“It’s a shame!” we shouted, in muffled rebellion, from the sheets.
“I’ll give you shame, if you don’t hold your noise and go to sleep,” called our mother from her room. Whereupon we shed angry tears and went to sleep. But there was a tension.
“Such a houseful of idiots would make me detest the little beast, even if he was better than he is,” said my mother.
But as a matter of fact, she did not detest Rexie at all. She only had to pretend to do so, to balance our adoration. And in truth, she did not care for close contact with animals. She was too fastidious. My father, however, would take on a real dog’s voice, talking to the puppy: a funny, high, sing-song falsetto which he seemed to produce at the top of his head. “ ‘S a pretty little dog! ‘s a pretty little doggy! — ay! — yes! — he is, yes! — Wag thy strunt, then! Wag thy strunt, Rexie! — Ha-ha! Nay, tha munna — ” This last as the puppy, wild with excitement at the strange falsetto voice, licked my father’s nostrils and bit my father’s nose with his sharp little teeth.
“ ‘E makes blood come,” said my father.
“Serves you right for being so silly with him,” said my mother. It was odd to see her as she watched the man, my father, crouching and talking to the little dog and laughing strangely when the little creature bit his nose and toused his beard. What does a woman think of her husband at such a moment?
My mother amused herself over the names we called him.
“He’s an angel — he’s a little butterfly — Rexie, my sweet!”
“Sweet! A dirty little object!” interpolated my mother. She and he had a feud from the first. Of course he chewed boots and worried our stockings and swallowed our garters. The moment we took off our stockings he would dart away with one, we after him. Then as he hung, growling, vociferously, at one end of the stocking, we at the other, we would cry:
“Look at him, mother! He’ll make holes in it again.” Whereupon my mother darted at him and spanked him sharply.
“Let go, sir, you destructive little fiend.”
But he didn’t let go. He began to growl with real rage, and hung on viciously. Mite as he was, he defied her with a manly fury. He did not hate her, nor she him. But they had one long battle with one another.
“I’ll teach you, my Jockey! Do you think I’m going to spend my life darning after your destructive little teeth! I’ll show you if I will!”
But Rexie only growled more viciously. They both became really angry, whilst we children expostulated earnestly with both. He would not let her take the stocking from him.
“You should tell him properly, mother. He won’t be driven,” we said.
“I’ll drive him further than he bargains for. I’ll drive him out of my sight for ever, that I will,” declared my mother, truly angry.
He would put her into a real temper, with his tiny, growling defiance.
“He’s sweet! A Rexie, a little Rexie!”
“A filthy little nuisance! Don’t think I’ll put up with him.”
And to tell the truth, he was dirty at first. How could he be otherwise, so young! But my mother hated him for it. And perhaps this was the real start of their hostility. For he lived in the house with us. He would wrinkle his nose and show his tiny dagger-teeth in fury when he was thwarted, and his growls of real battle-rage against my mother rejoiced us as much as they angered her. But at last she caught him in flagrante. She pounced on him, rubbed his nose in the mess, and flung him out into the yard. He yelped with shame and disgust and indignation. I shall never forget the sight of him as he rolled over, then tried to turn his head away from the disgust of his own muzzle, shaking his little snout with a sort of horror, and trying to sneeze it off. My sister gave a yell of despair, and dashed out with a rag and a pan of water, weeping wildly. She sat in the middle of the yard with the befouled puppy, and shedding bitter tears she wiped him and washed him clean. Loudly she reproached my mother. “Look how much bigger you are than he is. It’s a shame, it’s a shame!”
“You ridiculous little lunatic, you’ve undone all the good it would do him, with your soft ways. Why is my life made a curse with animals! Haven’t I enough as it is — — ”
There was a subdued tension afterwards. Rex was a little white chasm between us and our parent.
