"Only, what I feel is, that no charity at all can get rid of a
certain natural unkindness which I find in things themselves."
--Pater's _Marius the Epicurean_.
The grippe had held me a prostrate prisoner for weeks. Books, pencils,
people were forbidden. It was a strange but not unhappy Lent to lie
helpless day after day, gazing through my blessed square of window into
a first snowy, then blowy, often rainy and rarely sunshiny patch of
woodland, watching the brown oak leaves whirl in hurricane dances above
the pine-tops, and the crows wing their strong flight against the gray
of the sky. As a cumberer of the earth, I was meekly grateful for the
least attention from this active outdoor world, for the cheery pipings
of the chickadees, whose wee black bills pounded the marrow-bone on the
window-sill, for the guttural greetings of the white-breasted
nuthatches who played the acrobat on the swinging, open-work bag of
cracked walnuts outside the pane, even for the jeers of the bluejays
who swooped to the sash and dashed off like triumphant Dick Turpins
with our bounty of bread and cheese.
So Joy-of-Life, hearing of a Boston confectioner's pious offer to
bestow an Easter chicken on every customer who should alleviate the
fast by the purchase of two pounds of expensive candies at any time
during Holy Week, thought she would add to my feathered acquaintance a
more intimate companion. Herself an abominator of sweets, she
heroically passed a dollar and a half across the counter and received
in exchange, beside two boxes of riotous living, a tiny chick, only a
day or so out from egg and incubator.
It was pretty, she said, to see the interest with which the tired
shop-girls bent over that fluffy morsel of life, petting it with light
touches and soothing words, as it was tucked away, with Indian meal for
provender and a wad of cotton-wool for bedding, in a gay pasteboard
houselet. The color of this miniature mansion was russet flecked with
black. The door was a painted sham, but the red-tiled roof swung open.
The window boasted four oblong apertures, and the whole establishment
was symmetrically set in a half-inch estate of the reddest pasteboard
clay. The girl made the roof secure with a few turns of silver cord and
the captive was reduced to thrusting an indignant yellow bill through
one after another of his window openings, expostulating with all
creation in a series of shrill chirps. As the customer stepped out with
her premium in hand, the candy-coveting group of ragamuffins outside
the window surged forward in rapture at sight and sound of the chicken,
and one particularly grimy urchin reached up both arms toward it with
such an imploring gesture that the birdling almost changed ownership
then and there. But Joy-of-Life bethought herself in time of the
conditions of tenement and alley, not favorable to the development of
any sort of biped, and said:
"It is for a sick lady. Don't you want her to have it?"
And the tatterdemalion slowly dropped his wistful hands, sighing
dutifully, "Yes, m'm."
The chicken-bearer's dignified progress, "cheep, cheep, cheep," across
the Common and Public Gardens and through the Back Bay section,
afforded her a new gauge for testing human nature. Colonial Dames who
looked an aristocratic rebuke she put lower in the scale of sympathy
than the Italian organ-grinder whose black eyes laughed frankly into
hers, while the maid who opened a door in Newbury street, where
Joy-of-Life had a call to make, fell with her shocked, contemptuous
stare quite under passing rank.
It was late in the evening before I heard upon the stairs a welcome
tread, mounting to that queer accompaniment of cheep, cheep, cheep, now
pitched upon a key, had we but ears to hear, of acute distress. My
delight in greeting the chicken was not reciprocated, and no wonder.
Our unconscious, ignorant crimes against his frail little being had
already begun. Joy-of-Life, ever most tender toward the weak, enjoyed,
moreover, the advantage of having been reared upon a farm, where she
had often watched the life of coop and poultry-yard, but not even she
was wise enough to give that chicken comfort.
She had carefully seen to it, all the journey through, that he had
oxygen enough. The March wind blew so harshly that she had wanted to
shelter the fairy chalet under her cloak, but had feared that the
yellow bill, forever thrusting itself through the small casement, would
gasp for air. Air! That is the least of a chicken's wants. With all his
baby energy, Microbe, as we promptly christened him, had called for
heat, heat, heat, and had not been understood. Those thin pasteboard
walls and that shred of cotton-wool had left him practically naked to
the blast, and he was chilled--poor innocent--to the bone.
