in search of which I opened the _Encyclopædia_. The egg I was looking
for was the Easter egg, and it seemed to be the only egg that was not
mentioned. There were birds' eggs, and reptiles' eggs, and fishes'
eggs, and molluscs' eggs, and crustaceans' eggs, and insects' eggs,
and frogs' eggs, and Augustus Egg, and the eggs of the duck-billed
platypus, which is the only mammal (except the spiny ant-eater) whose
eggs are "provided with a large store of yolk, enclosed within a
shell, and extruded to undergo development apart from the maternal
tissues." I do not know whether it is evidence of the irrelevance of
the workings of the human mind or of our implacable greed of
knowledge, but within five minutes I was deep in the subject of eggs
in general, and had forgotten all about the Easter variety. I found
myself fascinated especially by the eggs of fishes. There are so many
of them that one was impressed as one is on being told the population
of London. "It has been calculated," says the writer of the article,
"that the number laid by the salmon is roughly about 1000 to every
pound weight of the fish, a 15-lb. salmon laying 15,000 eggs. The
sturgeon lays about 7,000,000; the herring 50,000; the turbot
14,311,000; the sole 134,000; the perch 280,000." This is the sort of
sentence I always read over to myself several times. And when I come
to "the turbot, 14,311,000," I pause, and try to picture to myself the
man who counted them. How does one count 14,311,000? How long does it
take? If one lay awake all night, trying to put oneself to sleep by
counting turbots' eggs instead of sheep, one would hardly have done
more than make a fair start by the time the maid came in to draw the
curtains and let in the sun on one's exhausted temples. A person like
myself, ignorant of mathematics, could not easily count more that
10,000 in an hour. This would mean that, even if one lay in bed for
ten hours, which one never does except on one's birthday, one would
have counted only 100,000 out of the 14,311,000 eggs by the time one
had to get up for breakfast. That would leave 14,211,000 still to be
counted At this point, most of us, I think, would give it up in
despair. After one horrible night's experience, we would jump into a
hot bath muttering: "Never again! Never again!" like a statesman who
can't think of anything to say, and send out for a quinine-and-iron
tonic. Our friends meeting us later in the day would say with concern:
"Hullo! you're looking rather cheap. What have you been doing?"; and
when we answered bitterly: "Counting turbots' eggs," they would hurry
off with an apprehensive look on their faces. The naturalist, it is
clear, must be capable of a persistence that is beyond the reach of
most of us. I calculate that, if he were able to work for 14 hours a
day, counting at the rate of 10,000 an hour, even then it would take
him 122-214 days to count the eggs of a single turbot. After that, it
would take a chartered accountant at least 122-214 days to check his
figures. One can gather from this some idea of the enormous industry
of men of science. For myself, I could more easily paint the Sistine
Madonna or compose a Tenth Symphony than be content to loose myself
into this universe of numbers. Pythagoras, I believe, discovered a
sort of philosophy in numbers, but even he did not count beyond seven.
After the fishes, the reptiles seem fairly modest creatures. The
ordinary snake does not lay more than twenty or thirty eggs, and even
the python is content to stop at a hundred. The crocodile, though a
wicked animal, lays only twenty or thirty; the tortoise as few as two
or four; and the turtle does not exceed two hundred. But I am not
really interested in eggs--not, at least, in any eggs but birds'
eggs--or should not have been, if I had not read _The Encyclopædia
Britannica_. The sight of a fly's egg--if the fly lays an egg--fills
me with disgust--and frogs' eggs attract me only with the fascination
of repulsion. What one likes about the birds is that they lay such
pretty eggs. Even the duck lays a pretty egg The duck is a plain bird,
rather like a char-woman, but it lays an egg which is (or can be) as
lovely as an opal. The flavour, I agree, is not Christian, but, like
other eggs of which this can be said, it does for cooking. Hens' eggs
are less attractive in colour, but more varied. I have always thought
it one of the chief miseries of being a man that, when boiled eggs are
put on the table, one does not get first choice, and that all the
little brown eggs are taken by women and children before one's own
turn comes round. There is one sort of egg with a beautiful sunburnt
look that always reminds me of the seaside, and that I have not tasted
in a private house for above twenty years. To begin the day with such
an egg would put one in a good temper for a couple of hours. But
always one is fobbed off with a large white egg of demonstrative
uncomeliness. It may taste all right, but it does not look all right.
