Here are some of the secrets of taxidermy. They were told me by the
taxidermist in a mood of elation. He told me them in the time between
the first glass of whiskey and the fourth, when a man is no longer
cautious and yet not drunk. We sat in his den together; his library it
was, his sitting and his eating room—separated by a bead curtain, so far
as the sense of sight went, from the noisome den where he plied his
trade.
He sat on a deck chair, and when he was not tapping refractory bits of
coal with them, he kept his feet—on which he wore, after the manner of
sandals, the holey relics of a pair of carpet slippers—out of the way
upon the mantel-piece, among the glass eyes. And his trousers,
by-the-by—though they have nothing to do with his triumphs—were a most
horrible yellow plaid, such as they made when our fathers wore
side-whiskers and there were crinolines in the land. Further, his hair
was black, his face rosy, and his eye a fiery brown; and his coat was
chiefly of grease upon a basis of velveteen. And his pipe had a bowl of
china showing the Graces, and his spectacles were always askew, the left
eye glaring nakedly at you, small and penetrating; the right, seen
through a glass darkly, magnified and mild. Thus his discourse ran:
“There never was a man who could stuff like me, Bellows, never. I have
stuffed elephants and I have stuffed moths, and the things have looked
all the livelier and better for it. And I have stuffed human
beings—chiefly amateur ornithologists. But I stuffed a nigger once.
“No, there is no law against it. I made him with all his fingers out and
used him as a hat-rack, but that fool Homersby got up a quarrel with him
late one night and spoilt him. That was before your time. It is hard to
get skins, or I would have another.
“Unpleasant? I don’t see it. Seems to me taxidermy is a promising third
course to burial or cremation. You could keep all your dear ones by you.
Bric-à-brac of that sort stuck about the house would be as good as most
company, and much less expensive. You might have them fitted up with
clockwork to do things.
“Of course they would have to be varnished, but they need not shine more
than lots of people do naturally. Old Manningtree’s bald head—Anyhow,
you could talk to them without interruption. Even aunts. There is a
great future before taxidermy, depend upon it. There is fossils again—”
He suddenly became silent.
“No, I don’t think I ought to tell you that.” He sucked at his pipe
thoughtfully. “Thanks, yes. Not too much water.
“Of course, what I tell you now will go no further. You know I have made
some dodos and a great auk? No! Evidently you are an amateur at
taxidermy. My dear fellow, half the great auks in the world are about as
genuine as the handkerchief of Saint Veronica, as the Holy Coat of
Treves. We make ’em of grebes’ feathers and the like. And the great
auk’s eggs too!”
“Good heavens!”
“Yes, we make them out of fine porcelain. I tell you it is worth while.
They fetch—one fetched £300 only the other day. That one was really
genuine, I believe, but of course one is never certain. It is very fine
work, and afterwards you have to get them dusty, for no one who owns one
of these precious eggs has ever the temerity to clean the thing. That’s
the beauty of the business. Even if they suspect an egg they do not like
to examine it too closely. It’s such brittle capital at the best.
“You did not know that taxidermy rose to heights like that. My boy, it
has risen higher. I have rivalled the hands of Nature herself. One of
the _genuine_ great auks—” his voice fell to a whisper—“one of the
_genuine_ great auks _was made by me_.
“No. You must study ornithology, and find out which it is yourself. And
what is more, I have been approached by a syndicate of dealers to stock
one of the unexplored skerries to the north of Iceland with specimens. I
may—some day. But I have another little thing in hand just now. Ever
heard of the dinornis?
“It is one of those big birds recently extinct in New Zealand. ‘Moa’ is
its common name, so-called because extinct; there is no moa now. See?
Well, they have got bones of it, and from some of the marshes even
feathers and dried bits of skin. Now, I am going to—well, there is no
need to make any bones about it—going to _forge_ a complete stuffed moa.
I know a chap out there who will pretend to make the find in a kind of
antiseptic swamp, and say he stuffed it at once, as it threatened to
fall to pieces. The feathers are peculiar, but I have got a simply
lovely way of dodging up singed bits of ostrich plume. Yes, that is the
new smell you noticed. They can only discover the fraud with a
microscope, and they will hardly care to pull a nice specimen to bits
for that.
“In this way, you see, I give my little push in the advancement of
science.
“But all this is merely imitating Nature. I have done more than that in
my time. I have—beaten her.”
He took his feet down from the mantel-board, and leant over
confidentially towards me. “I have _created_ birds,” he said in a low
voice. “_New_ birds. Improvements. Like no birds that was ever seen
before.”
He resumed his attitude during an impressive silence.
“Enrich the universe; _rath_-er. Some of the birds I made were new kinds
of humming-birds, and very beautiful little things, but some of them
were simply rum. The rummest, I think, was the _Anomalopteryx Jejuna_.
_Jejunus-a-um_—empty—so-called because there was really nothing in it; a
thoroughly empty bird—except for stuffing. Old Javvers has the thing
now, and I suppose he is almost as proud of it as I am. It is a
masterpiece, Bellows. It has all the silly clumsiness of your pelican,
all the solemn want of dignity of your parrot, all the gaunt
ungainliness of a flamingo, with all the extravagant chromatic conflict
of a mandarin duck. _Such_ a bird. I made it out of the skeletons of a
stork and a toucan and a job lot of feathers. Taxidermy of that kind is
just pure joy, Bellows, to a real artist in the art.
“How did I come to make it? Simple enough, as all great inventions are.
One of those young genii who write us Science Notes in the papers got
hold of a German pamphlet about the birds of New Zealand, and translated
some of it by means of a dictionary and his mother-wit—he must have been
one of a very large family with a small mother—and he got mixed between
the living apteryx and the extinct anomalopteryx; talked about a bird
five feet high, living in the jungles of the North Island, rare, shy,
specimens difficult to obtain, and so on. Javvers, who even for a
collector, is a miraculously ignorant man, read these paragraphs, and
swore he would have the thing at any price. Raided the dealers with
inquiries. It shows what a man can do by persistence—will-power. Here
was a bird-collector swearing he would have a specimen of a bird that
did not exist, that never had existed, and which for very shame of its
own profane ungainliness, probably would not exist now if it could help
itself. And he got it. _He got it._
“Have some more whiskey, Bellows?” said the taxidermist, rousing himself
from a transient contemplation of the mysteries of will-power and the
collecting turn of mind. And, replenished, he proceeded to tell me of
how he concocted a most attractive mermaid, and how an itinerant
preacher, who could not get an audience because of it, smashed it
because it was idolatry, or worse, at Burslem Wakes. But as the
conversation of all the parties to this transaction, creator, would-be
preserver, and destroyer, was uniformly unfit for publication, this
cheerful incident must still remain unprinted.
The reader, unacquainted with the dark ways of the collector, may
perhaps be inclined to doubt my taxidermist; but so far as great auks’
eggs, and the bogus stuffed birds are concerned, I find that he has the
confirmation of distinguished ornithological writers. And the note about
the New Zealand bird certainly appeared in a morning paper of
unblemished reputation, for the taxidermist keeps a copy and has shown
it to me.