Dogsbody Read Online Free PDF Page B

had to drag him right down the passage. He was not what he seemed. He felt as if the world had stopped, just in front of his forefeet, and he was looking down into infinite cloudy green depths. What was down in those depths frightened him, because he could not understand it.
    “Really, Leo!” said Kathleen, at the end of the passage.
    Sirius gave in and began to walk, absently at first, trying to understand what had happened. But he had no leisure to think. As soon as they were in the street, half a million new smells hit his nose simultaneously. Kathleen was walking briskly, and so were other legs around her. Beyond, large groaning things shot by with a swish and a queer smell. Sirius pulled away sideways to have a closer look at those things and was distracted at once by a deliciously rotten something in the gutter. When Kathleen dragged him off that, there were smells several dogs had left on a lamppost, and, beyond that, a savory dustbin, decaying fit to make his mouth water.
    “No, Leo,” said Kathleen, dragging.
    Sirius was forced to follow her. It irked his pride to be so small and weak when he knew he had once been almost infinitely strong. How had he come to be like this? What had happened to reduce him? But he could not think of the answer when something black was trickling on the pavement, demanding to be sniffed all over at once.
    “Leave it,” said Kathleen. “That’s dirty.”
    It seemed to Sirius that Kathleen said this to everything really interesting. It seemed to Kathleen that she had said it several hundred times before they came to the meadow by the river. And here more new smells imperiously wanted attention. Kathleen took off the leash and Sirius bounded away, jingling and joyful, into the damp green grass. He ranged to and fro, rooting and sniffing, his tail crooked into a stiff and eager question mark. Beautiful. Goluptious scents. What was he looking for in all this glorious green plain? He was looking for something. He became more and more certain of that. This bush? No. This smelly lump, then? No. What then?
    There was a scent, beyond, which was vaguely familiar. Perhaps that was what he was looking for. Sirius galloped questing toward it, with Kathleen in desperate pursuit, and skidded to a stop on the bank of the river. He knew it, this whelming brown thing—he dimly remembered—and the hair on his back stood up slightly. This was not what he was looking for. And surely, although it was brown and never for a second stopped crawling past him, by the smell it was only water? Sirius felt he had better test this theory—and quickly. The rate the stuff was crawling, it would soon havecrawled right past and away if he did not catch it at once. He descended cautiously to it. Yes, it was water, crawling water. It tasted a good deal more full-bodied than the water Kathleen put down for him in the kitchen.
    “Oh, no!” said Kathleen, panting up to find him black-legged and stinking, lapping at the river as if he had drunk nothing for a week. “Come out.”
    Sirius obligingly came out. He was very happy. He wiped some of the mud off his legs onto Kathleen’s and continued his search of the meadow. He still could not think what he was looking for. Then, suddenly, as puppies do, he got exhausted. He was so tired that all he could do was to sit down and stay sitting. Nothing Kathleen said would make him move. So she sat down beside him and waited until he had recovered.
    And there, sitting in the center of the green meadow, Sirius remembered a little. He felt as if, inside his head, he was sitting in a green space that was vast, boundless, queer, and even more alive than the meadow in which his body sat. It was appalling. Yet, if he looked around the meadow, he knew that in time he could get to know every tuft and molehill in it. And, in the same way, he thought he might come to know the vaster green spaces inside his head.
    I don’t understand, he thought, panting, with his tongue hanging out.