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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Schwartz: A History, by David Christie Murray
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Schwartz: A History
+       From “Schwartz” by David Christie Murray
+
+Author: David Christie Murray
+
+Release Date: August 8, 2007 [EBook #22271]
+Last Updated: September 16, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SCHWARTZ: A HISTORY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+SCHWARTZ: A HISTORY
+
+By David Christie Murray
+
+Author Of ‘Aunt Rachel,’ ‘The Weaker Vessel,’ Etc.
+
+
+
+
+SCHWARTZ: A HISTORY
+
+
+
+
+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
+manuscript 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 shorewards 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 assurance
+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 constitutional 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 glass of much-watered whisky which kept a final
+pipe in company.
+
+He had grown already into an unutterable bore, and when he insisted upon
+passing 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 shiver at you, as
+I decline to sweat and shiver. 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 grass to the variously-toned grays of the
+same grass 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 clustering 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 friendship I made--I have since spent three years in the
+delightful place, and have made several friendships 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 sparse
+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 Café 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 amusement and analysis--_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
+fashion.
+
+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 _café_ 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 glass 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 _café_ 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
+passers-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, passing 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 repassed him, and returned to lie at the feet of the fat old
+_gendarme_. The absurd little drama of coquetry and worship 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 assiduity. 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 godsend. 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 mass 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
+shell-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 repetition 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. Nobody 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 astonishing 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.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+Janenne is on the outskirts of the Forest Country, and in the shooting
+season the _chasseur_ is a familiar personage. He arrives by evening
+train or diligence, half a dozen strong. He sups and betakes himself to
+the singing of comic songs with choruses, moistening and mellowing his
+vocal chords with plenteous burgundy. Long after everybody else has gone
+to bed, he tramps in chorus along the echoing unclothed corridor, and
+he and his chums open bedroom doors to shout Belgian scraps of _facetio_
+at each other, or to cast prodigious boots upon the sounding boards.
+Then long before anybody else has a mind to rise, he is up again
+promenading the corridor like a multiplied copy of the giant in the
+_Castle of Otranto_. He rolls away in the darkness with the cracking of
+whips and jingling of bells, and sleep and silence settle down again.
+At night he is back to supper with tales of big game multitudinous as
+Laban’s flocks, and a bag unaccountably empty. That same evening he is
+away to desk or counter or studio in Brussels, Antwerp, or Liège, and
+Janenne falls back into its normal peace.
+
+It was mid-December, and the snow was falling in powdery flakes, when
+a sportsman alighted at the Hotel des Postes, and at the first glance
+I knew him for a countryman. He was a fine, frank, free-hearted young
+fellow, one of the most easily likable of youngsters, and we were on
+friendly terms together before the first evening was over. He knew a
+number of people in the neighbourhood, had received a dozen invitations
+to shoot, or thereabouts, and meant to put up three weeks at Janenne,
+so he told me, shooting when sport was to be had, and on other days
+tramping about the country. He was accompanied by a bull-terrier, who
+answered to the name of Scraper, a handsome creature of his kind, with
+one eye in permanent mourning.
+
+‘Of course he’s no good,’ said the young fellow, in answer to an
+observation of mine, ‘but then he’s perfectly tamed, and therefore he’s
+no harm. He’ll stay where he’s told; and I believe the poor beggar would
+break his heart if I left him behind. Wouldn’t you, old chap?’
+
+The young sportsman went away to the chase next morning, taking his
+bull-terrier with him, and returning at night reported Scraper’s perfect
+good behaviour. In the course of that evening’s talk I spoke of certain
+peculiarities I had noticed in the formation of the country, and my new
+acquaintance proposed that on an idle day of his next week we should
+take a walk of exploration. When the day came we started together, and I
+showed him some of the curiosities of nature I had noticed.
