Four little rabbits had seen the light in a hutch snugly stuffed with
straw, where they lived cosy and warm by their mother’s side.
They were pretty, plump little things, all four as fat as butter, and
just as well-liking one as the other; but while three of them had white
bellies and dappled backs, one was white all over from head to foot, and
his mother was mighty proud of his beauty, you may be sure.
You could not have found so exquisite a rabbit, no, not for three
leagues round, and every day he grew handsomer and handsomer, like a
king’s son. Two great rubies glittered in his fine eyes, and his teeth
were just like the edge of a saw; yes, and he had a moustache—three
hairs, which made him, oh! so conceited.
Mother Rabbit loved them all tenderly; but she loved Jannot, her
firstborn, best of all.
To begin with, he was the eldest; then she had had more trouble to rear
him, and ill-health always draws a closer bond between mother and child;
besides, she was inordinately proud of his white coat, and dreamt he was
destined for greatness. What form would it take? This she could not
tell. Perhaps he would take first prize at a show—perhaps he would found
a breed of white rabbits like himself. She lavished every delicacy upon
her darling, and his prospective honours consoled her for the triviality
of everyday existence.
They would soon be two months old, and that is the age when young
bunnies are taken from their mothers. She dreaded the moment of parting;
Jannot would have to go with the rest.
In fact, all four were weaned by this time; they were beginning to gnaw
at carrots now, and would often try to get out through any gaps they
could find, for they longed to see the great world. The hutch had open
bars, and they could look out into a kitchen-garden with lettuce-beds,
and beyond that see a flock of ducks paddling about beside a brook.
There was an apple-tree to the right, with a cloud of sparrows always
squabbling round it. To the left an outhouse door gave a glimpse of cows
and horses, dimly outlined in the gloom of the interior. There were
cats, too, stretching themselves in the sun or stalking sedately up and
down.
At peep of day the whole farmyard woke up; noon brought a momentary
silence; then, as the sun grew hotter, sparrows chirped, ducks quacked,
cows lowed, and the din went on uninterruptedly till dusk.
The little bunnies would fain have joined the other animals; they would
gaze wistfully at the birds flying high in the air, and the sight of the
cattle marching off cheerfully for the pastures gave them a craving for
the green fields.
How big the farmyard seemed, to be sure! and how amazed they were when
Mother Rabbit told them there were other places bigger still which they
could not see. She described the woods and ravines and burrows, for she
knew these well enough from hearsay; why, they could not have travelled
round the world in a whole day, so enormous it was! Squatted round their
mother, the youngsters listened to all this, and their hearts almost
failed them.
But not so Jannot; _his_ imagination was stimulated by what he heard.
“Ah!” he would cry, “will they never let me out, that I may have _my_
chance of seeing all these wonderful things?”
Then his mother was alarmed; but he would kiss her and promise he would
come back again directly, once he had seen the world. But she only shook
her head, and could not make up her mind to let him go.
“The world is full of cruel beasts; you will never, never escape its
dangers.”
“I have teeth and claws.”
“So have they, child; but their teeth are longer and their claws sharper
than yours. Restrain your eagerness; time enough yet to go forth into
the wide, wide world.”
He would shake his head impatiently and fall to gnawing at the woodwork
of the hutch; in fact his mind was full of guilty thoughts of escape. At
last, one fine morning, when his mother was tidying the litter, he made
a bolt for it.
Scarcely had he gone a hundred steps when he was arrested by a startling
sight. He beheld half-a-dozen hairy brown skins nailed up in a row. They
still retained the shape of the bodies they had once clothed, and little
trickles of blood ran down the wall where they hung. There was no
mistaking; they had belonged to rabbits like himself.
“Oh, dear!” he thought, “so they kill rabbits, do they?”
But this sinister sight was quickly forgotten in the variety of new
wonders he encountered. A pig was grunting on a dunghill, with a young
foal kicking at him and destroying his peace of mind, and a goat
gambolling near by; one after the other he saw a rat, a dog, a calf, and
a flock of pigeons that suddenly took wing.
They rose in the warm morning air, glittering in the sun, flying so high
he soon lost sight of them altogether. Looking down again, he noticed a
cat watching him, and remembered he had seen her in the garden, prowling
among the lettuces.
