HOW vividly one sometimes retains for years the memory of a chance acquaintance—a person whom one has met but once, passed in the street, talked to for half an hour, whose name one may not even know.
A friend of mine was travelling in Persia, and as she and her brother were resting in a caravansarai after a journey, they saw a Persian gentleman beckoning to them from the garden. They went down to him, and he asked them to come and have supper with him. They came, and found the bread laid out, plate-wise, and the roast meat on it. They ate and talked to him, and after their meal went on their journey. They never asked for nor heard his name, nor he theirs,—they willnever meet again; but that Persian gentleman will be as vivid to them until the day of their death as a friend of years.
Such memory of a mere passing chance acquaintance is not confined to human beings. Sometimes one meets animals for an hour or two, sometimes one accidentally lights upon them in a crisis of their lives,—such even as their death,—and one suddenly and unexpectedly understands and knows them. Some people and animals one never gets near. You may, for instance, sit opposite people in church for years, know all their Sunday dresses and hats, and how much they give in the offertory, and be not a bit nearer to them in the end than at the beginning. Such is the acquaintance one has with caterpillars; they are always just the same; they eat and grow and become cocoons, and reappear as butterflies, and there is no character from beginning to end. That is partly why they are such excellent symbols.
Then there are some animals that have no sense of intimacy; they let you into all their domestic relations,—their committees, their politics, and so forth, at once; for the reason that they have only one side to their character. They have established a Platonic Republic; they do their domesticduties on the scale of the commonwealth, have a universal nursery and government education. In spite of their monarchical arrangements, they are real socialists at heart,—they care for nothing but the good of the State. Even those that live in a tiny community, two or three together, have no real individuality. Have you ever found one of those tiny round nests, like ashes of paper, which apparently grow on a stalk, and in which two or three yellow and black tree-wasps live? It is the easiest thing in the world to scrape acquaintance with those wasps; kill an ordinary housefly and give it to them. They will take it from your fingers, and, without the slightest shame at “talking shop” in public, will roll it into a neat, hard, black ball, crushing up legs and wings alike, and stow it away inside the nest.
But the want of intimacy characteristic of many insects is not characteristic of insectsas such. I once attended a grasshopper crisis. There was nothing professional about the grasshoppers; they did not not “spend themselves in leaps ... to reach the sun.” They did not think the least bit in the world about the sun, they were merely private individuals—courting. Grasshoppers’ courting is an organised affair. I saw it inSwitzerland on a soft, sunny afternoon, when the hotel population was divided between the Roman Catholic Church on the right and the English Church on the left, and the steps of the hotel between the two. As I dawdled along by a bank of bilberry just turning red, the grasshoppers were singing loud among the stalks of heather; suddenly I was aware that they were not singing aimlessly and jumping without purpose, but that they were intently engaged. It was like the old fairy-story, when a child falls asleep on a bank, and wakes to find himself surrounded by fairies intent on preparation for the marriage of the king. The large limp ladies were sprawling about ungracefully, and in front sat their small, spry gentlemen singing away. Here was a green gentleman serenading a brown lady, and I wondered at his taste; presently she got up and ran away. Clearly that was part of the drama; it was the genuine “flirtatious” instinct of avoiding a plain answer on purpose to provoke pursuit; for the gentleman does not jump, but runs after her to bring her back. When lo! a green lady is seen crossing the path, also coyly escaping from a suitor, and the faithless swain is captivated all in a moment by the green charms, and deserts his brunette to pursueher. Further on—astonishing sight!—is a young ladies’ school, just “come out”; fourteen or fifteen green and brown ladies, shy and awkward, scrambling down the bank and all talking together.
I never saw such courting before or since, but I shall never lose the feeling of intimacy, for I know now that grasshoppers are not always little machines arranged with the greatest amount of muscle for the smallest amount of weight, or wound up to trill on in the sunshine, as mechanically as a watch ticks, or even created to be a burden,—but they are tiny creatures, full of emotion and insect loves, putting their best energy into their whirring song to claim the admiration of the languid, lovely creatures that lie lazily listening.
But sometimes one arrives at a sudden personal relation to a wild creature, too often ended abruptly by its escape or death, and its kinsfolk are never afterwards to one as little as before. One has regarded it as a member of a class; henceforward one regards that class as composed of individuals possessed of strong personal desires, needs, emotions, not merely obeying what we call “instincts,”—meaning thereby the mechanical impulse to eat, grub, make nests, care for young. To take anextreme instance, perhaps you think that moles are altogether uninteresting, merely existing for the sake of lightening the soil and destroying the wire-worm, and, in case of undue increase, fit to make a cap for the mole-catcher and a little skeleton to swing from a tree. But perhaps some day you will see in the stubble, after the hay is cut, a little black form running confusedly round and round; catch it, and hold in your hands the soft, velvet-coated body; feel the funny, groping snout pushing through your fingers, on the chance—however different their touch is from the damp, delicious earth—that it will be able to find some place where it may grub a hole and escape; realise that you might make a pet of this small, soft thing, and then please recognise its wild desire for liberty, and let it go.
