Part 19

But one Saturday morning I called Robin Hood in vain. The air, ringing with bird-carols, held no music so precious as his hungry chirp. Joy-of-Life was now a thousand miles away, but Mary and Dame Gentle joined anxiously in the search. We were a distracted household when, at eight, a ruddy young Audubon from the hilltop arrived, bringing in one hand our overjoyed little truant, and in the other another fledgling robin, with the merest beginnings of a tail--a waif picked up by the roadside. Audubon reported that, as he was busy in his garden, a young robin had flown down and alighted at his feet, fluttered there a moment and raised the nestling cry for food. Happy Robin Hood, to have chosen from all the boys of Wellesley the one wisest in benignant woodcraft! Audubon slipped quietly to the ground, caught a caterpillar and held it out to Robin, who came fearlessly to his hand and choked the furry delicacy down. Then Audubon was sure that this was our famed fosterling and, taking up the unsuspicious little fellow, hastened to bring him down the hill to his home.

The new arrival from the greenwood, whom we dubbed Friar Tuck, promptly belied that jovial memory. He was a wild, sullen, desperate little outlaw, whose chirp was a metallic click and whose bill had to be pried open before he would eat. Not even Robin Hood's hospitable chatter could dispel his scared, defiant misery, and on the second morning, unable to bear the look he turned up to the trees, we lifted the cage lid and let him fly. We never, to our knowledge, saw Friar Tuck again, and although we often listened for his uncanny chirp, it was not heard--not even by Mary, whose imagination so expanded under these Natural History studies that she would rush upstairs several times a day to report all manner of rainbow-colored fowl that she had discovered in the thickets. By the following winter, her Celtic vision had soared beyond all bounds. "The cherubs are shoveling snow off the porch of Paradise this morning," I once happened to remark, whereat Mary, plumping down the hot coffee-pot helter-skelter, sprang open-eyed and open-mouthed to the window, gazing ecstatically up into the white whirl of the storm. "I see thim! I see thim! The shining little dears! It's using their wings for shovels they are, and I see one of their feathers afloating down in the snow."

As the summer went on, Robin Hood became the pet of the neighborhood. Even Giant Bluff, who had moods of declaring that "what with 'Biddy-Biddy' on one side, and 'Robby-Robby' on the other, this hill ain't fit for nothin' but females to live on," would bring tidbits to our Speckle, who soon saved him the trouble by making frequent calls at the front door. A guest of that house used to come to her window in the early morning and sing him "Robin Adair," while he stood on the opposite roof attentively listening, his head cocked and his bright eye turned on the serenader.

But he was a loyal little soul. He spent much of his time on Dame Gentle's piazza, and although Joy-of-Life, just before her departure, treating him for asthma--due, the sages said, to an overhearty diet in his inactive babyhood--had popped an unhappy worm dipped in red pepper down his throat, yet even this Robin could forgive. It had hurt his feelings at the time. He had withdrawn to his best-beloved branch on his best-beloved oak and maintained an offended silence for half an hour, but with the sting his anger went, and for days after Joy-of-Life's disappearance, Robin would fly up to her window ledge and chirp to the closed blinds.

During this second week of freedom, his experience was enlarged by a thunderstorm, which he contemplated with lively astonishment from within my window, but the next morning worms were plentiful, and there, to Giant Bluff's inordinate pride, was Robin trotting about the lawn like an old hand, turning up bits of turf with a grubby little bill and actually getting his own breakfast.

A day or two later our fledgling began to sow wild oats. Thursday afternoon Mary missed him and, hunting for him beyond the cairn, which she designated "The Pets' Cemetery," found him lending charmed attention to a big, red-breasted robin, who dashed off so guiltily that he bumped himself against the fence. All Friday our Speckle was shy and wild, flying about the edge of the wood with this first friend of his own feather, but he came to perch on the piazza rail at twilight, as usual, keeping us company while we took our open-air dinner, and responding to our blandishments with a drowsy chirp. When he soared to choose his slumber-spray in one of the tall trees before the house, we strained our eyes to follow him into the shadows and called up laughing counsels and good-nights as long as he would answer. But the next morning an evil-eyed black cat sat on our steps and, hour after hour, no Robin Hood appeared. Mary spent most of the forenoon in the woods and, after luncheon, we both went calling through a leafy world with a Babel of chirps about us. "Thim birds, they're just a-mocking me," wailed Mary. But suddenly we both heard, hurrying along the air, that dear, unmistakable baby squawk, and in an instant more our own little Speckle came plumping down on my head, where he rode triumphantly into the house, flapping his funny right wing all the way and gasping with speed and excitement. He had perhaps been in a fight, for one side of his guileless face was badly pecked. Throughout the afternoon he devoured one full meal after another, allowing ten-minute siesta intervals, with all the enthusiasm of a prodigal son, and then he must have a bath, and then he must be held and petted, and all the while--yep, yep, yep! flop, flop, flop!--he was trying to tell the story of his terrible adventures. Whatever they were, he was a reformed little robin, and spent the Sunday partly on my window box, where he would play for fifteen minutes together with the nutshells that the chickadees had emptied, and partly under a leafy canopy in the oak within easy squirrel-leap beyond, not having a chirp to chirp to any bad bird who would lead him into mischief.

