There he sits now, in yokel-like, ungraceful attitude, in the very
middle of the road, and stares after my retreating form, down the
whole long vista. If I turn my head, he pricks up his ears, but
does not follow me. Nor would he follow me if I should call or
whistle—he knows this would all be to no purpose. Even from the
very end of the avenue I can see him still sitting there, a small,
dark, awkward shape in the middle of the highroad. A pang goes
through my heart—I mount the tram with an uneasy conscience. He
has waited so long and so patiently—and who does not know what
torture waiting can be! His whole life is nothing but waiting—for
the next walk in the open—and this waiting begins as soon as he
has rested after his last run. During the night, too, he waits,
for his slumbers are distributed throughout the entire twenty-four
hours of the sun’s revolution, and many a siesta upon the smooth
lawn, whilst the sun beats upon his coat, or behind the curtains
of his hut, must help to shorten the bare and empty spaces of the
day. His nocturnal rest is therefore dismembered and without unity.
He is driven by blind impulses hither and thither in the darkness,
through the yard and the garden—he runs from place to place—and
waits. He waits for the recurrent visit of the local watchman with
the lantern, the heavy thud of whose footfall he accompanies
against his own better knowledge with a terrible burst of heralding
barks. He waits for the paling of the heavens, the crowing of the
cock in the near-by nursery-garden, the stir of the morning wind
in the trees, and for the unlocking of the kitchen entrance, so
that he may slip in and warm himself at the white-tiled range.
But I believe that the torture of this nightly vigil is mild,
compared to that which Bashan must endure in the broad of day,
particularly when the weather is fair, be it winter or summer, when
the sun lures into the open, and the desire for violent motion tugs
in every muscle, and his master, without whom, of course, there
can be no real enjoyment, persistently refuses to leave his seat
behind the glass door.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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