Birds and Beasts 1

Birds and Beasts 1

Birds and Beasts

Author: Camille Lemonnier

 

PAGE

Jack and Murph 1

The Captive Goldfinch 53

Strange Adventures of a Little White Rabbit 91

“Monsieur Friquet” 106

A Lost Dog 133

Misadventures of an Owl 156

 

 

 

 

Birds and Beasts

 

 

[Illustration: JACK AND MURPH]

 

 

 

 

Jack and Murph

 

 

I

 

Jack and Murph were friends, old friends, trusty and tried.

 

It was now nearly six years since the day chance had brought them

together as members of the same company. Jack had come straight from the

African forests; he had crossed the seas, and set foot on the continent

of Europe for the first time; his amazement knew no bounds.

 

It is not for nothing a little fellow of his sort is torn from the

freedom of his vagabond life in the woods and surrendered to the tender

mercies of a showman of performing animals. He learned to know the cruel

tedium of captivity; shut up in a cage, he thought sadly of his merry

gambols in the tree-tops; his little face grew wan and withered, and he

came near pining to death. But time damped the keenness of his grief; by

dint of seeing around him other little creatures that, like himself, had

wearied for their native wilds, then little by little had grown

reconciled to their fate, and now seemed to get a prodigious amount of

fun out of their new life, he made the best of the bars, the tainted air

of the booth, and the clown’s grimaces, rehearsing his drolleries before

the animals’ cages.

 

At the same time he could never quite share the gaiety of his companions

in misfortune. While they were enjoying everlasting games of

hide-and-seek, scuffling, squabbling, pelting each other with nuts, he

would cower timidly in a corner, too sad at heart to join in their noisy

merriment. Sometimes, when his feelings grew too much for him, he would

break out in a series of sharp, shrill outcries, or wail like a new-born

babe in his doleful despair.

 

The master was very fond of him, for he was both intelligent and

teachable. In a very short time he learned to do his musket drill, to

walk the slack-rope, and use the spring-board. But these accomplishments

only earned him the ill-will of the other pupils. There was never a

prank they did not play him. No sooner had he cracked a nut, to eat the

kernel, than a hand would dart over his shoulder and snatch the morsel

just as he was putting it between his teeth. They slapped his face,

pinched his tail, scarified his head with their nails, jumped upon him,

or half strangled him in a corner, till a day came at last when his

master, noticing how he was bullied, put him in a separate cage all by

himself. But this loneliness only made him more unhappy still; he spent

his life in lamentation, sitting stock-still all day long, with his arms

hanging limp, and his eyes fixed on vacancy, refusing either to eat or

drink. This would never do; so they left him at liberty to wander at

will in the house.

 

 

II

 

Oh! but this house was not a bit like mine or yours; yet it had doors

and windows like any other house, but so tiny these doors and windows

were, they were hardly worth mentioning. Imagine a house on four wheels,

and no higher than a man of middle size, with three little windows high

up admitting light and air from outside; you entered by a wooden

staircase that looked more like the ladder of a windmill than anything

else.

 

This queer construction rolled most part of the year along the high

roads, jolting, gee-wo, gee-hup! in and out of the ruts, and carting

about in its interior men and animals, to say nothing of household

stuff—beds, cooking-stoves, chests crammed with clothes, and a whole

heap of other things. An old horse, who was little better than a bag of

bones, was in the shafts; when a halt was called, they let him crop the

grass alongside the hedgerows.

 

It was the funniest thing, being hauled along like this, tossing and

tumbling in this box on wheels where the furniture seemed to be always

just on the point of starting a polka. The table would throw up its legs

in the air, and the chairs turn head over heels, while the pots and pans

knocked together in the corners, making the quaintest music, sharp or

flat in key according to the jolts.

 

Jack, perched atop of a big press, held on tooth and nail to save a

tumble. More often than not he found himself under the table along with

his good friend Murph, a Stoic philosopher, who let nothing ever disturb

his equanimity, but calmly went on beating the bush of his thick woolly

coat in search of the game that lived there. All the while the caravan,

bumping and thumping with a terrific rattle, was tacking and luffing

over the rolling billows of the stony roads.

