Commodore and Lady Jane slept on! Oh, if they had known! Oh, the mews of disappointment and the terrible barkings and the Fi-fo-fum there would have been! But no, they slept on; and at last, having supped but lightly, the little mouse took itself away, carrying with it neither money-bags nor marvelous hen, nor golden harp. A true story and a fairy tale all in one, if you like—and without the questionable ethics of its more famous prototype.
IV
What do they make of life? Their stoicism, their gentleness, their never-jaded curiosity perpetually tempt my speculation. That they are a people of vicissitudes and disappointments due largely to ourselves needs no arguing. What opinions have they of us? What effect have our behaviors on them? A consistently gentle people, they are treated with unvarying severity. What have they in lieu of logic to make life bearable? And what reward is there for their virtues? Or, are they too simple at heart, as yet, to ask for reward at all beyond the hope of a mere precarious existence? Is life as dear to them as that? And what, if any, in the way of religious speculation of a crude and early order, might they be supposed to entertain? I would like to be delegated to investigate and report upon mouse mythology.
I can hardly rid myself of the idea that in their present is, as it were, some dim glimmering of our own past. They seem to me testing the world, as we ourselves must have done when we too were less established, when we also were in a position scarcely less precarious, eons before any written records were kept, long before man had learned to remember at will for the quick purposes of convenience and comparison—in a dim, dim foretime, when to us, in some early Caliban existence, the outward world was as Prospero, unaccountable, and possessed of strange whimsies and quick with unwarrantable revenges.
"When a tree," says Frazer, tracing in his "Golden Bough" the beginnings of mythology, "comes to be viewed no longer as a body of the tree spirit, but simply as its abode, which it can quit at pleasure, an important advance has been made in religious thought. Animism is passing into polytheism."
I cannot help wondering from time to time, whimsically, whether those quiet denizens of that old house had made "an important advance in religious thought"; was "animism," with them, "passing into polytheism"? Were mouse-traps deceptive and evil gods with terrible snapping jaws, or but the abodes of these evil deities? And for philosophy and metaphysic, what had they? In that dim attic world was this perhaps an entire people in its mythopœic age, their gods descending and ascending miraculously, leaving a magenta cheese as incontrovertible evidence, or as unaccountably visiting them with swift and crafty destruction?
I am inclined to think their world is a colored one, fertile in fables. It would not surprise me to find that a small wooden object, known to us of a different development as a mere "mouse-trap," is to them some Dis or Ahriman, a terrible deity of dark powers and multiple personalities. That there are other gods besides,—the great and awful CAT, the less omnipresent but not less terrible TERRIER,—I am not disposed to doubt; nor do I think they lack the shining ones also, as quiet as the others are full of movement, as conducive to life and well-being as the others to death and destruction—bright, effulgent ones of the godlike color of cheese, or silver sheen of tallow and paraffine; and back of all these, it may be, some elder deities,—ourselves,—the older gods with Olympian powers, who can establish earthquakes; who can wipe away entire communities; gods and goddesses whose heads are in the clouds, whose movements are terrific, who shake complete creation when they walk, and with unthinkable besoms sweep with horrible sweepings, and periodically visit the world with awful scourges and hellish visitations of order and cleanliness.
I would not pretend to be acquainted with mouse literature, but I would venture a wager that their "Arabian Nights" outdoes ours as cheese, chalk. Djinns, genii, and affrites—can it be thought that they lack them? If the unaccountability of the world be, as it would seem to me, the basis of all literature and the origin of all fable, philosophy, entertainment, and speculation, can it be denied that they have extraordinary inducement? If our own world seems full of chance, and forever breaking away from bonds and probabilities, I only ask you to compare it with theirs!—in which the unaccountable is the sole certainty they possess.
I awoke one morning in the late fall, and began to dress, giving no thought whatever to them and their problems. When I came to put on my shoe, however, I could no longer ignore them. In the toe of it, stowed away safely, were three hickory-nuts!
Some sleek-coated citizen, with a winter house in mind, had wandered in those purlieus, thinking to begin the arduous labor requisite to the building of a home suitable to the long, dark season nearly at hand, when lo, this prudent necessity was suddenly, by a miraculous bounty, waived! Mark you and observe! Here was provided for him a home such as his best skill could never have contrived. A place how warm, how neat, how conformable! That his acceptance was immediate, was testified by his already accumulated stores.