Schwartz: A History Part 1

Schwartz: A History.

by David Christie Murray.

I

I was expatriated by a man with an axe. The man and the axe were alike visionary and unreal, though it needed a very considerable effort of the will to hold them at mental arm's length. I had work on hand which imperatively demanded to be finished, and I was so broken down by a long course of labour that it was a matter of actual difficulty with me when I sat down at my desk of a morning to lay hold of the thread of last night's work, and to recall the personages who had moved through my ma.n.u.script pages for the past three or four months. The day's work always began with a fog, which at first looked impenetrable, but would brighten little by little until I could see my ideal friends moving in it, and could recognise their familiar lineaments. Then the fog would disperse altogether, and a certain indescribable, exultant, feverish brightness would succeed it, and in this feverish brightness my ideal friends would move and talk as it were of their own volition.

But one morning--it was in November, and the sand-tinged foam flecks caught from the stormy bay were thick on the roadway before my window--the fog was thicker and more obdurate than common. I read and re-read the work of the day before, and the written words conveyed no meaning. In a dim sort of way this seemed lamentable, and I remember standing at the window, and looking out to where the white crests of the waves came racing sh.o.r.ewards under a leaden-coloured sky, and saying to myself over and over again, 'Oh, that way madness lies!' but without any active sentiment of dismay or fear, and with a clouded, uninterested wonder as to where the words came from. Quite suddenly I became aware of a second presence in the chamber, and turned with an actual a.s.surance that some one stood behind me. I was alone, as a single glance about the room informed me, but the sense of that second presence was so clearly defined and positive that the mere evidence of sight seemed doubtful.

The day's work began in the manner which had of late grown customary, and in a while the fog gave way to a brilliance unusually flushed and hectic. The uninvited, invisible personage kept his place, until, even with the constant fancy that he was there looking over my shoulder, and so close that there was always a risk of contact, I grew to disregard him. All day long he watched the pen travelling over the paper, all day long I was aware of him, featureless, shadowy, expressionless, with a vague cheek near my own. During the brief interval I gave myself for luncheon he stood behind my chair, and, being much refreshed and brightened by my morning's work, I mocked him quite gaily.

'Your name is Nerves,' I told him within myself, 'and you live in the land of Mental Overwork. I have still a fortnight's stretch across the country you inhabit, and if you so please you may accompany me all the way. You may even follow me into the land of Repose which lies beyond your own territory, but its air will not agree with you. You will dwindle, peak, and pine in that exquisite atmosphere, and in a very little while I shall have seen the last of you.'

After luncheon I took a const.i.tutional on the pier, not without a hope that my featureless friend might be blown away by the gusty wind, which came bellowing up from the Firth of Forth, with enough stinging salt and vivifying freshness in it, one might have fancied, to shrivel up a host of phantoms. I tramped him up and down the gleaming planks in the keen salt wind for half an hour, and he shadowed me unshrinkingly. With the worst will in the world I took him home, and all afternoon and all evening he stuck his shadowy head over my shoulder, and watched the pen as it spread its cobweb lines over the white desert of the paper. He waited behind my chair at dinner, and late at night, when the long day's work at last was over, he hung his intrusive head over my shoulder and stared into the moderate gla.s.s of much-watered whisky which kept a final pipe in company.

He had grown already into an unutterable bore, and when he insisted upon pa.s.sing the night with me I could--but for the obvious inutility of the thing--have lost my temper fairly. He took his place at the bed-head, and kept it till I fell asleep. He was there when I awoke in the night, and probably because the darkness, the quiet, and the sense of solitude were favourable to him he began to grow clearer. Quite suddenly, and with a momentary but genuine thrill of fear, I made a discovery about him. He carried an axe. This weapon was edged like a razor, but was unusually solid and weighty at the back. From the moment at which I first became aware of it to that happy hour when my phantom bore departed and took his weapon with him, there was never a conscious second in which the axe was not in act to fall, and yet it never fell.

It was always going to strike and never struck.

