Our Friend the Dog | Page 2

near; to observe that the meadows, the
farm-yards and sometimes the roads are haunted by giant creatures with
threatening horns, creatures good-natured, perhaps, and, at any rate,
silent, creatures who allow you to sniff at them a little curiously
without taking offence, but who keep their real thoughts to themselves.
It was necessary to learn, as the result of painful and humiliating
experiment, that you are not at liberty to obey all nature's laws without
distinction in the dwelling of the gods; to recognize that the kitchen is
the privileged and most agreeable spot in that divine dwelling, although
you are hardly allowed to abide in it because of the cook, who is a
considerable, but jealous power; to learn that doors are important and
capricious volitions, which sometimes lead to felicity, but which most
often, hermetically closed, mute and stern, haughty and heartless,
remain deaf to all entreaties; to admit, once and for all, that the
essential good things of life, the indisputable blessings, generally
imprisoned in pots and stewpans, are almost always inaccessible; to
know how to look at them with laboriously-acquired indifference and
to practise to take no notice of them, saying to yourself that here are
objects which are probably sacred, since merely to skim them with the
tip of a respectful tongue is enough to let loose the unanimous anger of
all the gods of the house.
[Illustration]
And then, what is one to think of the table on which so many things
happen that cannot be guessed; of the derisive chairs on which one is
forbidden to sleep; of the plates and dishes that are empty by the time
that one can get at them; of the lamp that drives away the dark?... How
many orders, dangers, prohibitions, problems, enigmas has one not to
classify in one's overburdened memory!... And how to reconcile all this

with other laws, other enigmas, wider and more imperious, which one
bears within one's self, within one's instinct, which spring up and
develop from one hour to the other, which come from the depths of
time and the race, invade the blood, the muscles and the nerves and
suddenly assert themselves more irresistibly and more powerfully than
pain, the word of the master himself, or the fear of death?
Thus, for instance, to quote only one example, when the hour of sleep
has struck for men, you have retired to your hole, surrounded by the
darkness, the silence and the formidable solitude of the night. All is
sleep in the master's house. You feel yourself very small and weak in
the presence of the mystery. You know that the gloom is peopled with
foes who hover and lie in wait. You suspect the trees, the passing wind
and the moonbeams. You would like to hide, to suppress yourself by
holding your breath. But still the watch must be kept; you must, at the
least sound, issue from your retreat, face the invisible and bluntly
disturb the imposing silence of the earth, at the risk of bringing down
the whispering evil or crime upon yourself alone. Whoever the enemy
be, even if he be man, that is to say, the very brother of the god whom
it is your business to defend, you must attack him blindly, fly at his
throat, fasten your perhaps sacrilegious teeth into human flesh,
disregard the spell of a hand and voice similar to those of your master,
never be silent, never attempt to escape, never allow yourself to be
tempted or bribed and, lost in the night without help, prolong the heroic
alarm to your last breath.
There is the great ancestral duty, the essential duty, stronger than death,
which not even man's will and anger are able to check. All our humble
history, linked with that of the dog in our first struggles against every
breathing thing, tends to prevent his forgetting it. And when, in our
safer dwelling-places of to-day, we happen to punish him for his
untimely zeal, he throws us a glance of astonished reproach, as though
to point out to us that we are in the wrong and that, if we lose sight of
the main clause in the treaty of alliance which he made with us at the
time when we lived in caves, forests and fens, he continues faithful to it
in spite of us and remains nearer to the eternal truth of life, which is full
of snares and hostile forces.

But how much care and study are needed to succeed in fulfilling this
duty! And how complicated it has become since the days of the silent
caverns and the great deserted lakes! It was all so simple, then, so easy
and so clear. The lonely hollow opened upon the side of the hill, and all
that approached,