by Unknown
The Rook becomes composed after breakfast and takes a rosier view of life. Circling round the tree-tops and cawing as he flies, he reminds one of the gentleman in the ‘Canterbury Tales’ who was certainly busy but nevertheless seemed busier than he was. I know no other bird familiar to the inhabitants of towns with so complete an indifference to the affairs of men. Rooks like the proximity of houses because they know man is helpful in supplying food; but as for his toiling and spinning, which is an endless amusement to the sparrow, it concerns them not. From the highest tree-tops they see him crawling along the shabby earth, but unless he should happen to have a gun they take no notice of the plodding backbent clown. The object of the one we are looking at is to get that beautiful twig out of his neighbour’s nest. Certainly it is a fine twig; but watchful is the eye of its owner. To sit solemnly blinking at another’s possession is suspicious, so Mr. Rook and his wife go off on a caw together. Nothing could look more innocent; but still that twig is in their eye. Their circles become smaller, and they are a little hurt to find the proud owner still sitting on his jewel of a twig. Between friends there should be no suspicions. The couple separate. Mrs. Rook drops down on her neighbour to gossip and innocently kicks the twig overboard. It flutters toward earth, when the other conspirator pounces on it, under the impression that it is the property of the wind, and carries it off to his own nest. This kind of thing is to be seen any day, and when you have watched the comedy so far I advise you to go away. For now begins a deafening din. ‘Hullo, what is up now?’ caw a hundred Rooks, rushing to the despoiled nest; and as they have a keen sense of justice, woe to the guilty bird who has no defence.
‘Caw-caw’ is mistaken for the call of the Rooks. They spend the greater part of their lives trying to say this but never quite manage it. Some of them think they do, but the others undeceive them. It is probably known among the older ones that there never yet was a Rook who could master the ‘c’ sound. It is more like ‘Aw-aw’ or perhaps ‘Awr-awr,’ an imitation of the first man who approached a tree with a saw. The’ other morning I watched two lofty Rooks rehearsing by themselves. They were on the same branch. ‘Look here,’ said one, ‘I flatter myself I have got it at last; pay particular attention to the “c” sound, “Aw-aw.”’
‘Can’t say I catch it,’ said the other, ‘you should bring it out more like this, “Awr-awr.”’ Then the first Rook hopped nearer the other and, rising on his tiptoes, exclaimed, ‘By no means — observe,’ and then croaked ‘Aw-aw’ triumphantly down the other’s throat. They were still at it, but less raucously, when I left.
I should like to feel sure that I shall never encounter a second Rook suffering from a severe cold. My walk the other morning was by the river; and there I fell in with a male bird who should have been in bed with a stocking round his throat. A hoarse Rook makes a whole Rookery rage, for they are sensitive to mockery, especially from one of themselves; and this one had evidently been ostracized. He now grubbed for himself among the garbage of the river within sound of his old home. It is not unusual for Rooks to gad about the banks of rivers in the hope of lighting upon stranded worms or insects; and this poor creature had perhaps got his feet wet in the puddles. He was a forlorn bird, apparently without hope of regaining either his voice or standing. ‘Rawk-rawk’ he wheezed forth, and shook his wings in abasement. I expect, however, to see him again consoling himself with grubs; he is the misunderstood invalid with a fine appetite.
