The Traveler must look to other guides if he is interested in the minor promotions of Greek or Italian genius, or the ruins of military/ecclesiastical misadventures. There will be no chronological list of potentates. Indeed, Cannonia is a kingdom in which the person of the Sovereign has always been difficult to determine. The writer must further confess that he is not an artist of any sort, but an amateur enthusiast of the profound, the beautiful, and the sublime, so now increasingly out of fashion — nor does he confuse the authority of the aesthetical genius with the political ambitions which often encourage it, which seems to be our intelligensias’ only fascination. Nor am I anything of a philosopher. Dialectics do not interest me, though like ballsports, I am very good at them. I neither write a system nor promise a system, not do I subscribe or ascribe anything to a system. My only expertise is in the finality of love. I intend, nonetheless, to make my reputation good with you, as I have acquired, at no little expense, the Cannonian taste of seeing things for what they are.
RUBATO AND NIMBUS (Iulus)
By this time Father could do no wrong in the Professor’s eyes, the doctor seizing upon each success in the field with an enthusiasm tinged by self-deprecatory remarks about his own researches:
“It’s just as well we’re friends, otherwise I should burst with envy.” Or, “You really ought to write this up, you know. It would make a great impression on the masses.”
Moreover, Father’s indifference had the odd effect of cheering him.
“It’s merely an amateur’s business,” Father sniffed, “and at any rate, I don’t live to publish my brain.”
One day, when the Professor was waxing particularly effusive about a schnauzer whose mania for shredding had been softened measurably, he blurted out, “Let’s leave off the uglies, Councilor. You realize in all this time you haven’t really shown off your own animals. I want to see good dogs today, the best dogs — the emblem I should aspire to!”
Father took off his hat, lowered his head, and looked directly at his esteemed friend’s heart, as if to gauge his sincerity. Then he took a step backward and looked him up and down.
“Very well,” he spoke in measured tones, “but you deserve nothing less than the whole play. And it’s spring, you know. Man isn’t up to any good, and neither is nature.”
The difference between them, after all, was that the Professor truly believed he was the first mortal to set foot into the mind, and like every true colonial assumed that mere priority allowed him to name it and submit it to his laws. My father, who had preceded him there and left as rapidly as he could, knew with his layman’s tick that what you give your name to only makes you liable for its eventual perversions, and that while the ferns of the world may give way around your stride, they immediately pop back up, covering your tracks as though you never passed. Father also, in retrospect, had made an elemental mistake, not realizing that the exercise of personal modesty, which had won my mother, does not often work as well with men, for modesty in men is simply inverted pride. The Professor was not content with intimacy, but only unreserved mutual admiration, and my father believed that he could wean him from this course.
It was in this spirit that Felix summoned Rubato and Nimbus, models of the Chetvorah, parented by Sirius and Isisirene, the brightest constellation yet projected on the dome of dogdom. Brother and sister, they could hardly be distinguished from one another at two years of age, save for Rubato’s gallant poise, which made him the better pointer, and the passionate devotion of Nimbus, which made her an indefatigable retriever.
Returning the schnauzer to the kennels, we walked around to the rear of the house and down the lawn to Cherith’s Brook. Father turned on his heel, gazing back to the tower of his den, and blew two syllables on a silver whistle, a bass and a deeper quartertone, the second phrase of Schubert’s Unfinished. Immediately the pair appeared on the den’s balcony (as usual, they had flung themselves with a sob under his desk upon his departure), and then with tempered passion they flashed across the southern sky, turning extraordinary caprioles in the air. Emerging from a circular pool behind a cypress hedge, then bolting through the broken garden gate, they stormed toward us, unfolding their forces as their wet ribcages realigned with each stride — flews loose, underlips shortened, teeth gleaming in the sun.
The Professor’s heart had dropped when they leapt, fearing the worst, and now it did again as their clear-veined legs and drawn-in haunches seemed to promise more than virile virtue, bringing back the awe and helplessness he had felt at the Cossack-like charge of the Astingi boy on his pony.
The animal’s bodies lurched on a centrifugal plane like dervishes, and as they neared us, rather than stopping, they took on the masters (Rubato attending the Hauptzuchtwart, Nimbus the stranger) with a sudden upward lunge, snapping at the men’s faces as if to bite their noses off. The Professor had already recoiled, but as the jaws of Nimbus passed by his head, she planted a floating air-kiss on his lips, half-tenderly, half-mischievously, beslobbering his defensive, outthrust arm. Then began the dance of welcome and salutation — prodigious waggings of hindquarters, violent tugs of muscles, rapid tramplings, daring vaults, annular contractions, far-flung leaps, and the indubitable claw-flamenco.
Their cut tails were vibrating to quick-time, their rosy riffled mouths exposed. Then Father quietly spoke their favorite words—“Ru-ba-to, Nimbus”—and with a single leap they were at his side, shoulder blades against his shinbones like statues, each with a white whorl on its chest. Father put them in a double-harness, and without another word we set off for the forest where the juiciest ferns grow thick and the deer congregate to escape the midday heat. The birds stopped singing.
Our forests were not the true trackless type, the only true remnants of which exist in northern Russia and northmost America, but in fact were leafy islands cut from fields to shield the springs and water sources. Before the Great War you could move a thousand kilometers east and rarely be a hundred yards from drinking water, and by carefully picking its portages across the sterile fields, a full column of horsemen could remain in shade for days at a time. The emphasis had always been to extract game from the brutal and never bucolic forms of agriculture, circumventing those bound to the garner of the land — a never-ending battle to wrest trees from the peasant’s poaching axe and the magnate’s long saw.
“Ah, to live in harmony with the land,” the Professor let slip as he picked his way about the cowpats.
“Stand for a day with a shepherd dog, my friend,” Felix riposted, “and we shall see what becomes of your mind. You could turn all the Germanies into a gymnasium and not restore it. For a landscape to have grandeur, it must have a bit of nonsense.”
Then he discoursed on why nature is anything but naturaclass="underline"
“One must work incessantly so that the landscape is neither diminished nor allowed to revert to uncontrolled growth. A constructive edge which is not impenetrable but in which one can hide takes many men to create, many lifetimes, many tricks and sacrifices, so that you can get close to a bird who has survived all history with the latecomer, the dog, who it took eight thousand years to train just to eat out of his own dish.”
Father had this theory, as far as I know unrefuted, that every nation takes the structure of its mind from the nature of its forest, whether it be the diagonal rows of the French bocage and its filtered crystalline light, making the informal formal; the dense darkness of the Teuton wood, where the trees die top down and the canopy seems made of gnarled roots; the ever-correct English copses, memorial to the vanished forest of thieves and adventurers; or the single druidical cypress worshiped by Mediterraneans — as well as those ancient civilizations where the austerity of intellect is apparently the result of having no trees at all, but only unaesthetical shrubbery, not to speak of jungles where rarity is homogeneity; the Russian taiga of birch, pine, and rowan whose inwardness is so palpable and passive; and finally the American backwoods, the richest botanically but the most slovenly kept, its most prominent feature stumps, which exist chiefly to hide broken, discarded toys — toys, they say, made of everything but wood.