Collected Essays (45 page)

‘It is here we must finish our tunnel,’ he croaked. ‘Portland Bill is the place. I don’t care what the High Command says. If they want me to help them they must listen to me. It is the shortest distance across the Channel from here.’

‘
Ja
, that is right, Herr Vultz, but they say –’ began a red-faced colonel.

‘Bah, I will hear no more of it,’ screeched the greatest engineer in Germany. ‘I don’t care what they say. You can tell them I will build my tunnel to Portland Bill or nowhere. It will be finished one week from today – if only they send me some more prisoners of war to work for me.’

The second man spoke up.

‘We have hundreds of thousands of prisoners of all kinds, British, French, and Polish. We send you thousands of them, but you demand RAF men. Not enough RAF men are being captured to supply you, Herr Vultz. Why will you not use someone else?’

The face of the mad engineer became twisted like that of a demon. He thumped the table.

‘Because my boring-maching kills those who work in it. It shakes them to pieces. I have reason to hate them. I will have RAF men or none. If they cannot capture enough, they must do so in some other way. I want five hundred RAF men.’

In fact, Vultz lost even the men he had: they were rescued by Zoom, and the Guernsey tunnelling camp was pounded to pieces by the RAF. ‘The Birdman had succeeded in his biggest job, the saving of Britain.’

But Vultz, one assumes, escaped. None of the leaders in this war ever dies, on either side. There are impossible escapes, impossible rescues, but one impossibility never happens – neither good nor evil is ever finally beaten. The war goes on; Vultz changes his ground – perhaps in happier days he may become again only a Pirate sniggering as his lesser victims walk the plank: Falconer, the air ace, is condemned to the firing squad, but the bullets have not been moulded that will finish his career. We are all of us seeing a bit of death these days, but we shall not see their deaths. They will go on living week after week in the pages of the
Rover
, the
Skipper
, the
Hotspur
, the
BO.P.
, and the
Girl’s Own Paper
; in the brain of the boy who brings the parcels, of the evacuee child scowling from the railway compartment on his way to ignominious safety, of the shelter nuisance of whom we say: ‘How can anyone live with a child like that?’ The answer, of course, is that he doesn’t, except at meal-times, live with
us.
He has other companions: he is part of a war that will never come to an end.

1940

GREAT DOG OF WEIMAR

M
Y
title is not, I must explain at once, a disrespectful reference to the great German poet, but to another inhabitant of Weimar, equally interesting but less well known. Perhaps I should have heard long ago of the unbearable Kurwenal, the companion (it would be inaccurate and flippant to call him the pet) of Mathilde, Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, but if I had not opened by chance a little book called
When Your Animal Dies
, written by Miss Sylvia Barbanell and recently published by the Psychic Press, I should have remained in ignorance that dogs had ever spoken – not only Kurwenal, the dachshund of Weimar, but Lola Kindermann, the airedale, and her father Rolph Meokel, of Mannheim. I have always suspected dogs: solid, well-meaning, reliable, they seem to possess all the least attractive human virtues. What bores, I have sometimes thought, if they could speak, and now my most appalling conjectures have been confirmed.

Miss Barbanell’s is – let me emphasize it – a serious book: the unbearable Kurwenal could have no place in a humorous one. He is here a minor character: Miss Barbanell is mainly concerned with the afterlife of animals towards which she gently leads us by her stories of animal intelligence – an afterlife not only for the unbearable Kurwenal and his kind but also for cats, pet pigs, and goats. We hear of two pet frogs materializing, and of Red Indian ‘guides’ who answer evasively – in language oddly unlike Fenimore Cooper’s – embarrassing questions about bugs. (The lesser – undomesticated – creatures, it appears, join a group soul: there is a group soul for every species and sub-species, but nobody seems worried at the thought of how the group bug grows every time a Mexican crushes one with his toe: as for roast chicken, in future it will seem to me like eating a theosophist.)

