Atlantic Classics Volume Ii Part 14

She had evidently been through a terrible experience. A broken rope was around her neck; she was as gaunt as a wolf; her eyes were almost iridescent with terror, like the wonderful eyes of some hysteriacs.

Imprison her soft hand and let her rave, And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes!

We did not adopt Viola; she adopted us. She followed us to the tent where we were spending the summer, and there she stayed with us, to remain on guard when we were away, to welcome us on our return with such a show of abject grat.i.tude. I think a male dog could not have shown such a union of love and fear; her spirit had evidently been broken; it became our task to lure her confidence back again--and here began my own education. If I spoke with--well, decision to my wife, poor Viola slunk to the ground. She thought the tone was meant for her. I would never claim to be a model husband, but I did learn from Viola, theoretically at least, that one can have good manners even in the privacy of the family circle.

More rapidly than we could have expected Viola's terrors left her, and she resumed the normal canine outlook on life-like humans I have known who have managed to counteract the false starts of their early childhood--obsessions regarding dark closets, snakes, or an avenging Deity.

I am not going to dwell on the intelligence Viola manifested after she had freed herself from fear. All dogs are wonderful, even when they are not intelligent. The most stupid dog I know mopes around the house and refuses to eat whenever his master is away, thus evincing an emotional sensibility more valuable than the smartness of the most Frenchified of poodles that ever trod the vaudeville stage. Unlike a collie of my acquaintance, Viola did not keep the woodbox replenished; nor had she a vocabulary of several hundred words, like another collie that I know.

Still, she had an apt.i.tude to learn spelling. When it was inadvisable to take her out for a walk, we spelled the words, vainly trying to conceal the fact from her, as we would from a child; and often, to this day, people stop me on the road, and ask if I am the owner of the dog that knows how to spell.

What I want to dwell on is my own education rather than Viola's, and this began in earnest after we had moved to the real country, and lived in a little farmhouse without any farm. Viola was a lovely ornament to the dooryard; but it seemed a pity that there were no flocks or herds to evoke her ministering care. We didn't even keep chickens; we were ostensibly in the country to cultivate thoughts,--such as they were,--and while Viola might be said to inspire thoughts, they hardly gave her the necessary exercise. A collie should have a run of ten miles every day, and it was pathetic to see Viola lying in the dooryard, ears erect, eyes eager, watching, waiting, hoping for something to happen. I should not be surprised if her very eagerness attracted the thing she longed for.

Our next-door neighbor, a man fully as fond of dogs as myself, was early attracted to her. He had recently lost his own dog, and asked if he might borrow Viola to help him catch his chickens, and if she might accompany him on the long drive he took every day through the countryside. With perfect good will, and in utter innocence, I consented. Little did I dream, as they say in the novels, of what lay before me.

I had an idea that Viola would understand that she was merely loaned for these expeditions; that she would come back from them with undiminished loyalty, grateful to me for having given her a chance for exercise. But our friendly neighbor had a very taking way with dogs. Aside from the wonderful trips, which were enough to turn the head of any collie, he knew how to talk dog-language better than I did. He knew how to pinch a dog's ear in the most seductive manner. With him, doggishness was both an art and a science.

There was nothing lovelier than the sight of Viola rounding up the chickens, shepherding them into their houses, holding down a recalcitrant pullet with her paw, or bringing in her mouth a dowager hen to her foster-father. If I had the gift of a sculptor and wished to carve a personification of pride, I think I should depict Viola bringing in a chicken--her tail aloft, like a plume of triumph, her eyes shining, stepping over imaginary obstacles like a high-manege horse with an air of dignity that was really ludicrous. If an unlucky chicken got away from her, away she went across meadows, and over walls, her beautiful voice vibrating through the landscape, sometimes breaking to an octave higher in her excitement.

It was fun to see her scour ahead of the wagon when her new master took her out to help him pick up eggs. It was charming to see her come home sitting on the seat beside him, tired but still eager, looking to right and left, sniffing the air, learning all sorts of smell secrets which are closed forever to our supposedly superior human consciousness. Is it any wonder that it was necessary for me to go next door to get her, and that she followed me along the path with a certain droopy air that was hardly flattering?

