Sigurd Our Golden Collie and Other Comrades of the Road Part 20

"How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world!"

He was not, to be sure,

"The gla.s.s of fashion and the mold of form,"

for his nose, from the bench point of view, was nearly half an inch too long. But his "dejected haviour" and deep-rooted suspicion of his surroundings were Hamlet's own. He felt himself "be-netted round with villanies" and apprehensively watched the simple ways of our family in profound despondency and distrust. The fears that haunted him kept him so hushed that we grew to believe he was actually dumb,--a defect in physical endowment that might account for many abnormalities. Now and then the rigid little figure beside me on the veranda--for gradually, day by day, he edged an inch or two nearer--would give a stir of weariness or even drop, exhausted, for a nap, but in the main

"as patient as the female dove When that her golden couplets are disclos'd, His silence" would "sit drooping."

Through all the hot summer days I had to see him,

"A dull and muddy mettled rascal, peak Like John-a-dreams,"

but as soon as we reached the cool cover of dusk, I would lift the now crouching, anxious puppy to his four feet and snap on his new leash.

His troubled eyes would well over with expostulatory questions:

"Say, why is this? wherefore? what should we do?"

"We're going to walk, Little Stick-in-the-Mud. Come on!"

And thus Hamlet, "with much forcing of his disposition," would undergo the daily const.i.tutional, which he converted into a genuine gymnastic exercise for us both by pulling back on the leash with all his considerable strength, protesting:

"It is not, nor it cannot come to good; But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue."

In this ign.o.ble fashion I would drag him along for a mile or so of the least frequented road, until he would suddenly fix his slender legs and refuse to be budged:

"Where wilt thou lead me? speak; I'll go no further."

"Very well! If you insist on turning back here, you know what will happen. It will be your turn to drag me."

To this he had always the same rejoinder:

"'Tis true 'tis pity, And pity 'tis 'tis true."

So Hamlet, all his soul set on getting back to the comparative security of that veranda, would fall to tugging like an infant Hercules, scrabbling me along, regardless of sidewalks, by the nearest route to safety, till I felt myself, on reaching home, more than ever a "quintessence of dust."

When I tried him off the leash, he would, even into the autumn, run back to the kennels, though he would let no one there touch him but the gypsy-tanned child. Later, he would slip back to the Scarab, usually after dark, but be afraid to come near or ask admittance, sweeping around the house in wide, wistful circles. It took our softest coaxings to bring that palpitating puppy across the threshold and, once in, we all had to shake paws with him many times before he would believe himself welcome and sink down at my feet to sleep away his tiredness and terror. It was midsummer before I dared loose him on the campus for a free scamper, from which, hesitant, with many tremors and recoils, he came back to me in answer to my call. I thought then that the battle was won, but the next time I ventured it, and the next, he ran away.

Yet before the leaves fell we had made such progress that when I fastened on his leash and invited him to go to walk,

"there did seem in him a kind of joy To hear of it."

For weeks the rooms of the house were to this kennel-bred puppy no better than torture-chambers, being full of strange, sinister objects, for to Hamlet, even yet, the unknown is a menace and a dread. Brought into study or dining-room, he would "wax desperate with imagination,"

throwing wild looks at ceiling and walls and then spinning about and about like an agonized top. "Upon the heat and flame" of those excitements it was hard to persuade him to "sprinkle cool patience,"

but in process of time he became accustomed to rugs and furniture and even, after repeated a.s.surances, grew to understand that Sigurd's chair was at his service.

By mid-winter he had come to realize, with a touching relief and responsive fervor of affection, that the members of the family were his friends, but he was still thrown into a panic by the door-bell and the murderous monsters whose entrance he believed it to announce. Every arrival he regarded as an agent of Hamlet's doom and fled precipitately to chosen places of concealment on the upper floors. Yet curiosity was strong in the little fellow, too. As I sat chatting with a caller, I would presently be aware of an excessively un.o.btrusive collie stealing down the stairs. Quivering all over, in awe of his own daring, he would place himself erect on the threshold with his face to the hall and very slowly, inch by inch, would "like a crab" back into the room, edging along on his haunches, steering his blind course for the further side of my chair. Still keeping his back to the stranger, he would reach up a pleading paw for me to clasp and then, regarding himself as both invisible and protected, listen keenly to learn if the conversation were by any chance about Hamlet.