+
+Round and about Janenne the world is hollow. The hills are mere bubbles,
+and the earth is honeycombed with caverns. By the side of the road which
+leads to Houssy a river accompanies the traveller’s steps, purling and
+singing, and talking secrets (as shallow pebbly-bedded streams have a
+way of doing), and on a sudden the traveller misses it. There, before
+him, is a river bed, wide, white, and stony, but where is the river? If
+he be a curious traveller he will retrace his steps, and will find the
+stream racing with some impetuosity towards a bend, where it dwindles by
+apparent miracle into nothing. The curious traveller, naturally growing
+more curious than common in the presence of these phenomena, will,
+at some risk to his neck, descend the bank, and make inquiry into the
+reason for the disappearance of the stream. He will see nothing to
+account for it, but he will probably arrive at the conclusion that there
+are fissures in the river’s bed, through which the water falls to feed
+the subterranean stream, of which he is pretty certain to have heard
+or read. If he will walk back a mile, against the course of the stream,
+will cross the main street of Janenne, strike the Montcourtois Road
+there, and cross the river bridge, he will see a cavern lipped by the
+flowing water, and in that cavern, only a foot or so below the level of
+the open-air stream, he will find its subterranean continuation. It has
+worked back upon itself in this secret way, by what strange courses no
+man knows or can guess. But that the stream is the same has been proved
+by a device at once ingenious and simple. Colouring matter of various
+sorts has from time to time been thrown into the water at its place
+of disappearance, and the tinted stream has poured, hours and hours
+afterwards, through the cavern, which is only a mile away, and stands so
+near the earlier stream that in times of rain the waters mingle there.
+
+On the sides of the hills, and in the brushwood which clothes their
+feet, one finds all manner of holes and caves and crevices, some of them
+very shallow, and some of them of unknown depth. In the Bois de Janenne
+alone there are four or five of them.
+
+All this has strictly to do with the history of Schwartz, as will by and
+by be seen.
+
+When heavy rains fall the river is so swollen that the underground call
+upon its resources fails to drain it, and it foams above the fissures in
+full volume, so wild and deep that a passer-by would never guess of the
+curious trick of nature which is here being played. But the season being
+exceptionally dry, I was able to show my find, and from the spot of
+the stream’s disappearance I led my acquaintance to the cavern. Here
+prowling about in a light-footed and adventurous fashion the young
+Englishman found a hole in the wall of stone, and, venturing into it,
+discovered to his great delight a passage which seemed to lead into the
+very entrails of the hill. He proposed instantly to explore this, and I
+having that morning purchased of the local tobacconist a box of Italian
+vestas, each three or four inches long, and calculated to burn for
+several minutes, and having the same in my pocket at the moment, we set
+out together on a journey of adventure. The passage varied in width
+from six to three feet, and in height from eight feet upwards. The faint
+illumination of the big wax vestas often failed to touch the roof. The
+way was sometimes over ankle deep in a thick mud, and sometimes strewn
+with fragments of rock which had fallen from the roof; but we went
+on gaily until we came to a great slippery boulder, which blocked
+the passage for some three feet in height. My companion was in act to
+clamber over this, when the light I carried pinched my thumb and finger
+with sudden heat, and I dropped it on to the ground. I struck another,
+and found the youngster perched upon the boulder.
+
+‘Wait a moment,’ said I, ‘and let us see what is beyond. There may be a
+deepish hole there.’
+
+We leaned over, and could see nothing. My companion got down from the
+boulder with a grave look.
+
+‘I was just going to jump when you spoke,’ he said. ‘Lucky I didn’t. I
+wonder how deep it is?’
+
+We hunted about for a stone, and by and by found one about the size of
+a man’s head. This the youngster tossed over the boulder into
+the darkness, and we stood looking at each other, by the little
+clear-burning light of the wax match. I do not know how long we stood
+there, for time has a knack of magnifying itself beyond belief in such
+conditions, but it was long, long before an awful hollow boom came
+rolling to our ears from the depth. We turned without a word, and
+stumbled back towards the daylight, and when we reached it I looked
+at the young Englishman and saw that all the roses had faded from his
+healthy young cheeks, and that he was as gray as ashes.
