Part 4

IN THE BOSOM OF THE FAMILY

Is it not true that there is a very general want of recognition of family-life among domestic animals? It is a great mistake to suppose they are incapable of it; often, as a matter of fact, they do not lead domestic lives, for the simple reason that people will not let them. If, for instance, you won’t keep a whole family of cats, how can you expect them to develop domestic affections? We talk of their being “domesticated,” but we mean that they are made a part of our domestic arrangements, without being allowed to have any of their own; yet they are quite as capable of it as we are. Of course their domesticity does not last long, naturally and necessarily not, because they have not one family but a series of families, and one family must be dismissed before the next is taken on; so domestic affection developes into murderous desires. However, I must say that in all experiences I have personally had of cats, guinea-pigs, rabbits, dogs, goats, and birds, I have only known one murder, and that was by an uncle.

Rector was allowed to have all his family about him. His wife was decidedly under-bred. He was called Rector, in fact, because he would not catch the mice, and had to have another less aristocratic but more useful cat to help him. The curate was called Jenny. She was a low-bred tabby. Rector could not help despising Jenny, and if anything vexed him he used to bite her badly; but she was a very meek drudge, and took it as a matter of course. Rector was white, with blue eyes, so we only kept the white kittens, some of which were blue-eyed, and not deaf; blue-eyed or not, Rector used to take them out walks in the evening.

The four--papa and mamma and two kittens--used to proceed together to the mound near the pump, and Jenny then left them, to crouch in the bushes,--this for a purpose of her own.

Then began the game. Rector rolled the kittens over and played with them gently, until all three became a little excited; then, if Rector got carried away, and bit or scratched his infant till it squeaked, out bounced Jenny from the bushes to deal him a handsome box on the ear; and, having thus admonished her husband to take better care of the children, she retreated again to the shelter of the yew-trees.

If you keep a whole family, you will find that there is not only a parental, filial, brotherly, and sisterly relation, but also a grand-parental. When Midge had some white kittens, Jenny, whose under-bred offspring had been put out of the way shortly before, helped her to nurse them, with as much pride and perhaps more solicitude than Midge herself showed. It was a most charming scene. We went to see the family soon after the birth of the kittens, and found Midge, in the rôle of the interesting young mother, leaning back upon Jenny. Jenny put a paw round her, while they surveyed--the mother languidly and the grandmother proudly--the squirming white family.

But it is not cats only who have these strong domestic ties; almost every animal shows the same thing in a greater or less degree.

We inherited, on changing our home, a beautiful pair of swans. The first year that they became ours they had four cygnets, and brought them up extremely well. It is true that when they were full grown, the cock-swan, if one may use such an expression, tried to kill them; but that was only natural, they had become his rivals. They were variously disposed of: one was taken up to a pond in London, from which, not being properly pinioned, he escaped, and kept a cockney crowd for an hour well amused on London Bridge by flying over it and swimming under, after which he--or, as he could not possibly be caught, the abstract idea of him--was presented to the Thames Conservancy.

So far, this doesn’t seem to have much to do with the swan’s idea of home, but, as some candid preacher said, “You may think this has not got much to do with my text, but I’m coming to it presently.”

The swans lived on in peace and happiness through the autumn and winter, but in the spring, when they ought to have been nesting, some wicked boy hit the lady swan on the head with a stick, and she sickened and died.

For some time the widower was left solitary; then we thought this was rather cruel, and busied ourselves in getting a mate for him; and a fine young swan was procured. When lo! it was found that the old fellow would not let his young companion come into the pond. We thought it would “wear off,” and left the young one to its fate; and many times we passed the pond to find the poor young thing squatting sadly on the road, and the widower swelling up and down.

Then we found there was a slight mistake, the young swan was a cock-swan also.

So we changed him, and got a real lady instead. This time he would just let his companion come into the pond, but oh! she had a bad time of it there; he pulled her feathers out, and he drove her away from the bread; but it had to be gone through,--it was his way of showing constancy, and it turned out all right. She is treated now with as much respect as his first wife.

But she was a very young wife; so, when she had hatched three eggs into cygnets, her pride knew no bounds. The father, getting into his dotage, encouraged her in her maternal follies. The cygnets were fine healthy birds, but the two old birds took them out walking to such an extent that one by one they died. No one quite knows why. Some say that there was not enough grass by the pond, and the parents took them to find grass; and some say that parental vanity wished to display such flourishing offspring; but anyhow, the fact remains that the cygnets took walks with their parents till they died. There is nothing more domestic than the family walk.

But now contrast this domestic affection with the melancholy fate of the inebriate swan.

A clergyman’s wife kept one swan, and the swan, no one knows how, got into the habit of going to eat malt at a public-house. If he had done this within bounds it would not have mattered, but he got regularly intoxicated, and every evening reeled homewards. His mistress tried to reform him, but to no purpose; and she tried to shut him up, but he got out; and she used to meet him coming home with rolling, uncertain step and hanging head. She wept, for it was such a bad example to the parish; but that had no effect on him. At last, one evening, he was run over and killed while reeling home in a state of intoxication.

Now, how far more melancholy is such an end than that of the three infants killed by family affection! I would rather die three times over from walking with my family than once from intoxication.

What is the moral? Do not break up the family too early. The presence of the children (up to the age when he wants to kill them) will have a softening and steadying effect on the manners of the father; while who knows what stores of masculine experience he may not impart to his children up to the time when they wish to fight him.

Besides all this, it is really much more amusing.