But to return to the unbearable Kurwenal. Nobody can question
his
claim to immortality, with his strong moral sense, his rectitude, and his little clean clerical jokes. Perhaps I should have explained that the Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven (with a name like that she must have been a friend of Rilke) taught him to speak a language of barks, and the appalling dog was only too ready to learn. Five hundred investigators investigated him, including Professor Max Müller, but he seems on the whole to have endured them with exemplary patience. Only once did he rebel, and that momentarily, against a young neurologist of Berne University, exclaiming, ‘I answer no doubters. Bother the asses.’ It is the only recorded instance when this vile dog behaved other than well; there is no suggestion that he ever buried a bone, and the imagination boggles with embarrassment at the thought of the intimate scenes that must have taken place between Kurwenal and the Baroness when he was being house-trained. He would have done nothing to make the situation easier. ‘To me’, he was in the habit of saying with priggish self-approval, ‘learning is a great happiness’, and to a young scientist who visited him, he said, ‘I like to have you here. You are more sincere than most people.’ He was that kind of dog: one pictures the earnest melting brown gaze between the ears like ringlets.

Dachshunds, of course, are always serious and usually sentimental, but occasionally one has seen them shocked into abandon by a fleshy bone, a good smell, or an amiable tree. Not so the unbearable Kurwenal. Miss Barbanell writes that he had an ‘attractive personality and grand sense of humour’, but those words one uses of a dean who does – sometimes – unbend.

Kurwenal had a roguish sense of fun. The Baroness was given a very fine Roman rug for him on his birthday. Kurwenal said, ‘I find rug nice, will tear.’ Then he paused before he added with a sly look in his eye, ‘Not’.

If you accompanied Kurwenal on his walks you were more likely to be edified than amused. He was fond of discussing religion in a rather evangelical way. ‘On one of these occasions he said to the Baroness, “I often pray”. She asked, “What do you pray for?” Kurwenal answered, “For you.”’ Once, during tea, Professor Max Müller discussed with his hostess the slaughter of dogs for food. ‘He thought that the topic must be of particular interest to Kurwenal and asked the dog whether he had followed the conversation. “Yes,” replied Kurwenal. “Do you wish to say something about it?” “Yes,” answered the dog, and barked out the following: “The Christian religion prohibits killing.”’ Sometimes when I remember that all this was spoken in the German language I feel sorry even for the unbearable Kurwenal: to think of those constructions – that awful drift of guttural words – expressed with a sort of slow pedantry in barks. For Conversations with Kurwenal were quite as protracted as Conversations with Eckermann. With the same neurologist from Berne who was the victim of Kurwenal’s only breach of good manners the dachshund carried on a conversation lasting nearly an hour. One pictures him on a hard ornate chair facing the scientist across a salon table: I doubt if even the Baroness ever held Kurwenal on her knees (it would hardly have been proper and it certainly would not have been suitable). ‘When the scientist was about to leave, he turned to the dachshund and said, “I nearly forgot to ask you what you think about a dog’s soul.” “It is eternal like the soul of a man,” replied Kurwenal.’

Earnest, thoughtful, full of familiar quotations (he knew his
Hamlet
), his manner lightened very rarely by a touch of diocesan humour, this dachshund possessed as well the awful faculty of always saying – and doing – the right thing. There was the message he sent with his photograph to the Animal Defence Society in London: there was the emotional scene with the military widower.

The Baroness tells how she was visited by a friend, an army officer, who was very sad because his wife had recently passed on. Kurwenal said to his owner, ‘We must cheer him up.’ The dog approached the downcast man. ‘Do you want to say something to him?’ asked the Baroness. ‘Yes,’ replied Kurwenal.

‘You can make up such nice little poems now,’ she said. ‘Make one for him.’

Without much delay Kurwenal recited:

Touched by the intelligent dog’s sympathy, the depressed man’s spirits brightened considerably.

Kurwenal, I am heartlessly glad to say, has ‘passed on’. Otherwise he would probably have become a refugee, for his Christian principles would never have allowed him to support the Nazi party; around Bloomsbury therefore we should have heard continually his admonitory barks, barks about the great Teutonic abstractions – eternity, the soul, barks of advice, reproof, consolation. Strangely enough there is no record in a book crammed with séances, apparitions, invisible pawings, of the great dog’s return. Silence has taken him at last, but I for one feel no doubt at all that somewhere he awaits his mistress – no, that is not a word one can use in connexion with Kurwenal and the Baroness – his former companion, ready to lead the Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven firmly among the group souls and the Red Indian ‘guides’, among the odd frequenters of the Kluski séances – the buzzard, the Eastern sage and his weasel, the Afghan with his maneless lion – into the heart of the vague theosophic eternity.

