Part 2

Accordingly, the next time Clarence came strutting up to her, with swishing feathers and a gurgle of "Hello, wifie dear!" she answered serenely, "How do you do, Clarence? I want to have a talk with you."

"Huh!" said he in surprise. Drawing himself up and holding one foot meditatively in the air, he cocked his head sidewise to have a good look at her.

"I have been thinking things over very seriously," she continued, in the same tone, "and from now on I intend to be a very different sort of wife to you. In the past I have not shared your interests as I should have; but in future I shall make myself your companion in everything. I shall keep informed on all topics of the day, such as the organization of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Insects and the report of the Vice Commission on conditions in the rabbit pen, so as to be able to discuss them with you and give you the benefit of my opinions."

"Say, what's the matter with you?" he demanded. "I'll be plucked if I ever saw you this way before!"

Emboldened by having disconcerted him, she went on to make good her advantage. "And after this I shall always...."

"Sorry, but I'll have to be going. Have an important engagement." He started to move away.

"With whom?"

Startled at the audacity of her question, he inquired ill-humoredly, "Why do you ask?"

"Because I am your wife, and, therefore, take an interest in everything you do."

"You do, do you?" He looked her square in the profile, then lowered his head and pecked thoughtfully at a weed; then he said, "Well, since you are so curious to know--I'm going cricketing with Jim, the turkey."

"Then I'll go with you. You and I together can catch them twice as fast as he can."

"Look here, now--this is no hen party!" he rasped.

"I'm not so sure," she retorted, stirred more and more by jealous suspicions. "It may be a speckled hen party!"

Clarence gave an involuntary start. Then, falling into a quivering rage, he clawed the ground with fury. "Just for _that_, now, it _shall_ be a speckled hen party! Good-bye!"

"Wait a moment, Clarence!" she called abjectly, as he stalked away. "Ah, don't leave me!"

"Green-eyed termagant!" he gargled, as a parting thrust, and headed straight for the clump of bushes where waited his affinity.

Two days later, when Eustace was expressing to Gertrude his gratification over having converted Martha to modernism, he was suddenly struck dumb by the appearance of the hen herself. That disconsolate female, with every feather ruffled the wrong way, had a shaky manner and a wild look in her eye that gave promise of an unpleasant scene.

"Why, what is the matter?" he inquired nervously, as she drew near and fixed her glance upon him.

"A pretty question for you to ask, you breaker-up of homes!" Eustace took a step backward.

"Monster!--to poison my mind against my husband! I hope you're satisfied, now that you've wrecked my happiness!"

At this point, Gertrude, who had witnessed Martha's first outburst with scornful composure, thought it time to intervene. "Come, come--control yourself!" she said sternly. "Now tell me what's the matter. Have you had a quarrel with Clarence?"

"Yes," gulped the hen. "Your husband made me do it."

"Why, I...."

"Keep quiet, Eustace! Let me manage her. Did he go away and leave you?"

The hen nodded.

"And he hasn't been back since?"

She shook her head.

"And now you want him to come back?"

"Oh yes--_yes_!" she moaned. "I'll let him have his way in everything, and never leave my nest, and never ask any more questions!"

"Hear that, Eustace?"

He did, in blank silence.

"Then go repeat it to Clarence, and bring him here at once," she commanded.

He hesitated, and was about to speak.

"Don't stop to talk. Hurry!"

He did as he was told.

Swinging sharply around the corner of the clump of bushes, he collided with the very fowl he was seeking.

"Why, hullo, old Single Standard!" exclaimed the rooster jocularly. "Whither hurried hence?"

"Ah! I'm glad I've found you," said Eustace earnestly. "Martha, your wife, is in great distress of mind. She wants you to come home, and promises she'll never ask any more questions."

"Really? Then you're my friend for life!" As they started off together, he continued, "You'll have to forgive me, old sport--I didn't see it at first, but you certainly were far-sighted to put her up to that 'modern female' nonsense. The truth is, until you did this I was afraid she might some day get on to me, and that I'd never hear the end of it; but now, since she's learned her lesson, I'll have her right where I want her. She knows she can't afford to ruffle the only rooster in the barnyard."

They walked on for a while in silence. Eustace, toddling dazedly, could find no utterance for the thoughts in his mind.

