Short Stories 1895-1926 (45 page)

‘A pet canary, perhaps?' But the voice was almost too tired to be insolent.

‘Why not indeed?' replied the old man, ‘if you took a lively pleasure in it. Still, cages remain cages; and you yourself would agree with me that heart and soul you yourself are something of a recluse. And this I gather is your hermitage. And I have seldom in a pretty wide experience of such things seen a cage more elaborate. You are content with it?'

Mr Blumen stared a little heavily into the face of his visitor. ‘If you know anything of the society in this neighbourhood, and if you mean that I enjoy solitude, then I am in complete agreement with you.'

‘So would any chrysalis be,' said his visitor almost gaily. ‘I grieve with all my heart that you are compelled to resign things you have grown to care for – hoarded, Mr Blumen; that it is now too late, I mean, to have
given
them away.'

Mr Blumen laid a gentle hand upon the corner of the chimney-piece. For an instant their ashen wax-like lids descended over his green-grey eyes.

‘And now,' went on his visitor gently, rising to his feet, ‘that last taxi-cab has passed out of hearing. There is more than half a moon to-night over Whinnimoor. It is time for us to be off.'

The soft white glare of snow fringed the crests of the mountains that surrounded the tortuous valley beneath them. Blossoming trees and coloured drifts of flowers mounted up almost to their frozen margin. The sun ascending into the dark blue vault of the sky, though it was but an hour or two after break of day, cast beams so fierce upon their flanks that the lawn-like mists were already swirling in the heat, showering their dew on leaf and flower and rock.

St Dusman had made his way into the valley in the small hours, and now sat drowsing on a stone beside which roared a torrent of green water. He had removed his sandals in order to lave his feet in the coldness, and now it would appear as if every flame-plumed bird in the thickets around him, and every puffing breath of wind that came wandering across the precipitous gorges, were inviting the spirit of the old man to return to the world, to slip out of sleep and waken again. With mouth agape, however, he nodded on. Flies and butterflies of innumerable dyes flashed and fluttered in the empty air around him. Fish of hardly less brave a livery sported with fin and tail over the coloured stones that tessellated the bed of the stream that flowed beside him.

Two or three hundred feet above, at the foot of one of the lower peaks glittering in the sunrays with rainbow flashes from its exposed face of rock and quartz, a mountain leopard now stole into view, lifting its gentle head into the sunshine. With twitching brows and whiskers, it sniffed the morning air, while its amber eyes rested for a moment upon the stooping figure of the old man crouched up and motionless in sleep far beneath him. With a faint uneasy mew, it then lifted its gaze upwards towards a pair of eagles circling in the enormous cavity of the now starless heavens. Then curling its narrow beautiful body upon the sward under the rocky wall of the mountain, it couched with head on paws, and composed itself to sleep.

It was the scream of a parrakeet that pierced through the old man's dreams at last. His eyes opened, he raised his head and looked around him. Where all had been dark with the gloom of night was now radiant with day. He rose to his feet and shuffled towards a huge spreading tree from amid whose swaying branches of foliage, almost brushing the ground beneath them with their blooms, he could wait and watch unseen. Resting his hand upon a smooth bough of the tree a little above his head, he contemplated the scene around him.

A smile spread over his seamed, weather-worn old face as his eyes roved to and fro. For twenty or thirty paces distant from him on a smooth drift of sward stood, as it were, a low small arbour woven of dried grass and rushes, and roofed with patches of moss and coloured feathers even. No bigger than a beehive though it was, it showed as conspicuous on the turf as a green oasis in the wilderness, or an isle of coral rising gently with its palms and tamarisks from out of the sea.

Some small creature, it was evident, had diligently collected together for its pleasure a few of the more sparkling and garish objects that lay within reach – muscous growths, for example, that flourished only in the denser and darker thickets of the surrounding forest, the bark of a silvery shrub that ventured nearest of all on the hilltops to the never melting snows, a fossil shell or two. While scattered about the rounded entrance to the arbour lay bright pebbles, bright ‘everlasting' flowers, scraps of quartz, and what appeared to be flakes of a shining metal.

