The Plague Dogs: A Novel Read online

  “Anyway, I’ve told you how good my master was, and he had just as healthy an enjoyment of paper as ever a dog had for a sniff round a post. And sometimes when he got home from the paper house in the evening, he used to sit down and scratch about with even more paper, and then he’d go out and push it into the red bin up the road.

  “Well, it was plain enough that that was what he was doing this evening. He nearly always used to call me to go with him, but I suppose he hadn’t been able to find me anywhere about the place and thought it didn’t matter as we’d be going for a longer walk later. Anyway, out through the gate he went. So after a minute or two I thought, why not slip out after him and catch him up, just for fun—you know, give him a bit of a surprise? So I waited till he’d turned the corner at the end of the street and then I came out of the rhododendrons and jumped right over the gate. I was pretty good at jumping. It was a trick my master had taught me. He used to call out, ‘Hoop-la, sugar lump,’ and I’d jump clean over the table and get a lump of sugar for it. Well, anyhow, I jumped the gate and then I ran up the road and round the corner after him.

  “The big red bin was on the other side of the road and you had to be rather careful crossing this particular road because of all the cars and lorries and things. Whenever my master took me with him he used to put me on a lead and he always used to cross the road at the same place, where it was painted black and white. I must have crossed there any number of times—we never crossed anywhere else. I saw him, in front of me, just coming up to it, swinging his stick, with the bit of paper in his hand, so I said to myself, ‘Now to surprise him,’ and I ran past him and out on to the black and white bit of road.”

  For a while Snitter said nothing, lying, with closed eyes, on the damp straw. Rowf waited silently, almost hoping that he would tell no more and thus, by desisting, perhaps avert or change what he knew must be some dreadful outcome. Who has not, as a sad story approaches its climax, found himself thinking in this way? The archons of Athens punished for lying the barber who first put about the news of the Syracusan disaster; for if he were treated as a liar, would it not follow that he must have been lying indeed, and therefore that it had never taken place?

  After a time the moon, moving westward, shone directly upon the spot where the dogs lay. As though the light had broken in upon and put an end to Snitter’s attempt to hide from the close of his story, he opened his eyes and went on.

  “I was about half-way over when I heard my master, behind me, shout, ‘Snitter! Stop!’ I always obeyed him, as I told you, and I stopped absolutely dead. And then—then there came a dreadful, squealing noise on the road, and in the same moment my master ran out and grabbed me and threw me bodily right across into the opposite gutter; and as I fell I heard the lorry hit him—oh, what a terrible noise it made! I heard his head hit the road—if only I could ever forget it! His head on the road!

  “There was glass all over the place. A piece cut my paw. A man got out of the lorry and people came running up—first one or two and then more and more. They picked my master up—his face was all covered with blood—no one took any notice of me. And then there was a bell ringing and a big white car came and men in blue clothes got out of it. I told you how my master used to talk to that bell in his room and I suppose they’d brought this other bell—it was a very loud one—to try to get him to talk: but he never did. He just lay still as death in the road. His eyes were shut and there was blood all over his clothes. They all knew—you could see they all knew. The lorry driver kept on shouting and crying—he was hardly more than a boy—and then a blue man saw me wandering about and grabbed me by the collar. The grey-haired woman with the apron had come—everyone from our street seemed to be there—and she put me on a lead and took me back to her house. She wasn’t kind any more—she acted as though she hated me—they all did, they all did! She shut me up in the coal cellar, but I howled so much that in the end she let me out and left me in the kitchen.

  “I can’t remember it all, but I never saw my master again. I suppose they put him in the ground. They do, you know. That’s what they do. The next day Annie Mossity came. She stood in the kitchen doorway and just looked at me. I’ll never forget it. You’d have thought anyone would have had a word for a dog as lost and miserable as I was. She said something to the grey-haired woman and then they shut the door and went away. And the next day she came back with a basket and put me in it and drove me off in her car—it wasn’t our car, anyway; it smelt of her—and she took me a long way and then she gave me to the whitecoats. And I believe she took the trouble to do all that because she wanted something horrible to happen to me.”