And still, in our big, human obtuseness, we did not comprehend. We
brought him meal mixed with cold water--an atrocious diet from which he
angrily turned away. All at cross purposes, we flattered him foolishly
in our alien tongue, while he remonstrated passionately in his. At last
the warmth of the room and very weariness quieted that incorrigible
cheep a little, and he was put downstairs out of invalid hearing, with
a strip of batting cast, like a snowdrift, over his jaunty dwelling.
The family went snugly to bed, while the furnace fire burned lower and
lower and the chill of the small hours stole through the house. A less
mettlesome chicken, overwhelmed with the loneliness and cruel cold,
would have yielded up its accusing little ghost then and there, but
this mite had a marvelous spirit of his own and struggled against fate
like a De Wet.
In that heavy hour before the dawn, Joy-of-Life was roused from sleep
by such desperate chicken shrieks, "Yep, yep, yep! Help, help, help!"
that no doors could shut them out. Shivering in her dressing-gown she
went down to our unhappy fosterling, who lay stiff and straight, with
head thrust forward and legs stretched back, apparently _in articulo
mortis_. The rigid bit of body was cold to her touch, and the only
hopeful sign was that shrill, protesting chirp, into which all
remaining vitality seemed to be forced. Holding the downy ball
compassionately between her palms, this ineffectual giantess--from
Microbe's point of view--reflected on the possibilities of the
situation only to be baffled. The kitchen fire was out, the oven had
not a hint of warmth in it, there was no hot water for the rubber bag.
Besides, the chicken seemed too far gone for restoration, and she
guiltily smothered him away under the fold of cotton batting and
retreated to her chamber. But Microbe had by no means surrendered his
sacred little claims to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The
persistent prick of his muffled, frantic cries drove sleep from her
pillow. She rose once more and, by inspiration, carried the diminutive
mansion down cellar, where she placed it on top of the furnace!
Instantly the genial heat reached that exhausted chick, who had battled
for it so valiantly and long. The white-barred lids slipped up over the
round black eyes--for chickens literally "shut their peepers up"--and
he was asleep before his rescuer had turned away.
Joy-of-Life did not believe such a day-old atom of mortality could
survive this woeful night. She came to my bedside at the breakfast hour
and prepared me solemnly for word of Microbe's premature decease. But
little did we know as yet the meaning of that maligned phrase
"chicken-hearted." She descended at a funereal pace to the cellar, but
with the sound of her swift returning feet I laughed to hear, clearer
from stair to stair, an eager, spirited little pipe, "Chip, chip, chip!
What's up now? Where are we going on this trip, trip?"
Such a wide-awake, enterprising speck of poultry it was that
Joy-of-Life proudly set upon the counterpane! He gave prompt proof of
his activity by scrambling madly for my plate, and fluttered down, with
yellow winglets spread, exactly in the center of my slice of toast.
"It's spring chicken on toast he's giving yez," cried our delighted
Mary, and in honor of that ready display of Irish humor, his name was
forthwith abbreviated to Mike.
Then he hopped up into my neck, cuddled down, sang a little, contented
song and went off to sleep again, waking to find himself the ruler of
the roost.
Word of our mutual devotion went abroad and forthwith the critics
began. A high-minded friend sent word that if she heard of my lavishing
any more affection on that ridiculous little rooster, she would come
and wring his yellow neck, and even the Madre herself, she who had
borne with my foibles longest and most indulgently, wrote in a flash of
scandalous uncharity that she wished I would rest content with the wild
birds that God had made, and not waste attention on an illegitimate,
incubator chicken.
But "God be with trewthe qwer he be!" The foolish fact is that, in the
restlessness of convalescence, when work and worry, thought and
humanity must still be shooed from the threshold, I found hourly mirth
and comfort in that dot of sunshine. The phenomenal mists and rains of
this first April of the new century caused such a dearth of golden
lights in the world that a yellow chicken acquired peculiar values. The
furnace-man said he was a Wyandotte and, as a feminine household, we
invariably put absolute faith in the word of our furnace-man. I do not
know how Wyandottes ought to look, but I know that this was a
daffodil-colored mite, with legs and feet more slender than chicken
wont, and with a hundred diverting, confiding, tyrannical little ways.
