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A short story by Katharine Lee Bates |
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Farewells |
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Title: Farewells Author: Katharine Lee Bates [More Titles by Bates] "The door of Death is made of gold, --Blake's Dedication to Queen Charlotte.
They were celebrated with becoming pomp, with much-wrapped gifts that he rejoiced to open himself and often with a yellow tea. As his taste inclined to broad and simple effects, there would be a giant sunflower in the center of the table, with strips of goldenrod emanating from it like rays. The guests, his best-beloved of all ages and conditions, would drink Sigurd's health in orangeade and feast in his honor on sponge cake. From the day of Poor Ellen to that of Housewife Honeyvoice, Amelia, a young and comely Irish Protestant, reigned in the kitchen and made it her pride to celebrate Sigurd's anniversaries with all due splendor, though even then she would not intermit the daily scoldings to which she attributed his very gradual growth in grace. For still he would run away at intervals and wallow in all iniquity. If the prodigal returned by daylight and found us together, he would disport himself at our feet in a brief agony of penitence. As he lay on his back, writhing with remorse and apparently trying to clasp his paws in supplication, we would reproach him, to the accompaniment of his hollow groans, until our gravity would break down. Then he would cheerfully scramble up and fetch us his latest rubber toy, with a coaxing invitation to let bygones be bygones and have a frisk with Sigurd. If he came home under cover of darkness, he would shamelessly go straight to his own piazza corner, venting an indignant grunt, like an outraged man of the house, if he found his supper soggy and his bed not made. The birthday teas, though they brought so many of his friends across the threshold, were not an unmixed joy to Sigurd. The flaunting bow of new, stiff, yellow ribbon tickled his ears, until he had succeeded in working it around, a rumpled knot, under his chin, and worse yet were the wreaths of yellow wild flowers that the small fingers of some of his child neighbors had woven for his neck. His share of his own birthday cake, too, was more hygienically apportioned than he approved. What is a speck of yellow frosting on a collie's long red tongue? But Amelia saw to it that his birthday dinner was after his own heart,--fresh corncake, rice and liver, while now and then some devoted sophomore, even though the long vacation had put a thousand miles between them, would send him a home-made chocolate cream as large as a saucer, at which he was allowed only to sniff and nibble. We may have noticed that Sigurd's girth was ampler and his bearing more sedate than in his younger days, but still he was the first in every frolic and almost as fleet as a deer. He roused one at the edge of the woods one morning when he was out for an early airing with Joy-of-Life and chased it across the meadows so fast and far that she was in dismay lest he overtake the beautiful creature and pull it down. Even to the last he would let no dog pass him. His frankest admirer and fellow-runner through his sunset years was a simple-minded young collie whom Sigurd would outwit by wheeling sharply, when he felt Sandy gaining on him, and making off at right angles while the precipitate pursuer sped on for some distance in the old direction. But the goal was what Sigurd chose to make it, and Sandy, bewildered by these subtle tactics, always believed himself outrun. We had come to regard a walk without Sigurd as hardly a walk at all. Perhaps we observed that he found the heat, which brought out his tormenting eczema, a little harder to bear from summer to summer, but our crisp, crackling winters revived him to all manner of puppy antics. I remember, like a picture, one frosty afternoon, the evergreens festooned with ice, while the leafless trees, struck by the level rays of the western sun, glistened with rainbow crystals. Through this enchanted world, as through the heart of a diamond, Joy-of-Life and Sigurd were coming home. Sigurd, barking his glad music, was bounding hither and thither over the sparkling crust, now trying to fulfill his contract to keep all chickadees and nut-hatches, blue jays and juncos, from alighting on the earth, and now convinced that at last the moment had come when he was to realize his supreme ambition, inherited from Ralph, and catch a crow. Their sardonic caws above his head, as they flapped heavily from pine to pine, made him so furious that he would pounce on their black, sliding shadows, while Joy-of-Life, her cheeks apple-bright with the cold, laughed at