Part 17
‘Despite the horror of his disease, I stooped over him and stroked him, and, always caressing him, I induced him to lie still, and to bury his little nose in the cone of cardboard; he, a little surprised at first, and sniffing the strange, potent odour with alarm, ended however in doing what I wished with such docility that I hesitated to continue my work. The annihilation of a thinking creature is, equally with annihilation of man, a cruel and responsible thing, and contains the same revolting mystery. And death, besides, carries in itself so much majesty that it is capable of giving grandeur in an instant to the most tiny and finite creatures, as soon as its shadow descends on them. Once he raised his poor head to look at me fixedly; our eyes met, his with an expressive interrogation, an intense anxiety, asked me, “What is it that you do? You whom I know so little, but to whom I trusted—what is it that you do to me?” And I still hesitated; but his throat inclined downwards, and his face rested on my hand, which I did not withdraw; stupefaction had begun to steal over him, and I hoped that he would not look at me again.
‘And yet, yes, once again! Cats, as the village people here say, have their lives united to their bodies. In one last struggle for life his eyes met mine; across his mortal semi-sleep he seemed now to perceive and understand: “Ah! it was to kill me, then? Well, I let you do it! It is too late—I sleep!”
‘In truth, I feared I had done ill. In this world, where we know nothing surely of anything, it is not even allowed us to let pity take this shape. His last look, infinitely sad, even whilst glazing in death, continued to pursue me with reproach. “Why,” it said, “why interfere with my fate? Without you I should have dragged my life on a little longer, had a few more little thoughts. I had still strength to jump up on a window-sill, where the dogs could not reach me; where I was not too cold in the morning, especially if the sun shone there. I still passed some bearable hours watching the movement in the street, seeing other cats come and go, having consciousness of what was doing round me, whilst now there is nothing for me but to rot away for ever into something which will have no memory. _Now I am no more!_” Truly, I should have recollected that the feeblest and poorest things prefer to linger on under the most miserable conditions, prefer no matter what suffering to the terror of being nothing, of _being no more_.’
And he cannot forgive himself an act which was meant out of kindness, but in which the regard of the dying animal makes him see almost a crime. This tenderness for every breathing thing, this sentiment of the infinite, intense pity and mystery which accompany all forms of death is ever present with him, and nothing in its hour of dissolution is too small or too fragile, or too mean or too miserable, in his sight not to arouse this in him.
Read only the story of the _Sorrow of an Old Galley Slave_.
This old man, who has been in prison many times, is at last being sent out to New Caledonia. ‘Old as I am, could they not have let me die in France?’ he says to our friend Yves (Mon Frére Yves), who is gone with his gunboat to take a band of these prisoners from the shore to the ship in which they are to make their voyage. Encouraged by the sympathy of Yves in his impending exile, the old felon shows him his one treasure; it is a little cage with a sparrow in it.
‘It is a tame bird, that knows his voice, and has learnt to sit on his shoulder. It was a year with him in his cell, and with great difficulty he has obtained permission to carry it with him to Caledonia, and, the permission once obtained, with what trouble he has made a little cage for it to travel in, to get the bits of wood and wire necessary, and a little green paint to brighten it and make it look pretty!
‘“Poor sparrow!” says Yves to me afterwards when he tells me this tale. “It had only a few crumbs of prison bread such as they give to convicts, but he seems quite happy all the same. He jumps about gaily like any other bird.”
‘Later still, as the train reaches the transport ship, he, who has forgotten for the moment the old man and the sparrow, passes by the former, who holds out to him the little cage. “Take it,” says the old prisoner, in a changed voice. “I give it to you; perhaps you may like to use it.”
‘“No, no,” says Yves, astonished. “You know you are going to take it with you. The bird will be your little comrade there.”
‘“Ah,” answers the old man, “he is no longer in it. Did you not know? He is no longer here.”
‘And two tears of unspeakable grief rolled down his withered cheeks.
‘During a rough moment of the crossing the door of the cage had blown open, the sparrow had fluttered, frightened, and in a second of time had fallen into the sea, his wings, which had been clipped, not being able to sustain him.
‘Oh, that moment of horrible pain! To see the little thing struggle and sink, borne away on the tearing tide, and to be unable to do anything to save him! At first, in a natural movement of appeal, he was on the point of crying for help, of begging them to stop the boat, of entreating for pity, for aid; but his impulse is checked by the consciousness of his own personal degradation. Who would have pity on a miserable old man like him? Who would care for his little drowning bird? Who would hearken to his prayer?
