Part 6 (1/2)
The man who held Finn instinctively recognised all this, and the knowledge whetted the savagery of his temper, and withdrew all restraint from its cruel indulgence. He had no conscious wish to injure the hound; quite the contrary, since Finn represented money to him, and money was what he desired more than anything else; but he was tired, things seemed to be going ill with him, his temper was thoroughly roused, and the innocent cause of all this, a sensitive, living creature, was tethered and helpless beside him; and so he kicked and cursed, and jerked at the lead, and found relief in Finn's gasps of pain and want of breath.
When the shaft was mended, the tail-board of the little cart was let down, and, with a savage kick at Finn's hind-quarters, the man bade him ”Get up, there, ---- ye! Get up, ye brute!” Another kick.
Poor Finn tried to squirm forward under the cart to escape the heavy boot of his persecutor. Then he was furiously jerked backward and half throttled.
”Steady with 'im, matey,” said the other man. ”Don't knock the dollars off of 'im.”
”Who asked you to shove your jaw in?” snarled the first man. ”You didn't get the brute, did ye--curse him!”
Another kick.
The other man was used to his friend's temper, and said nothing; but he hated to see a valuable animal knocked about, just as he would have hated to see money thrown in the gutter instead of into a publican's till; so he stooped down and lifted Finn's fore-feet from the ground, and placed them on the floor of the cart.
”My oath!” he said, ”but 'e's a tidy weight, ain't he? Up ye go, my bully boy!” And up Finn went, on the spur of another violent kick, which broke the skin across one of his hocks. The lead was now fastened close down to a staple in the floor of the cart, Finn being forced down on his side by the simple process of being knelt upon by his persecutor. To make doubly sure of him, his fore-legs were then tightly lashed together with his own green collar; and then the two men mounted the front of the cart and drove off.
The memory of that night's drive burnt itself deep into Finn's young mind. He never really forgot it; that is to say, its effect upon his att.i.tude toward men and life was never completely lost.
His skin was broken in three or four places; every bone in his body ached from the heavy kicks he had received; an intolerable thirst kept him gasping for every breath he drew; the cramp set up in his fore-legs by their being strapped tightly together, one across the other, was an exquisite pain; and his muzzle was held hard down against the grimy floor-boards of the cart, while his mind was full of a black despairing fear of he knew not what. It was a severe ordeal for one who, up till then, had never even known what it meant to receive a severe verbal scolding; for one who had never seen a man's hand lifted in anger.
An end came at last to this horrible drive.
”Thank Gawd, 'ere's 'orley!” said the man who drove; and after another minute or two the little cart came to a standstill in a walled-in yard. The pony was taken out and stabled, and then the man addressed as ”Matey,” still sullen and sour, let down the tail-board of the cart with a jerk, and dragged Finn out by the collar, allowing him to fall with a thud from the cart to the ground, rendered helpless by the strap round his fore-legs.
”'Ere, get up outa that!” growled the man, with a careless kick.
Then, seeing that Finn could not move, he bent down, unbuckled the green enamelled strap, dragged it roughly away, and kicked the dog again. Cramped and sore beyond belief, Finn staggered on to his feet. A door was opened, and Finn was jerked and dragged into a perfectly dark, evil-smelling hole, about four feet square, with an earthen floor, from which horrible odours rose. The ground in this place was filthy. It had no drainage and no ventilation, except a few round holes in the door; which door was now slammed to and locked on the outside.
”Ain't ye goin' to give 'im a drink, matey?” asked Bill, outside.
”Drink be blowed! Let 'im wait till mornin'. Come in an' 'ave one yerself. I'm blessed glad this night's job's done; an' if I can't make fifty quid out 've it, I shall want to know the reason why, I can tell yer. Big, ugly brute, ain't 'e! Strong as a mule, too.
_I'd_ want to be paid pretty 'andsome fer the keepin' o' such a brute; but the American gent's red 'ot ter get 'im, I can tell yer.
Biggest ever bred, they tell me. I think I shall 'ave to stick on another tenner, eh, Bill? Come on!”
Their very voices were a misery to the shrinking, aching, choking Finn, who stood shuddering in his fetid den, his sensitive nose wrinkling with horror and disgust. His need of water was the thing which hurt him the most cruelly; but the nature of his prison was a good deal of a torture, too. Remember that his life so far had been as cleanly and decent in detail as yours or mine. Certainly this was a sad plight for the hero of the Kennel Club Show, and the finest living descendant of a fifteen hundred year old line of princes among dogs.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
CHAPTER VIII
FINN WALKS ALONE
For a long while after the men had left the scene of Finn's miserable captivity, he remained standing, and occupying as small a s.p.a.ce as possible in his prison. The fastidiousness bred in him by careful rearing told severely against Finn just now. He had never, until this night, been without water to slake his thirst; and never, never had he smelt anything so horrible as the earth of the little den in which he was now confined. Also, the place was actually filthy, as well as apparently so. Finn could not bring himself to move in it. He stood shrinking by the door, with his nose near a crack beside its hinges. For long he reflected upon the events of that night, without moving. Then, gradually, thoughts of Kathleen and Tara, and the sweet cleanliness and freedom of his home beside the Downs, came swimming into Finn's mind, and these thoughts seemed to add intolerably to the aching of his bruised bones and muscles, to the soreness of those spots in which his skin had been broken, and to the misery of the thirst which kept his tongue protruding at one side of his jaws.