He was as timorous out of doors as in, having little to do with other dogs, save with a benignant collie neighbor, old Betty, and yielding up his choicest bones without remonstrance to any impudent marauder. If I reproached him for his pacifist bearing, he would touch my hand with an apologetic tongue and look up with shamefaced eyes that admitted:

"it cannot be But I am pigeon-liver'd, and lack gall To make oppression bitter."

It was his habit to take legs, rather than arms, "against a sea of troubles," and when enemies loomed on the horizon he would precipitately make for home. He was by this time dog enough to be overjoyed if one of us summoned him for a walk.

"What noise? who calls on Hamlet?"

And all his belated frolic of puppyhood came out in impatient collie capers while, with our intolerable human tardiness, wraps were donned and doors thrown open. And then the leaps of ecstasy!

"Go on; I'll follow thee."

But he hated, and still hates, to be out in the great, dangerous world of noises, people, motors, alone by daylight. "Nay, come, let's go together," is his constant plea. But if no one of the household is at liberty to companion him, he prefers to wait for his exercise till "the very witching time of night," when he plunges into the mystery of the woods or runs by moonlight along deserted roads. During his first winter, on returning from one of his nocturnal rambles, he would stand, snow-coated, without a whine or scratch, shivering at the outside door, silent even under the beating of an icy storm, until some anxious watcher caught sight of him and let him in. He had been with us over a year before he found his voice. Then, one noon, a brisk step coming up to the south porch along our private path took Hamlet by surprise. His quick, shrill protest astonished him as much as it did us and he promptly rushed to refuge under the table. But having shattered our psychopathic theories and confessed that he was no mute, he took to barking with immoderate enthusiasm that has already more than made up for lost time. Yet as with his movements, so his barking is odd,--discordant, off the pitch, "jangled out of tune."

These tremendous bouts of barking, combined with his excitable and suspicious temperament, have given our timid collie a preposterous reputation for ferocity. Callers wise in dogs observe that even as he roars he runs away, wagging his tail, and come boldly on to the north door, while Hamlet announces and denounces them at the south:

"O villain, villain, smiling, d.a.m.ned villain!"

"A guilty thing."

"A puff'd and reckless libertine."

"A pestilence on him for a mad rogue!"

"What, ho! help, help, help!"

But when he has torn his "pa.s.sion to tatters, to very rags," he slips in shyly to greet the accepted caller, usually seating himself, according to his own peculiar code of etiquette, with his back to the guest, but sometimes, especially if it is a college girl "in the morn and liquid dew of youth," he will, instead of taking his accustomed place by me, lie down at Ophelia's feet, explaining:

"Here's metal more attractive."

Hamlet is a delicate subject for discipline as any sign of displeasure on the part of the few he trusts will fling him back to his puppy state of quivering misery. But for his inhospitable clamors he is occasionally shut up in the telephone closet, a custom which he considers

"More honour'd in the breach than the observance."

Released, he bounds toward us beseeching caresses and every a.s.surance that we have forgiven him and love him still. But he is just as ready to bark at the next arrival, though the dread word CLOSET will sometimes arrest a roar in mid-career. His sense of duty, as the guardian of the house, is inextricably intertwisted with his desire to be good.