Food should appeal to the eye as well as to the palate, as everyone
recognises when the blancmange that has not set is brought to the
table. At the same time, there is one sort of white egg that is quite
delightful to look at. I do not know its parent, but I think it is a
black hen of the breed called Spanish. Not everything white in Nature
is beautiful. One dislikes instinctively white calves, white horses,
white elephants and white waistcoats. But the particular egg of which
I speak is one of the beautiful white things--like snow, or a breaking
wave, or teeth. So certain am I, however, that neither it nor the
little brown one will ever come my way, while there is a woman or a
child or a guest to prevent it, that when I am asked how I like the
eggs to be done I make it a point to say "poached" or "fried." It
gives me at least a chance of getting one of the sort of eggs I like
by accident. As for poached eggs, I agree. There are nine ways of
poaching eggs, and each of them is worse than the other. Still, there
is one good thing about poached eggs: one is never disappointed. One
accepts a poached egg like fate. There is no sitting on tenterhooks,
watching and waiting and wondering, as there is in regard to boiled
eggs. I admit that most of the difficulties associated with boiled
eggs could be got over by the use of egg-cosies--appurtenances of the
breakfast table that stirred me to the very depths of delight when I
first set eyes on them as a child. It was at a mothers' meeting, where
I was the only male present. Thousands of women sat round me, sewing
and knitting things for a church bazaar. Much might be written about
egg-cosies. Much might be said for and much against. They would be
effective, however only if it were regarded as a point of honour not
to look under the cosy before choosing the egg. And the sense of
honour, they say, is a purely masculine attribute. Children never had
it, and women have lost it. I do not know a single woman whom I would
trust not to look under an egg cosy--not, at least, unless she were
forbidden eggs by the doctor. In that case, any egg would seem
delicious, and she would seize the nearest, irrespective of class or
colour.
This may not explain the connection between eggs and Easter. But then
neither does _The Encyclopædia Britannica_. I have looked up both the
article on eggs and the article on Easter, and in neither of them can
I find anything more relevant than such remarks as that "the eggs of
the lizard are always white or yellowish, and generally soft-shelled;
but the geckos and the green lizards lay hard-shelled eggs" or
"Gregory of Tours relates that in 577 there was a doubt about Easter."
In order to learn something about Easter eggs one has to turn to some
such work as _The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable_, which tells us that
"the practice of presenting eggs to our friends at Easter is Magian or
Persian, and bears allusion to the mundane egg, for which Ormuzd and
Ahriman were to contend till the consummation of all things." The
advantage of reading _Tit-Bits_ is that one gets to know hundreds of
things like that. The advantage of not reading _Tit-Bits_ is that one
is so ignorant of them that a piece of information of this sort is as
fresh and unexpected as the morning's news every Easter Monday. Next
Easter, I feel sure, I shall look it up again. I shall have forgotten
all about the mundane egg, even if Ormuzd and Ahriman have not. I
shall be thinking more about my breakfast egg. What a piece of work is
a man! And yet many profound things might be said about eggs, mundane
or otherwise. I wish I could have thought of them.
XVIII
ENTER THE SPRING
One would imagine from the way in which some people are talking that
this is an early spring. I do not think it is. The daffodils certainly
came before the swallows dared, but they came reluctantly and in less
generous profusion than usual--at least, in one county. As for the
swallow, it may have arrived by Saturday, but it has not arrived on
the day on which I am writing. "About the middle of March," says Mr
Coward, "the first swallows arrive," but I have met no one who has
seen one even in the first week in April. The sky seems empty without
them. This is, no doubt, an illusion. There are plenty of rooks and
pigeons, and there are always starlings desperately hustling from the
chimney-pot across to the plum-tree and back again. But the starling
is most interesting, not when he is in the air, but when he is at
rest--making queer noises in his effulgent, tight-fitting clothes,
sometimes like a baby in a cradle, sometimes like a girl trying to
whistle, always experimenting with sound rather than singing. One
looks forward to the swallows and martins and swifts because they
really do live the life of the air. The sky is their domain, and no
roof or tree or even telegraph wire. Till they arrive the air is an
all but stagnant pool. They transform it into a scene of whirlpools.
