Horrors Unknown

by Sam Moskowitz (ed)

  “Good morning, pretty bird,” said I, holding out my finger to my visitor, who immediately flew to my hand and established himself there.

  “Good morning,” answered the Green Bird, in a voice so like Rosamond’s that I was startled; “I am come to breakfast with you.”

  As the Green Bird spoke, a small bright feather dropped from its wing and fell slowly to the ground.

  “I am delighted to have your society,” I replied, with the utmost courtesy, “but I fear that I shall not be able to offer you any preserved butterflies. Nay, I have not as much as a beetle in pickle.”

  “Don’t mention it,” said the bird, with an off-hand flirt of his tail; “I can put up with anything. Besides, you know, one can always fall back on eggs.”

  To my surprise another bright green feather disengaged itself from the bird’s plumage, and floated softly towards the carpet.

  “Why, you’ll lose all your feathers,” said I. “Are you moulting?”

  “No,” answered the bird, “but I am gifted with speech on the condition that I shall lose a feather every time I use the faculty. When I lose all my feathers, which I calculate will not take place for about a year, I shall invent some artificial ornithological covering.”

  “Gracious!” I exclaimed, “what a figure—of speech you will be!”

  At this moment the usual knock was heard at my door, on opening which I discovered a large tray covered with a snowy cloth, on which were placed a number of small porcelain covers, some bottles of red and white wine, a silver coffee-service, in short, everything necessary for a good breakfast,

  X / BREAKFAST, ORNITHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED. In a few moments my repast was arranged on the table, at which I seated myself, the Green Bird perching on the edge of a pretty dish of scarlet fruits at which he pecked, occasionally moistening his golden bill in the slender glass of Barsac which I placed near him.

  “Breakfast,” said the bird, looking at me with a glance of undisguised contempt while I was devouring a plate of rognons au vin de champagne—“breakfast is a meal utterly misinterpreted by human beings. What can be more unhealthy or more savage than the English or American breakfast? The latter is a miracle of indigestibility. The elastic, hot cakes. The tough, over-cooked meats. The half-boiled, muddy coffee. The half-baked, alum-tempered bread. Breakfast should be a light meal, invigorating, yet not overloading—fruits to purify the palate and the physical system, and a little red wine to afford nourishment to the frame, and enable it to go through the work of the day. In the morning man arises refreshed, not exhausted; his frame needs but little support; it is only when the animal vitality has been used up by a hard day’s labor, that the meal of succulent and carbonized food is required. The French make their breakfast too elaborate; the English too heavy; the Americans too indigestible.”

  “Am I to understand, then,” I asked, “that birds breakfast more sensibly than men?”

  “Certainly,” replied the Green Bird. “What is more delicate, and at the same time more easy of digestion, than the mucilaginous Caterpillar? The Dragonfly, when carefully stripped of its corselet, is the lobster of the Insectivora. The green acarus is a dainty morsel, and the yellow roses sigh with relief when we gobble up their indolent enemy. The coccinella, or Lady-bird, is our turtle: with what dexterity is he stript of his upper shell and eaten palpitating!

  “But the chief hygienic feature about the breakfast of us birds is, that we exercise in order that we may eat. Supposing the Blackbird, on withdrawing his head from under his crimson epaulet in the early morning, were merely to yawn, and stretch his wings, and, hopping lazily down branch by branch to the pool at the bottom of the tree on which he roosts, take his bath. That finished, we will suppose him retreating to his covert, when he rings a bell made of the blue campanula, and, being answered by an attendant Tom Tit, commands breakfast to be served. Tom Tit disappears, and after the usual absence returns with a meal of beetles, caterpillars, ripe cherries, and wild honey, neatly served on a satiny leaf of the Maple. Blackbird falls to and gorges himself. What an unhealthy bird he would be, compared with the Blackbird as he really is, stretching his wings at the first light of dawn, and setting off on a foraging expedition through the woods and fields! What glorious exercise and excitement there are in this chase after a breakfast! How all the physical powers are cultivated! The sight is sharpened. There is not a cranny in the bark of a tree, or a crevice in the earth, that the eye of the hungry bird does not penetrate. The extremist tip of the tail of a burrowing worm cannot remain undiscovered; he is whipped out and eaten in a moment. Then the long flight through the fresh air; the delicious draught of cool dew taken from time to time; the—”