He became clean. But then another tragedy loomed. He must be docked. His floating puppy-tail must be docked short. This time my father was the enemy. My mother agreed with us that it was an unnecessary cruelty. But my father was adamant. “The dog’ll look a fool all his life, if he’s not docked.” And there was no getting away from it. To add to the horror, poor Rex’s tail must be bitten off. Why bitten? we asked aghast. We were assured that biting was the only way. A man would take the little tail and just nip it through with his teeth, at a certain joint. My father lifted his lips and bared his incisors, to suit the description. We shuddered. But we were in the hands of fate.
Rex was carried away, and a man called Rowbotham bit off the superfluity of his tail in the Nag’s Head, for a quart of best and bitter. We lamented our poor diminished puppy, but agreed to find him more manly and comme il faut. We should always have been ashamed of his little whip of a tail, if it had not been shortened. My father said it had made a man of him.
Perhaps it had. For now his true nature came out. And his true nature, iike so much else, was dual. First he was a fierce, canine little beast, a beast of rapine and blood. He longed to hunt, savagely. He lusted to set his teeth in his prey. It was no joke with him. The old canine Adam stood first in him, the dog with fangs and glaring eyes. He flew at us when we annoyed him. He flew at all intruders, particularly the postman. He was almost a peril to the neighbourhood. But not quite. Because close second in his nature stood that fatal need to love, the besoin d’aimer which at last makes an end of liberty. He had a terrible, terrible necessity to love, and this trammelled the native, savage hunting beast which he was. He was torn between two great impulses: the native impulse to hunt and kill, and the strange, secondary, supervening impulse to love and obey. If he had been left to my father and mother, he would have run wild and got himself shot. As it was, he loved us children with a fierce, joyous love. And we loved him.
When we came home from school we would see him standing at the end of the entry, cocking his head wistfully at the open country in front of him, and meditating whether to be off or not: a white, inquiring little figure, with green savage freedom in front of him. A cry from a far distance from one of us, and like a bullet he hurled himself down the road, in a mad game. Seeing him coming, my sister invariably turned and fled, shrieking with delighted terror. And he would leap straight up her back, and bite her and tear her clothes. But it was only an ecstasy of savage love, and she knew it. She didn’t care if he tore her pinafores. But my mother did.
My mother was maddened by him. He was a little demon. At the least provocation, he flew. You had only to sweep the floor, and he bristled and sprang at the broom. Nor would he let go. With his scruff erect and his nostrils snorting rage, he would turn up the whites of his eyes at my mother, as she wrestled at the other end of the broom. “Leave go, sir, leave go1” She wrestled and stamped her foot, and he answered with horrid growls. In the end it was she who had to let go. Then she flew at him, and he flew at her. All the time we had him, he was within a hair’s-breadth of savagely biting her. And she knew it. Yet he always kept sufficient self-control.
We children loved his temper. We would drag the bones from his mouth, and put him into such paroxysms of rage that he would twist his head right over and lay it on the ground upside-down, because he didn’t know what to do with himself, the savage was so strong in him and he must fly at us. “He’ll fly at your throat one of these days,” said my father. Neither he nor my mother dared have touched Rex’s bone. It was enough to see him bristle and roll the whites of his eyes when they came near. How near he must have been to driving his teeth right into us, cannot be told. He was a horrid sight snarling and crouching at us. But we only
laughed and rebuked him. And he would whimper in the sheer torment of his need to attack us.
He never did hurt us. He never hurt anybody, though the neighbourhood was terrified of him. But he took to hunting. To my mother’s disgust, he would bring large dead bleeding rats and lay them on the hearth-rug, and she had to take them up on a shovel. For he would not remove them. Occasionally he brought a mangled rabbit, and sometimes, alas, fragmentary poultry. We were in terror of prosecution. Once he came home bloody and feathery and rather sheepish-looking. We cleaned him and questioned him and abused him. Next day we heard of six dead ducks. Thank heaven no one had seen him.
But he was disobedient. If he saw a hen he was off, and calling would not bring him back. He was worst of all with my father, who would take him walks on Sunday morning. My mother would not walk a yard with him. Once, walking with my father, he rushed olf at some sheep in a field. My father yelled in vain. The dog was at the sheep, and meant business. My father crawled through the hedge, and was upon him in time. And now the man was in a paroxysm of rage. He dragged the little beast into the road and thrashed him with a walking stick.
