Читать книгу Friendly Acres - Peter McArthur - Страница 16

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An act of public justice is required. At various times I have written bitter paragraphs telling about the way the cattle break loose when I am left alone with them. In the past I have regarded this as an evidence of innate perversity. But the truth has at last dawned on me. One day last week I was left alone on the farm, and Fenceviewer II. apparently announced a birthday and proceeded to celebrate it. She began by breaking through the bars of the barnyard and then led the rest of the flock on a romp through the orchard. At the road they found a gate that had been left open, and at once began to gambol up the sideroad toward the railroad. I began to puff across a plowed field to head them off—in the meantime muttering execrations. Then it dawned on me that the cattle were merely living up to the part that they should play for me. When being looked after by other members of the family they content themselves with looking sleek and leisurely when a buyer comes to look them over, or with giving a proper flow of milk at the proper times. But that kind of circumspect conduct when I am around would be unfruitful, and the brutes know it. It is out of the kindness of their hearts that they cut up when left with me. They have sensed the fact that their chief use to me is in the inspiration of newspaper copy, and when they get a chance they never fail to provide me with material for a paragraph. If they behaved themselves I would be obliged to write about ordinary matters, and they would never get their names in the papers. So they just cut loose. I could have written a column about the amount of trouble they gave me before I got them rounded up, and could have abused each one of them personally, but when I realized the purpose of their outbreak I felt so proud of their intelligence that I could not find it in my heart to lambaste them. And, as you will notice, they furnished the copy. The fact that they furnish me with a lot of wrathful exercise was merely incidental.

Three airships in one day, and one of them straight over the house! You never saw or heard such excitement. The hens cackled and squawked and made for cover under the spruce trees and the currant bushes. Bildad, the collie pup, ran around barking and jumping in the air, but he couldn't understand what was causing the racket. Crows were flying across with that swift flapping fly I have noticed when they have been fired at in the cornfield and missed. Human beings were laughing, yelling, rolling over on the ground, and otherwise expressing their excitement. I hear that a man down the road swallowed his false teeth, while looking up at the passing wonders. And what was it all about? I'd be willing to bet that two of the three who went over in such a hurry forgot what they started out for before they reached the end of their journey. It's no use. You can't convince me that any normal human being is ever in enough of a hurry to travel at the rate these things go. It is simply a manifestation of the unrest, the speed-mania that is afflicting the world. We must all be hustling all the time, rushing to win things, and never understanding what the rush is about. We don't know what we are doing, but let us hurry about it. We don't know why we are doing it, but let's hurry about it!

"And lo! the phantom caravan has reached

The nothing it set out from—Oh, make haste!"