him so merrily that he took it for applause. Yet change was busy about our collie, who welcomed no changes but loved his world exactly as it was. We sold the first home and moved into a more spacious one that we had built on a strip of untamed land hard by. Then a street came, and more houses, and quietly the wildwood drew away from us. Within our own bounds, at least, we strove to keep the forest growth in its own careless beauty, but never a man stepped on the place, brother or guest or gardener or state warden or whosoever, but, driven by the deep instinct of the pioneer, he must needs go stealthily forth with ax or saw or shears and lay about him in our happy tangle. The worst of it was that we had to appear grateful. Sigurd accepted his new abode with but a passing bewilderment. Racing up from the train on his return from a summer in the mountains with Joy-of-Life, he was whistled into the Scarab while yet too utterly absorbed in the rapture of his greetings to heed where he was. After a little he looked about him in obvious surprise and perplexity and set out at once on a tour of investigation, trotting from cellar to attic, nosing into the closets and under the shelves, sniffing at the familiar desks and bookcases and recognizing with a wag his own chair and rug. As soon as might be he was out of doors, examining porches and paths. Then he crossed the intervening bit of wilderness, granite ledge matted over with the red-berried kinnikinic, and woofed for admittance at his accustomed door. He was kindly received and allowed to go about as he liked, upstairs and downstairs and into my lord's chamber, but the furniture was not his furniture, the smells were not his smells, and within ten minutes he had quitted those rooms, scene of so many puppy exploits, to enter them no more. He knew the difference between house and home. Yet our new holding did not seem to Sigurd nor to us entirely natural until he had cut one of his unfortunate paws on a broken bottle left by the carpenters as a souvenir and had strewn steps and driveway and lawn with shreds of cotton bandages and adhesive plaster. "When is a clutter not a clutter?" asked my mother, and answered her own conundrum: "When Sigurd does it." In a snug corner against the south wall of the Scarab stood a massive and elegant erection, with gable roof and olive-green door, that only the unsophisticated called a kennel. It was "Sigurd's House," and as such he accepted it, counting its artistically shingled walls and heavy layers of sheathing paper no more than his just deserts. He delighted in its deep bed of fresh straw which tickled him most agreeably as he rolled over and over in it. He found it an exciting by-play, too, to dash in with stick or bone and lose it under his bedding, which he would proceed to scratch up with all the fury of a New England matron in housecleaning time. Then he would come swaggering out with the air of duty done, shaking his own skin. Sigurd's House was such a palace that the children of the neighborhood liked to play in it, but our collie deemed this high trespass and, from the screened study porch, would roar indignant protest when five or six chubby tots, with that saucy black spaniel, Curly, would all squeeze in together. To the Scarab came new friends for Sigurd with new caresses, to which he always made cordial and courteous response. Amelia crossed the ocean to a waiting bridegroom and a happy home of her own, but Housewife Honey-voice, with her little Esther, petted Sigurd even more devotedly. Sigurd's only difficulty with Housewife Honey-voice, the only shadow on their sympathy, arose from the delicacy of her appetite by which she was inclined, at first, to measure his. When her enthusiasm and culinary skill persuaded the family to go on a vegetable diet, Sigurd gave us clearly to understand that we need not count him in. And when I came home, one evening, from a week's motor trip, Sigurd barely waited for his customary chant of welcome before gripping my dress and leading me to the refrigerator. "Hasn't Sigurd had his dinner yet?" "Why, yes, an hour ago." "Nonsense, boy! You're not hungry. Nobody is hungry just after dinner." "What a whopper!" sighed Sigurd, as he pattered after me back to the study. No sooner had I turned my attention to the accumulation of letters on my desk than again Sigurd pulled gently, yet with determination, at my skirt and insisted on a second promenade to the refrigerator. "He really is hungry. How much have you been giving him for dinner?" But when I saw the measure, I heaped his plate, while he eagerly watched the process, waving his tail in triumph, but hurrying once across the kitchen to snuggle his head against the knee of Housewife Honey-voice, looking up at her with those