[Illustration]
His cage is exactly two Japanese inches high and one inch and a half
wide: its tiny wooden door, turning upon a pivot, will scarcely
admit the tip of my little finger. But he has plenty of room in that
cage,--room to walk, and jump, and fly; for he is so small that you
must look very carefully through the brown-gauze sides of it in order
to catch a glimpse of him. I have always to turn the cage round and
round, several times, in a good light, before I can discover his
whereabouts; and then I usually find him resting in one of the upper
corners,--clinging, upside down, to his ceiling of gauze.
Imagine a cricket about the size of an ordinary mosquito,--with a
pair of antennae much longer than his own body, and so fine that
you can distinguish them only against the light. _Kusa-Hibari_, or
"Grass-Lark," is the Japanese name of him; and he is worth in the
market exactly twelve cents: that is to say, very much more than his
weight in gold. Twelve cents for such a gnat-like thing!...
By day he sleeps or meditates, except while occupied with the slice of
fresh egg-plant or cucumber which must be poked into his cage every
morning. ... To keep him clean and well fed is somewhat troublesome:
could you see him, you would think it absurd to take any pains for the
sake of a creature so ridiculously small.
But always at sunset the infinitesimal soul of him awakens: then
the room begins to fill with a delicate and ghostly music of
indescribable sweetness,-a thin, thin silvery rippling and trilling as
of tiniest electric bells. As the darkness deepens, the sound becomes
sweeter,--sometimes swelling till the whole house seems to vibrate
with the elfish resonance,--sometimes thinning down into the faintest
imaginable thread of a voice. But loud or low, it keeps a penetrating
quality that is weird.... All night, the atomy thus sings: he ceases
only when the temple bell proclaims the hour of dawn.
*
Now this tiny song is a song of love,--vague love of the unseen and
unknown. It is quite impossible that he should ever have seen or
known, in this present existence of his. Not even his ancestors, for
many generations back, could have known anything of the night-life
of the fields, or the amorous value of song. They were born of eggs
hatched in a jar of clay, in the shop of some insect-merchant; and they
dwelt thereafter only in cages. But he sings the song of his race as it
was sung a myriad years ago, and as faultlessly as if he understood the
exact significance of every note. Of course he did not learn the song.
It is a song of organic memory,--deep, dim memory of other quintillions
of lives, when the ghost of him shrilled at night from the dewy grasses
of the hills. Then that song brought him love--and death. He has
forgotten all about death; but he remembers the love. And therefore he
sings now--for the bride that will never come.
So that his longing is unconsciously retrospective: he cries to the
dust of the past,--he calls to the silence and the gods for the return
of time.... Human lovers do very much the same thing without knowing
it. They call their illusion an Ideal; and their Ideal is, after all,
a mere shadowing of race-experience, a phantom of organic memory. The
living present has very little to do with it.... Perhaps this atomy
also has an ideal, or at least the rudiment of an ideal; but, in any
event, the tiny desire must utter its plaint in vain.
The fault is not altogether mine. I had been warned that if the
creature were mated, he would cease to sing and would speedily die.
But, night after night, the plaintive, sweet, unanswered trilling
touched me like a reproach,--became at last an obsession, an
affliction, a torment of conscience; and I tried to buy a female.
It was too late in the season; there were no more kusa-hibari for
sale,--either males or females. The insect-merchant laughed and said,
"He ought to have died about the twentieth day of the ninth month." (It
was already the second day of the tenth month.) But the insect-merchant
did not know that I have a good stove in my study, and keep the
temperature at above 75° F. Wherefore my grass-lark still sings at
the close of the eleventh month, and I hope to keep him alive until
the Period of Greatest Cold. However, the rest of his generation are
probably dead: neither for love nor money could I now find him a mate.
And were I to set him free in order that he might make the search for
himself, he could not possibly live through a single night, even if
fortunate enough to escape by day the multitude of his natural enemies
in the garden,--ants, centipedes, and ghastly earth-spiders.
*
Last evening--the twenty-ninth of the eleventh month--an odd feeling
came to me as I sat at my desk: a sense of emptiness in the room. Then
I became aware that my grass-lark was silent, contrary to his wont. I
went to the silent cage, and found him lying dead beside a dried-up
lump of egg-plant as gray and hard as a stone. Evidently he had not
been fed for three or four days; but only the night before his death he
had been singing wonderfully,--so that I foolishly imagined him to be
more than usually contented. My student, Aki, who loves insects, used
to feed him; but Aki had gone into the country for a week's holiday,
and the duty of caring for the grass-lark had devolved upon Hana, the
housemaid. She is not sympathetic, Hana the housemaid. She says that
she did not forget the mite,--but there was no more egg-plant. And
she had never thought of substituting a slice of onion or of cucumber!
... I spoke words of reproof to Hana the housemaid, and she dutifully
expressed contrition. But the fairy-music has stopped; and the
stillness reproaches; and the room is cold, in spite of the stove.
*
Absurd!... I have made a good girl unhappy because of an insect half
the size of a barley-grain! The quenching of that infinitesimal life
troubles me more than I could have believed possible. ... Of course,
the mere habit of thinking about a creature's wants--even the wants of
a cricket--may create, by insensible degrees, an imaginative interest,
an attachment of which one becomes conscious only when the relation
is broken. Besides, I had felt so much, in the hush of the night,
the charm of the delicate voice,--telling of one minute existence
dependent upon my will and selfish pleasure, as upon the favour of a
god,--telling me also that the atom of ghost in the tiny cage, and
the atom of ghost within myself, were forever but one and the same in
the deeps of the Vast of being.... And then to think of the little
creature hungering and thirsting, night after night, and day after day,
while the thoughts of his guardian deity were turned to the weaving of
dreams!... How bravely, nevertheless, he sang on to the very end,--an
atrocious end, for he had eaten his own legs!... May the gods forgive
us all,--especially Hana the housemaid!
Yet, after all, to devour one's own legs--for hunger is not the worst
by that can happen to a being cursed with the gift of song. There are
human crickets who must eat their own hearts in order to sing.