More Tales of the Birds

The poor little woman put her arm round the dead pony’s neck, and began to caress it. I saw that it was hopeless to get her home without help, and went on up the road towards the nearest farmhouse, telling her to stay where she was till I came back. There was no need to tell her: she neither could nor would have moved.

I had not gone far when by good luck I met a waggon returning empty to our village. I stopped the driver, whom I knew, told him what had happened, and got him to undertake to carry both Selina and her pony home in his waggon. I felt sure she would not leave her Fan to the mercy of any one who came by; and indeed I would not have left her there myself. Fan had so long been one of us that I shuddered to think of what nocturnal creatures might find her out in the night. There was a horrible story of a tramp who had passed a night in a barn not half a mile from this very spot, and had been attacked by rats in his sleep.

When we reached the cart, Selina was again fast asleep. Gently we raised her from the pony’s side, and I had to almost use force to unfasten the grip of her arm on its neck. I whispered to her that we were going to take Fan and Elimelech too, and she made no more resistance, but lay down quietly on some straw in a corner of the waggon. It was hard work to get poor Fan in after her; but she was so small and thin that at last we managed it. Elimelech perched himself upon his friend’s motionless body, and so we set off, a strange funeral procession.

Arrived at the village, I roused the neighbours, and Selina, now almost unconscious, was put to bed by kindly hands. Fan we deposited in her old hovel, and Elimelech, subdued and puzzled, was left there too.

Next morning Selina was unable to get out of her bed, though she struggled hard to do so; fatigue and exposure on the wet grass had brought her very low, and the doctor thought she would hardly get over it. We had to tell her that she would see Fan no more. She only sighed, and asked for Elimelech.

I went down to the hovel; the men were come to take the poor old pony away. Elimelech was there, not upon poor Fan’s body, but upon a rafter; and when the pony was taken out, he followed, and evaded all my efforts to catch him. I saw the cart with its burden turn the corner of the street, with the bird perched on the edge of it, fluttering his wings, as if he were expostulating with the ruthless driver.

I returned to Selina. “Elimelech is gone to see the last of poor Fan,” I said; “but we shall see him back here before long.”

“He loves me,” answered she; “but he loves Fan better, and I don’t think he’ll come back.” And Elimelech did not return that day.

But the next morning I found him sitting on her bed. She told me that he must have come back to the hovel, and when he found that shut, have come in by the front door and made his way upstairs. “And now poor Fan is gone, he loves me better than any one,” she said.

Selina is still alive, as I said at the beginning of this tale; she still finds work to do, and does it with all her might. All her animals are gone now – cats, fowls, ducks, and pony; Elimelech alone remains; he has never been unfaithful to her. But they are both growing old – too old to last much longer; and all we can hope is that Elimelech will be the survivor.

TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING

“Bessie, my lassie,” exclaimed the Poet, as they entered their new garden for the first time together, “what a time we shall have!”

When the Poet called his wife “lassie” she knew he was in a happy frame of mind, and was happy herself. It was long since she had heard the word; illness, overwork, and the dull surroundings of a London suburban villa, had taken all the spring out of his body, and all its natural joyousness from his mind. I call him Poet because it was the name by which his best friends knew him; I cannot be sure that he ever wrote poetry, and certainly he never published any; but they called him Poet because he was dreamy, and hated the fag and the noise of London, and pined for the country, and loved to talk of his old Yorkshire home and its plants and animals, and its beck curling under heathery banks on the edge of the moor. He was indeed only a London clerk, released at last from long years of drudgery by a happy stroke of good fortune.

They had just arrived from London to take possession of their cottage and garden in the country. It was a frosty evening early in March, and the sun was just setting as they went up the garden together; it lit up the bare boughs of a tree which stood just in front of the cottage.

“Look here, Bessie,” said the Poet; “that is a rowan tree, and it was the sight of that rowan that fixed me. The cottage was snug, the garden was good, but the rowans – there are three of them – were irresistible. There were three just outside our garden in Yorkshire, and every August the berries turned orange-red and made a glory before my window. Next August you shall see them, and you’ll see nothing quite so good till then.”

