Murphy Part 8

Perhaps he was hunting birds, though it may be doubted. More likely he was working to the hand over the sunlit fields, in the glad air, with a full life all before him yet; and in the company of one whom he loved with his whole heart, and to whom, while learning constantly himself, he, a dog, had taught no end of things.

There can be little doubt that he was working by the hand. Of course he was. But the hand that was beckoning him now was from over the border--from the land where there is room for both the man and the dog, and where there shall be a blessed reunion with old friends.

The bark died away: Murphy was dead.

"Not five years; or only just," remarked Bill.

Both men heaved a sigh.

Day was breaking as they walked away together down the yard.

A few days later came this, written by one whose business it was to tend the sick and the suffering among animals; to whom their pa.s.sing was no rare event; and who must have had many thousands through his hands:

"I am so very sorry; but it was really a happy release after the brain symptoms had developed.

"I can only say your dog won the affection of all of us here to an extent unequalled by any other patient. I think this was due to the very brave way that he bore his sufferings, his kind and amenable temperament, and his almost human intelligence. There is no doubt that this last increased the susceptibility of his brain to disease, and made recovery hopeless."

Two men were working their way slowly up the Dene. They were the shepherd, Job Nutt, and his second. And their dogs followed them closely to heel.

They had just set out a new bait for the sheep on the vetches lower down, and were making for home.

Violet shadows had stretched themselves out to their furthest over the red wheat, now rapidly ripening; soon they would fade out altogether, and the woods would grow blue. For the sun was touching the line of the distant hills, and the long day's work was done.

"Why, there goes Him," says one, pointing up at the down to the eastward.

"So it be," returns the other--"Him and his ... Oh ah! but I was a-most forgettin'. I allus liked that dog"; and Job Nutt waved his hand.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Alas!" by Him.]

All knew it. Contrary to what is generally supposed, certain items of news circulate rapidly among farm-folk.

XIII

It was only a dog.

Perhaps so.

The fact does not forbid the familiar question that rises always at certain hours to the mind of man, and will continue to do so till time shall cease, whether his friend take human or only canine form in life:

"But his spirit--where does his spirit rest?

It was G.o.d that made him--G.o.d knows best."

In truth, there is no answer to this question--"Whither?" And thus it is that we are compelled to leave it according to our habit when we are at fault, and much as the poet leaves it here. In the case of the man, we think we understand. In that of the dog, our difficulty appears to defy solution: it is no question of argument, a.s.sertions are idle, dogma has no place. On the one hand we have those principles that come to man's aid, but of which it would be unbecoming now to speak. The vast majority of Christian men are enabled to ride out the storms of life without confidence wholly giving way, and with the first of sheet-anchors fixed in what is felt to be the best of holding ground. When, however, we turn to the possible future status of the dog, there is no sheet-anchor, and the holding ground is indifferent. Yet, in considering the case of the man and the dog, we are not left without a certain measure of support equally applicable to both. The spirit definable as the immediate apprehension of the mind without reasoning--the spirit of intuition--aids us on either hand. "We are endued," as Bishop Butler tells us, "with capacities of perception"; and these enable us to accept much that lies outside the actual region of proof, because our inner consciousness tells us that we are not altogether on a false track, and that truths, if half hidden, yet, of a certainty, exist in the direction in which we are making earnest search.

We necessarily suffer here, as always, from the tendency that makes the wish the father to the thought; or, in other words, we not infrequently shovel the unpalatable overboard, that we may lighten the s.h.i.+p, and ride out this or that squall without quite so much strain upon the sheet-anchor aforesaid. The majority of mankind believe, and will continue to believe, most staunchly in what they wish to believe. Yet this tendency on our part--visible as it often is in directions where we should least expect to find it--does not necessarily prove our beliefs false, while it also leads us not infrequently direct to truths, however unorthodox our course may have appeared to lookers-on.

In considering, then, the question of the possible future existence of our canine friends, the dominant feeling is commonly this: We believe that a future, in great probability, exists for them, because we feel that not to believe this would be to turn the whole scheme of the universe, as we understand it, into one little short of nonsense. We do not stop to reason: such things are because they must be; they cannot cease to be without total disfigurement of the plan of our conception.