I never ceased marveling at the pluck with which this Lilliputian
tackled life in the midst of such Brobdingnagian surroundings. The only
time I ever saw him scared was when a guest, so well acquainted with
chickens as to venture on personal liberties, flourished her glove over
the graveled box that served poor little Mike for his Earthly Paradise.
"Squawk! squawk!" he cried in an agitated pipe I had not heard before,
and scrabbled wildly to the shelter of my hand, nestling out of sight
under the palm in his favorite fashion.
"Did you hear him call hawk, hawk?" asked my erudite visitor. "We have
an old biddy at home who nurses a grudge against me this week because I
will not let her set, and the last time I went out into the henyard, if
she didn't scream hawk, hawk, just like that, and send the chickens
scuttling to cover under the barn! The hateful thing! She knew how
insulted I would feel to be taken for a hawk!"
But apart from that trying occasion, Mike was a scrap of valor. No
member of the family was tall enough to disconcert him. He pecked
whatever he saw, from his own feet to the register, and would pounce
like a baby pirate upon objects many times larger than himself,
cheeping to the world his tidings of magnificent discovery. I am no
pastoral linguist, but I learned the rudiments of chicken language from
Mike, who was such a chatterbox that he twittered in his sleep.
Meal-times, which he liked to have occur every hour from dawn to dark,
brought out his conversational fluency at its best. We tried many
experiments with his diet, in obedience to many counselors. We were
told that his Indian meal should be mixed with scalding water, that he
was too young for this hearty dish and should be fed with dry oatmeal,
that minute crumbs of bread would comfort his crop, that larger bits of
bread, kindly masticated in advance, were better, that sour milk was
essential, mashed potato indispensable, string beans a plausible
substitute for angle-worms, that he must be given a chance to swallow
gravel to assist the grinding in his wee gizzard mill, and that his
cereals should be discreetly spiced with grubs and lettuce leaves and
such spring dainties. Whatever we were told to do, we did. Mike's
repasts were thus seasons to him of delicious excitement, and he would
tear deliriously from one end of his box to the other, pecking to right
and left, exclaiming in high glee, "Tweet, tweet! Something to eat!
Bless my pin-feathers! Here's a treat!"
This up-to-date son of an incubator had an obstinate instinct in him
which made the tap of my finger on the floor of his box equivalent to
the tattoo of a hen's bill beside some scratched-up delicacy, and it
was funny to see him rush to the sound, his black eyes shining with
joyous expectancy. So queerly did instinct serve him that he would grab
the goody as if a brood of famished brothers were on his heels and,
spreading his bits of wings, race off with his prize, most indiscreetly
shrilling as he went, "Twit, twit, twit! You shan't have a bit," and
gobbling it down in a corner with choking precipitation.
One of the "Arrows of the Wise" carries the point, "Be not idle and you
shall not be longing," and I had no chance to miss my customary
vocations with this importunate cockerel demanding constant society and
care.
Hatched to the vain anticipation of brooding wings and crooning cluck
and the restless pressure of other downy little bodies all about him,
Mike was a lonesome chick and could not bear to have his sorry
substitute for a mother-hen out of sight and sound a minute. His box
must be within reach of my hand, whither every few minutes he would run
for a snuggle and a snooze, turning a disdainful back on the elaborate
hot-water-bottle and cotton-batting shelters I had been at such pains
to erect. The life in him craved contact with life. If I withdrew my
hand, having occasionally other uses for it, or neglected to respond to
his casual remarks, my ears would suddenly be assailed by a storm of
piteous chirps, the neck would stretch until two round eyes peered
anxiously above his castle wall, and then, with clamber and scramble,
that indomitable little spirit would achieve the impossible and land a
fluttering fluff-ball against my face. When I was well enough to move
from room to room Mike would dare the most terrific rumbles from his
box to come chasing after, though every threshold was a towering
obstacle over which a Labor Union of wings and legs could barely carry
him.