“Do you know you’re thrashing that dog unmercifully?” said a passerby.
“Ay, an’ mean to,” shouted my father.
The curious thing was that Rex did not respect my father any the more, for the beatings he had from him. He took much more heed of us children, always.
But he let us down also. One fatal Saturday he disappeared. We hunted and called, but no Rex. We were bathed, and it was bedtime, but we would not go to bed. Instead we sat in a row in our nightdresses on the sofa, and wept without stopping. This drove our mother mad.
“Am I going to put up with it? Am I? And all for that hateful little beast of a dog! He shall go! If he’s not gone now, he shall go.”
Our father came in late, looking rather queer, with his hat over his eye. But in his staccato tippled fashion he tried to be consoling.
“Never mind, my duckie, I s’ll look’for him in the morning.”
Sunday came — oh, such a Sunday. We cried, and didn’t eat. We scoured the land, and for the first time realized how empty and wide the earth is, when you’re looking for something. My father walked for many miles — all in vain. Sunday dinner, with rhubarb pudding, I remember, and an atmosphere of abject misery that was unbearable.
“Never,” said my mother, “never shall an animal set foot in this house again, while I live. I knew what it would be! I knew.”
The day wore on, and it was the black gloom of bed-time, when we heard a scratch and an impudent little whine at the door. In trotted Rex, mud-black, disreputable, and impudent. His air of offhand “How d’ye do!” was indescribable. He trotted around with suffisance, wagging his tail as if to say, “Yes, I’ve come back. But I didn’t need to. I can carry on remarkably well by myself.” Then he walked to his water, and drank noisily and ostentatiously. It was rather a slap in the eye for us.
He disappeared once or twice in this fashion. We never knew where he went. And we began to feel that his heart was not so golden as we had imagined it.
But one fatal day reappeared my uncle and the dog-cart. He whistled to Rex, and Rex trotted up. But when he wanted to examine the lusty, sturdy dog, Rex became suddenly still, then sprang free. Quite jauntily he trotted round — but out of reach of my uncle. He leaped up, licking our faces, and trying to make us play.
“Why, what ha’ you done wi’ the dog — you’ve made a fool of him. He’s softer than grease. You’ve ruined him. You’ve made a damned fool of him,” shouted my uncle.
Rex was captured and hauled off to the dog-cart and tied to the seat. He was in a frenzy. He yelped and shrieked and struggled, and was hit on the head, hard, with the butt-end of my uncle’s whip, which only made him struggle more frantically. So we saw him driven away, our beloved Rex, frantically, madly fighting to get to us from the high dog-cart, and being knocked down, whilst we stood in the street in mute despair.
After which, black tears, and a little wound which is still alive in our hearts.
I saw Rex only once again, when I had to call just once at The Good Omen. He must have heard my voice, for he was upon me in the passage before I knew where I was. And in the instant I knew how he loved us. He really loved us. And in the same instant there was my uncle with a whip, beating and kicking him back, and Rex cowering, bristling, snarling.
My uncle swore many oaths, how we had ruined the dog for ever, made him vicious, spoiled him for showing purposes, and been altogether a pack of mard-soft fools not fit to be trusted with any dog but a gutter-mongrel.
Poor Rex! We heard his temper was incurably vicious, and he had to be shot.
And it was our fault. We had loved him too much, and he had loved us too. much. We never had another pet.
It is a strange thing, love. Nothing but love has made the dog lose his wild freedom, to become the servant of man. And this very servility or completeness of love makes him a term of deepest contempt — ”You dog!”
We should not have loved Rex so much, and he should not have loved us. There should have been a measure. We tended, all of us, to overstep the limits of our own natures. He should have stayed outside human limits, we should have stayed outside canine limits. Nothing is more fatal than the disaster of too much love. My uncle was right, we had ruined the dog.
My uncle was a fool, for all that.