"You know," said Clarence reflectively, "I'll be glad to see Martha again. I'm getting a bit tired of that speckled minx. She's beginning to nag me with 'Why do you love me?' and 'How much do you love me?' questions."

"Clarence," said Eustace, finding speech at last, "I had a very different purpose in mind when I counseled Martha as I did."

The rooster cocked his head quizzically. "So you wanted to reform my coophold, did you?"

"Yes," answered Eustace, in deep earnest.

Clarence exploded into a prolonged guffaw. "Whoopee!" he gurgled, stamping around and shaking his feathers. "Say, old bird, you've got lovely ideas, all right--but you don't understand _hens_. You're _quaxotic_."

III

BEYOND THE PALING

Eustace waddled stanchly in the path of virtue. Despite the ill success of his attempt to set Clarence's coop in order, he still pursued his crusade against plural doting.

The unregenerate rooster continued to chaff him.

"Ah there, old top-knot!" Clarence would gurgle. "How's our bright little uplifter to-day? Still busily uplifting?"

But the thrust that got Eustace in the pin feathers was:

"I know why you're such a model drake,--it's because your wife is the only duckess in the barnyard."

"Not at all!" he replied. "The principles for which I stand are absolute. They would be the same if there were a hundred duckesses besides Gertrude!"

"Even a hundred _pretty_ ones?"

"Certainly!"

Clarence chuckled.

"For all your noble principles, I wouldn't trust you with a wooden decoy! No, old angel-wings, I.... Look! as I live, a bewitching broiler! What elegantly slender drumsticks she has! I'll have to make her acquaintance."

Forgetting all about Eustace, he scrambled out of the woodpile (where this conversation was held), and stalked forward jauntily to meet the new arrival.

"Are you looking for anyone?" he inquired gallantly.

"No, I'm a stranger. I just arrived by the latest crate."

"Ah, I see. So you're one of this week's débutantes.--Then may I have the honor of showing you about?"

"You're very kind."

And off they strolled down the alley of tin cans known as Lover's Lane.

Eustace watched them sadly.

"So young and tender!" he thought. "Such chick-like innocence!" The wickedness of the world appalled him.

Hearing an unfamiliar voice, he looked up. Like a queenly galleon swaying from side to side, there approached a snowy, rounded whiteness. The paddling feet seemed scarcely to leave the ground. A golden-webbed goddess!

Eustace was spellbound.

She, all unconscious, continued to approach, caroling little toot-like honks. There was a soft rasp in her voice that thrilled him to the gizzard.

Seeing Eustace, she paused. Their eyes met. Then, with a pretty turn of her head, she looked at him out of the other eye.

"Who are you?" he said, as though in a dream.

"I am Phyllis," she answered simply.

"What a beautiful name!"

"And yours?"

"Eustace."

After a moment of silence, he asked:

"Where did you come from?"

She sighed.

"From a far-distant barnyard. I was kidnapped."

"Kidnapped!"

"Yes, snatched away from my mother and sisters."

"But was there no one to defend you?"

She shook her tail mournfully. A glistening tear coursed down her lovely beak.

"There, little bird, don't cry!" he said sympathetically, smoothing down her soft feathers.

"I was subjected to the most cruel indignities," she murmured.... "I, who had always been treated with particular care and regaled with special dishes of mush!"

"Oh!" he exclaimed, his blood boiling at the thought, "If only I had been there!" He clenched his pinions.

Smiling gratefully amid her tears, she quacked:

"You are very comforting."

Eustace's heart beat faster.

"I was lonely and homesick," she continued, "but your sympathy makes me forget everything."

"Phyllis!"

His crop heaved.

"Now I am not even sorry!"

"Really? Do you really mean that?"

"Yes. For in that other barnyard there were no drakes as high-minded and chivalrous as you."

High-minded! Chivalrous! How those words singed him! Dazedly he awoke from his wild dream.

"I ... I am not what you think I am," he stammered, conscience-stricken. "I am unworthy. I forgot myself. Forgive me ... I ... I am a married bird!"

And he fled, wobbling rather than waddling, from her presence.

In the solitude of the dim crypt under the veranda he pondered over what had happened. He was contrite, humbled, thoroughly ashamed of himself. As he listened to the ominous rumble of rocking chairs overhead, he felt that the Powers Above knew and were displeased.