Bessie, London born and bred, was glad to get into the house, and make herself snug before the fire, where the kettle was singing an invitation to tea. She too was ready to welcome the slow and gentle ways of the country, and to be rid of perpetual bell-ringing, and postmen’s knocks, and piano-practising next door, and the rattle of carts and cabs; but I doubt if the rowans would have decided her choice. I think she thought more of the useful fruits of the garden – of the currants and gooseberries of which good store of jam should be made in the summer, of the vegetables they would grow for themselves, and the strawberries they would invite their London friends to come and share.

Next morning quite early the Poet threw his window wide open and looked out into his garden. It was not a trim and commonplace garden; it was an acre of good ground that had grown by degrees into a garden, as in the course of ages of village life one owner after another had turned it to his own purposes. The Poet looked over a bit of lawn, in the corner of which stood one of his favourite rowans, to an old bulging stone wall, buttressed up with supports of red brick of various shades, and covered with ivy. Over the top of it he could see the church tower, also ivy-clad, the yews of the churchyard, and the elms in the close beyond, in the tops of which the rooks were already busy and noisy. A thick and tall yew hedge separated the lawn from the village allotments, where one or two early labourers were collecting the winter’s rubbish into heaps and setting them alight; the shadow of the hedge upon the lawn was sharply marked by a silvery grey border of frost. On these things the Poet’s eye lingered with wonderful content for a while, and then wandered across the allotments over meadow and rich red ploughland to the line of hills that shut in his view to the south. There came into his mind the name he used to give to the moors above his Yorkshire dale in his young days when his mother read the Pilgrim’s Progress to her children – the Delectable Mountains.

He was suddenly recalled to his garden by a low melodious pipe, as of a bird practising its voice for better use in warmer days; it came from one of the rowans. Sometimes the notes were almost whispered; sometimes they rose for an instant into a full and mellow sweetness, and then died away again. They were never continuous – only fragments of song; as if the bird were talking in the sweetest of contralto voices to a friend whose answers were unheard. No other bird was singing, and the rooks were too far away in the elms to break harshly with their cawing on the blackbird’s quiet strain.

The Poet listened for a while enraptured, watching the dark form of the singer, and the “orange-tawny” bill from which the notes came so softly, so hesitatingly; and then drew in his head and began to dress, still keeping the window open, and repeating to himself —

“O Blackbird, sing me something well:Though all the neighbours shoot thee round,I keep smooth plats of garden groundWhere thou may’st warble, eat, and dwell.“The espaliers, and the standards, allAre thine; the range of lawn and park:The unnetted blackhearts ripen dark,All thine, against the garden wall.”

A few minutes later he was in the garden himself, scenting the dew and the fragrant earth, listening to the blackbird – his own blackbird, that meant to be his cherished guest all that spring and summer – to the singing of a skylark high above the allotment field, and to the distant murmur of the rooks. The garden was in disorder – what delicious work there would be in it! – fruit-trees to prune, vegetables to plant, a big strawberry bed to tend, borders to make gay. All this he would fain have done himself, even though he knew as little of gardening as he did of Hebrew; why not learn to do it himself, make mistakes and profit by them? So he had written to the friendly Parson of the village, who had been looking after his interests for him; but the Parson would not bear of it, and he was despotic in his own parish. He had decided that old Joseph Bates was to start the work and direct the Poet’s enthusiasm into rational channels; and after breakfast Joseph and the Poet were to meet. “A worthy old man,” the Parson had written; “you can’t do better than give him a little employment; if he gives you any trouble, send for me and I’ll settle him.”

So after breakfast – a delicious one it was, that first breakfast in the country – the Poet left his wife to her household duties, and went again into the garden to face Mr. Bates. He made his way towards his yew hedge, where he could see the old fellow busy clearing the ground beneath it of a melancholy tangle of decayed weeds. As he reached the hedge, one blackbird and then another flew out with awkward impetuosity and harsh chuckles, and the Poet stopped suddenly, sorry to have disturbed his friends.

Joseph touched his hat. “Good morning, Sir,” he said, “and welcome to your garden, if I may make so free. I’ve known it any time these fifty years and more, and my father he worked in it long afore I were born. We’d use to say as the Bateses belonged to this here bit of land years and years ago, when times was good for the poor man; but ’tis all gone from us, and here be I a working on it for hire. And ’tis powerful changed since I were a lad, and none for the better either. Look at this here yew hedge now; ’tis five and twenty year ago since I told Mr. Gale as ’twouldn’t do no good but to harbour birds, and here they be. And here they be,” he repeated, as another blackbird came scurrying out of the hedge a little further down.

