The black spaniel, and other stories

I

IN the big hall of the Grand Hotel at Rome I introduced Peter Deeming to Vernon Kersteven.

The two men were friends of mine, and I wanted them to like each other; and, perhaps because they were both fond of me, I thought that they would get on well together, and that we should form a happy and a lively trio at dinner. Was this the fancy of an egoist? I have sometimes wondered since.

At the time I speak of I had known Deeming for over two years, having met him first in London at a friend’s house. Vernon was a comparatively recent acquaintance whom I had encountered when I was travelling in Algeria; but already in my heart I gave him the dearer title, for I had come to like him greatly, and I knew that my sympathy was returned.

The two men were very different—in their appearance, their natures, their ways of life—but differences sometimes seem to make for pleasant intercourse, and even for intimacy. We often love ourselves; but do we generally love those who markedly resemble us?

Vernon usually spent his winters in Rome, where he had a delightful house on the Trinità dei Monti. Deeming had come from England to take a long holiday, as his health had partially broken down from overwork. He was a very successful London doctor, devoted to his profession. Vernon was a rich man, passionately interested in the arts and in travel. How well I remember that first evening we spent together, that—I had almost written fatal evening! We were dining in the restaurant, and directly I had made my friends known to each other we went in and sat down at our table, which was in the middle of the room.

Deeming was a very thin man, nearly forty, clean shaven, with iron-grey thick hair, narrow clear-cut features, and a tremendously decisive mouth and chin, betokening power and resolution. His face was pale, and bore traces of his recent illness. In his long, rather colourless grey eyes, penetrating and usually calm, one could see the slightly anxious and irritable expression of a man whose nerves had been, and still were, overwrought. His hands were delicate, with thin fingers curving backward perceptibly at the tips. He leaned forward as he sat in his chair, glancing over the crowd of English, Americans, and foreigners who were busily eating and talking round us.

Vernon was tall and fair, younger than Deeming by some five or six years, with meditative, almost gentle, and very kind brown eyes, a sensitive, though not handsome, face, with a clear boyish colour in it, a voice that was generally low unless he got much interested in the subject he was discussing, and an extremely fascinating manner, whose fascination sprang from his great courtesy, combined with a perfectly natural self-possession, as of a man who seldom thought about himself, and who was desirous of making things go easily and pleasantly for those with whom he was brought into contact.

I saw Deeming look at him steadily, rather as a doctor looks at a new patient, more than once as we drank our soup, and I knew that with his invariable acuteness he was taking stock of his new acquaintance. Vernon, on the other hand, showed at first no special interest in Deeming, did not regard him earnestly, but was gracefully agreeable to him as he was to everyone. He was far more what is generally called a man of the world than Deeming, whose devotion to, and great success in, his profession had kept him bound to the wheel of work in London, and had prevented him from having the opportunity of knowing the nations and mixing perpetually with society which Vernon had enjoyed.

At first we talked quietly, almost languidly, of Rome, of its changes and its tourists, of the influence of America upon its society, of its climate, of the differences between life in England and life abroad, and so forth. It was not till the middle of dinner that anything occurred to wake us up into great animation. Then a stout, dark, and very vivacious little lady, with a commanding air, came into the restaurant followed by two men, and sat down at a table near us. She and her companions were obviously Italians, and almost directly she screwed up her eyes at Vernon and nodded to him. He returned her salute with empressement.

“Would you mind telling me who that lady is?” said Deeming.

“Margherita Terrascalchi,” replied Vernon.

“What—the famous authoress?” I said. “The writer of ‘Pietà’?”

“Yes.”

Deeming stared hard at the little lady, who was beginning to eat with extraordinary, almost comical, gusto.

“I have read that book,” he said. “In a translation.”

“What do you think of it?” asked Vernon.

“No doubt it is well done and calculated to move the ordinary reader.”

“Only the ordinary reader?” said Vernon, with a slight upward movement of his eyebrows.

“I think it wrongheaded and sentimental,” said Deeming, with more energy than he had yet shown. “She appears to wish to elevate the animals above humanity, to take them out of their proper place.”

“What would you say is their proper place?”

