A Cocker Recaptures His Youth: Flush: A Biography. Iv

I

SOON Flush became aware of the more profound differences that distinguish Pisa — it was in Pisa that they were now settled — from London. The dogs were different. In London he could scarcely trot round to the pillar box without meeting some pug dog, retriever, bulldog, mastiff, collie, Newfoundland, St. Bernard, fox terrier, or one of the seven famous families of the Spaniel tribe. To each he gave a different name; to each he gave a different rank. But here in Pisa, though dogs abounded, there were no ranks; ail — could it be possible? — were mongrels. As far as he could see, they were dogs merely — gray dogs, yellow dogs, brindled dogs, spotted dogs; but it was impossible to detect a single spaniel, collie, retriever, or mast iff among them.

Had the Kennel Club, then, no jurisdiction in Italy? Was the Spaniel Club unknown? Was there no law which decreed death to the topknot, which cherished the curled ear, protected the feathered foot, and insisted absolutely that the brow must be domed but not pointed? Apparently not. Flush felt himself like a Prince in exile. He was the sole aristocrat among a crowd of canaille. He was the only pure-bred cocker spaniel in the whole of Pisa.

For many years now Flush had been taught to consider himself an aristocrat. The law of the purple jar and of the chain had sunk deep into his soul. It is scarcely surprising that he was thrown off his balance. A Howard or a Cavendish set down among a swarm of natives in mud huts can hardly be blamed if now and again he remembers Chatsworth and muses regretfully over red carpets and galleries daubed with coronets as the sunset blazes down through painted windows. There was an element, it must be admitted, of the snob in Flush; Miss Mitford had detected it years ago; and the sentiment, subdued in London among equals and superiors, returned to him now that he felt himself unique. He became overbearing and impudent. ‘Flush has grown an absolute monarch and barks one distracted when he wants a door opened,’ Mrs. Browning wrote. ‘Robert,’ she continued, ‘declares that the said Flush considers him, my husband, to be created for the especial purpose of doing him service, and really it looks rather like it.’

‘Robert,’ ‘my husband’ — if Flush had changed, so had Miss Barrett. It was not merely that she called herself Mrs. Browning now, that she flashed the gold ring on her hand in the sun; she was changed, as much as Flush w as changed. Flush heard her say ‘Robert,’ ‘my husband,’ fifty times a day, and always with a ring of pride that made his hackles rise and his heart jump.

But it was not her language only that had changed. She was a different person altogether. Now, for instance, instead of sipping a thimbleful of port and complaining of the headache, she tossed off a tumbler of Chianti and slept the sounder. Then there was a flowering branch of oranges on the dinner table instead of one denuded, sour, yellow fruit. Then, instead of driving in a barouche landau to Regent’s Park, she pulled on her thick boots and scrambled over rocks. Instead of sitting in a carriage and rumbling along Oxford Street, they rattled off in a ramshackle fly to the borders of a lake and looked at mountains; and when she was tired she did not hail another cab; she sat on a stone and watched the lizards. She delighted in the sun; she delighted in the cold. She threw pine logs from the Duke’s forest on to the fire if it froze. They sat together in the crackling blaze and snuffed up the sharp, aromatic scent.

She was never tired of praising Italy at the expense of England. ‘Our poor English,’she exclaimed, ‘want educating into gladness. They want refining not in the fire but in the sunshine.’ Here in Italy were freedom and life and the joy that the sun breeds. One never saw men fighting, or heard them swearing; one never saw the Italians drunk — ‘the faces of those men’ in Shoreditch came again before her eyes. She was always comparing Pisa with London and saying how much she preferred Pisa. In the streets of Pisa pretty women could walk alone; and great ladies first emptied their own slops and then went to court ‘in a blaze of undeniable glory.’ Pisa with all its bells, its mongrels, its pine woods, was infinitely preferable to Wimpole Street and its mahogany doors and its shoulders of mutton. So Mrs. Browning every day, as she tossed off her Chianti and broke another orange from the branch, praised Italy, and lamented poor dull, damp, sunless, joyless, expensive, conventional England.

Wilson, it is true, for a time maintained her British balance. The memory of butlers and basements, of front doors and curtains, was not obliterated from her mind without an effort. She still had the conscience to walk out of a picture gallery ‘struck back by the indecency of the Venus.’ And later, when she was allowed, by the kindness of a friend, to peep through a door at the glories of the Grand Ducal court, she still loyally upheld the superior glory of St. James’s, ‘It . . . was all very shabby,’ she reported, ‘in comparison with our English court.’ But even as she gazed, the superb figure of one of the Grand Duke’s bodyguard caught her eye. Her fancy was fired; her judgment reeled; her standards toppled. Lily Wilson fell passionately in love with Signor Righi, the guardsman.

II

And just as Mrs. Browning was exploring her new freedom and delighting in the discoveries she made, so Flush too was making his discoveries and exploring his freedom. Before they left Pisa — and in the spring of 1847 they moved on to Florence — Flush had faced the curious and at first upsetting truth that the laws of the Kennel Club arc not universal. He had brought himself to face the fact that light topknots are not necessarily fatal. He had revised his code accordingly. He had acted, at first with some hesitation, upon his new conception of canine society. He was becoming daily more and more democratic. Even in Pisa, Mrs. Browning noticed, ‘he goes out every day and speaks Italian to the little dogs.’ Now in Florence the last threads of his old fetters fell from his back.

