How shall we with a conscience justify ourselves in the eyes of the
animal creation? Humbler folk than ourselves, yet I cannot think
that mice suffer by a comparison. I have attended to them with much
speculative attention, and I have found them a peaceable people without
malice. The worst offense that I have to record against them is the
demolition of several fine books in my library; but it was done (it
is not fair to hide this testimony) with the high intent of providing
a comfortable nest for the birth and early tending of the tender
young. As much cannot be said for the destruction of Louvain, for the
shelling of Rheims. They have purloined my cheese and been sly as to
my soap and tallow candles, but not, you will note, that they might
grow disproportionately fat and sleek thereon; no, nor for the sake of
banking these riches, to exchange them later for horseless carriages in
which to loll lazily or to pursue madly some unwholesome excitement;
no, nor yet to lay such things by in hoard and stores in such a
manner as to make it difficult or impossible for others to have the
same pleasure as themselves. No; they took only what hunger rendered
legitimate, a few satisfying nibbles at the candle, then leaving it
free, with a fine democracy, for the next man to take whatever was his
need.
Where shall you find me a millionaire, or even a moderately
conscientious business man among us, with as generous and as democratic
a tendency? We who are so sharp with them, so eager to give them the
death-penalty, would we have thieved as little as they? Nor have I
ever, for all my listenings, been able to hear any quarrelings or
recriminations among them. Solicitous cautions, dangerous adventure,
frolickings and gigglings and squeaking laughter I have heard, but
nothing to compare with our harshnesses, spoken and unspoken; nor do
I believe them capable either of our sullenness or our spites. I have
met, as have most of us, with days of such from honorable men and
women, which I do not believe a mouse--of a so much lower order!--would
for a moment be capable of.
In the face of uncertainties and disappointments such as theirs, what
would become, I wonder, of our philosophy? Yet they would appear to
maintain their gentleness unspoiled. We who take offense so readily;
we who would boast if we forgave a man seven times seven! They, it
would appear from easily collected data, do, in all likelihood, forgive
seven hundred times seventy, and make no ado about it at all. They seem
always ready to try life anew, and to give you another chance to be
generous.
I was sitting once in the library of the old house, of which I have
written, reading. Stillness and the stars were out; a fire burned on
the hearth, for the night was cold. I read by the light of a lamp
a book that I loved. At my feet slept Commodore, my collie, his
pointed nose resting on his paws. On the rug by the fire was the old
tortoise-shell cat, Lady Jane, a spoiled but endeared companion. Both
had had their supper so bounteously that the dish of milk lay unemptied
still on the hearth, and, like the Giant in the fairy tale, they slept
"from repletion."
They slept and I read, and for comfort of mind and body you might
have gone far to find three so comfortable as we that night. And then
presently I became aware of a little timorous shadow, that was not
a shadow, after all, but a tiny, tiny mouse. It put up its nose and
sniffed the air nor'-nor'-west, sou'-sou'-east. It tasted the possible
danger with its whiskers. It tasted and made sure, delicately, like a
connoisseur. Could the great adventure be risked?
I can give you no idea by what sensitive soundings and testings and
deliberations and speculations it at last crept into the flickering
firelight. I wish I could convey to you the delicacy of its behavior:
manners to make those of Commodore and Lady Jane (they with their
sounding titles!) seem crude and greedy and plebeian. Its little
pauses said, "May I?" Its delicate deliberations conveyed, "If I am
troubling no one?" Its hesitations offered, "If I may be so bold?" And
then, after these preliminaries, it took its place how politely on the
brim of the flat dish of milk, and drank, and raised its head, and
drank, paused and drank again, daintily. Once, I thought, it offered a
courteous toast to me and my silence.
Commodore and Lady Jane slept on! Oh, if they had known! Oh, the mews
of disappointment and the terrible barkings and the _Fi-fo-fum_ there
would have been! But no, they slept on; and at last, having supped but
lightly, the little mouse took itself away, carrying with it neither
money-bags nor marvelous hen, nor golden harp. A true story and a fairy
tale all in one, if you like--and without the questionable ethics of
its more famous prototype.