  “But,” said I, interrupting the Green Bird, who I began to perceive was an interminable talker, “how is it possible for men to have the opportunity of pursuing their meals in the manner you describe? It would indeed present rather a ridiculous appearance, if at six o’clock in the morning I were to sally out, and run all over the fields turning up stones in order to find fried smelts, and diving into a rabbit burrow in the hope of discovering mutton chops enpapillotes. ”

  “If I were a man,” said the Green Bird, sententiously, “I would have my meals carefully concealed by the servants in various places, and then set to work to hunt them out. It would be twice as healthy as the present indolent method.”

  Here he took another sip at the Barsac, and looked at me so queerly that I began to have a shrewd suspicion that he was drunk.

  A brilliant idea here flashed across my mind. I would intoxicate the Green Bird, and worm out of him the reason why it was that the Blond Head was never able to stretch farther out of her window than the shoulders. The comicality of a drunken bird also made me favorable to the idea.

  “As far as eating goes,” said I, “I think that you are perhaps right; but as to drinking, you surely will not compare your insipid dew to a drink like this!” and, as I spoke, I poured out a glass of Richebourg, and handed it to the bird.

  He dipped his bill gravely in it, and took one or two swallows. “It is a fine wine,” he said sententiously, “but it has a strong body. I prefer the Barsac. The red wine seems to glow with the fires of earth, but the white wine seems illumined by the sunlight of heaven.”

  And the Green Bird returned to his Barsac.

  XI / LEG-BAIL.

  “So the fair Rosamond made you,” I said carelessly.

  “Yes, from terra-cotta,” answered the Green Bird; “and, having been baked and colored, I came to life in the sun. I love this white wine, because the sun, who is my father, is in it”; and he took another deep draught.

  “What induced her to construct you?” I asked.

  “Why, with a view of escaping from this place, of course.”

  “O, then you are to assist her to escape?”

  “Not at all—you are to assist her. I will furnish her with the means.”

  “What means?”

  “With the wings.”

  “The what?” I asked, somewhat astonished.

  “The wings!”

  “What the deuce does she want of wings? She is not going to escape by the window, is she?”

  “Ha, ha, ha! Ho, ho, ho! He asks what Rosamond wants of wings!” And the bird, overcome with laughter at the ludicrousness of some esoteric jest, tumbled into his glass of Barsac, from which I rescued him draggled and dripping, all the more draggled as during our conversation he had been continually shedding his feathers.

  “Well, what does she want of wings?” I asked, rather angrily, because a man does not like to see people laughing at a joke into the secret of which he is not admitted.

  “To fly with,” replied the Green Bird, nearly choking with the involuntary draught of white wine he had swallowed during his immersion.

  “But why does she want to fly?”

  “Because she has no legs—that’s the reason she wants to fly,” said the bird, a little crossly.

  “No legs!” I repeated, appalled at this awf
ul intelligence—“no legs! O, nonsense! you must be joking.”

  “No, I’m choking,” answered the Green Bird.

  “Why, she is like Miss Biffin, then, born without legs. Heavens! what a pity that so lovely a head shouldn’t have a leg to stand on!”

  “She wasn’t born without legs,” replied the Bird. “Her legs are down stairs.”

  “You don’t mean to say that they have been amputated?”

  “No. Count Goloptious was afraid she would escape; and as he wanted only her bust, that is, her brain, hands, and arms, he just took her legs away and put them in the storeroom. He’ll take your legs away some day, too, you’ll find. He wants nothing but heads in this hotel.”

  “Never!” I exclaimed, horror-stricken at the idea. “Sooner than part with my legs, I’d—”

  “Take arms against him I suppose. Well, nous verrons. Gracious! what a lot of feathers I have shed!” suddenly continued the Bird, looking down at a whole pile of green feathers that lay on the floor. “I’m talking too much. I shan’t have a feather left soon if I go on at this rate. By the way, where is your mirror? I must reproduce myself.”

