indeed truer word was never spoken, for my appetite was entirely lost. ‘Shall we talk of something else for a bit? If you don’t mind. What about sport? Rats, for instance.’
‘Our wainscot was not well stocked with game,’ said the Dean; ‘either rats or mice. I have hunted rats, but not often. There is only one thing to remember at this sport: shake the rat. To shake the rat is essential. I need hardly tell you how to do that, because I think everybody is born to it. It is not merely a method of killing the rat, but it prevents him from biting you. He must be shaken until he is dead. Mice of course are small game.’
‘What is the largest game you have ever hunted?’ I asked. For he had stopped talking, and it was essential to the interests of these researches that he should be kept to the same mood.
‘A traction-engine.’ replied the Dean.
That dated him within fifty years or so; and I decided that that incarnation of his was probably some time during the reign of Queen Victoria.
‘The thing came snorting along our road, and I saw at once that it had to be chased. I couldn’t allow a thing of that sort on our flower-beds, and very likely coming into the house. A thing like that might have done anything, if not properly chased at once. So I ran round and chased it. It shouted and threw black stones at me. But I chased it until it was well past our gate. It was very hard to the teeth, very big, very noisy and slow. They can’t turn round on you like rats. They are made for defence rather than for attack. Much smaller game is often more dangerous than traction-engines.’
So clearly did I picture the traction-engine on that Victorian road, with a dog yapping at the back wheels, that I wondered more and more what kind of a dog, in order to complete the mental picture. And that was the question I began to ask the Dean. ‘What kind of a dog———-?’ I began. But the question was much harder to ask than it may appear. My guest looked somehow so diaconal, that the words froze on my lips; and, try as I would, I could not frame the sentence: what kind of a dog were you? It seems silly, I know, to say that it was impossible merely to say seven words; and yet I found it so. I cannot explain it. I can only suggest to any that cannot credit this incapacity, that they should address those words themselves to any senior dignitary of the church, and see whether they do not themselves feel any slight hesitancy. I turned my question aside, and only lamely asked, ‘What kind of a dog used they to keep?’
He asked me who I meant. And I answered: ‘The people that you were talking about.’
Thus sometimes conversations dwindle to trivial ends.
Many minutes passed before I gathered again the lost threads of that conversation. For nearly ten minutes I dared hardly speak, so near he seemed to the light of to-day, so ready to turn away from the shadows he saw so clearly, moving in past years. I poured out for him more Tokay, and he absently drank it, and only gradually returned to that reminiscent mood that had been so gravely disturbed by the clumsiness of my question. Had I asked the Dean straight out, ‘What kind of a dog were you?’ I believe he would have answered satisfactorily. But the very hesitancy of my question had awakened suspicion at once, as though the question had been a guilty thing. I was not sure that he was safely back in the past again until he made a petulant remark about another engine, a remark so obviously untrue that it may not seem worth recording; I only repeat it here as it showed that the Dean had returned to his outlook over the reaches of time, and that he seems to have been contemporary with the threshing-machine. ‘Traction-engines!’ he said with evident loathing. ‘I saw one scratching itself at the back of a haystack. I thoroughly barked at it.’
‘They should be barked at,’ I said, as politely as I could.
‘Most certainly,’ said the Dean. ‘If things like that got to think they could go where they liked without any kind of protest, we should very soon have them everywhere.’
And there was so much truth in that that I was able to agree with the Dean in all sincerity.
‘And then where should we all be?’ the Dean asked.
And that is a question unfortunately so vital to all of us, that I think it is sufficient to show by itself that the Dean was not merely wandering. It seemed to me that the bright mind of a dog had seen, perhaps in the seventies of the last century, a menace to which the bulk of men must have been blind; or we should never be over-run by machines as we are, in every sense of the word. He was talking sense here. Was it not therefore fair to suppose he was speaking the truth, even where his words were surprising? If I had faintly felt that I was doing something a little undignified in lowering myself to the level of what, for the greater part of these conversations, was practically the mind of a dog, I no longer had that feeling after this observation the Dean had uttered about machinery. Henceforth I felt that he was at least my equal; even when turning, as he soon did, from philosophical speculation, he returned to talk of the chase.
‘To chase anything slow,’ he said, ‘is always wearisome. You are continually bumping into what you are chasing. There is nothing so good as a ball. A ball goes so fast that it draws out your utmost speed, in a very exhilarating manner, and it can jump about as far as one can oneself, and before one can begin to be tired, it always slows down. And then it takes a long time to eat; so that, one way and another, there is more entertainment in a ball than perhaps anything else one can chase. If one could throw it oneself, like the Masters, I cannot imagine any completer life than throwing a ball and chasing it all day long.’
My aim was purely scientific; I desired to reveal to Europeans a lore taught throughout Asia, but neglected, so far as I knew, by all our investigators; I desired to serve science only. Had it been otherwise, the momentary temptation that came to me as the Dean spoke now might possibly have prevailed; I might possibly have hurried on some slight excuse from the room and come back with an old tennis-ball, and perhaps have suddenly thrown it, and so have gratified that sense of the ridiculous that is unfortunately in all of us, at the expense of more solid study.
The temptation to which I referred in the last chapter was far too trivial a thing to have its place in this record, or indeed in any summary of investigations that may claim to be of value to science. It should certainly have never arisen. And yet, having arisen, it enforces its place amongst my notes; for, my researches being of necessity conversational, whatever turned the current of the conversation between the Dean and myself becomes of scientific importance. And that this unfortunately frivolous fancy, that came so inopportunely, did actually affect the current of our conversation is regrettably only too true. For about five minutes I was unable to shake it off, and during all that time, knowing well how inexcusable such action would be, I dared scarcely move or speak. Dean Spanley therefore continued his reminiscences unguided by me, and sometimes wandered quite away from the subject. I might indeed have lost him altogether; I mean to say, as a scientific collaborator; for during that five minutes I never even filled his glass. Luckily I pulled myself together in time, banished from my mind entirely that foolish and trivial fancy, and resumed the serious thread of my researches by saying to the Dean: ‘What about ticks?’
‘It is not for us to deal with them.’ said the Dean. ‘The Wise Ones, the Masters, can get them out. Nobody else can. It is of no use therefore to scratch. One’s best policy towards a tick is summed up in the words, “Live and let live.” That is to say, when the tick has once taken up his abode. When the tick is still wild it is a good thing to avoid him, by keeping away from the grasses in which they live, mostly in marshy places, unless led there by anything exciting, in which case it is of course impossible to think of ticks.’
This fatalistic attitude to a tick, when once it had burrowed in, so strangely different from the view that we