They do for the air what the hum of insects does for the garden. They
banish the stillness of winter and lead the year in the movements of a
remembered dance. Spring, however, awakens gradually, and does not
plunge precipitately into an orgy. First, the home birds sing, or
rather redouble their singing, for the wren and the robin hardly ever
left off. This, I think, must be an exceptional year for the chorus of
wrens. Last year the lane that leads to the station was at this time a
lane of chaffinches: this year it is a lane of wrens. Last year the
garden was a garden of thrushes: this year it is a garden of wrens.
That is possibly an exaggeration, but this little Tetrazzini among the
birds has never seemed to me to trill so dominantly and over so wide a
rule. As for the thrushes, I do not know what has happened to them. I
heard plenty of them on the outskirts of London in February, but here,
fifty miles from London, it is as though they were an exterminated
race. Whether gardeners or cats or some other epidemic is to blame,
the trees are silent of them. Even the blackbird is not too common
here this year, but then a country gardener regards a blackbird as a
Turk regards an Armenian. I wish thrushes and blackbirds could read,
so that one could put up a notice offering them sanctuary even at the
expense of one's gooseberries and strawberries. Strange that a
strawberry should appear more delightful to anyone than the song of a
blackbird! I know, I may say, the feeling of helpless rage that wells
up in the human breast at the sight of a blackbird stealing one's
strawberries. Thank God, I am not impervious to moral indignation. If
shouting "Stop thief!" could save the strawberries, my voice would be
for saving them. But I do not believe in capital punishment for petty
theft, and, anyhow, if I must lose either a song or a strawberry, I
had rather lose the strawberry.
The larks luckily take to the fields and do not trust themselves near
either cats or gardeners. They do not always escape even in the
fields, and the dead bodies of some of them are served in a pudding in
a Fleet Street restaurant. But, on the whole, considering what a
dangerous neighbour man is, they escape fairly lightly. There is a
sort of "live and let live" truce between them and the human race. The
chaffinches, too--the greatest bird multitude there is, perhaps, after
the house-sparrows--are free enough to sing. They have been, during
the past week, sailing out on short voyages from the tops of trees,
like flycatchers, dancing in the air after their victims and then
returning to the spray. The green-finch--that beautiful-winged Mrs
Gummidge among birds--is also abundant, and slips down nervously every
now and then among the groundsel in the unweeded garden. I confess the
greenfinch has all my sympathy, but it rather bores me. What the deuce
is it worrying about? There is no poetry in its lamentation--only a
sort of habitual formula of a poor, lorn woman. If birds could read, I
think I should add to the notices I put up a little board containing
the words:
"No bottles.
No hawkers,
No greenfinches."
I should feel really sorry if they took any notice of my notice, but
it might convey a hint to them that it would be good policy on their
part to cheer up for at least five minutes in the day and that, in any
case, there is no need to say the same thing over and over again.
Every bird, it is true, says the same thing over and over again--at
any rate, more or less the same thing. Birds such as the robin and the
thrush vary their song as the chaffinch and the willow-wren do not.
But even the robin and the thrush have a recognisable pattern.
Fortunately, they are not always, like the greenfinch, thinking of the
old 'un and thinking out loud.