  XII / HOLDING THE MIRROR UP TO NATURE.

  I handed the Green Bird a small dressing-glass which lay on the bureau—I mean, I placed it before him, for the impossibility of handing a bird anything will strike even the most uncultivated mind—and seated myself to watch his proceedings with a considerable amount of curiosity.

  I wish, before proceeding any further, to make a few random remarks on the looking-glass in America.

  I take a certain natural pride in my personal appearance. It is of no consequence if my nose is a trifle too long, my chin too retreating, or my head too angular. I flatter myself that the elegance of a man’s appearance does not depend on his individual traits, but upon his tout ensemble. I feel, when regarding myself in a well-constituted mirror, that, in spite of any trifling defects in detail, my figure on the whole is rather distingue.

  In the matter of mirrors, I have suffered. The hotel and boarding-house keepers of this country—actuated doubtless by a wholesome desire to crush that pet fly called “vanity,” with which the Devil angles for human souls—have, I am convinced, entered into a combination against the admiration of the human face divine by its owner.

  Like Proteus, I find myself changing my shape wherever I go. At the Bunkum House, I am a fat boy. At the St. Bobolink, a living skeleton. Once I was seriously alarmed on inspecting myself for the first time in the glass—on an occasion when I had just taken possession of a new boarding-house—at discovering that one of my eyebrows was in the middle of my forehead. I had been informed by a medical student—since plucked—from whom I derived most of my chirurgical information, that paralysis not unfrequently produced such effects. I descended in some trepidation to the parlor, where I had an interesting interview with my landlady, who succeeded in removing the unpleasant impression from my mind that I was a victim to that unbecoming disease.

  The glass was not, however, changed, and I never looked in it and beheld that eyebrow in the middle of my forehead, without the disagreeable sensation that in the end I should die a Cyclops.

  The glass which I placed before the Green Bird possessed, I regret to say, certain defects in the plane of its surface, which rendered self-contemplation by its aid anything but an agreeable occupation. I know no man egotist enough to—as the novels say—“spend hours before” such a mirror.

  The Green Bird, as soon as he beheld himself in this abominable mirror, uttered a scream of disgust. I must say, that, on looking over his shoulder, the image formed by him in the glass was not a graceful one. He was humped, one leg was shorter than the other, and his neck looked as if it had just been wrung by a schoolboy.

  What attracted my attention most, however, were certain peculiarities in the reflected image itself. It scarcely seemed a reflection. It was semi-substantial, and stood out from the surface of the glass in a sort of half-relief, that grew more and more positive every moment. In a few seconds more, the so-called image detached itself from the mirror, and hopped out on the table, a perfect counterpart of the Green Bird, only humped, with one leg shorter than the other, and a wry neck. It was an ornithological caricature.

  The Green Bird itself now sidled away from its position before the mirror, and the Caricature Bird took his place. If the image cast by the former was distorted, no words can convey the deformity of the image cast by the latter. It was a feathered cripple. It was all hump. It stood on one long attenuated leg. Its neck was tortuous as the wall of Troy.

  This rickety, ornithological image produced itself in the mirror, in precisely the same fashion as did its predecessor, and, after gradually growing into substance, detached itself from the polished surface, and came out upon the table, taking its position before the mirror, vice the first humpback resigned.

  What the image cast by the third bird was like I cannot at all attempt to portray. It was a chaos of neck and humps and feathers. The reproduction, nevertheless, went on, and the prolific mirror kept sending forth a stream of green abortions, that after a little while were no longer recognizable as belonging to any species of animal in the earth below, or the heavens above, or the caverns that lie under the earth. They filled my room. Swarms of limping, wall-eyed, one-legged, green-feathered things hustled each other on the floor. My bed was alive with a plumed mass of deformity. They filled the air, making lame efforts at flight, and blindly falling to the floor, where they tumbled about in inextricable confusion. The whole atmosphere seemed thick with green feathers. Myriads of squinting eyes glittered before me. Quintillions of paralytic yellow bills crookedly gaped at me.

