"It is as you say; he is not handsome, certainly not beautiful as
flowers and the stars and women are, but he has another sort of beauty,
I think, such a beauty as made Victor Hugo's monster, Gwynplaine,
fascinating, or gives a certain sort of charm to a banded rattlesnake.
He is not much like the dove-eyed setter over whom we shot woodcock this
afternoon, but to me he is the fairest object on the face of the earth,
this gaunt, brindled Ulm. There's such a thing as association of ideas,
you know.
"What is there about an Ulm especially attractive? Well, I don't know.
About Ulms in the abstract very little, I imagine. About an Ulm in the
concrete, particularly the brute near us, a great deal. The Ulm is a
morbid development in dog-breeding, anyhow. I remember, as doubtless you
do as well, when the animals first made their appearance in this country
a few years ago. The big, dirty-white beasts, dappled with dark blotches
and with countenances unexplainably threatening, reminded one of hyenas
with huge dog forms. Germans brought them over first, and they were
affected by saloon-keepers and their class. They called them Siberian
bloodhounds then, but the dog-fanciers got hold of them, and they
became, with their sinister obtrusiveness, a feature of the shows; the
breed was defined more clearly, and now they are known as Great Danes or
Ulms, indifferently. How they originated I never cared to learn. I
imagine it sometimes. I fancy some jilted, jaundiced descendant of the
sea-rovers, retiring to his castle, and endeavoring, by mating some ugly
bloodhound with a wild wolf, to produce a quadruped as fierce and
cowardly and treacherous as man or woman may be. He succeeded only
partially, but he did well.
"Never mind about the dog, and tell you why I've been gentleman, farmer,
sportsman and half-hermit here for the last five years--leaving
everything just as I was getting a grip on reputation in town, leaving a
pretty wife, too, after only a year of marriage? I can hardly do
that--that is, I can hardly drop the dog, because, you see, he's part of
the story. Hamlet would be left out decidedly were I to read the play
without him. Besides, I've never told the story to any one. I'll do it,
though, to-day. The whim takes me. Surely a fellow may enjoy the luxury
of being recklessly confidential once in half a decade or so, especially
with an old friend and a trusted one. No need for going far back with
the legend. You know it all up to the time I was married. You dined with
me once or twice later. You remember my wife? Certainly she was a
pretty woman, well bred, too, and wise, in a woman's way. I've seen a
good deal of the world, but I don't know that I ever saw a more tactful
entertainer, or in private a more adorable woman when she chose to be
affectionate. I was in that fool's paradise which is so big and holds so
many people, sometimes for a year and a half after marriage. Then one
day I found myself outside the wall.
"There was a beautiful set to my wife's chin, you may recollect--a
trifle strong for a woman; but I used to say to myself that, as students
know, the mother most impresses the male offspring, and that my sons
would be men of will. There was a fullness to her lips. Well, so there
is to mine. There was a delicious, languorous craft in the look of her
eyes at times. I cared not at all for that. I thought she loved me and
knew me. Love of me would give all faithfulness; knowledge of me, even
were the inclination to wrong existent, would beget a dread of
consequences. My dear boy, we don't know women. Sometimes women don't
know men. She did not know me any more than she loved me. She has become
better informed.
"What happened! Well, now come in the dog and the man. The dog was given
me by a friend who was dog-mad, and who said to me the puppy would
develop into a marvel of his kind, so long a pedigree he had. I
relegated the puppy to the servants and the basement, and forgot him.
The man came in the form of an accidental new friend, an old friend of
my wife, as subsequently developed. I invited him to my house, and he
came often. I liked to have him there. I wanted to go to Congress--you
know all about that--and wasn't often at home in the evening. He made
the evenings less lonely for my wife, and I was glad of it. I told her I
would make amends for my absence when the campaign was over. She was all
patience and sweetness.
