Part 12

At that time it used to be my week-end home, and on one of my early visits I noticed the skull of an animal nailed to the wall about a yard above the stable door. It was too high to be properly seen without getting a ladder, and when the gardener told me that it was a bulldog's skull, I thought no more about it.

One day, several months later, I took a long look at it and got the idea that it was not a bulldog's skull--that it was more like the skull of a human being of a very low type. I then asked my hostess to let me have it, and she said, "Yes, certainly, take it if you want it." Then she added, "But what in the world do you want that horrid old skull for?" I said I wanted to find out what it was, and then she told me that it was a bulldog's skull--the gardener had told her. I replied that I did not think so, that it looked to me more like the skull of a cave-man who had inhabited those parts half a million years ago, perhaps. This speech troubled her very much, for she was a religious woman, and it pained her to hear unorthodox statements about the age of man on the earth. She said that I could not have the skull, that it was dreadful to her to hear me say it might be a human skull; that she would order the gardener to take it down and bury it somewhere in the grounds at a distance from the house. Until that was done she would not go near the stables--it would be like a nightmare to see that dreadful head on the wall. I said I would remove it immediately; it was mine, as she had given it to me, and it was not a man's skull at all--I was only joking, so that she need not have any qualms about it.

That pacified her, and I took down the old skull, which looked more dreadful than ever when I climbed up to it, for though the dome of it was bleached white, the huge eye cavities and mouth were black and filled with old black mould and dead moss. Doubtless it had been very many years in that place, as the long nails used in fastening it there were eaten up with rust.

When I got back to London the box with the skull in it was put away in my book-room, and rested there forgotten for two or three years. Then one day I was talking on natural history subjects to my publisher, and he told me that his son, just returned from Oxford, had developed a keen interest in osteology and was making a collection of mammalian skulls from the whale and elephant and hippopotamus to the harvest-mouse and lesser shrew. This reminded me of the long-forgotten skull, and I told him I had something to send him for his boy's collection, but before sending it I would find out what it was. Accordingly I sent the skull to Mr. Frank E. Beddard, the prosector of the Zoological Society, asking him to tell me what it was. His reply was that it was the skull of an adult gorilla--a fine large specimen.

It was then sent on to the young collector of skulls--who will, alas! collect no more, having now given his life to his country. It saddened me a little to part with it, certainly not because it was a pretty object to possess, but only because that bleached dome beneath which brains were once housed, and those huge black cavities which were once the windows of a strange soul, and that mouth that once had a fleshy tongue that youled and clicked in an unknown language could not tell me its own life-and-death history from the time of its birth in the African forest to its final translation to a wall over a stable door in an old house near London.

There are now several writers on animals who are not exactly naturalists, nor yet mere fictionists, but who, to a considerable knowledge of animal psychology and extraordinary sympathy with all wildness, unite an imaginative insight which reveals to them much of the inner, the mind life of brutes. No doubt the greatest of these is Charles Roberts, the Canadian, and I only wish it had been he who had discovered the old gorilla skull above the stable door, and that the incident had fired the creative brain which gave us _Red Fox_ and many another wonderful biography.

Now here is an odd coincidence. After writing the skull story it came into my head to relate it to a lady I was dining with, and I also told her of my intention of putting it in this book of Little Things. She said it was funny that she too had a story of a skull which she had thought of telling in her volume of Little Things; but no, she would not venture to do so, although it was a better story than mine.

She was good enough to let me hear it, and as it is not to appear elsewhere I can't resist the temptation of bringing it in here.

On her return to Europe after travelling and residing for some years in the Far East, she established herself in Paris and proceeded to decorate her apartment with some of the wonderful rich and rare objects she had collected in outlandish parts. Gorgeous fabrics, embroideries, pottery, metal and woodwork, and along with these products of an ancient civilisation, others of rude or primitive tribes, quaint headgear and plumes, strings and ropes of beads, worn as garments by people who run wild in woods, with arrows, spears and other weapons. These last were arranged in the form of a wheel over the entrance, with the bleached and polished skull of an orang-utan in the centre. It was a very perfect skull, with all the formidable teeth intact and highly effective.

She lived happily for some months in her apartment and was very popular in Parisian society and visited by many distinguished people, who all greatly admired her Eastern decorations, especially the skull, before which they would stand expressing their delight with fervent exclamations.

