Tales of the birds

by W. Warde Fowler

The work began again next day; the same thing happened again, and again Gaffer encouraged them to persevere. Next day Jetsom stayed on guard, while his wife collected sticks. Seeing this, Gaffer took himself off, and only returned to find, to his extreme delight, his victim in a very ruffled state, the other rooks in possession of all his sticks, and his wife in very low spirits. She appealed to him to protect them.

“My dear,” said Gaffer, “this is one of the problems of life. You are now beginning to face the facts of the world. Go on, persevere, and sooner or later you will solve the problems.”

The luckless pair took his advice once more, and day after day went on collecting their sticks, only to find them stolen directly their backs were turned. If one remained on guard, battles ensued; and Gaffer could hardly repress his delight when he saw Jetsom’s feathers begin to fall off in these fights. Several times he had to retire by himself to a distant tree, to enjoy his revenge in solitude.

At last the younger birds began to get tired of this game, and having finished their own nests, were no longer in want of the sticks that Jetsom collected. Gaffer began to get sulky and anxious. He sat on his bough and saw the nest beginning to rise at last: something must be done at once. He waited till both birds were away together; then down he went on the nest and began to pull it all to pieces. But it was a long job for one bill, and before he had done, back came the owners. Gaffer was surprised, and was quite unable to persuade them that he was only helping to arrange the sticks; it was all too plain. Jetsom fell into a fury that frightened his poor wife out of her wits, and before Gaffer could stammer out something about “the problems of life,” he was attacked, pecked, driven from one tree to another, worried, pushed, flapped at, till his one eye closed for ever, and he fell to the ground lifeless. But the problems of life had been too much for Jetsom. He felt a moment of glorious triumph as his enemy fell, and was just returning to his wife and nest with pride and honour, with heart swelling with joy and hope: when his senses gave way, his bill opened, his eyes grew dim, and in the moment of victory he expired, falling to the ground by the side of his conquered foe. He had solved his problem.

Half an hour later a gentleman walking down the road, stopped to watch a strange assembly of rooks in an adjoining meadow. They were standing in a large circle, making a great noise; in the centre of the circle stood a single rook, ruffled and miserable-looking. As he watched, the noise gradually ceased, and after a moment’s silence, the whole company rose on their wings and rushed upon the victim in the middle. The noise again became deafening, and nothing could be seen but a mêlée of wings, tails, and beaks, on the spot where the solitary bird had been seen a moment before. The gentleman scrambled over the hedge, waving his stick and shouting: the rooks flew away with loud cawings. When he reached the spot, he found nothing but a mangled mass of feathers—the lifeless body of one miserable bird.

It was the body of Jetsom’s widow. She too had solved the problem of her life, and the rookery was no longer troubled with revolutionary ideas.

A QUESTION BEGINNING WITH “WHY.”

One warm summer afternoon two young men were leaning out of a window, smoking their pipes, and enjoying a lazy half-hour. The window was one of a long row in the garden-quadrangle of an old gray Oxford college; and you looked out of it on a beautiful close-shaven lawn, bordered with flower beds, and inclosed on one side by one of watery Oxford’s many streams. This lawn, in the summer, is never without its family of water-wagtails. Here there is no fear of bird-nesting boys, and comparatively little peril of cats; and the turf is mown so often and so closely, that even the youngest bird can find his food there without the least trouble. And there they were that July afternoon, sometimes running so quickly that you quite lost sight of their little black legs, then stopping suddenly and moving their tails rapidly up and down for a few moments, then pouncing upon some unlucky insect on the grass, or perhaps pursuing it in the air with a quick fluttering of wings and tails; and all the while uttering that contented little double-note of theirs, which seemed to say to the occupants of the old panelled rooms above them, “This is real happiness; we take what comes, and ask no questions; we don’t puzzle our heads over Philosophy, and Biology, and Constitutional History, and Economical Science. Why, even you wouldn’t be trying to find out a reason for everything, if you weren’t afraid the Examiners were going to ask you for it! Come down here and lie on this beautiful lawn in the shade, and forget all about the why and the wherefore. Take things as you find them; there are no Examiners about just now!”

The two young men were not thinking of the wagtails; but neither were they thinking of anything else in particular, and the invitation to go and lie on the lawn found its way somehow into their temporarily vacant minds. They put on their flannels and their boating coats and went and stretched themselves at full length under the cool shade of an acacia. There they lay quite quiet and happy, and were for some time so silent that the wagtails ventured up quite close to them without any sign of fear.

One was a poet; at least his friends thought him one, and as he himself was not quite sure that they were right, it is not impossible that he had a few poetic streaks in his nature. The other was a student of science, and spent most of his time in cutting earth-worms and frogs into beautiful little slices, and looking at them through a microscope. They had a liking for each other, because neither fully understood the other’s thoughts and ambitions; so there was plenty of room for comfortable silence, and cosy human companionship.