comprehending, trustful eyes that said: "You didn't mean to starve dear Sigurd, and now that you know how big my hollow is, it will be all right forever." Every autumn a new horde of freshmen fell in love with him and visiting alumnae embraced him in mid-campus. Toward the Freshman Twins, who gladdened the Scarab one year, he conducted himself like a sophomore, humoring their childish ways, guiding them through the college labyrinth, serving as a towel for their homesick tears and partaking freely of their consoling fudge, but all with a comical air of condescension. He was himself accustomed to the best society, even seniors. Our gracious college president made him welcome to her veranda, as she sat at tea among her roses; a beloved frequenter of the Scarab, Hoops-of-Steel, though clinging to her preference for boys, accorded him a true if tempered friendship; and even Scholar Carol, our fifteenth-century historian, who affected the fireside sphinx and had named a particularly gallant kitten Eddy IV, counted him only a little lower than a cat. As for the children on our hill, they hugged him to the limit of endurance. His warmest admirer among them was Wee-wee, a rosy bunch of unweariable energy, who, when she came to us of an afternoon in order to give her exhausted parents a brief respite, would wear out the entire family as, one by one, we undertook to amuse her, and would finally fling herself upon Sigurd, riding on his back, rolling him over and over and examining his paws with an envious admiration that broke forth in the remark: "Wen I'm old and big like Sigurd, maybe I'll have feet on my hands." For two lively years a brace of graduate students, Cherub and Seraph, folded their wings beneath the Scarab rooftree. Cherub was a bit afraid, at first, of "that bouncing yellow elephant," but Seraph instantly became Sigurd's very pink of playmates. Every morning they would start off early for the college library, scampering across the landscape at a rate that sent the sparrows fluttering from their path like so many irregular verbs. Between the meadow and the campus is a perilous stretch of railway tracks and trolley tracks, and here Sigurd would assume full charge of his companion. If the whistle of an engine, as they drew near the crossing, cut the air, Sigurd would leap upon her and, with his paws upon her breast, hold her back until the train had hurtled by, when he would lead her triumphantly across under the trailing plume of smoke. Every autumnal Sunday they spent hours together in the woods, from which the Seraph would bring home gentians, wych-hazel and a lyric, and Sigurd a ruff all tangled up with burrs. Winter did not daunt their zeal. They formed themselves into a rescue expedition and saved from the frost all manner of wild-flower roots, which the Seraph arranged in rows of pots placed on boards stretched from a little table in her room to her south window. Alas for sweet Saint Charity! There came a day when Sigurd, wishing to study the scenery to verify a suspicion of a dog burglar after his treasure-trove of bones, sprang up and struck his forefeet on the edge of the nearest board with such violence that the whole structure came crashing down, enveloping him in a flying ruin of pots and plants and earth and water. He did not stay to help the Seraph clear up the landslide, but remembered a pressing engagement in the remotest corner of the attic. Through December these happy comrades explored the fringes of the forest for glowing vines to serve as Christmas decorations, and in the whirling snowstorms of a peculiarly ferocious little February they would come romping home, two white objects plunging through the drifts, looking like Peary and one of his huskies just back from the North Pole. Joy-of-Life had been in Egypt that winter, seeking health after a grave illness, but she came again with April, more welcome than the spring. Sigurd bounded to her shoulders in ecstasy of greeting, his coat ruddy in the sun. He shone more than ever with a supreme content as he sat erect between us while we motored through the miracle of May, under red-budded maples and oaks whose baby leaves, while the orioles shouted to them to hurry up, where trembling from misty pink to golden green. He did not care to run with the machine, however slowly it was driven, but saved his energies for the long rambles with the Seraph, as she went questing for anemone and dogwood, bellwort, violets, columbine, lady slippers and all