One day when on a visit at a friend's house, her host brought up a gentleman who wished to be introduced to her. He made himself extremely agreeable, but was a little too effusive with his complimentary speeches, telling her how delighted he was to meet her, and how much he had been wishing for that honour.

After hearing this two or three times she turned on him and asked him in the directest way why he had wished to see her so very much; then, anticipating that the answer would be that it was because of what he had heard of her charm, her linguistic, musical and various other accomplishments, and so on, she made ready to administer a nice little snub, when he made this very unexpected reply:

"O madame, how can you ask? You must know we all admire you because you are the only person in all Paris who has the courage and originality to decorate her _salon_ with a human skull."

XXVII

A STORY OF A WALNUT

He was a small old man, curious to look at, and every day when I came out of my cottage and passed his garden he was there, his crutches under his arms, leaning on the gate, silently regarding me as I went by. Not boldly; his round dark eyes were like those of some shy animal peering inquisitively but shyly at the passer-by. His was a tumble-down old thatched cottage, leaky and miserable to live in, with about three-quarters of an acre of mixed garden and orchard surrounding it. The trees were of several kinds--cherry, apple, pear, plum, and one big walnut; and there were also shade trees, some shrubs and currant and gooseberry bushes, mixed with vegetables, herbs, and garden flowers. The man himself was in harmony with his disorderly but picturesque surroundings, his clothes dirty and almost in rags; an old jersey in place of a shirt, and over it two and sometimes three waistcoats of different shapes and sizes, all of one indeterminate earthy colour; and over these an ancient coat too big for the wearer. The thin hair, worn on the shoulders, was dust-colour mixed with grey, and to crown all there was a rusty rimless hat, shaped like an inverted flowerpot. From beneath this strange hat the small strange face, with the round, furtive, troubled eyes, watched me as I passed.

The people I lodged with told me his history. He had lived there many years, and everybody knew him, but nobody liked him,--a cunning, foxy, grabbing old rascal; unsocial, suspicious, unutterably mean. Never in all the years of his life in the village had he given a sixpence or a penny to anyone; nor a cabbage, nor an apple, nor had he ever lent a helping hand to a neighbour nor shown any neighbourly feeling.

He had lived for himself alone; and was alone in the world, in his miserable cottage, and no person had any pity for him in his loneliness and suffering now when he was almost disabled by rheumatism.

He was not a native of the village; he had come to it a young man, and some kindly-disposed person had allowed him to build a small hut as a shelter at the side of his hedge. Now the village was at one end of a straggling common, and many irregular strips and patches of common-land existed scattered about among the cottages and orchards. It was at a hedge-side on the border of one of these isolated patches that the young stranger, known as an inoffensive, diligent, and exceedingly quiet young man, set up his hovel. To protect it from the cattle he made a small ditch before it. This ditch he made very deep, and the earth thrown out he built into a kind of rampart, and by its outer edge he put a row of young holly plants, which a good-natured woodman made him a present of. He was advised to plant the holly behind the ditch, but he thought his plan the best, and to protect the young plants he made a little fence of odd sticks and bits of old wire and hoop iron. But the sheep would get in, so he made a new ditch; and then something else, until in the course of years the three-quarters of an acre had been appropriated. That was the whole history, and the pilfering had gone no further only because someone in authority had discovered and put a stop to it. Still, one could see that (in spite of the powers) a strip a few inches in breadth was being added annually to the estate.

I was so much interested in all this that from time to time I began to pause beside his gate to converse with him. By degrees the timid, suspicious expression wore away, and his eyes looked only wistful, and he spoke of his aches and pains as if it did him good to tell them to another.

I then left the village, but visited it from time to time, usually at intervals of some months, always to find him by his gate, on his own property, which he won for himself in the middle of the village, and from which he watched his neighbours moving about their cottages, going and coming, and was not of them. Then a whole year went by, and when I found him at the old gate in the old attitude, with the old wistful look in the eyes, he seemed glad to see me, and we talked of many things. We talked, that is, of the weather, with reference to the crops, and his rheumatism. What else in the world was there to talk of? He read no paper and heard no news and was of no politics; and if it can be said that he had a philosophy of life it was a low-down one, about on a level with that of a solitary old dog-badger who lives in an earth he has excavated for himself with infinite pains in a strong stubborn soil--his home and refuge in a hostile world.

