Cute little devils, those corgis

First, an admission: I’m scared of dogs. But not in the sense you may think: I have no fear of being attacked and bitten by a dog.

I’m scared not of what dogs may do, but of what they represent. That fear resides in the far recesses of my mind and it hardly ever comes out. It did the other day though, and I was terrified.

Sitting opposite to me on the tube train was a woman with a corgi. The dog sat quietly at the woman’s feet and stared at me with its unblinking eyes.

Now, the competitor in me won’t let anyone stare me down, man, woman or beast. So, for lack of anything better to do, I stared back and we stayed transfixed on each other’s eyes for some 15 minutes until the train arrived at Parsons Green and I got off.

I wouldn’t say that staring contest was the scariest thing in my life. But it was right up there with the time some 55 years ago, when Maj. Sazonov, KGB, summoned me to Lubyanka for an avuncular chat about my seditious behaviour, ill-becoming a young Soviet man. At that time, I was served an intimation of physical mortality.

The other day on the District Line, by contrast, I was reminded yet again that the immortal soul exists and man alone possesses it. Not that I ever believed anything else, but, looking into that corgi’s eyes, I no longer just believed. I knew, the same way one knows that grass and trees exist.

Now, if it’s true that the eyes are the window to the soul, I’m a Peeping Tom of no mean attainment. I’ve always been so keenly interested in people’s eyes that I’ve often been embarrassed when caught staring. After a long life of such ocular voyeurism, I’ve seen them all, every colour, every size, every expression from mirth to love to indifference to fury, every shade of intelligence from sharp to bovine.

Some of those windows were wide-open to reveal the soul behind them, some were barely ajar, as if protecting the soul from visual intruders like me. But I never doubted the soul was there, in spite of occasionally cracking silly jokes, when pretending to seek reconciliation between ‘creationists’ and ‘evolutionists’.

Debates along those lines were quite popular back in the ‘80s, and I used to reassure the two groups that they were both right. Some people, a minority, were indeed created by God and endowed with the immortal soul. Others, most as a matter of fact, did evolve from the ape, which they prove by espousing half-baked theories. Incomprehensibly, that conciliatory stance earned me the anger of both sides.

But, as I said, I was only joking. I wasn’t always a Christian but I always believed in the immortal soul within every human body.

I didn’t yet know what the purpose of human life was, but Bach’s fugues taught me there had to be some transcendent purpose. Since, by definition, it was unattainable during physical life, the soul had to outlive the body – it was a logical deduction, irrefutable as far as I was concerned, flawed as a pedantic logician would argue.

I’ve met many evil men in my life, including the aforementioned Maj. Sazonov, but I’ve never met one who’d make me doubt the existence of the soul. What kind of soul is a different matter, but it’s always there, shining bright or glimmering dull through that window.

My interest in human eyes never extended to other species. Until that episode on the District Line the other day, I had never cast more than a fleeting glance at the eyes of any animal. Then I spent 15 minutes looking at the perfectly round eyes of that pretty corgi, and I got a mighty fright.

For there was no expression in them. None. The dog’s demeanour was generally friendly, it was as well-behaved as befits the breed so beloved of our late Queen. But its eyes weren’t friendly. Neither were they hostile, threatening, bad- or good-natured. They were just convex, mahogany-coloured disks with no irises that might as well have been painted on a piece of wood.

They weren’t a window to anything because there was nothing behind them, not even a hint at any other than a purely biological life. Hence that pretty corgi is infinitely closer to a plant than to a human being, even one as flawed as Richard Dawkins.

It can move, but so can tumbleweed blown across a field. It can make sounds, but so can a stream. It needs food and water, but so does a potted geranium. It’s a thing, not a being.

Even the argument that dogs too are God’s creatures doesn’t cut much ice with me. Those original proto-dogs might have been, but a corgi owes its existence more to man-made breeding techniques than to any divine design. No, that corgi is just an inanimate object on four short legs.

That realisation was nothing new to me, and by itself it was insufficient to give me a fright. But now I’m going to say something that may make me sound insane, yet I promise you I’m not (still, any nutter would say that, wouldn’t he?). What I’m about to describe isn’t a product of rational thought gone awry. It’s merely a feeling, but none the less scarier for that.

Staring into the corgi’s eyes, I blanked out the rest of the animal. For a while I didn’t see the dog’s silky fur or endearingly proportioned small body. All I saw were those convex mahogany disks, and for a second I thought — nay, knew — I was looking at the devil.

I mean to anthropomorphise neither the dog nor indeed the devil. I’ve never tried to imagine Satan as a being in flesh and blood. But riding on that District Line train, I did so for the first time: the corgi’s eyes were exactly what, for that moment, I imagined the devil’s eyes to be. Devoid of any expression, neither cold nor warm, neither kind nor mean, a window not into the soul but into gaping nothingness.

Now, some of my best friends are dog lovers, treating them not as pets but as members of the family. They give those devil’s spawns human names, talk to them (I don’t just mean saying things like ‘heel’, ‘sit’ or ‘fetch’), kiss them. Some of my friends treat their dogs as children surrogates, those with no need for surrogates treat them as little friends.

I used to be like that myself, when I was very young. As a child, I once spent five summers in a row being looked after by an old couple who had four dachshunds. The old couple were nice strangers, but strangers none the less, and there were no children around I could play with. I was a lonely boy during those summers, and the dachshunds were my sole friends and playmates. I was passionately, almost hysterically, attached to them – but then it was time to grow up.

Would you agree that people who still feel that way in their adulthood are Peter Pans refusing to leave their childhood behind them? I don’t know, and I couldn’t make a convincing case one way or the other.

But I can describe what I felt on that train, irrationally but strongly. Staring into that corgi’s eyes, I thought for a second I had seen the prince of this world. Then I forced my field of vision to widen and saw a cute puppy wagging its tail. But I resisted the temptation of saying “Good boy”.