Sirius (14 page)

One day in mental agony he said, "Plaxy, why have you gone dead on me? I do so want us to be happy together!" She answered, "Oh, I know I'm sometimes a pig to you. The trouble is I'm terribly worried just now, and I can't think of anything else." "Tell me about it," he said; but she replied, "I
can't
. It's too complicated. You wouldn't understand. How could you? There's nothing in your life to help you to begin to understand. No, I'm sorry, but somehow I
can't
tell you. It's--it's just a
human
thing."

It was not the words that offended him so much as the faint tone of superiority in the voice. The wolf-mood, which had been brewing in him ever since his conversation with Thomas, came violently into action. The smell of this human female beside him suddenly lost all its loveliness and became a repugnant stink. Sidelong he looked at her. Instead of seeing the dearest face in the world, he saw the uncouth hairless features of a super-ape, in fact of that species which so long ago had broken in his ancestors to be their slaves in body and soul.

"Sorry," he said. "I didn't want to butt in." He was startled at the snarl in his own voice, and surprised (and oddly resentful) that she did not notice it. All the way home they walked in silence. At the gate she touched his head with her hand, and said, "I'm sorry." He answered, "That's all right, I wish I could help." The snarl was still in his voice, hidden under gentleness. She did not hear it. Her touch sent conflicting tremors down his back, for it was at once the touch of his darling and the touch of the super-simian tyrant.

At the doorway the human smell of the house raised his gorge. She entered. Longing to restore community with her, he actually licked her hand as she passed in; and while he did so, he felt to his horror his lips curl themselves back, baring his teeth for action. She vanished into the house. He turned away, sniffing the fresh air.

He cantered ruthlessly across a flower-bed, leapt the garden wall, and swung easily up the hillside with his tail streaming out behind him.

That night he failed to return home. There was nothing unusual in this, and no one was anxious. On the following night also he was absent. Thomas was disturbed, but concealed his anxiety under annoyance, for he had planned a long walk with Sirius for the next day. On the third night also there was no Sirius. Pugh had not seen him, nor had he put in an appearance at any of the neighbouring farms, nor in the village. Thomas was now alarmed; and Plaxy, thinking of their last meeting, felt remorse for her coldness.

The whole household was organized as a search party, with Idwal and another super-sheep-dog, who were borrowed for the occasion and made to smell Sirius's sleeping-basket before setting out on the search. Since there was no news of him in the cultivated regions, it seemed probable that he had taken to the moor. The searchers spread out fanwise in allotted directions.

It was Plaxy who found Sirius, late in the afternoon. Coming round a buttress, she saw him standing over the carcass of a little moorland pony. She had approached up wind, and Sirius had not seen her. He began tugging savagely at the hide of the mangled neck, tearing it away from the flesh. His legs were driven deep into the bog in the effort to get a solid purchase. His tail curved under his belly. His jaws and shoulders were smeared with blood, and peaty mud was splashed all over him. A great pool of blood and mire spread from the pony's throat. There had evidently been a wild struggle, for the pony's flanks were torn and the bracken and grass were trampled.

Only for a second did Plaxy watch, unobserved and horror-stricken. Then she gasped out, "Sirius!" He let go and faced her, licking his crimson lips and muzzle. The two gazed at each other, she into the eyes of a wolf, he into the white, nude, super-simian face of his ancestral tyrant. His back bristled. A snarl twisted his lips. A low growl was all his greeting.

She was thoroughly frightened and nauseated, but also she realized that some desperate art was needed to save him from ruin. And in that moment (she afterwards said) she realized for the first time the strength of the bond between them. She advanced towards him. "Sirius,
darling
," she cried, surprising herself no less than him, "what ever will become of us now?" Miserably she approached him, with the bog squelching over her shoe-tops. His growl became more threatening, for the beast in him was jealous for its quarry. His ears lay back. His teeth were more crimson than white. She felt a weakening at the knees, but plodded towards him, and stretched out a hand to touch the savage head. As she did so, she caught a nearer view of the carcass, and suddenly she vomited. When the paroxysm was over, she sobbed out, "
Why
did you have to do it? I don't understand. Oh, they'll want to kill you for it." She sat down on a damp tussock and gazed at Sirius, and he at her. Presently he turned on the carcass and tore at the flesh. Plaxy screamed, leapt up and tried to drag him off by the collar. With a roar he turned on her, and she was flung hack on to the boggy ground with the great beast standing over her, and the cold hoggy water oozing about her shoulders. Their eyes were close together. His breath smelt of blood.