Just now we have an opportunity of watching the houses of the Rooks being built or undergoing repairs. A cruel blast of wind made sad havoc of the Rookery last spring, blowing the floors out of half of the nests and carrying the sticks to every corner of the country. The green sward beneath was dismal to contemplate next morning, though some farmers who will not be on terms with a good friend bore the sight with equanimity. The ground beneath the trees showed the white and yellow of eggs, like snowdrops and primroses, as if boys had passed by; ever and again bits of nests, giving way after a brave resistance, flopped to the ground. The Rooks were in a sad way and hovered about the trees commiserating with each other and filling the wood with their wailing. This year they are as gay as ever. If they remember last year’s wreckage, it has only been to make them better builders. It is amusing to watch these birds struggling with twigs twice the length of themselves. I have seen them turned topsyturvy by the unwonted weight and shape; but dire must be their predicament before they will leave go their hold. The stick has to be steered with caution. In the first place, one does well to guard it from envious eyes until it is woven into the nest, when you can brag about it as much as you like, and indeed do; and then again it has a heartbreaking trick of sticking among the branches that bar the way to the nest. In our Rookery you may almost any day see some one of these builders squatting on a branch with a love of a twig in his mouth, puzzling out the safest way to the nest. If the stick is very heavy he flits with it from tree to tree, backing between close branches when needs be, or trying the effect of a strategic movement sideways. At other times he mounts high and reaches his destination with a swoop. One does not require to climb the giddy heights to know that there are no eggs as yet; for the female is at present as noisy as the male, and with the eggs will come silence. Then the expectant father goes out alone to look for the family bread, and you may see him feeding his wife on his return.
I write in the evening. Nearly an hour ago the Rooks sailed homeward through the sky. They go together and they return together. But though they are home betimes, they are not always inclined for rest. There is a row in the Rookery tonight. Some impertinent intrusion by an outsider, perhaps, or a dispute about sleeping accommodation.”
THAT was an old article in the ‘St. James’s,’ and I now begin my comments, written so many years afterwards. Here is the thrill it gave on that March morning in’85. The baggage of our hero (to whom we are about to give a name) consisted of a powerful square wooden box, which had always accompanied him to the university and taken his uncle and brother before him, though to them it was to Aberdeen. On the inside of its lid there adhere to this day remnants recording their academic distinctions (which were outstanding), but for a doleful reason none of his. Having reached London for the great adventure, he was hauling this box to the left-luggage shed at St. Paneras when his eyes fell upon what was to him the most warming sight in literature. It was the placard of the ‘St. James’s Gazette’ of the previous evening with printed on it in noble letters ‘The Rooks begin to Build.’ This was the title of an article he had sent from Dumfries a few days before. In other dazzling words, having been a minute or so in London, he had made, two guineas. This may not seem a great thrill to you, but try it in his circumstances. I remember how he sat on his box and gazed at this glorious news about the rooks. He would have had singular pleasure in drawing the attention of all the other passengers to the placard, even though he had to drag them to it by force.
Forty-five years having elapsed since this event, the romance of my life, I myself can now regard it with comparative calm, but I still hold that it was almost as if Greenwood had met me at the station. Yes, and said, ‘I baptize thee James Anon.’ Henceforth, let that be his name in these pages except when I forget.
I have no recollection how long Anon sat on his box gazing at that two guineas, but I know the box was finally hauled to its destination, and I hope he stepped into London without too much of an air. I can track him for the rest of the day. London was known to him only, as to Branwell Brontë, by maps, and chiefly by wanderings in a map of Bloomsbury, that district which is so convenient for the British Museum. Before, however, he could seek for a habitation, or even for breakfast, he looked around for more placards (to make sure, you know), I think without success, but he did procure in Gray’s Inn Road a copy of the paper itself in which he read his article more often than you will do. In that same delightful thoroughfare (as he always afterwards considered it) he breakfasted triumphantly, on what I forget, but we may be sure it was chiefly on rooks
.
The remainder of his programme for the first day was carried out as arranged at home, coat buttoned against burglars. Looking for lodgings he was more than once alarmed to find himself by mistake in a boarding-house, the outer door closed, and a majestic black silk dress marching upon him down the stair. Having escaped these dangers, he found a resting-place for a brief period in Guilford Street, where on the table he at once set out his weapons, consisting mainly of a desk of the size and methods of a concertina. He then sallied back into the friendly Gray’s Inn Road and bought the Hat. He also bought a penny bottle of ink to heave at the metropolis, and began the heaving before noon. I don’t think his head ever went swimming unless for those moments when he sat on his box at St. Paneras. He knew very well that the campaign was to be a hard one, though not that he should have fourteen articles returned before there was a No. 2. The Hat, of course, was bought for the subjection of Greenwood. He understood that without a silk hat he could not advance upon a lordly editor, and from first to last it was used entirely for this purpose every few weeks. It never fitted him (he does not know his size in hats to this day), it was not so much worn as poised on his head, and if, in his walk to or from the St. James’s office near Bouverie Street, he suddenly stopped, it as suddenly fell off. He had, however, a religious faith in it, and there is a legend in Fleet Street that he wrote what proved to be No. 2 in his lodgings with the Hat balanced on his head, in the hope that it might change his luck.
