“_Kind hearts are more than coronets._”
I have no clue at all to what the real grievance of the peacock is,
though his history, so far as one can piece together fragmentary
records, contains all the materials of a tragedy.
Down in the orchard is a great cage made of galvanised wire; a high
perch runs across it, and it stands in a sunny, sheltered corner, where
it was prepared for the peacock and his hen. Now the galvanised wire
is rusty and torn, the woodwork is broken, the cage is patched up now
and again to seclude a nesting hen or scratching brood of chickens, or
to give temporary lodging to a dainty pair of bantams, and a vegetable
marrow ripens its striped gourds in the sunshine. But all alone the
peacock, lame on one foot, limps through the farmyard, and haunts
the pigeon tower on the hill; while tradition tells of a day when he
alighted on the engine of a moving train, and rumour hints at dark
deeds in the past, the scared and blighted life of pea-hen, and a
holocaust of young pheasants.
Yet he seems harmless enough, this limping fellow, harmless but
embittered. Sometimes evening after evening he will follow me to the
fowl-yard and wait for his own portion, drumming out an odd hard note,
like the tap of a wooden mallet. Again he disappears, and for days we
do not see him. Sometimes he comes to be fed under the windows or at
the kitchen door, and will take food even from our hands, but with the
distrustful air of one over-persuaded by raisins and lemon-peel.
Sometimes he seems but a mean, faint-hearted creature, running from
us with the doubly mincing motion of the lame foot and the horizontal
tail, as each separate feather beats upon the air; and again he
appears, as when I first saw him, posed for a Japanese picture, high
in a flowering cherry with his train, bronze, emerald and indigo,
flowing down out of fairy-like clusters of flowers.
But to a peacock “all the world’s a stage.” If he does but sit
meditating at evening on the low garden wall, the flowers below, the
dark shrub to the left, the hedgerow elms beyond, with the slope of
a field against a primrose sky, all these at once become a fitting
background to the crested head and trailing tail. As he stands so, the
silhouetted outline shows curves strangely like those of some great
cat. Just so Ra’s head erects itself; so slope his neck and back, and
so the tail lies out in a free curve over the hind leg stretched back.
Is there such a thing as a protective outline, and does the silly
peacock owe his safety partly to this?
If his very pose is dramatic, much more so is his sudden entrance on
the scene. All round the house in summer nights comes the whirring
of the owls. Now there seems to be a heavy sleeper under one’s very
window, now the sound purrs out from the walnut tree across the lawn,
now from the bell tower or the ivy on the chimney stack.
So one night we went exploring in the moonlight. Shadows of elms
flecked the road where the White Lady is said to ride on November
nights. A fir tree stood up in dark masses; thick shadows lay on the
grass under the walnut tree. Round the side of the farm buildings an
unexpected pool flashed into whiteness; the imagination was on the
stretch to see an old owl flap out from under the eaves, and shoot by
with silent wing; when suddenly from overhead came a flutter and crash
of branches, and a great creature swooped down and fled by with train
streaming behind.
It is but seldom he can cause so much sensation; and for the most part
he walks alone behind the hedge, peering through at the barn-door
fowls, as an anxious exhibitor at a fair peers out from his van to
count the sordid crowd collecting.
[Illustration: _Photograph by S. A. McDowall_
“For the most part he walks alone.”]
Towards feeding time, when the fowls begin to gather, the peacock, if
he can, pens a few hens into a corner by the woodshed and begins to
posture before them, making a harmony of green and gold against the
greening lichened wood behind. And the dance, _Il Pavone_[4], is a
stately affair. He lifts the tail, separating each layer of feathers
from the next; each feather of each layer from its neighbour, and the
whole train flashes sapphire and emerald. Then with another sibilant
shake, feather striking against feather, it is raised upright; the
wings showing chocolate wing feathers are drooped almost to the ground,
raised and drooped two or three times with a quick flutter, and he
begins to turn, conscious that he has an audience behind as well as
before. As he turns full face the beauty of outline of the eyeless
feathers is made clear; one is apt to think when one finds them,
that these are eyed-feathers spoilt; but now they are seen to fringe
the entire tail, each ending like a shallow crescent with the horns
outwards, so that, instead of the scalloped edging which the eyed
patterns would give, these show a fine outline, airy and regular. So
raised, too, the fringe up each feather is copper-coloured, the eyes
stand out separately in long curved rows, the tail falls away from each
side below him in convex curve, and it is here that the feathers with
metallic green fringe grow, forming completely a shining curve away
from the body. The tail is raised so high that the definite scales of
the emerald feathers on the back flow into it; in the front view the
wings are hidden. As a single note to a melody, so is the beauty of a
peacock’s feather to the beauty of a peacock’s tail.
[4] It appears that the author is making a play on words. La Pavane was
a slow processional dance common in Europe during the 16th century.
Pavone is Italian for Peacock.--_Transcriber._
Then he turns again towards the fowls, showing to us behind his
drooping wings and the skeleton white rays of the feathers on the back.
He curves this over his head until it looks like an umbrella turned
inside out, and advances upon them with dainty steps; but the fowls
dully preen their feathers and run away.
What we call the tail is only the tail covert, and the back view shows
the real tail is of stiff feathers, arranged, when these are spread, in
an inverted heart shape. Then comes a sudden noise like a loud sneeze,
repeated again and again before one can see that it is caused by the
sharp striking of the tail feathers against each other and the tail
covert--and again he turns and paces.
He made a long solitary parade the other day on the grass, and finally
crept through the hedge and into the poultry yard, where we followed
him to discover that the whole elaborate proceeding had been carried on
for the sake of one dull black hen, in a flurry about the egg she had
left behind her.
He was waiting for these fowls the other day while, pending dinner,
they had come to dig up a tulip bed. They were routed with ignominy and
rushed home past him, indifferent to his presence; and as the pursuer
turned he sent out after her an angry, discordant, mocking scream.
The bird is but a false prophet. He screams like a cheap trumpet out
of tune when the dog barks, or children shout; and when all is still
he fills the air with shrieks, till the superstitious tremble and the
scientific say there will be rain to-morrow.
But the morrow rises with cloudless sky and fortunes, and the bird is
again discredited. We impute his mistake to the fact that he revels in
pessimism.
All of which shows the peacock seen _sub specie humanitatis_ and
brings us not a whit nearer to what he is thinking, or rather is not
thinking, in the small emptiness of his coroneted head. After all,
there is very little head, and the tale of a peacock is mainly the
story of his tail.