'You cannot be supposed to know it, my phantom nuisance,' I said, being ready to seek any means by which I might discredit the dreadful rapidity with which he seemed to be growing real;' you cannot be supposed to know it, but one of these days you will furnish excellent copy. As a literary man's companion you are not quite without your uses. One of these days I will haunt a rascal with you, and he shall sweat and s.h.i.+ver at you, as I decline to sweat and s.h.i.+ver. You observe I take you gaily. I am very much inclined to think that if I took you any other way that axe might fall, and sever something which might be difficult to mend. So long as you choose to stay, I mean to make a study of you.'

Most happily I was able to adhere to that resolve, but I solemnly declare it made him no less dreadful. Sometimes I tried to ignore him, but that was a sheer impossibility. Very often I flouted him and jeered at him, mocked him with his own unreality, and dared him to carry out his constant threat and strike. But all day and every day, and in all the many sleepless watches of my nights, he kept me company, and every hour the threatened blow of the razor-edged axe seemed likelier to fall.

But at last--thank Heaven--the work was done, I touched the two or three hundred pounds which paid for it, and I was free to take a holiday.

We had grown too accustomed to each other to part on a sudden, even then. I never saw him, for he was always behind me (and even when I stood before a mirror he was invisible but _there_), but he was no longer featureless. His eyes shone through a black vizard with one unwinking, glittering, ceaseless threat. He wore a slashed doublet with long hose reaching to the upper thigh, and he had a rosette on each instep. I can see quite clearly now the peculiar dull cold gleam the razor-edged axe wore as he stood in some shadowed place behind me, and the brighter gleam it had in daylight in the streets.

When I had borne with him until I felt that I could bear with him no longer, I took him, being back in town again, to a London physician of some eminence. The doctor took him somewhat gravely, insisted upon absolute mental rest, prescribed a tonic, laid down certain rules about diet, certain restrictions upon wine and tobacco, and ordered immediate change of scene.

To begin with I went to Antwerp, thence to Brussels, and thence, by the merest chance in the world, to Janenne, a little village in the Belgian Ardennes, at no great distance from the French frontier. I had no idea of staying there, and on the surface of things there was no reason why I should have prolonged my stay beyond a day or two. People visit Janenne in the summer time, and suppose themselves to have exhausted its limited attractions in four-and-twenty hours. There is nothing at first sight to keep the stranger longer, but if he will only stay for a week he will inevitably want to stay for a fortnight, and if once he has stayed for a fortnight, his business is done, and he is in love with Janenne for the rest of his natural life. Rural quiet has made her home in Janenne, and contentment dwells with her, sleepy-eyed.

Even in the first week of December, the russet and amber-coloured leaves still cling to the branches of the huge old lime-trees of Lorette, and my lonely feet on the thick carpet of dead leaves below made the sole sound I heard there except the ceaseless musical tinkle of chisel and stone from the distant granite quarries--a succession of notes altogether rural in suggestion--like the tinkle of many sheep-bells.

Even in that first week of December I could sit in the open air there, where the mild winter sunlight flashed the huge crucifix and the colossal Christ of painted wood, which poise above the toy chapel carved out of the live rock. The chapel and the crucifix are at one end of a lime-tree avenue a third of a mile long, and the trees are aged beyond strict local knowledge, gnarled and warty and bulbous and great of girth. You climb to Lorette by a gentle ascent, and below the rock-carved chapel lies a precipice--not an Alpine affair at all, but a reasonable precipice for Belgium--say, two or even three hundred feet, and away and away and away, the golden-dimpled hills go changing from the yellowish green of winter gra.s.s to the variously-toned grays of the same gra.s.s in mid-distance, and then to a blue which grows continually hazier until it melts at the sky-line, and seems half to blend with the dim pallid sapphire of a December sky.

Here, 'with an ambrosial sense of over-weariness falling into sleep,'

would I often sit at the foot of the great crucifix, and would smoke the pipe of idleness, a little unmindful, perhaps, of the good London doctor's caution against the misuse of tobacco. It was here that I awoke to the fact one day that the man with the axe was absent. He had slipped away with no good-byes on either side, and I was blissfully alone again.

The sweet peace of it, and the quiet of it no tongue or pen can tell.