Intuition points, and almost impulsively perhaps, in one direction. There is "an intelligent Author of Nature or Natural Governor of the world."

Life is not made up of haphazards. Eventually there will be happiness in completest form: otherwise there would be injustice, and of this, life, as we know it, affords little or no evidence. For happiness to be complete, there can be no question of the songs we are to hear being indifferently harmonised, there can be no rifts in the lute: in a state of perfection imperfections must necessarily be imperceptible.

With our narrow, human limitations we are driven to conclusions naturally circ.u.mscribed and coloured by those limitations. We are cognisant of the narrowness of the field of vision allowed us, and we are perpetually made aware that we are beating our wings against the bars; but we nevertheless accept this or that conclusion because it satisfies our souls, or we refuse to accept it because we cannot honestly confess that it does so.

Yet, once again, behind both acceptance and rejection there is something further--that intuition and power of perception that enable us to find satisfaction in inferences that we know lie outside questions of faith, but which we nevertheless feel to be true. And the very fact that we are enabled to derive this satisfaction and to feel that our conclusions have an element of truth in them tends to confirm us, rightly or wrongly, in our conjectures.

Thus we come deliberately to the opinion that dogs will have a place in the land over the border. Such an opinion may be a bold one; but there is reason for believing that it is somewhat widely held. We naturally tend to materialise when we build up our several pictures; but we sin here, if at all, in the best of company. The city that lay foursquare, and that is described to us in the vision in the Island of Patmos, was of pure gold, with walls of jasper and gates of precious stones, and had within it trees and birds and many divers animals, and material things of greatest beauty, besides the figures of innumerable angels. The description could not have been otherwise drawn if it was to be grasped by the mind of man, even to a limited extent. So with ourselves. To conceive of a world with all the attributes of beauty yet without flowers is impossible. To realise a world full of music and song yet without birds may be possible, but transcends the powers of most minds. To attempt to believe in the happiness of a world where companions.h.i.+p is to be looked for and reunion is promised, yet where the companions.h.i.+p of dogs is denied, is to strain the belief of some to the uttermost and not improbably to fail.

"Nor," writes Bishop Butler in his immortal treatise, "can we find anything throughout the whole a.n.a.logy of nature to afford us even the slightest presumption that animals ever lose their living powers; much less, if it were possible, that they lose them by death: for we have no faculties wherewith to trace any beyond or through it, so as to see what becomes of them. This event removes them from our view. It destroys the sensible proof, which we had before death, of their being possessed of living powers, but does not appear to afford the least reason to believe that they are, then, or by that event, deprived of them. And our knowing that they were possessed of these powers, up to the very period to which we have faculties capable of tracing them, is itself a probability of their retaining them beyond it."

When Robert Southey looked for the last time on his old friend, Phillis--and there is a bitter difference on such an occasion between looking upon the young and the old--he tells how often in his earlier days this dog and he had enjoyed childish sports together, and how, later on, when hard times overtook him, he found delight in recalling the faithful fondness of the friend in the distant home, and longed to feel again the warmth of his dumb welcome. Then, when the old dog is at last dead, and there has come a severance of these precious a.s.sociations, he breaks out with:

"Mine is no narrow creed; And He who gave thee being did not frame The mystery of life to be the sport Of merciless man. There is another world For all that live and move--a better one!

Where the proud bipeds, who would fain confine Infinite goodness to the little bounds Of their own charity, may envy thee!"

When we turn to the first of all books, the dog certainly appears to receive harsh treatment. The term "dog" is invariably one of reproach.

Goliath cursing David asks, "Am I a dog?" Abner exclaims, "Am I a dog's head?" St. Paul refers to false prophets as dogs. In the Psalms the dog is found to be synonymous with the devil; in the Gospels it stands for unholy men. Evil-workers are dogs; a dog is the equivalent of a fool; nothing is lower than a dog, and nothing is to be more abhorred. Finally, there is that hardest sentence of all--"Without are dogs"; as though any hope for dogs was entirely forbidden. It is the same throughout: the depraved of mankind are dogs, and the very acme of possible reproach and contempt is apparently to be found in the use of this one term. Abandon hope;--without, are you who are dogs!