But there are some animals which, although usually recognised as “wild animals,” seem to have no fear whatever, except when they are being chased; once they are in the hands of a human being they are completely self-possessed. A friend of mine sat in a field when the hay was being carried, and saw a little field-mouse playing about; she pursued and nearly caught it, but it finally escaped. She came back to where she hadbeen sitting to fetch her umbrella, and under it was found another little field-mouse asleep, which she caught without difficulty, carried back, and put into a box with holes in it.
She brought him in to tea that afternoon, and even at this, his first meal, he sat up like a kangaroo on his long hind-legs, and ate bread and milk out of a spoon. He absorbed alarming quantities of it, fell instantly asleep, woke up after a few minutes and ate a great deal more; but the next morning the poor little beast was found gasping, apparently dying; and when his box was opened he would not run away. But he presently recovered as suddenly, and again devoured much food, and so went on through the day, though his gasping fits returned at intervals. Next morning he died. Is it that we find these creaturesgenerally when they are ill?—the least touch seems to make them die. Certainly I remember once or twice, in those joyful days when sitting in a hayfield meant the height of bliss, that our very gentle and amiable collie, excited by an “animal” smell, would grub open a nest of little field-mice, and stand by delighted and smiling at his discovery, while we came up just in time to see three or four expiring infants. He could hardly have killed them, for he only wanted to look at them. Yet they died.
What was it, I wonder, that killed Maximilianus? Maximilianus was a very small shrew, and we found him running about the garden; he was just about as long as his name. He was not the least frightened, and we carried him about for half a day; but we found nothing he could eat, until at last we came upon a very large, fat, orange-coloured centipede. Maximilianus seized upon this with the utmost delight, began it vigorously at one end, and ate it up like a radish as far as the middle. Then he died.
We had once a visitor in the shape of a squirrel, who came uninvited, made his abode with us for some months, and finally departed, taking “French leave.” My mother was his guide, philosopher,and friend. He slept in a pocket of her apron (this was in the seventies), whence he came out to fly up the curtains and drop down, venture on to the breakfast table, and experiment on her tea with a tiny paw. He always ran up the curtain when he was scolded; as for instance when my father, going to the sideboard to cut ham, found the squirrel’s head just coming out of it, having eaten its way through from the other side. Then, after being received in the bosom of our family, after sharing meals with the household, after attending lessons and even prayers (when he ran up the back of a kneeling housemaid), theskwug suddenly disappeared without warning. A few days after, my mother was walking in the wood, when a squirrel ran up to her, put its paw upon her foot, looked her in the face, then turned and ran away. It was never heard of again.
Sometimes you find animals which, though not very near and dear to human beings, have a great influence on other animals. Our donkey died the other day. She was a remarkable and original animal. Though she was a fixture, taken at a high valuation from our predecessors, her demeanour was such that we called her Jack, and thought she had retired to a well-earned repose.Then we found she was not quite two years old, and a lady. We were always good friends, but not specially intimate. She and her mule-foal might come to the window for bread and salt when the horses were not allowed on the grass; but for weeks together she did not avail herself of this privilege, till one day a snort was heard from outside, and the donkey’s nose was seen flattened against the glass. Once, when my mother was walking with a friend of hers,—not an acquaintance of the donkey,—Jack, for I cannot help calling her so, solemnly accompanied them all the afternoon, walking between them. But such occasional walks, and the fact that she was amiably willing to follow anyone quite impartially for a handful of oats, constituted the extent of our intimacy with her. Not such was her relation to the other animals. As exclusively as my goat walked with the cows, Jack walked with the horses. She did not, of course, consider herself so superior to her company as the goat. She made many friends among the horses; you might not have known it, perhaps, but neither as a general rule would you suspect the friendship which men have for one another by their way of behaving. If a man meets a great friend in company, he either takesno notice of him or stands near him without saying anything. Jack used to stand about with the horses without saying anything, but they liked to have her near.
One morning Jack was found dead of fatty degeneration of the heart. “I’m sure the horses miss her,” said the bailiff’s wife; “I look at them standing in the yard, and I can see they miss her.”
Jack was buried in the orchard, and her little mule followed the body as far as the garden-gate. But there they shut the door, and the one mourner was left outside.