+
+‘I was going to jump when you spoke,’ he said. ‘Precious lucky for me I
+didn’t.’
+
+I congratulated him very heartily on not having jumped, and our search
+for natural wonders being ended we went back to the hotel. We made
+inquiry there--at first in vain--about this inner cavern, but at last
+we came across the Garde Champêtre of the district, who told us that the
+depth was unknown. He and some of his friends had had the curiosity to
+try to measure it, but they never had rope enough.
+
+It befell on the morning of the next day that I wandered out alone, and
+in the course of the first score yards encountered Schwartz, who was
+demonstrative of friendly civilities. I returned his salutations, and he
+gave me to understand in his own too-humble manner that he would like to
+accompany me. I let him know that I should be delighted by his society,
+and away we went together. The ground was firm with last night’s frost
+and musical to the sabots of peasants and the iron-shod feet of horses.
+The hills and fields were covered with a powdery snow that threw their
+grays into a dark relief, and the air was so still that I could hear the
+bell-like tinkle of chisel and stone from the quarry nearly a mile
+away. We entered the Bois de Janenne together, and wandered through its
+branchy solitudes by many winding pathways. There is a main road running
+through this wood, cut by order of the commune for the pleasure of
+visitors, and the middle of this road was white with a thin untrodden
+snow. On either side this ribbon of white lay a narrower ribbon of gold
+where the pines had shed their yellow needles and the overhanging
+boughs had guarded them from the falling snow. The ground ivy was of all
+imaginable colours, but only yielded its secrets on a close examination,
+and did not call upon the eye like some of the louder reds and yellows
+which still clung to the trees. Here and there the _fusain_ burned like
+a flame with its vivid scarlet berries--_chapeau de curé_ the country
+people call them, though the colour is a little too gay for less than a
+cardinal’s wearing. For the most part the undergrowth was bare, and the
+branches were either purple or of the tone of a ripe filbert, so that
+the atmosphere, with the reflected dull golds and bluish-reds and
+reddish-blues, was in a swimming maze like that of a sunset distance,
+though the eye could scarcely pierce twenty yards into the thick-grown
+tangle.
+
+Schwartz and I rambled along, now and then exchanging a sign of friendly
+interest, and in a while we left the main path and wandered where we
+would. Suddenly Schwartz began to hunt and sniff and bark on what I
+supposed to be the recent trace of a rabbit or a hare, and I stood
+still to watch him. He worried industriously here and there until he
+disappeared behind a clump of brushwood, and then I heard a sudden
+‘Yowk!’ of unmistakable terror. After this there was dead silence. I
+called, but there was not even the rustle of a leaf in answer. I waited
+a while and called again, but still no answer came. Not in the least
+guessing what had befallen the dog, I mounted the hillside and came to
+the clump of bushes behind which he had disappeared. There I found a
+hole some three feet wide and two in height, a hole with sides of moist
+earth, formed like an irregularly-shaped funnel, and affording at its
+farther end little more than room enough for a creature of Schwartz’s
+size to pass. At the narrow end the earth was freshly disturbed.
+
+I shouted down this reversed trumpet of a hole. I listened after every
+call I explored the place so far as I could with a six-foot wand cut
+from a near tree. I heard no movement, no whine of distress, and I
+touched nothing with the wand except the roof of the cavern into which
+poor Schwartz had fallen. At length I gave him up for dead, remembering
+the adventure of the day before, the terrible space of time which had
+elapsed before the echo of the fallen boulder came booming from the
+abyss, and thinking it as likely as not that Schwartz had fallen to an
+equal depth. When I got back to the hotel I told the tale as well as I
+could, and one of the servants took the news to Schwartz’s master.
+
+When once this lamentable accident had happened, it became surprising to
+learn how frequently its like had happened before. There was scarcely
+a sportsman in the village who had not his story of some such
+disappearance of a dog whilst out shooting. The poor beast would become
+excited in pursuit of game, would dash headlong into a set of bushes and
+emerge no more. Then a moment’s examination would reveal the fatal cave.