  After a long time, Rowf asked, “Is that why you’ve so often told me you’re falling?” Snitter made no reply and he went on, “It’s a bad world for animals. You might just as well have fallen—out of the sky, I mean. There’s no going back there, where you’ve come from, is there? Never. But at least it’s over, Snitter. It can’t happen again.”

  “It can—it does,” whispered Snitter. “That’s the dreadful thing. Men can do worse things than hurt you or starve you—they can change the world: we’ve seen that they can, you and I. But what I understand now is that they’ve done it through me. Annie Mossity—what she wanted to happen has happened. I don’t know what she told the whitecoats to do, but I know now that everything bad comes out of my head, and that it happens again and again. That’s where the bad things start and then they come out into the world, like maggots coming out of meat and changing into flies. When you and I got away from the whitecoats’ place, we thought the men had taken all the nouses and gardens away. But it was really I who destroyed them. The lorry driver that morning who threw stones at me—he knew who I was; and that man with the sheep-dogs—so did he. What happened to my master has happened again; the white bell-car—you said you actually saw it there, by the bridge. The man with the kind voice—the dark-faced man beside the car at the bridge—I killed him. I tell you, there isn’t a world at all now except this wound in my head, and you’re in there too, Rowf. I’m not going outside again—not any more. If I can die and stop it all, then I’ll stay here and do that. But perhaps I’ve died already. Perhaps dying—perhaps even dying doesn’t stop it.”

  “The tod’s left us,” said Rowf. “He wouldn’t come with me to look for you.”

  “Do you blame him?”

  “It’s his nature, I suppose. We’ll just have to do the best we can without him. Some of what you’ve said may be true, for all I know. I can’t understand it, really. There’s no way out for us, I’m sure of that, but at least I mean to stay alive as long as I can, like the tod. And as for dying, I’ll fight before I’m killed.”

  “They’ll shoot you, Rowf. When the gun—the dark man—”

  “They tried—a man standing near the white bell-car—he tried.”

  “The noise breaks the world to bits, like a stone dropping into the top of the water. But then it all comes together again and goes on, like the water. And that can happen again and again.”

  “Stop chewing that!” said Rowf fiercely. “No one’ll steal it—it’ll still be there when you get back. Come with me, come on! Once we’ve found some food you’ll know you’re not dead.”

  “Hunt sheep?”

  “No chance of that—I’m exhausted. I couldn’t make the kill. It’ll have to be dustbins, and somewhere where there are no dogs to give the alarm. After that, we must decide what we’re going to do.”

  A second time he jumped the half-door and Snitter, feeling now that sense of relief and acquiescence which often follows the telling of a grief, followed him. Slowly, with no clear sense of purpose or direction, they plodded away southward, towards the bleak summit of High Wallowbarrow outlined against the moonlit sky.

  FIT 6

  W

  hat place in all the Lakes can surpass, in grandeur and beauty, the summit of Wreynus Pass and the high solitude of the Three Shire Stone? Where, if not here, is to be found the heart of the Lakeland—he
re, where the northern shoulder of the Coniston range meets the southern tip of the great Scafell horseshoe, and Langdale reaches up its arms to Dunnerdale across this desolate band of rock, turf and ling? Stand, reader, here—by the long stone itself, if you will, or at the summit of the pass—at dawn on a June morning, or at dusk of a rainy November nightfall. What, in the emptiness, do you hear, listening with closed eyes and fingers resting upon the squared edge of the stone? Nothing that you would not have heard a thousand years ago. Down the long, bare ridges on either side sounds the wind, tugging in uneven gusts over the slopes, breaking, as strongly as round a cathedral, about the corners of the greater crags that oppose their masses to its force. Up from below—from before and behind you—wavers the distant sighing of the becks, the sound coming and going on that same wind; and the occasional cry of hawk, buzzard or crow sailing on the currents in obedience to behavioural instincts evolved tens of thousands of years gone by. A curlew cries, “Whaup, whaup,” and something on Wetside Edge—a grazing yow or wandering fox—has put up a blackcock which rockets away, rattling in its throat with a noise like Mr. Punch about his gleeful mischief. A sheep bleats close by and little, cloven hooves—ah, here is a new sound—rattle across the metalled road. Open your eyes—unless a car comes there will be nothing else to hear except, perhaps, the thin note, now and again, of twite, pipit or shrike.

