We found that he was at this time only four months old, and absolutely the most self-confident creature living. He thought he knew everything, and scorn was the very breath of his nostrils. Though his personal experience, compared to ours, was short, he felt behind him the centuries of Chinese civilisation. When his empire was elderly, our civilisation was in the cradle. This more than redressed the personal balance and left him to the good.
Confucius clearly did not care to make our acquaintance, but we felt it a privilege to be admitted to a greater intimacy with him.
Photograph by Messrs. Fall
“Scorn was the very breath of his nostrils.”
He comported himself at home with dignity, though not always with civility; he had none of the puppy abandon natural at his age. I tried to teach him to retrieve a piece of paper. He was bored, but he would not be taken at a disadvantage; so he walked slowly after the paper and gravely returned it to me. After I had persisted in this exercise for some time, he saw that it was meant for a game, and as he would not appear deficient in a sense of humour, he gambolled a little as he went after it.
Confucius never gave himself up to a passing emotion. I saw him once on the rocks with a real puppy, a spaniel puppy bigger than the Chow and probably older. It crouched before him sinuous and silly; it sprang up, gambolled round him and crouched again; it flew at a gallop past his nose and lay down on the other side of him. It exhausted itself in futilities, and gasped and panted with its efforts; and all this time the Chow surveyed it with a bright, contemptuous eye. When it was utterly worn out he got up and went away.
At last Confucius made a mistake. We saw him on the edge of the lake one day with something in his mouth which he swung and tossed from side to side. We called him, and with exultant pride he came towards us. The thing was soft and furry, and so long that it hindered him as he ran. He laid it down before us with jaunty tail and conceited eye—it was his first rabbit.
I had so often smarted under the sense of Confucius’ contempt that I was not prepared to be tender to his humiliation. I had not known what it would be like. He took corporal punishment with a fair amount of self-control, but he strained and howled at the indignity of a chain, and the shame of looking at that furry thing of which but just now he had been so proud. When he found that he could not get free, he sat down and thought over the situation until his tail uncurled.
In our walk that evening we were not preceded by a triumphant golden dog, with well-cocked tail and exalted nose, for Confucius followed behind, lost in thought. He did not stray for a moment into the bushes; no rustle of wild creatures could attract him. He was dreeing his weird.