IV
What do they make of life? Their stoicism, their gentleness, their
never-jaded curiosity perpetually tempt my speculation. That they are
a people of vicissitudes and disappointments due largely to ourselves
needs no arguing. What opinions have they of us? What effect have our
behaviors on them? A consistently gentle people, they are treated
with unvarying severity. What have they in lieu of logic to make life
bearable? And what reward is there for their virtues? Or, are they too
simple at heart, as yet, to ask for reward at all beyond the hope of a
mere precarious existence? Is life as dear to them as that? And what,
if any, in the way of religious speculation of a crude and early order,
might they be supposed to entertain? I would like to be delegated to
investigate and report upon mouse mythology.
I can hardly rid myself of the idea that in their present is, as it
were, some dim glimmering of our own past. They seem to me testing
the world, as we ourselves must have done when we too were less
established, when we also were in a position scarcely less precarious,
eons before any written records were kept, long before man had
learned to remember at will for the quick purposes of convenience and
comparison--in a dim, dim foretime, when to us, in some early Caliban
existence, the outward world was as Prospero, unaccountable, and
possessed of strange whimsies and quick with unwarrantable revenges.
"When a tree," says Frazer, tracing in his "Golden Bough" the
beginnings of mythology, "comes to be viewed no longer as a body of the
tree spirit, but simply as its abode, which it can quit at pleasure,
an important advance has been made in religious thought. Animism is
passing into polytheism."
I cannot help wondering from time to time, whimsically, whether those
quiet denizens of that old house had made "an important advance
in religious thought"; was "animism," with them, "passing into
polytheism"? Were mouse-traps deceptive and evil gods with terrible
snapping jaws, or but the abodes of these evil deities? And for
philosophy and metaphysic, what had they? In that dim attic world
was this perhaps an entire people in its mythopœic age, their gods
descending and ascending miraculously, leaving a magenta cheese as
incontrovertible evidence, or as unaccountably visiting them with swift
and crafty destruction?
I am inclined to think their world is a colored one, fertile in fables.
It would not surprise me to find that a small wooden object, known
to us of a different development as a mere "mouse-trap," is to them
some Dis or Ahriman, a terrible deity of dark powers and multiple
personalities. That there are other gods besides,--the great and
awful CAT, the less omnipresent but not less terrible TERRIER,--I
am not disposed to doubt; nor do I think they lack the shining ones
also, as quiet as the others are full of movement, as conducive to
life and well-being as the others to death and destruction--bright,
effulgent ones of the godlike color of cheese, or silver sheen of
tallow and paraffine; and back of all these, it may be, some elder
deities,--ourselves,--the older gods with Olympian powers, who can
establish earthquakes; who can wipe away entire communities; gods and
goddesses whose heads are in the clouds, whose movements are terrific,
who shake complete creation when they walk, and with unthinkable besoms
sweep with horrible sweepings, and periodically visit the world with
awful scourges and hellish visitations of order and cleanliness.
I would not pretend to be acquainted with mouse literature, but I
would venture a wager that their "Arabian Nights" outdoes ours as
cheese, chalk. Djinns, genii, and affrites--can it be thought that
they lack them? If the unaccountability of the world be, as it would
seem to me, the basis of all literature and the origin of all fable,
philosophy, entertainment, and speculation, can it be denied that they
have extraordinary inducement? If our own world seems full of chance,
and forever breaking away from bonds and probabilities, I only ask you
to compare it with theirs!--in which the unaccountable is the sole
certainty they possess.
I awoke one morning in the late fall, and began to dress, giving no
thought whatever to them and their problems. When I came to put on my
shoe, however, I could no longer ignore them. In the toe of it, stowed
away safely, were three hickory-nuts!
Some sleek-coated citizen, with a winter house in mind, had wandered in
those purlieus, thinking to begin the arduous labor requisite to the
building of a home suitable to the long, dark season nearly at hand,
when lo, this prudent necessity was suddenly, by a miraculous bounty,
waived! Mark you and observe! Here was provided for him a home such as
his best skill could never have contrived. A place how warm, how neat,
how conformable! That his acceptance was immediate, was testified by
his already accumulated stores.
