Birds and Beasts 6

Birds and Beasts 6

“Little madcap,” he told him, “am I to put out all the folk of the

countryside for you? Don’t you know everything goes on by rule and

regulation among your neighbours, and that each hour brings its own

tasks? Why, whatever would they think if I rang vespers before the great

timepiece of the heavens had indicated the time of twilight? What would

the mole say if I brought him out of his underground house, looking

black as a collier, before nightfall, and if suddenly the sun dazzled

him with its light—poor purblind fellow who had never in his life dared

look at anything but the moon?”

 

So, the cuckoo having shown him the door, he wandered off again,

flitting from hedgerow to hedgerow, burning with impatience.

 

 

VII

 

A heap of little white grubs lay under the hedge of an orchard. More for

lack of anything else to do than because he was hungry, the goldfinch

flew up and fell upon it.

 

Ah! have a care, pretty birdie. A man was busy thereabouts just now.

 

But, alas, it is too late; a whole life of happiness is ruined by a

moment’s curiosity. Hardly had the poor fellow plunged his beak in the

mass when a string pulled the catch; down comes the trap, and he is a

prisoner. Then the shape crouching behind a tree comes out from its

hiding-place; it approaches, looms larger and larger, turns into a big

bearded man, who opens enormous great hands, seizes the poor bird, and

claps it in a cage, grinning a broad grin of satisfaction. Good-bye,

little bride! Good-bye, marriage-feast and wedding-march! Good-bye,

woods and orchards, gardens and flowers! Good-bye, twittering nests!

Good-bye, life and love!

 

Consternation nailed our little hero to the spot; something had befallen

him he could make nothing of; he gazed at the cage with haggard eyes,

too scared to think.

 

Ah! if only he had lost his memory! But this consolation was denied him.

He shook himself, dashed at the bars, pecked and bit at them, thinking

maybe they would open and leave him free as air again.

 

But no; the bars would _not_ give way.

 

Then he shuddered from head to foot. Anger and terror frenzied his

little brain. He flew wildly at the bars; but all in vain—the cage was

solid and strong.

 

Suddenly he realised his calamity, and, filled with a perfect frenzy of

despair, with panting breath and trembling, shuddering limbs, he hurled

himself at the bars, beat his head against the wires, tearing and

lacerating beak and claws, flew madly up and down, breaking his wings,

till, battered and bruised, his feathers all dripping with blood,

exhausted and out of breath, he rolled half-dead into a corner.

 

It was all over!

 

While joy was paramount yonder in his bride’s home, while song and

laughter were the order of the day, while preparations for the

wedding—bitter mockery!—were completing, and all things, leaves and

butterflies and nests, were a-flutter, the poor bridegroom lay in his

agony amid the silence of a prison.

 

 

VIII

 

Evening lit up the sky with its gleaming tints of copper; little by

little the chattering family groups fell silent, and the darkling trees

assumed the look of long-drawn, solemn colonnades. Alas! it was not

under this familiar aspect that night fell for our captive goldfinch. A

dirty whitewashed wall, on which hung strangely shaped objects, replaced

the sable curtain spangled with stars that twilight spreads over the

countryside. A guttering, flaring candle smoked on the table, bearing

how faint a resemblance to the silver moon! and by its sordid light the

hard-hearted wretch who had robbed him of his liberty was moving to and

fro.

 

Ah! what right had he, this miserable birdcatcher, this highway robber,

to tear him from the free air, the hedgerows and the green fields? Tiny

though he be, is the bird therefore of no import to the leaves, the

winds, the trees, which without him would be voiceless? Has the blue sky

no need of his outspread wings, his echoing song, the flutter of his

plumage?

 

What use the pool glittering in the woodland, if he was not there to dip

his beak in it and absorb in a drop of water the red of dawn, the gold

of noon, the deep shadow of the quivering leaves? Is not a little bird

the less a disaster in the forests and orchard-closes, a voice silenced

in the symphony of nature, a furrow left barren in the fields of space,

a bright point vanished from the azure sky? Is not the universe

disturbed for the loss of a little creature wherein all nature is summed

up and glorified?

 

The man blew out the taper, and a moonbeam shot in at the garret-window

and fell on the poor captive.