The moment of liberation came one day in the Cascine. As he raced over the grass ‘like emeralds’ with ‘the pheasants all alive and flying,’ Flush suddenly bethought him of Regent’s Park and its proclamation: ’Dogs must be led on chains.’ Where was ‘must’ now? Where were chains now? Where were park keepers and truncheons? Gone, with the dog stealers and Kennel Clubs and Spaniel Clubs of a corrupt aristocracy! Gone with four-wheelers and hansom cabs, with Whitechapel and Shoreditch! He ran, he raced; his coat flashed; his eyes blazed. He was the friend of all the world now. All dogs were his brothers. He had no need of a chain in this new world; he had no need of protection.

If Mr. Browning was late in going for his walk — he and Flush were the best of friends now — Flush boldly summoned him. He ‘stands up before him and barks in the most imperious manner possible,’ Mrs. Browning observed with some irritation, for her relations with Flush were far less emotional now than in the old days; she no longer needed his red fur and his bright eyes to give her what her own experience lacked; she had found Pan for herself among the vineyards and the olive trees; he was there too beside the pine fire of an evening.

So if Mr. Browning loitered, Flush stood up and barked; but if Mr. Browning preferred to stay at home and write, it did not matter. Flush was independent now. The wistarias and the laburnum were flowering over walls; the Judas trees were burning bright in the gardens; the wild tulips were sprinkled in the fields. Why should he wait? Off he ran by himself. He was his own master now. ‘ He goes out by himself, and stays hours together,’ Mrs. Browning wrote; ‘knows every street in Florence — will have his own way in everything. I am never frightened at his absence,’ she added, remembering with a smile those hours of agony in Wimpole Street and the gang waiting to snatch him up under the horses’ feet if she forgot his chain in Vere Street. Fear was unknown in Florence; there were no dog stealers here, and, she may have sighed, there were no fathers.

But, to speak candidly, it was not to stare at pictures, to penetrate into dark churches and look up at dim frescoes, that Flush scampered off when the door of Casa Guidi was left open. It was to enjoy something, it was in search of something denied him all these years. Once the hunting horn of Venus had blown its wild music over the Berkshire fields; he had loved Mr. Partridge’s dog; she had borne him a child. Now he heard the same voice pealing down the narrow streets of Florence, but more imperiously, more impetuously after all these years of denial.

Now Flush knew what men can never know — love pure, love entire; love that brings no train of care in its wake; that has no shame, no remorse; that is here, that is gone, as the bee on the flower is here and is gone. To-day the flower is a rose; to-morrow a lily; now it is the wild thistle on the moor, now the pouched and portentous orchid of the conservatory. So variously, so carelessly Flush embraced the spotted spaniel down the alley, and the brindled dog and the yellow dog — it did not matter which. To Flush it was all the same. He followed the horn wherever the horn blew and the wind wafted it. Love was all; love was enough.

No one blamed him for his escapades. Mr. Browning merely laughed — ‘Quite disgraceful for a respectable dog like him’ — when Flush returned very late at night or early the next morning. And Mrs. Browning laughed too, as Flush flung himself down on the bedroom floor and slept soundly upon the arms of the Guidi family inlaid in scagliola.

For at Casa Guidi the rooms were bare. All those draped objects of his cloistered and secluded days had vanished. The bed was a bed; the washstand was a washstand. Everything was itself and not another thing. The drawing-room was large and sprinkled with a few old carved chairs of ebony. Over the fire hung a mirror with two Cupids to hold the lights. Mrs. Browning herself had discarded her Indian shawls. She wore a cap made of some thin bright silk that her husband liked. Her hair was brushed in a new way. And when the sun had gone down and the shutters had been raised, she paced the balcony dressed in thin white muslin. She loved to sit there looking, listening, watching the people in the street.

III

They had not been long in Florence before one night there was such a shouting and trampling in the street that they ran to the balcony to see what was happening. A vast crowd was surging underneath. They were carrying banners and shouting and singing. All the windows were full of faces; all the balconies were full of figures. The people in the windows were tossing flowers and laurel leaves on to the people in the street; and the people in the street — grave men, gay young women — were embracing each other, and raising their babies high in their arms to the people in the balconies. Mr. and Mrs. Browning leant over the balustrade and clapped and clapped. Banner after banner passed. The torches flashed their light on them, ‘liberty’ was written on one; ‘The Union of Italy’ on another; and ‘The Memory of the Martyrs’ and ‘Viva Pio Nono’ and ‘Viva Leopoldo Secondo’ — for three and a half hours the banners went by and the people cheered and Mr. and Mrs. Browning stood with six candles burning on the balcony, waving and waving.

For some time Flush too, stretched between them with his paws over the sill, did his best to rejoice. But at last — he could not conceal it — he yawned. ‘He confessed at last that he thought they were rather long about it,’ Mr. Browning observed. A weariness, a doubt, a ribaldry, possessed him. What was it all for? he asked himself. Who was this Grand Duke and what had he promised? Why were they all so absurdly excited? — for the ardor of Mrs. Browning, waving and waving, as the banners passed, somehow annoyed him. Such enthusiasm for a Grand Duke was exaggerated, he felt.