PAN IN AMERICA
At the beginning of the Christian era, voices were heard off the coasts of Greece, out to sea, on the Mediterranean, wailing: “Pan is dead! Great Pan is dead!”
The father of fauns and nymphs, satyrs and dryads and naiads was dead, with only the voices in the air to lament him. Humanity hardly noticed.
But who was he, really? Down the long lanes and overgrown ridings of history we catch odd glimpses of a lurking rustic god with a goat’s white lightning in his eyes. A sort of fugitive, hidden among leaves, and laughing with the uncanny derision of one who feels himself defeated by something lesser than himself.
An outlaw, even in the early days of the gods. A sort of fshmael among the bushes.
Yet always his lingering title: The Great God Pan. As if he was, or had been, the greatest.
Lurking among the leafy recesses, he was almost more demon than god. To be feared, not loved or approached. A man who should see Pan by daylight fell dead, as if blasted by lightning.
Yet you might dimly see him in the night, a dark body within the darkness. And then, it was a vision filling the limbs and the trunk of a man with power, as with new, strong-mounting sap. The Pan-power! You went on your way in the darkness secretly and subtly elated with blind energy, and you could cast a spell, by your mere presence, on women and on men. But particularly on women.
In the woods and the remote places ran the children of Pan, all the nymphs and fauns of the forest and the spring and the river and the rocks. These, too, it was dangerous to see by day. The man who looked up to see the white arms of a nymph flash as she darted behind the thick wild laurels away from him followed helplessly. He was a nympholept. Fascinated by the swift limbs and the wild, fresh sides of the nymph, he followed for ever, for ever, in the endless monotony of his desire. Unless came some wise being who could absolve him from the spell.
But the nymphs, running among the trees and curling to sleep under the bushes, made the myrtles blossom more gaily, and the spring bubble up with greater urge, and the birds splash with a strength of life. And the lithe flanks of the faun gave life to the oak- groves, the vast trees hummed with energy. And the wheat sprouted like green rain returning out of the ground, in the little fields, and the vine hung its black drops in abundance, urging a secret.
Gradually men moved into cities. And they loved the display of people better than the display of a tree. They liked the glory they got of overpowering one another in war. And, above all, they loved the vainglory of their own words, the pomp of argument and the vanity of ideas.
So Pan became old and gr
ey-bearded and goat-legged, and his passion was degraded with the lust of senility. His power to blast and to brighten dwindled. His nymphs became coarse and vulgar.
Till at last the old Pan died, and was turned into the devil of the Christians. The old god Pan became the Christian devil, with the cloven hoofs and the horns, the tail, and the laugh of derision. Old Nick, the Old Gentleman who is responsible for all our wickednesses, but especially our sensual excesses — this is all that is left of the Great God Pan.
It is strange. It is a most strange ending for a god with such a name. Pan! All! That which is everything has goat’s feet and a tail! With a black face!
This really is curious.
Yet this was all that remained of Pan, except that he acquired brimstone and hell-fire, for many, many centuries. The nymphs turned into the nasty-smelling witches of a Walpurgis night, and the fauns that danced became sorcerers riding the air, or fairies no bigger than your thumb.
But Pan keeps on being reborn, in all kinds of strange shapes. There he was, at the Renaissance. And in the eighteenth century he had quite a vogue. He gave rise to an “ism,” and there were many pantheists, Wordsworth one of the first. They worshipped Nature in her sweet-and-pure aspect, her Lucy Gray aspect.
“Oft have I heard of Lucy Gray,” the school-child began to recite, on examination-day.
“So have I,” interrupted the bored inspector.
Lucy Gray, alas, was the form that William Wordsworth thought fit to give to the Great God Pan.
And then he crossed over to the young United States: I mean Pan did. Suddenly he gets a new name. He becomes the Oversoul, the Allness of everything. To this new Lucifer Gray of a Pan Whitman sings the famous Song of Myself: “I am All, and All is Me.” That is: “I am Pan, and Pan is me.”
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 995