At this point Joseph broke off his discourse, thrust his arm into the hedge, lifting the thick branches here and there, and pulled out a lump of fresh green moss, the first preparations for a blackbird’s nest.

“Ah, ye blackguards,” he cried, “at it already, are ye? I’ll be bound there are a dozen or two of ye somewhere or another on the premises. You see, Sir, ’tis their nater, when they’ve had it all their own way so long, and no one to look after ’em, a year come next June. They take it as the garden belongs to them; they’re like rats in a stack-yard, and you won’t have a thing to call your own by summer. But don’t you take on, Sir,” he went on, seeing the Poet’s visage lengthening; “we’ll nip ’em in the bud in no time. There’s my grandson Dan, a wonderful smart lad to find nests – you give him a sixpence, Sir, or what you please, and he’ll have every nest in the garden in an hour or two. Take it in time, Sir, as the doctor says to my wife when her rheumatics is a coming on.”

Mr. Bates chucked the unfinished nest on to a heap of weeds, thrust in his arm again, and began a fresh search. The Poet’s face grew dark: he could hardly find his voice.

“Bates,” he said at last, “stop that. You’ve taken one nest already, and if you or your grandson take another here, I’ll send you straight about your business. Do you think I took this garden to rob my blackbirds of their nests?”

“Lord save us,” cried Joseph, suddenly bewildered by this vehemence, “do I rightly understand you, Sir?”

“You needn’t understand me, if you can’t do so,” said the Poet, feeling a great dislike and dread for this terrible old man and his barbarian grandson; “but I mean to keep my blackbirds, so if you take another nest I’ll find another man.”

Joseph admitted to his wife afterwards that he was “clean took aback by this queer gentleman from London;” but, recovering himself quickly, he stuck his spade into the ground to lean upon, and began a further discourse.

“Begging your pardon, Sir, if I’ve in any ways offended you; but may be you ben’t quite accustomed to our country ways. You see, Sir, a garden’s a garden down our way: we grows fruit and vegetables in it for to eat. If the birds was to be master here, ’twouldn’t be no mortal manner of use our growing of ’em. Now I’ve heard tell as there’s gardens in London with nothing but wild animals in ’em, and maybe folks there understands the thing different to what we does.”

The Poet was inclined to think he was being made a fool of: this mild and worthy old man was quite too much for him. But he swallowed his temper and made an appeal to Joseph’s better feelings.

“Bates,” he said, in that gentle pathetic tone that his friends knew so well, “if you had lived in London for thirty years you would love to have the birds about you. Don’t people down here like to hear them sing? Don’t you feel a better man when you listen to a blackbird at dawn, as I did this morning?”

“Bless your heart, Sir,” answered Joseph, beginning to understand the situation, “I loves to hear ’em whistling, in their proper place! There’s a place for everything, as the Scripture says, and the garden’s no place for thieves; so we thinks down here, Sir, and if ’tis different where you come from, there’s no call for me to be argufying about it. We’ll let ’em be, Sir, we’ll let ’em be. I hope I knows my place.”

“Better than the birds, eh, Joseph,” said the mollified Poet. Joseph resumed his digging, and, as the newspapers say, the incident was closed.

Later in the morning the Parson dropped in to see his new parishioner, and was told of Mr. Bates’s loquacity.

“Well, well,” he said, “old Joseph is an oddity, and you must take him as you find him. But he’s quite right about the birds. They simply swarm here: the rooks and sparrows take your young peas, the bullfinches nip off your tender buds, and the blackbirds and thrushes won’t leave you a currant or a gooseberry to make your jam of.” Bessie looked up from her work with a face of alarm.

“You ask my wife,” continued the Parson. “One year when we were abroad in June, and there was no one to keep watch, she hadn’t a chance with anything except the plums. Next spring we took all the nests we could find, and even then we came off second-best. Of course we like to hear them singing, as you do, but when it comes to June, you know, you can thin them off with a gun, and that frightens the rest. I always shoot a few, and stick them up on the gooseberry bushes as scarecrows. I suppose you’re not much of a hand at a gun? I or my boys will do it for you with pleasure.”