The air was balsamic with the odours of the pines which clothed the hillsides for miles and miles and miles in squares and oblongs and a hundred irregular forms of blackish green, sometimes snaking in a thin dark line, sometimes topping a crest with a close-cropped hog-mane, and sometimes cl.u.s.tering densely over a whole slope, but always throwing the neighbouring yellows and greens and grays into a wonderful aerial delicacy of contrast. The scarred lime trunks had a bluish gray tone in the winter sunlight, and the carpet at their feet was of Indian red and sienna and brown, of fiercest scarlet and gold and palest lemon colour, of amber and russet and dead green. And everywhere, and in my tired mind most of all, was peace.

I had been a fortnight at Janenne when my intrusive phantom left me on Lorette. I had made no acquaintances, for I was but feeble at the language, and did not care to encounter the trouble of talking in it.

The first friends.h.i.+p I made--I have since spent three years in the delightful place, and have made several friends.h.i.+ps there--was begun within five minutes of that exquisite moment at which I awoke to the fact that my phantom was away.

There was not a living creature in sight, and there was not a sound to be heard except the distant tinkle of chisel and stone, and the occasional rustle of a falling leaf, until Schwartz, the subject of this history, walked pensively round a corner eighty yards down the avenue, and paused to scratch one ear with a hind foot. He stood for a time with a thoughtful air, looked up the avenue and down the avenue, and then with slow deliberation, and an occasional pause for thought, he walked towards me. When within half a dozen yards he stopped and took good stock of me, with brown eyes overhung by thick grizzled eyebrows.

Then he offered a short, interrogative, authoritative bark, a mere monosyllable of inquiry.

'A stranger,' I responded. 'An invalid stranger.' He seemed not only satisfied, but, for some unknown reason, delighted. He wagged the cropped stump of a gray tail, and writhed his whole body with a greeting that had an almost slavish air of charmed propitiation; and then, without a word on his side or on mine, he mounted the steps which led to the great crucifix, sate down upon the topmost step beside me, and nestled his grizzled head in my lap. I confess that he could have done nothing which would have pleased me more. I have always thought the unconditional and immediate confidence of a dog or a child a sort of certificate to character, though I know well that there is a kind of dog whose native friendliness altogether outruns his discretion, and who is doomed from birth to fall into error, and to encounter consequent rebuffs which must be grievous to be borne.

My new companion wore a collar, and had other signs that distinguished him from the mere mongrel of the village street, but he was of no particular breed. His coat was of a bluish gray, and though soft enough to the touch, had a harsh and spiky aspect. He came nearer to being a broken-haired terrier than anything else, but I seemed to discern half a dozen crosses in him, and a lover of dogs who asked for breed would not have offered sixpence for him.

II

Somewhere about the year 1560 this tranquil and beautiful country was devastated by a plague which carried off hundreds of its spa.r.s.e inhabitants, and left many villages desolate. The legends of the countryside tell of places in which no human life remained.

The people of Janenne, headed by the _doyen_, made a pilgrimage in procession to the shrine of Our Lady of Lorette, and offered to strike a bargain. They promised that if Janenne should be spared from the plague they and their descendants for ever would each year repeat that procession in honour of Our Lady of Lorette, and that once in seven years they would appear under arms and fire a salvo. Whether in consequence of this arrangement or not, Janenne escaped the plague, and from that year to this the promised procession has never been forgotten.

In course of time it became less the local mode than it had been to carry arms, and nowadays the great septennial procession can only be gone through after a prodigious deal of drilling and preparation.

A week or two after my arrival the villagers began to train, under the conduct of a stout military-looking personage, who had been in the Belgian cavalry and _gendarmerie_, and was now in honourable retirement from war's alarms as a grocer. He traded under the name of Dorn-Casart--the wife's maiden name being tacked to his own, after the manner of the country. This habit, by the way, gives a certain flavour of aristocracy to the trading names over even the smallest shop windows.

'Coqueline-Walhaert, _negotiant_,' is the sign over the establishment wherein a very infirm old woman sells centimes' worth of sweetstuff to the _jeunesse_ of Janenne, whilst her husband works at the quarries.