The width of the yard was between them, and he had a barn behind him.
The cat lay crouched on the kitchen steps; she never moved, but her eyes
were wide open and glittered cruelly. Then she got up slowly.
Jannot believed his last hour was come; he thought of his mother, and
shut his eyes. A furious barking made him open them again. The cat was
gone; with one bound Jannot sprang into a cart round which a bull-dog
was racing with his mouth wide open, and leapt from there into the barn.
Inside the straw was piled up mountains high, so close to the wall he
had some difficulty in forcing a passage; still, it was only betwixt the
wall and the straw he could hope to find a safe refuge. He durst not
come out again, and stayed there in hiding till nightfall.
Then he plucked up spirit, took a step or two in the dark, and came upon
a hole close down to the floor through which he could slip.
What a sight met him outside! The country lay white in the moonlight,
house-roofs, pools, watercourses glittering in the beams. The leaves
quivered restlessly in the night wind, and the distant clumps of
brushwood stood out in clear-cut outline. It was very beautiful; but
look! suddenly, close to him, two long, black, moving shadows scared him
out of his seven senses.
The cat!
Jannot never stopped till he reached the woods, after darting across the
garden, leaping a brook, scurrying over the fields, breathless and
exhausted. Vague shadows loomed around him; flying footsteps sounded
about his path; suddenly, by the startled cry that escaped a little
creature which halted right before his nose, he knew he was in presence
of another rabbit.
“I am Jannot,” he said, in a low voice; “perhaps we are relations.”
From the first moment the rabbit saw him, he loaded him with polite
attentions, declared he loved him already, and offered him the
hospitality of his house; so the two of them jogged off in company. But
after a moment or two Goodman Rabbit stopped dead, saying—
“You’d best go by the clearing, and I through the scrub; it will never
do to let the polecat see us. We will meet at the foot of a great oak
you can’t help seeing.”
Jannot followed his companion’s advice; but no sooner were they together
again than the rabbit, after fifty yards or so, cried out once more—
“The place we’re in now is just as dangerous as the other. A wild-cat
lurks hereabouts, and slaughters whatever comes under his claws. You go
that way; I’ll go this. A rock you will see will serve as rendezvous.”
They reached the rock at the same moment, and then trotted off again.
They were just coming to a coppice of young trees with narrow winding
paths through it when his experienced friend called a halt for the third
time, crying—
“Well, we did well not to travel side by side. My advice is that we go
each his own way again, without bothering about one another, till we
come to the crossroads you’ll find down yonder. Ah! d’ye see those
snares? Mind you don’t get into them, for if the polecat and the
wild-cat are lords of the lands we have just been through, the poacher
rules here as monarch paramount.”
The advice was good, but its giver had no time to finish it; he was
caught by the foot in one of the gins, and the more he struggled to get
free, the tighter the dreadful noose was drawn.
“Help! help!” he clamoured.
But already Jannot was off and away, panic-stricken; he ran on and on,
never once stopping till he won back as quick as ever he could to the
edge of the woodland where he and Master Rabbit had first met.
“If the world is so strewn with dangers,” he thought to himself, “better
to live in peace and quietness in a hutch. What use in roaming the
woods, when death is at the journey’s end?”
Then in his mind’s eye he saw his mother again and his brothers; and the
safe shelter where they awaited his return seemed a far-off, happy
refuge he could hardly hope to reach.
Field-mice and weasels and martens were stirring in the dark underwood
and shaking the leaves. Suddenly a new terror, more appalling than all
the rest, gripped him; he thought he was being pursued. Then he dashed
out into the plain that lay clear in the moonlight, and, with ears
pricked, thinking all the while he could hear at his heels the
unwearying, unflagging trot, trot of the fell creatures that were on his
track, he pushed through hedges, leapt ditches, climbed banks.
He had his back to the moon, and two black shadows, the same he had seen
at the outset of his escapade, stretched out before him; this time they
went in front, never leaving him, and sometimes lengthening out to
portentous proportions.
No doubt about it, a whole host of enemies was after him!