“Oh, thank you,” cried Bessie, “I should be so sorry to have them killed, but we must have our jam now we’ve come to live in the country. When the time comes, I’m sure Gilbert will be most grateful to you.”

“No he won’t,” said the Poet:

“Though all the neighbours shoot thee round,I keep smooth plats of garden groundWhere thou may’st warble, eat, and dwell.”

“Well, well,” said the Parson, rather puzzled, “there’s time enough, there’s time enough. Tackle your weeds first, and plant your borders, and if you want the policeman in June, here he is.” And the hearty Parson took his leave, the Poet escorting him down the garden, where a blackbird was still singing. They stopped and listened.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” said the Parson. “It’s a pity they’re such rascals. I’m an enthusiastic gardener, and I have to choose between my garden and the birds, and I think you’ll have to choose too.”

“Is there no compromise?” asked the Poet mildly.

“Not for an enthusiast,” said the Parson, decidedly.

“Then my choice is made already,” said the Poet. And so they parted.

So the birds built where and when they pleased, and brought up crowds of hungry young ones; the old gardener kept his word and his place. They throve upon a juicy diet of grubs and caterpillars, and the garden throve in getting rid of these; so that by May it was such an Eden as even the Poet’s fancy had never dreamed of. His ear was daily soothed with a chorus of mellow song: he began to make a list of all the birds that visited his garden, to take notes of the food they seemed to love, and to record the dates of their nest-building, egg-laying, and hatching. His eyes were daily feasting on the apple-blossoms and lilacs, and there was promise of a full harvest of fruit on espaliers, standards, and garden-walls. The rowans were gay with heavy bunches of white flowers, which promised a glorious show of orange-red berries for August.

Joseph Bates had long ago given up engaging his master in conversation, and maintained in the garden an air of silent wisdom which quite baffled the Poet’s advances; but in the village, when asked by his friends about his employer, he would touch his forehead significantly, as implying that the good man was “weak in the upper storey.”

Bessie’s careful mind was already providing for the fruit-harvest; a huge cooking-vessel was procured, and scores of clean white jam-pots graced the larder shelves. The Poet wrote to a congenial friend, an ardent member of the Society for the Prevention of the Extinction of Birds, who, living in a London suburb, had come to believe that in the course of a few years the whole race of birds would be exterminated in this country through the greed and cruelty of that inferior animal Man. This enthusiast was now bidden to come in a month’s time, eat his fill of fruit, and bask in one garden where birds still built and sang and fed in unmolested freedom. Nor did the blackbirds watch the ripening treasure unmindful of the future; they, and the thrushes, and the starlings, while they did their duty towards the grubs and caterpillars, looked forward to a plentiful reward, and told their young of new treats and wonders that were yet in store for them.

And now a spell of fine sunny weather began to bring out a blush on the cherries and gooseberries and red currants; the roses burst into bloom; and the Poet and his wife were busy tending and weeding the garden they had learnt to love so well. In the warm afternoons he sat out reading, or walked up and down the path through the allotments listening to the birds and nursing his thoughts; and the villagers were quite content to see him doing this, for, as one of them expressed it to Joseph Bates, “he do make a better scarecrow than all the old hats and bonnets in the place.” So the Poet, with his white terrier at his heels (he kept no cat, I need hardly say), was all unknown to himself doing a work of grace for his neighbours.

He noticed, in these perambulations, that the birds now sang less frequently and heartily; but then there were more of them than ever, for the young ones were now all about the garden, and had grown so bold and tame that they would hardly get out of the Poet’s way as he moved gently along his paths. He loved them all, and thought of them almost as his own children; and no shadow of a foreboding crossed his mind that they, born in his garden, reared under his protection, could ever vex the even flow of his happiness.

One fine evening, just as the strawberries were ripening, the Member of the S.P.E.B. arrived on his visit. It was agreed that they should open the strawberry season next morning after breakfast; for that, as the Poet observed, is the real time to eat strawberries, “and the flavour is twice as good if you pick them yourself in the beds.” So in the fresh of the morning they all three went into the garden, and the Poet pointed out with pride the various places where the birds had built.

