The Diary of a Goose Girl Part 3

All this tending of downy young things, this feeding and putting to bed, this petting and nursing and rearing, is such pretty, comforting woman's work. I am sure Phoebe will make a better wife to the carrier for having been a poultry-maid, and though good enough for most practical purposes when I came here, I am an infinitely better woman now. I am afraid I was not particularly nice the last few days at the Hydro. Such a lot of dull, prosy, inquisitive, bothering old tabbies! Aunt Margaret furnis.h.i.+ng imaginary symptoms enough to keep a fond husband and two trained nurses distracted; a man I had never encouraged in my life coming to stay in the neighbourhood and turning up daily for rejection; another man taking rooms at the very hotel with the avowed purpose of making my life a burden; and on the heels of both, a widow of thirty-five in full chase! Small wonder I thought it more dignified to retire than to compete, and so I did.

I need not, however, have cut the threads that bound me to Oxenbridge with such particularly sharp scissors, nor given them such a vicious snap; for, so far as I can observe, the little world of which I imagined myself the sun continues to revolve, and, probably, about some other centre. I can well imagine who has taken up that delightful but somewhat exposed and responsible position--it would be just like her!

{Threatened . . . to hatch in my hand: p51.jpg}

I am perfectly happy where I am; it is not that; but it seems so strange that they can be perfectly happy without me, after all that they--after all that was said on the subject not many days ago. Nothing turns out as one expects. There have been no hot pursuits, no rewards offered, no bills posted, no printed placards issued describing the beauty and charms of a young person who supposed herself the cynosure of every eye. Heigh- ho! What does it matter, after all? One can always be a Goose Girl!

I wonder if the hen mother is quite, quite satisfied with her ducklings!

Do you suppose the fact of hatching and brooding them breaks down all the sense of difference? Does she not sometimes reflect that if her children were the ordinary sort, and not these changelings, she would be enjoying certain pretty little attentions dear to a mother's heart? The chicks would be pecking the food off her broad beak with their tiny ones, and jumping on her back to slide down her glossy feathers. They would be far nicer to cuddle, too, so small and graceful and light; the changelings are a trifle solid and brawny. And personally, just as a matter of taste, would she not prefer wee, round, glancing heads, and pointed beaks, peeping from under her wings, to these teaspoon-shaped things larger than her own? I wonder!

We are training fourteen large young chickens to sit on the perches in their new house, instead of huddling together on the floor as has been their habit, because we discover rat-holes under the wire flooring occasionally, and fear that toes may be bitten. At nine o'clock Phoebe and I lift the chickens one by one, and, as it were, glue them to their perches, squawking. Three nights have we gone patiently through with this performance, but they have not learned the lesson. The ducks and geese are, however, greatly improved by the application of advanced educational methods, and the _regime_ of perfect order and system inst.i.tuted by Me begins to show results.

{One can always be a Goose Girl: p53.jpg}

There is no more violent splas.h.i.+ng and pebbling, racing, chasing, separating. The pole, indeed, still has to be produced, but at the first majestic wave of my hand they scuttle toward the sh.o.r.e. The geese turn to the right, cross the rickyard, and go to their pen; the May ducks turn to the left for their coops, the June ducks follow the hens to the top meadow, and even the idiot gosling has an inspiration now and then and stumbles on his own habitation.

{The geese . . . cross the rickyard: p54.jpg}

Mrs. Heaven has no reverence for the principles of Comenius, Pestalozzi, or Herbert Spencer as applied to poultry, and when the ducks and geese came out of the pond badly the other night and went waddling and tumbling and hissing all over creation, did not approve of my sending them back into the pond to start afresh.

"I consider it a great waste of time, of good time, miss," she said; "and, after all, do you consider that educated poultry will be any better eating, or that it will lay more than one egg a day, miss?"

I have given the matter some attention, and I fear Mrs. Heaven is right.

A duck, a goose, or a hen in which I have developed a larger brain, implanted a sense of duty, or instilled an idea of self-government, is likely, on the whole, to be leaner, not fatter. There is nothing like obeying the voice of conscience for taking the flesh off one's bones; and, speaking of conscience, Phoebe, whose metaphysics are of the farm farmy, says that hers "felt like a hunlaid hegg for dyes" after she had jilted the postman.

As to the eggs, I am sure the birds will go on laying one a day for 'tis their nature to. Whether the product of the intelligent, conscious, logical fowl, will be as rich in quality as that of the uneducated and barbaric bird, I cannot say; but it ought at least to be equal to the Denmark egg eaten now by all Londoners; and if, perchance, left uneaten, it is certain to be a very superior wife and mother.