The old man sighed, though he did not stop smiling, as he feasted himself on these simple artifices and awaited the appearance of the hidden designer. The hours of eternity are no longer than those of time. Contrariwise, a century of earth's seasons may be in thought but as transitory as the colours of a rainbow. But, whatever his ruminations might be, St Dusman made no attempt to suppress the look of humorous compassion that now wrinkled his face at this showing of yet another renewed attempt to make a haven in the wilderness.

He had not very long to wait. For sunbeams had but just gilded the fringe of the water in its cold rocky channel, when there came a sudden scurry of wings from above his sheltering tree, and there alit on the very stone that had been his nocturnal stool, a bird.

From claw to crest it reared itself about eighteen inches from its resting-place, and in plumage was of a uniform saddish green, though tinged at the extremities of its primaries and of its tail feathers with a dull cinnamon, its breast deepening to a faint shot purple towards the belly.

With dipping and sidling head it surveyed the minute surrounding plateau, showing in its quick movements a faint unease as if its senses were dimly aware of strange and dangerous company. So translucent was the surrounding air that even at this distance the old man could mark the silvery rim to the iris of its eye, and could count the horned, outspread claws that clutched the stone. He had long since descried too, even to the delicate markings of its rosettes, the leopard apparently sleeping away its vigil on the height above.

The bird that had thus alighted on the stone nearby, appeared to be in quest of company. It bowed and becked now a little this way, now a little that; it stretched and sleeked a wing until every speck on its neutral-patterned feathers displayed itself in the sun. Then crouching lower and amorously into its soft plumage, with stealthy movements it twisted its neck upon its shoulders until its beak, as if in maternal joy and quietude, lay gently upon its bosom. The old man smiled at the realization that while this last gesture had come straight from nature's teaching, what had preceded it seemed to have been learned by mimicry and to have been practised with reluctance.

A slight stir within the arbour now caught his attenion. Instantly the visitor on the stone drew herself down and sped swiftly into cover behind and beneath the boulders that lay along the margin of the stream. Many minutes passed. The sun swept upward into the heavens, rejoicing in his strength. By infinite degrees the shadows cast by mountain peak and crest moved in a vast curve like the hands of an enormous timepiece. At faintest touch of their chill in its lair the leopard had stirred, lifted and stretched itself, and after one swift glance over the scene spread out beneath it, had vanished from sight, as if in obedience to a secret cue.

And now from out the pitch-black arch of its nesting-place, issued into the blazing glare of the morning a creature compared with whom the visitor to its domains was but as a handmaid in the train of the Queen of Sheba compared with King Solomon in all his glory. Its crested head was of molten gold – a gold which swam and rippled down towards its folded wings into a lively green seen only in rare mosses and in the shallows of the oceans. Green, blue, and purple then mingled their beauty. The wing tips were black as soot; the tail coverts, interrupted with snow, resembled them; while above them, arched over its back, flowed upwards two paler shafts terminating in a lyre-shaped pattern of hues almost indistinguishable the one from the other, as they glinted, flashed, and melted in the sun.

This lordly creature, having surveyed a moment the surrounding day, trod delicately onwards to its bathing-place; and after a while returned once more to preen itself amid the odd riches which it had collected and strown in devices recognizable only by itself, around its arbour. And not until now stole out again its humble infatuated visitor.

The old man almost laughed outright to see the disdain with which his lordship refused to recognize his visitor's presence there. Indolently, methodically he continued his exquisite toilet. While she, poor creature, as if now utterly ashamed of her former wiles, cowered half in shadow, half in sun, gently observing him. ‘O Lucifer, Son of the Morning,' muttered the old man – beads of sweat, in spite of the sheltering branches above him glistening on his bald pate, ‘O Lucifer, Son of the Morning, by pride fell the Angels.'

Sheer curiosity seemed at last to overcome her as she drew a little nearer to watch the adored one rearrange his treasury. Now one shell, then another, a fragment of quartz or of glinting metal, he lifted with his beak and disposed in place. There appeared to be singularly little method in his peculiar hobby, for as often as not he returned to its former place in the pattern what but a moment or two before he had with extreme deliberation deposited elsewhere. Possibly some outlying province of his bird-like mind and attention was concerned with his faithful visitor. But not the faintest ripple of neck or plume betrayed it. His complete heed seemed to be solely for his pretty collection.