“They are in the world, in my opinion, to be the servants of humanity, to minister to our comfort, our pleasure, our necessities, to help to increase our knowledge and satisfy our appetites, to give us ease and to gain us money. Don’t you think so?”

“No doubt many scientists, many sportsmen, and most, if not all, butchers do.”

I laughed.

“But you, Vernon,” I said, “are neither scientist, sportsman, nor butcher, and Deeming asks you what you think.”

Vernon was looking less tranquil, less gentle than usual at this moment. His face was lit up by a fire I had never seen burning in his eyes before.

“My sympathies march with Madame Terrascalchi’s,” he answered, “though perhaps she expresses them with a feminine enthusiasm that may seem to some almost hysterical, and is carried away by her passion of pity into an excess of animosity against men and women, who often err against the animal world more from lack of imagination than from any definite bias towards cruelty.”

“The question is, are we to be the servants of the animals or they to be our servants?” Deeming said rather drily. “I notice that Madame Terrascalchi is eating something that looks remarkably like a veal cutlet at this very moment.”

“Oh,” said Vernon, with his pleasant smile. “I hold no brief for her. I believe her, in fact, to be very—shall I say human? But as to what you were saying. Is it wholly a matter of whether we are to be masters or slaves? Cannot we and the animals—we are not, of course, discussing dangerous wild beasts—be friends, or, let us say, could we not be friends, good and close friends, they serving us in their way, we serving them in ours?”

“How are we to serve the animals?” asked Deeming, still drily.

“By considering them far more than we generally do, by studying them, their natures, habits, desires, likes and dislikes far more closely, by encouraging their affection for us, and giving them more of ours.”

“I think that would be a great waste of time.”

“Deeming is a terribly busy man, Vernon,” I said.

“I know my London well enough to know it,” Vernon remarked politely. “Still, I think we might find time for that; even that we ought to find time for it. I am rather what you might call a ‘crank’ on the subject of the animal world.”

“I didn’t know it,” I said.

“Oh, yes, I am.”

The almost fierce light again shone in his eyes.

“I love all animals. Ouida speaks of their ‘mysterious lives,’ spent side by side with ours, and comparatively little noticed, little sympathised with by us. I know that many animal-lovers would raise a cry of protest against this. ‘Look,’ they would say, ‘how dogs are worshipped and petted, how horses are loved by their owners, how cats are stroked and fondled!’ and so forth. Yes, it is true. Out of the great world of the animals, we—those of us who are fond of animals—select a few who, we think, can minister to our pleasure, and we give them, or think we give them, a good time. But these pet animals who enjoy life are few in number compared with the many who are made to suffer by man; the dogs that are kept everlastingly tied up, or are half-starved, or are perpetually cuffed and kicked and beaten; the cats that are abandoned to die when their thoughtless owners change home; the horses that are overdriven, tortured by tight bearing-reins, lashed with the whip, made to draw loads that are too heavy for them; the birds—let me include them—that are forced to spend their lives in tiny cages in dark places. To any real, observant lover of animals, even of the so-called pet animals—excluding the beasts of burden, donkeys, mules, oxen, and the beasts that form part of our food supply, and the dumb creatures that are given over to the tender mercies of the sportsman: the hares that are coursed, the foxes and stags and deer that are hunted, the pigeons that are let out of traps (their eyes pierced to make them fly in a given direction) to be shot and are often left maimed to die, the sea-birds that the Cockney ‘wings’ and abandons to starve and rot, floating helpless on the waves of the sea, the pheasants that, wounded in a battue, are crushed one on the top of the other into bags to perish of suffocation; excluding all these—to any real and observant lover of animals the lack of sympathy, or the actual cruelty of man, is a perpetual source of disturbance, of anxiety, even of lively distress and misery.”

I was quite amazed at the energy with which Vernon had spoken, at the vigour and force of his manner. He paused for a moment, then he added—

“My love of animals has given me very many horrible moments in my life, moments in which I confess that my heart has been turned to bitterness and I have longed to make men suffer as they were making animals suffer. Yes, I have longed to see the cursed Cockney sportsman drifting face to face with a lingering death upon the sea, the callous game-preserver wounded in one of his traps and alone in the darkness of night in the forest, the careless hunter at bay with hounds rushing in upon him. But especially have I known the longing to turn one whom I have seen being cruel to a pet animal into that animal, and to be his master for a little while. You know some hold that theory.”