Then the Seraph disappeared, as all his student lovers, one after another, would disappear. Letters came back to him and gifts, but he could not puzzle out what these had to do with the dancing playmate no longer to be found on hillside or by lake. Nor could he foresee the day when that ridiculous Puck, grown into a noble collie, would in his turn sorely miss the Seraph, who had sailed away, on the ship that bore another of Sigurd's most devoted Wellesley lassies, to France. There were dogs on that ship, Professor Peggy and her scarred comrades, veterans of war, that had been sent over, like wounded French officers, to instruct, and were now returning to duty at the front. But Puck, too old for the Red Cross training, was left behind, sniffing up and down the garden paths in patient search for his dainty mistress, who, arrayed in gas-mask and trench-helmet, was serving from a battered camionette hot coffee and cocoa to our boys in khaki just behind the trenches. In the Orchard, too, the venerable Cousin for whom Sigurd since puppyhood had cherished a romantic attachment, the white-haired inamorata whom he would run to meet with his most grotesque waggle, was no longer to be found in the familiar nooks from which Laddie had long since disappeared. And now that the all-beloved Elder Sister lay mortally ill, Sigurd pattered over day after day to look in at the sickroom and invite a stroking from the delicate hand that would rest so languidly upon his lifted head. Sometimes he carried her a yellow chrysanthemum or a cluster of cream-colored tea-roses tied to his collar. And when she had passed to Paradise through brain-wandering memories of Italy, as through a vestibule of beauty, Sigurd coaxed long at the closed door, whining softly, calling to his friend, troubled by the silence but incredulous of death. Because of their vanishing ways, Sigurd had early come to look on college girls in general as an inconstant factor in life and accepted their attentions with the casual air of a confirmed old bachelor, but his faithfulness to his friends of riper age never wavered. Even to the last he always raised for the Lady of Cedar Hill his rapturous lyric cry, though it would sometimes embarrass him by breaking into a hoarse and husky squeak. He had special ways with each of us. He kept one piquant game for my mother, who, while he wagged his tail in ever wilder circles at her, would wag her Congregationalist in exact mockery at him, until he would make a maddened leap and snatch that sacred sheet from her hand. But he was gentle with old people, even in his frolics, and from the first had felt a certain responsibility for their safety. Joy-of-Life had left him late one afternoon, while he was still a youngster, to guard her mother's nap on the piazza couch, but a white flash of Laddie, temptation incarnate, at the foot of the hill, had sent him careering off into the gloaming. Rising hurriedly to call him back, confused by the sudden waking, his charge had missed her footing in the dusk and fallen down the steps. Her first clear consciousness was of Sigurd standing over her, licking her face and hands with a penitent tongue, nor would he leave her all that evening, lying on the edge of her dress as she sat and trotting close beside her whenever she crossed the room. And when, touched by his concern, she bent to him and said: "I wasn't really hurt, and Sigurd was a good dog to come back," he joyously flopped over on his spine and presented his snowy shirt-front for a forgiving pat. A household dear to Sigurd was that in which two of our college professors, long retired, dwelt in sisterly affection. He bore himself with the utmost discretion there, as if aware of a dignity and fragility beyond the wont of households. The classicist, whose Greek precision of accent gave beauty to her least remark, would introduce Sigurd to callers from abroad as "one of our most distinguished citizens," while the botanist, prisoned in a hooded chair on wheels,--ah, the feet that had so often and so lightly carried her in a day over twenty miles and more of the green earth she loved!--liked to have him escort her on her pathetic airings. He was not with her, but attending his own family on a drive one day, when we saw in the village square before us a sudden commotion, people running from all sides toward that familiar little carriage, which, rashly left standing at the edge of the curb with its hood open toward the wind, had been overset, so that the poor lady, strapped to the seat, was standing on her bonnet. Sigurd reached her first of all and when, shocked by the jar into a momentary oblivion, she looked up, "it was," she afterward said, "right into the kindest, most reassuring brown eyes in the world," for Sigurd's head was drooping close above her own and all the help that a collie could give beamed in his friendly gaze. Hints of age began to appear, reluctant though we were to recognize them, in Sigurd himself,--an inclination toward longer and longer naps in his own disreputable chair, an increasing