Part 10

I have no way of knowing whether any Daniel rose to warn them. If so, he was not heeded. The feast went on uninterrupted. Or, it is possible, too, they had not the requisite education or conscience to enable them to read the moonlight on the rafter wall for writing of an ominous character.

When I wakened in the morning, not a sound or evidence. Like Bottom, it seemed to me that I had had a most rare vision, for daylight had laid a hushing and dispersing hand on them also. Then, suddenly, I knew it all for reality. Not a beady eye among them, of course, that was not closed now; in the daytime twilight of old rafters, all of them, without doubt, slept, dandelion deep, their noses and their whiskers on their tails.

Meanwhile, time and events went forward. Miss Layng, a North-of-Ireland woman who kept house for us, while I attended to the work required of me in my study, appeared before me with a white and sleepless face.

Miss Layng had ominous colored hair, which she heaped each morning in an exact manner above a face in which delicate health, gentleness, and unalterable determination were composite. She stood before me now, like an allegorical figure of Justice, or Commerce, or Law, bearing in one outheld hand a magenta "Dutchman's head" cheese.

"You heard them?"

She spoke with quiet severity.

I looked inquiring, innocent.

She disregarded this, as a person too much above a lie herself to recognize one.

"I think we shall need six traps, at least. Cook says she will not stay unless they go. She says one ran across her face last night!"

(Oh, the riotousness of them! More than I had suspected!)

At this moment the cook herself appeared, far less allegorical, comfortingly real, a lemon-squeezer in one hand.

"Oh, mum, I can't be saying exactly whether it did or not. Maybe it did, belike it didn't. But they do get me that nervous with what they _might_ do!"

"You can see from this," antiphonied Miss Layng, solemnly.

She turned the Holland cheese toward me. In its side was eaten what could only be called a cavern. She stood there exhibiting it, eloquent, without need of words.

Meanwhile, my own mental processes were busy, delightedly. Of course! of course! Here was a revelation and an accounting! It was this, undoubtedly, that had been the occasion of so much merriment and wild celebration. And how altogether natural! For days they had been fearful, and oppressed with dark anxiety. What harm might not such a race as ourselves bring them! Other powers had fled before us. They had remained! But who dared tell the outcome? Dark prophecies! Sombre forebodings! Unthinkable possibilities! And then,--then,--when the dark-minded and old among them pointed out optimism as the sheerest folly,--then came this proof of unlooked-for benevolence! Age and pessimism received their due. Caution and timorousness were flung to the winds. Old wives and grandfathers were flouted, and their cautiousness set down to sheer envy and crabbedness. The day and the victory were in the hands of the young, the optimistic, the full of faith! Come, ladies; come gentlemen! Pay no heed to these pessimistic aged people. Preserve your faith in life! Here is good warrant! Quick! uncork the bottles! Bring the baskets along! This is a day for feasting, for feasting! Look upon this magenta miracle of benevolence, and be convinced. Life is kind!

Where is a man with heart and imagination so dead who would not understand, by the light of all this, why the night had seen such celebration? How well understood, now, was the daring of the gentlemen, the almost hysterical gayety of the ladies!

Meanwhile Miss Layng waited.

"I thought I would get six traps, but wished to speak of it first, otherwise you might wonder to see so many on the bill at the end of the month."

In this cryptic yet crystalline fashion the problem of their fate was presented to me. There was put before me a choice, a clear choice, between the proper maintaining of an honorable household, the retaining of a housekeeper and a cook with all that this implied as to my own comfort, and--a whole community of I know not how many fathers, mothers, children, step-children, brothers, half-brothers, uncles, aunts, cousins, first cousins once removed, prophets, sibyls, lawgivers.

Need I say which I felt constrained to choose?

Six were caught the first night.