And yet he could not free himself from the spell of the enchantress. Her image haunted him,--the dark eyes and radiant bill, the softly undulating neck, the downy complexion, the beautifully-rounded form, the feet that tapered exquisitely toward the heel....

Oppressed by the consciousness of sin, and, at the same time, inflamed by his guilty infatuation, Eustace could not endure being alone a moment longer. He decided to go home. It would be hard to look Gertrude in the beak ... but he would have to; for he needed her spiritual influence. Communion with her strong nature would calm him.

Toddling home moodily, he arrived just as his wife was on the point of leaving.

"Where are you going?" he said.

(How _bony_ she looked to-day!)

"To the mass meeting at the haystack."

"What mass meeting?"

"You don't mean to tell me you've forgotten!"

"Oh, I remember now. This is the day of your rally." But she was not satisfied.

"I must say, you take a fine interest in my work!" she exclaimed caustically. "Why, you act as though you didn't care whether I raised the funds for that laying-in hospital or not!"

"I _do_, dear. But to-day ... I ... I don't feel well. I have a headache."

"I'm sorry.--But hurry and come along, or you'll be late."

The thought of facing that gabbling assemblage was revolting to him.

"I don't think I'll go."

"What!"

"I believe I'll stay home.--I came here to have a talk with you, Gertrude. I need your spiritual help."

"I'm awfully sorry, then, that you didn't come a little sooner,--for you know how glad I always am to discuss anything that is on your mind. If you had only...."

"But couldn't you stay with me just a _little_ while?"

"My dear Eustace, you seem to forget that I have to _preside_ at that meeting. How could I stay with you? Besides, this whole idea of endowing a free nest-box is mine, and I intend to see it carried through."

She started off.

"But, Gertrude ..." he protested.

She paused, with an expression of impatience, and said:

"Oh, well, I'll be late, then. What is it?"

"Gertrude ... I just wanted to talk with you ... and be with you. I...."

"Do hurry!"

The words stuck in his gullet.

"Well, I can't wait here all day, you know!"

"Gertrude ..."

"Sorry, but I'll have to see you some other time. Good-bye!" And she hastened away to her meeting.

Eustace gazed after her stonily.

"You might have saved me--if you had cared!"

He had craned out to her for help, and she had deliberately sidled away from him.

"Hah!" he quacked bitterly. "What difference does it make! What does anything matter! Hah! I flap my wings at the world!"

He was becoming a queer duck.

Casting one farewell look at his home, he fled. Beyond the outermost paling of the barnyard he went, on into the uncharted wilds of the cow pasture. He waddled blindly.

As he entered a grove of cat-tails, there was a stifled quack. A snowy apparition started up from the couch of reeds where it had been squatting.

"You!" cried Eustace.

She returned his gaze mutely.

"How ... how did you get here?" he asked.

"The cold-heartedness I met with was more than I could bear. It drove me out. Even you, the only living fowl who spoke to me ... even you...."

"Ah, can't you understand!"

"Yes, I understand ... only too well. Let's not talk of it.--Tell me, how is it that _you_ are here?"

"I, too, am an exile."

"What! Why, I heard you spoken of as a great leader, almost a prophet."

"All that is past!" he said in soul-agony. "I go to become a hermit."

"But your wife?"

"I shall never see her again."

There was a tense silence. Phyllis, avoiding his look, toyed nervously with a leaf. At last, stiffening up his neck with as much firmness as he could muster, Eustace said:

"Good-bye."

She raised her lovely profile and was about to quack, when he burst out, croaking with emotion:

"Ah, Phyllis, Phyllis! I have said a last farewell to nest, wife, career,--but I cannot say it to you! You hold me as with a magic spell. Love--tempestuous, convention-defying--has swept me off my webs."

"I, too, have...."

She buried her head, in confusion, under her wing.

"Phyllis!"

He covered her beautiful amber wax-cherry lips with kisses.

After a while she murmured:

"We'll be exiles together, won't we, dear."

"Yes, my duckie. We'll paddle out on the pond of love sidebone by sidebone. We'll seek some friendly wild where we may build our nest, far from the madding cackle."

"Yes; in a land of milk-weed and honeysuckle."