At last his breath failed him and he sank down in despair, waiting for
death; but as it was a long time coming, he began to recover a little
courage, and, turning round, stared hard into the night.
Not a thing was visible amid the loneliness of the fields, and the moon
seemed to be grinning down at him from the sky.
Then he discovered that the two shadows that had terrified him so were
only the shadows of his own two ears. This was mortifying!
Day dawned by slow degrees; and presently he found himself back by the
brook, the ducks, the cow-shed and the kitchen-garden.
“Mind this,” his mother told him, “there’s no adventures so fine as to
match the pleasure of being safe at home, among the folks who love you.”
“Monsieur Friquet”
Nature had not been generous to the poor thing; Claire was born a
hunchback, and a hunchback she had grown up—if indeed she can be said
ever to have grown up—an undersized, sickly, suffering creature, who at
thirty was not as high, from head to heels, as a little girl of nine.
She had been left an orphan when quite a child; first her mother died,
and her father had not survived her long. So Claire had had to face the
world alone, with her own ten fingers for all her fortune. Her parents
had never spoilt her with overmuch indulgence. They were poor,
hardworking folks, who hardly knew what it was to smile. Even when they
were alive, she had led a lonely enough existence. Still, after their
death, she missed the life lived in common, the destitution shared with
others, the bustle of the hugger-mugger household, where scolding and
grumbling were by no means unknown. Her parents were her parents after
all; with them life had its happy moments, now and then.
[Illustration: “MONSIEUR FRIQUET”]
They were hard times now for Claire. Shut up all day long in the
unhealthy air of workrooms, she seemed to grow more and more emaciated,
and smaller and smaller every day. Nobody ever thought of pitying the
poor, uncouth being who sat sewing apart from the rest, who, with a
gentle humility, always sought the shade, where her deformity was less
noticeable; nobody ever dreamed of asking if there was a soul within
that misshapen body, and her great eyes—light blue, sickly-looking eyes,
which she would raise slowly and languidly, as if afraid of the
light—encountered only mockery and indifference from all about her.
The tall, handsome girls who sat round the sewing-table had nothing but
hard words for her; scarcely knowing why, yielding to a cruel impulse
which a little thought, if nothing better, would have checked, they
treated her vilely.
Little by little she had become the general butt of the workroom; one
dismal day in December a last outrage was added to all the rest.
An ill-conditioned cripple, a girl who had borne Claire a grudge from
the first day of her coming, because of their sisterhood in misfortune,
which caused twice as many gibes to be levelled at her own club-foot,
contrived to secrete a piece of silk, in order to accuse Claire of the
theft. She declared stoutly she had taken the piece and hidden it inside
her dress. In vain the poor girl, bursting into tears, swore she was
innocent. The head of the shop ordered her to strip. She begged
piteously for mercy, clasping her hands in supplication; but the cripple
moved heaven and earth to set the others against her. Rough hands were
laid on her; she was bruised and shaken and hurt; all she could do was
to stammer out appeals to their compassion; she was nearly fainting, and
the tears were streaming down her cheeks. No use; the poor back was
bared, and while the mistress was searching her, the pretty,
rosy-cheeked workgirls were feeling the deformity curiously, examining
what like a hump exactly was.
Claire had buried her face in her hands; her hair had fallen about her
ears, and there she stood, quite still and helpless, terrified at the
angry faces about her; her throat was dry and her whole body quivering
with overmastering agitation. She wished she was dead.
The mistress’s hard voice dismissing her roused her at last; she got to
her feet amidst the jeers of the workroom, buttoned her frock, collected
her needles and scissors, and, shuddering and shaking, catching her feet
in her skirts, she hurried to the door; there was a loud buzzing in her
ears, and she seemed to see everything through a sort of mist.
She dashed downstairs two steps at a time and reached the riverside
quays, looking in her despair for an unfrequented bridge from which an
unhappy hunchback might throw herself into the water and not be noticed.
But everywhere she seemed to see mocking eyes pursuing her.
By degrees she began to think of the dreadful publicity of such a death;
she saw herself dragged from the river, laid on the crowded bank, under
the eyes of a throng of curious onlookers, in the glaring light of day.