Some people in desperate moments have a knack of doing the right thing. Plaxy is one of them. "My dear," she said, "you are
not
a wild beast, you're Sirius. And you don't really want to hurt me. You love me, you know you do. I'm your Plaxy." His lips crept back over his teeth. His growl died out. Presently, with a little whimper he delicately kissed her cheek. Stroking his throat, she said, "Oh, my poor darling, you must have been mad"; then, as she rose to her feet, "Come, let me clean you up a bit."

She took him to the edge of the boggy pond, and with a bit of moss for a sponge she wiped the blood from his muzzle and his neck and shoulders. While she was doing so she said, "
Why
did you have to do it?
Why
did you have to leave us? Was I
very
horrid to you that day?" He stood silent, passive to her ministrations, with his tail still tight under him. When he was more or less clean of blood, she kissed his forehead, then straightened herself. She walked over to the carcass. "Poor pony." she said. "He's like our Polly that we used to ride on when Giles and I were little. Do you remember how you used to kiss her nose, nearly getting yourself fallen over?" A sudden tortured whimper was his answer. Then she, still gazing at the pony, said in an altered voice, "If we leave this mess to be found, they won't rest till they have tracked you down, and then? If only we could bury it in the bog! We had better go home and tell Thomas."

On the long walk home she tried to make Sirius tell her all about it, and suddenly she realized that he had never said a word since she had found him. "Tell me, tell me!" she implored. "Oh, do at least say something. What's the matter with you?"

At last he spoke. "You wouldn't understand. There's nothing in your life for you to judge it by. It's just--a canine thing." This echo of her own words startled and pained her. "Oh, I'm terribly sorry," she said, "I
was
horrid." But he said, "It wasn't all your fault. I was going wild before that."

The rest of the search party had arrived home before them. Sirius was given a hearty but anxious welcome. He took it coldly. Refusing his supper, he retired to bed. Plaxy at once told her story to Thomas, who was at first indignant and then increasingly interested, though of course alarmed for Sirius's safety. Next day he traced the owner of the pony and told him the whole story, attributing the murder to "a new, untrained experimental super-sheep-dog of mine." He paid up twice the value of the pony.

The killing of the pony was one of the turning points in Sirius's career. It clarified his relations with Plaxy, and it made Thomas realize that Sirius was being seriously strained, and would have to be treated carefully.

A couple of days later Plaxy and Sirius found themselves talking more freely to one another than had been possible for many months. It began by her telling him about that "human" matter which she had formerly withheld. Consideration for Plaxy forbids me to publish its details, which are anyhow irrelevant to my theme. Let it suffice that Plaxy had allowed herself to become entangled with a young man for whom she felt a strong sexual attraction but no great respect; and that in these circumstances the shameless promiscuity of Sirius's own sex life seemed to her to render him an impossible confidant. But the pony incident had made her realize more clearly how much her intimacy with Sirius mattered to both of them. She felt compelled to do her utmost to restore confidence. Sirius on his side told her of the conflict which was racking him, the alternating moods of respect and loathing for humanity. "You, for instance, are sometimes the dearest of all things in the world, and sometimes just a horrible monkey that has cast a filthy spell on me." She answered at once, "And
you
are sometimes just my father's experimental dog that I have somehow got tangled up with and responsible for, because of
him
; but sometimes you are--
Sirius
, the part of Sirius-Plaxy that I love." A faint change in her fragrance made him realize the warmth of her feeling far better than her words could do, or even the shy frankness of her voice.

Thomas made a point of lecturing Sirius on the folly of killing ponies, but the lecture gradually changed into a discussion about the causes of the wolf-mood in him. At the crisis of this talk Sirius cried, "Unless you help me to be
myself
, you will force me to be--a sham wolf." Thomas countered this with, "And
what
must you be to be 'yourself?" After a long pause Sirius said, "I don't know, yet. But I must be given a chance to find out. I must be helped to look round at the world. I shall not see much of it if I just alternate between sheep and your laboratory. You see, I feel I have my
own
active contribution to make to--well to human understanding. I can't be just a passive subject for experiments, or at best a tenth-rate research worker. There's something I
must
get clear in my own mind, and when I have got it clear, then I must get it across somehow to mankind." Thomas softly whistled. "Sounds as though you wanted to be a sort of canine messiah to men!" Sirius moved restlessly and said, "No, I'm not as silly as all that. I don't feel superior at all, far from it. But--well, my point of view is so utterly different from man's, and yet at bottom the same. In making me you made something that sees man from clean outside man, and can tell him what he looks like." Thomas was silent, considering this, and Sirius presently added, "There's another point. When I feel I'm not going to be able to be my true self, or not allowed to try to be it, the whole human race turns foul in my nose, and I just go wild. Everything blacks out. I don't know why, but there it is."

