Part 11

Joy-of-Life, who was an historian as well as an economist and had written, despite the annoyance of being confined to the same set of dates and dynasties, three histories of England, would reach down from her book shelves some high authority and read us, perhaps, Plutarch's report of the watchdog, Cipparus, who guarded the temple of AEsculapius at Athens so well that when a thief slipped off with some of the precious offerings, he went after in unrelenting pursuit. "First, the man pelted him with stones, but Cipparus would not give up. When day came, he kept at a little distance, but followed with his eye on the man and, when the fellow threw him food, would not touch it. When the man lay down, he spent the night by him; when he walked again, the dog got up and kept following. Cipparus fawned on any wayfarers he met, but kept barking at the thief. When the authorities, who were in chase, heard of this from people who had met the pair and who described the color and size of the dog, they pursued with yet more zeal, seized the man and brought him back from Crommyon. The dog turned round and led the way, proud and delighted, evidently claiming that he had caught the temple thief."

Another evening it would be Motley's account of the escape of the Prince of Orange from a night raid sent out by the Duke of Alva, when the Prince was encamped near Mons. "The sentinels were cut down, the whole army surprised, and for a moment powerless, while, for two hours long, from one o'clock in the morning until three, the Spaniards butchered their foes, hardly aroused from their sleep, ignorant by how small a force they had been thus suddenly surprised, and unable in the confusion to distinguish between friend and foe. The boldest, led by Julian in person, made at once for the Prince's tent. His guards and himself were in profound sleep, but a small spaniel, who always passed the night upon his bed, was a more faithful sentinel. The creature sprang forward, barking furiously at the sound of hostile footsteps, and scratching his master's face with his paws. There was but just time for the Prince to mount a horse which was ready saddled, and to effect his escape through the darkness, before his enemies sprang into the tent. His servants were cut down, his master of the horse and two of his secretaries, who gained their saddles a moment later, all lost their lives, and but for the little dog's watchfulness, William of Orange, upon whose shoulders the whole weight of his country's fortunes depended, would have been led within a week to an ignominious death. To his dying day, the Prince ever afterwards kept a spaniel of the same race in his bed-chamber."

And well he might, and well, too, did the sculptors place a little dog of marble or bronze at the feet of his royal statues hardly more silent than himself, but what Sigurd and I clamored to know was whether, on that wild night of September eleventh, 1572, the spaniel escaped with his master or died with the servants and secretaries on Spanish steel, and no historian, not even our own, could tell us. With the ancient guile of teachers she would divert our attention from the question she could not answer by relating something else,--how Denmark commemorates a dog true to a deposed king in a high order of nobility whose motto runs, Wild-brat was faithful. Or she would take down the first volume of her well-worn Heimskringla and excite Sigurd's young ambition by the record of King Saur. For when Eyestein, King of the Uplands, had harried Thrandheim and set his son over them, and they had slain the son, then "King Eyestein fared a-warring the second time into Thrandheim, and harried wide there, and laid folk under him. Then he bade the Thrandheimers choose whether they would have for king his thrall, who was called Thorir Faxi, or his hound, who was called Saur; and they chose the second, deeming they would then the rather do their own will. Then let they bewitch into the hound the wisdom of three men, and he barked two words and spake the third. A collar was wrought for him, and chains of gold and silver; and whenso the ways were miry, his courtmen bare him on their shoulders. A high-seat was dight for him, and he sat on howe as kings do; he dwelt at the Inner Isle, and had his abode at the stead called Saur's Howe. And so say folk that he came to his death in this wise, that the wolves fell on his flocks and herds, and his courtmen egged him on to defend his sheep; so he leaped down from his howe, and went to meet the wolves, but they straightway tore him asunder."

On the whole, Sigurd preferred poetry, whose rhythm promptly put him to sleep. It was all one to him whether Homer sang the joy-broken heart of old Argus, over whom

"the black night of death Came suddenly, as soon as he had seen Ulysses, absent now for twenty years,"

or Virgil chanted the device whereby AEneas and the Sibyl baffled the giant watch-dog of Hades.