And then, as the Grand Duke passed, he became aware that a little dog had stopped at the door. Seizing his chance when Mrs. Browning was more than usually enthusiastic, he slipped down from the balcony and made off. Through the banners and the crowds he followed her. She fled further and further into the heart of Florence. Far away sounded the shouting; the cheers of the people died down into silence. The lights of the torches were extinguished. Only a star or two shone in the ripples of the Arno where Flush lay with the spotted spaniel by his side, couched in the shell of an old basket on the mud. There, tranced in love, they lay till the sun rose in the sky.

Flush did not return until nine next morning and Mrs. Browning greeted him rather ironically — he might at least, she thought, have remembered that it was the first anniversary of her wedding day. But she supposed ‘he had been very much amused.’ It was true. While she had found an inexplicable satisfaction in the trampling of forty thousand people, in the promises of Grand Dukes and the windy aspirations of banners, Flush infinitely preferred the little dog at the door.

IV

It cannot be doubted that Mrs. Browning and Flush were reaching different conclusions in their voyages of discovery — she a Grand Duke, he a spotted spaniel; and yet the tie which bound t hem together was undeniably still binding. No sooner had Flush, as he thought, abolished ‘must’ and raced free through the emerald grass of the Cascine gardens where the pheasants fluttered red and gold, than he felt a check. Once more he was thrown back on his haunches. At first it was nothing — a hint merely — only that Mrs. Browning in the spring of 1849 became busy with her needle. And yet there was something in the sight that gave Flush pause. She was not used to sew.

He noted that Wilson moved a bed, and she opened a drawer to put white clothes inside it. Raising his head from the tiled floor, he looked, he listened attentively. Was something once more about to happen? He looked anxiously for signs of trunks and packing. Was there to be another flight, another escape? But there is nothing to be afraid of here, he assured Mrs. Browning. They need neither of them worry themselves here in Florence about Mr. Taylor and Mr. Barrett and dogs’ heads tied up in brown paper parcels. Yet he was puzzled. The signs of change, as he read them, did not signify escape. They signified, much more mysteriously, expectance. Something was coming, he felt, as he watched Mrs. Browning so composedly, yet silently and steadfastly, stitching, in her low chair; something was coming that was inevitable, yet to be dreaded.

As the weeks went on, Mrs. Browning scarcely left the house. She seemed, as she sat there, to anticipate some tremendous event. Was she about to encounter somebody, like the ruffian Taylor, and let him rain blows on her alone and unaided? Flush quivered with apprehension at the thought. Certainly she had no intention of running away. No boxes were packed. There was no sign that anybody was about to leave the house — rather there were signs that somebody was coming. In his jealous anxiety Flush scrutinized each newcomer. There were many now, — Miss Blagden, Mr. Landor, Miss Hattie Hosmer, Mr. Lytton, — ever so many ladies and gentlemen now came to Casa Guidi. Day after day Mrs. Browning sat there in her armchair quietly stitching.

Then one day early in March Mrs. Browning did not appear in the sitting room at all. Other people came in and out; Mr. Browning and Wilson came in and out; and they came in and out so distractedly that Flush hid himself under the sofa. People were trampling up and down stairs, running and calling in low whispers and muted unfamiliar voices. They were moving upstairs in the bedroom. He crept further and further under the shadow of the sofa. He knew in every fibre of his body that some change was taking place — some awful event was happening. So he had waited, years ago, for the step of the hooded man on the staircase. And at last the door had opened and Miss Barrett had cried, ‘Mr. Browning!’ Who was coming now? What hooded man ?

As the day wore on, he was left completely alone. He lay in the drawingroom without food or drink; a thousand spotted spaniels might have sniffed at the door and he would have shrunk away from them. For as the hours passed he had an overwhelming sense that something was thrusting its way into the house from outside. He peeped out from beneath the flounces. The cupids holding the lights, the ebony chests, the French chairs, all looked thrust asunder; he himself felt as if he were being pushed up against the wall to make room for something that he could not see. Once he saw Mr. Browning, but he was not the same Mr. Browning; once Wilson, but she was changed too — as if t hey were both seeing the invisible presence that he felt.

At last Wilson, looking very flushed but triumphant, took him in her arms and carried him upstairs. They entered the bedroom. There was a faint bleating in the shadowed room — something waved on the pillow. It was a live animal. Independently of them all, without the street door being opened, out of herself in the room, alone, Mrs. Browning had become two people. The horrid thing waved and mewed by her side. Torn with rage and jealousy and some deep disgust that he could not hide, Flush struggled himself free and rushed downstairs.

Wilson and Mrs. Browning called him back; they tempted him with caresses; they offered him titbits; but it was useless. He cowered away from the disgusting sight, wherever there was a shadowy sofa or a dark corner. ‘For a whole fortnight he fell into deep melancholy and was proof against all attentions lavished on him’ — so Mrs. Browning, in the midst of all her other distractions, was forced to notice. And when we take, as we must, human minutes and hours and drop them into a dog’s mind and see how the minutes swell into hours and the hours into days, we shall not exaggerate if we conclude that Flush’s ‘deep melancholy’ lasted six full months by the human clock. Many men and women have forgotten their hates and their loves in less.

V

But Flush was no longer the unschooled, untrained dog of Wimpole Street days. He had learnt his lesson. Wilson had struck him. He had been forced to swallow cakes that were stale when he might have eaten them fresh. He had sworn to love and not to bite. All this churned in his mind as he lay under the sofa; and at last he issued out.

