Читать книгу Tales of To-day and Other Days - Various Authors - Страница 4
I
ОглавлениеIT is a great thing, in this workaday world of ours, to be something a little above the common run of ordinary blackbirds, but then, too, the eminence is not without its inconveniences. I am not a bird of fable; Monsieur de Buffon has written my description, but woe is me! I am rare and but seldom met with. Would to Heaven I had never emerged from the lowly state in which I was born!
My father and mother were a couple of honest people who had lived for many years in the seclusion of a quiet old garden in the Marais. It was a model household. While my mother, in the depths of some bushy thicket, laid three times a year regularly and hatched out her brood, gently slumbering most of the time, my father, very neat in his attire and very fussy still, notwithstanding his great age, would be pecking, pecking about her all day long, with patriarchal devotion, bringing her nice little insects that he was always careful to seize by the tail, very daintily, so that his wife's delicate stomach might not be offended, and at nightfall he never failed, when the weather was fine, to treat her to a song that delighted all the neighborhood. Never was there such a thing as a quarrel, never had the smallest cloud arisen to darken this sweet union.
I had hardly made my appearance in the world when, for the first time in his life, my father began to display bad temper. Although as yet I was of only a doubtful shade of gray, he failed to recognize in me either the color or the form of his numerous progeny. Sometimes he would cock his head and look at me askance and say:
"There is an untidy child for you; it would seem as if the little blackguard took pains to go and wallow in every mud-hole and plaster-heap that he came to, he is always so ugly and filthy."
"Eh! Mon Dieu, my friend," my mother would answer, looking like nothing so much as a little round ball of feathers in the old earthenware porringer where she had made her nest, "don't you see that it is owing to his age? And you yourself, in your early days, were you not a charming little scapegrace? Give our little blackbirdling time to grow, and you will see how pretty he will be; I don't think that I ever hatched out a finer one."
My mother was not deceived while pleading my cause in this manner; she saw the growth of my ill-omened plumage, which appeared to her a monstrosity; but she acted as all mothers do, who allow themselves to become more strongly attached to their offspring for the very reason that nature has ill-used them, as if the responsibility rested on the maternal shoulders, or as if they rejected in advance the injustice of their unkind destiny.
With the approach of my first moulting season my father became extremely thoughtful and watched me attentively. He continued to treat me with considerable kindness so long as my feathers kept falling out, and would even bring me something to eat when he saw me shivering, almost naked, in my corner, but as soon as the down began to come out on my poor little half-frozen wings, he would fly into such a tearing rage at every white feather he saw that I greatly feared he would leave me featherless for the remainder of my days. Alas! I had no looking-glass; I did not know the cause of his anger, and I wondered why it was that the best of fathers could treat me so cruelly.
One day when a glimpse of sunshine and my growing plumage had cheered me and warmed my heart a little in spite of myself, as I was hopping about an alley I began, tempted by my evil genius, to sing. At the very first note that he heard my father flew up into the air like a sky-rocket.
"What do I hear there?" he shouted. "Is that the way a blackbird whistles? Do I whistle that way? Do you call that whistling?"
And perching beside my mother with a most terrific expression of countenance:
"Wretched bird!" he said, "what stranger has been sharing your nest?"
At these words my mother indignantly threw herself from her porringer, severely injuring one of her claws in doing so; she endeavored to speak, but her sobs choked her; she fell to the ground in a half-fainting condition. I beheld her at the point of expiring; terrified and trembling with fear, I threw myself upon my knees before my father.
"Oh, father!" I said to him, "if I whistle but poorly and if I am meanly clad, let not the punishment fall upon my mother. Is it her fault if nature has not graced me with a voice like yours? Is it her fault if I have not your beautiful yellow bill and your handsome black coat à la Française, which give you the appearance of a churchwarden about to swallow an omelette? If Heaven has seen fit to make me a monster and if someone must pay the penalty, grant, at least, that I alone may bear the burden of misery."
"That has nothing to do with the case," said my father; "what do you mean by taking the liberty of whistling in that ridiculous manner? Who was it that taught you to whistle thus, contrary to every known rule and custom?"
"Alas! sir," I humbly replied, "I whistled as well as I knew how; for I was feeling in good spirits because the weather is fine, and perhaps I had eaten too many flies."
"That is not the way they whistle in my family," my father rejoined, quite beside himself with anger. "We have been whistling for centuries from generation to generation, and let me tell you that when I raise my voice at night there is an old gentleman here on the first floor, and a young grisette up there in the garret, who throw up their windows to listen to me. Is it not enough that my eyes are constantly offended by the horrid color of those idiotic feathers of yours, which make you look like a whitened jack-pudding at a country fair? Were I not the most long-suffering of blackbirds I should have stripped you naked long before this and reduced you to the condition of a barnyard fowl prepared for the spit."
"Very well!" I cried, unable longer to submit to such injustice, "if that is the case, sir, never mind! I will relieve you of my presence; your eyes shall no more be offended by the sight of these poor white tail-feathers by which you are continually pulling me about. I will go away, sir, I will take refuge in flight; since my mother lays thrice a year there will be other children in plenty to console your declining years; I will go and hide my wretchedness in some distant country, and it may be," I added, with a sob, "it may be that along the gutters or in the neighbors' kitchen-garden I shall find some earth-worms or a few spiders to enable me to eke out my miserable existence."
"As you please," replied my father, far from melting at this speech of mine; "only let me never set eyes on you again. You are not my son; you are not a blackbird."
"What am I then, sir, if you please?"
"I have not the slightest idea; but you are not a blackbird."
With these crushing words my father strode slowly away; My mother sadly arose and went limping to her porringer to have tier cry out, while I, for my part, confounded and disconsolate, stretched my wings and took my flight as well as I could, and went and perched upon the gutter of an adjoining house as I had said I would do.