For a fortnight longer Robin was our daily joy. It seemed to make us intimates of the woods to hear, as we were walking there, the hail of a familiar voice from overhead and look up to see our own small Speckle peeping down at us from some breezy twig against the blue. For he soon recovered from his penitence and went sailing through the trees on ever longer voyages of discovery, being often out of call for two or three hours at a time. But he was always on the window box, where no other robin ever came, in the early morning from half-past three on to seven, overflowing with conversation and insisting on intelligent replies to his remarks. At intervals throughout the day, too, I would hear a soft thud on the box, followed by a chirp-p-p and the flap-p-p of a very impatient and business-like little wing. On these occasions Robin Hood was quite too much occupied with his greenwood affairs to feed himself, and I must needs drop book or pen and cram refreshment down his importunate yellow gullet till it could hold no more. Then he would hop across to his Japanese water-cup, take a dozen eager dips, wipe his bill first on one side, then the other, on the edge of the box, and then, flapping his wing for good-by, sweep off again. In the middle of every forenoon and, during the hottest weather, of the afternoon as well, he alighted on his cage and called imperiously to Mary to bring him fresh water for his bath. We shut him in during this and during his sun-baths, since he enjoyed these rites so much as to be even more than commonly oblivious of cats.

On the evening of July 24 the mercury "dropped on us," as Mary said, some thirty degrees, and a drenching rain fell all night--a new experience for Robin Hood, who appeared at my window Thursday morning, a draggled little vagabond. Had there been no wise robin at hand to teach him how to take the oil from his back pockets and convert his airy fluff into a tight-fitting waterproof? He was glad to come in out of the wet and spent the forenoon in Mary's kitchen, letting her fondle him as she would, but flying with alarm from the proffered caresses of market-man and grocer-boy. In the course of the next few days, however, he began to protest a little when even his old friends stooped to take him up. He would hop backward, snapping his bill, but he seldom flew and, if the hand did not remain closed upon him, but left him perching free on wrist or finger, he was entirely content.

On August 8 we did our Robin wrong. An expected dinner guest had expressed a desire to see him and, as by this time he was spending his nights, presumably, in a far-off Robin roost, for which he sometimes started early in the afternoon, Mary caught him during the absorbed ecstasy of his sun-bath and shut him into the cage. This was still a favorite resort of his, and he did not object in the slightest until a young robin playmate with whom he was in the habit of flying to the roost whistled for him from a scarlet oak. Then Robin chirped to us to let him out, growing frantic with excitement as we, hitherto so prompt to obey his behests, made no move for his release. He called and called again, beating about the cage and even breaking into a song of wild entreaty. Shame-faced and conscience-stricken, we yet put him off, expecting our guest minute by minute. It was nearly seven when regrets were telephoned, but by that time Robin was in a panic and smote our hearts by the terror with which he fluttered back from us as we bent over the cage.

The instant the lid was raised he whirred up to the scarlet oak, where his faithful chum still waited, but before their belated departure Robin flew down to Dame Gentle's window and told her all about it, and then over to Giant Bluff's piazza, where he rehearsed his grievances again in a scolding chirp never heard from him before.

We closed the house on the fourteenth and went away, unforgiven by Robin Hood, who has never, so far as I know, come to human hand since Mary's clasp betrayed him to captivity. During those six days we caught flying glimpses of our estranged fosterling, easily recognized from a distance by the two white feathers in his tail, and a few times he started, by sheer force of habit, to hop across the road to us from Dame Gentle's, but, half-way over, he would turn sharply about, give an angry little yep, and hop back again.

When we reopened the house in late September, not even Dame Gentle had recent news of Robin Hood, and all the winter long we carried a sorrowful sense of broken friendship. We were anxious about our hand-reared birdling, too, hardly daring to hope that he could survive the perils of migration. What a desperate adventure it seemed!

"Who hath talked to the shy bird-people, And counseled the feathered breast To follow the sagging rain-wind Over the purple crest?"