Monsieur Dorn is a man with a huge moustache, fat cheeks streaked with scarlet lines on a bilious groundwork, and a voice raspy with much Geneva and the habit of command. He rides with the unmistakable seat of an old cavalry man, and his behaviour on horseback was a marked contrast to that of the mounted contingent he drilled every day in the open place in front of the hotel. His steed, artfully stimulated by the spur, caracoled, danced, and lashed out with his hind feet, and Monsieur Dorn, with one fist stuck against his own fat ribs, swayed to the motion with admirable nonchalance. His voice, which has the barky tone inseparable from military command, would ring about the square like the voice of a commander-in-chief, and by the exercise of a practised imagination, I could almost persuade myself that I stood face to face with the horrid front of war.

When Monsieur Dorn was not drilling his brigade he was generally to be found at the Cafe de la Regence, smoking a huge meerschaum with a cherry wood stem and sipping Geneva. Even in this comparative retirement the halo of his office clung about him, and seemed to hold men oflf from a too familiar intercourse; but one afternoon I saw him unbending there.

He was nearly always accompanied by a dog, spotlessly white, the most ladylike of her species I remember to have seen. Her jet-black beady eyes and jet-black glittering nose set oflf the snowy whiteness of her coat, and were in turn set off by it. She had a refined, coquettish, mincing walk, which alone was enough to bespeak the agreeable sense she had of her own charms. Perhaps a satiric observer of manners might have thought her more like a lady's-maid than a lady. A suggestion of pertness in her beady eyes, and a certain superciliousness of bearing were mingled with a coquetry not displeasing to one who surveyed her from the human height. To look important is pretty generally to feel important, but is, by no means, to be important. We discern this fact with curious clearness when we look at other people, but it is nowhere quite so evident as in what we call the brute creation. (As if we didn't belong to it!) Perhaps there are intelligences who look at us with just such a pitying amus.e.m.e.nt and a.n.a.lysis--_our_ prosperous relatives, who started earlier in the race of life than we did, and met with better chances.

In spite of airs and graces, natural and acquired, Lil's claims to purity of race were small, though, like my older acquaintance, Schwartz, she was more a broken-haired terrier than anything else. Schwartz was simply and purely _bourgeois_. He had no airs and no pretensions; but Lil, whatever her genuine claims may have been, was of another stamp and fas.h.i.+on.

It was Lil who was the cause of Monsieur Dorn's unbending. The fat old _gendarme_ was putting her through a set of tricks, which she executed with complete _aplomb_ and intelligence. There was nothing violent in these exercises; nothing a dog of the best breeding in the world could have felt to derogate from dignity. She was much petted and applauded for her performances, and was rewarded by two or three lumps of sugar, which she ate without any of the vulgar haste characteristic of most dogs in their dealings with sweetmeats.

The language of the peasantry hereabouts is that same Walloon tongue in which old Froissart wrote his _Chronicles_. It is little more comprehensible to the average Frenchman than to the average Englishman, but its vocabulary is restricted, and the people who talk it have enriched (or corrupted) it with many words of French. When the loungers in the _cafe_ began to talk, as they did presently, it amused me to listen to this unknown tongue; and whenever I heard '_la procession_'

named, I enjoyed much the kind of refreshment Mr. Gargery experienced when he encountered a J.O., Jo, in the course of his general reading.

_La procession_ was not merely the staple of the village talk, but the warp and woof of it, and any intruding strand of foreign fancy was cut short at the dips of him who strove to spin it into the web of conversation. I myself ventured an inquiry or two, for all but the most ignorant speak French of a sort. Monsieur Dorn accepted a gla.s.s of _pequet_ at my request (a fire-water, for a dose of which one halfpenny is charged, and upon which the unaccustomed stranger may intoxicate himself madly at an outlay of five-pence), and the fat and stately old fellow told me all about the origin and meaning of the pious form the village was then preparing to fulfil. He made the kindest allowance for my limited powers of speech, and bounteously fed my native sense of retiring humility with patronage.

The door of the _cafe_ was open to the mild, fir-scented December air, though a crackling fire burnt noisily in the thin-ribbed stove. Lil made occasional excursions to the open doorway, looking out upon the pa.s.sers-by with a keen alertness. She had some time returned from one of these inspections, and had curled herself at her master's feet, when I heard a singular and persistent tapping upon the unclothed floor, and looking round caught sight of my friend Schwartz, who was making a crouching and timid progress toward us, and was wagging his cropped tail with such vehemence that it sounded on the boards like a light hammer on a carpeted flooring. At first I fancied that he recognised me, and I held out to him an encouraging hand, of which he took no notice. That air of propitiatory humility which I had seen in him when we had first encountered on Lorette was exaggerated to a slavish adulation. There is no living creature but a dog who would not have been ashamed to show such a mixture of transport and self-depreciation. He fawned, he writhed, he rapped his tail upon the floor in a sustained _crescendo_.

