Our Friend the Dog

Our Friend the Dog

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Our Friend the Dog, by Maurice
Maeterlinck This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost
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Title: Our Friend the Dog
Author: Maurice Maeterlinck
Illustrator: Cecil Alden
Translator: Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
Release Date: April 20, 2006 [EBook #18214]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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FRIEND THE DOG ***

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[Illustration]

OUR FRIEND THE DOG
BY MAURICE MAETERLINCK
AUTHOR OF "THE LIFE OF THE BEE," ETC.
TRANSLATED BY ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS
ILLUSTRATED BY CECIL ALDEN
NEW YORK DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
1913
COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY THE CENTURY CO. COPYRIGHT, 1904,
BY DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
Published, October, 1913

OUR FRIEND THE DOG
I
I have lost, within these last few days, a little bull-dog. He had just
completed the sixth month of his brief existence. He had no history. His
intelligent eyes opened to look out upon the world, to love mankind,
then closed again on the cruel secrets of death.
The friend who presented me with him had given him, perhaps by
antiphrasis, the startling name of Pelléas. Why rechristen him? For how
can a poor dog, loving, devoted, faithful, disgrace the name of a man or
an imaginary hero?
Pelléas had a great bulging, powerful forehead, like that of Socrates or
Verlaine; and, under a little black nose, blunt as a churlish assent, a pair
of large hanging and symmetrical chops, which made his head a sort of
massive, obstinate, pensive and three-cornered menace. He was

beautiful after the manner of a beautiful, natural monster that has
complied strictly with the laws of its species. And what a smile of
attentive obligingness, of incorruptible innocence, of affectionate
submission, of boundless gratitude and total self-abandonment lit up, at
the least caress, that adorable mask of ugliness! Whence exactly did
that smile emanate? From the ingenuous and melting eyes? From the
ears pricked up to catch the words of man? From the forehead that
unwrinkled to appreciate and love, or from the stump of a tail that
wriggled at the other end to testify to the intimate and impassioned joy
that filled his small being, happy once more to encounter the hand or
the glance of the god to whom he surrendered himself?
[Illustration]
Pelléas was born in Paris, and I had taken him to the country. His
bonny fat paws, shapeless and not yet stiffened, carried slackly through
the unexplored pathways of his new existence his huge and serious
head, flat-nosed and, as it were, rendered heavy with thought.
For this thankless and rather sad head, like that of an overworked child,
was beginning the overwhelming work that oppresses every brain at the
start of life. He had, in less than five or six weeks, to get into his mind,
taking shape within it, an image and a satisfactory conception of the
universe. Man, aided by all the knowledge of his own elders and his
brothers, takes thirty or forty years to outline that conception, but the
humble dog has to unravel it for himself in a few days: and yet, in the
eyes of a god, who should know all things, would it not have the same
weight and the same value as our own?
It was a question, then, of studying the ground, which can be scratched
and dug up and which sometimes reveals surprising things; of casting
at the sky, which is uninteresting, for there is nothing there to eat, one
glance that does away with it for good and all; of discovering the grass,
the admirable and green grass, the springy and cool grass, a field for
races and sports, a friendly and boundless bed, in which lies hidden the
good and wholesome couch-grass. It was a question, also, of taking
promiscuously a thousand urgent and curious observations. It was
necessary, for instance, with no other guide than pain, to learn to

calculate the height of objects from the top of which you can jump into
space; to convince yourself that it is vain to pursue birds who fly away
and that you are unable to clamber up trees after the cats who defy you
there; to distinguish between the sunny spots where it is delicious to
sleep and the patches of shade in which you shiver; to remark with
stupefaction that the rain does not fall inside the houses, that water is
cold, uninhabitable and dangerous, while fire is beneficent at a distance,
but terrible when you come too