 

 

III

 

It is high time to tell you that Jack was a dear, pretty little monkey

of the chimpanzee kind, with tiny, delicate hands, nervous and

semi-transparent, almost like a sick child’s. He was no bigger, the

whole body of him, than a pocket-handkerchief, and you could have easily

hidden him inside your hat. He was slim and slender, daintily made, with

narrow chest and sloping shoulders—a creature all nerves, with a

wonderful little pale phiz of his own, puckered and wrinkled, and long,

drooping eyelids, greyish-white, and as thin as an onion skin, that

slowly, rhythmically, opened and closed over brown eyes ringed with

yellow. He bore the solemn, serious look of those who suffer; his eyes

seemed fixed on something beyond the visible world, and now and again he

would pass his long, dry fingers across his eyes as if to wipe away a

tear. He seldom gambolled, and never indulged in the grotesque

contortions of other apes; their restless, ceaseless activity seemed

foreign to his nature, and even his grimaces had nothing in common with

theirs.

 

Noise scared him; he was never angry, but habitually silent and

thoughtful. He preferred to lurk alone in dark corners, where he would

spend long hours, squatted on his tail, almost motionless, dreaming

sadly of some mysterious, unattainable future. But, for all his

unlikeness to his colleagues and their comicality, his queer little

crumpled, wrinkled face never failed to produce its effect on the

spectators. Jack was perfectly irresistible; no one _could_ look at him

for any length of time without bursting out laughing. His aspect was at

once so piteous and so ridiculous, his gaze so pathetic and so

grotesque, his deadly earnestness so side-splitting, while his eyelids

would droop suddenly ever and anon in so anxious and appealing a wink,

that the result was comic beyond belief. An old, old man’s head on a

baby’s body, a mask that was for ever changing, twitching, wrinkling,

with eyes that looked out grave, intense, solemn, from beneath a low,

flat brow crowned by what looked for all the world like a wig!

 

The louder the merriment he excited, the more serious Jack became. On

show days, while the audience was convulsed with mirth, the gravity of

his mien, the careworn look in his eyes, over which the lids dropped

mechanically at regular intervals, as if weighed down with their load of

melancholy, reached the acme of fantastic absurdity.

 

Alas! men cannot tell what monkeys are thinking of. If they knew, they

would not always laugh. Jack was dreaming of the sun, the vast green

forests, the friends he had left behind; he was dreaming of the delights

of swinging high in the air, cradled in the leafy hammocks of the

boughs, dreaming of the trailing lianas, of the romps and games with his

fellows throwing cocoanuts at one another’s heads, and of the endless

chivyings and chasings from tree-top to tree-top above the rolling

billows of the wind-tossed jungles, through which the wild

beasts—elephants, panthers, and lions—plough their way like ships on the

high seas, leaving in their wake a broad furrow of floating odours and

deep-toned sounds.

 

 

IV

 

But Jack had a friend, and he never embarked on his voyages into the

far-away dreamland without calling on his old chum Murph to join him.

 

Yes, Murph gambolled with him in the tropical jungles, Murph frolicked

with him in the tall grasses, Murph and he amused themselves together at

never-ending games of play; if ever it was granted him to see his native

land again, he fully hoped to take Murph along with him.

 

Poor Jack! he did not understand that the worthy Murph, acrobat as he

was, would have found it hard to follow him in the lofty regions where

his congeners are wont to disport themselves, nearer to the stars than

the earth. Not a doubt of it, Murph would have had to kick his heels at

the foot of a tree, while his friend was off and away aloft; and the

smallest of his perils would have been to find himself, on looking

round, face to face with a python-snake, just uncoiling his folds to

spring, or else, on the river-banks, confronted with the gaping jaws of

a crocodile.

 

Murph could play dominoes, tell fortunes, hunt for a handkerchief in a

spectator’s pocket, read the paper. Murph had many other accomplishments

besides, but it is far from certain that he would have extricated

himself successfully from a _tête-à-tête_ of this sort with beasts that

could boast neither his education nor his manners.