While we are discussing the subject of educating poultry, I confess that the case of Cannibal Ann gives me much anxiety. Twice in her short career has she been under suspicion of eating her own eggs, but Phoebe has never succeeded in catching her _in flagrante delicto_. That eminent detective service was reserved for me, and I have been haunted by the picture ever since. It is an awful sight to witness a hen gulp her own newly-laid fresh egg, yolk, white, sh.e.l.l, and all; to realise that you have fed, sheltered, chased, and occasionally run in, a being possessed of no moral sense, a being likely to set a bad example, inculcate vicious habits among her innocent sisters, and lower the standard of an entire poultry-yard. _The Young Poultry Keeper's Friend_ gives us no advice on this topic, and we do not know whether to treat Cannibal Ann as the victim of a disease, or as a confirmed criminal; whether to administer remedies or cut her off in the flower of her youth.

{Poor little chap, . . . 'e never was a fyvorite: p56.jpg}

We have had a sad scene to-night. A chick has been ailing all day, and when we shut up the brood we found him dead in a corner.

Phoebe put him on the ground while she busied herself about the coop. The other chicks came out and walked about the dead one again and again, eyeing him curiously.

"Poor little chap!" said Phoebe. "'E's never 'ad a mother! 'E was an incubytor chicken, and wherever I took 'im 'e was picked at. There was somethink wrong with 'im; 'e never was a fyvorite!"

I put the fluffy body into a hole in the turf, and strewed a handful of gra.s.s over him. "Sad little epitaph!" I thought. "He never was a fyvorite!"

CHAPTER VIII

July 13th.

I like to watch the Belgian hares eating their trifolium or pea-pods or gra.s.s; graceful, gentle things they are, crowding about Mr. Heaven, and standing prettily, not greedily, on their hind legs, to reach for the clover, their delicate nostrils and whiskers all a-quiver with excitement.

As I look out of my window in the dusk I can see one of the mothers galloping across the enclosure, the soft white lining of her tail acting as a beacon-light to the eight infant hares following her, a quaint procession of eight white spots in it glancing line. In the darkest night those baby creatures could follow their mother through gra.s.s or hedge or thicket, and she would need no warning note to show them where to flee in case of danger. "All you have to do is to follow the white night-light that I keep in the lining of my tail," she says, when she is giving her first maternal lectures; and it seems a beneficent provision of Nature. To be sure, Mr. Heaven took his gun and went out to shoot wild rabbits to-day, and I noted that he marked them by those same self- betraying tails, as they scuttled toward their holes or leaped toward the protecting cover of the hedge; so it does not appear whether Nature is on the side of the farmer or the rabbit . . .

{Mr. Heaven . . . went out to shoot wild rabbits: p59.jpg}

There is as much comedy and as much tragedy in poultry life as anywhere, and already I see rifts within lutes. We have in a cage a French gentleman partridge married to a Hungarian lady of defective sight. He paces back and forth in the pen restlessly, anything but content with the domestic fireside. One can see plainly that he is devoted to the Boulevards, and that if left to his own inclinations he would never have chosen any spouse but a thorough Parisienne.

The Hungarian lady is blind of one eye, from some stray shot, I suppose.

She is melancholy at all times, and occasionally goes so far as to beat her head against the wire netting. If liberated, Mr. Heaven says that her blindness would only expose her to death at the hands of the first sportsman, and it always seems to me as if she knows this, and is ever trying to decide whether a loveless marriage is any better than the tomb.

Then, again, the great, grey gander is, for some mysterious reason, out of favour with the entire family. He is a n.o.ble and amiable bird, by far the best all-round character in the flock, for dignity of mien and large- minded common-sense. What is the treatment vouchsafed to this blameless husband and father? One that puts anybody out of sorts with virtue and its scant rewards. To begin with, the others will not allow him to go into the pond. There is an organised cabal against it, and he sits solitary on the bank, calm and resigned, but, naturally, a trifle hurt.

His favourite retreat is a tiny sort of island on the edge of the pool under the alders, where with his bent head, and red-rimmed philosophic eyes he regards his own breast and dreams of happier days. When the others walk into the country twenty-three of them keep together, and Burd Alane (as I have named him from the old ballad) walks by himself. The lack of harmony is so evident here, and the slight so intentional and direct, that it almost moves me to tears. The others walk soberly, always in couples, but even Burd Alane's rightful spouse is on the side of the majority, and avoids her consort.