The goldfinches have begun to fly about the garden again with their
little sequins of song, as someone has delightfully described their
music. They have their eyes, I hope, on the pear-tree--now as white as
an Alp--where they built and brought up a large family last year. The
cornflowers in the flower border are already in bud, and I am told
that this is the temptation to which goldfinches most easily yield. I
hope so, at any rate. I should have a garden blue with cornflowers, if
I were sure that this would entice the seven colours of the goldfinch
to make their home in it. Last Saturday, two lesser spotted
woodpeckers invaded the garden. One always imagines a woodpecker as a
bird of more substantial size, and it is surprising to see this little
creature, patterned on the back like something made in the Omega
workshop, no bigger than a sparrow, as it hastily visits apple and fig
tree and even wygelia. As it climbed the wygelia, indeed, a sparrow
stooped down from an upper branch to study it, and then advanced in
the direction of the woodpecker. The woodpecker lay back from the
trunk of the tree--lying on its back in the air, as it were, and
fluttering its wings while holding on with its claws--and seemed to
invite the sparrow to come on. I don't think the sparrow had ever seen
a woodpecker before. Its curiosity rather than its wrath was aroused
by the strange spectacle. It did not want to hurt the foreigner, but
only to look at him. After having looked its fill, it moved off to a
safer tree. Then the woodpecker, whose heart had no doubt been in its
boots for the past five minutes, also loosed its hold on the bark and
made off over the gate for a less exciting garden.
Outside the garden the spring began on Good Friday. It came in with
the chiffchaff. For three years in succession I have heard the first
chiffchaff in exactly the same place--a clump of nut-trees on the top
of a high bank. At this time of year, too, before the leaves are out,
it is easy to see it. And there are few more charming birds to watch.
With its little beak as slender as a grass-seed, and its body moving
among the branches like a tiny shadow rather than flesh and bones, it
pauses again and again in the midst of its eating to take an upward
glance and utter its mite of music--as monotonous as a Thibetan's
praying wheel. Still lovelier is the willow-wren that follows it. It
is as though the chiffchaff were the first sketch of a willow-wren.
The willow-wren is the perfected work of art, with little shades of
green added and a voice that, small though its range is, is perhaps
the most exquisite that will fill the air till the nightingale
arrives. When I went out on Sunday morning, I prophesied that I would
hear the first willow-wren, and, though I heard only one in a
hill-side copse where the cowslips are just getting their bells ready,
the prophecy came true. Not that I am much of a prophet. I don't know
how often I have prophesied the arrival of the swallow. And, indeed,
it is the surprises in nature, rather than the things that one
foresees, that are the pleasantest--especially if one is easily
surprised, as I am. Whoever ceases to be surprised, for instance, by
the sight of a goldcrested wren? I heard its tiny pinpoint of voice
last Sunday afternoon when I was walking past a plantation where the
bullace was in flower, and, on looking into the trees, saw the little
thimble-sized creature making free with invisible insects--his beak is
hardly big enough to eat a visible one--and performing acrobatics like
a tit. One of the charms of the goldcrest is that he does not look on
a human being as a wild beast. The blackbird regards a man as a
policeman; the greenfinch bolts for it if you so much as look at him,
but the goldcrest feels as secure in your presence as if you were
behind bars in a cage in the Zoological Gardens. One could probably
make him jump if one went up to him and shouted suddenly into his ear,
or even by making a violent gesture. But his first instinct is not to
run. That, for a bird, is a considerable compliment. There can be
nothing more distressing to a man of strictly honourable intentions
than to have to creep about hedges furtively like a criminal in order
to get a good look at a bird. Why he should want to look at birds at
all it is difficult to explain. I suppose it is a sort of disease,
like going to the "movies" or doing exercises. All I know is that, if
you get it, you get it very badly. You would stop Shakespeare himself,
if he were reciting a new sonnet to you, and bid him be quiet and look
half-way up the elm where the nuthatch was beating away--up and down,
like a blacksmith--at a nut or something in a knob of the tree. St
Paul might be reading out to you the first draft of his Epistle to the
Romans; you would quite unscrupulously interrupt him with a "Hush,
man! There's a tree-creeper somewhere about. Listen, there he is! If
you keep quiet, perhaps we'll be able to see him." I assure you, it is
as bad as that. As for a man who takes out a noisy dog, or who whacks
at loose stones with his stick on the road, you would regard him as a
misbehaved and riotous person and would not call him your friend.
