Part 1

SCRAMBLED EGGS

By LAWTON MACKALL

With illustrations by OLIVER HERFORD

CINCINNATI STEWART & KIDD COMPANY PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY STEWART & KIDD COMPANY _All Rights Reserved_ Copyright in England

TO Orson Lowell DELIGHTFULEST OF FRIENDS

CONTENTS

SCRAMBLED EGGS

HIS COOP IN ORDER

BEYOND THE PALING

THE JUGGERNAUT

I

SCRAMBLED EGGS

Eustace was a thorough gentleman. There was candor in his quack, and affability in his waddle; and underneath his snowy down beat a pure and sympathetic heart. In short, he was a most exemplary duck.

Or rather, to be more correct, a drake: for he was a husband, and the proud father of several eggs.

He admired his wife tremendously. "Gertrude," he said to her one day, as he squatted beside the nest in his burdock home, "you are certainly a wonderful female to have laid those eggs. I can't tell you how I respect you for what you have done."

"That's all very well," she replied, preening herself coolly, "but I notice you never offer to sit on them."

[Illustration: _"That's all very well," she replied, preening, "but I notice you never offer to sit on them."_]

Eustace was taken aback. "Surely you wouldn't expect me to do that!" he said.

"I don't see why not. I've been sitting here for over two weeks, and now it seems only fair that you should take your turn."

"But, my dear duckling," he protested, "it would never do! It would look unmanly. Think how Clarence would crow over me!"

"That's it!" she said scornfully. "That's the way it is with you drakes! You haven't the spunk to do what you ought to, for fear some old libertine of a rooster will make fun of you!"

"But, darling ..."

"Oh you males! You expect a female to give up everything for motherhood, and yet you aren't willing, or are afraid, to do anything to make her life endurable!"

"But I should think you would be happy, with such beautiful eggs as these," he ventured in a conciliatory tone. "Look at Martha: _she_ seems quite blissful over hers, and yet they aren't nearly as large or as white."

This allusion had just the wrong effect. "Now don't try to set up that stupid hen as an example for me!" she snapped indignantly. "All her life she's done nothing but lay eggs and sit on them. And what is the result?--she hasn't an idea under her comb, no, not even sense enough to know that Clarence is carrying on disgracefully with other chickens."

Eustace, feeling uncomfortable, tried to interpose a pacifying remark, but she did not give him a chance.

"It's females like that who have kept our sex in subjection. But _I'm_ not one of them, let me tell you. I believe in a communal incubator."

"Yes, dear,--such a thing might be very convenient, if it were once established,--though I fear it would lack the personal touch. But for the time being, since there isn't any communal incubator, your duty is to sit on your eggs."

"My duty! How about my duty to myself? Don't you suppose that my nature demands any higher fulfillment than this?" Rustling her feathers petulantly, she got up.

"Stop!" he cried. "You shall not desert our eggs! I have acceded to your other modernisms--your coop-reform theories, your sex-education for ducklings; I have even come out openly for the single standard of morality;--but this thing I will not tolerate."

"You'd like me to be an insipid nestwarmer like Martha, wouldn't you? Well, I won't, now. I intend to know life!" And, with a defiant waggle of her tail, she departed, to undertake research in distant puddles.

Eustace felt stunned. He was so dazed that he allowed a luscious black beetle, that crawled past within easy range, to proceed on its way ungobbled. Poor, forlorn eggs, he thought, children of an unnatural mother, they were too young to realize that they had been forsaken!

Pity overcame his pride: he sidled over and sat on them. They felt rather cosy and comforting, pressing thus snugly against his paternal breast. He spread out his feathers lovingly.

He would sit here for a while, he thought, as he craned his neck this way and that to be sure that no one was looking,--yes, he would sit here till Gertrude returned, and then he would do what he could to make things up again. After all, there was a good deal in what she had said. She _had_ had a hard time, sitting still for so many days, and he ought to be willing to....

"Er-ur-er-ur-errr!" crowed an insolent voice, startlingly near by.