The dumb heart had no language for its own delight and humility. Anybody who takes pleasure in dogs has seen the _sort_ of thing scores and scores of times. It was the quality of intensity which made it remarkable in Schwartz.

Lil, for whom this display of joy and humbleness was made, was altogether unmoved by it. She was not merely regardless of it, but ostentatiously disdainful. She took a coquettish lady's-maidish amble to the door, pa.s.sing Schwartz by the way, and yawned as she looked out upon the street. Schwartz fawned after her to the door, and with a second yawn she repa.s.sed him, and returned to lie at the feet of the fat old _gendarme_. The absurd little drama of coquetry and wors.h.i.+p went on until the old fellow arose with a friendly _bon jour_, to me, and a whistle to Lil, who followed him with a supercilious nose in the air.

The despised Schwartz stood a while, and then set out after her at a ridiculous three-legged run, but before he had gone ten yards he stopped short, looked after the retreating fair in silence, and then walked off with a dispirited aspect in the opposite direction.

So far as I could tell, my shadowy enemy with the axe had taken himself away for good and all, but I was so fearful of recalling him that I kept altogether idle, and in other respects nursed and coddled myself with a constant a.s.siduity. But it is a hard thing for a man who has accustomed himself to constant mental employment to go without it, and in the absence of pens, ink, and paper, books and journals, the procession bade fair to be a perfect G.o.dsend. Even when the inhabitants of the village took to rising at four o'clock in the morning, and fanfaronaded with ill-blown bugles, and flaring torches, and a dreadful untiring drum about the street, I forbore to grumble, and when on Sundays they turned out in a body after ma.s.s to see their own military section drilled in the _Place_ of the Hotel de Ville, one bored valetudinarian welcomed them heartily. The military section had got down uniforms from one of the Brussels theatres,--busbies and helmets, and the gloriously comic hats of the _garde civile_,--dragoon tunics, hussar jackets, infantry sh.e.l.l-jackets, cavalry stable-jackets, foresters' boots, dragoon jack-boots, stage piratical boots with wide tops to fit the thigh that drooped about the ankles,--trousers of every sort, from blue broadcloth, gold-striped, to the homely fustian,--and a rare show they made.

They went fours right or fours left with a fine military jangle, and sometimes went fours right and fours left at the same time, with results disastrous to military order. Then it was good to see and hear the fat Dorn as he caracoled in a field-marshal's uniform, and barked his orders at the disordered crowd like a field-marshal to the manner born.

Monsieur Dorn being thus gloriously lifted into the range of the public eye, Lil seemed to take added airs of importance. I say _seemed_, but that is only because of the foolish and ignorant habit into which I was born and educated. Ever since I can remember, people have been telling stories to prove that dogs have some sort of intelligence, as if--except to the most stupid and the blindest--the thing had ever stood in need of proof. There is nothing much more fatal to the apprehension of a fact than the constant causeless repet.i.tion of it. And then the tales of the intelligence of dogs are told as a general thing with a sort of wide-eyed wonder, so that the dog's very advocates contrive to impress their readers with the belief that their commonplace bit of history is remarkable.

Of course there are clever dogs and dull dogs, just as there are sages and idiots, but any dog who was not a fool would have known and recognised his master's splendour and importance if he had belonged at this epoch to Monsieur Dorn. Lil saw him sitting up there in vivid colours, heard him shouting in a voice of authority, and saw people answer to that voice There was not a Christian in the crowd who had a better understanding of the situation. To see her running in and out amongst the horses' feet, ordering the sham dragoons and hussars about in her own language, was to know she understood the thing, and had invested herself with some of her master's glory. Wherever she went, in and out and about, Schwartz, with his meek spikes raging in all directions, followed, close at heel. Almost everybody has seen the loud aggressive swaggering boy with the meek admiring small boy in his train.