Everything has to be subordinated to the hope of catching sight of a
hypothetical bird--which you have probably seen dozens of times
already. Truly, there is no accounting for human vices. There is,
however, at least this to be said in favour of bird-watching, that it
is the pleasantest of the vices, that it is cheaper than golf, and
does not harden the arteries like tea-drinking. And after all, if one
is going to get excited at all, one may as well get excited about the
colours and songs of birds as about most things.
XIX
THE DAREDEVIL BARBER
To roll over Niagara Falls in a barrel is an odd way of courting
death, but it seems that death must be courted somehow. Danger is more
attractive to many men than drink. They prefer gambling with their
lives to gambling with their money. They have the gambler's faith in
their lucky star. They are preoccupied with the vision of victory to
the exclusion of all timid thoughts. They have a dramatic sense that
sets them anticipatorily on a stage, bowing to the applause of the
multitude. It is the applause, I fancy, rather than the peril itself,
that entices them. The average boy who performs a deed of derring-do
performs it before his admiring fellows. Even in so small a thing as
ringing a bell and running away he likes to have spectators. Few boys
ring bells out of mischief when they are alone. Poor Mr Charles
Stephens, the "Daredevil Barber" of Bristol, who lost his life at
Niagara Falls in his six-foot barrel the other Sunday, made sure that
there would be plenty of witnesses of his adventure. Not only had he a
party of sightseers in motors along the road following the cask on its
perilous voyage but he had a cinematograph photographer ready to
immortalise the affair on a film. Two other persons, it is said, had
already accomplished a similar feat. One of them, a woman, "was just
about gone," according to a witness, "when we got her out of the
barrel." The other "was a used-up man for several weeks." This
however, did not deter the daredevil barber. Had he not already on one
occasion put his head into a lion's mouth? Had he not boxed in a
lion's den? Had he not stood up to men with rifles who shot lumps of
sugar from his head? It may seem an extraordinary way to behave in a
world in which there are so many reasonable opportunities for heroism,
but men are extraordinary creatures. There is no adventure so wild
that they will not embark on it. There are men who, if they took it
into their heads that there was one chance in a hundred of reaching
the moon by being precipitated into space in some kind of torpedo,
would volunteer for the adventure. They do these mad things alike for
trivial and noble ends. They love a stunt even (or especially) at the
risk of their lives. Half the aeroplane accidents are due to the fact
that many men prefer risk to safety. To do some things that other
people cannot do seems to them the only way of justifying their
existence. It is an initiation into aristocracy. Every man is the
rival of all other men, and he is not satisfied till he has beaten
them. If he is a great cricketer, or a great poet, or a Cabinet
Minister, or wins the Derby, his ambition as a rule is fulfilled and
he does not feel the need of jumping down Etna or hanging by his toes
from the Eiffel Tower in order to create a sensation. But if a man is
no use at either poetry or football, he must do something. Blondin
became a world-famous figure simply by walking along a tight-rope
along which neither Shakespeare nor Shelley could have walked. It may
be that they would have had no desire to walk along it, but in any
case Blondin was able to feel that he could beat the greatest of men
in at least one game. In his own business he stood above the Apostle
Paul and Michelangelo and Napoleon. He was a king and, even if you did
not envy him his trade, you had to envy him his throne. He was a man
you would have liked to meet at dinner, not for the sake of his
conversation, but for the sake of his uniqueness. One remembers how
one stood with heart in mouth as he set out with his balancing-pole in
his hand on his journey across the rope blindfolded and pretending to
stumble every ten yards. A single false step and he would have fallen
from the height of a tower to certain death, for there was no net to
catch him. Strange that one should have cared whether he fell or not!
But ninety-nine out of a hundred did care. We watched him as
breathlessly as though he were carrying the future of the world in his
hands. He knew that he was interesting us, engrossing us, and that was
his reward. It was a reward, no doubt, that could be measured in gold.
But it is more than greed of gold that sets men courting death in such
ways. The joy of being unique is at least as great as the joy of being
rich. And the surest way of becoming unique is to trail one's coat in
the presence of Death and challenge him to tread on the tail of it.