Hamlet has, indeed, an uncharacteristic conviction of the preciousness of property. He did not learn it from me. I resent the metal that outlasts flesh and bone and am careless about locking doors since against grief and death no bolts avail; but Hamlet, had destiny put him in his proper place, would have ridden through life on top of an express wagon, zealously guarding its packages from every thievish touch. As it is, he keeps an embarra.s.sing watch and ward on my desk and bookcases. Often a seminar student, reaching for a volume that promises to throw light on the discussion, is amazed by the leap of what had seemed to be a slumbering collie, now all alert and vigilant, gently nipping her sleeve to hold that arm of robbery back. Or in the midst of committee toils, a guileless colleague may move toward my desk to make a note. From the hall Hamlet dashes in with gleaming eyes and, as she turns in astonishment, squeezes his yellow bulk between her and that mysterious altar of my midnight devotion and firmly shoves her back.

These policeman ways of his are not universally endearing and, in return, he has no faith whatever in the honesty of my a.s.sociates, "arrant knaves all." He has never put aside his dark suspicions of one who is not only generosity itself, but a socialist to boot, because on his first Christmas Eve in the Scarab she had been so kind as to act as her own Santa Claus and take away her labeled packet from the pile of tissue-papered and gay-ribboned gifts in a corner of the study.

Although I had noticed that the puppy made a point of lying down before that heap, I did not realize that he, terrified and bashful as he then was, had const.i.tuted himself its custodian, till this action of hers left his soul "full of discord and dismay." Even yet he heralds her approach with consternation:

"O shame! where is thy blush?"

"A most pernicious woman!"

"Marry, this is miching mallecho; it means mischief."

So our dog has few friends outside his home. It is difficult to maintain with the children on the hill the pleasant fiction that their Christmas playthings come from Hamlet when it so obviously "harrows"

him "with fear and wonder" to see the little recipients allowed to bear these objects away. Laddie's mistress, ever gracious, pets and praises him, and hers is the only home in the village at which, sure of a happy welcome and delectable bits of bread and b.u.t.ter, he consents to call, but Jack's mistress, catholic as her sympathies are, remembers an unlucky encounter from which her famous comrade retired, blinking queerly, the loser of a tooth. It is, of course, her theory that Hamlet feloniously reached into Jack's mouth to snap out that treasure, while to me it seems crystal clear that Jack uprooted the venerable fang himself in an unholy effort to bite Hamlet; but now the collie is shut up whenever the terrier comes, though they manage to exchange through the windows a vituperative language not taught in our curriculum.

Hoping to extend this too limited circle of Hamlet's friendships, we have accepted as a summer guest a cynical old parrot, who has already, in a lifetime cruelly long for a captive, known a variety of vanishing households. The tones that Poor Pol echoes, the names that he calls, insistently and vainly, in his lonesome hours, the sc.r.a.ps of family talk dating perhaps from five, ten, twenty years ago that his strange voice, a mockery of the human, still repeats, make him, even to us, an awesome personage, a Wandering Jew of the caged-pet generations. What does he miss, what does he remember, as he sits sweetly crooning to himself "Peek-a-boo, Pol," and then rasps crossly out, "Wal! what _is_ it?" and then falls to a direful groaning "Oh!" and "Ah!" over and over, more and more feebly, as if in mimicry of a death-bed, and suddenly spreads his wings, hurrahs like a boy on the Glorious Fourth and storms our ears with a whole barn-yard of cackles and c.o.c.ka-doodledoos?

For the first few minutes after the arrival of Polonius, Hamlet regarded the great cage, set on top of a tall revolving bookcase, and its motionless perching inmate, whose plumage of sheeny green was diversified by under-glints of red and the pride of a golden nape, as new ornaments committed to his guardianship. Erect on his haunches, he gazed up at them with an air of earnest responsibility, but when Polonius, c.o.c.king his head and peering down on the collie with one round orange eye, crisply remarked:

"h.e.l.lo! What's that? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!" Hamlet went wild with amazement. After making from every side vain leaps and scrambles toward the unperturbed parrot, he tore from one of us to another, with whines and imploring gaze striving to learn what this apparition might mean

"So horridly to shake" his "disposition With thoughts beyond the reaches" of his soul.