No, what she craved was a quiet death in some dark corner, where she
would be sheltered from prying looks.
She retraced her steps, bought a supply of charcoal, which she hid in a
fold of her gown, and made her way home. Her poor worn hands had helped
her—how hardly!—to live, now they should help her to die.
Possessed by these ideas, she pushed open the door of the room—and
suddenly stopped....
How, when, by what way had he got in, the little sparrow she saw beating
his wings against the walls, looking so scared and frightened, trying in
vain to find a way out of the garret he had invaded so impudently, like
the little good-for-nothing scamp he was?
Yes, she remembered; that morning, before leaving, she had left the
window ajar; but no doubt the wind had blown it to, and after coming in
unhindered, like a conquering hero taking possession of a new kingdom,
the bird was now a prisoner.
A prisoner? But why a prisoner? What had she and he in common? He only
asked to live, to fly, to soar in the free air, while she, she was fain
to die. Begone, little madcap! you shall have your freedom again.
She went to the window; but as her hand touched the latch, she paused.
The sparrow had stopped fluttering about the room; cowering in the
corner of a cupboard, his little breast heaving with terror and
breathlessness, he was looking at her with his frightened eyes.
To see him shivering and shaking and ruffling his feathers in terror,
she seemed to recognise a fellow-sufferer. _Her life_, from first to
last, had it not been one long quaking agony of fear, exposed to
never-ending uncertainties and disappointments? The similarity made a
sort of common bond between them, and her heart stirred with a longing
for a last touch of love and sympathy with the living creatures of this
earth she was about to quit.
She left the window, advanced a step, and held out her finger to beckon
and encourage him. But the movement, gentle as it was, was misunderstood
by the bird; he spread his wings and darted up to the ceiling. Then she
spoke to him, and very humbly—she found it very easy to be
humble—besought him—
“Poor birdie, why should you be afraid of me? Do you think I want to
hurt you? I only ask you one favour—to kiss you once, just once,
before.... There, come, light there on my hand; let me just hold you;
you shall fly away again directly after. Come, dear birdie, I know I am
ugly to look at, but I am not cruel.”
And stepping softly, silently, she followed him about the room, with
outstretched fingers and smiling lips, almost like a mother, as if she
were talking to a little child. Then, as he would not come—
“Come, now.... Does my back shock you—like the others? Why should you
care if I _am_ hunchbacked, when you are so pretty? Come, pretty
birdie—if only to give me the strength I need so badly.”
She crumbled some bread on the table. This made the bird hesitate; he
did not come down at once, but, still perching aloft, gazed down at the
white crumbs, craning his neck, his eyes glittering with greediness.
Finally appetite overcame prudence. He darted down on to the table and
began to peck—_tock, tock!_ at the food, stopping every now and then to
shake out his feathers and cocking up his head to look about him.
Presently she scattered more crumbs, first on the floor and then on the
window-sill, and he soon came hopping up to them on his little pink
toes, flirting his tail and looking as happy as a king, the glutton!
What a darling he was, to be sure! She forgot all thoughts of death, to
see him so alive and so handsome, coming and going, marching up and down
with his mettlesome air, his rolling eye, his tossing head, his
everlasting pickings and peckings and his fine look of swagger and
impudence. He had a way of peeping at her askance, winking one eye with
a merry, mocking glint in it, that seemed to say unmistakably: “I don’t
mind eating your bread, because it’s downright good; but never you think
I’m going to give up my freedom for you. I shall be off and away again
just whenever I choose.”
Other times he would fix his little black beads of eyes meditatively
upon her face, scrutinising her features as if bent on reading her
inmost thoughts, but never missing a peck at the food for all that, or
one crumb of this long, luxurious repast.
When he had eaten up every scrap, she got some more and offered it him,
this time in her palm.
Up he fluttered, took his stand in front of her hand, examined it from
every side, from above and from below, wishing but not daring; then
suddenly caution carried the day, and he hopped away.
“Pst! pst!” she chirped to him, but never stirred. Her stillness
reassured him; with a determined air, feeling a sinking again in his
insatiable little stomach—it was not every day he had such a chance of
filling it—he hopped forward, then drew back again; finally, making up
his mind once for all, he began to peck warily at the contents of the
well-stored hand.
