The Black Dog, and Other Stories

by A. E. Coppard

But all this time the scholar was following after him, searching under the sun, and from here to there, calling out high and low, and questioning the travelling people: had they seen a simple man, an old man who had been but three times happy?—but not a one had seen him. He was cut to the heart with anxiety, with remorse, and with sorrow, for in a secret pocket of the coat he had given to Simon he had left—unbeknown, but he remembered it now—a wallet of sowskin, full of his own black sins, and nothing to distinguish them in any way from any other man’s. It was a dark load upon his soul that the poor man might be punished with an everlasting punishment for having such a tangle of wickedness on him and he unable to explain it. An old man like that, who had been happy but the three times! He enquired upon his right hand, and upon his left hand he enquired, but not a walking creature had seen him and the scholar was mad vexed with shame. Well, he went on, and on he went, but he did not get a lift on the way. He went howling and whistling like a man who would frighten all the wild creatures down into the earth, and at last he came by a back way to the borders of heaven. There he was, all of a day behind the man he was pursuing, in a great wilderness of trees. It began to rain, a soft meandering fall that you would hardly notice for rain, but the birds gave over their whistling and a strong silence grew everywhere, hushing things. His footfall as he stumbled through briars and the wild gardens of the wood seemed to thump the whole earth, and he could hear all the small noises like the tick of a beetle and the gasping of worms. In a grove of raspberry canes he stood like a stock with the wonder of that stillness. Clouds did not move, he could but feel the rain that he could not see. Each leaf hung stiff as if it was frozen, though it was summer. Not a living thing was to be seen, and the things that were not living were not more dead than those that lived but were so secret still. He picked a few berries from the canes, and from every bush as he pulled and shook it a butterfly or a moth dropped or fluttered away, quiet and most ghostly. “An old bit of a man”—he kept repeating in his mind—“with three bits of joy, an old bit of a man.”

Suddenly a turtle dove with clatter enough for a goose came to a tree beside him and spoke to him! A young dove, and it crooed on the tree branch, croo, croo, croo, and after each cadence it heaved the air into its lungs again with a tiny sob. Well, it would be no good telling what the bird said to the scholar, for none would believe it, they could not; but speak it did. After that the scholar tramped on, and on again, until he heard voices close ahead from a group of frisky boys who were chasing a small bird that could hardly fly. As the scholar came up with them one of the boys dashed out with his cap and fell upon the fledgling and thrust it in his pocket.

Now, by God, that scholar was angry, for a thing he liked was the notes of birds tossed from bush to bush like aery bubbles, and he wrangled with the boy until the little lad took the crumpled bird out of his pocket and flung it saucily in the air as you would fling a stone. Down dropped the bird into a gulley as if it was shot, and the boys fled off. The scholar peered into the gulley, but he could not see the young finch, not a feather of it. Then he jumped into the gulley and stood quiet, listening to hear it cheep, for sure a wing would be broken, or a foot. But nothing could he see, nothing, though he could hear hundreds of grasshoppers leaping among the dead leaves with a noise like pattering rain. So he turned away, but as he shifted his foot he saw beneath it the shattered bird: he had jumped upon it himself and destroyed it. He could not pick it up, it was bloody; he leaned over it, sighing: “Poor bird, poor bird, and is this your road to heaven? Or do you never share the heaven that you make?” There was a little noise then added to the leaping of the grasshoppers—it was the patter of tears he was shedding from himself. Well, when the scholar heard that he gave a good shout of laughter, and he was soon contented, forgetting the bird. He was for sitting down awhile but the thought of the old man Simon, with that sinful wallet—a rare budget of his own mad joys—urged him on till he came by the end of the wood, the rain ceasing, and beyond him the harmony of a flock roaming and bleating. Every ewe of the flock had numbers painted on it, that ran all the way up to ninety and nine.

Soon he came to the farmhouse and the kitchen and the odd sheep and a kind girl with a knot of hair as thick as a twist of bread. He told her the thing that was upon his conscience.

“Help me to come up with him, for I’m a day to the bad, and what shall I do? I gave him a coat, an old coat, and all my sins were hidden in it, but I’d forgotten them. He was an old quavering man with but three spells of happiness in the earthly world.” He begged her to direct him to the man Simon. The smiling girl gave him a good direction, the joyful scholar hurried out and on, and in a score of minutes he was peeping in the fine hut, with his hand on the latch of the half door, and Simon snoring in bed, a quiet decent snore.

“Simon!” he calls, but he didn’t wake. He shook him, but he didn’t budge. There was the coat hanging down from the iron peg, so he went to it and searched it and took out the wallet. But when he opened it—a black sowskin wallet it was, very strong with good straps—his sins were all escaped from it, not one little sin left in the least chink of the wallet, it was empty as a drum. The scholar knew something was wrong, for it was full once, and quite full.

“Well, now,” thought he, scratching his head and searching his mind, “did I make a mistake of it? Would they be by chance in the very coat that is on me now, for I’ve not another coat to my name?” He gave it a good strong search, in the patch pockets and the inside pockets and in the purse on his belt, but there was not the scrap of a tail of a sin of any sort, good or bad, in that coat, and all he found was a few cachous against the roughening of his voice.

“Did I make another mistake of it,” he says again, “and put those solemn sins in the fob of my fancy waistcoat? Where are they?” he shouts out.

Simon lifted his head out of sleeping for a moment. “It was that girl with the hair,” Simon said. “She took them from the wallet—they are not allowed in this place—and threw them in the pigwash.”

With that he was asleep again, snoring his decent snore.