Clarence! Eustace hopped off the eggs as though they were live coals. Hastily snapping up something from the ground, he began gulping it assiduously, with much show of hunger. But his success was not great, for it was a rubber washer and proved to be more pliable than swallowable.

Clarence came swaggering up with, "Hello, Eustace, old game bird! Say, did you see a good-looking blonde pullet go past here?"

Eustace laid down the washer and answered stiffly, "No."

"Well, you needn't act so sanctimoniously about it," said the rooster with a leer. "You may fool your wife with your righteous air, but you can't gull me!" He gave Eustace a sly dig in the wishbone.

"Clarence," said the other with dignity, "there are some things which, I fear, we shall never regard in the same light."

The rooster burst into a jeering gurgle, flapping his wings with merriment. "Oh, I forgot,--you're one of those single standard cranks. Well, no wonder you're henpecked!" Just then he caught sight of the nest. "Been sitting on the eggs, like a well-trained husband?"

"No. Certainly not!" stammered Eustace, overcome with mortification.

Clarence, not to be hoodwinked with such a feeble denial, only chortled the more scoffingly. He would have continued his gibes but for the sudden appearance of the blonde pullet. "Ah, there she is!" he exclaimed abruptly, and strutted off after her.

The frame of mind in which Eustace now found himself was not a pleasant one. "I suppose the old scoundrel will tell everybody he caught me sitting on the eggs!" he reflected. "And how those gossipy Guinea fowls will carry on when they hear it!" He picked up the washer again and chewed it malevolently--_nyap, nyap, nyap, nyap--ulp!_--out it flipped. Oh, what was the use of anything anyhow? Casting one look at the eggs that had been the innocent authors of his undoing, he waddled sadly away and buried his dejected head in the depths of the frog-pond.

When, several hours later, he returned home, he found Gertrude already there. She was in the best of spirits. "What do you think," she said breathlessly, "my theories are working out!"

But he hardly heard her. He was staring blankly at the nest. It was empty. The beautiful white eggs were gone.

"What have you done with our poor unhatched children?" he gasped.

"Nothing," she replied calmly. "I was just going to tell you: they have been taken to the communal incubator."

"What!--Who took them?"

"I don't know."

"Then how do you know where they are gone?"

"By intuition, you stupid. How else should you expect me to know?--It just _had_ to come. I've been predicting it all along."

"I only hope nothing serious has happened to them," he said earnestly.

"Nonsense!" she replied. Then she went on triumphantly: "Think what it will mean for them. They will be hatched scientifically, eugenically. And when our little girls grow up--for some of them may be girls--they will be _free women_; they will enjoy the happiness of motherhood without its drudgery."

Eustace did not share her enthusiasm. He felt anxious and lonesome.

* * * * *

A week later, the whole barnyard was agog with the news that Martha had hatched out a brood of ducklings.

Gertrude veiled her disappointment over there being really no communal incubator, by remarking sarcastically to her husband, "Well, a hot-nurse is the next best thing, and Martha makes an excellent one. It's all she's capable of."

"But do you think people will understand?" asked Eustace uneasily.

"All who keep abreast of the times will."

But gossip was rife. The Guinea hens started it, jabbering most scurrilously; the geese prated of it to the turkeys, who held up their feathers in genteel horror at the thought of such a scandal; and a pair of puritanical doves, looking down disapprovingly from a high gable, puffed themselves out with self-righteousness and murmured thanks be to heaven that they had always kept aloof from everybody else.

When the news reached Clarence, he left off flirting with his newest affinity and stalked home in a towering rage. He found Martha sitting on a batch of eggs, while round about her pattered the furry little ducklings.

"Faithless wife!" he cried. "Go! Never let me see your beak again! And take your web-footed brats with you!"

The hen was in a pitiable flutter of distress. "I am innocent," she clucked. "I have been true to you. I really don't know _how_ it happened."

"Hah! Do you expect me to believe that, you English sparrow?"

"Revile me and peck me, if you have stopped loving me,--but, oh, don't drive me away from my eggs."

