Sirius (29 page)

"Come to the lair," she said. "We must hide till after dark, then we'll go down to Tan-y-Voel and wait till McBane comes with his car to take us away. I told him to hurry."

The lair was as good a retreat as they could expect. At the foot of the cliff was a tangle of heather and broken rocks. A huge slab had split from the side of the cliff and moved away, leaving a gap. This formed the lair. Its floor was below the surrounding wreckage and heather clumps. The buttress above was inaccessible, so no one could look down on them. Inside lay the remains of the heather which Plaxy herself had gathered to fort-n a couch long ago. She now added a fresh supply. They nestled close together, and little by little, by talk about their common past, she weaned his mind away from madness. For some hours they remained talking with increasing ease and happiness. Plaxy often spoke about their future, but whenever she led his attention forward a dark cloud seemed to settle on his mind, Once she said, "We will leave this district and start a flock somewhere in Scotland, as soon as we can find a place." He answered, "There is no place for me in man's world, and there is no other world for me. There is no place for me anywhere in the universe." She answered quickly, "But wherever I am there is always a place for you. I'm your home, your footing in the world. And I'm--your wife, your dear constant bitch." He caressed her hand, and said, "In the last few days, whenever I was not raging mad against your whole species, I was longing for you; but you--must not be tied to me. And anyhow you cannot make a world for me. Of course, any world that I could live in must have you in it for its loveliest scent, drawing me along the trail; but you can't make a whole world for me. Indeed, it's not
possible
for me to have a world at all, because my own nature doesn't make sense. The spirit in me needs the world of men, and the wolf in me needs the wild. I could only be at home in a sort of Alice-in-Wonderland world, where I could have my cake and eat it."

A distant voice set both their hearts racing. She clung to him, and they waited in silence, thankful for the deep shadow of the lair, for it was already almost sunset. They heard quite near at hand the scrape of a nailed boot on rock. Sirius began to move in her arms, and growl. "Idiot! Be quiet," she whispered. She tried to hold his mouth shut with one hand while she desperately gripped him with the other. Footsteps moved past the entrance of the lair, then faded into the distance. After some minutes she could hold on no longer. Cautiously she let go, saying, "Now, for God's sake keep quiet."

For a long time they sat together waiting and occasionally talking. Twilight was now far advanced, and Plaxy began to feel that the worst of their ordeal was over. "Soon it will be dark enough to go home," she said, "home to Tan-y-Voel, my dog, and a great big meal. I'm hungry as hell. Are you?" He said nothing for a moment; then, "Yesterday I ate part of a man." He must have felt her shudder. "Oh," he said, "I was savage. And I shall be again, unless you hold me tight with your love." She hugged him, and a surge of joy made her softly laugh. Her imagination leapt forward to the time when they would be safely on the way to Cambridge.

Presently she rose, and went cautiously out to look round. The sunset colour had almost gone. There was no sign of the enemy. She moved round a projecting rock, and still there seemed to be no danger. After straying about for a few moments, searching the landscape, she felt the need to relieve herself. She crouched down in the heather, and sang softly the little tune which since childhood had been associated in both their minds with this homely operation. He should have responded with one or other of the appropriate antistrophes, but he was silent. She repeated her phrase several times, but there was no answer. Suddenly alarmed, she hurried round the intervening rock and saw Sirius standing outside the lair sniffing the wind. His tail was erect, his back bristling. At that moment another dog came into sight, and Sirius, rousing the echoes with his uproar, charged the intruder, who turned tail, with Sirius on his heels. Both dogs vanished round the shoulder of the hill. There was a savage sound of dog-fight, then human voices, and a shot, followed by a canine scream. Plaxy stood fixed in horror. After a moment's silence a man's voice cried, "Blast! I've hit the wrong one. The devil's got away." Two more shots were fired. Another voice said, "No bloody good. Too dark." Plaxy from behind a rock peered at the men. They strode over to inspect the dead dog; then moved off down the valley. When they were out of sight, she wandered about looking for Sirius. After a while she returned to the lair, hoping to find him there. It was still empty. Anxiously she strayed about in the dark, sometimes softly calling his name. For hours she wandered. Some time in the middle of the night she heard the sirens wailing far off in the villages. Searchlights fingered the clouds. After a while the wavering drone of a plane passed overhead towards the north-east; then another, and many others. There was distant firing, and one larger thud. Dead tired, Plaxy still strayed farther and farther over the dark moor, sometimes calling.

At last, almost at her feet she heard a little sound. She stepped aside and found him stretched out on the grass. The end of his tail beat feebly on the ground for greeting. She knelt beside him. Passing her hand along his body, she found that his flank was wet and sticky. One of the Home Guards" last shots had taken effect, though in the failing light he had seen only that the dog had not been immediately stopped. The badly damaged animal had staggered off towards the mountains, but shock and loss of blood had at last brought him down. With the first-aid outfit that she had carried on all her searches she put a pad on the wound and contrived to pass a bandage round his body to hold it, though he trembled with the added pain. Then she said, "I must go and get help and a stretcher." He protested, with feeble earnestness; and when she rose to go, he cried piteously for her to come down to him again. In despair she sank beside him, and lay down to put her face to his cheek. "But, my darling," she said, "we
must
get you home before daylight, else they'll find you." He feebly cried again, and seemed to say, "Dying--stay--Plaxy--dear." Presently he said "Dying--is very--cold." She took off her coat and laid it over him, then tried to lie closer to him to warm him. He said something which she guessed to be, "I don't fit you. Robert does." Stabbed with love and compassion, she said, "But dearest darling, our spirits fit." His last words were "Plaxy-Sirius--worth while." Some minutes later she saw his mouth fall open a little, revealing the white teeth in the faint light of dawn. His tongue slipped out. She buried her face in the strong fur of his neck, silently weeping.