 

It formed, as it were, a luminous rail on which his thoughts glided; and

they always travelled in one direction—to his little _fiancée_, who at

that moment, softly cradled by the night wind, was fast asleep and

dreaming of the great to-morrow.

 

The moon paled and daylight appeared.

 

Yonder no doubt all was ready; the harebells were ringing their peal,

the drones were organing their deep music, while the trembling bride,

white as the lilies, was asking herself why her bridegroom did not come.

 

The cuckoo clanged out the hour of dawn. One and all were ready for the

fête; only _his_ arrival was waited for.

 

The hours slipped by without his appearing, and little by little the

murmuring and muttering, low at first, grew louder and louder, and rose

into a perfect tempest of cries and jeers and gibes. The chaffinches

were jubilant, the parents disconsolate. And what of her, the poor,

despairing bride? Her pretty innocent eyes could not bear the light of

day; stricken to the heart by this unaccountable desertion, she was

borne away fainting, half dead with shame and sorrow.

 

 

IX

 

Dark days followed. At first only a prisoner, his cruel master now made

him into a galley-slave. He put a chain round his foot, and condemned

him to the servitude of the car and cord. So drag your weight, work your

pulley, haul in your little car, poor outcast! Who has not seen the

monstrous spectacle—one of God’s creatures, created to fly free in the

realms of air, coming and going on a toy platform, a ring about its leg?

Who has not seen the unhappy captive, to win meat and drink, drawing up

by little laborious jerks the water-jar and car, its eye gleaming with

pitiful longing, gaining its subsistence by a never-ending useless

martyrdom? Only he who has seen the cruel sight knows to what lengths

the cruelty of bad men can go.

 

This was the fate of the poor goldfinch.

 

The man had given him a cage to imitate a Swiss châlet, in front of

which was a little terrace. On the terrace was fixed a post, with a

pulley attached worked by a thread. This thread the captive had to pull

in with his beak, little by little, till the little drinking-bucket

hooked to the other end rose to the level of the platform; then putting

his foot on the cord, he had to hold it in place and so drink a drop,

bitter as a tear, hurriedly and fearfully, lest the thread should slip

from under his claw and suddenly let the bucket run down again.

 

More often than not the bucket upset in its descent, and then he had to

go without water for the rest of the day.

 

A second thread made it possible for him to haul to the edge of the

platform a miniature car running on an inclined plane outside the cage;

this held his bird-seed. What a struggle it was to drag it up! At each

snap of the beak the car would ascend, but oh! so slowly. By successive

jerks, never tiring, never stopping, with straining neck, working with

the adroitness of a galley-slave, and clapping his foot on the cord

after each pull, he had to drag up the accursed car, which would

sometimes elude him and dash down the incline again, spilling the seed

and mocking all his laborious efforts!

 

A hundred times a day he was forced to begin the horrid task again.

 

Many a time the goldfinch resolved to give in and die of hunger; but

hunger is a terrible thing, and no sooner did its pangs begin to pinch

his little stomach than he would seize the cord afresh and pull for dear

life.

 

 

X

 

So passed the hours for the once happy bridegroom. Never a chirp now,

never a flirt of the tail! Disconsolate and draggled, every feather of

his little body betraying the misery of his broken life, he seemed an

embodiment of the bitter protest of the winged creation against the

cruelty of man.

 

A feeble ray of sunshine used to flicker on the garret walls towards

midday; he would watch for it, and when it came at last, shooting a

slender pencil of gold, in which the dust-motes danced athwart the gloom

of his prison-house, it was like a brief instant of recovered freedom;

for a moment he forgot his chain, his car, his slavery, and away he flew

in fancy to the great orchards that showed their black masses of shadow

on the horizon. Alas! the sunbeam slid along the wall and disappeared,

and the appalling reality came home to him again.

 

What had he done to deserve this cruel fate? To filch a grain of corn

here and there, to forage in the kitchen-gardens, to play the truant, to

make the most of life, all day long to fly hither and thither, the free

denizen of air—was this a crime? He never reflected how he had forgotten

his mother, and that this crime alone deserved the sternest expiation.

 

His master was one of those good-for-nothing workmen who make the whole

week a series of Sundays. One night he forgot to come home at all; next