After he had eaten his supper, with undiminished enthusiasm, and had
drunk his fill from a butter-plate, lifting his yellow bill to heaven
with every drink, and giving thanks, as all good chickens do, we used
to tuck him away in a basket. At first we buried him deep under a light
mass of cotton-wool, from the precise center of whose surface his head
would shine out in the morning like a star set in fleecy clouds; but
the chief of our advisory council warned us that the films might get
into his eyes and down his gullet with disastrous results, and
suggested instead the use of a retired table-scarf. Chicken in the
cloth, cloth in the basket, basket on the register, the family would
compose itself to listen to the "Life of Huxley," while the softest,
drowsiest nest song, "Tweety-tweet! Tweety-tweet!" from the depths of
the table-scarf accompanied the voice of the reader. The elfin
music-box would fall silent presently, but when bedtime came, and
Joy-of-Life, before taking the basket down cellar to hang it near the
furnace for the night, brought it to me that I might ask, no matter how
quietly, "All well, Mike?" a dreamy little note would instantly float
back, "Tweety-tweet! Sleeping sweet!"
We grew so fond of our pet as to dislike to see him deprived of the
natural companionship of chickenhood, and two other downy midgets--a
Penciled Brahmapootra, the gift of the market-man, and a Plymouth Rock,
from the Lady of Cedar Hill--were procured to bear him company. The
first we dubbed Patience, as the proper associate of a Microbe, but
this beautiful little fowl, whose golden face and delicately striped
body gave it a wild-bird look, developed such shillalah
characteristics, especially when Mike made off with the choice morsels,
that his name was speedily curtailed to Pat. The Plymouth Rock was
called Cluxley, in memory of our evening readings; but a meek,
illogical, not to say unscientific henny-penny she proved, who would
stand gazing on a dainty until one of her foster-brothers had snatched
it up and then industriously go and scratch for it in all the places
where it never could have been. Pat was a self-reliant, material-minded
younker, and we let him go his own lively way, with the minimum of
handling, but our brown Cluxley was of a clinging disposition and had
an embarrassing habit of imperiling her life by stealthy excursions up
loose sleeves. Mike did not welcome these birds of his own feather any
too cordially and held somewhat aloof from them to the end. One of my
students sent in a pair of dainty blue slippers, fortunately too small,
as thus my conscience was clear in devoting them to the welfare of my
immediate brood; but I always had to see to it that Mike and Pat took
their siestas in separate slippers, where they would drowsily flute
away in musical rivalry. Cluxley, with her customary indiscretion,
bestowed herself one day in a damp rubber for her nap and caught a bad
cold, which we successfully doctored with hempseed.
Mike had begun to show signs of feathers and once he tried to crow. He
had become less dependent on me for intimate society, his attention
being much taken up with thwarting Pat's designs on the tidbits, but he
could by no means dispense with me as general protector. If I were in
the room, or close beside them in a steamer chair out of doors, he was
willing to ramble a bit with Pat and Cluxley, always taking the lead,
but I could not slip away and leave them, even in Mary's charge,
without immediate consternation, protest and pursuit on Microbe's part.
He was such a humanized chicken, coming at the call of his name, loving
to eat from the finger, cocking his little head so sagely when he was
addressed and politely cheeping a response, that he became perilously
attractive to the children of the neighborhood. Sturdy schoolboys would
kiss his yellow softness on the sly and we often had to rescue him from
the unskillful clutch of loving childish hands.
When a luncheon was brought to me out of doors, all three chickens
would come winging and scrabbling up the rug that wrapped the sorceress
of the steamer-chair and dispose themselves about the edge of the tray,
chirping continuous amens to the grace steeped in ancient witchcraft:
"Spread, table, spread.
Meat, drink and bread.
Ever may I have
What I ever crave,
When I am spread.
Meat for my black cock,
And meat for my red."
Now that I was to be seen outside the house with my little brood,
kindly neighbors came from all sides with offers of more chickens, but
my family cares were already heavy for a convalescent, and experience
had taught me that
"true happiness
Consists not in the multitude of friends,
But in the worth and choice."
Occasional misgivings as to the future crossed my mind. I had often
seen reposing sheep blocking up the doorways of Andalusian
homes,--Easter lambs given, all gay with ribbons, to the children the
year before and still withheld by family affection from their natural
destiny of mutton. The Dryad looked forward with glee to my appearance
on the academic platform with three full-grown fowls roosting on the
back of my chair or stalking up and down the desk, picking up bits of
chalk and pencil whittlings, but such embarrassments were not to be.