  What do you see—for the wind, though sharp and bleak, is nevertheless friendly in blowing away the mist that might have enclosed you, muffling all sound, confusing north with south and compelling you to stumble your way from cairn to cairn along the tops, or to follow the course of a beck until it led you down below the mist-ceiling—what do you see? To the south, the mile-long shoulder of Wetside Edge comes curving down from Great Carrs, falling away into the dip below Rough Crags, where the river Brathay, itself no more than a beck, tumbles, cold and lonely, towards the meadows of Fell Foot and Little Langdale Tarn. To the north, the summit of Pike O’Blisco rises beyond its south face that they call the Black Crag. Behind you stands Cold Pike and between the two, on the other side of the saddle, so that you cannot see it from here, lies the little Red Tarn—barely two hundred yards long but big enough, no doubt, to cast a chill into the heart of our friend Rowf, should he ever happen upon it in his wanderings. The high, uneven ridge of the Crinkle Crags you cannot see—not today, for over it the vapour is still lying, a grey cloud extending from Gladstone Knott right across to Adam-a-Cove and back along Shelter Crags to Three Tarns. But walk over a little way to the west, back over the crest of the pass, across this high watershed. There, below you, patters the narrow, stony stream of the infant Duddon itself, gaining from tributary beck to beck as it runs down, alongside the road but well below it, all of two miles to that bridge, that very gate where Snitter faced Mr. Ephraim on the road. Beside its course stand great tussocks of grass over which you can trip and measure your length in the soaking peat, tracts of bilberry, bog myrtle, wet moss and boulder-broken turf strewn with lichened stones; and on either side, stretching up the fell and all along the banks, the dry stone walls built of those same rocks and boulders, gathered and piled by men—whence came their patience?—dead these two hundred years and more.

  Despite their seeming emptiness, many men have in fact marked these hills—marked at least their surface, though they have not changed it, as the great fens of East Anglia have been changed or the once-forested Weald of Sussex. Beyond your view from Wreynus, away over the crest of Hard Knott, on its western slope and not far above Bootterilket, lies the Roman camp they call the Castle. Mediobogdum the Romans called it, and here, where the rock-face falls to the grassy platform of their parade ground, the legionaries must have stood cursing as they looked out over the wet, windy heather, with lice in the tunic and a cold in the nose, all the way down the valley of the Esk to its sandy estuary at Ravenglass. The Duddon valley was held by a Norman and its tenure is recorded in Domesday Book. Here, where you stand, a beacon burned to pass on news of the Spanish Armada. Wordsworth tramped over the Wreynus—indeed, he knew the Duddon valley from Wreynus to the sea, and late in life wrote a not-terribly-arresting sonnet sequence about it. And Arnold of Rugby and Ruskin and G. M. Trevelyan and Beatrix Potter and all the Everest climbers from Mallory to Hillary and for the matter of that, Mr. Switchburg B. Tasker of Nebraska, for on his vacation last summer he drove over here in a hired Renault and I observe that he—or somebody—has scratched his name on the face of a nearby rock. Never mind, Switchburg, old boy, the rain will rain and the lichen—Hypogymnia physodes, perhaps; or Parmelia conspersa, or perhaps the pretty, rust-coloured Lecidea dicksonii—will grow over the blurred place, and later on you’ll be able to join the Roman and his trouble, just like A. E. Housman. There’s glory for you: well, all that you or I—or Rowf and Snitter, for that matter—are going to get, anyway.