Thomas was by now thoroughly aware that his policy for Sirius had been too simple. He undertook to modify it. On the following day he talked it all over with Elizabeth. "What a fool I was," he said, "not to foresee this psychological trouble! I don't think I ever
really
realized that if things went wrong with
this
experiment I couldn't just wash my hands of it all, and start again; any more than a surgeon can wash his hands of an operation that has gone wrong. I feel as God ought to have felt towards Adam when Adam went wrong--morally responsible. The devil of it is that, though moral feelings are mere subjective feelings, you can't ignore them."

After a long discussion Elizabeth and Thomas decided on a new programme for Sirius. He should come to the Laboratory, as planned; but also he should be "shown round a bit" by Elizabeth, so that he could "begin to get the hang of this crazy human world," He would go about simply as her dog, meeting her friends in Cambridge and elsewhere, listening to their talk. She would also help him to do a bit of sight-seeing, if it could be arranged--slums, factories, docks, museums, concerts. This could be done at odd times, from the lab. He could also, with Thomas's aid, make proper use of Cambridge as an educational centre. Thomas would suggest lines of study and get him books from libraries. All this might help him to see more clearly what he could do with his life.

When Thomas explained the new plan to Sirius, he ended with a caution. If Sirius did wander about the country with Elizabeth, he must be very careful not to give the show away. He must behave simply as her dog. No one must suspect him of being able to talk, no one but the people in the know at the laboratory. "But why?" protested Sirius. "Surely it's time I came out into the open. I can't go on pretending for ever." Thomas insisted that the time had not yet come for publicity. "We must have you firmly established in the scientific world before the commercial world can get hold of you. Otherwise some unscrupulous tough, out on the make, will try to kidnap you and run you into some foreign country to show you off for money. Then you really would be a slave for the rest of your life." Sirius snorted. "Let 'em try, that's all." Thomas pointed out that a choloroform cloth would put him out of action very effectively, till they got him away. "Don't think it's just my fancy," Thomas added. "There are some guys on your track already, and it's time I warned you. Only yesterday two townee people called here to inquire about buying a super-sheep-dog. I put them off because I didn't like the look of them. Told them I had no animal ready. They said they had seen one in Trawsfynydd posting a lettter, you in fact. Wouldn't I sell you? They offered $30, $40, and gradually raised it to $250. This was fantastic for a super-sheep-dog, so I began to be suspicious. Well, those fellows have been hanging about here since then, so look out. And remember, chloroform."

Some weeks later, when Sirius had almost forgotten about this story, an attempt was actually made to kidnap him. He had been out hunting, and was returning by his usual route, which passed over a stile in a wall about a hundred yards or so above the house. He was on the point of climbing over the stile when he caught a whiff of something strange. It was sickly-sweet and pungent. He remembered chloroform, and checked. Now unfortunately for his assailants his meditations on the way home from the chase had been sombre. He had been brooding on his subjection to the human race, and so he was in a mood for retaliation. He leapt the stile and crashed into two men, who were waiting for him. They had not expected him to come over like a shell from a gun, exploding on impact. Both men were knocked flying, and in the struggle which followed Sirius got his teeth in the throat of one of the men before the other could apply the chloroform cloth. The choking smell forced him to let go and attack his other assailant. Number one, however, was temporarily out of action, so Sirius had to deal only with number two and the chloroform. The taste, or rather the idea, of human blood had roused the wolf-mood in Sirius, He became just an animal fighting its natural enemy-species. The man did his best with the chloroform, but though Sirius had a few strong whiffs he managed to avoid its full power. Meanwhile the noise of battle had roused Thomas, who was down below in the garden at Garth. He pounded up the hill shouting. The damaged man had risen to his feet to help his colleague, but when he saw Thomas he made off. The other had succeeded in doping Sirius enough to make him no longer dangerous; but he too, when he heard Thomas, clambered to his feet, with blood streaming from his face, and took to his heels, leaving the dog already three parts doped and quite unable to give chase. Both men reached the cart track where they had left their car, and drove off as fast as the bumps would permit. Thomas made no attempt to follow them. Instead, he went to Sirius and gripped his collar, lest the dog should recover in time to pursue his enemies.