+I am certain that I heard a good half-score of such histories. The cave,
+by the way, was not always fatal, for I heard of cases in which the dog
+had been known to find his way out of the underground labyrinth, and
+return home dreadfully thin and hungry, but otherwise undamaged. These
+cases gave me some faint hope for Schwartz, but as day after day went by
+the hope faded, and I made up my mind that I had seen the last of him.
+I was sorry to think so, for he had been very much a friend and a
+companion.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+It was curious to notice how that unquestioning allegiance and
+admiration which the missing Schwartz had been used to bestow on Lil
+was now bestowed by her on the new-comer who answered to the name of
+Scraper, and how in answer to all her advances and endearments Scraper
+remained scornful and unreceptive. One knows a hundred poems and
+legends in which this form of vengeance is taken upon the cruel fair; in
+which the proud lady who has scorned the humble and faithful heart lives
+to be scorned in turn. Scraper, probably unconscious of his mission as
+avenger, fulfilled it none the less on that account.
+
+His master, being an Englishman, had the common English reverence for
+the Sunday, and would not shoot on that day, though by his conscientious
+abstention he missed, undoubtedly, the best battue the country-side
+afforded. We had a brief discussion as to the morality and propriety
+of the procession, and I pointed out to him that notwithstanding the
+military element by which it was so strongly marked, it was purely
+sacerdotal in origin and pious in intent, but he merely replied that as
+a form of religious exercise for a Sunday it struck him as being jolly
+rum. He added shortly afterwards that whether he looked at it or not the
+coves would do it, and that he therefore felt at liberty to watch them.
+
+Scraper displayed the profoundest interest in the business, and took
+upon himself the organisation of the whole affair, barking with so much
+authority, and careering about the cavalry squadron with such untiring
+energy that he threw Lil’s efforts in that way into the shade, and
+in the course of a mere half-hour had superseded her. Then, just as
+Schwartz had been used, with every evidence of faith, to follow Lil,
+regarding her as the very mainspring of the military movement, Lil
+followed Scraper. Mr. Herbert Spencer has shown that, in spite of the
+apparent unreasonableness of the fact, humbug and credulity are sworn
+companions. The savage mystery man, who knows what a humbug he himself
+is, is the first to yield allegiance and faith to the abler humbug,
+who has more tricks or bolder invention than he. So, Lil’s groundless
+pretensions of a week ago did not seem in the least to prevent her from
+being imposed upon by the groundless pretensions of Scraper, much as one
+might have thought her own career of imposture would have set her upon
+her guard. She had caught that very fawning method of appeal for a kind
+regard which had once distinguished Schwartz, and it was obvious that
+Scraper could make no claim to which she would not be ready to give
+adhesion. It is in the very nature of poetical justice that it satisfies
+the emotions, and I was not displeased to see affairs take this sudden
+turn, to view the hard and despiteful heart thus humbled.
+
+It was on a Friday that Schwartz’s chase had ended so disastrously. It
+was on the following Sunday that Lil laid down the honours of command at
+the feet of the new-comer. It was on the Sunday following, the ninth day
+clear from the date of the mischance, that the great event of the seven
+years took place. My young acquaintance had two or three days free of
+engagements, and he spent these in watching the preparations for the
+procession. He spoke French with a fluency and purity which excited my
+envy, and he spent most of his spare time among the village people, who
+talked and thought and dreamed of nothing but the procession. Wherever
+he went Scraper accompanied him, and wherever Scraper went Lil was to be
+seen following in fascinated admiration.