"My swan! My nightingale! My dove!"

"My kingbird!"

Lifted from earth on wings of ecstacy, Eustace recited:

"A nook of rushes underneath the bough, A bug or twain, or toothsome frog--and thou Beside me quacking in the wilderness,-- O, wilderness were paradise enow!"

Phyllis sighed.

"But come!" said Eustace eagerly. "Let us fly to that wilderness!"

"Yes, let us fly!"

Gathering up her feathers, she waddled with him out into the great unknown.

Before they had traveled a distance of twenty leaves, they heard an awful sound. A gigantic Being, under whose terrible feet great twig-logs snapped like straws, came crashing through the jungle. In an instant he was upon them.

Eustace, disregarding his own peril, spread out his wings to shield Phyllis. But she, lacking the valor of a drake, ducked.

O fatal flop! In less time than the twitching of a tail the awful Being pounced down, seized her by her lily-white neck, and bore her, shrieking, away; while Eustace, following frenziedly, exhausted himself in futile cries. At sight of the execution block, his honks became hysterical.

The hatchet gleamed aloft. He turned away and closed his eyes. The sound of the blow went through him like a spit. Sick at heart, he staggered away, hardly aware that he was back in the barnyard.

"The good-to-eat die young!" he cried in anguish.

O the irony of life! Why should she be cut off in her prime, and he, a hardened sinner, be spared? Miserable bird that he was, why should he be left to linger on uselessly in the world?

"Mr. Eustace!" ventured a timid voice.

Looking up, he saw a bright little red-combed cockerel.

"Oh, sir," said the cockerel deferentially, "I've been searching for you everywhere."

His sweet ingenuousness was very appealing.

"You have? Why, what can I do for you?" said Eustace, softened.

"Please, sir, I'm secretary of the Young Peepers' League, and we want to know if you'll be kind enough to give us a talk tomorrow on 'Character Building'".

[Illustration: "_Please, sir, I'm secretary of the Young Peepers' League._"]

What!--_he_, the weak and sinful wretch, the....

"Please say you will!" pleaded the cockerel. "It'll mean so much to us. You know, we all look up to you so!"

A feeling of balm stole into Eustace's breast.

"I will," he answered humbly, strumming the little chap's comb.

The young fowl thanked him, and then skipped away happily.

"Bless his little giblets!" sighed Eustace.

From that moment everything seemed more cheerful. The ground looked weedier, the pond looked greener, the watering trough looked leakier, the sleepy hollows of the dirt-bathing resort looked dustier, and the sky more like rain.

There was still work to be done, there were still ideals to be striven for.

Feeling once more himself--no, not quite his old self, for the fire through which he had just passed had burned into his soul--he went home to make peace with Gertrude.

She was waiting for him. Standing in front of a salmon-can cheval glass, she was anxiously massaging the wrinkles under her eyes. She had heard that there was a new duckess in the barnyard.

"Well, dear!" she exclaimed with unwonted cordiality; and then launched into a nervous babble of demonstrativeness.

Eustace let her chatter on. He was in too serious a mood to listen to her. Deep and solemn thoughts filled his mind.

"Vanity of vanities!" he reflected. "The paths of glory lead but to the gravy."

[Illustration: "_The good-to-eat die young. The paths of glory lead but to the gravy._"]

IV

THE JUGGERNAUT

Eustace had grown old. He was nearly seven, and a widower. Hardships had seared and toughened him; so that the dread of a culinary fate, which lurks in the breasts of softer-constituted fowls, no longer beset him.

What did cause him distress, however, was the worldliness of the younger generation. Their aims were deplorably low. They went about seeking only the things of earth. Crass, superficial, they were satisfied with merely scratching the surface. And the fowl with the greatest following was ever he that bore the biggest morsel of food.

Even the land had changed for the worse. The large tract which enclosed the barnyard--that gorgeous Natural Park, scene of many a happy vacation tour, where grew stately thistles and forests of majestic weeds--had, after a disgusting orgy of fertilizer, degenerated into a sordid, monotonous, soul-less field of wheat.

Saddened by all this, Eustace plead earnestly but vainly with his fellow fowls, entreating them to moult themselves of evil. But they would not. They merely shrugged their wings and called him "the old hoot owl." But he--their taunts rolling off him like water--ceased not to warn them; for he knew that some terrible visitation must be in store.