III

Six the first night! In the very midst of their rejoicings and the apparent favor of their divinity--six! What a subject for a rodent Æschylus! How they must have set themselves to ponder it! How and by what neglect or unintentional disrespect had they offended the gods, who but a while before had shone so kind! Six! And, as in the reapings of war among ourselves, these were bound to have been the best and most adventurous spirits. I paused to look at only one of them. What a sleek and likely fellow he was! What a bead of an eye! What a father of a family he would have made, nay, perhaps was!

After that I asked Miss Layng to spare me all bulletins and statistics; but by the frequency with which I came across her in the halls, or just emerging from closets, holding far from her, between horrified fingers, a small magenta trap rigged with wires and a dangling tail, I knew the number was large.

I knew, too, by signs other and quite as authentic. The riotous junketings had indeed ceased. The community was without doubt sobered, and, it may be, led to think of its sins, its gods having turned against it. There was less frolic and gladness in the world than there had been.

I confess, all this seemed to me a loss, or, more exactly, a kind of waste. The wiser and the brooding East does not throw such things away. Are there not many folk in India, of tawny skin and gentle eye, who regard the humbler orders as sacred? There in that land are not the monkeys (and I cannot believe them to be a less destructive or garrulous race) welcome to the temples? There does not Kim's sacred bull go about and select the best vegetables for himself?

I was discontent with our order of things, not to say conscience-stricken, and thought much about it. How we patronize and humiliate and rout and exterminate these humbler folk! With how marked an arrogance we deal with them! How we impose our morals upon them, and bid them live up to our laws or be gone! They must exist in the presence of a perpetual ultimatum. No court is held for their benefit. There is no appeal possible save to mouse-traps with their inevitable death-penalty. There is no more chance of getting their case correctly stated before us than before the White Queen. Who ever listened to even their most able and eloquent attorney?

"My lords," he begins, with nervous whiskers, "the case of my client is one that especially commends itself to human clemency. Six little ones at home, my lords, and not a mouthful to eat! If this, my lords, if this be not--"

"Off with his head! Sentence first" (the inevitable sentence!), "verdict afterward!"

So we behave ourselves atrociously toward these, who, though of a humbler order, are yet susceptible, I doubt not, of sensibilities and sorrows and enjoyments; we, who in turn are so ready to abuse our own order for their atrocities when we do not happen to be a party to them.

These things are disturbing to philosophy and troubling to the heart. How shall we with a conscience justify ourselves in the eyes of the animal creation? Humbler folk than ourselves, yet I cannot think that mice suffer by a comparison. I have attended to them with much speculative attention, and I have found them a peaceable people without malice. The worst offense that I have to record against them is the demolition of several fine books in my library; but it was done (it is not fair to hide this testimony) with the high intent of providing a comfortable nest for the birth and early tending of the tender young. As much cannot be said for the destruction of Louvain, for the shelling of Rheims. They have purloined my cheese and been sly as to my soap and tallow candles, but not, you will note, that they might grow disproportionately fat and sleek thereon; no, nor for the sake of banking these riches, to exchange them later for horseless carriages in which to loll lazily or to pursue madly some unwholesome excitement; no, nor yet to lay such things by in hoard and stores in such a manner as to make it difficult or impossible for others to have the same pleasure as themselves. No; they took only what hunger rendered legitimate, a few satisfying nibbles at the candle, then leaving it free, with a fine democracy, for the next man to take whatever was his need.

Where shall you find me a millionaire, or even a moderately conscientious business man among us, with as generous and as democratic a tendency? We who are so sharp with them, so eager to give them the death-penalty, would we have thieved as little as they? Nor have I ever, for all my listenings, been able to hear any quarrelings or recriminations among them. Solicitous cautions, dangerous adventure, frolickings and gigglings and squeaking laughter I have heard, but nothing to compare with our harshnesses, spoken and unspoken; nor do I believe them capable either of our sullenness or our spites. I have met, as have most of us, with days of such from honorable men and women, which I do not believe a mouse--of a so much lower order!--would for a moment be capable of.

