Under the Sun. Philip Stewart Robinson
they set to work, then and there, and plucked the ten geese bare. Not a feather did they leave on the gander, not a tuft of down on the old grey goose; and, the job completed, they left the dame with her bag full of plumage and her ten plucked geese, not without assuring her, we may be certain, of their sympathy with her in her loss.
Next morning the good woman got up as usual and, remembering the feathers down stairs, dressed betimes, for she hoped, thrifty soul, to get them off her hands that very day at market. And then she bethought her of the ten plucked bodies lying out under the porch, and resolved that they should be buried before she went. But as she approached the door, on these decent rites intent, and was turning the key, there fell on her ears the sound of a familiar voice—and then another—and another—until at last the astonished dame heard in full chorus the well-known accents of all her plucked and poisoned geese! The throat of the old gander sounded, no doubt, a trifle husky, and the grey goose spoke in muffled tones suggestive of a chastening headache; but there was no mistaking those voices, and the dame, fumbling at the door, wondered what it all might mean.
Has a goose a ghost? Did any one ever read or hear of a spectre of a gander?
The key turned at last; the door opened, and there, quacking in subdued tones, suppliant and shivering, stood all her flock! There they stood, the ten miserable birds, with splitting headaches and parched tongues, contrite and dejected, asking to have their feathers back again. The situation was painful to both parties. The forlorn geese saw in each other’s persons the humiliating reflection of their own condition, while the dame, guiltily conscious of that bag full of feathers, remembered how the one lapse of Noah—in that “aged surprisal of six hundred years, and unexpected inebriation from the unknown effects of wine,”—has been excused by religion and the unanimous voice of posterity. She, and her neighbors with her, however, had hastily misjudged the geese, and, finding them dead drunk, had stripped them, without remembering for a moment that if feathers are easy to get off they are very hard to put on. Here were the geese before her, bald, penitent, and shaking with the cold. There in the corner were their feathers, in a bag. But how could they be brought together? Even supposing each goose could recognize its own, how were they to be reclothed? Tarring and feathering were out of the question, for that would be to add insult to injury; and to try to stick all the feathers into their places again, one by one, was a labor such as only folk in fairy tales could ever hope to accomplish.
So she called in her neighbors again; but they proved only sorry comforters, for they reminded her that after all the fault was her own, that it was she and no one else who had thrown the brandied cherries to the geese. The poor fowls, brought up to confide in her, and repaying her care of them by trustful reliance, could never, her neighbors said, have been expected to guess that when she threw the vinous fruit in their path she, their own familiar mistress, at whose hands they looked for all that was good, could have intended to betray them into the shocking excesses of intoxication, and deceive them to their ruin. Yet so it had been. Accepting the feast spread out before them, the geese had partaken gladly, gratefully, freely, of the insidious cherry; and the result was this, that the geese were in one place and their feathers were in another! At last, weary of the reproaches of her friends, the widow gathered all her bald poultry about her round the kitchen fire, and sat down to make them flannel jackets—registering a solemn vow, as she did so, never to jump hastily at conclusions about either bird or beast, lest she might again fall into the error of misconstruing their conduct.
The mischief, however, was done; for the geese, who had got drunk with brandied cherries, and been plucked by mistake in consequence, had good reason for withholding from human beings for ever afterwards that pleasing trustfulness which characterizes the domestic fowl. They would never again approach their food without suspicion, nor look upon a gathering of the neighbors except as a dark conspiracy against their feathers. The dame herself, whom hitherto they had been wont to greet with tumultuous acclaim, and whose footsteps to and fro they had been accustomed to follow so closely, would become to them an object of distrust. Instead of tumbling over each other in their glad hurry to meet her in the morning, or crowding round her full of gossip and small goose-confidences when she came to pen them up for the night, they would eye her askance from a distance, approach her only strategically, and accept her gifts with reproachful hesitation. And how keenly the dame would feel such estrangement I leave my readers to judge for themselves.
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This untoward inebriation of the geese points, however, another lesson; for I cannot but see in it one more of those deplorable instances of moral deterioration of the animal world which from time to time obtrude themselves, unwelcome, upon.the notice of lovers of nature.
In Belgium and other places men try to make dogs believe they are donkeys or ponies by harnessing them to carts, but the attempt can never succeed; for a dog thus employed will always be a very indifferent donkey, and never a good dog. In Paris, again, the other day a man demoralized all his bees by bringing their hives into the city and putting them down next a sugar warehouse. The bees, hitherto as pure-minded and upright insects as one could have wished to meet in a summer’s day, developed at once an unnatural aversion to labor, and a not less unnatural tendency to larceny. Instead of winging their industrious way to the distant clover-fields, and there gathering the innocent honey, they swarmed in disorderly mobs upon the sugar casks next door, and crawled about with their ill-gotten burdens upon the surrounding pavement. The owner of the hives benefited immensely by the proximity of the saccharine deposits, but it was at the sacrifice of all moral tone in the bees which he had tempted and which had fallen.
We never tire of protesting against the unnatural relations of lion and lion-tamer, and of reminding the keepers of menageries that instinct is irrepressible, untamable, and immortal; and every now and then a lion, tired of foolery, knocks a man into mummy. The narrative is always the same, whether it happens at San Francisco or at Birmingham. A lion’s keeper goes into the beast’s cage to clean it, and having, as he supposed, seen all the occupants safely out, sets to work. As it happens, however, the sliding door which divides the two compartments of the cage has not fallen securely into its place, and an old lion, seeing his opportunity, springs at the opening. The door gives way, and the next instant the beast has seized his keeper. A number of people, powerless of course to give assistance, are looking on ; but fortunately there is also present some professional lion-tamer, belonging to the establishment, and this man, with great courage, rushes straight into the cage and confronts the lion. Discipline and a loaded stick triumph over instinct. The lion releases its prey and the unfortunate keeper is at once dragged out.
Now it is easy enough, after such an incident as this, to talk of lions as savage brutes, and then to moralize over the foolhardiness of men who have grown accustomed to lions, and think that lions have therefore grown accustomed to them. But surely it is much more just to the animals to remember that it is the most natural thing in the world for a flesh-eating animal to spring at meat when it sees it within its reach.
The marvel, indeed, in these narratives always is the lion’s forbearance. In the end that staggering blow right between the eyes is accepted by him as a very forcible argument; but before the gallant lion-tamer comes to his friend’s rescue, at such a terrible risk to himself, the lion has always had plenty of time to do what he liked with the keeper he had caught, or at any rate to gobble up a good luncheon. When a lion is in a hurry it does not as a rule take him long to make a meal; but in the accidents that occur in menageries it does not seem to occur to the beast that there is any necessity for haste. Long captivity has made his practices unnatural. He has forgotten his old habits of hurried feeding. He had caught a man sure enough, for there the man was, and it was quite early in the morning. But he had all the day before him, so he thought; and, though he remarked that there was a great deal of unusual excitement on the other side of his bars, and that the human beings who were generally so leisurely seemed strangely flurried about something on this particular occasion, he had the cage to himself, and there was no occasion that he saw for making a hurried meal. But he had misunderstood the facts of the case.