CHANCE ACQUAINTANCE

How vividly one sometimes retains for years the memory of a chance acquaintance--a person whom one has met but once, passed in the street, talked to for half an hour, whose name one may not even know.

A friend of mine was travelling in Persia, and as she and her brother were resting in a caravansarai after a journey, they saw a Persian gentleman beckoning to them from the garden. They went down to him, and he asked them to come and have supper with him. They came, and found the bread laid out, plate-wise, and the roast meat on it. They ate and talked to him, and after their meal went on their journey. They never asked for nor heard his name, nor he theirs,--they will never meet again; but that Persian gentleman will be as vivid to them until the day of their death as a friend of years.

Such memory of a mere passing chance acquaintance is not confined to human beings. Sometimes one meets animals for an hour or two, sometimes one accidentally lights upon them in a crisis of their lives,--such even as their death,--and one suddenly and unexpectedly understands and knows them. Some people and animals one never gets near. You may, for instance, sit opposite people in church for years, know all their Sunday dresses and hats, and how much they give in the offertory, and be not a bit nearer to them in the end than at the beginning. Such is the acquaintance one has with caterpillars; they are always just the same; they eat and grow and become cocoons, and reappear as butterflies, and there is no character from beginning to end. That is partly why they are such excellent symbols.

Then there are some animals that have no sense of intimacy; they let you into all their domestic relations,--their committees, their politics, and so forth, at once; for the reason that they have only one side to their character. They have established a Platonic Republic; they do their domestic duties on the scale of the commonwealth, have a universal nursery and government education. In spite of their monarchical arrangements, they are real socialists at heart,--they care for nothing but the good of the State. Even those that live in a tiny community, two or three together, have no real individuality. Have you ever found one of those tiny round nests, like ashes of paper, which apparently grow on a stalk, and in which two or three yellow and black tree-wasps live? It is the easiest thing in the world to scrape acquaintance with those wasps; kill an ordinary housefly and give it to them. They will take it from your fingers, and, without the slightest shame at “talking shop” in public, will roll it into a neat, hard, black ball, crushing up legs and wings alike, and stow it away inside the nest.

But the want of intimacy characteristic of many insects is not characteristic of insects as such. I once attended a grasshopper crisis. There was nothing professional about the grasshoppers; they did not not “spend themselves in leaps ... to reach the sun.” They did not think the least bit in the world about the sun, they were merely private individuals--courting. Grasshoppers’ courting is an organised affair. I saw it in Switzerland on a soft, sunny afternoon, when the hotel population was divided between the Roman Catholic Church on the right and the English Church on the left, and the steps of the hotel between the two. As I dawdled along by a bank of bilberry just turning red, the grasshoppers were singing loud among the stalks of heather; suddenly I was aware that they were not singing aimlessly and jumping without purpose, but that they were intently engaged. It was like the old fairy-story, when a child falls asleep on a bank, and wakes to find himself surrounded by fairies intent on preparation for the marriage of the king. The large limp ladies were sprawling about ungracefully, and in front sat their small, spry gentlemen singing away. Here was a green gentleman serenading a brown lady, and I wondered at his taste; presently she got up and ran away. Clearly that was part of the drama; it was the genuine “flirtatious” instinct of avoiding a plain answer on purpose to provoke pursuit; for the gentleman does not jump, but runs after her to bring her back. When lo! a green lady is seen crossing the path, also coyly escaping from a suitor, and the faithless swain is captivated all in a moment by the green charms, and deserts his brunette to pursue her. Further on--astonishing sight!--is a young ladies’ school, just “come out”; fourteen or fifteen green and brown ladies, shy and awkward, scrambling down the bank and all talking together.

I never saw such courting before or since, but I shall never lose the feeling of intimacy, for I know now that grasshoppers are not always little machines arranged with the greatest amount of muscle for the smallest amount of weight, or wound up to trill on in the sunshine, as mechanically as a watch ticks, or even created to be a burden,--but they are tiny creatures, full of emotion and insect loves, putting their best energy into their whirring song to claim the admiration of the languid, lovely creatures that lie lazily listening.

But sometimes one arrives at a sudden personal relation to a wild creature, too often ended abruptly by its escape or death, and its kinsfolk are never afterwards to one as little as before. One has regarded it as a member of a class; henceforward one regards that class as composed of individuals possessed of strong personal desires, needs, emotions, not merely obeying what we call “instincts,”--meaning thereby the mechanical impulse to eat, grub, make nests, care for young. To take an extreme instance, perhaps you think that moles are altogether uninteresting, merely existing for the sake of lightening the soil and destroying the wire-worm, and, in case of undue increase, fit to make a cap for the mole-catcher and a little skeleton to swing from a tree. But perhaps some day you will see in the stubble, after the hay is cut, a little black form running confusedly round and round; catch it, and hold in your hands the soft, velvet-coated body; feel the funny, groping snout pushing through your fingers, on the chance--however different their touch is from the damp, delicious earth--that it will be able to find some place where it may grub a hole and escape; realise that you might make a pet of this small, soft thing, and then please recognise its wild desire for liberty, and let it go.

But there are some animals which, although usually recognised as “wild animals,” seem to have no fear whatever, except when they are being chased; once they are in the hands of a human being they are completely self-possessed. A friend of mine sat in a field when the hay was being carried, and saw a little field-mouse playing about; she pursued and nearly caught it, but it finally escaped. She came back to where she had been sitting to fetch her umbrella, and under it was found another little field-mouse asleep, which she caught without difficulty, carried back, and put into a box with holes in it.