"Meanwhile that brute of a puppy in the basement had been developing. He
had grown into a great, rangy, long-toothed monster, with a leer on his
dull face, and the servants were afraid of him. I got interested and
made a pet of the uncouth animal. I studied the Ulm character. I learned
queer things about him. Despite his size and strength, he was frequently
overcome by other dogs when he wandered into the street. He was tame
until the shadows began to gather and the sun went down. Then a change
came upon him. He ranged about the basement, and none but I dared
venture down there. He was, in short, a cur by day, at night a demon. I
supposed the early dogs of this breed had been trained to night
slaughter and savageness alone, and that it was a case of atavism, a
recurrence of hereditary instinct. It interested me vastly, and I
resolved to make him the most perfect of watchdogs. I trained him to lie
couchant, and to spring upon and tear a stuffed figure I would bring
into the basement. I noticed he always sprang at the throat. 'Hard
lines,' thought I, 'for the burglar who may venture here!'
"It was a little later than this nonsense with the dog, which was a
piece of boyishness, a degree of relaxation to the strain of my fight
with down-town conditions, that there came in what makes a man think the
affairs of this world are not adjusted rightly, and makes recurrent the
impulse which was first unfortunate for Abel--no doubt worse for Cain.
There is no need for going into details of the story, how I learned, or
when. My knowledge was all-sufficient and absolute. My wife and my
friend were sinning, riotously and fully, but discreetly--sinning
against all laws of right and honor, and against me. The mechanism of it
was simple. The grounds back of my house, you know, were large, and you
may not have forgotten the lane of tall, clipped shrubbery that led up
from the rear to a summer-house. His calls in the evening were made
early and ended early. The pinkness of all propriety was about them. The
servants suspected nothing. But, his call ended, the graceful gentleman,
friend of mine, and lover of my wife, would walk but a few hundred
paces, then turn and enter my grounds at the rear gate I have mentioned,
and pass up the arbor to the pretty summer-house. He would find time for
pleasant anticipation there as he lolled upon one of the soft divans
with which I had furnished the charming place, but his waiting would not
be long. She would soon come to him, and time passed swiftly.
"That is the prologue to my little play. Pretty prologue, isn't it?--but
commonplace. The play proper isn't! The same conditions affect men
differently. When I learned what I have told--after the first awful five
minutes--I don't like to think of them, even now!--I became the most
deliberate man on the face of this earth peopled with sinners.
Sometimes, they say, the whole substance of a man's blood may be changed
in a second by chemical action. My blood was changed, I think. The
poison had transmuted it. There was a leaden sluggishness, but my head
was clear.
"I had odd fancies. I remember I thought of a nobleman who had another
torn slowly apart by horses for proving false to him at the siege of
Calais. His cruelty had been a youthful horror to me. Now I had a
tremendous appreciation of the man. 'Good fellow, good fellow!' I went
about muttering to myself in a foolish, involuntary way. I wondered how
my wife's lover could endure the strain of four strong Clydesdales, each
started at the same moment, one north, one south, one east, one west.
His charming personal appearance recurred to me, and I thought of his
fine neck. Women like a fine-throated man, and he was one. I wondered if
my wife's fancy tended the same way. It was well this idea came to me,
for it gave me an inspiration. I thought of the dog.
"There is no harm, is there, in training a dog to pull down a stuffed
figure? There is no harm, either, if the stuffed figure be given the
simulated habiliments of some friend of yours. And what harm can there
be in training the dog in a garden arbor instead of in a basement? I
dropped into the way of being at home a little more. I told my wife she
should have alternate nights at least, and she was grateful and
delighted. And on the nights when I was at home I would spend half an
hour in the grounds with the dog, saying I was training him in new
things, and no one paid attention. I taught him to crouch in the little
lane close to the summer-house, and to rush down and leap upon the
manikin when I displayed it at the other end. Ye gods! how he learned to
tear it down and tear its imitation throat! The training over, I would
lock him in the basement as usual. But one night I had a dispatch come
to me summoning me to another city. The other man was to call that
evening, and he came. I left before nine o'clock, but just before going
I released the dog. He darted for the post in the garden, and with
gleaming eyes crouched, as he had been accustomed to do, watching the
entrance of the arbor.
"I can always sleep well on a train. I suppose the regular sequence of
sounds, the rhythmic throb of the motion, has something to do with it.
I slept well the night of which I am telling, and awoke refreshed when I
reached the city of my destination. I was driven to a hotel; I took a
bath; I did what I rarely do, I drank a cocktail before breakfast, but I
wanted to be luxurious. I sat down at the table; I gave my order, and
then lazily opened the morning paper. One of the dispatches deeply
interested me.
