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ネロとパトラッシュの出会い
A dog of Flanders. Nello and Patruski were leftall alone in the world. They were friends in afriendship closer than brotherhood.
Nello was a little Ardennes, Patruski was a bigFleming. They were both of the same age by length
of years, yet one was still young, and the otherwas already old. They had dwelt together almost
all their days, both were orphaned and destitute,and owed their lives to the same hand. It had been
the beginning of the tie between them, their firstbond of sympathy, and it had strengthened day by
day, and had grown with their growth, firm andindissoluble, until they loved one another very
greatly. Their home was a little hot on the edgeof a little village, a Flemish village a leaguefrom
Antwerp, set amidst flat breaths of pasture andcorn lands, with long lines of poplars and of
alders bending in the breeze on the edge of thegreat canal which ran through it. It had about a
score of houses and homesteads, with shutters ofbright green or sky-blue, and roofs rose red or
black and white, and walls whitewashed until theyshone in the sun-like snow. In the centre of the
village stood a windmill, placed on a little moss-grown slope, it was a landmark to all the
country round. It had once been painted scarlet,sails and all, but that had been in its infancy,
half a century or more earlier, when it had groundwheat for the soldiers of Napoleon,
and it was now a ruddy brown, tanned by wind andweather. It went queerly by fits and starts,
as though rheumatic and stiff in the joints fromage, but it served the whole neighbourhood,
which would have thought it almost as impious tocarry grain elsewhere as to attend any other
religious service than the Mass that was performedat the altar of the little old grey church,
with its conical steeple, which stood opposite toit, and whose single bell rang morning,
noon, and night with that strange, subdued, hollowsadness which every bell that hangs in
the low country seems to gain as an integral partof its melody. Within sound of the little
melancholy clock almost from their birth upward,they had dwelt together, Nello and Patrusky,
in the little hut on the edge of the village, withthe cathedral spire of Antwerp rising in the
north-east, beyond the great green plain ofseeding grass and spreading corn that stretched
away from them like a tideless, changeless sea. Itwas the hut of a very old man, of a very poor
man, of old Jehan Das, who in his time had been asoldier, and who remembered the wars that had
trampled the country as oxen tread down thefurrows, and who had brought from his service
nothing except a wound, which had made him acripple. When old Jehan Das had reached his full
eighty, his daughter had died in the Ardennes,hard by Stavelot, and had left him in legacy her
two-year-old son. The old man could ill contriveto support himself, but he took up the additional
burden uncomplainingly, and it soon became welcomeand precious to him. Little Nello,
which was but a pet diminutive for Nicholas, drovewith him, and the old man and the little
child lived in the poor little hut contentedly. Itwas a very humble little mud hut indeed,
but it was clean and white as a seashell, andstood in a small plot of garden ground that
yielded beans and herbs and pumpkins. They werevery poor, terribly poor, many a day they had
nothing at all to eat. They never by any chancehad enough, to have had enough to eat would have
been to have reached Paradise at once. But the oldman was very gentle and good to the boy,
and the boy was a beautiful, innocent, truthful,tender-hearted creature, and they were happy on
a crust and a few leaves of cabbage, and asked nomore of earth or heaven, save indeed that
Patrusky should be always with them, since withoutPatrusky where would they have been?
For Patrusky was their alpha and omega, theirtreasury and granary, their store of gold and
wand of wealth, their breadwinner and minister,their only friend and comforter. Patrusky dead
or gone from them, they must have laid themselvesdown and died likewise. Patrusky was body,
brains, hands, head, and feet to both of them,Patrusky was their very life, their very soul.
For Jehandas was old and a cripple, and Nella wasbut a child, and Patrusky was their dog.
パトラッシュの過去
A dog of Flanders, yellow of hide, large of headand limb, with wolf-like ears that stood erect,
and legs bowed and feet widened in the musculardevelopment wrought in his breed by many
generations of hard service. Patrusky came of arace which had toiled hard and cruelly from sire
to son in Flanders many a century, slaves ofslaves, dogs of the people, beasts of the shafts
and the harness, creatures that lived strainingtheir sinews in the gall of the cart, and died
breaking their hearts on the flints of thestreets. Patrusky had been born of parents who hadlaboured
hard all their days over the sharp-set stones ofthe various cities and the long, shadowless, weary
roads of the two Flanders and of Brabant. He hadbeen born to no other heritage than those of pain
and of toil. He had been fed on curses andbaptized with blows. Why not? It was a Christiancountry,
and Patrusky was but a dog. Before he was fullygrown he had known the bitter gall of the cart
and the collar. Before he had entered histhirteenth month he had become the property
of a hardware dealer, who was accustomed to wanderover the land north and south,
from the Blue Sea to the Green Mountains. Theysold him for a small price, because he was soyoung.