+
+For a whole week the drum had known but little rest. I never learned the
+purpose of the proceeding, but every day and all day, from long before
+daylight till long after dark, somebody marched about the village and
+rattled unceasingly upon the drum. It could not possibly have been one
+man who did it all, for the energies of no one man that ever lived could
+have been equal to the task. Most of the time it was far away, and it
+only made two daily promenades past the hotel, but whenever I listened
+for it I could hear it, beating the same unweary rataplan. Then at
+intervals all day and every day, the big gun boomed and the clarion
+blared until I used to dream that I was back at Plevna or the Shipka
+Pass, and could not get my “copy” to London and New York because
+Monsieur Dorn had filled the Houssy Wood with Cossacks from Janenne. It
+may be supposed that all this _charivari_ was but an evil thing for
+a man as much in need of rest as I was, but I verily believe that the
+noise and bustle of the preparations, though they robbed me now and then
+of an hour of morning sleep, were almost as useful to me as the idleness
+I enjoyed, and the tranquil country air into which I could drive or
+wander afoot whenever the fancy for perfect quiet came upon me.
+
+At last the great day dawned, and the great event dawned earlier than
+the day. At five o’clock the noise of drum and clarion began, and the
+light of torches flared on the painted fronts of houses--yellow and pink
+and blue--in the quaint old village street. A little later a band came
+by with shattering brass and booming drum, and for an hour or so the
+whole place was in a ferment. The cavalry came clattering into the
+_Place_, the hoarse voice of Monsieur Dorn barked through the orders
+which had by this time grown conventional, and his squadron jingled for
+the last time for seven years through the movements he had taught them
+at the expense of so much time and lung power. Then a strange foreboding
+sort of quiet, an unnatural tranquillity, settled upon everything and
+continued until near upon the hour of ten. A long waggon drawn by four
+oxen excited, by the freight it bore, a momentary curiosity, and brought
+faces to doors and windows. The air was keen to-day, and we were at the
+very season of mid-winter, but in the waggon which the four slow
+oxen dragged through the streets of Janenne were a dozen lofty shrubs
+reaching to a height of eight or nine feet at least, the which shrubs
+were one mass of exotic-looking blossom. I discovered later on that
+they were nothing more than a set of young pines with artificial paper
+flowers attached to every twig, but the effect as they went down the
+wintry street in their clothing of gold and rose and white with the
+live green of the fir peeping through the wealth of bloom was quite an
+astonishment in its way. These decorated shrubs were set at the church
+porch, and seemed to fill the whole of that part of the street with
+colour and light.
+
+When the procession came at last there was one curious thing about it.
+Such a crowd of people--for Janenne took part in it--that there was
+scarcely anybody left to look at it. But then the processionists had the
+pleasure of looking at each other. The band came first, in blue blouse
+and clean white trousers. Then came the soldiery, a motley crew, with
+Monsieur Dorn at their head, drawn sword in hand, and next to him
+a personage who might have been translated clean from Astley’s--a
+gentleman in long hose, with a flower on each shoe, and a hat of red
+velvet shaped like a bread tray, decorated with prodigious coloured
+feathers, and a slashed doublet gay with many knots of bright ribbon.
+Years and years ago Janenne had a Count and a _château_. The ruins of
+the _château_ still kept gray guard over the village street; but there
+is not even a ruin left of the old family. But in the day when Our Lady
+of Lorette stayed the local pestilence the existing Count of Janenne was
+pious enough to ride in the promised procession; and for a century or so
+the magnate of the village and its neighbourhood was never absent from
+the demonstration of thanksgiving. In a while, however, the Counts of
+Janenne took to wildish ways, and, leaving the home of their ancestors,
+went away to Paris and led extravagant lives there, gambling and
+drinking, and squandering their substance in other and even more foolish
+fashions, and at last there ceased to be estates of Janenne to draw
+upon, or even Counts of Janenne to draw. But before things came to this
+pass the absentee Counts had always sent a representative to join the
+procession to the shrine of Our Lady of Lorette; and it has come about
+that the legend has clung in the popular fancy even unto the present
+day. Somebody--anybody--gets himself up in theatrical guise, and rides
+at the head of the military forces, between the first rank and the
+commander-in-chief, as the representative of that extinct great house.