  I felt myself treading on a thick carpet of soft, formless life. The fluttering of embryonic wings, the twittering of sickly voices, the ruffling of lusterless plumages, produced a continuous and vague sound that filled me with horror. I was knee-deep in the creatures. From out the distorting mirror they poured in a constant stream, like a procession of nightmares, and the tidemark of this sea of plumage rose higher and higher every instant. I felt as if I was about to be suffocated—as if I was drowning in an ocean of Green Birds. They were on my shoulders. Nestling in my hair. Crooning their loathsome notes into my ear. Filling my pockets, and brushing with their warm fuzzy breasts against my cheek. I grew wild with terror, and, making one desperate effort, struggled through the thick mass of life that pressed like a wall around me to the window, and, flinging it open, cried in a despairing voice: “Rosamond! Rosamond! Save me, Rosamond!”

  XIII / A STUPID CHAPTER, AND I KNOW IT.

  “What’s the matter?” cried the Blond Head, appearing at her window, with all her curls in a flurry.

  “Your Green Bird,” I answered, “has been misconducting himself in the most abominable manner. He—”

  “You surely have not let him get at a mirror?” screamed Rosamond.

  “Unfortunately I have; and pretty things he has been doing with it. My room is full of Green Birds. If you don’t call them away, or tell me how to get rid of them, I shall be killed, as the persons suspected of hydrophobia were formerly killed in Ireland, that is, I shall be smothered by a featherbed.”

  “What a wretch of a bird to waste himself in such a foolish way, when he was so particularly wanted! But rest a moment. I will rid you of your unpleasant company.”

  So saying, Rosamond withdrew her head from the window, and in a second or two afterwards a long shrill whistle came from her room, wild and penetrating as the highest notes of the oboe. The instant the Green Birds heard it, they all commenced jostling and crushing towards the open window, out of which they tumbled in a continual stream. As scarcely any of them could fly, only a few succeeded in reaching the sill of Rosamond’s casement—the goal towards which they all struggled. The rest fell like a green cataract on the hard flags with which the yard underneath my window was paved. In this narrow enclosure they hustled, and crawled, and limped, and writhed, till the place, filled with such a mass
of feathered decripitude, resembled an ornithological Cour des Miracles.

  So soon as my room was cleared of the bird multitude, I commenced sweeping up the mass of green feathers which lay on the floor, and which had been shed by the original Green Bird, during his conversation with me at breakfast. While engaged in this task, I heard a laugh which seemed to come from my immediate neighborhood. I turned, and there sat the Green Bird on the mantelpiece, arranging what feathers he had left with his bill.

  “What,” I said, “are you there? Why, I thought you had gone with the rest of them!”

  “Go with such canaille as that set!” answered the Green Bird, indignantly. “Catch me at it! I don’t associate with such creatures.”

  “Then, may I ask, why the deuce did you produce all this canaille in my room, Green Bird?”

  “It was your own fault. I intended to produce a few respectable and well-informed Green Birds, who would have been most entertaining society for you in your solitude, and materially aided you in your projects against Count Goloptious. But you presented me with a crooked mirror, and, instead of shapely and well-behaved Green Birds, I gave birth to a crowd of deformed and ill-mannered things, of no earthly use to themselves or anyone else. The worst of it is, they will build nests in the yard underneath, and bring forth myriads of callow deformities, so that unless they are instantly destroyed you will have no peace from them.”

  “I’ll shoot them.”

  “Where’s your gun?”

  “Well, then, I’ll fish for them with a rod, line, and hook, as the Chinese fish for swallows, and then wring their necks.”

  “Pooh! that won’t do. They’ll breed faster than you can catch them. However, you need not trouble yourself about them; when the time comes I’ll rid you of them. I owe you something for having caused this trouble; beside, your Barsac was very good.”

  “Will you take another glass?” I said.

  “No, thank you,” politely replied the Green Bird. “I have drunk enough already. About those feathers” (I had just swept the green feathers up into a little heap)—“what are you going to do with them?”