I paused and took them in my hand: one, two, three. There was a saint,
I am told, who allowed the birds to build in his two palms, and did not
rise from his knees until the fledglings were ready to fly from the
nest. Neither was I a saint, nor could I afford such beneficence. I was
pressed for time, as God's saints, I believe, never are, and I needed
my shoe. I slipped it on as I had slipped on its mate; I tied its lace
neatly, gave the bow an efficient pat, and walked away in it. It is
true, I did put the three hickory-nuts on the bureau. I am not sure
what I meant to do with them, but I never saw them again. Miss Layng,
the terrible goddess of order, probably flung them out of the window
with mutterings.
But I ask you only to picture the romance, and it may be the
terror, of the thing to the one who had laid such delightful plans,
who had enjoyed such anticipations! House, stores, hopes, social
aggrandizement, everything--gone! carried off entire, by God knows what
spirit! and not so much as a vestige left to tell the tale!
I do not forget that it is the custom to speak of mice as
_destructive_; yet may not that word be used, after all, with something
of a bias? I picture one of them on his way to seek a few bits of
newspaper for the lining of a nest, and I imagine him suddenly endowed
with the ability to read the inky characters. He pauses in amaze.
His eyes bulge and devour the news beadily. And what news it is!
Statistics! Staggering statistics of the men and officers killed since
our great war's beginning; and of aged and innocent citizens shot,
women violated, little children sacrificed, noble cities destroyed!
His hand goes over his heart to quiet its violent beating. Ah, what
a race of gods they are! Or, he reads this from a recent account of
the bayonet practice at Plattsburg--whatever "bayonet" may mean, and
whatever "Plattsburg"; for these accessories of civilization lie ahead
of him some eons.
"Aim for the vitals," he reads. "Do not fire until you feel your
bayonet stick. Thus you will shatter the bone, and you can then
withdraw the blade. At the same time, try to trip your enemy with your
left foot, so that he will fall forward."
None of this is clear to him. This is the deportment, without doubt, of
the immortal gods! Fancy the consequences of _his_ attempting to trip
_his_ enemy, the mouse-trap, or the cat, or the terrier, with _his_
left foot!
No; these are powers and potencies to which he can only look forward
in dim futures, when the mouse tribe shall have attained, eons hence,
perhaps, to a higher order of being, and to these godlike practices.
But that, however glorious, is but a far dream! Meek and gentle and
forgiving, in his inferiority, he lends himself devotedly once more to
his labors, and nibbles the newspaper, carrying off small pieces of it,
very destructively, to build that near-by nest in which soon are to be
born tiny creatures as gentle and inferior and destructive as himself.
To one who has studied mythology with a reverence for its revelations,
it must often have seemed that man is kinder than his conception of
the mighty powers that try him. Job would seem to be, rather than the
Deity, the hero of Job's tragical story; and how much nobler, to cite a
most obvious instance, is the ancient Greek than his deities!
However impious this may appear to the pious, yet to me the thing
looks hopeful. Dread and powerful as are our own gods,--Authority,
Mammon, Sentiment, Public Opinion, Superstition, Fear,--and many as
have been our sacrifices offered up to them, yet may it not be that
humanity, frail, and so largely at their mercy, retains some sovereign
nobilities still unvanquished by them?
Have we not had our own disappointments and vicissitudes? Have not our
conceptions of our duties and privileges and rights and gayeties been
but poorly adjusted to those powers whose awful retributions we have
tempted? Yet I am inclined to hope that, notwithstanding all this, we
shall still preserve some gentleness that cannot be conquered; shall
still retain some virtues which, let these terrible powers descend upon
us as they will, cannot be obliterated, that we shall be, till the end,
something better than our fate, something more kind than our destiny.
I have but speculated widely concerning mouse mythology. Truth compels
me to state that it is to me, after all, but dim and debatable
territory. I can give you nothing authoritative as to their philosophy.
But this I know: they have maintained their gentleness, and are a
reproach to those whom I take to be their gods.
All else is but speculation and possibility, but this is the evidence
of their lives. They are a meek and a forgiving people. Think only
what they endure at our hands, who justly make so great a matter of a
Belgium violated, and forget, in a god-like manner, when it so pleases
us, a violated Congo, or a divided Persia, or a Poland outraged and cut
to pieces, but not defended! How gentle, how consistent, how without
spite, ill-will, or grudge, they remain toward those unalterably
hostile to them! With what mildness not matched among us do they
conduct themselves! How they preserve their cheerfulness, their good
nature, their kindliness! Have you not heard with what gayety they
roll hickory-nuts away? Has your ear not witnessed their gigglings and
rejoicings?