"Go!" he reiterated, shaking his comb at her. "You're not fit to have the custody of them!"

The poor flustered thing got up, all atremble. She called despondently to her foster children, who toddled after her as she departed.

"Now for that villain of a drake!" thought Clarence, and he set out in search of Eustace.

The father of the ducklings was at that moment in the middle of the pond, regaling himself upon a lucky find of frog's-egg tapioca. As he swallowed the succulent globules his neck writhed in contortions of joy.

"Hah! you guzzling hypocrite! you hawk in dove's clothing!" cried a voice.

Eustace looked up. There on the bank was Clarence, pacing to and fro in a fury.

"Come out on shore, you sleek betrayer, you whited sepulcher!"

The full terror of his situation dawned on him. Here was he, despite his conscientious integrity, accused of a most heinous sin,--and, worst of all, accused by Clarence!

Interested spectators began to assemble on the bank. Eustace became a center of attention. And the rooster continued to rail and threaten.

"Oh, if I could only get at you!--you with your single standard!"

That was a bombshell. "Shut your bill, you liar!" shouted Eustace, as, with a vigorous kick of his foot, he wheeled away from the tapioca and started for the shore.

Gertrude, arriving on the scene with a flying scuttle, beheld her hero paddling resolutely to land. How proud she was to see him face that big prize-fighter! But, determined that they should not come to blows, she rushed up behind Clarence and honked in his ear: "_I_ laid those eggs, you blustering fool. Martha only _sat_ on them. She would sit on anything."

"What--what's that?" asked the startled rooster.

"Martha would sit on _anything_," repeated the Amazon. "I can prove it.--Stand back, Eustace!--Here she comes now. I'll make her sit on that stone." She indicated a smooth white pebble that was somewhat oval in shape.

As she spoke, the forlorn hen drew near, followed by the ducklings. They trailed along after her like a train of guilt.

"Shameless creature!" muttered Clarence.

But she, keeping her eyes dejectedly on the ground, did not notice him, nor anyone else.

Gertrude stationed herself by the pebble. As Martha passed by, she said, in a tone of politeness, "Pardon me, but you dropped an egg."

Martha stopped. "Oh, did I?" she said gratefully. "Thank you, thank you for telling me. I'm so bewildered I hardly know what I'm doing--Ah, the poor little thing is all cold!" she added, sitting compassionately upon the pebble; while, unobserved by her, the ducklings tobogganed down the bank into the water.

Gertrude eyed the rooster witheringly. "Whom are you going to fight with about _this_ egg?" she demanded.

"Well, I'll be fricasseed!" said Clarence. Then he turned to the drake. "Eustace, I apologize. And I don't mind saying that you have a remarkably clever wife."

"She's the most wonderful female in feathers!" assented Eustace fervently.

"However," added the rooster, "there are compensations about having a dull one." For among the crowd of onlookers his eye had just fallen upon a little bantam lady whom he had never seen before.

II

HIS COOP IN ORDER

If there was one thing that the sympathetic heart of Eustace could not endure, it was the spectacle of abused virtue.

"Gertrude," quacked he thoughtfully to his help-meet, as they were cruising one day on the frog-pond, "I am really distressed about Martha. Her husband is acting shamelessly."

Gertrude shrugged her wings. "Well, what else could you expect?" she said. "The silly hen has brought it all on herself by being so humble and simpleminded."

"I'm afraid she has," admitted Eustace. "And that is the sad part about it; for she's really such a fine female--so unselfish, so devoted to her nest."

"Yes, and such a fool. She's never taken any care of her personal appearance, or tried to be Clarence's intellectual companion; and now, when she's getting old (she must be nearly five) and has lost the figure she had when she was a pullet, it's no wonder that she bores him. You can't expect to hold a rooster's affections with a mere egg record."

"I suppose you're right. And yet I'm awfully sorry for her. It's common talk at the haystack that he has just added another affinity to the three he had already."

"What! Do you mean that bold-faced speckled creature who was uncrated only two days ago?"

"Yes."