She watched him with delight and admiration. The sight of him and his
pretty ways stirred deep, unsuspected feelings within her. The blue sky
seemed to have entered at her humble window, as if the bird had brought
in along with him a fragment of space. Under his wing he hid, Claire
thought, all the gaiety and brightness of the spring.
Memories awoke in her heart; she dreamed of the woodlands, the fields of
golden grain, the water-springs, all the glories of kindly Mother
Nature. Three or four times in her colourless life she had been taken
into the country; she had heard the birds sing, the great trees swaying
and rustling in the breeze and the prattling of the brooks. One day—it
was fifteen years ago at least—she had actually dropped asleep on the
moss in the warm shadow of the woods, and when she awoke the old oaks
seemed to be smiling down on her.
Her black thoughts fled before this memory of rosy hours.
Besides, after days of gloom do not happier days follow? Had not he,
too, her little friend, had not he known the hardships of winter?
Shivering with cold, he had endured frost and bitter wind; his nest
battered by the hail, his plumage soaked by the rain, his wings stiff
with pain—was not all this far harder to bear than the gibes and insults
of a few silly girls, giddy-pated perhaps rather than really
ill-natured? Twenty times, a hundred times over, death had hovered near,
when the storms scattered the leaves and tore down the nests all round
him; but he had kept a good heart, and when spring-time came back again,
had he not been rewarded for his bravery by happy, happy days? As she
thought of the stubborn courage of the little sparrow, she was ashamed
of her own weakness.
Who knows?—perhaps the bird had been sent to call her back to duty, to
encourage her never to despair, to bring her a lesson straight from
Mother Nature. Something of Nature’s tender care for the weak and
unprotected was in his coming to visit her garret; it was not for
nothing he had chosen out the barest and poorest of them all, driving
away with the rustle of his tiny wings those other dark, overshadowing
wings—the wings of death. She found herself calling down blessings on
him, thanking him for arriving so opportunely, weeping with joy to see
his graceful gambols; for he was not frightened now, but bright and gay,
and rather amused than otherwise at the four walls that had suddenly
replaced the boundless plains of air.
A new life began for the two.
Monsieur Friquet—that was the name she had given him—seemed to be quite
content to take his place as house-mate with the poor work-girl, whose
heart was so full of affection, and who, to his partial eyes, looked as
pretty as the prettiest things he had ever seen in the world outside.
Did she not always wear a kind smile on her lips whenever she came home?
And is not kindness, when all is said and done, the same thing as
beauty?
Monsieur Friquet had forgotten all about the distractions of the
streets. Like a rakish younger son who has been living for years on his
wits, he thoroughly enjoyed this life of slippered ease in a cosy house,
where, it is true, the sun did not often penetrate, but then neither did
the wind. Its quiet was unbroken all day long while his mistress was
abroad, allowing him to doze and dream away the long hours till her
return set stove and saucepans in activity again.
He was a lazy loon, and nothing could have suited him better than to
have a place at table laid out for him morning and evening, without his
having so much as to put his head outside the door.
He had known so many of his comrades who had perished miserably under a
cat’s claws, at the corner of a gutter-pipe or in the treacherous shadow
of a chimney-stack; so many who, grown old and impotent, and unable to
find themselves a warm lodging, had died a lonely death on some deserted
housetop; in fact, he had witnessed so much disappointment and
disillusion and misery that he was ready—some days, at any rate—to swear
he would not exchange for all the spacious blue of heaven shining in
through the windowpane the indigo-blue paper with white bunches of
flowers that covered the garret walls.
He had put on flesh, and his chirp had grown thick and fruity; nowadays
the graceless fellow had nothing but ill to say of the freedom he had
lost, but which, after all, was limited, in summer, to scolding and
squabbling in the tree-tops, and, in winter, to freezing on a wretched
perch.
And _pr’t! prr’t! chirp! chirp!_ he went, in scorn of everything that
could remind him of the old bad times of his life.