"'Inexplicable Tragedy' was the headline. By the way, 'Inexplicable
Tragedy' contains just about the number of letters to fill a line neatly
in the style of heading now the fashion. I don't know about such things,
but it seems to me compact and neat and most effective. The lines which
followed gave a skeleton of the story:
"'A WELL-KNOWN GENTLEMAN KILLED BY A DOG.
"'THEORY OF THE CASE WHICH APPEARS THE ONLY ONE
POSSIBLE UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES.'
"I read the dispatch at length. A man is naturally interested in the
news from his own city. It told how a popular club man had been found in
the early morning lying dead in the grounds of a friend, his throat torn
open by a huge dog, an Ulm, belonging to that friend, which had somehow
escaped from the basement of the house, where it was usually confined.
The gentleman had been a caller at the residence the same evening, and
had left at a comparatively early hour. Some time later the mistress of
the place had gone out to a summer-house in the grounds to see that the
servants had brought in certain things used at a luncheon there during
the day, but had seen nothing save the dog, which snarled at her, when
she had gone into the house again. In the morning the gardener found the
body of Mr. ----- lying about midway of an arbor leading from a gateway
to the summer-house. It was supposed that the unfortunate gentleman had
forgotten something, a message or something of that sort, and upon its
recurrence to him had taken the shorter cut to reach the house again, as
he might do naturally, being an intimate friend of the family. That was
all there was of the dispatch.
"Oddly enough, I received no telegram from my wife, but under the
circumstances I could do nothing else than return to my home at once. I
sought my wife, to whom I expressed my horror and my sorrow, but she
said very little. The dog I found in the basement, and he seemed very
glad to see me. It has always been a source of regret to me that dogs
cannot talk. I see that some one has learned that monkeys have a
language, and that he can converse with them, after a fashion. If we
could but talk with dogs!
"I saw the body, of course. I asked a famous surgeon once which would
kill a man the quicker: severance of the carotid artery or the jugular
vein? I forget what his answer was, but in this case it really cut no
figure. The dog had torn both open. It was on the left side. From this I
infer that the dog sprang from the right, and that it was that big fang
in his left upper jaw that did the work. Come here, you brute, and let
me open your mouth! There, you see, as I turn his lips back, what a
beauty of a tooth it is! I've thought of having that particular fang
pulled, and of having it mounted and wearing it as a charm on my
watch-chain, but the dog is likely to die long before I do, and I've
concluded to wait till then. But it's a beautiful tooth!
"I've mentioned, I believe, that my wife was a woman of keen perception.
You will understand that after the unfortunate affair in the garden, our
relations were somewhat--I don't know just what word to use, but we'll
say 'quaint.' It's a pretty little word, and sounds grotesque in this
conversation. One day I provided an allowance for her, a good one, and
came away here alone to play farmer and shoot and fish for four or five
years. Somehow I lost interest in things, and knew I needed a rest. As
for her, she left the house very soon and went to her own home. Oddly
enough, she is in love with me now--in earnest this time. But we shall
not live together again. I could never eat a peach off which the street
vendors had rubbed the bloom. I never bought goods sold after a fire,
even though externally untouched. I don't believe much in salvage as
applied to the relations of men and women. I've seen, in the early
morning, the unfortunates who eat choice bits from the garbage barrels.
So they stifle a hunger, but I couldn't do it, you know. Odd, isn't it,
what little things will disturb the tenor of a man's existence and
interfere with all his plans?
"I came here and brought the dog with me. I'm fond of him, despite the
failings in his character. Notwithstanding his currishness and the
cowardly ferocity which comes out with the night, there is something
definite about him. You know what to expect and what to rely upon. He
does something. That is why I like Ulm.
"What am I going to do? Why, come back to town next year and pick up the
threads. My nerves, which seemed a little out of the way, are better
than they were when I came here. There's nothing to equal country air. I
must have that whirl in my district yet. I don't think the boys have
quite forgotten me. Have you noticed the drift at all? I could only
judge from the papers. How are things in the Ninth Ward?"