Under the Sun. Philip Stewart Robinson
finer feelings (though fostering self-reliance), and makes the bird’s daily life miserable. Think of the lives cursed by suspicion, and confer your pity on the hen—Cromwell shifting from bedroom to bedroom, and the royal Louis refusing food. Adam Smith was stolen in infancy by gypsies, and his parents lived ever afterwards in terror for the rest of their children. But what was this compared to the life of the staging-house fowl? His whole life is spent in strategy. Every advance in his direction is a wile, each corner an ambuscade, and each conclave of servants a cabal. With every sun comes a Rye-House Plot for the wretched bird, and before evening he has had to run the gauntlet of a Vehm-gericht. His brother, suspicious yet all too confiding, would trust no one but the wife of the grain dealer who lived at the corner; and this single confidence cost him his life. So our bird trusts no one.
Indeed, now that I come myself to think seriously of the staging-house fowl, I would not hesitate to say that the washerman’s donkey has the better life. The donkey can remember childhood’s years as an interval of frivolity and light-heartedness; and even in maturer life it is free (with three of its legs), after the day’s work is over, to disport itself with its kind. But the case is different with the bird. Pullets of the tenderest years are sought out for broth; adolescence is beset with peril in hardly a less degree than puberty; while alas! old age itself is not respected. Like Japanese youth it fives with sudden death ever in prospect; but the hara-kiri in the case of the fowl is not an honorable termination of life, while the lively apprehension of it unwholesomely sharpens its vigilance. It has, moreover, nothing to live on and plenty of it; and this diet affects its physique, inasmuch as it prevents the increase of flesh, while the constant evasion of death develops its muscles—the thigh-bones assuming vulturine dimensions. The feathers, by frequent escapings through small holes, become ragged and irregular; the tail is systematically discarded as being dangerous and a handle to ill-wishers. Death therefore must come upon some of them as a sharp cure for life—il est mort guéri.
But to others it is the bitter end of a life of perilous pleasure—to such a one perhaps as the following. The bird I speak of was a fine young cock, a Nazarene in his unclipt wings, with the columnar legs of an athlete, snatching life by sheer pluck and dying without disgrace. His death happened in this wise. There came up the hill one day some travellers with whom the cook at the staging-house wished to stand well, and when they asked, “What is there to eat?” he replied with suavity, “Whatever your honors choose to order.” So they ordered beef and then mutton, but there being neither, they desisted from “ordering” and left it to the cook to arrange their meal. And he gave them soup made of an infant poult, two side-dishes composed of two elder brothers, a fine fowl roasted, by way of joint, and the grandmother of the family furnished forth a curry. And one of the party watched the dinner being caught. With the soup there was little difficulty, for it succumbed to a most obvious fraud. The side-dishes fell victims to curiosity, for while they were craning their necks into the cook-room door, a hand came suddenly round the corner and closed upon them. The curry, poor old soul, was taken in her afternoon sleep. But the roast, the bird italicized above, showed sport, as well it might. For seven months it had daily evaded death, scorning alike the wiles of the cook and the artifices of his minions. Nothing would tempt it during the day within the enclosure in which so many of its family had lost their lives, and as it roosted high up in the walnut-tree behind the bungalow, night surprises were out of the question. Whenever travellers came in sight it would either fly on to the roof of the bungalow, and thence survey the preparations for dinner; or, slipping away quietly over the cliff, would enjoy healthful ease in some sequestered nook, whither was borne, tempered by distance and the comfortable sense of security, the last screech of the less wary. But its day had come. The fig-tree had drunk of the Neda. The travellers had been expected. An hour, therefore, before they came in sight preparations were made for the great capture; and, when on the appearance of the first horseman, the fowl turned as usual to escape, he found two boys on the roof of the bungalow, six more up the walnut-tree, and a cordon of men round the yard. There was nothing for it but to trust to its wings; so mounting on the wall he flew for his life. And his strong wings bore him bravely—up over the fowl-yard and the goat-house and the temple, over the upturned faces of the shouting men—up into the unbroken sky. Below him, far, far down he saw the silver thread of water that lay along the valley between the hills. But there was a worse enemy than man on the watch—a hungry eagle. And on a sudden our flier saw, between him and the red sunset, the king of birds in kingly flight towards him, and stopping himself in his course he came fluttering down—poor Icarus!—to the friendly covert of earth with outspread wings. But the eagle with closed pinions fell like a thunderbolt plumb from out the heavens, and striking him in mid-sky sent him twirling earthward; then, swooping down again, grasped him in his yellow talons before he touched the ground, and, rising with slow flight, winged his burdened way to the nearest resting-place—the roof of the staging-house. But his exploit had been watched, and hardly had his feet touched the welcome tiles before a shower of sticks and stones rained round him. One pebble struck him, and, rising hastily at the affront, his prey escaped his talons and, rolling over and over down the roof, fell into the arms of the exultant cook ! But the scream of the baffled eagle drowned the death-cry of the fowl.
Visitors in Feathers
II.
VISITORS IN FEATHERS.
AMONG the common objects of my Indian Garden is the Corvus splendens. Such at any rate is the scientific name given by Vieillot to that “trebledated bird,” the common crow of India, and although one naturalist yearned to change it to “shameless” (impudicus), and although another still declares that splendens is inappropriate and tends to bring scientific nomenclature into ridicule, that bird—as was only to be expected from a crow—has kept its mendacious adjective, and in spite of every one is still, in name, as fine a bird in India as it was time out of mind in Olympus. Splendens or not at present, the crow must have had recommendations either of mind or person to have been chosen, as Ovid tells us it was, as the messenger-bird of so artistic a deity as Apollo. But the crow lost paradise—and good looks with it—not for one impulsive act, but for a fortnight’s hard sinning. Now punishment has a hardening influence on some people, and it has had a most dreadful effect on the corvine disposition. Heedless of all moral obligations, gluttonous, and a perverter of truth, Ovid tells us it was, even in its best days; but now it has developed into a whole legion of devilry. Lest a Baboo should think to trip me up by throwing Menu in my teeth and quoting from the great lawgiver, “A good wife should be like a crow,” I would give it as my opinion that Menu, when he said this, referred to that doubtful virtue of the crow that forbids any exhibition of conjugal tenderness before the public eye—an unnatural instinct and reserve, to my thinking. Crows cannot, like young sweeps, be called “innocent blacknesses,” for their nigritude is the livery of sin, the badge of crime, like the scarlet V on the shoulder of the convict voleur, the dark brand on Cain’s brow, the snow-white leprosy of Gehazi, or the yellow garb of Norfolk Islander; and yet they do not wear their color with humility or even common decency. They swagger in it, pretending they chose that exact shade for themselves. Did they not do this, perhaps Jerdon would not have begrudged them their flattering name, nor Hodgson have called them impudicos, but by their effrontery they have raised every man’s hand against them; and were they anything but crows, they must have had to take, like Ishmael the son of Hagar, to the desert. Perhaps it is that they presume upon their past honors. If so, they should beware. Cole’s dog was too proud to move out of the way of a cart of manure, and South ey has told us his fate. Again, their Greek and Latin glories have had a serious counterpoise in the writings of modern ancients, where the nature of crows is proven as swart as their Ethiop faces. Is it not written in the Singhalese Pratyasataka that nothing can improve a crow? Students of Burton will remember that in the Anatomy of Melancholy devils (including sprites