There is not much in the literary life that would interest an outdoor dog. I felt somewhat like a dry-as-dust professor married to a young and attractive wife who is being taken to all the routs and parties throughout the neighborhood by a disgustingly youthful and handsome cavalier. I know nothing quite so shriveling to the soul as jealousy, nor anything so hard to fight against. I reasoned that Viola's expeditions were doing her good, that I ought to be grateful for them, and I repeated the antediluvian fallacy that my jealousy was only indicative of my love. Nothing that I could say to myself made any difference; and if I were in danger of forgetting how I felt, there were plenty of other persons to remind me.

'Well,' said the fisherman, 'I guess you don't know whether that dog is yours or Lysander's!' And my most intimate friend remarked genially, 'If I had a dog, I'd want it to be _my_ dog, or I wouldn't want to have any.'

It was bad enough to bear the sympathy of the community; it was worse to witness the triumph of my rival. Often, after I had brought home the drooping Viola, Lysander would follow after her. Instantly she revived like flowers in water. She smiled, she was even coquettish. They began a lengthy conversation I could not understand--little sounds from him, little grunts from her. If, by any chance, through a belated sense of duty, she happened to remain beside my chair, he surrept.i.tiously snapped his fingers and made little sucking sounds that he fancied were inaudible, and then she sidled over to his chair.

If jealously is an index of one's love, it is strange that, the more jealous I became of Lysander, the less I loved Viola. 'Well, _let_ her stay with him,' I said to myself. 'I guess he won't object to having me pay for the license.'

She did stay; she sometimes stayed all night; and few things in my life have been more humiliating than my visits to get her.

Lysander was glad to see me--oh my, yes! He welcomed me with a crooked sardonic smile that I understood thoroughly. Viola knew just as well as he did why I had come, and pretended to take an interest in the wall-paper. As we walked home along the path, I scolded her, and she slunk to the ground and asked my pardon. Was there anything in her life that could make her conscious of any evil? Of course not. Without realizing it, I was exercising a sort of spiritual coercion over her. I was really condemning her for what was a true expression of collie life; but she accepted my suggestion of evil. I have often wondered since, how many persons in the human realm are suffering from a sense of sin as false as hers was. Of course, I did not philosophize the situation at the time. I simply felt disquietude when I was with her. This disquietude increased rapidly until I apparently disliked her; and I suppose that in my feeling for her there was actually an element of hate.

'Very well,' I said to myself in effect, 'there are better dogs in the world than ever were licensed. The next one I get, I'll keep for my very own.'

I had now reached my low spot--a centre of indifference; and if this were fiction, the reader might expect an ever-increasing objective crescendo from this point onward, culminating in a stirring climax.

Possibly Viola would rescue me from a burning building, thus showing that she really loved me, after all. Unfortunately I am dealing with facts of a rather intangible nature. I have noticed that in life coffee and pistols for two are not called for so often as in literature. We pa.s.s the time of day with an acquaintance, discuss the play, and what not, little dreaming that behind that smiling exterior a spiritual crisis may be taking place.

My crisis was rather interesting because it seemed almost physical. Not so much in the subconscious brain ganglia as in the sympathetic nerve-centres, the process was taking place--the reverse process of what had taken place during my period of jealousy. I could almost hear a spiritual clicking going on inside me, as if I were composed of children's blocks which had become disarranged and were being replaced in a symmetrical pattern. One by one, the filaments of possession were being broken--that sense which in its grossest terms is really a sort of fatuous pride. Say what we will, most of us feel that we deserve praise and tribute for having selected so attractive a wife, for having begotten such charming children. Having no longer any more of a proprietary interest in Viola than I had in the wild flowers, or the sea, or sky, I got a fresh eye on her. I could not help admiring her, and I could not help admiring her for herself alone. Having no longer any taint of possession, it was impossible for me to impose my will on her, so I adopted unconsciously the courtesy one shows to some one else's wife.