But on the sixth day of March Robin Hood came home. There had been a baby blizzard the night before and, as we returned from college in the early afternoon, I noticed birdtracks in the light snow that still mantled the piazza rail.

"See those prints, right where Robin Hood used to sit and watch us take our supper!" I exclaimed, a wild hope knocking at my heart, but Joy-of-Life thought it a case of hungry tree sparrows and, with her especial tenderness for the plucky, one-legged fox sparrow that had consorted with them all winter, went in to find them a choice handful of scraps. But when, a few minutes later, I entered my chamber, there outside his accustomed window, on the feeding-box now drifted over with snow, sat a great, plump, glossy redbreast, staring into the room with Robin's own bright eyes and cocking his head to listen to our welcome. He fluttered back to the nearest tree, when we opened the window, indicating that he had learned a thing or two, in the gossip of the long aerial journeys, about the human race, nor did he ever again enter the house nor let us touch him, but he kept close by, for weeks, perching in his old familiar places on roof and rail and window-ledge, hopping in our walks and gamboling in our eyes. Out in the open, he would come within a few inches of us and there take his stand and chirp the confidences that we would have given all our dictionaries to comprehend. He was such a tall, stately robin, with such an imposing air of travel and experience as he stood erect, swelling his bright breast with the effort to relate his Winter's Tale, that Joy-of-Life rechristened him Lord Bobs.

In course of time our gallant fledgling appeared in company with a mate, most disappointing to our romantic anticipation,--a faded crosspatch old enough to be his grandmother, a very shrew who scolded him outrageously whenever she saw him lingering beside us. She told him we were ogres, alligators, everything that was horrible and dangerous, and threatened to peck out his last pin-feather unless he flew away from us at once. A selfish old body she was, too, monopolizing the rock-bath, as if she were taking a cure for rheumatism, whole hours at a time, while Robin Hood, hot and dusty, waited on her pleasure in the drooping branches above. But despite her shrill remonstrances, he would still visit the window box, perching on Downy Woodpecker's marrow-bone for an opera stage and trilling his matins and vespers to our delighted ears. We were as proud of Robin Hood's singing as if we had taught him ourselves. Between his carols our troubadour would take a little refreshment, trying in turn Nuthatch's lump of suet, Bluejay's rinds of cheese, Junco's crumbs and his own mocking-bird food, or quaffing rain water from Chickadee's nutshell cups. He would sometimes hop to the sill and, close against the glass, watch all the doings in that world which lay about him in his infancy. We looked forward to an hour when he might bring his own little speckles to play, as he had loved to play, with the empty nutshells, but Mrs. Robin hustled him off to the woods for the nesting season and we were never able after that first spring to distinguish him with certainty among our robin callers. None the less he had made the summer and all summers happier for us by his gracious though guarded pardon for our unkindness.

"Truth never fails her servant, sir, nor leaves him With the day's shame upon him,"

and even over wild-bird tradition and matrimonial tyranny the truth of our love for Robin Hood, its single lapse forgiven, had prevailed.

WHY THE SPIRE FELL

Our Emperor built a marble church So holy never a bird might perch On cross or crocket or gilded crown, A fretted minster of far renown, But still the spire came crashing down.

They stoned the swallow and limed the lark; A rosy throat was an easy mark; The tiniest wren that built her nest In Christ's own halo, on Mary's breast, Was scared away like a demon guest.

Once, twice, thrice, the glistening spire That soared from the central tower, higher Than all its clustered pinnacles, fell, And not one of the carven saints could tell The cause, though the emperor quizzed them well.

Down in the cloister all strewn with chips Of alabaster and ivory tips Of pastoral staffs and angel wings, In a rainbow ruin of sacred things He held high court in the way of kings.

All the while in a royal rage He pelted with fragments of foliage, Curly acanthus and vineleaf scroll, Finial, dogtooth and aureole, The linnets and finches who came to condole.

Crowned with a cobwebby cardinal's hat That swooped from the vaulted roof like a bat, On a tilted porphyry plinth for a throne, The emperor summoned in thunder tone The hallowed folk of metal and stone.

Martyrs, apostles, one and all, Tiptoed down from the quaking wall; Crusaders, uncrossing their legs of brass, Sprang from their tombs; over crackle of glass Balaam rode on a headless ass.

But not one of the sculptured cavalcade Flocking from choir and creamy facade, Deep-arched portal and pillared aisle Had a word on his lips, though all the while Gentle St. Francis was seen to smile.

Whistles, chuckles, warbles tried To give the answer the saints denied; Gurgles, tinkles, twitters, trills, Carols wild as wayward rills Troubadouring daffodils.