Again he was rewarded. At first, it must be admitted, the reward was insubstantial if not positively disagreeable. The baby was set on his back, and Flush had to trot about with the baby pulling his ears. But he submitted with such grace, only turning round, when his ears were pulled, ‘to kiss the little bare, dimpled feet,’ that before three months had passed this helpless, weak, puling, mewling lump had somehow come to prefer him, ‘on the whole’ — so Mrs. Browning said — to other people.

And then, strangely enough, Flush found that he came to return the baby’s affection. Did they not share something in common — did not the baby somehow resemble Flush in many ways? Did they not hold the same views, the same tastes? For instance, in the matter of scenery. To Flush all scenery was detestable. He had never, all these years, learnt to focus his eyes upon mountains. When they took him to Vallombrosa, all the splendor of its woods had merely bored him.

Now again, when the baby was a few months old, they went on another of those long expeditions in a traveling carriage. The baby lay on his nurse’s lap; Flush sat on Mrs. Browning’s knee. The carriage went on and on and on, painfully climbing the heights of the Apennines. Mrs. Browning was almost beside herself with delight. She could scarcely tear herself from the window. She could not find words enough in the whole of the English language to express what she felt. But the baby and Flush felt none of this stimulus, none of this inadequacy. Both were silent. Flush drew ‘in his head from the window and did n’t consider it worth looking at. . . . He has a supreme contempt for trees and hills or anything of that kind,’ Mrs. Browning concluded. The carriage rumbled on. Flush slept and the baby slept.

Then at last there were lights and houses and men and women passing the windows. They had entered a village. Instantly Flush was all attention. ‘His eyes were starting out of his head with eagerness; he looked east, he looked west, you would conclude that he was taking notes or preparing them.’ It was the human scene that stirred him, not beauty. Beauty had to be crystallized into a green or violet powder and puffed by some celestial syringe down the fringed channels that lay behind his nostrils before it touched Flush’s senses; and then it issued not in words, but in a silent rapture. Where Mrs. Browning saw, he smelt; where she wrote, he snuffed.

VI

Here, then, the biographer must perforce come to a pause. Where two or three thousand words are insufficient for what we see, — and Mrs. Browning had to admit herself beaten by the Apennines; ‘of these things I cannot give you any idea,’ she admitted, — there are at most two words and one half for what we smell. The human nose is practically nonexistent. The greatest poets in the world have smelt nothing but roses on the one hand and dung on the other. The infinite gradations that lie between are unrecorded.

Yet it was in the world of smell that Flush mostly lived. Love was chiefly smell; form and color were smell; music and architecture, law, politics, and science, were smell. To him religion itself, one might make bold to say, was smell. To describe his simplest experience with the daily chop or biscuit is beyond our power. Not even Mr. Swinburne could have said what the smell of Wimpole Street meant to Flush on a hot afternoon in June. As for describing the smell of a spaniel mixed with the smell of torches, laurels, incense, banners, wax candles, trousers, and a garland of rose leaves crushed by a satin heel that has been laid up in camphor, perhaps Shakespeare, had he paused in the middle of writing Antony and Cleopatra — but Shakespeare did not pause.

Confessing our inadequacy, then, we can but note that to Flush Italy, in these the fullest, the freest, the happiest years of his life, meant mainly a succession of smells. Love, it must be supposed, was gradually losing its appeal. Smell remained.

Now that they were established in Casa Guidi again, all had their avocations. Mr. Browning wrote regularly in one room, Mrs. Browning wrote regularly in another. The baby played in the nursery. But Flush wandered off into the streets of Florence to enjoy the rapture of smell. He threaded his path through main streets and back streets, through squares and alleys, by smell. He nosed his way from smell to smell; the rough, the smooth, the dark, the golden. He went in and out, up and down, where they beat brass, where they bake bread, where the women sit combing their hair, where the bird cages are piled high on the causeway, where the wine spills itself in dark red stains on the pavement, where leather smells, and harness and garlic, where cloth is beaten, where vine leaves tremble, where men sit and drink and spit and dice — he ran in and out, always with his nose to the ground, drinking in the essence; or with his nose in the air, vibrating with the aroma. He slept in this hot patch of sun — how sun made the stone reek! He sought that tunnel of shade — how acid shade made the stone smell! He devoured whole bunches of ripe grapes largely because of their purple smell; he chewed and spat out whatever tough relic of goat or macaroni the Italian housewife had thrown from the balcony — goat and macaroni were raucous smells, crimson smells. He followed the swooning sweetness of incense into the violet intricacies of dark cathedrals; and, sniffing, tried to lap the gold on the window-stained tomb.

Nor was his sense of touch much less acute. He knew Florence in its marmoreal smoothness and in its gritty and cobbled roughness. Hoary folds of drapery, smooth fingers and feet of stone, received the lick of his tongue, the quiver of his shivering snout. Upon the infinitely sensitive pads of his feet he took the clear stamp of proud Latin inscriptions. In short, he knew Florence as no human being has ever known it; as Ruskin never knew it, or George Eliot either. He knew it as only the dumb know. Not a single one of his myriad sensations ever submitted itself to the deformity of words.

VII

Though it would be pleasant for the biographer to infer that Flush’s life in late middle age was an orgy of pleasure transcending all description; to maintain that while the baby day by day picked up a new word, and thus removed sensation a little further beyond reach, Flush was fated to remain forever in a Paradise where essences exist in their utmost purity, and the naked soul of things presses on the naked nerve — it would not be true. Flush lived in no such Paradise. The spirit, ranging from star to star, the bird whose furthest flight over polar snows or tropical forests never brings it within sight of human houses and their curling wood smoke, may, for anything we know, enjoy such immunity, such integrity of bliss. But Flush had lain upon human knees and heard men’s voices. His flesh was veined with human passions, he knew all grades of jealousy, anger, and despair.