resentment of sweeping days and housecleaning, and a tendency, long after a swollen ear or a sharp attack of eczema was cured and Sigurd, settling his chin on his paws, had dismissed Dr. Vet with a low, majestic sweep of tail, to continue to claim the lazy privileges of an invalid. Sometimes his stiffening limbs failed to fold themselves with the old comfort into the hollow of his chair, and he would look up to us in puzzled appeal. He was a handsome collie still, but his manners had grown more reserved and his bearing more stately. He was no longer excited by Commencement festivities, though he would stroll up to take a look at the Tree Day dances and saunter into the Garden Party, accepting the embraces of old friends and new with an amiability only slightly tinged with boredom. But he loved more and more to bask in the sun on the south porch or to dream, his legs tied into his favorite bowknot, in front of the study fireplace, where Joy-of-Life's annual barrel of Christmas driftwood made the flames look like little rainbows on a holiday. He was almost ten years old when he was run over by an automobile. Except for a bruised paw he did not seem to be hurt, for he crouched so flat in the road that the machine merely scraped his back, but his nerves were severely shaken. When we came home that noon, he greeted us with a prolonged, strange howl, unlike anything that we had ever heard from him before, and for weeks would not venture out upon the roads without one of us to serve as bodyguard, wheedling until we had to drop our books and devise some respectable excuse for a walk. Left behind at a Greek Letter Society House one evening, he refused to start off for home alone--the bold ranger of a thousand midnights--and his indulgent girl hostesses telephoned for a carriage, so that Sigurd came proudly driving up to his front door in a hack. He so enjoyed the extra petting that came with any mischance that he affected, when it occurred to him, this terror long after it had faded out, just as he would in running tuck up an injured foot, when he happened to think of it, weeks after it was healed, and hop plaintively on three legs until the sight of a cat or a squirrel made him forget all about it. Sigurd had several promising sons in the village, and one of these we would gladly have adopted had not our delight in its puppy graces nearly broken his jealous old heart. So we let it go to other admirers and presently lost all trace of his golden scions. But one day, when I was walking with him, a winsome little lad came up and, touching his cap, asked shyly if he might stroke Sigurd, "for he's the papa of my dog Trusty that died." Poor Trusty was a victim of distemper, and the child softly told us all about it, his arms about the neck of Sigurd, who put on an appropriate expression of bereavement. The burden of the years brought its own compensation. Instead of the darkling escapades that used to distract and worry us, Sigurd became the best of company, in the depths of a winter night. Joy-of-Life was the lark of the household, and I the owl, so our self-appointed caretaker, after seeing her early to bed, would come downstairs again to lie close against my feet, inviting confidences. When I became too absorbed in my task to answer his remarks, he would still hold forth in a broken conversational grumble, contented, for reply, with the crackling of the fire and the scratching of a pen. Nor was Sigurd the only one of our blithe fellowship for whom Time was quietly setting up milestones along the changing road. He was still in his prime when, on a date of gleaming memory, the Dryad gave at Norumbega Hall a birthday party for my mother, a party musical with our Poet's own sweet and roguish songs, not only in honor of
It is but a few years since that hour of "Laurels and laughter and light," yet all those smiling elder faces, and not those only, have vanished away. Sigurd had his part in that fairest of our festivities, for an impressionistic picture of him shines from the stanza that the Dryad addressed to Joy-of-Life:
A saucier dinner-card was mine: "You see her start out all agog
