Views and Opinions

by Ouida

‘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.