This man was a drunkard and a brute. The life ofPatrusky was a life of hell.
To deal the tortures of hell on the animalcreation is a way which the Christians have
of showing their belief in it. His purchaser was asullen, ill-living, brutal Brabant was,
who heaped his cart full with pots and pans andflagons and buckets, and other wares of crockery
and brass and tin, and left Patrusky to draw theload as best he might, whilst he himself lounged
idly by the side in fat and sluggish ease, smokinghis black pipe and stopping in every
wine shop or café on the road. Happily forPatrusky, or unhappily, he was very strong,
he came of an iron race, long-born and bred tosuch cruel travail, so that he did not die,
but managed to drag on a wretched existence underthe brutal burdens, the scarifying lashes,
the hunger, the thirst, the blows, the curses, andthe exhaustion which are the only wages with
which the Flemings repay the most patient andlaborious of all their four-footed victims.
One day, after two years of this long and deadlyagony, Patrusky was going on as usual along one
of the straight, dusty, unlovely roads that leadto the city of Rubens. It was full midsummer,
and very warm. His cart was very heavy, piled highwith goods in metal and in earthenware.
His owner sauntered on without noticing himotherwise than by the crack of the whip as
it curled round his quivering loins. The brabantwas had paused to drink beer himself at every
wayside house, but he had forbidden Patrusky tostop a moment for a draft from the canal.
Going along thus, in the full sun, on a scorchinghighway, having eaten nothing for twenty-four
hours, and, which was far worse to him, not havingtasted water for near twelve,
being blind with dust, sore with blows, andstupefied with the merciless weight which
dragged upon his loins, Patrusky staggered andfoamed a little at the mouth, and fell.
He fell in the middle of the white, dusty road, inthe full glare of the sun,
he was sick unto death, and motionless. His mastergave him the only medicine in his pharmacy,
kicks and oaths and blows with a cudgel of oak,which had been often the only food and drink,
the only wage and reward, ever offered to him. ButPatrusky was beyond the reach of any torture
or of any curses. Patrusky lay, dead to allappearances, down in the white powder of the
summer dust. After a while, finding it useless toassail his ribs with punishment and his ears
with maledictions, the brabant was, deeming lifegone in him, or going so nearly that his carcass
was for ever useless, unless indeed some oneshould strip it of the skin for gloves, cursed
him fiercely in farewell, struck off the leathernbands of the harness, kicked his body aside into
the grass, and, groaning and muttering in savagewrath, pushed the cart lazily along the road
uphill, and left the dying dog for the ants tosting and for the crows to pick. It was the lastday
before Kermessa away at Levon, and the brabant waswas in haste to reach the fair and get a good
place for his truck of brass wares. He was infierce wrath, because Patrusky had been a strong
and much-enduring animal, and because he himselfhad now the hard task of pushing his charrette
all the way to Levon. But to stay to look afterPatrusky never entered his thoughts, the beast was
dying and useless, and he would steal, to replacehim, the first large dog that he found wandering
alone out of sight of its master. Patrusky hadcost him nothing, or next to nothing, and for
two long, cruel years had made him toilceaselessly in his service from sunrise to sunset,through
summer and winter, in fair weather and fowl. Hehad got a fair use and a good profit out ofPatrusky,
being human, he was wise, and left the dog to drawhis last breath alone in the ditch,
and have his bloodshot eyes plucked out as theymight be by the birds, whilst he himself went on
his way to beg and to steal, to eat and to drink,to dance and to sing, in the mirth at Levon.