One day it came. Along the far edge of the field moved a grim red Monster, overwhelming and ravening the wheat in its path. It had a great black-and-white pinion with which it swept the ground destroyingly; uttering the while a gruesome roar, like the grinding of huge teeth.

At sight of it Eustace was aghast. (He happened to be meditating in the solitude of the wheat stalks.) Scudding home madly, he panted:

"Look! See what has come upon us!"

The turkey, official observer for the community, stretched his tall periscope neck and studied the situation critically.

"Pooh!" he said. "The thing's gone past."

Then he settled down comfortably in a dust bath.

Soon, however, one of the well-groomed pigeons lolling on the veranda of their pole-top club house, condescended to inform the rabble below that the Unpleasantness had not really gone, and would be visible again in a few moments, even to _them_.

"But of course," added the pigeon, smoothing an unruly quill, "what goes on in the underworld is of small interest to us."

[Illustration: "_But, of course," added the pigeon, "what goes on in the underworld is of small interest to us._"]

Eustace was shocked at the callousness of High Society.

"I just wish _they'd_ had to grub for a living!" he said indignantly, and then resumed his task of spreading the alarm.

An old deaf gander to whom he was obliged to repeat the story three times, offered the sage comment:

"Indeed! I suppose this may complicate our foreign relations. But I am too old and too much of a philosopher to allow myself to be disturbed by it. Those fowls whose duty it is to attend to such matters will no doubt do so. For myself,"--(he paused in contemplation of an unwarily-ambient bug)--"for myself, I have learned to take things as they come."

Saying which, the philosopher reached out solemnly and consumed the erring one.

Martha, unable to appear because of her confinement, clucked virtuously from within the coop:

"Well, I'm glad to say I've never bothered my head over things that don't concern me!"

Clarence took the matter more seriously.

"Man broil it!" he swore. "This may spoil my chief place of assignation!"

But the attitude of the community as a whole was voiced by the Guinea fowls, who said:

"How intensely interesting! We'd love to have you tell us more about it. But the dinner pan has just sounded, so we can't stay. Awfully sorry."

And so Eustace found himself a second Cassandra.

With horror he watched the Monster approaching. It was at that moment quite a distance away, but, because of the peculiar conformation of the wheat patch, it happened to be headed straight in the direction of the barnyard.

"Defend your nests!" he cried.

Not a bird heeded him.

"I think the meals here are getting awfully skimpy," remarked one hen to another.

"Indeed they are. I almost wish I'd stayed at home and gotten a pick-up lunch. Still, we can go over after this to the cold buffet at the pig pen."

At one side of the social gathering Clarence was chatting with the turkey.

"Come on, let's get over here out of this mob of hen-folks. They get on one's nerves sometimes.--Have a chew of spear-weed?"

"Thanks."

"Say. Heard a good one the other day. There was a young pullet who had never laid an egg, and she...."

"Heavens!" cried Eustace. "How _can_ you joke at a time like this!"

They eyed him curiously.

"So you take even your _dinner_ solemnly?" drawled Clarence.

The gobbler threw back his head and guffawed till he was purple in the face.

"You know very well what I mean," retorted Eustace. "_What are you going to do about that Monster?_"

"Why ... _you_ feed it."

"Yes," chimed in the turkey. "You're always so kind-hearted, and like to set us an example of charity and that sort of thing. This is just your chance."

"Ah, do be serious! Don't you _hear_ the horrible thing?"

"Certainly I do. I hear lots of unpleasant things without getting wrought up about them."

"But this is something we've got to face!--Listen to me, fellow denizens," he said, raising his voice and addressing a group who were just settling down for their post-prandial siesta. "The enemy is drawing nearer every moment! If you doubt my words, come up on this mound and see for yourselves."

A few, who had curiosity, did so.

"Dear me! I'm glad it's way out there instead of here!"

"But can't you see that it's _coming_ here?"

And so it was. Gradually this fact dawned upon one fowl after another, till all were in commotion.

"Well, what would you have us do about this Monster of yours?" demanded a hen querulously. She felt that since Eustace had, so to speak, flaunted the objectionable thing in their faces, it was for him to get them rid of it.