'Well, Viola,' I would say, 'do you want to come home to-night? You don't _have_ to.'

She would look up and listen, c.o.c.k her ears, consider the matter.

Sometimes she would decide to stay with Lysander, and sometimes, strangely enough, she would decide to go home with me. If she came, she came happily, because she was exercising the prerogative of an independent creature. Her sense of sin or shame left her; and somehow we were all gainers, Lysander, Viola, and myself. He no longer snapped his fingers or made little sucking noises. These had been psychical reactions from my jealous emanations when we were struggling for Viola's favor; but we were now united in doing what we could to make her happy; and our friendship, which had suffered previously, in this new office became confirmed. What expansive talks we had about her! How he rushed over to tell me the latest example of her wisdom or affection; and when one expects nothing from a dog, it is rather pleasant to feel suddenly, while struggling with a sentence, a damp delightful nose inside your hand.

Sometimes I fancy that Viola, in forming her friendship for Lysander, had a prevision; for the time came when we had to leave her, and in whose hands could it be better to leave her than Lysander's and his wife's?

Most dog stories end with the death of the dog, but I can a.s.sure the reader that Viola is still very much alive. Not agile any longer, she has become a privileged parlor guest, for the stairs are too much for her. Sometimes she even finds it impossible to bury a bone, and then she goes through the pantomime of burying it. She knows that we know that she has not really done it. Her a.s.sumption of achievement is ludicrous.

Who says dogs have not a sense of humor?

She is beautiful as old ladies are beautiful. If she wore a lace stomacher, she would make a magnificent Rembrandt--rich browns, tawny gold, and, in the heart of the picture, the spirit of her personality as mellow and pervasive as a flame.

I don't see Viola often nowadays, but what I gained by renouncing a purely personal interest in her has extended itself somehow beyond what we know as the realm of time and s.p.a.ce. This sounds rather esoteric, but what I mean is that I am very happy whenever I think of her, whether I am with her or not. I feel very near her though we are separated by a hundred miles; and I should not be surprised if, in the m.u.f.fled 'Woof!

Woof!' of her dreams, she often lives again what I happen to be thinking of at the moment--wonderful runs with Teddy, the c.o.c.ker spaniel, or the homeric combat with the woodchuck beside Simon Brook.

As I sit thinking of Viola, there happens to come into my mind, by one of those odd a.s.sociations that have so little logic in them, an apparently trivial incident that took place a day or so ago. A couple of little girls stopped me on Arlington Street, Boston, and asked the way to Marlboro Street. It chanced that I was going to Marlboro Street myself, and I offered to conduct them there, but they were walking in the leisurely way of children, taking in everything on the way, and I soon outstripped them. At the corner of Marlboro Street, however, I turned and waved to them to indicate that this was the street they wanted, and they waved back to show that they understood.

That was apparently the end of the incident; but two or three blocks up Marlboro Street, something impelled me to turn. The children had found the street, they were following safely, they were evidently watching me; for as soon as I turned, they waved again. As I went up the steps of the house where I had an appointment, I looked back for the third time. The children, now become almost fairy-like figures, were still watching me.

Up went their hands and up went mine, and across the long length of city street, we waved in greeting and farewell.

I do not know why the incident should have seemed to contain an element of real beauty. I was reminded of George E. Woodberry's poem in which a somewhat similar incident is celebrated. A boy, you remember, while playing, ran heedlessly into the poet, and the poem ends,--

It was only the clinging touch Of a child in a city street; It hath made the whole day sweet.

What struck me even more than the beauty of my adventure was the quality of permanence that it seemed to wear. In my under-consciousness, there was something immortal about it. Can it be possible that our casual relations, where love is,--our relations with children, or with strangers whom we shall never see again, or with the lower animals whose span of life is necessarily very limited,--can it be possible that these relations are less ephemeral than we think? Would it be too much to hope that the relation between Viola and myself is a small but permanent addition to the store of worth-while things?

