mind; images, too, of Terrence, and Biddy, and Michael, and
the rest of the long-vanished life at Meringe Plantation.
"My dear," Harley said to Villa at the conclusion of one such singing,
"it's fortunate for him that you are not an animal trainer, or, rather, I
suppose, it would be better called 'trained animal show-woman'; for you'd
be topping the bill in all the music-halls and vaudeville houses of the
world."
"If I did," she replied, "I know he'd just love to do it with me--"
"Which would make it a very unusual turn," Harley caught her up.
"You mean . . .?"
"That in about one turn in a hundred does the animal love its work or is
the animal loved by its trainer."
"I thought all the cruelty had been done away with long ago," she
contended.
"So the audience thinks, and the audience is ninety-nine times wrong."
Villa heaved a great sigh of renunciation as she said, "Then I suppose I
must abandon such promising and lucrative career right now in the very
moment you have discovered it for me. Just the same the billboards would
look splendid with my name in the hugest letters--"
"Villa Kennan the Thrush-throated Songstress, and Sing Song Silly the
Irish-Terrier Tenor," her husband pictured the head-lines for her.
And with dancing eyes and lolling tongue Jerry joined in the laughter,
not because he knew what it was about, but because it tokened they were
happy and his love prompted him to be happy with them.
For Jerry had found, and in the uttermost, what his nature craved--the
love of a god. Recognizing the duality of their lordship over the
_Ariel_, he loved the pair of them; yet, somehow, perhaps because she had
penetrated deepest into his heart with her magic voice that transported
him to the land of Otherwhere, he loved the lady-god beyond all love he
had ever known, not even excluding his love for Skipper.