  Hard Knott

  Who is there who does not sometimes need to be alone, and who is not the poorer deprived of that strength and solace, even though he may not himself be conscious of his loss? This hundred years and more great Pan has been disdained and robbed and his boundaries diminished—the boundaries of a kingdom which many fear and shun, having had, no doubt, too much of it in the past against their will: the kingdom of solitude and of darkness. White stands for good and black stands for bad, we learned as children (though half the human race is black). If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness! said the good Lord, and so we misapply the metaphor and pray, O God, give me more light, until I come to walk in the courts-heaven help us!—of everlasting day. And what will then become of your dreams, and of the phantasms that your own heart has summoned out of firelight and the dark; those fancies that do run in the triple Hecate’s team from the passage of the sun? I would not trade them for all the golden crowns to be cast down around the crystal sea. There shall be no night there? So much the worse, for light and darkness, sons of Man, for us are complementary. Think otherwise to your harm. Great Pan has retreated, if not fled; before the borough surveyor, that excellent and necessary man, with his street-lighting, his slide rule, duffle coat and gum-boots in the rain. And a good job, too, did I hear you say? Yes, indeed, for a hundred years ago it was a dark and lonely life for all too many, and now they are neither ignorant nor afraid, and at all events believe themselves less superstitious. And my goodness, how mobile they are! On a fine Saturday in summer the summit of Scafell Pike may well be thick with those who have climbed it, having first journeyed towards it by train, car, motorbike and even aeroplane. No one need be alone any more, in that solitude where Socrates stood wrapped in his old cloak in the night, Jesus told Satan to get behind him and Beethoven, in his scarecrow coat, walked through the fields with the voice of God sounding like a sea in the shell-like spirals of his ruined ears. Strange paradox! In solitude great Pan confers a dignity which vanishes among crowds and many voices. Great Pan is half animal and incapable of pity as the tod, sending fear, strange fancies, even madness to trouble the lonely and ignorant. But shun him altogether, tip the balance the other way entirely and another—a vulgar, meaner—madness will come upon you—even, perhaps, without your awareness. Do you think great Pan is going to stand idly by while Dr. Boycott stabs and maims and drowns his creatures in the name of science, progress and civilization?

  But wait—come back here a minute! Were you gazing up Wetside Edge into the mist on Great Carrs, or watching the buzzard sliding sideways down the north wind from Pike O’Blisco? Look eastward into Westmorland, down past Wreynus Bridge and Great Horse Crag to Little Langdale and the road that comes snaking up out of the valley, nearly eight hundred feet to where we stand on this clear November morning. A car is coming up, twisting from side to side with the road; a green car—a Triumph Toledo, I rather think-anyway, the kind of car that not infrequently goes with a job. And who, pray, is the driver? Take your binoculars to him. Yes, I thought as much. How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of Sir Ivor Stone’s emissary! We are to be route
d out in our solitude. It is indeed he! Ladies and gentlemen—Digby Driver, the urban spaceman! Let us—er—get a load of him, shall we?

  Digby Driver had not always been known by that name, for the very good reason that it was not his original one. He had been born about thirty years before—in some year soon after the Second World War, in fact—in a midland county borough; and at that time his name was Kevin Gumm. True, he had not been christened Kevin, for he had never been christened (which was not his fault), but he had nevertheless grown up with that name, which had been given to him by either his mother or his grandmother. We shall never know which, for not long after his birth his mother had left him in the care of his grandmother before vanishing permanently out of his life. This was partly due to the arrival of Kevin himself, for his paternity, like Ophelia’s death, was doubtful and his mother’s husband had laid it, most resentfully, at the door of the American G.I.s who at that time were thick on the ground in England. He certainly had some evidence tending toward this conclusion; and although his mother had denied the accusation, poor Kevin became first a casus belli between them and before long the final disrupter of a marriage-tie which had never been anything but tenuous. Mrs. Gumm began to look elsewhere and before long struck oil in the person of a sergeant from Texas, with whom she “took up,” as the saying goes. Kevin would certainly have met with no more favour from the sergeant than he had from Mr. Gumm, and Mrs. Gumm (whose name, by the way, was Mavis), divining this intuitively (no very hard matter), took care to give the sergeant no opportunity to form a view. By the time Kevin was old enough to talk, Mavis Gumm had not been among those present for nearly two years, and since her own mother had not the least idea on which side of the Atlantic to begin to look for her, she found herself reluctantly stuck with Kevin.