"This is a scientific error: the beast should be Bufo Lentiginosus not Rana catesbiana. Such errors are common in the best poetry." As successive sorrows cast their shadows on our hearts, as the mothers slipped away, as the Dryad was smitten down in her brightness, a star fallen from midsummer sky, Sigurd proved himself a very comforter. The sympathetic droop of his ears and decorum of his disconsolate brown eyes in the first hush of mourning and, in the later loneliness, his nuzzling head against the knee, touches of a pleading tongue on hand and cheek, his insistence on an answering smile, a pat, a romp, his conviction that, while sun and wind made holiday and the wood was full of sticks to throw for Sigurd, it was natural to be glad, helped us better than more formal consolations. Both solitude and society, both ignorance and wisdom, he could press close to the hurt without intrusion. Often when one or the other of us, forgetful of the work upon the desk, had let the cloud creep over, Sigurd would rouse himself, trot across to the fireplace, select from the basket a piece of light kindling wood, and present it with the clear intimation that it would be more true to love to cheer up Sigurd with a bit of play than to lose the hour in grieving. Rarely in his joyful life, and then but for a matter of days or weeks, had we both been away from Sigurd. He hated to have either of us go. He knew only too well the meaning of trunks and suitcases and always stalked uneasily about the room, getting in the way as much as possible, during the process of packing. When at last he saw these objects of ill omen closed and carried downstairs, followed by one of his mistresses in traveling garb, he would desperately take his stand in the doorway and, planting his legs like principles, do his best to bar her exit. For a few days he would be very restless, watchful, anxious, keeping close to the mistress who stayed behind to question her with troubled looks and entreat her not to abandon Sigurd; nor was the missing all on his side. The summer of 1908 was so hot that our gasping collie would tease his friends to fan him and, for the first and only time, we had him shaved. His bright hair, duly cleansed, was made up with corn-colored silk into a sofa-pillow and sent to Joy-of-Life, then sojourning in strange places, now among the Mormons, now on an Indian reservation, gathering material for her two vivid volumes on the Economic Beginnings of the Far West; and she assured him that his "yellow bunch of love" was a magical cure for a certain ache beyond the ken of the doctors. But grievously abashed he was with only the white waves of his ruff, his fore-pantalets and plumy tail unprofaned by the shears, and his sufferings from mortification and mosquitoes outwent all that he had endured from the heat. As his silky under-vest grew long enough to curl, he reminded us of Cagnotte, the supposed poodle bought for three-year-old Gautier by his nurse, on whom the Paris dealers palmed off a cur sewed up in a jacket of lamb's wool. On summer vacations our Volsung sometimes went up into New Hampshire with one or both of us. He especially rejoiced in our cottage life on Twin Lake, where Sigurd renewed his youth, pursuing
One summer he was with Joy-of-Life up in Franconia, where they loved to climb the scenery, Sigurd taking immense satisfaction in his duties as guide. "Find the path, boy," she would bid, and very proudly he would run at a little distance before her, nosing out the way. It was on one of these excursions that he came upon a scattered flock of sheep and--hey presto!--was instantly transformed into a dog that we had never known. Uttering a curious "Yep, yep, yep!" unlike any sound he had ever been heard to make before, he sped away toward those astonished sheep, rounded them up and drove them, much too fast for their comfort, to the furthest limit of their sloping pasture, where Joy-of-Life found him, panting in tremendous excitement, holding the sheep, a woolly huddle, penned into an angle of the deep stone walls. The next morning he was off before daybreak and, after an arduous search, she found him again playing stern guardian to that same embarrassed flock. If only the Lady of Cedar Hill had offered him the lordship of a sheepfold instead of a cattle-barn, Sigurd would have been Njal to the end of his days. But Joy-of-Life, afraid that the ancestral Scotch conscience so suddenly awakened in him might not be to the liking of the Franconia farmers, decided on an immediate return to the Scarab. Sigurd always detested train travel, and this time he barely escaped a tragedy. The baggage car was so full that to him could be allotted only a space the size of his body. Into that narrow cavity he was confined by walls of trunks that towered on every side. Within an hour of Boston an abrupt jolt threw the passengers forward in their seats. Beyond a few bumps and bruises no harm was done and Joy-of-Life speedily made her way forward through the disordered train, which had come to a standstill, to the baggage-car. Here she found a scene of disastrous confusion, trunks and valises pitched madly about, one baggageman groaning with a broken arm, on which a doctor was already busy, and the other bleeding from a cut across his forehead. For very shame she could not speak of a collie until, under the doctor's directions, she had washed and bound up that