For a long while she lay, till discomfort forced her to move. Then a shuddering sigh heaved her body, a sigh of bitter grief, but also of exhaustion; of love and compassion, but also of relief. Presently she realized that she was deadly cold and shivering. She sat up and rubbed her bare arms. Gently she took away the coat from dead Sirius, and put it on herself once more. The act seemed callous, and she wept again; then stooped once more to give the great head a kiss. For a while she sat by Sirius with a hand in the side pocket of her coat. She found that her fingers had closed upon the little field-glass that I had given her. Even this seemed a disloyalty to the dead; but she reminded herself that Sirius had accepted me.

Presently the sirens sounded, far down in the villages, steady, sad and thankful. A sheep called mournfully. Very far away a dog barked. Behind Arenig Fawr the dawn was already like the glow of a great fire. "What must I do now?" she wondered. She remembered how, a few hours earlier, with happiness too soon in her heart, she had sung for him to answer, but in vain. The memory overpowered her with a sense of the gulf that now divided them. He that had been so near seemed now as remote as their common mammalian ancestor. Not again would he sing to her.

But now at last she thought of a fitting thing to do. She would sing his requiem. Returning to her dead darling, she stood erect beside him, facing the dawn. Then in as firm and full a voice as she could muster, she began singing a strange thing that he himself had made for her in his most individual style. The wordless phrases symbolized for her the canine and the human that had vied in him all his life long. The hounds" baying blended with human voices. There was a warm and brilliant theme which he said was Plaxy, and a perplexed one which was himself. It began in playfulness and zest, but developed in a tragic vein against which she had often protested. Now, looking down on him she realized that his tragedy was inevitable, And under the power of his music she saw that Sirius, in spite of his uniqueness, epitomized in his whole life and in his death something universal, something that is common to all awakening spirits on earth, and in the farthest galaxies. For the music's darkness was lit up by a brilliance which Sirius had called "colour," the glory that he himself, he said, had never seen. But this, surely, was the glory that no spirits, canine or human, had ever clearly seen, the light that never was on land or sea, and yet is glimpsed by the quickened mind everywhere.

As she sang, red dawn filled the eastern sky, and soon the sun's bright finger set fire to Sirius.

THE END

English philosopher and novelist who signs his works Olaf Stapledon, writes: "I was born in the Wirral, across the water from Liverpool. The Wirral has nearly always been my headquarters. I now live at the opposite comer of the peninsula, across the water from Wales. Most of my childhood, however, was spent on the Suez Canal, which in a way still seems my home. Subsequently I was educated at Abbotsholme School and Balliol College, Oxford. Then, for a year, with much nerve strain and little success, I taught at the Manchester Grammar School. Next I entered a shipping office in Liverpool, to deal ineffectively with manifestoes and bills of lading. A short period in a shipping agency at Port Said concluded my business career. I then lectured to tutorial classes for the Workers' Educational Association, under the University of Liverpool, imparting my vague knowledge of history and English literature to a few of the workers of Northwestern England. For the three last years of the first great war I was with the Friends' Ambulance Unit, in a motor convoy attached to a division of the French Army. After the war I married Agnes Miller, an Australian. Thus was sealed an intermittent romance of twelve years' standing. We have a daughter and a son."

"Having returned to Workers' Educational Association work, I also began to study philosophy and psychology at Liverpool, and took a Ph.D. Henceforth these were my lecturing subjects, both outside the university and for a short time within. I wrote a technical philosophical book, and purposed an academic career. But I also wrote my Last and First Men, which was a success. I therefore, relying on unearned increment, rashly gave up my university post, determining to pull my weight by writing. Well, well! I have written mostly fantastic fiction of a semi-philosophical kind, and occasionally I have ventured into sociological fields."

“I find it difficult to summarize the main interests and influences in my life. Philosophy, in spite of a late attack, has always taken a high place. Formerly English literature dominated. Science, though I lacked scientific training, was first a sort of gospel and later something the fundamental principles of which must be carefully criticized. It took me long to realize both its true value and its mischief. In politics I accept the label Socialist, though all labels are misleading. My chief recreations have been foreign travel, and rough walking with a very small spot of rock climbing. I am addicted to swimming, and I like the arduous and brainless side of gardening."

* * *

Mr. Stapledon writes occasionally on ethics and philosophy for the technical and scholarly reviews. He is primarily not a novelist but a philosopher, and his style is sometimes cumbersome and crude, but the originality and brilliance of his thought outweighs these disadvantages. Elmer Davis, though he acknowledged that "fiction is a tool he uses awkwardly," said of Mr. Stapledon's first and most successful novel that it is "perhaps the boldest and most intelligently imaginative book of our times." Stapledon himself considers Star Maker "by far the best" of his novels. He is striking in appearance, with thick dark hair, deep-set eyes, and a lined, brooding face.