"The three-mouthed bark of Cerberus here filleth all the place, As huge he lieth in a den that hath them full in face; But when the adders she beheld upon his crest up-borne, A sleepy morsel honey-steeped and blent of wizard's corn, She cast him: then his three-fold throat, all wild with hunger's lack, He opened wide, and caught at it, and sank his monstrous back, And there he lay upon the earth enormous through the cave."

Sigurd would softly thump his tail in cadence with the melancholy beat of a dog elegy, whether Prior's tribute to the virtues of Queen Mary's True, or Gay's ironic consolation to Celia on the death of her lap-dog Shock, Cowper's impartial epitaphs for My Lord's pointer Neptune and My Lady's spaniel Fop, Lehmann's memorial of his retriever, who

"Chose, since official dogs at times unbend, The household cat for confidante and friend,"

Louise Imogen Guiney's lament for

"All the sweet wavy Beauty of Davy,"

or Winifred Letts' apostrophe to the debonair collie Scott, or Hilton Brown's tenderest of farewells to his Scotch terrier, Hamish.

"In the nether spaces Will the soul of a Little Black Dog despair? Will the Quiet Folk scare him with shadow-faces? And how will he tackle the Strange Beasts there? Tail held high, I'll warrant, and bristling, Marching stoutly if sore afraid, Padding it steadily, softly whistling;-- That's how the Little Black Devil was made."

Sigurd lived too early to take part in the Free Verse controversy, but he evinced an open mind on matters metrical in that he liked Lord Byron's inscription for his Newfoundland Boatswain no better than Lord Eldon's for his Newfoundland Caesar. It was Sir William Watson's famous quatrain, An Epitaph, that affected him most keenly, because it invited emphasis on the one word that always brought him springing to his feet.

"His friends he loved. His fellest earthly foes --Cats--I believe he did but feign to hate. My hand will miss the insinuated nose, Mine eyes the tail that wagged contempt at Fate."

As Sigurd was duly shown Canis Major in the ethereal heavens, so was he introduced to certain starry dogs that shine in the skies of English poetry,--the pampered "smale houndes" of Chaucer's Prioress, King Lear's elegant little "Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart," dear, clownish Crab, and all that pack of rich-voiced hunting hounds whose "gallant chiding" rings through Elizabethan literature. The boy Will Shakespeare must often have hearkened to the hounds, "match'd in mouth like bells," coursing the Cotswolds, Silver and Belman and Sweetlips and Echo, their heads hung "with ears that sweep away the morning dew," the "speed of the cry" outrunning his "sense of hearing."

Sigurd was but mildly interested when we told him that in George Eliot's novels there were over fifty dogs, ranging all the way from pug to mastiff, nor did he care greatly for Dickens' dogs, not even blundering, ill-favored, clumsy, "bullet-headed" Diogenes, Florence Dombey's comforter, nor the bandy leader of Jerry's dancing troupe, who, because of a lost half-penny, had to grind out Old Hundred on the barrel-organ while his companions devoured their supper--and his; but Scott's dogs, from fleet Lufra of The Lady of the Lake to the Dandy Dinmonts of Guy Mannering,--"There's auld Pepper and auld Mustard, and young Pepper and young Mustard, and little Pepper and little Mustard"--made him blink and prick up his ears. Thus encouraged, I would tell him of Sir Walter's love for all his home dogs and most of all for the tall stag-hound Maida; how Herrick wept for his spaniel Tracy; how Southey grieved when his "poor old friend" Phillis, another spaniel, was drowned; how Landor delighted in dogs from the boyhood when he boxed with Captain behind the coach house door to the extreme old age whose loneliness was solaced by two silky-coated Pomeranians, first, in Bath, by the golden Pomero, who would bark an ecstatic accompaniment to his master's tremendous explosions of laughter, and then, in Florence, by Giallo, whose opinions on politics and letters the snowy-bearded poet would quote with humorous respect; how Nero, a Maltese fringy-paws, brightened the somber home of the Carlyles; and how Pope's favorite dog was, as he bitterly suggests, not unlike himself in being "a little one, a lean one, and none of the finest shaped." If Sigurd seemed responsive, I might go on with accounts of Mrs. Browning's Flush; of Hogg's Hector, "auld, towzy, trusty friend"; of Arnold's dachshunds, Geist, Max and Kaiser; of Gilder's Leo,