Mike was the first to sicken. His name may have been against him or the
long confinement in the basket may have injured him. The table-scarf
may have been too heavy to admit of his standing and moving during the
night as a chicken should. He suddenly became crippled, as with
paralysis. One morning, although he breakfasted with abundant relish,
he insisted on hiding in my hand immediately after. I wanted him to run
about for exercise, and twenty times put him back into his box, but he
returned to me twenty-one and had his own way for a while, until Mary
played the kidnapper. Coming down stairs half an hour later I heard her
remonstrating with Mike, who was cheeping wildly.
"Faith, Mike, ye're that onraysonable I can't plaze yez any how.
There's Pat and Cluxley as good as clover in the kitchen, but I let yez
into the dining-room, and still ye're discontinted, and now I've let
yez into the parlor, Mike, and not the parlor is good enough. Whativer
is it that ye can be wanting?"
Poor Chicken Little! He heard my voice and started to meet me, but with
such hobbling, staggering, bewildered steps that, at last, the
threshold overthrew him. We did for him what we knew--and we knew
nothing--that day and the next, and he sang his tuneful tweety-tweet on
Monday night; but on Tuesday morning, a fortnight from his coming, when
I asked for my chicken, they brought me a ghastly little form lying
among primroses.
I might say that I met the loss of my tiny comrade with adult dignity
and composure, but
"Syr, for lying, though I can do it,
Yet am I loth for to goo to it."
The core of my grief is the sense that my blundering devotion cut
short, on the very edge of spring, that gallant little life which
brought help to me in my heavy hour, and which had in it all the
promise of a Chaucer chanticleer.
In deep humiliation, we forthwith gave Pat and Cluxley over to higher
intelligence than ours, to a neighbor's hen who had no narrow parental
prejudices, but amply gathered them in with her own brood. Pat was the
beauty of the coop, but in a day or so his legs began to waver and sink
under him, and he, too, never knew a Maytime. Cluxley was always the
belated one and outlived him some three days, but on the fourth morning
she went staggering into the undiscovered realm.
People say, "But you did well to keep your Easter chicken alive
fourteen days. If the truth were known, you would find that very few of
those candy-sale chickens hold out so long as that. We bought one for
the children, but it was dead before Sunday. It is next to impossible
to raise chickens by hand, even with experience. As to the ducklings
that are coming into fashion for Easter gifts, they die sooner than
chickens."
Then to our moral, for Mike's small story surely has a moral, though it
does not matter in the least to Mike. I have no delusions there.
"All men are
Philosophers to their inches,"
but chickens' inches are so very few that there is no room for altruism
in their philosophy. Yet the thought of how much these wee innocents
may suffer from the incompetence of those who so lightly assume their
fostering urges a protest against keeping Easter, the Festival of Life,
by such wanton sacrifice of life. How can we reproach the Spaniards,
who celebrate their Easter by the merciless bullfight, while we permit
this cruelty to tender chickenhood?
A chicken's death is not more trivial than a sparrow's fall. St.
Francis of Assisi would have cared.
But beneath it all lies the old, dark problem of creature existence.
They are so ready to trust and love us, these feathered and furred
companions of ours on the strange, bright star that whirls us all
through the vast of ether to an unknown rhythm, and we, with a lordly
selfishness that scoffs at question, slaughter them for our food and
clothing, hunt them for our sport, make them our drudges in peace and
our victims in war. I can never forget the eyes of a calf that ran to
me from his butcher in Norway,--of a kid that I saw struggling away
from the knife on Passover eve in Palestine. Yet such is the order of
the earth. All carnivorous creatures prey upon the weaker. Water and
wood and field and air are but varying scenes of the unpausing tragedy.
Why, if it must be so, were these doomed animals endowed with the awful
gift of suffering? And what recompense, even in the far reaches of
eternity, can their Creator make to these myriad martyrs for their
griefs and tortures? Is He the God of Hardy's _The Dynasts_, careless
of mortal agonies? There dwelt a truer God in Shelley's heart, the _cor
cordium_ of him who wrote:
"I wish no living thing to suffer pain."