CHAPTER FIVE

There was a matter that seemed to me of vital importance, if one could only get it fixed so firm in the core of one’s memory that it would have a chance of survival, of surviving in fact the memory itself. This was the matter of wholesome food and water. How could one be sure of obtaining it? Sitting over a tidy table, with a clean table-cloth on it, and clean knives and forks, one may have exaggerated the importance of cleanliness; though I still feel that in the case of water such exaggeration is hardly possible. And then again I exaggerated the probability of finding oneself one day in the position I contemplated. But the vividness and sheer assurance of the Dean’s memories were most conducive to this. Add to that vividness and assurance a glass or two of Tokay, and I hardly know who would have held out against the belief that such a change was quite likely. And so I said to him, ‘I should object, as much as anything, to drinking bad water.’

And the Dean said: ‘There is no such thing as bad water. There is water with different flavours, and giving off different smells. There is interesting water and uninteresting water. But you cannot say there is bad water.’

‘But if there are really great impurities in it,’ I said.

‘It makes it all the more interesting,’ said the Dean. ‘If the impurities are so thick that it is solid, then it ceases to be water. But while it is water it is always good.’

I may have looked a trifle sick; for the Dean looked up and said to me reassuringly, ‘No, no, never trouble yourself about that.’

I said no more for a while: it seemed hardly worth the trouble to drive and drive into one’s memory, till they became almost part of one’s character, little pieces of information that might perhaps survive the great change, if the information was no better than this. Of food I had heard his views already; the whole thing seemed disgusting; but I decided that in the interests of science it was my duty to get all the facts I could from the Dean.

So I threw in a word to keep him to the subject, and sat back and listened.

‘It is the same with meat,’ he went on. ‘When meat can no longer be eaten, it is no longer there. It disappears. Bones remain always, but meat disappears. It has a lovely smell before it goes; and then fades away like a dream.’

‘I am not hungry,’ I said.

And indeed truer word was never spoken, for my appetite was entirely lost. ‘Shall we talk of something else for a bit? If you don’t mind. What about sport? Rats, for instance.’

‘Our wainscot was not well stocked with game,’ said the Dean; ‘either rats or mice. I have hunted rats, but not often. There is only one thing to remember at this sport: shake the rat. To shake the rat is essential. I need hardly tell you how to do that, because I think everybody is born to it. It is not merely a method of killing the rat, but it prevents him from biting you. He must be shaken until he is dead. Mice of course are small game.’

‘What is the largest game you have ever hunted?’ I asked. For he had stopped talking, and it was essential to the interests of these researches that he should be kept to the same mood.

‘A traction-engine.’ replied the Dean.

That dated him within fifty years or so; and I decided that that incarnation of his was probably some time during the reign of Queen Victoria.

‘The thing came snorting along our road, and I saw at once that it had to be chased. I couldn’t allow a thing of that sort on our flower-beds, and very likely coming into the house. A thing like that might have done anything, if not properly chased at once. So I ran round and chased it. It shouted and threw black stones at me. But I chased it until it was well past our gate. It was very hard to the teeth, very big, very noisy and slow. They can’t turn round on you like rats. They are made for defence rather than for attack. Much smaller game is often more dangerous than traction-engines.’

So clearly did I picture the traction-engine on that Victorian road, with a dog yapping at the back wheels, that I wondered more and more what kind of a dog, in order to complete the mental picture. And that was the question I began to ask the Dean. ‘What kind of a dog———-?’ I began. But the question was much harder to ask than it may appear. My guest looked somehow so diaconal, that the words froze on my lips; and, try as I would, I could not frame the sentence: what kind of a dog were you? It seems silly, I know, to say that it was impossible merely to say seven words; and yet I found it so. I cannot explain it. I can only suggest to any that cannot credit this incapacity, that they should address those words themselves to any senior dignitary of the church, and see whether they do not themselves feel any slight hesitancy. I turned my question aside, and only lamely asked, ‘What kind of a dog used they to keep?’

He asked me who I meant. And I answered: ‘The people that you were talking about.’

Thus sometimes conversations dwindle to trivial ends.

Many minutes passed before I gathered again the lost threads of that conversation. For nearly ten minutes I dared hardly speak, so near he seemed to the light of to-day, so ready to turn away from the shadows he saw so clearly, moving in past years. I poured out for him more Tokay, and he absently drank it, and only gradually returned to that reminiscent mood that had been so gravely disturbed by the clumsiness of my question. Had I asked the Dean straight out, ‘What kind of a dog were you?’ I believe he would have answered satisfactorily. But the very hesitancy of my question had awakened suspicion at once, as though the question had been a guilty thing. I was not sure that he was safely back in the past again until he made a petulant remark about another engine, a remark so obviously untrue that it may not seem worth recording; I only repeat it here as it showed that the Dean had returned to his outlook over the reaches of time, and that he seems to have been contemporary with the threshing-machine. ‘Traction-engines!’ he said with evident loathing. ‘I saw one scratching itself at the back of a haystack. I thoroughly barked at it.’

‘They should be barked at,’ I said, as politely as I could.

‘Most certainly,’ said the Dean. ‘If things like that got to think they could go where they liked without any kind of protest, we should very soon have them everywhere.’

And there was so much truth in that that I was able to agree with the Dean in all sincerity.

‘And then where should we all be?’ the Dean asked.

And that is a question unfortunately so vital to all of us, that I think it is sufficient to show by itself that the Dean was not merely wandering. It seemed to me that the bright mind of a dog had seen, perhaps in the seventies of the last century, a menace to which the bulk of men must have been blind; or we should never be over-run by machines as we are, in every sense of the word. He was talking sense here. Was it not therefore fair to suppose he was speaking the truth, even where his words were surprising? If I had faintly felt that I was doing something a little undignified in lowering myself to the level of what, for the greater part of these conversations, was practically the mind of a dog, I no longer had that feeling after this observation the Dean had uttered about machinery. Henceforth I felt that he was at least my equal; even when turning, as he soon did, from philosophical speculation, he returned to talk of the chase.

‘To chase anything slow,’ he said, ‘is always wearisome. You are continually bumping into what you are chasing. There is nothing so good as a ball. A ball goes so fast that it draws out your utmost speed, in a very exhilarating manner, and it can jump about as far as one can oneself, and before one can begin to be tired, it always slows down. And then it takes a long time to eat; so that, one way and another, there is more entertainment in a ball than perhaps anything else one can chase. If one could throw it oneself, like the Masters, I cannot imagine any completer life than throwing a ball and chasing it all day long.’

My aim was purely scientific; I desired to reveal to Europeans a lore taught throughout Asia, but neglected, so far as I knew, by all our investigators; I desired to serve science only. Had it been otherwise, the momentary temptation that came to me as the Dean spoke now might possibly have prevailed; I might possibly have hurried on some slight excuse from the room and come back with an old tennis-ball, and perhaps have suddenly thrown it, and so have gratified that sense of the ridiculous that is unfortunately in all of us, at the expense of more solid study.