‘So he keeps silence, and is motionless in his place while the little grey body floats away on the frothing waves, quivering and struggling always against its fate. And he feels now all alone—frightfully alone for evermore, and his tears dull his sight, the slow salt tears of lonely despair, of a hopeless old age.
‘And a young prisoner, chained to his side, laughs aloud to see an old man weep.’
Was anything more beautiful than this ever written in any tongue?
Loti stretches to a nobler and a truer scope the _nihil humani a me alienum puto_. To him nothing which has in it the capacity of attachment and of suffering is alien; and it is this sentiment, this sympathy which breathe through all his written pages like the fragrance of some pressed and perfumed blossom. It is these which make his influence so admirable, so precious, in an age which is choked to the throat in suffocating egotisms and vanities, and bound hand and foot in the ligaments of a preposterous and purblind formalism of exclusive self-adoration. Can any reader arise from reading the page which follows without henceforth giving at least a thought of pity to the brave beasts of the pasture who perish that the human crowds may feed?
‘In the midst of the Indian Ocean one sad evening when the wind began to rise.
‘Two poor bullocks remained of a dozen which we had taken on board at Singapore, to be eaten on the voyage. These last two has been saved for the greatest need, because the voyage was protracted and the ship blown backward by the wicked monsoon.
‘They were two poor creatures, weak, thin, piteous to see, their skin already broken about their starting bones by the rude shaking of the waves. They had journeyed thus many days, turning their backs to their native pastures, whither no one would ever lead them again; tied up shortly by the horns, side by side, lowering their heads meekly every time that a wave broke over them and drenched their bodies in its chilly wash; their eyes dull and sad, they munched together at bad hay, soaked and salted; condemned beasts, already struck off the roll of the living, but fated to suffer long before they would be killed—to suffer from cold, from blows, from sickness, from wet, from want of movement, from fear.
‘The evening of which I speak was especially melancholy. At sea there are many such evenings, when ugly, livid clouds drag along on the horizon as the light fades, when the wind arises and the night threatens to be bad. Then when one feels oneself isolated in the midst of these infinite waters, one is seized with a vague terror that twilight on shore would never bring with it even in the dreariest places. And these two poor bullocks, creatures of the meadow and its fresh herbage, more out of their element than men on this heaving and rolling desert, and not having like us any hope to sustain them, were forced, despite their limited intelligence, to endure in their manner all this suffering, and must have seen confusedly the image of their approaching death. They chewed the cud with the slowness of sickness, their big, joyless eyes fixed on the sinister distances of the sea. One by one their companions had been struck down on these boards by their side; during two weeks they had lived alone, drawn together by their loneliness, leaning one against another in the rolling of the ship, rubbing their horns against each other in friendship.
‘The person charged with provisioning the ship came to me on the bridge, and said to me in the usual formula: “Captain, they are about to kill a bullock.”
‘I received him ill, though it was not his fault that he came on such an errand. The slaughter of animals took place just underneath the bridge, and in vain one turned away one’s eyes or tried to think of other things, or gazed over the waste of waters. One could not avoid hearing the blow of the mallet struck between the horns in the centre of the poor forehead held down so low to the floor by an iron buckle; then the crash of the falling animal, who drops on the bridge with a clashing of bone upon wood. And immediately after it is bled, skinned, cut in pieces; an atrocious, nauseous odour comes from its opened belly, and all around the planks of the vessel, so clean at other times, are soiled and inundated with blood and filth.
‘Well, the moment had come to slay one of the bullocks. A circle of sailors was formed round the iron ring to which it was to be fastened for execution. Of the pair they choose the weaker, one which was almost dying and which allowed itself to be led away without resistance.
‘Then the other one turned its head to follow its companion with its melancholy eyes, and seeing that its friend was led to the fatal corner where all the others had fallen, _it understood_; a gleam of comprehension came into the poor bowed head, and it lowed loudly in its sore distress. Oh, that moan of this poor, solitary creature! It was one of the most grievous sounds that I have ever heard, and at the same time one of the most mysterious. There were in it such deep reproach to us, to men, and yet a sort of heart-broken resignation, I know not what, of restrained and stifled grief, as if he, mourning, knew that his lament was useless and that his appeal would be heard by none. “Ah, yes,” it said, “the inevitable hour has come for him who was my last remaining brother, who came with me from our home far away, there where we used to run together through the grass. And my turn will come soon, and not a living thing in the world will have any pity either for him or me.”
‘But I who heard had pity.