"The hussy! She tried yesterday to shoulder me away from the refreshment can, right before everybody; but I gave her a look that let her know I was ready to tweak her comb off, and she thought better of it."

"I'll warrant she did!" assented Eustace admiringly. He knew Gertrude could take care of herself in any situation. "But what can we do about poor Martha?"

"Nothing that I can see. I confess I have quite lost interest in her since she refused to attend our conference on Free Puddles for the Public. But as for that brazen-beaked speckled thing, the next time I...."

[Illustration: "_She refused to attend our conference on Free Puddles for the Public._"]

"But, darling, don't you think it is our duty, as citizens, to rescue Martha from the shame of her present position? We mustn't act pharisaically toward her, the way the swans do, just because she is afraid of the water and can't walk gracefully. It isn't right to evade the issue by saying, 'Oh, what better morality could you expect among chickens?' No; it is for us of the white-feathered race to uplift and enlighten those of the colored-feathered race, so that when Death comes chopping at our neck, we shall have amounted to something in this barnyard."

Gertrude was softened. "I believe you're right," she said, after a pause. "You have such a noble, high-minded way of looking at things! Yes, you had better go to Clarence and talk this over with him, fowl to fowl, and make him realize the great wrong he is committing."

"I've tried it already--several times. But it's no use. He only laughs, and says that as long as Martha puts up with his ways he has no intention of changing them. So the only thing to be done is for you to go to see Martha and...."

"_I_ go to see Martha?"

"Yes--as a friend."

"She's no friend of mine! I'll never forget the way she acted when I invited her to that meeting. When I said to her that it was the duty of every one to attend, she had the effrontery to tell me, very pointedly, that a _female's place was on the nest_."

"Yes, yes, I know, dear. Yet I should think that, just this once, you might...."

"No, I won't. She'd as likely as not say something insulting about my quacking in public."

"Very well, then," said Eustace in an aggrieved tone. "_I_'ll go talk to her."

"You will? And what will you say to her?"

"I don't know exactly; but I'll try to bring her to a full realization of the position she's in, and then...."

"_That_ will please her, I'm sure," said Gertrude ironically. "Yet I doubt if you get that far. She's so blind, she probably believes him to be as innocent as an egg, and, therefore, won't hear a word against him."

"Gertrude," he replied with dignity, "I am sorry that your prejudices have biased your mind to such an extent. However, I shall, notwithstanding, do what I can to redress this poor hen's wrongs, by encouraging her to defend her rights and to make her husband respect her."

"Why, certainly. Don't let me deter you. If you think you can make a modern female out of a feathered incubator, then by all means go and try it."

"I shall," he said confidently.

Quitting the pond with a bold waggle of his tail (would that human beings could thus shake themselves free of all that lies behind them!), he wriggled sturdily up the bank, and started off for Martha's nest with a magnificent seagoing waddle.

He found the hen sitting on a large brood of eggs. "Good afternoon," he said, bobbing his neck affably.

"Good afternoon," she echoed colorlessly.

"I have come to talk with you as a friend," he began, lowering his voice to an earnest tone, "about something that weighs very deeply on my heart."

She looked at him with a dull, nonplussed expression.

"You see," he continued, becoming a little nervous, "--h'm--where is your husband?"

Martha drew herself up in modest alarm. "Sir," she said, "I don't know where my husband is at this moment; but if what you have to say can't be said whether he is present or not, then I don't wish to hear it at all."

"I beg your pardon," stammered Eustace hastily. "You misunderstood me. It is about him that I wished to speak. I--I merely wanted to say that you have my sincerest sympathy, and that I am ready to do all I can to help you redress your wrongs."

"Your sympathy? Help me redress my wrongs?" she exclaimed, divided between astonishment and perturbation. "What do you mean?"

"Madam," he replied with knightly gallantry, "I respect you for endeavoring to shield your husband. But my admiration for you only makes me regret the more his--er--his neglect of you."

"My husband neglect me!" Ruffling up still more, she glanced for reassurance at her eggs.

"I refer--since you compel me to speak bluntly--to his attentions to other females."