Now in summer he was scourged by fleas. With a cruel irony the sun that ripened the grapes brought also the fleas. ‘Savonarola’s martyrdom here in Florence,’ wrote Mrs. Browning, ‘is scarcely worse than Flush’s in the summer.’ Fleas leapt to life in every corner of the Florentine houses; they skipped and hopped out of every cranny of the old stone; out of every fold of old tapestry; out of every cloak, hat, and blanket. They nested in Flush’s fur. They bit their way into the thickest of his coat. He scratched and tore. His health suffered; he became morose, thin, and feverish.

Miss Mitford was appealed to. What remedy was there, Mrs. Browning wrote anxiously, for fleas? Miss Mitford, still sitting in her greenhouse at Three Mile Cross, still writing tragedies, put down her pen and looked up her old prescriptions — what Mayflower had taken, what Rosebud. But the fleas of Reading die at a pinch. The fleas of Florence are red and virile. To them Miss Mitford’s powders might well have been snuff. In despair Mr. and Mrs. Browning went down on their knees beside a pail of water and did their best to exorcise the pest with soap and scrubbing brush. It was in vain.

At last one day Mr. Browning, taking Flush for a walk, noticed people pointing; he heard one man lay a finger to his nose and whisper, ‘La rogna’ (mange). As by this time ‘Robert is as fond of Flush as I am,’ to take his walk of an afternoon with a friend and to hear him thus stigmatized was intolerable. Robert, his wife wrote, ‘wouldn’t bear it any longer.’ Only one remedy remained, but it was a remedy that was almost as drastic as the disease itself. However democratic Flush had become and careless of the signs of rank, he still remained what Philip Sidney had called him, a gentleman by birth. He carried his pedigree on his back. His coat meant to him what a gold watch inscribed with the family arms means to an impoverished Squire, whose broad acres have shrunk to that single circle. It was the coat that Mr. Browning now proposed to sacrifice. He called Flush to him and, ‘taking a pair of scissors, clipped him all over into the likeness of a lion.’

As Robert Browning snipped, as the insignia of a cocker spaniel fell to the floor, as the travesty of quite a different animal rose round his neck, Flush felt himself emasculated, diminished, ashamed. What am I now, he thought, gazing into the glass. And the glass replied with the brutal sincerity of glasses, ‘You are nothing.’ He was nobody. Certainly he was no longer a cocker spaniel.

But as he gazed, his ears, bald now, and uncurled, seemed to twitch. It was as if the potent spirits of truth and laughter were whispering in them. To be nothing — is that not, after all, the most satisfactory state in the whole world? He looked again. There was his ruff. To caricature the pomposity of those who claim that they are something — was that not in its way a career? Anyhow, settle the matter as he might, there could be no doubt that he was free from fleas. He shook his ruff. He danced on his nude, attenuated legs. His spirits rose.

So might a great beauty, rising from a bed of sickness and finding her face eternally disfigured, make a bonfire of clothes and cosmetics, and laugh with joy to think that she need never look in the glass again or dread a lover’s coolness or a rival’s beauty. So might a clergyman cased for twenty years in starch and broadcloth cast his collar into the dustbin and snatch the works of Voltaire from the cupboard. So Flush scampered off, clipped all over into the likeness of a lion, but free from fleas.

’Flush,’ Mrs. Browning wrote to her sister, ‘is wise.’ She was thinking perhaps how the Greeks say that happiness is only to be reached through suffering. The true philosopher is he who has lost his coat, it may be, but is free from fleas.

VIII

But Flush had not long to wait before his newly won philosophy was put to the test. Again in the summer of 1852 there were signs at Casa Guidi of one of those crises which, gathering soundlessly as a drawer opens or as a piece of string is left dangling from a box, are to a dog as menacing as the clouds which foretell lightning to a shepherd or as the rumors which foretell war to a statesman. Another change was indicated, another journey. Well, what of that?

Trunks were hauled down and corded. The baby was carried out in his nurse’s arms. Mr. and Mrs. Browning appeared dressed for traveling. There was a cab at the door. Flush waited philosophically in the hall. When they were ready he was ready.

Now that they were all seated in the carriage, with one bound Flush sprang lightly in after them. To Venice, to Rome, to Paris — where were they going? All countries were equal to him now; all men were his brothers. He had learnt that lesson at last. But when finally he emerged from obscurity he had need of all his philosophy — he was in London.

Houses spread to right and left in sharp avenues of regular brick. The pavement was cold and hard beneath his feet. And there, issuing from a mahogany door with a brass knocker, was a lady bountifully appareled in flowing robes of purple plush. A light wreath starred with flowers rested on her hair. Gathering her draperies about her, she glanced disdainfully up and down the street while a footman, stooping, let down the step of the barouche landau. All Welbeck Street — for Welbeck Street it was — was wrapped in a splendor of red light — a light not clear and fierce like the Italian light, but tawny and troubled with the dust of a million wheels, with the trampling of a million hoofs.