救出と絆の深化
A dying dog, a dog of the cart, why should hewaste hours over its agonies at peril of losing
a handful of copper coins, at peril of a shout oflaughter? Patrusky lay there, flung in the
grass-green ditch. It was a busy road that day,and hundreds of people, on foot and on mules,
in wagons or in carts, went by, tramping quicklyand joyously on to Levon. Some saw him most did
not even look, all passed on. A dead dog more orless, it was nothing in Brabant,
it would be nothing anywhere in the world. After atime, among the holidaymakers,
there came a little old man who was bent and lameand very feeble. He was in no guise for feasting,
he was very poorly and miserably clad, and hedragged his silent way slowly through the dust
among the pleasure-seekers. He looked at Patrusky,paused, wondered, turned aside,
then kneeled down in the rank grass and weeds ofthe ditch, and surveyed the dog with kindly eyes
of pity. There was with him a little rosy, fair-haired, dark-eyed child of a few years old,
who pattered in amidst the bushes, for him breasthigh, and stood gazing with a pretty seriousness
upon the poor, great, quiet beast. Thus it wasthat these two first met, the little Nello and
the big Patrusky. The upshot of that day was, thatold Jehan Doss, with much laborious effort,
drew the sufferer homeward to his own little hut,which was a stone's throw off amidst the fields,
and there tended him with so much care that thesickness, which had been a brain seizure brought
on by heat and thirst and exhaustion, with timeand shade and rest passed away, and health and
strength returned, and Patrusky staggered up againupon his forced-out, tawny legs.
Now for many weeks he had been useless, powerless,sore, near to death, but all this time he had
heard no rough word, had felt no harsh touch, butonly the pitying murmurs of the child's voice and
the soothing caress of the old man's hand. In hissickness they too had grown to care for him,
this lonely man and the little happy child. He hada corner of the hut, with a heap of dry grass for
his bed, and they had learned to listen eagerlyfor his breathing in the dark night, to tell them
that he lived, and when he first was well enoughto essay aloud, hollow, broken bay, they laughed
aloud, and almost wept together for joy at such asign of his sure restoration, and little Nello,
in delighted glee, hung round his rugged neck withchains of margarites, and kissed him with
fresh and ruddy lips. So then, when Patruskyarose, himself again, strong, big, gaunt,powerful,
his great wistful eyes had a gentle astonishmentin them that there were no curses to rouse him
and no blows to drive him, and his heart awakenedto a mighty love, which never wavered once in its
fidelity whilst life abode with him. But Patrusky,being a dog, was grateful. Patrusky lay pondering
long with grave, tender, musing brown eyes,watching the movements of his friends. Now,
新たな生活と協力
the old soldier, Jehandas, could do nothing forhis living but limp about a little with a small
cart, with which he carried daily the milk cans ofthose happier neighbours who owned cattle away
into the town of Antwerp. The villagers gave himthe employment a little out of charity,
more because it suited them well to send theirmilk into the town by so honest a carrier,
and bide at home themselves to look after theirgardens, their cows, their poultry,
or their little fields. But it was becoming hardwork for the old man. He was eighty-three,
and Antwerp was a good league off, or more.Patrusky watched the milk cans come and go that
one day when he had got well and was lying in thesun with the wreath of margarites round his tawny
neck. The next morning, Patrusky, before the oldman had touched the cart, arose and walked to it
and placed himself betwixt its handles, andtestified as plainly as Dumbshow could do his
desire and his ability to work in return for thebread of charity that he had eaten. Jehandas
resisted long, for the old man was one of thosewho thought it a foul shame to bind dogs to labour
for which nature never formed them. But Patruskywould not be gainsaid, finding they did not
harness him, he tried to draw the cart onward withhis teeth. At length Jehandas gave way,
vanquished by the persistence and the gratitude ofthis creature whom he had succoured.
He fashioned his cart so that Patrusky could runin it, and this he did every morning of his life
thenceforward. When the winter came, Jehandasthanked the blessed fortune that had brought
him to the dying dog in the ditch that fair day ofLouvain, for he was very old, and he grew
feebler with each year, and he would ill haveknown how to pull his load of milk cans over thesnows
and through the deep ruts and the mud if it hadnot been for the strength and the industry of the
animal he had befriended. As for Patrusky, itseemed heaven to him. After the frightful burdens
that his old master had compelled him to strainunder, at the call of a whip at every step,
it seemed nothing to him but amusement to step outwith this little light green cart,
with its bright brass cans, by the side of thegentle old man who always paid him with a tender
caress and with a kindly word. Besides, his workwas over by three or four in the day,
and after that time he was free to do as he would,to stretch himself, to sleep in the sun,
to wander in the fields, to romp with the youngchild, or to play with his fellow dogs.
Patrusky was very happy.