How much better to sit soft and warm over a good feed of bird-seed, to
sleep away his afternoons in slothful ease, never to soil his feathers
scratching for doles in a dungheap, but to live like a gentleman on his
means, among his own belongings, without even a thought of work or
worry!
Monsieur Friquet, you see, was a philosopher of an accommodating temper.
Thank God! everybody does not think alike; for what would become of the
sky and the woodland if all the race of sparrows forsook them like him
for cosy quarters and a free table? He was one of those selfish folk who
deem all is well directly all is well with them, and who only think of
being on the best terms with the world and with themselves, without ever
a care beyond.
True, he was barely awake ere he saw his kind mistress bustling about in
her room and filling up his bowl with new milk; true, she shared her
loaf and her eggs with him, always giving him the best of everything and
cheerfully keeping the crust and the white for herself; true, all day
long the table was laid for him, and he had nothing to do but to eat and
drink to his heart’s content, like the regular glutton he was; but
Monsieur Friquet never once thought at the cost of what painful
sacrifices he enjoyed all these good things.
Claire had resumed the cruel slavery of the workroom.
Every morning, at seven o’clock, she set out, a meagre hunch of bread in
her basket, and along the sleeping streets where the yawning passers-by
were few and far between, half dozing herself, but brave and thinking of
Monsieur Friquet, she would make her way to the dismal room where she
was to be kept prisoner all day. Her companions never dreamed what
strength to bear unhappiness a friend affords, a good friend you are
sure to find at home on your return, who welcomes you with bright eyes
of pleasure and who fills your thoughts even when he is not there.
How he filled her thoughts, to be sure! What endless dialogues she had
with him down in her own heart, just between the two of them.
“Now then, Monsieur Friquet, what are we going to have for dinner? A
couple of poached eggs? I’ve just bought them, new laid, at the
green-grocer’s. Oh! you can almost see through them; just you look. And
not too dear either, thank God! There, the fire just burning up nicely.
Well, have you made up your mind? Will you have them poached or boiled?
Oh! never mind me. To begin with, I don’t care which; I like one as well
as the other. I’ve got some salad too—fine fresh salad. Ah! so you’re
laughing, Monsieur Friquet! You’ll laugh better still directly. Boiled,
then, it’s to be, eh? You see, you bad boy, we only think of pleasing
you.”
She was hardly home before the fire was crackling, the egg-boiler
singing; in next to no time the eggs were on the table, and the two of
them, Claire and the sparrow, were pecking away, she sitting in front of
the cloth, he perched in front of her on the edge of a glass or else
clinging to her fingers.
At every mouthful he would give his wings a shake, looking saucily now
at the food, now at Claire, with his head on one side.
_Chirp! chirp! chirp!_ he would say in his shrill treble. It was at once
an appeal to his mistress to give him more, and a way of thanking her
for the trouble she took in feeding him.
His impudent little beak would dive into every single thing—bread, salt,
salad, the hollow of his mistress’s hand, poking everywhere, filching
bits from her very lips, never still for an instant. Teasing, defying,
thieving, he was in perpetual motion, as his brethren are among the
leaves of the forest trees.
They drank out of the same cup, ate off the same plate. Ah! but Monsieur
Friquet had his wilful moods too at times; _he_ was not the fellow to be
satisfied with everything; now it was the bread he refused with a little
decided peck that said as plain as words: “I won’t have it!”—now it was
the egg, or the salad, or something else. You see, he knew quite well,
did Monsieur Friquet, there was a biscuit waiting for him in the
cupboard, and he was inordinately fond of biscuit.
Sunday was a special festival.
Up betimes as usual, for workgirls are never lie-abeds, Claire would set
to rights the disorder of the week, tripping on tip-toe about the room,
not to wake Monsieur Friquet, who was snoring in a corner, a fat ball of
feathers, with his head under his wing.
“Monsieur Friquet won’t be awake for another hour,” she would think to
herself. “I shall have time enough to set all straight”—and she would
set to work, dusting, sweeping, washing the floor, happy in the prospect
of the coming Sunday that would release her a while from her chain of
servitude.
At last the bird would wake up, and there would be quick cries of: “Good
morning, Monsieur Friquet! How have you slept?”
“Chirp! chirp!” would come the answer.