The London season was at its height. A pall of sound, a cloud of interwoven humming, fell over the city in one confluent growl. By came a majestic deerhound led on a chain by a page. A policeman, swinging past with rhythmical stride, cast his bull’seye from side to side. Odors of stew, odors of beef, odors of basting, odors of beef and cabbage, rose from a thousand basements. A flunky in livery dropped a letter into a box.

Overcome by the magnificence of the metropolis, Flush paused for a moment with his foot on the doorstep. Wilson paused too. How paltry it seemed now, the civilization of Italy, its courts and its revolutions, its Grand Dukes and their bodyguards! She thanked God, as the policeman passed, that she had not married Signor Righi after all. And then a sinister figure issued from the public house at the corner. A man leered. With one spring, Flush bolted indoors.

For some weeks now he was closely confined to a lodging-house sitting room in Welbeck Street. For confinement was still necessary. The cholera had come, and it is true that the cholera had done something to improve the condition of the rookeries; but not enough, for still dogs were stolen and the dogs of Wimpole Street had still to be led on chains.

Flush went into society, of course. He met dogs at the pillar box and outside the public house; and they welcomed him back with the inherent good breeding of their kind. Just as an English peer who has lived a lifetime in the East and contracted some of the habits of the natives — rumor hints, indeed, that he has turned Moslem and had a son by a Chinese washerwoman — finds, when he takes his place at Court, that old friends are ready enough to overlook these aberrations and he is asked to Chatsworth, though no mention is made of his wife and it is taken for granted that he will join the family at prayers, so the pointers and setters of Wimpole Street welcomed Flush among them and overlooked the condition of his coat.

But there was a certain morbidity, it seemed to Flush now, among the dogs of London. It was common knowledge that Mrs. Carlyle’s dog Nero had leapt from a top-story window with the intention of committing suicide. He had found the strain of life in Cheyne Row intolerable, it was said. Indeed Flush could well believe it now that he was back again in Welbeck Street. The confinement, the crowd of little objects, the black beetles by night, the bluebottles by day, the lingering odors of mutton, the perpetual presence on the sideboard of bananas — all this, together with the proximity of several men and women, heavily dressed and not often or indeed completely washed, wrought on his temper and strained his nerves. He lay for hours under the lodging-house chiffonier. It was impossible to run out of doors. The front door was always locked. He had to wait for somebody to lead him on a chain.

IX

Two incidents alone broke the monotony of the weeks he spent in London. One day late that summer the Brownings went to visit the Reverend Charles Kingsley at Farnham. In Italy the earth would have been bare and hard as brick. Fleas would have been rampant. Languidly one would have dragged oneself from shadow to shadow, grateful even for the bar of shade cast by the raised arm of one of Donatello’s statues. But here at Farnham there were fields of green grass; there were pools of blue water; there were woods that murmured, and turf so fine that the paws bounced as they touched it.

The Brownings and the Kingsleys spent the day together. And once more, as Flush trotted behind them, the old trumpets blew; the old ecstasy returned — was it hare or was it fox? Flush tore over the heaths of Surrey as he had not run since the old days at Three Mile Cross. A pheasant went rocketing up in a spurt of purple and gold. He had almost shut his teeth on the tail feathers when a voice rang out. A whip cracked. Was it the Reverend Charles Kingsley who called him sharply to heel ? At any rate he ran no more. The woods of Farnham were strictly preserved.

A few days later he was lying in the sitting room at Welbeck Street, when Mrs. Browning came in dressed for walking and called him from under the chiffonier. She slipped the chain on to his collar, and, for the first time since September 1846, they walked up Wimpole Street together. When they came to the door of number fifty they stopped as of old. Just as of old they waited. The butler just as of old was very slow in coming. At length the door opened. Could that be Catiline lying couched on the mat? The old toothless dog yawned and stretched himself and took no further notice.

Upstairs they crept as stealthily, as silently, as once before they had come down them. Very quietly, opening the doors as if she were afraid of what she might see there, Mrs. Browning went from room to room. A gloom descended upon her as she looked. ‘They seemed to me,’ she wrote, ‘smaller and darker, somehow, and the furniture wanted fitness and convenience.’ The ivy was still tapping on the back bedroom windowpane. The painted blind still obscured the houses. Nothing had been changed. Nothing had happened all these years. So she went from room to room, sadly remembering.

But long before she had finished her inspection Flush was in a fever of anxiety. Suppose Mr. Barrett were to come in and find them? Suppose that with one frown, with one stare, he turned the key and locked them into the back bedroom forever? At last Mrs. Browning shut the doors and went downstairs again very quietly. Yes, she said, it seemed to her that the house wanted cleaning.

After that, Flush had only one wish left in him — to leave London, to leave England forever. He was not happy until he found himself on the deck of the Channel steamer crossing to France. It was a rough passage. The crossing, indeed, took eight hours. As the steamer tossed and wallowed, Flush turned over in his mind a tumult of mixed memories — of ladies in purple plush, of ragged men with bags; of Regent’s Park, and Queen Victoria bowling past with outriders; of the sweetness of English grass and the rankness of English pavements — all this passed through his mind as he lay on deck; and, looking up, he caught sight of a stem, tall man leaning over the rail.

‘Mr, Carlyle!’ he heard Mrs. Browning exclaim; whereupon — the crossing, it must be remembered, was a bad one — Flush was violently sick. Sailors came running with pails and mops. ‘He was ordered off the deck on purpose, poor dog,’ said Mrs. Browning. For the deck was still English; dogs must not be sick on decks. Such was his last salute to the shores of his native land.