{Out of favour with the entire family: p61.jpg}

What is the nature of his offence? There can be no connubial jealousies, I judge, as geese are strictly monogamous, and having chosen a partner of their joys and sorrows they cleave to each other until death or some other inexorable circ.u.mstance does them part. If they are ever mistaken in their choice, and think they might have done better, the world is none the wiser. Burd Alane looks in good condition, but Phoebe thinks he is not quite himself, and that some day when he is in greater strength he will turn on his foes and rend them, regaining thus his lost prestige, for formerly he was king of the flock.

Phoebe has not a vestige of sentiment. She just asked me if I would have a duckling or a gosling for dinner; that there were two quite ready--the brown and yellow duckling, that is the last to leave the water at night, and the white gosling that never knows his own 'ouse. Which would I 'ave, and would I 'ave it with sage and onion?

Now, had I found a duckling on the table at dinner I should have eaten it without thinking at all, or with the thought that it had come from Barbury Green. But eat a duckling that I have stoned out of the pond, pursued up the bank, chased behind the wire netting, caught, screaming, in a corner, and carried struggling to his bed? Feed upon an idiot gosling that I have found in nine different coops on nine successive nights--in with the newly-hatched chicks, the half-grown pullets, the setting hen, the "invaleed goose," the drake with the gapes, the old ducks in the pen?--Eat a gosling that I have caught and put in with his brothers and sisters (whom he never recognises) so frequently and regularly that I am familiar with every joint in his body?

In the first place, with my own small b.u.mp of locality and lack of geography, I would never willingly consume a creature who might, by some strange process of a.s.similation, make me worse in this respect; in the second place, I should have to be ravenous indeed to sit down deliberately and make a meal of an intimate friend, no matter if I had not a high opinion of his intelligence. I should as soon think of eating the Square Baby, stuffed with sage and onion and garnished with green apple-sauce, as the yellow duckling or the idiot gosling.

Mrs. Heaven has just called me into her sitting-room, ostensibly to ask me to order breakfast, but really for the pleasure of conversation. Why she should inquire whether I would relish some gammon of bacon with eggs, when she knows that there has not been, is not now, and never will be, anything but gammon of bacon with eggs, is more than I can explain.

"Would you like to see my flowers, miss?" she asks, folding her plump hands over her white ap.r.o.n. "They are looking beautiful this morning. I am so fond of potted plants, of plants in pots. Look at these geraniums!

Now, I consider that pink one a perfect bloom; yes, a perfect bloom. This is a fine red one, is it not, miss? Especially fine, don't you think?

The trouble with the red variety is that they're apt to get "bobby" and have to be washed regularly; quite bobby they do get indeed, I a.s.sure you. That white one has just gone out of blossom, and it was really wonderful. You could 'ardly have told it from a paper flower, miss, not from a white paper flower. My plants are my children nowadays, since Albert Edward is my only care. I have been the mother of eleven children, miss, all of them living, so far as I know; I know nothing to the contrary. I 'ope you are not wearying of this solitary place, miss?

It will grow upon you, I am sure, as it did upon Mrs. Pollock, with all her peculiar fancies, and as it 'as grown upon us.--We formerly had a butcher's shop in Buffington, and it was naturally a great responsibility. Mr. Heaven's nerves are not strong, and at last he wanted a life of more quietude, more quietude was what he craved. The life of a retail butcher is a most exciting and wearying one. n.o.body satisfied with their meat; as if it mattered in a world of change!

Everybody complaining of too much bone or too little fat; n.o.body wis.h.i.+ng tough chops or cutlets, but always seeking after fine joints, when it's against reason and nature that all joints should be juicy and all cutlets tender; always complaining if livers are not sent with every fowl, always asking you to remember the trimmin's, always wanting their beef well 'ung, and then if you 'ang it a minute too long, it's left on your 'ands!

I often used to say to Mr. Heaven, yes many's the time I've said it, that if people would think more of the great 'ereafter and less about their own little stomachs, it would be a deal better for them, yes, a deal better, and make it much more comfortable for the butchers!"

{The life . . . is a most exciting and wearying one: p65.jpg}

Burd Alane has had a good quarter of an hour to-day.

{His spouse took a brief promenade with him: p66.jpg}

His spouse took a brief promenade with him. To be sure, it was during an absence of the flock on the other side of the hedge so that the moral effect of her spasm of wifely loyalty was quite lost upon them. I strongly suspect that she would not have granted anything but a secret interview. What a petty, weak, ign.o.ble character! I really don't like to think so badly of any fellow-creature as I am forced to think of that politic, time-serving, pusillanimous goose. I believe she laid the egg that produced the idiot gosling!

CHAPTER IX