By this time he had gone across from swagger Guilford Street (where he was too haughty on the surface to tell the lady that a dinner every day was Brobdingnagian) to little Grenville Street, from which he might for many months thereafter have been seen emerging to dine quite agreeably on four provocative halfpenny buns from a paper bag. Though this was his dinner it must not be thought that he ever went hungry to bed. There was jam and other delicacies from home, and abundance of bread and cheese and tea, and baked potatoes from the oven in the street, with, on gala days, something exquisite from a tin, one of those luscious tins that thought they could defy his knife. He was in that Grenville Street house (which is now splendiferous beyond recognition) off and on for years, sometimes in its finest apartments (all according to the state of his finances), but at first he had a room not much larger than a piano case; it was merely the end of a passage, and was only able to call itself a room because it had a door. It looked on to a blank wall, two or three yards away, with a dank tree between him and the wall. When he stood on the window ledge, as he sometimes did for company, he could count the leaves on the tree. It is there still. As I say, he had always sufficiency of food for a Scot, but he had his shivering fits and he did hanker, you know, for Nos. 2 and 3 to come along. He wished too that he knew some other Anons.
CHAPTER III
“BETTER DEAD” — ANON AS A SANDWICH-BOARD MAN, AN M.P., AN EXPLORER, A MOTHER, A CHILD, A GRANDSIRE, A DOG, A PROFESSIONAL BEAUTY — EPISODE OF AN ARCHBISHOP
“No one who has thought the matter over a little can escape the conclusion that there are a number of our fellow-creatures for whom something should be Done. It may be otherwise, yet I cannot think that we should be justified in Removing them against their wish. It would seem, then, that the time has come for forming a mission Society to reason with them, to convince them, to strengthen them in a wise and blest determination to Go. Further than this, a sub-committee might be appointed for seeing that the Necessary Arrangements are carried out; and everything should be gone through decently and quietly. They should be encouraged to Do it themselves; but where Assistance appeared absolutely necessary, the Executive Committee should not see their way to refuse it.
One thing, however, is certain: if the project is to be successfully carried out, only men of known probity can be enrolled on the Society’s books. Except in extreme cases, or when the Society is practically unanimous, persuasion should never take the form of force; and, above all, we must start warily. With this object I would suggest that we begin with ‘lion comiques.’ There no harm could be done, even though the machinery did work badly at first. Not to be too sanguine, we might expect that only one in five would be amenable to reason. As an experiment, what would follow would still be interesting. Friends might have to be talked over; but once convince the principal, and his relatives would surely see that it were better so.
This brings me back to the constitution of the Society. No one would be eligible for election who did not have the welfare of his country at heart, and three black balls would exclude. In certain cases the Committee of Management would have the power to choose persons for Departure without the formality of a ballot; but these would be strictly confined to persons who had already come under the consideration of the Executive Committee and were prepared to meet the Society halfway. As members of the body they would be familiar with this mode of procedure, and, having chosen their own time (within certain limits), could Retire in whatever way they preferred. There would be no fixed entrance-fee or subscription, but the Society would be supported by voluntary contributions. Two books would be kept in the hall of the Society’s rooms — one for the use of members, the other for the names and addresses of persons whom in the opinion of not less than two members, it might be well for the Executive Committee to Consider Seriously. To avoid ostentation, one member of committee only would in the first instance pay the person referred to a Business visit; and to facilitate the dispatch of business, London would be divided into districts. There would be branch associations in the provinces, with Birmingham as a suitable centre. Each member of committee would have his own district, but with the privilege of calling in the assistance of one other member should the first visit prove unsatisfactory.