cut. It was her patient who mentioned Sigurd first. "By George, your dog!" he said. "He's down under that tumble of trunks over there. Not a yelp from him. I'm afraid he hadn't a chance." Brakemen had pushed in, by this time, and with ready sympathy undertook to clear a way to the corner where Sigurd had been imprisoned. A monster crate had fallen in such a way as to roof him over and, when this was dragged aside, there crouched Sigurd, showing no physical injury but utterly motionless, staring with blank eyes at his rescuers. "Back broken," suggested one of the men. But Joy-of-Life gave, though from pale lips, the glad, out-of-door trill that Sigurd knew so well. He quivered and, with one tremendous bound, cleared the intervening heap of baggage and reached her. She sat on a portmanteau, with her arms about him, till they arrived at Boston, and then led him down the platform and took him with her into a cab. All the time Sigurd was strange, remote, moving like a body without a spirit, unresponsive to all her attempts at comfort and cheer. But during the long wait for her missing trunk, Sigurd suddenly brightened up and tried to scrabble out of the window into the cab drawn up alongside. It was occupied by a plump, elderly couple, who gleefully pulled him in, and to them Sigurd at once began to tell, in eager whines and pitiful whimpers, that hardly needed Joy-of-Life's commentary, the story of his peril. "Poor fellow! Poor beauty!" they crooned. "We know, we know. Our own dear collie was killed in just such a mix-up twenty years ago. Your collie knew that we would understand." And Sigurd, restored in soul at last, licked their kind old faces and retired to his own cab. By the time he reached home, he was so completely himself again that he ate a hearty dinner and spent the better part of the evening scratching up the straw in Sigurd's House to see what treasures dogs and children might have stored there during his absence. In the scorching July of 1913 we both left Sigurd for a year. The poor lad was so wretched with the heat that we hoped he might be less keenly aware than usual of the packing; but he knew. I do not like to remember the look in his eyes when, that last morning, he was brought up from his retreat in the cellar for good-by. I turn from that memory to his antics a few evenings earlier, when he had been out frisking with some dog callers in the comparative cool. He woofed imperiously at the screen door and, as soon as it was unlatched, dashed it open and came tearing into the study to demand of me some service that I was slow to comprehend. "How dull you are to-night!" he grunted and, flouncing down beside me, fell clumsily to work on a hind paw. Investigating, I found a long thorn run up into the pad. It took me a minute or two to grip it and pull it out, while Sigurd, wincing a little but with full confidence in my surgery, waited as patiently as a boy when a ball game is on. When the thorn was drawn, he gave one flying lick to his foot and another to my hand--"Much obliged, but you might have been quicker about it"--and bounded back to his play with puppy eagerness. We had made all possible arrangements for his comfort, boarding him still at his home where three of the household remained with the new tenants, but he was no longer the Lord of the Scarab. We knew that he would do his golden best and we hoped that in his own sweet wisdom he would realize that love never goes away, but as he watched and searched in vain, week after week and month after month, Sigurd drooped, and grew deaf with listening for voices over sea. Old friends took him on the short walks that sufficed him now and affectionate greetings met him everywhere on campus and on street. He would often be seen napping on one neighborly porch or another, for he dwelt more and more in the dim land of "Nod, the shepherd," consorting with "His blind old sheep-dog, Slumber-soon." Housewife Honey-voice gave him true and tender care, and when, on a zero night, she had to deny him the warmth of the Scarab and put him to bed, well tucked up with rugs, in Sigurd's House, she would tell him, for the strengthening of his spirit, that "even Jesus Christ slept in the straw." For our own part, we tried not to think too much of our forsaken collie, but up in Norway we heard dogs called by his name and even on our housetop promenades in Seville we were reminded of his frolic grace by a scalawag puppy on a neighboring flat roof, a gleeful little gymnast whose joy it was to leap up and jerk the linen off the line. Sigurd's friends and ours wrote to us of his welfare with a cheerfulness that was apt to waver before the end of the paragraph. "I met him on the campus yesterday," scribbled Nannikachee, "and when I asked him where his professors