“What theory?” said Deeming.

“That what we do is eventually done to us in another life; for instance, that if a man has been brutal to an animal, at death his soul passes into a similar animal, which endures the fate he once meted out when he was a man.”

“Good heavens!” exclaimed Deeming. “You surely can’t believe such unscientific nonsense!”

“I did not say I believed it, but I should not be sorry to.”

He sipped his champagne. Then, more lightly, he said—

“I told you I was a bit of a crank. I am even hand-in-glove with Arthur Gernham.”

At the mention of this name, Deeming moved, and I saw his eyes flash.

“The prominent anti-vivisectionist?” he said.

“Yes.”

“And you share his views?”

“To a considerable extent, though I don’t always approve of what he writes or of what he says.”

“I’m glad of that. We doctors, you know, ab—well, we don’t love that eager gentleman. If he had his way humanity would undoubtedly suffer far more in the future than it will. For I don’t think his sentimentalities and wild exaggerations will ever gain over our legislators to his views.”

“Perhaps not. But I sometimes wonder whether anyone has the right, whether anyone was intended by the Creator to have the right, to avoid suffering at the cost of inflicting it, even to save life by causing death. However, the vivisection question is hardly a pleasant one for the dinner-table, eh!”

There was a moment’s silence. Then Deeming said—

“Of course you never shoot or hunt?”

“Never.”

“I do,” I said. “But I am not such a contemptible hypocrite as to deny that cruelty, and often very gross cruelty, enters into sport.”

Deeming slightly smiled.

“Do you keep any pets?” said Vernon to him, rather sharply.

“Yes. I have a dog at home, a black spaniel; and you?”

“No. For years I have kept no animals. I shall never keep one again.”

“That surprises me. You would give them a remarkably good time, I feel sure.”

“I have a reason.”

“May I ask what it is?”

“Certainly. I once had a dog that I—that I cared about. She was out with me one day in London and disappeared. I made every possible inquiry, offered a reward, went to the Dogs’ Home, but I couldn’t find her. Eventually, through an odd chain of circumstances that I needn’t trouble you with, I learnt her fate.”

“What was it?” I asked.

“She had been picked up by a dog-stealer and sold to the proprietor of an establishment called ‘Lilac Hall,’ near London.”

“An establishment?” I said, struck by the tone in which he had uttered the words.

“Where a large number—stock, I’ll say—of animals of all kinds, horses, cats, rabbits, guinea-pigs, dogs, was kept on hand for scientific purposes. My companion and friend died under the knife of the vivisector. What do you think of the food here? They’ve got a new chef.”

“I—I—oh, it’s very good, I think; it’s excellent.”

Deeming seemed startled by the sudden change of topic, and when we went into the hall to smoke he tried to return to the discussion. But Vernon did not rise to the bait he threw out, and at last frankly said—

“You’d much better not get me on to the subject of animals. I am really a bore when I let myself loose, as I did at dinner. And I am quite sure you”—and he met Deeming’s eyes—“don’t agree with my views. Are you staying long in Rome?”

“Till I feel quite set up again and ready for work.”

“Then I’ll hope you’ll come and see me.”

He gave his card to Deeming, and soon after went away.

I felt sure he had asked Deeming to call in order to please me. My two friends, I feared, had not taken a fancy to each other. One curious thing struck me as I watched Vernon’s tall figure going out through the doorway to the street. It was this—that I knew a side of Vernon’s, and a side of Deeming’s character that had been hitherto completely concealed from me. Each had elicited a frankness from the other that I, of whom they were fond, had not been able to bring forth.

Their two enmities—so I thought of it—had clashed together and struck out sparks of truth.

By the way, Vernon’s last remark to me in the outer hall of the hotel, whither I had accompanied him, leaving Deeming in the winter-garden, was this—

“I shouldn’t care to be Deeming’s black spaniel.”