The small boy glorifies the other in his mind, setting him on a level with Three-Fingered Jack, or Goliath's conqueror, and the aggressive boy, feeling rather than understanding the other's reverence, does his best to look as if he deserved it. To see Lil swagger and to hear her bark, and to see the foolish humble Schwartz follow her, admiring her, believing in her, utterly borne away by her insolent pretence that the whole show was got up by her orders--to observe this was to see one half the world in little.

On other days Lil was as other dogs, except, perhaps, to the love-blinded eyes of Schwartz, but on Sundays, so long as the drills for the procession lasted, the field was all her own. One or two of her companions, carried away by her example, dared to run amongst the horses' feet and bark. They were promptly kicked into the ring of spectators, and Lil was left alone in her glory. Of course it all went with his own confiding nature, and the state of complete slavery in which he lived, to persuade Schwartz of her greatness. She deserves at least that one truth should be admitted. She never gave her admirer the least encouragement so far as I could see. She never in a chance encounter in the street paused to exchange good-morrow. She never so much as turned a head in his direction. She tolerated his presence and that was all. But wherever she went he shadowed her. He was not obtrusive, but was content to keep at heel, and to be permitted to admire. I have seen him sit for half an hour on a doorstep, a canine monument of patience, waiting for her to come out, and I have seen her travel about the _Place_ in apparently purposeless zigzags and circles for the mere pride and vanity of knowing how closely he would follow her least reasonable movements.

A week or two before the grand event came off there was a prodigious excitement in Janenne. An idea, originating in the military spirit of Monsieur Dorn, had been industriously put about, a subscription had been set on foot for it, a committee had been appointed to superintend its working, and now the glorious fancy was actually translated into fact.

The procession was to be supplemented by artillery, and now here was a time-eaten old gun, mounted on a worm-eaten old carriage, and trailed in harness of rope by two stalwart Flemish horses. Here also was gunpowder enough to wreck the village, and the Janennois, who for a moral people have a most astounding love of noise, were out at earliest dawn of light on Sunday morning to see the gun fired. The first firing was supposed to be an experiment, and everybody was warned to a safe distance when the gun was loaded, whilst Monsieur Dorn arranged a train of powder, and set a slow match in connection with it. When the bang came and the old iron stood the strain everybody went wild with joy, and even Monsieur Dorn himself was so carried away by the general enthusiasm that he tested the piece all morning. It was finally discovered that the powder was exhausted, and the hat had to be sent round again for a new subscription.

The annual procession is far and away the greatest event of the year at Janenne, and the septennial procession would of itself be enough to satisfy any resident in the village that he had lived if he had but seen it once. n.o.body dreamed of spoiling the procession for the sake of a cart-load or so of gunpowder, and the hat was soon filled. Next Sunday Janenne enjoyed a new series of experiments on the big gun, and what with the banging of the drum, and the blowing of the bugle, and the flaming of torches in the dark morning, and the banging of the big gun from dawn till noon, and the clatter and glitter of the drill in the after part of the short winter day, the atmosphere of the village was altogether warlike.

The big gun gave Lil an added claim on the veneration of her admirer. On the morning of the second firing she came demurely down to the field in which the artillery experiments were conducted, with an air of knowing all about it, and Schwartz, as usual, pursued her. The gun was sponged and loaded, and the charge was rammed home under Monsieur Dorn's supervision, Lil standing gravely by, and Schwartz grovelling in her neighbourhood. Then the old _gendarme_ himself primed the piece, and taking a torch from a boy who stood near him applied it to the touch-hole. Out at the muzzle sprang the answering flame and roar, and away went Schwartz as if he had been projected by the force of the powder. Panic declared itself in every hair, and his usual foolish three-legged amble was exchanged for a pace like that of a greyhound. He had gone but a hundred yards at most, when reason resumed her seat. He stopped and turned, and after a little pause came back with an evident shamefacedness. Lil had stood her ground without the slightest sign of fear, and when Schwartz returned she took to looking so triumphantly, and superintended the subsequent operations with so much authority, that I am profoundly convinced of her intent to persuade her slavish follower that this was some new and astonis.h.i.+ng form of bark of which she alone possessed the secret.

Schwartz was most probably willing to believe anything she told him. It is the way of some natures to confide, and it is the way of others to presume upon their confidence.