But their virtues go deeper than this. It may be told of them above
all, that, however provident in other matters, they store up no malice,
they preserve no hate.
Once I lay ill in that house of which I have here written. I had been
very wretched, but my physician, seated now by my bed, promised me I
would soon be well. After that we spoke together, as we were wont to
do, of matters of a philosophic kind, then paused. At the bottom of
my bed, on the footboard, was a tiny mouse. No; it was not the same
adventurous spirit who had visited the giant's castle and drunk from
the plate of milk; this one was smaller and more slender. We did not
speak. He came down cautiously, very gently, to the coverlet, then
delicately up one fold, down another, pausing, listening, waiting to
take note; pausing, waiting, foot delicately lifted, until he had
got as far as the tray. He went very carefully about this, smelling
and inspecting it; yes, I would have sworn, inspecting. It had every
air of his wanting to know whether they had brought me the right and
well-cooked food. He tasted nothing save a tiny crumb on the tray
itself, and then, as though satisfied, was gone.
I hoped for another visit, but waited for him in vain. He was a little
fellow, sleek of skin, with a black, beady eye, and very delicate
whiskers. I never saw a daintier foot.
BIRTHDAYS AND OTHER EGOTISMS
I
Charles Lamb, in his "Grace Before Meat," protests--very endearingly,
it seems to me--against the custom of particular thankfulness for food.
He suspects that it had its origin in the "hunter state of man, when
dinners were precarious things, and a full meal was something more than
a common blessing; when a bellyful was a windfall and looked like a
special Providence.--"It is not otherwise easy to be understood," he
avers, "why the blessing of food--the act of eating--should have had
a particular expression of thanksgiving annexed to it, distinct from
that implied and silent gratitude with which we are expected to enter
upon the enjoyment of the many other various gifts and good things of
existence."
I find myself like-minded and similarly protestant as to birthdays. I
cannot discover why the blessing of these should be hailed with any
very particular delight, distinct from that implied joy with which we
might be expected to welcome the many other various days of the year.
It cannot be said that it was because I was abnormally shy throughout
my childhood that I found birthdays embarrassing, for I had no more
than the usual shyness of the average child. Moreover, my surroundings
and training gave me easy confidence in others and in myself. The
tragedies of my little girlhood were not exceptional: dead cats or
canaries, broken dolls, the inability to make myself always understood
by grown-ups, and certain moral and spiritual failures and cataclysms
known only to myself and what I took to be my fearfully disappointed
Maker. But barring these things, incident and customary, my early years
may be said to have been especially bright and reassuring. What was it,
then, which could have caused this early distrust of birthdays?
If I am to trace the growth of what perhaps seems so unwarranted a
thing, I shall have to ask indulgence for what may appear to be some
of that very egotism I decry: I shall have to ask to be allowed a
discussion of several of my own birthdays, and their celebration when
I was a child.
My fifth is the earliest that I remember. I had been promised a
cake with candles. Moreover, I had learned, by dint of the patience
of Mademoiselle Cinque, our queer old French governess, a little
French song, which I was to sing as my own share toward the festive
celebration. From the shelter of my father's arm, I was to sing it for
the rest to hear:--
"_Frè-re Jac-ques! Frè-re Jac-ques!
Dor-mez vous? Dor-mez vous?
Son-nez les matines; son-nez les matines;
Den, din, don!_"
The cake, then, and the song were, from my point of view, the
extraordinarily important and sufficient events of the day--these and
the fact that on that day I would be five years old. It is certain that
I chattered about these things a great deal, and laid deep plans. But,
as it happened, it was neither the cake nor yet my ripe years that
were to make that day so memorable. I can close my eyes and go back
to it unerring, and find myself in the old surroundings, familiar yet
strange--strange that day with an unwonted, unaccountable strangeness.
Where was everybody? The house was, indeed, still--as still as the
February day outside, which lay quiet as death under a sheeted
whiteness that had been drawn over it silently in the night.