There is one danger that must be guarded against. A member of committee having a grudge against some particular individual or body of individuals may get a name entered on the Society’s books to gratify private malice. Such action would, of course, render him liable to immediate expulsion. But it cannot be too much insisted on, that if the Society is to do really useful work such mistakes must be avoided. This more especially at first; and hence the prudence of beginning with ‘lion comiques.’ Until the Society is in good working order we must only use Material of which we are quite sure. Let it be enacted, too, that in no case shall the subject for inquiry be visited by any one of those members who may have entered his name on the Society’s books. This rule must be absolute. It is plain that men of parts would frequently come under the Consideration of the Executive Committee; and as soon as these had come to understand the reason of being of the Society, they might be expected to call at the office and thus take the Initiative into their own hands. This would be exceedingly gratifying and cheering to both parties. Cynics of over thirty years of age might be placed on the books with a note of interrogation to their names. This would be followed by an inquiry into their life and circumstances: but only with great delicacy and caution. They belong to the large class of semi-fit and semiproper persons for Attention who will give the Society more trouble than either of the two sections of the community between whom they are the connecting link. The cynic of over thirty years of age (it would be wrong to consider him seriously at an earlier age) might Go with the greatest advantage to himself and the world generally; or, on the other hand, a sphere might still lie open for him. In short, he must be judged in individual cases, not as a whole; and to visit him prematurely might be to Lose him altogether. I look with misgivings on the idea of taking cases collectively in any instance, and would even prefer to have comic persons considered one by one. At the same time, should the Society decide otherwise, I would think him a poor supporter of a good cause who quarrelled with the majority of his fellow-members on a matter of Detail.
To reason kindly but Firmly with the persons who seem to be lingering by mistake would thus be the true function of the Society. As fellow-creatures who feel with them, not as vindictive enemies, we would approach them with a view to their Disappearance. I am no apologist for murder;
indeed, it is my deep regard for the sanctity of life, and a torturing sense of the way in which it is adulterated, so to speak, by thousands of Spurious Existences, that suggest the foundation of this Society. The assassin goes to work in a hostile frame of mind, thirsting for the gold or blood of his victim; while our Society is inspired by, and would be conducted on, the strictest and purest principles of humanity. In no case would we (as a body) encourage a Removal where less than two-thirds of the Society voted in its support. The prospectus we propose issuing will contain these words:—’The suicide takes his life because he dare not face his circumstances; while it will be our part to open the eyes of all persons recommended to our consideration to their precise condition. Our representatives or delegates will lay the real state of affairs plainly and succinctly before them, after which it will be for themselves to decide whether they had better Go, or stay on. The Society will supply them with advice, encouragement, and Appliances; but it will assist no one acting under strong emotion, and in all cases six hours must elapse between the final decision and its execution.’ Instead of working upon the person’s feelings, we shall demand of him the exercise of those higher powers — the intellect and the will. I have thought it wiser to draw up no list of probable Subjects, though these must suggest themselves to any one who has mixed in society. Disappointments there will be assuredly at first; but a sphere of usefulness lies before the Society, if it could get a really good sample for a Beginning.”
HERE we resume our comments. There was a momentary improvement in the weather (let us call it) during the second half of that April, for not only did ‘Better Dead’ pierce the gloom, but also ‘An Enquiry into Heroines,’ and another not at all mysterious about sparrows; indeed Anon stepped into May with several little articles trotting behind him. Then (and so it was to alternate for long stretches) enter three murderers, Rejection, Despair, and the most shuddersome of his callers to a freelance, the one who knocks not, Silence. In a London fog, though one knows he is in his own street (or so it was in those gas-lit days), he may have to grope for keyholes until at last he finds one in which his key turns. So it often was with Anon trying to open doors with his pen.