In the face of uncertainties and disappointments such as theirs, what would become, I wonder, of our philosophy? Yet they would appear to maintain their gentleness unspoiled. We who take offense so readily; we who would boast if we forgave a man seven times seven! They, it would appear from easily collected data, do, in all likelihood, forgive seven hundred times seventy, and make no ado about it at all. They seem always ready to try life anew, and to give you another chance to be generous.

I was sitting once in the library of the old house, of which I have written, reading. Stillness and the stars were out; a fire burned on the hearth, for the night was cold. I read by the light of a lamp a book that I loved. At my feet slept Commodore, my collie, his pointed nose resting on his paws. On the rug by the fire was the old tortoise-shell cat, Lady Jane, a spoiled but endeared companion. Both had had their supper so bounteously that the dish of milk lay unemptied still on the hearth, and, like the Giant in the fairy tale, they slept "from repletion."

They slept and I read, and for comfort of mind and body you might have gone far to find three so comfortable as we that night. And then presently I became aware of a little timorous shadow, that was not a shadow, after all, but a tiny, tiny mouse. It put up its nose and sniffed the air nor'-nor'-west, sou'-sou'-east. It tasted the possible danger with its whiskers. It tasted and made sure, delicately, like a connoisseur. Could the great adventure be risked?

I can give you no idea by what sensitive soundings and testings and deliberations and speculations it at last crept into the flickering firelight. I wish I could convey to you the delicacy of its behavior: manners to make those of Commodore and Lady Jane (they with their sounding titles!) seem crude and greedy and plebeian. Its little pauses said, "May I?" Its delicate deliberations conveyed, "If I am troubling no one?" Its hesitations offered, "If I may be so bold?" And then, after these preliminaries, it took its place how politely on the brim of the flat dish of milk, and drank, and raised its head, and drank, paused and drank again, daintily. Once, I thought, it offered a courteous toast to me and my silence.

Commodore and Lady Jane slept on! Oh, if they had known! Oh, the mews of disappointment and the terrible barkings and the _Fi-fo-fum_ there would have been! But no, they slept on; and at last, having supped but lightly, the little mouse took itself away, carrying with it neither money-bags nor marvelous hen, nor golden harp. A true story and a fairy tale all in one, if you like--and without the questionable ethics of its more famous prototype.

IV

What do they make of life? Their stoicism, their gentleness, their never-jaded curiosity perpetually tempt my speculation. That they are a people of vicissitudes and disappointments due largely to ourselves needs no arguing. What opinions have they of us? What effect have our behaviors on them? A consistently gentle people, they are treated with unvarying severity. What have they in lieu of logic to make life bearable? And what reward is there for their virtues? Or, are they too simple at heart, as yet, to ask for reward at all beyond the hope of a mere precarious existence? Is life as dear to them as that? And what, if any, in the way of religious speculation of a crude and early order, might they be supposed to entertain? I would like to be delegated to investigate and report upon mouse mythology.

I can hardly rid myself of the idea that in their present is, as it were, some dim glimmering of our own past. They seem to me testing the world, as we ourselves must have done when we too were less established, when we also were in a position scarcely less precarious, eons before any written records were kept, long before man had learned to remember at will for the quick purposes of convenience and comparison--in a dim, dim foretime, when to us, in some early Caliban existence, the outward world was as Prospero, unaccountable, and possessed of strange whimsies and quick with unwarrantable revenges.

"When a tree," says Frazer, tracing in his "Golden Bough" the beginnings of mythology, "comes to be viewed no longer as a body of the tree spirit, but simply as its abode, which it can quit at pleasure, an important advance has been made in religious thought. Animism is passing into polytheism."

I cannot help wondering from time to time, whimsically, whether those quiet denizens of that old house had made "an important advance in religious thought"; was "animism," with them, "passing into polytheism"? Were mouse-traps deceptive and evil gods with terrible snapping jaws, or but the abodes of these evil deities? And for philosophy and metaphysic, what had they? In that dim attic world was this perhaps an entire people in its mythopœic age, their gods descending and ascending miraculously, leaving a magenta cheese as incontrovertible evidence, or as unaccountably visiting them with swift and crafty destruction?