Unable to bear these things any longer, Finn turned cautiously toward the middle of his loathsome prison, and, though his feet shrank from the task, sc.r.a.ped a hollow place in its midst of about the bigness of a wash-hand basin. Then, treading as though upon hot bricks, he squirmed his great body round to avoid touching the walls of his prison, and sat on his haunches in the hollow he had made. He was now filled with a desire to inform Tara and the Master, and, it may be, the rest of the world, about his sorry plight. But, particularly, he wanted to let the Master and Tara know about it. And so, seated there in what he had endeavoured to make the one approachably clean spot available, Finn pointed his long muzzle toward the stars he could not see, and, opening his jaws wide, expelled from them the true Irish Wolfhound howl, which seemed to tear its way outward and upward from the very centre of the hound's grief-smitten heart, to wind slowly through his lungs and throat, and to reach the outer air with very much the effect of a big steams.h.i.+p's syren in a dense fog. It is a very long-drawn cry, beginning away down in the ba.s.s, dragging up slowly to an anguished treble note in a very minor key, and subsiding, despairingly, about half-way back to the ba.s.s. It is a sound that carries a very long way--though not so far as from the place of Finn's captivity to the Suss.e.x Downs--and carries misery with it just as far as ever it can reach. Upon the hearer who has any bowels of compa.s.sion it falls with a weight of physical appeal which may not be denied. Above all, it is a strange, mysterious, uncanny cry, and not a sound which can be ignored. It is a sound to fetch you hurriedly from your bed at midnight; and that though you had been sunk in dreamless sleep when first it smote its irresistible way into your consciousness.
Finn was beginning the ba.s.s rumble of his sixth howl when the door of his prison was flung suddenly open, and he saw Matey, armed with a hurricane lamp and a short, heavy stick. He was still so new to the ways of Matey's kind of human, that he thought his howls had brought him release, and, for an instant, he even had a vision of a deep basin of cold water, a meal, and a sweet, clean bed, which his innocent fancy told him Matey might have been engaged in preparing for him. If he had not been so loath to risk touching the walls of his prison, his powerful tail would have wagged as the door opened and the clean night air came in to him. As it was, he leaned forward to express his grat.i.tude for the opening of the door. And as he moved forward, delicately, Matey's stick descended on his nose, with all the weight of Matey's arm and Matey's savage anger behind it. There was no more sensitive or vulnerable spot in the whole of Finn's anatomy, physically or morally. The blow was hideously painful, hideously unexpected, hideously demoralizing. It robbed Finn of sight, and sense, and self-respect, and forced a bewildered cry from him which was part bark, part howl, part growl, and part scream of pain. It planted fear and horror in a single instant in a creature who had lived in the world for fifteen months with no consciousness of either. The filth of his prison was forgotten in this new anguish of pain, and fear, and humiliation, compared with which the kicks and stranglings of the early part of the night were as nothing at all. In a few seconds of time the proudest of princes in the dog world was reduced to a shuddering, cringing object, cowering in one corner of a filthy cupboard.
Matey was not only furiously angry, he was also a good deal afraid; and that added cruelty to his anger. He had heard a number of bedroom windows raised as he crossed the walled-in yard; he wanted no enquiries about the source and reason of the weird, syren-like howls that had brought him out in his s.h.i.+rt and trousers. It was his business to see that there were no more howls; and the only means that occurred to his brutal mind were those he now proceeded to put into operation. He closed the door of the den behind him, and he rained down blows upon Finn's shrinking body till his arm ached, and the dog's cries subsided into a low, continuous whimper, the very paralysis of shame, anguish, fear, and distress. Then, when his arm was thoroughly tired, he flung the stick viciously into Finn's face, went out, and locked the door.
Matey certainly could not be called a clever dog stealer, because he had no notion of how to preserve that which he stole. Putting aside their brutality, his methods were incredibly stupid; but when, five minutes later, he lay listening in his bed, the only reflection that his stupid mind brought him was that he had succeeded admirably. No further sound came from the walled-in yard; and it appeared that there was to be no further risk of neighbours being disturbed by howls from Finn. Matey was too far away to hear anything of the low, tremulous, nasal whimpering which trickled out into the night through the holes in the door of Finn's prison; and, in any case, there was no fear of that small sound disturbing any one. So, after his own fas.h.i.+on--which one really hesitates to call brutal, because brutes rarely, and probably never, indulge in pointless, unnecessary ferocity--Matey had been successful.