X

Flush was growing an old dog now. The journey to England and all the memories it revived had undoubtedly tired him. It was noticed that he sought the shade rather than the sun on his return, though the shade of Florence was hotter than the sun of Wimpole Street. Stretched beneath a statue, couched under the lip of a fountain for the sake of the few drops that spurted now and then on to his coat, he would lie dozing by the hour. The young dogs would come about him. To them he would tell his stories of Whitechapel and Wimpole Street; he would describe the smell of clover and the smell of Oxford Street; he would rehearse his memories of one revolution and another — how Grand Dukes had come and Grand Dukes had gone; but the spotted spaniel down the alley on the left — she goes on forever, he would say.

Then violent Mr. Landor would hurry by and shake his fist at him in mock fury; kind Miss Isa Blagden would pause and take a sugared biscuit from her reticule. The peasant women in the market place made him a bed of leaves in the shadow of their baskets and tossed a bunch of grapes now and then to the red dog from Casa Guidi. He was known, he was liked, by all Florence — gentle and simple, dogs and men.

But he was growing an old dog now, and he tended more and more to lie not even under the fountain — for the cobbles were hard to his old bones — but in Mrs. Browning’s bedroom, where the arms of the Guidi family made a smooth patch of scagliola on the floor, or in the drawing-room under the shadow of the drawing-room table.

One day shortly after his return from London he was stretched there fast asleep. The deep and dreamless sleep of old age was heavy on him. Indeed to-day his sleep was even deeper than usual, for as he slept the darkness seemed to thicken round him. If he dreamt at all, he dreamt that he was sleeping in the heart of a primeval forest, shut from the light of the sun, shut from the voices of mankind, though now and again as he slept he dreamt that he heard the sleepy chirp of a dreaming bird, or, as the wind tossed the branches, the mellow chuckle of a brooding monkey.

Then suddenly the branches parted; the light broke in — here, there, in dazzling shafts. Monkeys chattered; birds rose crying and calling in alarm. He started to his feet wide awake. An astonishing commotion was all round him. He had fallen asleep between the bare legs of an ordinary drawing-room table. Now he was hemmed in by the billowing of skirts and the heaving of trousers. The table itself, moreover, was swaying violently from side to side. He did not know which way to run. What on earth was happening? What in Heaven’s name possessed the drawing-room table? He lifted up his voice in a prolonged howl of interrogation.

To Flush’s question no satisfactory answer can here be given. A few facts, and those of the baldest, are all that can be supplied. Briefly, then, it would appear that Mrs. Browning had become interested in investigating the spirits which reside in the legs of tables. ‘From the Legation to the English chemists,’ she wrote, ‘people are “serving tables” . . . everywhere. When people gather round a table it is n’t to play whist.’ No, it was to decipher messages conveyed by the legs. ‘You know I am rather a visionary and inclined to knock round at all the doors of the present world to try to get out,’ she wrote. So she had summoned the faithful to Casa Guidi; and there they sat with their hands on the drawingroom table, trying to get out.

Flush started up in the wildest apprehension. The skirts and the trousers were billowing round him; the table was standing on one leg. But whatever the ladies and gentlemen round the table could hear and see, Flush could hear and see nothing. True, the table was standing on one leg, but so tables will if you lean hard on one side. He had upset tables himself and been well scolded for it.

But now there was Mrs. Browning with her great eyes wide open staring as if she saw somet hing marvelous outside. Flush rushed to the balcony and looked over. Was there another Grand Duke riding by with banners and torches? Flush could see nothing but an old beggar woman crouched at the corner of the street over her basket of melons. Yet clearly Mrs. Browning saw something — clearly she saw something that was very wonderful. So in the old Wimpole Street days she had wept once without any reason that he could see; and again she had laughed, holding up a blotted scrawl. But this was different. There was something in her look now that frightened him. There was something in the room, or in the table, or in the petticoats and trousers, that he disliked exceedingly.

XI

As the weeks passed, this preoccupation of Mrs. Browning’s with the invisible grew upon her. It might be a fine, hot day, but instead of watching the lizards slide in and out of the stones, she would sit at the table; it might be a dark, quiet night, but instead of reading in her book, or passing her hand over paper, she would call, if Mr. Browning were out, for Wilson, and Wilson would come yawning. Then they would sit at the table together, until that article of furniture, whose chief function it was to provide shade, kicked on the floor, and Mrs. Browning exclaimed that it was telling Wilson that she would soon be ill. Wilson replied that she was only sleepy. But soon Wilson herself, the implacable, the upright, the British, screamed and went into a faint and Mrs. Browning was rushing hither and thither to find ‘the hygienic vinegar.’ That, to Flush, was a highly unpleasant way of spending a quiet evening. Better far to sit and read one’s book.

Undoubtedly the suspense, the intangible but disagreeable odor, the kicks and the screams and the vinegar, told upon Flush’s nerves. It was all very well for the baby, Penini, to pray ‘that Flush’s hair may grow’; that was an aspiration that Flush could understand. But this form of prayer which required the presence of evil-smelling, seedy-looking men, and the antics of a piece of apparently solid mahogany, angered him much as they angered that robust, sensible, well-dressed man, his master.