+On this occasion it was a red-cheeked shy young man, cousin to the
+chambermaid of the Hotel des Postes, a peasant proprietor who farmed,
+and still farms, some ten or a dozen hectares of sour land on the road
+to Montcourtois. The red-cheeked shy young man’s female cousin exchanged
+a red-cheeked, shame-faced, rustic grin with him as he rode by, and the
+young man, in imitation of Monsieur Dorn, made his horse caracole, but
+being less versed in horsemanship than the old _gendarme_, had to hold
+on ignominiously by the mane in payment for his own temerity.
+
+Following the military came a long array of little girls in white
+muslin, with sashes blue or red. Half a dozen nuns kept watch over them,
+pacing sombre in white head-dresses and black gowns by the side of all
+that smiling troop of glad hearts and childish faces. All the little
+girls carried bannerets of bright colour, and all went bareheaded,
+after the manner of the district, where no woman, short of the highest
+fashion, ever permits herself to wear hat or bonnet, except when going
+to mass or upon a railway journey. White childish locks, braided and
+shining, red locks, brown locks, black locks, with bright faces under
+all, went streaming by, and then a solemn priest or two headed a
+rambling host of lads with well-scrubbed cheeks and clean collars, and
+decent raiment of church-going Sunday black. Then came a flock of young
+women in white muslin, very starched and stiff, with blue bows and blue
+sashes. In front of these two stalwart wenches bore a flapping banner,
+inscribed ‘La Jeunesse de Janenne’; and closing up the rank of Janenne’s
+youth and rustic beauty came half a dozen chosen damsels, big limbed and
+strong, bearing on their shoulders a huge waxen statue of Our Lady of
+Lorette, and in her arms a crowned child, she herself being crowned with
+glittering tinsel, and robed in a glowing and diaphanous stuff, which
+only half revealed the white satin and spangles of the dress below
+it. Then a number of chubby-cheeked little boys in semi-ecclesiastical
+costume, improvised--no doubt under clerical supervision--by careful
+hands at home. Each little boy carried a fuming censer, and it was not
+difficult to see that they were well pleased with themselves and their
+office. After them came the _doyen_ in full ecclesiastical costume, a
+little tawdry perhaps, for the village is but poor and with the best
+heart in the world can only imitate the real splendours from afar. Then
+following the _doyen_ (who, by the way, marched under a canopy like the
+roof of an old-fashioned four-post bedstead) came the male choir of the
+church, chanting a musical service, which harmonised indifferently with
+the strains of the military band in front. Then the big gun, drawn
+by the two big Flemish horses. Then Jacques, Jules, André, François,
+Chariot, Pierre, Joseph, Jean, and all the rest, in sabots, short
+trousers, and blue blouses, marching bareheaded with reverent air, and
+with them Julie, and Fifine, and Nana, and Adèle, and other feminine
+relatives, all in their Sunday best, and all devout in mien. Then, at a
+little distance--the most astonishing and unlooked-for tail to all this
+village splendour and devoutness--Schwartz.
+
+Schwartz himself, but Schwartz so changed, so lean, so woebegone, as
+hardly to be recognisable, even to the eye of friendship. Of all his
+diverse-raging hairs not one to assert itself, but all plastered close
+with an oily sleekness by a slimy clinging mud, the thin ribs showing
+plainly, and the hinder part of the poor wretch’s barrel a mere
+hand-grasp. His very tail, which had used to look like an irregular
+much-worn bottle-brush, was thin and sleek like a rat’s, and he tucked
+it away as if he were ashamed of it. His feet were clotted with red
+earth, and he walked as if his head were a burden to him, he hung it so
+mournfully and carried it so low.