‘I was even beside myself with pity, and a mad impulse came over me to go and take his big, sickly, mangy head to rest it on my heart, since that is our instinctive caress by which to offer the illusion of protection to those who suffer or who perish. But truly indeed he could look for no succour from anyone, for even I, whose soul had thrilled with pain at the intense anguish of his cry, even I remained motionless and impassive in my place, only turning away my eyes. For the despair of a mere animal should one change the direction of a vessel and prevent three hundred men from eating their share of fresh meat? One would be considered a lunatic if one only thought of such a thing for a moment.
‘However, a little cabin boy, who, perhaps, was also himself alone in the world, and had found none to pity him, had heard the cry—had heard it and been moved by it like myself to the depths of his soul. He went up to the bullock and very softly stroked its muzzle. He might have said to it, had he thought to do so,—
‘“They will all die too, those who are waiting to eat your flesh to-morrow. Yes, all of them, even the youngest and strongest, and maybe their last hour will be more terrible than yours, and with longer pain. Perhaps it would be better for them if they too had a blow of the pole-axe on their foreheads.”
‘The animal returned affectionately the boy’s caress, gazing at him with grateful, kind eyes, and licking his hand.’
The cynic will demur that this compassion for cattle will not prevent the human eater from consuming his _bœuf à la mode_, or his slice from the sirloin, with appetite. But even if cattle must be slaughtered, how much might their torture be alleviated were men not wholly indifferent to it. The frightful infamies of the cattle trade on sea would be ended were none bought after a voyage. The hideous deaths by drought and by cold, all over the plains of South America, would be no more. No longer would a single living bullock endure thirty agonising operations on his quivering body, when fastened down to the demonstrating or experimenting table of veterinary students. It is not so much death itself, when swift, sure, almost painless, which is terrible, as it is the agony, protracted, infinite, frightful, incalculable, which is inflicted for the passions, the pleasure, or the profit of men.
Were such sympathy as breathes through the _Book of Pity and of Death_ largely felt, all the needless cruelty inflicted by the human race, that mere carelessness and indifference of which the world is so full, would gradually be reduced until it might in time cease entirely. The cruelty of the rich to horses from mere want of thought alone is appalling. Few know or care how their stables are managed, what is the maximum of work which should be demanded of a horse, and what the torture inflicted by certain methods of breaking-in and harnessing and driving. Frequently are to be seen the advertisements by carriage-makers of ‘one-horse broughams, warranted for hill work and to carry four persons, with, if desired, a basket on roof for railway luggage.’ That these abominable loads are given to one horse continually there can be no doubt, as these announcements are frequent in all the newspapers, and never seem to elicit any wonder or censure. A shabby and vicious economy constantly gives, in this extravagant and spendthrift generation, a load to one poor horse which would certainly, in a generation earlier, and undoubtedly in a century ago, only have been given to a pair of horses or even to two pairs with postillions. Speed, also, being insisted on, no matter what load is dragged, the race of carriage-horses grows weaker and weaker in build and stamina. What woman, either, in any capital of the world, thinks for a moment of keeping her horses out in rain and snow, motionless for hours, whilst she is chattering in some warm and fragrant drawing-room, or dancing and flirting in some cotillon? No attention is ever given to the preferences, tastes and affections of animals, which yet are undoubtedly of great strength and tenacity in them, not only towards their owners, but often, also, towards their own kind. I am, at the present moment, driving a mare who was always driven with her sister, who died eighteen months ago. She does not forget her sister, and the stable companion given her instead she hates, and endeavours, with all her might, to kick and bite across the pole and in the stalls. I owned also a pony so attached to his comrade that they could live in the same loose-box together, and when the companion died, this pony was miserable, whinnied and neighed perpetually, lost health, and in a few months died also. In life he was the humble and devoted slave of his brother, would fondle him, clean him, follow him about in all directions, and show to him every testimony of affection possible in one creature to another. Yet such feelings as these, although very common in animals, are never remembered or considered for an instant, and animals of all kinds are sold from owner to owner, and hustled from place to place, with no more regard than if they were chairs and tables. What they suffer from strange voices, new homes, and unfamiliar treatment no one inquires, for no one cares. Convenience and profit are all which are considered. There is little or no remembrance of the idiosyncrasy of each creature. The ecstatic, ardent, nervous temperament of the dog; the timid, imaginative, impulsive mind of the horse; the shrinking shyness of the sheep, the attachment to place and people of the wildest or silliest creature when once kindly treated and long domesticated—all these things are never recollected or considered in dealing with them. Hard and fast rules are laid down for them, by which they, in their various ways, are forced to abide. Their natural instincts and desires are treated as crimes, and their longings and preferences are unnoticed or thwarted. Who ever thinks of or cares for the injustice and cruelty concentrated in that single phrase, ‘_The hounds were whipped off_,’ or its pendant, ‘_The fox was broken up_,’ etc., etc.? They are sentences so common, and so often used, that the horrible cruelty involved in them has altogether passed out of notice. Men and women grow up amidst cruelty, and are so accustomed to it, that they no more perceive it than they do the living organisms in the air they breathe or in the water they drink. Were it otherwise they could not walk down Ludgate Hill or up Montmartre without unbearable pain.