But is the use of this term "dog" to be taken literally? There seems to be ample evidence that it should not be. The very extravagance of the language raises a doubt at once, just as the grotesqueness of the application of the term shows that the dog itself could never have been meant. St. Paul speaks of false prophets as dogs because of their impudence and love of gain--characteristics hardly to be attributed to the animal itself. The term "dead dog" was the most opprobrious to which a Jew could lay his tongue; when David endeavoured to convey to the mind of Saul that the persecution to which he was subjecting him was a dishonour to himself, he asked him whom he was pursuing; was he pursuing "after a dead dog"? If, as Horace has it, "death is the utmost boundary of wealth and power," it is surely no less so of pursuit.

Then again, in the Psalms, David writes, "Deliver my soul from the sword, my darling from the power of the dog"; in other words, the devil. All dogs are not good dogs, though all dogs are good dogs to their respective owners; but no dog can possibly be cla.s.sed as we find him here, or as the very image and likeness of the most depraved and debased of mankind as we find him elsewhere. He is incapable of these sins; he does not fall into these errors.

What we have to remember is apparently this. The earliest mention of the dog in Scripture is in connection with the sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt. The dog was declared by the Jewish law to be unclean; and it is not improbable that the Jews were so taught to regard him in opposition to those taskmasters who, they were well aware, held him sacred. Thus the term dogs appears often as the reflection of a pa.s.sionate and deep-seated hatred, apart altogether from the animal's uncleanness, and also from the animal itself. The word came in this way to be a useful one to hurl at the head of an enemy at all times, or by which to cla.s.sify those who lived outside the pale of common, human decency. For such as these last there could be no hope, and the term as applied to them was judged to carry with it the bitterest stigma, just as it continues to do in the East to the present day. To be a Christian is to be a dog; to be a Jew is to be a dog; an infidel is a dog; and to be known as "a Jew's dog," or "a dead dog," is to have sunk to the lowest depths of depravity in the eyes of all men.

But the way in which dogs were regarded did not stop with Jewish edicts and Jewish opinion. When the ancient Egyptians made way for another type, and Moslems took their place, the dog, honoured before as has been shown, fell at once into an inferior position. The Moslem law took its colour largely from Jewish practice, and the dog was generally looked upon by the Mahomedan as unclean. He continues, as all the world knows, to be still so regarded. The dog, in the East, is at once tolerated and neglected: he may be slightly better than the pig, but, like that wholly unclean animal, he is a scavenger, living largely on offal and what he is able to pick up.

He is thus, for the most part, a poor creature, leading a poor life, and being often much to be pitied. That he should have any future prospects before him, seeing him as he is, might well be doubted. But this must also be remembered, that if he is in various stages of development in these far-off lands, and with little chance of betterment, he does not differ greatly in these respects from vast mult.i.tudes of men among whom he moves, whether they be white, yellow, brown, or black. The conditions of his life are little by which to condemn him, just as they would be insufficient in the case of others. Moreover, all cla.s.ses certainly do not so condemn him, or do they look upon him in quite the same light. By the Pa.r.s.ees, for instance, he is not regarded as wholly unclean. Many of them keep English-bred dogs, as also do some of the more Europeanised natives of other cla.s.ses, treating them much as we do, though this is still uncommon. Hindus of good cla.s.s and Mahomedans are found generally to avoid them; but here again many Hindus, and such a caste as Sweepers, will touch a dog without considering themselves defiled, just as a Mahomedan will often hold or take charge of a dog, though he be careful not to do so by the chain, or leather lead, but by slipping his _jharan_, or cloth, through the dog's collar, and handling him that way. In many Mahomedan villages the dog is found in numbers, the inhabitants being glad of his services in shepherding their goats, though condemning him to live outside the house, even though there be likelihood of his being carried off by a prowling leopard.