1940

THE BRITISH PIG

T
HE
pig in our literature has always been credited with qualities peculiarly British. Honest, a little stupid, commercially-minded perhaps, but with a trace of idealism in his love affairs, the pig’s best nature is shown in domestic surroundings at a period of peace and material comfort. ‘They led prosperous uneventful lives, and their end was bacon’. Miss Potter has written of Miss Dorcas and Miss Porcas, but the sentence might stand as the epitaph of the whole race. In the latest variant on the tale of the
Three Little Pigs
, published by the Walt Disney Studios, one notices that same serenity in the portraits of the older generation hanging in the house of the provident pig: ‘Mother’, an old-fashioned parent drawn tenderly in the act of suckling eight children; ‘Uncle Otto’, changed to a Rugby football, but a football at rest, unprofaned as yet by the clamorous, vulgar game; ‘Father’, uncarved, sporting his paper frill with the heavy dignity of a Victorian parent in a Gladstone collar. It is impossible to doubt this strong domestic affection when we find it noticed by an earlier and less sympathetic observer than Miss Potter. The Rev. W. Bingley, using the very terms in which foreign historians have so often described Englishmen, wrote, ‘Selfish, indocile and rapacious, as many think him, no animal has greater sympathy for those of his own kind than the hog.’

But perhaps the British quality of the pig has never been more thoroughly expressed than in the early poem: ‘This little pig went to market (one remembers the pride with which Englishmen have always repeated Napoleon’s jeer); This little pig stayed at home (‘O sweet content! O sweet, O sweet content!’; ‘Sweet Stay-at-Home, sweet Well-Content’; ‘I love thee for a heart that’s kind – Not for the knowledge in thy mind’ – it is sometimes hard to remember that Dekker and Mr Davies are writing of men and not of pigs); This little pig had roast beef (no need to emphasize the parallel); This little pig had none; This litle pig cried wee wee wee all the way home.’ Perhaps no pig was more British than this last; a literary pig, for the mother-fixation, the longing for the womb has been the peculiar peril of our minor poets. ‘O mother quiet, breasts of peace’: Rupert Brooke is the obvious modern example, but all through the Georgian period one is aware of the patter of little hoofs along the dark road that leads back to the country sty, the roses round the door, the Mothering Sunday that goes on and on.

Sexual references, it will be noticed, are quite absent from this early poem, as they are from the rather cruel, politically-conscious story of the
Three Little Pigs.
It really seems that at this period of pig literature the bigger the litter the greater the inhibition, a situation closely paralleled in Victorian England. Miss Potter, I think, was the first to throw any real light on the Love Life of the Pig, and this she did with a delicacy and a psychological insight that recall Miss Austen. She drew for the first time in literature the feminine pig. Hitherto a pig had been just a pig; one usually assumed the sex to be masculine. But in Pig-Wig, whom Pigling Bland, it will be remembered, rescued from the cottage of the fatal Mr Peter Thomas Piperson, the female pig was revealed to be as completely British as the male: inquisitive, unromantic, demanding to be amused, fond of confectionery and admirably unselfconscious:

She asked so many questions that it became embarrassing to Pigling Bland.

He was obliged to shut his eyes and pretend to sleep. She became quiet, and there was a smell of peppermint.

‘I thought you had eaten them?’ said Pigling, waking suddenly.

‘Only the corners,’ replied Pig-Wig, studying the sentiments (they were conversation peppermints) by the firelight.

‘I wish you wouldn’t; he might smell them through the ceiling,’ said the alarmed Pigling.

Pig-Wig put back the sticky peppermints into her pocket. ‘Sing something,’ she demanded.

‘I am sorry . . . I have toothache,’ said Pigling much dismayed.

‘Then I will sing,’ replied Pig-Wig. ‘You will not mind if I say iddy tiddity? I have forgotten some of the words.’

It is impossible to deny that this is a peculiarly English love scene; no other nation, except perhaps the Russian, would have behaved or written quite like this, and the sentiment of the ending, the luxurious indulgence in wistfulness and idealism: ‘They ran, and they ran, and they ran down the hill, and across a short cut on level green turf at the bottom, between pebble beds and rushes. They came to the river, they came to the bridge – they crossed it hand in hand’ would be inconceivable to a race of pigs whose prosperity had been more precarious, to whom the struggle for existence had been more crudely presented. American pigs, for example, who meet their end, like so many other Americans, abruptly in Chicago, would have been at the same time more brutal and more soft-hearted.