I am inclined to think their world is a colored one, fertile in fables. It would not surprise me to find that a small wooden object, known to us of a different development as a mere "mouse-trap," is to them some Dis or Ahriman, a terrible deity of dark powers and multiple personalities. That there are other gods besides,--the great and awful CAT, the less omnipresent but not less terrible TERRIER,--I am not disposed to doubt; nor do I think they lack the shining ones also, as quiet as the others are full of movement, as conducive to life and well-being as the others to death and destruction--bright, effulgent ones of the godlike color of cheese, or silver sheen of tallow and paraffine; and back of all these, it may be, some elder deities,--ourselves,--the older gods with Olympian powers, who can establish earthquakes; who can wipe away entire communities; gods and goddesses whose heads are in the clouds, whose movements are terrific, who shake complete creation when they walk, and with unthinkable besoms sweep with horrible sweepings, and periodically visit the world with awful scourges and hellish visitations of order and cleanliness.

I would not pretend to be acquainted with mouse literature, but I would venture a wager that their "Arabian Nights" outdoes ours as cheese, chalk. Djinns, genii, and affrites--can it be thought that they lack them? If the unaccountability of the world be, as it would seem to me, the basis of all literature and the origin of all fable, philosophy, entertainment, and speculation, can it be denied that they have extraordinary inducement? If our own world seems full of chance, and forever breaking away from bonds and probabilities, I only ask you to compare it with theirs!--in which the unaccountable is the sole certainty they possess.

I awoke one morning in the late fall, and began to dress, giving no thought whatever to them and their problems. When I came to put on my shoe, however, I could no longer ignore them. In the toe of it, stowed away safely, were three hickory-nuts!

Some sleek-coated citizen, with a winter house in mind, had wandered in those purlieus, thinking to begin the arduous labor requisite to the building of a home suitable to the long, dark season nearly at hand, when lo, this prudent necessity was suddenly, by a miraculous bounty, waived! Mark you and observe! Here was provided for him a home such as his best skill could never have contrived. A place how warm, how neat, how conformable! That his acceptance was immediate, was testified by his already accumulated stores.

I paused and took them in my hand: one, two, three. There was a saint, I am told, who allowed the birds to build in his two palms, and did not rise from his knees until the fledglings were ready to fly from the nest. Neither was I a saint, nor could I afford such beneficence. I was pressed for time, as God's saints, I believe, never are, and I needed my shoe. I slipped it on as I had slipped on its mate; I tied its lace neatly, gave the bow an efficient pat, and walked away in it. It is true, I did put the three hickory-nuts on the bureau. I am not sure what I meant to do with them, but I never saw them again. Miss Layng, the terrible goddess of order, probably flung them out of the window with mutterings.

But I ask you only to picture the romance, and it may be the terror, of the thing to the one who had laid such delightful plans, who had enjoyed such anticipations! House, stores, hopes, social aggrandizement, everything--gone! carried off entire, by God knows what spirit! and not so much as a vestige left to tell the tale!

I do not forget that it is the custom to speak of mice as _destructive_; yet may not that word be used, after all, with something of a bias? I picture one of them on his way to seek a few bits of newspaper for the lining of a nest, and I imagine him suddenly endowed with the ability to read the inky characters. He pauses in amaze. His eyes bulge and devour the news beadily. And what news it is! Statistics! Staggering statistics of the men and officers killed since our great war's beginning; and of aged and innocent citizens shot, women violated, little children sacrificed, noble cities destroyed!

His hand goes over his heart to quiet its violent beating. Ah, what a race of gods they are! Or, he reads this from a recent account of the bayonet practice at Plattsburg--whatever "bayonet" may mean, and whatever "Plattsburg"; for these accessories of civilization lie ahead of him some eons.