“We’ve had half a dozen blackbirds’ nests that we know of,” he said, “and probably there are others that we never found. See there – there’s a nice crop of blackbirds for a single season!”

Out of the strawberry beds, hustling and chuckling, there arose a whole school of youthful blackbirds, who had been having their first lessons in the art of sucking ripe fruit. The elders set off first, and the young ones followed unwillingly, one or two bolder spirits even yet dallying in the further corner of the bed.

The Member hardly seemed enthusiastic; he had been invited from London to eat strawberries, not to see the birds eat them. The Poet half divined his thoughts: “Plenty for all,” he cried; “we share and share alike here.”

They began to search; but alas! wherever a ripe fruit betrayed itself among the leaves, its juicy flesh had been cut open by a blackbirds bill. A few minutes’ hunt had but scanty result, and the Poet became the more uncomfortable as he caught sight of Joseph Bates’s face, wearing an expression of taciturn wisdom, which suddenly emerged from behind a row of peas and disappeared again.

“Poet,” said the Member, raising himself and straightening an aching back, “if it’s share and share alike, does that mean that each of us is only to count as one blackbird? I say, my good fellow, you really must net this bed if we’re to get anything out of it.” In this suggestion he was warmly seconded by Bessie, aghast at finding her treasure slipping from her so fast.

The Poet was a little disconcerted; but he faced it out bravely, and with the obstinacy of his northern blood:

“The unnetted blackhearts ripen dark,All thine, along the garden wall,”

he quoted “No; I will net no fruit in this garden.”

“Then it will be all theirs, and no mistake,” said the Member. “Poet, I shall go back to London and found a Society for the Protection of Man from the Birds. The plain fact is that you have too many birds here; they have increased, are increasing, and ought to be diminished.”

“Such language from you – you,” cried the Poet, half angry and half amused: “look at all the work they have done for me this spring in clearing off all manner of pests: think of all the songs they have sung for me! Are they to have no reward?”

“But haven’t you worked in your garden too, and are you to have no reward?” said the perverse Member. “Why can’t they go on with their grubs and caterpillars, instead of devouring your strawberries, which are in no way necessary to their existence?”

“Are they necessary to ours?” retorted the Poet. This brought the argument to a standstill: it had got twisted up in a knot. The Member wished to say that he had not been asked into the country to restrict himself to the necessaries of life; but friendship prevailed, and he suppressed himself. They returned to the house a trifle dejected, and trying to keep the tempers which those thoughtless birds had roused.

The next day the Poet arose very early in the morning, to gather strawberries for breakfast before the birds should have eaten them all. But the birds had got up still earlier, and were there before him; and now for the first time they aroused in his gentle heart a mild feeling of resentment. He stood there and even expostulated with them aloud; but they gave him little heed and as soon as his back was turned they were down on his strawberries again. That day he was persuaded to have a boy in, who was to come next morning at daybreak, and keep the birds away till after breakfast; then (so the Poet bargained) they should have their turn. Joseph Bates, with much satisfaction, but nobly concealing his triumph, undertook to procure a trusty and humane boy.

Next day the Poet in the early morning threw open his window and looked out on his garden. The humane boy was there, faithful to his trust – so faithful that, even as the Poet looked, he drew from his pocket a catapult, picked up a stone, and discharged it (luckily without effect) at a black marauder. The Poet quickly huddled on his clothes, and hurried down into the garden, only to find the humane boy on his knees among the dewy plants, eagerly devouring the fruit that the blackbirds should have had!

In two minutes he was turned neck and crop out of the garden. The Poet utterly refused to listen to his plea that a boy had as good a right to a strawberry as a blackbird. He was beginning to get irritated. For the moment he loved neither boys, nor strawberries, nor even blackbirds. Misfortunes never come alone, and as he turned from the garden gate he began to be aware that it was raining. He looked up, and for the first time for weeks he saw a dull leaden sky, with here and there a ragged edge of cloud driven across it from the west. The thirsty soil began to drink in the moisture, and dull and dusty leafage quickly grew clean and wholesome; but the strawberries – such few as they could find – had no flavour that day; and now too the slugs came out refreshed, and finished the work of the blackbirds.