I can seem to feel myself actually as little as I was then, and with
my doll under one arm going up the silent stairs, laboriously but
determinedly, pulling one leg resolutely after the other, up the
length of them, with the aid of one hand on the banister spindles, to
investigate for myself the strangeness.
An older sister of mine, whom I loved dearly, had been ill, and for
several days past I had been cautioned to gentleness and had played
apart, so that quietness of a certain kind I understood. But the
quietness now was of a different order. In the upper hall some one
opened a door, at the patter of my investigating steps, I suppose; held
out a hand, stopped me in mid-search--stopped me and kissed me and told
me. My sister had died in the early hours of that day, before the dawn
was come.
I do not remember who it was who told me. I remember, however, pushing
myself away from the embrace a little, demanding whether I might see
my mother. I was told with great gentleness that this was impossible.
My father? No; him, also, I might not see--not yet. All this sobered
and puzzled me. I reached for the next, and perhaps on that day even
dearer, possibility. Might I see the cook? Yes.
That, for a time at least, righted matters, and restored my world to
me. I pattered down the stairs, down the lower hall, then more steps;
found the cook and demanded my birthday cake; and in place of the cake
received a most shocked look, delivered in the manner of unthinkable
rebuke. When I insisted, words came to her tongue, but not concerning
the cake. They dealt wholly with myself. They conveyed the impression
that I had done some dreadful and wicked thing. They did not explain. I
was expected to understand and repent.
I remember feeling only thoroughly outraged at having my reasonable
request received in that manner. This was _my_ day, and, in honor of
it, there was to have been a birthday cake. As to larger matters, they
were extraneous to the subject. Of death, it should be remembered, I
had absolutely no knowledge. I loved my sister to the full bent of my
simple but ardent little nature, and she had been peculiarly devoted to
me; but ask some one who has never seen the stars or spoken with one
who has seen them, what he knows of the deep firmament: so much I knew
of that night which had fallen upon our house--nothing!
What I did know presently--the information being conveyed to me in
unmistakable terms by the cook--was that my birthday celebration was
not to be; that it was not only jeopardized, it was clean wiped out,
by an event of immensely greater moment. I have little doubt I wept
sufficiently over my personal disappointment, and it may have taken
especial tact on the part of the gentle person upstairs to pacify me;
but by and by, with that easy forgetfulness which is the better part of
childhood, I must have relinquished all hope of appropriating that day
as my birthday, and accepted, in place of it, life as it was.
My parents, who twice before had been summoned to bear acute
loss,--once when, before I was born, a little baby brother of mine
died, and once when the life of a little baby sister had flickered out
before the flame got well started,--tasted now of what must have been a
far deeper bitterness. She who had gone now was their "extreme hope."
She was twenty-one when she died, and within a few months of her
graduation at the University. She was brilliant above any promise
given by the rest of us. I remember her very clearly--her sensitive
and beautiful face, her great delicacy of body, her ready, very gentle
laugh, and her unfailing understanding of all a little child's desires
and moods. She was exquisite, sensitive as a mimosa in a garden of
sturdier growth. Above us all she seemed to stretch delicate and
flowering branches, in which the wind moved more mysterious; and lovely
winged and songful things, that we could never have hoped to harbor,
seemed to have made their home in her. There was in her something rare
and unlooked for (I do not exaggerate), like the sudden call of a
thrush in the twilight, or delicate and darkling, as in starlight the
song of the nightingale. She was the one reckoned to be most like my
father, and by the generous, and, I think, even proud consent of all of
us, was by him the most beloved. She was as devoted as Cordelia, and
with lesser cause, bringing to the happiness and fullness of his life
what Lear knew only in his desolation. Since I have grown into what is
at least some slight realization of what her loss must have meant to my
father, I cannot touch without a trembling of tears the memory of his
taking me in his arms as he did, to look upon her as she lay, white and
final, delicate and done with life, there in the still and shuttered
room.
But, incredible though it seems to my present knowledge, I had then no
feeling of sadness whatever. She might have slept. Nor did the days
that followed lay heavy hands upon me. There was a quiet stir and
hushed preparation toward what I did not know, and I was looked after
by neighbors or relatives to the extent of believing that a certain
pleasant distinction accrued to me. In all that followed, I know that I
contributed no sadness, only a child's frank observation in the face of
unusual behavior of its elders.