Schwartz: A History | Page 6

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