But far worse than any smell to Flush, far worse than any antics, was the look on Mrs. Browning’s face when she gazed out of the window as if she were seeing something that was invisible. But there was nothing. Flush stood himself in front of her. She looked through him as if he were not there. That was the crudest look she had ever given him. It was worse than her cold anger when he bit Mr. Browning in the leg; worse than her sardonic laughter when the door shut upon his paw in Regent’s Park. There were moments, indeed, when he regretted Wimpole Street and its tables. The tables at number fifty had never danced upon their legs. The little table with the ring round it that held her precious ornaments had always stood perfectly still.

In those far-off days he had only to leap on her sofa and Miss Barrett started wide awake and looked at him. Now, once more, he leapt on to her sofa. But she did not notice him. She was writing. She paid no attention to Flush. She went on writing—‘also, at the request of the medium, the spiritual hands took from the table a garland which lay there, and placed it upon my head. The particular hand which did this was of the largest human size, as white as snow, and very beautiful. It was as near to me as this hand I write with, and I saw it as distinctly.’ Flush pawed her sharply. She looked through him as if he were invisible. He leapt off the sofa and ran downstairs into the street.

XII

It was a blazing hot afternoon. The old beggar woman at the corner had fallen asleep over her melons. The sun seemed droning in the air. Keeping to the shady side of the street, Flush trotted along the well-known ways to the market place. The whole square was brilliant with awnings and stalls and bright umbrellas. The market women were sitting beside baskets of fruit; pigeons were fluttering, bells were pealing, whips were cracking. The many-colored mongrels of Florence were running in and out sniffing and pawing. All was as brisk as a beehive, and as hot as an oven.

Flush sought the shade. He flung himself down beside his friend Caterina, under the shadow of her great basket. A brown jar of red and yellow flowers cast a shadow beside it. Above them a statue, holding his right arm outstretched, deepened the shade to violet. Flush lay there in the cool, watching the young dogs busy with their own affairs. They were snarling and biting; stretching and tumbling in all the abandonment of youthful joy. They were chasing each other in and out, round and round, as he had once chased the spotted spaniel in the alley.

His thoughts turned to Reading for a moment — to Mr. Partridge’s spaniel, to his first love, to the ecstasies and innocences of youth. Well, he had had his day. He did not grudge them theirs. He had found the world a pleasant place to live in. He had no quarrel with it now. The market woman scratched him behind the ear. She had often cuffed him for stealing a grape, or for some other misdemeanor; but he was old now; and she was old. He guarded her melons and she scratched his ear. So she knitted and he dozed. The flies buzzed on the great pink melon that had been sliced open to show its flesh.

The sun burnt deliciously through the lily leaves and through the green and white umbrella. The marble statue tempered its heat to a champagne freshness. Flush lay and let it burn through his fur to the naked skin. And when he was roasted on one side he turned over and let the sun roast the other. All the time the market people were chattering and bargaining; men and women were passing; they were stopping and fingering the vegetables and the fruit. There was a perpetual buzz and hum of human voices such as Flush loved to listen to.

After a time he drowsed off under the shadow of the lilies. He slept as dogs sleep when they are dreaming. Now his legs twitched — was he dreaming that he hunted rabbits in Spain? Was he coursing up a hot hillside with dark men shouting ‘Span! Span!’ Then he lay still again. And now he yelped, quickly, softly, many times in succession. Perhaps he heard Mr. Mitford egging his greyhounds on to the hunt at Reading. Then his tail wagged sheepishly, as if old Miss Mitford had cried, ‘Bad dog! Bad dog!’ as he slunk back to her where she stood among the turnips waving her umbrella. And then he lay for a time snoring, wrapped in the deep sleep of happy old age, dreaming of nothing at all.

Suddenly every muscle in his body twitched. He woke with a violent start. Where did he think he was? In Whitechapel among the ruffians? Was the knife at his throat again?

Whatever it was, he woke from his dream in a state of terror. He made off as if he were flying to safety, as if he were seeking refuge. The market women laughed and pelted him with rotten grapes and called him back. He took no notice. Cart wheels almost crushed him as he darted through the streets — the men standing up to drive cursed him and flicked him with their whips. Half-naked children threw pebbles at him and shouted, ‘Matta! Matta!’ as he fled past. Their mothers ran to the door and caught them back in alarm. Had he, then, gone mad? Had the sun turned his brain? Or had he once more heard the hunting horn of Venus? Or had one of the American rapping spirits, one of the spirits that live in table legs, got possession of him at last?

Whatever it was, he went in a bee line up one street and down another until he reached the door of Casa Guidi. He made his way straight upstairs and went straight into the drawingroom.

Mrs. Browning was lying, reading, on the sofa. She looked up, startled, as he came in. Was it a spirit? No, it was not a spirit — it was only Flush. She laughed. Then, as he leapt on to the sofa and thrust his face into hers, the words of her own poem came into her mind: —

She had written that poem one day years ago in Wimpole Street when she was very unhappy. Years had passed; now she was happy. She was growing old now, and so was Flush, She bent down over him for a moment. Her face, with its wide mouth and its great eyes and its heavy curls, was still oddly like his. Broken asunder, yet made in the same mould, each, perhaps, was meant to complete what was dormant in the other. Mrs. Browning went on reading. Then she looked at Flush again. But he did not look at her. An extraordinary change had come over him. ‘Flush!’ she cried. But he was silent. He had been alive; he was now dead. That was all. The drawing-room table, strangely enough, stood perfectly still.

(The End)