In certain directions, therefore, the dog is seen to be at least tolerated. But there remains one other remarkable fact to be noted. No one can have travelled in the East, especially in Turkey, without remarking the way in which the dog is generally regarded. Yet, in spite of this, he is all the while certainly cla.s.sed as supernatural, and by no less an authority than the Koran. His uncleanness must be recognised; but, on the other hand, how are his fidelity and courage to be overlooked? They cannot be. And so this unclean animal, from whom men shrink, lest by chance their garments touch him as they pa.s.s, is given, as already related, a position in Mahomed's paradise, and, because of his character, is deemed worthy a special place in that land of supreme bliss. There is a chance, then, for the outcast here.

It is time to look at the dog himself a little closer, and see what characteristics he can bring forward in support of hopes that many human beings entertain on his behalf.

Here is a dumb animal that, long before the dawn of history, is known to have been man's close companion. Step by step, we see him advancing with those to whom he is linked, until he raises himself immeasurably above all other animals, and takes his place pre-eminently as the friend of man. No one of those from whom he originally sprang was known to bark, and no wild species does so. By and through man, the dog was endowed with this means of expression, and was thus able to act as his more efficient guard. It is an established fact that the dog barks when in contact with man, and loses the power when separated from him. Such was the case with the dogs that were left many years ago on the uninhabited island of Juan Fernandez. The descendants of these dogs were found thirty years later to have lost the power of barking, and only subsequently regained it with difficulty.

The fact that the dog barks is not, however, the chief point. This peculiar gift has been developed into a language, for it is by those wonderful inflections of the voice in barking that the dog has learnt to make man understand his meaning. Thus, as we all know, he is able to convey, at will, a note of warning, to signal the approach of danger, to show his anger, his alarm, his joy, the spirit that animates him in the chase, to make his appeal for help, to declare the need of succour. His bark has in these ways become his chief means of communication, quite apart from the howl, the whimper, the whine, or the growl; the "singing"

that is a.s.sociated with a pack of foxhounds baying at the moon; the "talk" that the subject of these pages possessed to such an extraordinary degree.

Then again, as he responded more readily to education, and acquired by degrees something of the civilising instincts that were affecting man, the dog became not only a trusty companion but a humble servant. Nor did he stop here, for, what was still more remarkable, he certainly came by degrees to reflect some of man's chief characteristics, as well as nearly all human pa.s.sions. By a.s.sociation of ideas he developed memory. By his dreams and the various sounds he emits in sleep, he is seen to possess imagination. His wonderful power of scent is found capable of being turned to other uses than sport, and is even now not utilised in sundry quarters as it might be. Then, too, he habitually forms his own judgments, and these are usually exceedingly correct, as when he recognises an intruder, or arrives at what is right and what is wrong within the circle of his own domain. On many occasions he certainly gives evidence of a conscience and the possession of the rudiments of the moral sense. When he does wrong he frequently exhibits shame as well as contrition, seeking forgiveness, and being often distinctly unhappy till this is secured. So far does he occasionally carry this, that when he knows he has transgressed rules, he will come and make confession, his own honesty bringing upon him a punishment he would otherwise have escaped, or serving to declare what was not previously suspected by those about him.

But it is when we approach the higher qualities that the dog stands out in his true light. The best of his cla.s.s naturally possess these in greatest perfection, but it is a fact that none are altogether without them. His instinct, his patience and subservience to the will of his master, his pluck and his courage, his fidelity that nothing seems capable of undermining, his trustfulness, his power of sympathy with man and with his own cla.s.s, and, lastly, the touching and infinite depth of his love--all these are characteristics that occasionally put man to shame, but which make man always trust him more and more. In the face of his marvellous instinct, man is not infrequently struck dumb as he watches. A dog's patience is a thing to study, as well as one from which to learn many a fair lesson. His pluck and courage are almost proverbial.

In many a case the odds against him seem not to make the slightest difference: he will fight on to the end; let his master only lead, he will follow to the death.