Waggling

ONE of my friends says, ‘Don’t you like to have people make a pleasant, gentle hullabalooing over you sometimes?’

I know what she means, and I do like it. Only in my own parlance it is not hullabalooing, but waggling. A hullabaloo — even a pleasant gentle one — implies boisterous doings. But you can waggle without saying a word or lifting a finger. You can waggle with your inmost soul in a perfectly respectable and secret way, when nobody

— it may be in church, or in the trolley-car, or at a solemn Music — suspects you of anything but a little extra shine to your eyes and twist to your lips. Then again, you can waggle your way visibly but quietly through a rainy, dirty, dumpish day, so that people will almost signal back, with a kind of borrowed quirk of joy.

Of course a puppy is the perfect waggler. Our Airedale, with the sad brown eyes and rough coat and comically pivoted tail, can hardly stir himself without waggling. He loves us vastly, and he loves to be full of bones and fresh air and implicit trust in all dogs and men. Life is one glorious, simpleminded, adventurous holiday for him. He is downcast only when all his arts fail to persuade us that he should accompany us to church or to a dinnerparty. Then he cries and grieves and quivers; but even his grief has a naiveté and honesty that are akin to his joy. We know that when we come back and fumble at the latchkey, a happy urgent moaning and grunting will be heard behind the door, and Ben will leap out at us, pawing the air, tossing his ears, crimping his staunch blacksaddled body into incredible patterns, skidding along the rug on the side of his funny face, — in short, waggling over us in an abandon of love and delight fit to melt the heart of the stoniest puppy-hater or cynic-at-large.

For the person who cannot appreciate the attitude of mind that waggles, in animals or men, must be either a terrible cynic or a terrible hypochondriac. Such a person would not be moved, I am afraid, even by the kind manners of a Black Wolf, with whom we lately passed the time of day in a traveling Wild-Beast Show. Perhaps the Black Wolf had been reading Science and Health; or perhaps he wished to show us that not all wolves like to eat Little Red-Riding-Hoods; or perhaps he was simply bored by the bourgeois steam-piano music and generally low tone (for a Wild Beast of parts) of the show. At any rate, when we stood before his bars and spoke politely to him, he waggled at us. There was no mistaking it: he waggled, head and tail, as amiably as our mild Ben at home.

Surely, if a moth-eaten Black Wolf in a five-foot, cage can waggle, anybody can; and as I have said, the person who can neither understand waggling nor do it himself is in evil case. Many clergymen, many poets, many social investigators seem to have lost this simple power. They are too serious with the world and with themselves to remember that one of the most easily paid obligations to life is just letting one’s self be pleased with the things that were put here to please one without sin or shame, no matter how much else there may be to fret and fight against forever. Now the Black Wolf had very little to give him joy. Instead of wild free spaces for running and hunting, he had a patch of dirty sawdust, iron bars, stale odors, food flung at intervals, meaningless human shapes and faces: a life so tame and dull that even a house-dog would pine away under it. Yet that good Black Wolf had not forgotten the lively uses of his tail and head.

But I did not mean to write about the morals of waggling. I meant rather to tell of its simple causes. There are so many things that make one waggle. Of course, seeing the people whom we love and like produces waggling, or a ‘pleasant, gentle hullabalooing.’ But I should be sorry enough if ever a shining morning in green April, — a red October wood, — a full moon over frozen silvery lakes, — a good hearthfire, — a field of daisies, — a snatch of old song, suddenly dancing from the dark halls of memory, — and a thousand simpler, smaller things, did not make me paw the air and wag my secret tail. (For it seems to me that human beings need self-expressive tails just as much as dogs do.)

Now our precious Katy-in-the-kitchen waggles over a perfect soufflé, or a glorious Easter bonnet, or a ‘murdery’ moving-picture show; our newsboy over a prize bicycle or a full muskrat trap. There must be those who waggle over a glass of beer; a case won in the Supreme Court; a post-box filled with Suffragette stickum; a soul saved; a rise in stocks; a seal-skin coat smuggled; a neat horse-trade.

I cannot sympathize with all these causes for delight, but with the state of mind I do sympathize greatly. To be too old, or too sick, or too rich, or too poor, or too stupid, to waggle over anything would be more a death than death itself. And I have a suspicion that stupidity is the real root of most chronic heaviness of soul. I know old people, and sick people, who have almost as little to be pleased with as the Black Wolf, and yet who have never forgotten how to twinkle with childlike joy. And surely it is stupidity that dulls and paralyzes the very rich. The poor, for all their handicaps, can give millionaires lessons in waggling.

But there must be no taint of affectation about it, or everything is ruined. The society-waggle is as cheap and poor a farce as the society-compliment. The pious waggle is yet worse. The only genuine variety is as swift and spontaneous as the wild shake of a horse’s mane in the wind; as a terrier’s bark and leap0 and sidewise antics down the road; as a small girl’s hop-skip-andjump in the sun, or a small boy’s whistle and whoop as he tears from the school-door.

I wonder whether Stevenson did not have in mind a more serious aspect of this same mood when he wrote the familiar lines, —

Even Stevenson called his happiness a ‘great task’; and it was no wonder. For him, and for many, it must indeed be a task.

But it pleases me to feel that for most of us, our passing happiness is no task; that we are not Black Wolves, but Airedale puppies. We waggle, not for stern Duty’s sake, but because, like Ben, curled here at my feet, and humorous even in his dreams, the world seems so lively and amazing to us that we cannot help it.