"Aim for the vitals," he reads. "Do not fire until you feel your bayonet stick. Thus you will shatter the bone, and you can then withdraw the blade. At the same time, try to trip your enemy with your left foot, so that he will fall forward."

None of this is clear to him. This is the deportment, without doubt, of the immortal gods! Fancy the consequences of _his_ attempting to trip _his_ enemy, the mouse-trap, or the cat, or the terrier, with _his_ left foot!

No; these are powers and potencies to which he can only look forward in dim futures, when the mouse tribe shall have attained, eons hence, perhaps, to a higher order of being, and to these godlike practices. But that, however glorious, is but a far dream! Meek and gentle and forgiving, in his inferiority, he lends himself devotedly once more to his labors, and nibbles the newspaper, carrying off small pieces of it, very destructively, to build that near-by nest in which soon are to be born tiny creatures as gentle and inferior and destructive as himself.

To one who has studied mythology with a reverence for its revelations, it must often have seemed that man is kinder than his conception of the mighty powers that try him. Job would seem to be, rather than the Deity, the hero of Job's tragical story; and how much nobler, to cite a most obvious instance, is the ancient Greek than his deities!

However impious this may appear to the pious, yet to me the thing looks hopeful. Dread and powerful as are our own gods,--Authority, Mammon, Sentiment, Public Opinion, Superstition, Fear,--and many as have been our sacrifices offered up to them, yet may it not be that humanity, frail, and so largely at their mercy, retains some sovereign nobilities still unvanquished by them?

Have we not had our own disappointments and vicissitudes? Have not our conceptions of our duties and privileges and rights and gayeties been but poorly adjusted to those powers whose awful retributions we have tempted? Yet I am inclined to hope that, notwithstanding all this, we shall still preserve some gentleness that cannot be conquered; shall still retain some virtues which, let these terrible powers descend upon us as they will, cannot be obliterated, that we shall be, till the end, something better than our fate, something more kind than our destiny.

I have but speculated widely concerning mouse mythology. Truth compels me to state that it is to me, after all, but dim and debatable territory. I can give you nothing authoritative as to their philosophy. But this I know: they have maintained their gentleness, and are a reproach to those whom I take to be their gods.

All else is but speculation and possibility, but this is the evidence of their lives. They are a meek and a forgiving people. Think only what they endure at our hands, who justly make so great a matter of a Belgium violated, and forget, in a god-like manner, when it so pleases us, a violated Congo, or a divided Persia, or a Poland outraged and cut to pieces, but not defended! How gentle, how consistent, how without spite, ill-will, or grudge, they remain toward those unalterably hostile to them! With what mildness not matched among us do they conduct themselves! How they preserve their cheerfulness, their good nature, their kindliness! Have you not heard with what gayety they roll hickory-nuts away? Has your ear not witnessed their gigglings and rejoicings?

But their virtues go deeper than this. It may be told of them above all, that, however provident in other matters, they store up no malice, they preserve no hate.

Once I lay ill in that house of which I have here written. I had been very wretched, but my physician, seated now by my bed, promised me I would soon be well. After that we spoke together, as we were wont to do, of matters of a philosophic kind, then paused. At the bottom of my bed, on the footboard, was a tiny mouse. No; it was not the same adventurous spirit who had visited the giant's castle and drunk from the plate of milk; this one was smaller and more slender. We did not speak. He came down cautiously, very gently, to the coverlet, then delicately up one fold, down another, pausing, listening, waiting to take note; pausing, waiting, foot delicately lifted, until he had got as far as the tray. He went very carefully about this, smelling and inspecting it; yes, I would have sworn, inspecting. It had every air of his wanting to know whether they had brought me the right and well-cooked food. He tasted nothing save a tiny crumb on the tray itself, and then, as though satisfied, was gone.

I hoped for another visit, but waited for him in vain. He was a little fellow, sleek of skin, with a black, beady eye, and very delicate whiskers. I never saw a daintier foot.

BIRTHDAYS AND OTHER EGOTISMS

I