The grief of the ox driven from his pastures, of the cow divided from her calf, of the dog sent away from his master, of the lion torn from his desert or jungle, of the ape brought to die of nostalgia in cold climes, of the eagle chained down in inaction and gloom, of all the innumerable creatures taken from their natural life or their early associations, because the whim, the appetite, the caprice, the pleasure or the avarice of men is gratified or tempted by their pain, never moves anyone to pity. They are ‘subject-creatures’ in the human code, and what they may suffer, or may not suffer, is of no import; of less import even than the dying out of the Maoris, or the dwindling away of the Red Indian tribes, or the death of African porters on the caravan routes.
It is said that there is less cruelty now than in earlier times, because some public spectacles of cruelty have been put down in many countries. But since this age is the most exacting in small things, the most egotistic, the most silly, and the most nervous which the world has seen, it is probable that its increased interference with animal liberty, and its increased fear of them (not to mention its many increased means of animal destruction and torture, whether for sport or experiment) have diminished their freedom and multiplied their sacrifice. Freedom of choice and act is the first condition of animal as of human happiness. How many animals in a million have even relative freedom in any moment of their lives? No choice is ever permitted to them; and all their most natural instincts are denied or made subject to authority.
If old pictures and old drawings and etchings are any criterion of the modes of life of their own day, there can be no doubt that animals were much freer and much more intimately associated with men in earlier times than they are now. In their representations we see no banqueting scene without the handsome dogs stretched upon the rushes or before the daïs; no village fair without its merry mongrels running in and out between the rustics’ legs: no triumph of emperor or ceremonial of cardinal or pope without the splendid retriever and the jewel-collared hound: in the pictures of the Nativity the animals are always represented as friendly and interested spectators; in scenes from the lives of saints the introduction of animals wild and tame are constant; therefore, as we know that all these old painters and etchers depicted invariably what they saw around them, it is certain that they were accustomed to see in their daily haunts animals made part and parcel of men’s common life. Those animals were roughly treated, may be, as men themselves then were, but they were regarded as comrades and companions, not as alien creatures to be despised and unremembered except for use and profit. When the knight offered up his falcon his heart was rent, as in parting from a brother most beloved.
It is a fearful thought that were not animals considered to contribute to the convenience, the profit and the amusement of men, they would not be allowed to live for a half-century longer. They would be destroyed as ruthlessly as the buffalo of the United States of America has already been, and all birds would be exterminated as well without remorse. There is no honour, no decency shown in the treatment of animals and birds by men. When Menelek sent, as a gift to Carnot, his two tame young lions, who had been free in his rude African palace, and were only eighteen months old, the receiver of the gift could give them nothing better than a narrow cage in the Jardin des Plantes.
Even the lovely plumage and the great agricultural utility of the thistle-seed-eating goldfinch does not save him from being trapped, shot, poisoned, caged, as the ignorance, greed, or pleasure of his human foes may choose. Nothing is too large or too small, too noble or too innocent, to escape the rapacity, the brutality, and the egotism of men; and in the schools all the world over there is never a syllable said which could by suggestion or influence awaken the minds of the attendant pupils to a wider, gentler, and truer sense of the relations of animals and birds to the human race. Indeed, it would be almost ridiculous to attempt to do so when no princeling makes a royal visit or an Eastern tour without slaughtering, by hundreds and by thousands, tame birds and untamed beasts; when in every market and every shambles the most atrocious suffering is inflicted openly and often needlessly; when the imperial and royal persons find their chief diversion and distraction in rending the tender flesh of hares and pheasants, of elk and chamois with shot and bullet; and when the new scientific lexicons opened to them teach children how to make a white rabbit ‘blush’ by the severance of certain sensitive nerves, and bid them realise that in the pursuit of ‘knowledge,’ or even of fantastic conjecture, it is worthy and wise to inflict the most hellish tortures on the most helpless and harmless of sentient creatures. To sacrifice for experiment, or pleasure, or gain, all the other races of creation, is the doctrine taught by precept and example from the thrones the lecture-desks, the gunrooms, and the laboratory-tables of the world. It is not a doctrine which can make either a generous or a just generation. Youth is callous and selfish of itself, and by its natural instincts; and all the example and tuition given from palace, pulpit and professorial chair are such as to harden its callousness and confirm its selfishness.