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Haunted Lives

By Laura Spencer Portor

I

It is my increasing belief, to which the careful observation and study of years give strength, that all lives may be said to be haunted in greater or less degree by certain recurrent thoughts or influences or impressions or realizations, which, visiting and revisiting the chambers of the mind, probably from earliest years, come at last to dwell persistently with us, returning again and again like the French ghostly _revenants_, making free to haunt those long-closed rooms of the memory where once, it may be, they moved in the full daylight of consciousness and realization, as delights or dreads, joys or terrors of the soul.

'Two ideas,' says Pater, in writing of Leonardo, 'were especially fixed in him, as reflexes of things that touched his brain in childhood beyond the measure of other impressions--the smiling of women, and the motion of great waters.' And later on, 'He became above all a painter of portraits; faces of a modeling more skillful than has been seen before or since, embodied with a reality which almost amounts to illusion on dark air. To take a character as it was, and delicately sound its stops, suited one so curious in observation, curious in invention.'

So we seem to see Leonardo possessed always by the interest and beauty and meaning of faces, fascinated by the individuality, the infinite variety, the delicately interpretative meanings of them; reminiscent of the charm of them; visited by a hundred recurrent lovelinesses of them; preoccupied by their mystery; and above all, it seems, haunted and summoned by the lovely and enigmatic smiling of women.

To recognize this is to know much of Leonardo and his work; and even if we read no more of Pater's memorable essay, he has succeeded in these three sentences in bringing before us some impression of the essential man which is not readily forgotten, and has admitted us as it were to a partial knowledge of that great and diverse mind.

But all this is rare, very rare in biography. We write biography, for the most part, as we write history--with a leaning toward dates and successions of events.

M. Taine in the introduction to his _History of English Literature_ makes a strong protest, it will be remembered, against this method of writing history. He cites Carlyle's _Cromwell_ and Sainte-Beuve's _Port Royal_ as examples of the opposite and more modern method. In these event and happening are given but secondary place; in these it is always rather the subtle underlying causes which are touched on with particular insistence. It is the tragedy of the soul of Cromwell which is so memorably recorded by Carlyle; and by Sainte-Beuve it is the intricate psychology of an entire inst.i.tution which is laid bare.

It is according to this method, Taine argues, not only that history should be written, but also that we should study the literature of any nation. He then proceeds through his several volumes to his memorable consideration of English literature, dwelling repeatedly on the psychology of the English people as it manifests itself in their literature. He calls attention again and again to certain recurring ideas or ideals which manifest themselves persistently in this particular race, which haunt it almost as an individual is haunted by certain not always definite, yet strongly formative influences.

All this is not very new in substance, yet in application it belongs distinctly to modern times. It falls in with the spirit of research and inquiry so active in the past half century, and announces as with prophetic voice--for it was written as much as fifty years ago--the psychology of nations, of which we only lately begin to speak with real seriousness.

We have long admitted, it is true, a certain psychology of eras--a kind of 'soul' of certain times, or 'spirit' of certain ages, manifesting itself diversely in diverse periods. And, quite as the name of an individual not alone summons to the mind that individual and no other, but connotes a particular personality, so such wide phrases as 'The Elizabethan Age,' 'The Renaissance,' 'The Homeric Age,' the 'Age of Chivalry' do not alone designate certain ages, but in each case connote some essential quality which went to render that particular age memorable and significant. This quality is found to be in every instance dependent upon some idea or ideal which, drawing its power often from unremarked and not always discoverable sources, moulds and fashions the thought and motives of the times.

So the art, the science, the religion, the philosophy of any given age, all these do but flower from causes that have their roots deep under the surface; and he who would acquaint himself with any notable period must study, not so much the outward and obvious facts and happenings of that period, as the hidden and subtle forces lying beneath all these.

But if the true history of a people cannot be given, or the true spirit of an era be revealed by a mere citing of events, however important or carefully chosen, what shall be said of the futility of studying that infinitely more delicate thing, the history of a human soul, by method of index and compilation? Yet that is precisely what much of our accepted and well-credited biography amount to, and we have little of what might be called the more modern method. One looks in vain in the average Lives of great men for any careful consideration or a.n.a.lysis of the remote causes or springs of personality.