Finally, casting about in my mind for some new subject of conversation--for I was reluctant to leave him soon after so long an absence--it occurred to me that we had not said anything about his one walnut tree. Of all the other trees and the fruit he had gathered from them he had already spoken. "By-the-way," I said, "did your walnut tree yield well this year?"

"Yes, very well," he returned; then he checked himself and said, "Pretty well, but I did not get much for them." And after a little hesitation he added, "That reminds me of something I had forgotten. Something I have been keeping for you--a little present."

He began to feel in the capacious pockets of his big outside waistcoat, but found nothing. "I must give it up," he said; "I must have mislaid it."

He seemed a little relieved, and at the same time a little disappointed; and by-and-by, on my remarking that he had not felt in all his pockets, began searching again, and in the end produced the lost something--a walnut! Holding it up a moment, he presented it to me with a little forward jerk of the hand and a little inclination of the head; and that little gesture, so unexpected in him, served to show that he had thought a good deal about giving the walnut away, and had looked on it as rather an important present. It was, perhaps, the only one he had ever made in his life. While giving it to me he said very nicely, "Pray make use of it."

The use I have made of it is to put it carefully away among other treasured objects, picked up at odd times in out-of-the-way places. It may be that some minute mysterious insect or infinitesimal mite--there is almost certain to be a special walnut mite--has found an entrance into this prized nut and fed on its oily meat, reducing it within to a rust-coloured powder. The grub or mite, or whatever it is, may do so at its pleasure, and flourish and grow fat, and rear a numerous family, and get them out if it can; but all these corroding processes and changes going on inside the shell do not in the least diminish my nut's intrinsic value.

XXVII

A STORY OF A JACKDAW

At one end of the Wiltshire village where I was staying there was a group of half-a-dozen cottages surrounded by gardens and shade trees, and every time I passed this spot on my way to and from the downs on that side, I was hailed by a loud challenging cry--a sort of "Hullo, who goes there!" Unmistakably the voice of a jackdaw, a pet bird no doubt, friendly and impudent as one always expects Jackie to be. And as I always like to learn the history of every pet daw I come across, I went down to the cottage the cry usually came from to make enquiries. The door was opened to me by a tall, colourless, depressed-looking woman, who said in reply to my question that she didn't own no jackdaw. There was such a bird there, but it was her husband's and she didn't know nothing about it. I couldn't see it because it had flown away somewhere and wouldn't be back for a long time. I could ask her husband about it; he was the village sweep, and also had a carpenter's shop.

I did not venture to cross-question her; but the history of the daw came to me soon enough--on the evening of the same day in fact. I was staying at the inn and had already become aware that the bar-parlour was the customary meeting-place of a majority of the men in that small isolated centre of humanity. There was no club nor institute or reading-room, nor squire or other predominant person to regulate things differently. The landlord, wise in his generation, provided newspapers liberally as well as beer, and had his reward. The people who gathered there of an evening included two or three farmers, a couple of professional gentlemen--not the vicar; a man of property, the postman, the carrier, the butcher, the baker and other tradesmen, the farm and other labourers, and last, but not least, the village sweep. A curious democratic assembly to be met with in a rural village in a purely agricultural district, extremely conservative in politics.

I had already made the acquaintance of some of the people, high and low, and on that evening, hearing much hilarious talk in the parlour, I went in to join the company, and found fifteen or twenty persons present. The conversation, when I found a seat, had subsided into a quiet tone, but presently the door opened and a short, robust-looking man with a round, florid, smiling face looked in upon us.

"Hullo, Jimmy, what makes you so late?" said someone in the room. "We're waiting to hear the finish of all that trouble about your bird at home. Stolen any more of your wife's jewellery? Come in, and let's hear all about it."

"Oh, give him time," said another. "Can't you see his brain's busy inventing something new to tell us!"

"Inventing, you say!" exclaimed Jimmy, with affected anger. "There's no need to do that! That there bird does tricks nobody would think of."

Here the person sitting next to me, speaking low, informed me that this was Jimmy Jacob, the sweep, that he owned a pet jackdaw, known to every one in the village, and supposed to be the cleverest bird that ever was. He added that Jimmy could be very amusing about his bird.