"Leo the shaggy, the lustrous, the giant, the gentle Newfoundland,"

of Lehman's "flop-eared" Rufus, and of Miss Letts' terrier Tim in his "wheaten-colored coat."

Lest Sigurd should get the impression that the globe was populated chiefly by poets, Joy-of-Life would strike in with anecdotes of the little dogs that frisked about Frederick the Great, and Charles II, the Merry Monarch, and tell how Edward VII's last pet, Caesar, a fox terrier, trotted mournfully in the funeral procession behind Kildare, the royal charger; or she would "unmuzzle her wisdom" to the point of declaring that the kings of Babylon and Nineveh had their favorite hunting hounds with tails curled up over the back and collars wrought in the form of leafy wreaths. She would inform Sigurd, who took it flippantly, that solemn burial honors had been paid to dogs in ancient times, that the Egyptians held them sacred and religiously embalmed their bodies, and that many a Celtic chief and Norland viking lies more quiet beneath his cairn because his noblest deerhound slumbers at his feet. Or perhaps she would relate, for our collie's ethical guidance, celebrated deeds of hero dogs. Sigurd would grunt and grumble in sympathy with her deep tones as she chanted the famous ballad of Beth Gelert, that "peerless hound" whose fidelity cost him his life, or of the twice-sung terrier, haunter of Helvellyn, who for three months kept watch beside her master's body at the foot of the fatal precipice. Sigurd did not care for Wordsworth as much as Wordsworth would have cared for him, but he loved Little Music, striving in vain to save her fellow Dart under whose speed the river-ice had broken.

On one of those fortunate evenings when we had the Dryad with us, Sigurd would listen with waxing incredulity to legends of King Arthur's hound Cavall, whose paw left its print on British rock; of Merlin's demon dog, black with red ears, akin to the little black dog that danced about Faustus, sending out flying flames from its feet; of Fingal's Bran and his last chase after the enchanted snow-white hart; and of Tristram's faithful Hodain, who licked the dregs from the cup of love which the knight and Queen Iseult had quaffed together. Sigurd was frankly skeptical about those

"Half a hundred good ban-dogs"

of Fountains Abbey, who, whistled to his help by the fighting friar, gave Robin Hood and his archers not a little trouble.

"Two dogs at once to Robin Hood did go, T'one behind, the other before; Robin Hood's mantle of Lincoln green Off from his back they tore.

"And whether his men shot east or west, Or they shot north or south, The curtal dogs, so taught they were, They caught the arrows in their mouth."

But Petit-Crin, the fairy dog from Avalon that Tristram gave to Iseult, was more than any honest collie could endure.

"No tongue could tell the marvel of it; 'twas of such wondrous fashion that no man might say of what color it was. If one looked on the breast, and saw naught else, one had said 'twas white as snow, yet its thighs were greener than clover, and its sides, one red as scarlet, the other more yellow than saffron. Its under parts were even as azure, while above 'twas mingled, so that no one color might be distinguished; 'twas neither green nor red, white nor black, yellow nor blue, and yet there was somewhat of all these therein; 'twas a fair purple brown. And if one saw this strange creation of Avalon against the lie of the hair there would be no man wise enough to tell its color, so manifold and changing were its hues.

"Around its neck was a golden chain, and therefrom hung a bell, which rang so sweet and clear when it began to chime Tristram forgot his sadness and his sorrow, and the longing for Iseult that lay heavy at his heart. So sweet was the tone of the bell that no man heard it but he straightway forgat all that aforetime had troubled him.