‘How strange it is,' thought the old man, ‘that even in the simplest of her creatures nature consistently endeavours to reach the least bit further than she can stretch.' There was something almost human in the queer devices these creatures of the same kin and kind were exhibiting, though neglect and contempt were steadily reducing the unwanted one to her own sovran and instinctive self. She rose out of the shadow, displayed once more an indolent wing, and emitted from her throat a curious, bubbling, guttural note.

And apparently, as if at last in heed of her entreaties, her disdainful idol had suddenly thrust forward his golden head; every feather on his body seeming to bristle and roughen itself as he stared. Yet even this could be but small comfort to her meekness and vanity, for his silver-lined eyes were now fixed not upon herself but a few paces beyond her.

There was a deathly pause. For an instant or two the small lovely universe around them, snow-masked mountain-top to brawling stream, seemed to have been swept up in a soundless swoon. Then, as if at a signal, three sentient objects flashed into movement, so rapid as to be individually indistinguishable.

With a mighty whirr of wing, scattering with its talons as it rose the shells and pebbles strown around it, the Bird of the Arbour flashed into the air; and the crouching leopard leapt towards its prey.

Distracted an instant by the foe swooping to attack it, the beast swerved in its leap, missing by a few inches its assured victim, succeeding merely in tearing out a few dull feathers from her wing. She screamed piteously as she fled, then turned too late to observe what had befallen. Plunging with beak and claw, the master of the arbour had cowed for a moment her assailant. The leopard crouched snarling, with lashing tail, defending its eyes against plunging beak and claw. Then suddenly, and with one lightning buffet of its paws, it leapt into the air, and smote its aggressor down.

St Dusman drew his roughened hand over his forehead; and seizing his staff issued out from his retreat towards the fray. If he had intended to intervene to any purpose in what was passing, he had come too late. After one glimpse of this advancing Strangeness, the leopard with cringing body turned swiftly and fled.

The old man approached the wounded and dying bird, which feebly endeavoured to beat off his advances. He raised it gently in his arms, and carrying it back into the shadow of its arbour, laid it down among its treasures. The creature's dimming eye gazed vacantly on these vanishing possessions.

‘Poor soul, poor soul,' the old man whispered. Then hastening down to the stream, he dipped the hem of his outer garment into the water and returning, squeezed out a few drops into its yawning bill.

Strange changes of hue seemed to be chasing, like wind over wheat, across its miraculous plumage. Its glazing eye was fixed, hardly in terror now, but in mute hopeless entreaty, upon the old man's face.

‘There, there, my dear,' he said, as if an old bachelor of a hundred generations had somehow learned to croon to a hurt child. ‘There, there, my dear; it's only time to be whispering adieu again. The longer the journey the more numerous the inns. And perhaps a moment or two's rest in each.'

But as he watched its quickening pangs the old man suddenly rebuked himself for his stupidity in not reminding himself that other comfort – tenderer than any human heart could offer – was near at hand. He lifted his eyes and searched the surrounding thickets. It was not yet too late. The carcase of the creature beneath his hands was not yet wholly insensitive. And having moistened once again the pointed tongue within its beak, the old man rose to his feet and shuffled off as quick as his old bones would allow, down into the ravine where brawled the mountain river.

Nor while the morning hours lasted did he attempt to look behind him. He merely sat there lost in reverie.

And since the tongues of the water kept up an incessant roar and babblement, no faintest murmur of the plaintive farewells behind him told whether, like the fabulous swan, the Bird of the Arbour sings only at the approach of death.

Even the keenest eye slowly and circumspectly directing its gaze in as remote an ambience as it could command from any one of the blackened crests that lifted themselves fifteen to twenty feet like the billows of a frozen sea on this Plain of Kootoora, would have discerned no sign of life. Minute slender steel-coloured midges, it is true, their burnished wings like infinitesimal flakes of mica beating the arid air, their horn-shaped snouts curved beneath their many-prismed eyes, drifted in multitudinous clusters in every hollow. They might be animate ashes.