"Sir, you forget yourself! How dare you say such things to me!" She burst into tears.

Eustace was taken aback. "Why, really, I...."

"The best husband in all the barnyard!" she sobbed, wiping her eyes on a leaf. "So loving to me every time I see him!" Then, in a sudden cackle of rage, she cried, "Leave me, miscreant! With all your guile, you will never be able to alienate my affections from him!"

That was enough for Eustace. He went.

Gertrude was unable to elicit from him any very definite account of this interview, but from his disgruntled taciturnity and from one or two things which he let slip, she made her own inferences as to what had taken place. "It never pays to offer your sympathy unless you know it's wanted," she observed sagely. "Remember the time you tried to console Mrs. Swan for her children's not being white."

But the next day it was her turn to be astonished. As she and Eustace were trimming the shrubs in front of their burdock home, who should appear but Martha, with disheveled feathers and a woe-be-gone look.

At sight of her Eustace lost any rancor that had lingered in his breast from yesterday. "What is the matter?" he asked solicitously, as he hurried forward to meet her.

"Oh dear, oh dear!" gasped Martha hysterically. "Forgive me for what I said to you--the things you told me have proved only too true!" Here she broke down entirely.

Eustace, unaccustomed to such displays of emotion on the part of the weaker sex, turned an S. O. S. glance in the direction of Gertrude; but she, keeping scornfully aloof, ignored this call for assistance.

"After you left me," continued the hen, when she was able to regain her speech, "I couldn't help thinking over what you had said, and dreadful suspicions began to enter my mind, so that last night I didn't sleep at all. My head tossed and squirmed under my wing all night long."

Again she broke down, and Eustace felt more helpless than ever.

"When Clarence came to see me to-day, I asked him some pointed questions. He tried to evade them and change the subject, by complimenting me on having just laid another egg. But I could see he was hiding something, and when he went away I got up from my nest and followed him. As I turned the corner of that clump of bushes over yonder, I saw ... I saw my husband--in the act of embracing ... a speckled female!" Uttering these last words, she keeled over, and would have fallen had not Eustace stayed her with his outstretched pinion.

"Bring some smelling-roots!" he called excitedly. "Quick, some garlic!"

When the hen had been restored to consciousness, she thanked Eustace and his wife most humbly, and said, "I have come to you because you offered to help me. Tell me what I must do."

"Get a divorce," said Gertrude firmly.

"Oh no, no!" exclaimed the hen. "I couldn't live without Clarence. What I want is to have him all to myself."

At this confession of weakness, Gertrude, raising her bill in air in token of supreme disgust, waddled off to the pond, to attend a regatta of water-bugs.

But Eustace, believing that Martha's whole happiness was at stake, faced the matter seriously. He felt that this was a golden opportunity for doing her good. "You must make your husband respect you and feel the need of your companionship," he said. "You must share all his interests. If he has a passion for hunting which leads him to stalk grasshoppers or go coursing after a pack of beetles, then _you_ must take up hunting and join in his sport. If, on the other hand, he has a hobby for collecting, and goes about picking up pieces of old china, then you, also, must become a connoisseur in antiques."

As the hen listened to this advice, she blinked in a befuddled manner. "But what would become of my eggs?" she asked.

"Oh, I don't mean that you are to absent yourself from your home when maternal duties require your presence there. Far from it. You are to reign there as queen of his heart, enthroned on your nest."

Martha sighed wistfully.

"Even at those times when the cares of motherhood keep you within the coop," he went on, carried away with his theme, "you can still make yourself your husband's intellectual companion, by discussing with him such topics as the political betterment of the barnyard, the abolition of capital punishment for obesity, the restriction of overcrowding in bee tenements, and the regulation of food distribution by the Pan-Gastronomic Association. From talking over these things with you, he will learn the value of your opinion, and will come to find continual inspiration in your society."

The hen listened in awed silence. At last, heartened by his eloquence, she said, "I'll try to be that kind of wife. It will be hard at first, but perhaps I'll get used to it."