"I'd already begun to feel curious about that bird of yours," I said, addressing the sweep. "I'd like very much to hear his history. Did you take him from the nest?"

"Yes, Jim," said the man next to me. "Tell us how you came by the bird; it's sure to be a good story."

Jimmy, having found a seat and had a mug of beer put before him, began by remarking that he knew someone had been interesting himself in that bird of his. "When I went home to tea this afternoon," he continued, "my missus, she says to me: 'There's that bird of yours again,' she says."

"'What bird,' says I. 'If you mean Jac,' says I, 'what's he done now?--out with it.'

"'We'll talk about what he's done bimeby,' says she. 'What I mean is, a gentleman called to ask about that bird.'

"'Oh, did he?' says I. 'Yes,' she says. 'I told him I didn't know nothing about it. He could go and ask you. You'd be sure to tell him a lot.'

"'And what did the gentleman say to that?' says I.

"'He arsked me who you was, an' I said you was the sweep an' you had a carpenter's shop near the pub, and was supposed to do carpentering.'

"_Supposed_ to do carpentering! That's how she said it.

"'And what did the gentleman say to that?' says I.

"'He said he thought he seen you at the inn, and I said that's just where he would see you.'

"'Anything more between you and the gentleman?' says I, and she said: 'No, nothing more except that he said he'd look you up and arst if you was a funny little fat man, sort of round, with a little red face.' And I said, 'Yes, that's him.'"

Here I thought it time to break in. "It's true," I said, "I called at your cottage and saw your wife, but there's no truth in the account you've given of the conversation I had with her."

There was a general laugh. "Oh, very well," said Jimmy. "After that I've nothing more to say about the bird or anything else."

I replied that I was sorry, but we need not begin our acquaintance by quarrelling--that it would be better to have a drink together.

Jimmy smiled consent, and I called for another pint for Jimmy and a soda for myself; then added I was so sorry he had taken it that way as I should have liked to hear how he got his bird.

He answered that if I put it that way he wouldn't mind telling me. And everybody was pleased, and composed ourselves once more to listen.

"How I got that there bird was like this," he began. "It were about half after four in the morning, summer before last, an' I was just having what I may call my beauty sleep, when all of a sudding there came a most thundering rat-a-tat-tat at the door.

"'Good Lord,' says my missus, 'whatever is that?'

"'Sounds like a knock at the door,' says I. 'Just slip on your thingamy an' go see.'

"'No,' she says, 'you must go, it might be a man.'

"'No,' I says, 'it ain't nothing of such consekince as that. It's only an old woman come to borrow some castor oil.'

"So she went and bimeby comes back and says: 'It's a man that's called to see you an' it's very important.'

"'Tell him I'm in bed,' says I, 'and can't get up till six o'clock.'

"Well, after a lot of grumbling, she went again, then came back and says the man won't go away till he seen me, as it's very important. 'Something about a bird,' she says.

"'A bird!' I says, 'what d'you mean by a bird?'

"'A rook!' she says.

"'A rook!' says I. 'Is he a madman, or what?'

"'He's a man at the door,' she says, 'an' he won't go away till he sees you, so you'd better git up and see him.'

"'All right, old woman,' I says, 'I'll git up as you say I must, and I'll smash him. Get me something to put on,' I says.

"'No,' she says, 'don't smash him'; and she give me something to put on, weskit and trousers, so I put on the weskit and got one foot in a slipper, and went out to him with the trousers in my hand. And there he was at the door, sure enough, a tramp!

"'Now, my man,' says I, very severe-like, 'what's this something important you've got me out of bed at four of the morning for? Is it the end of the world, or what?'

"He looked at me quite calm and said it was something important but not that--not the end of the world. 'I'm sorry to disturb you,' he says, 'but women don't understand things properly,' he says, 'an' I always think it best to speak to a man.'

"'That's all very well,' I says, 'but how long do you intend to keep me here with nothing but this on?'

"'I'm just coming to it,' he says, not a bit put out. 'It's like this,' he says. 'I'm from the north--Newcastle way--an' on my way to Dorchester, looking for work,' he says.

"'Yes, I see you are!' says I, looking him up and down, fierce-like.