+
+My young English acquaintance, who, like myself, had been watching the
+procession, had posted himself a little farther down the road, with
+Scraper near at hand. Near to him, employing all the ingratiatory
+insinuating arts she knew, and so absorbed in Scraper that she forgot
+even to direct the procession, was Lil. To her, fawning and whining in
+such an excess of feeble joy as can be rarely known to dogs or man,
+came the half-starved, half-drowned creature. I was already halfway
+to Schwartz’s rescue, with immediate milk, to be followed by soap
+and water, in my mind, but I stopped to see how Lil would receive
+the returned companion of old days. It is scarcely probable that dogs
+believe in ghosts, and yet it would have been easy to fancy that she saw
+in him at first some purely supernatural apparition, she recoiled
+with so obvious a surprise and terror when she first beheld him. The
+wretched, propitiatory, humbly-ecstatic Schwartz advanced, but she
+showed her gleaming teeth, and growled aversion. He stopped stock-still,
+and whined a little, and Lil responded furiously. I took the returned
+wanderer up in both hands, and carried him into the hotel scullery, and
+got milk for him. He lapped it with tears running down his muddy nose;
+and when I had had him washed and tucked away into an old railway rug,
+beside a stove in the little room, he lay there winking and
+blinking, and licked at his own tears with an expression altogether
+broken-hearted. I should have liked to have known something of the
+history of his subterranean wanderings, but that was only to be left to
+conjecture. I bade him be of better cheer, and went outside to wait for
+the return of the procession, and to smoke a cigar in the open air,
+and an hour later found that Schwartz had again disappeared. This time,
+however, he had merely gone home, and though for a day or two he was
+quite an invalid, he was soon about the streets again, completely
+rehabilitated.
+
+And now I come to the relation of the one tragic fact which seemed to
+me to make this simple history worth writing. I hope that nobody will
+regard it as an invention, or will suppose that I am trading upon their
+sympathies on false pretences.
+
+On the day of the young Englishman’s departure I accompanied him to the
+railway station. Lil came down in attendance upon Scraper, and barked
+fiercely at the departing train which bore him away. Schwartz followed
+in humble pursuit of Lil, who, so far as I could understand affairs, had
+never forgiven him for intruding himself in so unpresentable a guise,
+and claiming acquaintance whilst she was engaged in conversation with a
+swell like Scraper. From that hour she had refused to hold the slightest
+communion with him, showing her teeth and growling in the cruellest
+way whenever he approached her. In spite of this, Schwartz seemed to be
+persuaded that, in the absence of his rival, he still stood a chance,
+and day after day he followed her with the old fawning humbleness, and
+day after day she received him with the same anger and disdain.
+
+On a certain Wednesday afternoon the air was wonderfully mild and dry.
+It was early in January, but the weather was so fine that I had not even
+need of an overcoat, as I sat in the sunshine smoking and reading. I had
+seen Monsieur Dorn enter the opposite house, taking Lil with him, and
+Schwartz had settled himself on the doorstep, as usual, to await her
+exit. I called him to me, and he crossed over, but soon returned and
+resumed his place, and sat there waiting still. After a considerable
+time the door opened, and Monsieur Dorn and Lil emerged together.
+I looked up at that moment, and saw Lil make a savage dart at her
+too-persistent worshipper. Monsieur Dorn beat them apart, but Schwartz
+had attempted no resistance. He was rather badly bitten, and when I
+picked him up the tears were running fast down his nose, and he was
+feebly licking at them, and whining to himself in a way which indicated
+the extremest weakness of spirit. I sat down with him, and comforted
+the poor-hearted creature, and he seemed grateful, for he licked my hand
+repeatedly, but he did not cease to whine and weep.
+
+By and by I heard, though I did not notice it at the time, the warning
+whistle of the approaching train. The station is little more than a
+stone’s throw from the hotel. Schwartz made a leap, licked my face,
+jumped from the bench, and ambled away. I never saw him alive again,
+for, on the testimony of the signalman, he ran down to the railway line,
+stretched himself upon one of the rails, and, in spite of a stone the
+man threw at him when the train had advanced dangerously near to him, he
+held his place until the wheels passed over his body.
+
+His remains were buried in his master’s back garden. I know that he knew
+full well what he was doing when he stretched himself upon the rail, and
+I know that his feeble and affectionate heart was broken before he did
+it.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg’s Schwartz: A History, by David Christie Murray
+
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