were, he galloped all over the snow, remembering you as juncos, and on second thought he reared up against an oak and barked up into its branches to scare you out of your holes, convinced that you had come to a bad end and been turned into squirrels. Such are the workings of the mighty mind you two sillies credit him with! He looked as round and yellow as a Thanksgiving pumpkin, but there was something wistful about him, too." On the twenty-third of May, within a month of our return, Sigurd died. To all his losses had been added, that spring, the loss of College Hall, through whose familiar corridors he had roamed as usual, always seeking, one March afternoon, and which he found the next morning a desolation of blackened walls and blowing ashes. If Sigurd could have counted into the hundreds, he would have known that every girl was safe, but if he could have read in the papers of the quiet self-control with which, roused from their sleep to find the flames crackling about them, they had steadily carried through their fire-drill, formed their lines, waited for the word and gone out in perfect order, he would have been no prouder of them than he always was. Of course his Wellesley girls would behave like that. Sigurd crowded with the rest of the college into close quarters, where he was more than ever underfoot. On that languid twenty-second of May he slept all day along the threshold of the improvised postoffice, and the hurrying feet stepped over him with unreproaching care. But with the arrival of the late afternoon mail, the postmistress, knowing the rush that was to come, said kindly to him: "Now, Sigurd, you must really go away." He rose slowly and moved from door to door till he came to the office of the Christian Association. Assured of Samaritan shelter here, he finished his snooze on their one rescued rug, but arrived at home in punctual time for his dinner, and that night it chanced to be the dinner Sigurd liked best. Little Esther, who had a romp with him on his arrival, said he "smiled all over when he smelt the liver cooking." He scraped out his pan to the last crumb and then lay down in a favorite burrow of loose, cool earth for a twilight revery. One of the household, a new lover, invited him to take a stroll with her, but he excused himself with a grateful rub of his head against her knees. He slept in Sigurd's House, as usual, and started out soon after dawn, as usual, to go for a splash in a brook not far away. An early riser, intent on making up her count of birds, met him and reported that he was trotting briskly and saluted her with "a sunny twinkle of his tail." Across the road from the brook is a pleasant old homestead under whose great trees Sigurd often took a morning nap before returning to the Scarab. Its occupants looked from the window, as they were dressing, and saw him lying at ease under a spreading evergreen. An hour later, as they rose from breakfast, they observed that Sigurd had not changed his posture and, going out to bid him good morning, found him lifeless. There was no injury on his body nor any sign of pain or struggle. He had made friends even with Death. Did he, like the old hero Njal, "gentle and generous," foreknow his end as he chose out this quiet, beautiful spot? "We will go to our bed," said Njal in the saga, "and lay us down. I have long been eager for rest." A grave was dug for Sigurd on the brow of Observatory Hill over which he had so often sped in the splendor of his strength, and there, under the pines, some score of his closest friends and ours gathered the following morning. With the reading of dog poems and the dropping of wild flowers they gave the still body, that was not Sigurd, back to earth. Jack pressed close to his mistress, whose Wallace sleeps near by, and whined as the box was lowered, while little Esther, beholding for the first time a burial, broke into wild crying. In the autumn I stood by the grave, on which the one dear Sister left in The Orchard had planted violets and periwinkles from Laddie's mound, and watched a kindly young workman set above it a low granite block inscribed, "Sigurd--Our Golden Collie. 1902-1914." As I strewed the stone with goldenrod and turned away, there echoed on the air ancient words from the Greek Anthology, "Thou who passest on the path, if haply thou dost mark this monument, laugh not, I pray thee, though it is a dog's grave. Tears fell for me." Sigurd would have been well content with the honors that his College paid him,--an obituary notice written with tenderest sympathy, a commemorative letter from his Class of 1911 and many a student elegy. It shall be his own class poet who paints the final picture:
* * * * * "When snow was over earth and lake and sky, [The end] GO TO TOP OF SCREEN |