An Easter Chick

________________________________________________
Title:     An Easter Chick
Author: Katharine Lee Bates [More Titles by Bates]

"Only, what I feel is, that no charity at all can get rid of a certain natural unkindness which I find in things themselves."

--Pater's Marius the Epicurean.

The grippe had held me a prostrate prisoner for weeks. Books, pencils, people were forbidden. It was a strange but not unhappy Lent to lie helpless day after day, gazing through my blessed square of window into a first snowy, then blowy, often rainy and rarely sunshiny patch of woodland, watching the brown oak leaves whirl in hurricane dances above the pine-tops, and the crows wing their strong flight against the gray of the sky. As a cumberer of the earth, I was meekly grateful for the least attention from this active outdoor world, for the cheery pipings of the chickadees, whose wee black bills pounded the marrow-bone on the window-sill, for the guttural greetings of the white-breasted nuthatches who played the acrobat on the swinging, open-work bag of cracked walnuts outside the pane, even for the jeers of the bluejays who swooped to the sash and dashed off like triumphant Dick Turpins with our bounty of bread and cheese.

So Joy-of-Life, hearing of a Boston confectioner's pious offer to bestow an Easter chicken on every customer who should alleviate the fast by the purchase of two pounds of expensive candies at any time during Holy Week, thought she would add to my feathered acquaintance a more intimate companion. Herself an abominator of sweets, she heroically passed a dollar and a half across the counter and received in exchange, beside two boxes of riotous living, a tiny chick, only a day or so out from egg and incubator.

It was pretty, she said, to see the interest with which the tired shop-girls bent over that fluffy morsel of life, petting it with light touches and soothing words, as it was tucked away, with Indian meal for provender and a wad of cotton-wool for bedding, in a gay pasteboard houselet. The color of this miniature mansion was russet flecked with black. The door was a painted sham, but the red-tiled roof swung open. The window boasted four oblong apertures, and the whole establishment was symmetrically set in a half-inch estate of the reddest pasteboard clay. The girl made the roof secure with a few turns of silver cord and the captive was reduced to thrusting an indignant yellow bill through one after another of his window openings, expostulating with all creation in a series of shrill chirps. As the customer stepped out with her premium in hand, the candy-coveting group of ragamuffins outside the window surged forward in rapture at sight and sound of the chicken, and one particularly grimy urchin reached up both arms toward it with such an imploring gesture that the birdling almost changed ownership then and there. But Joy-of-Life bethought herself in time of the conditions of tenement and alley, not favorable to the development of any sort of biped, and said:

"It is for a sick lady. Don't you want her to have it?"

And the tatterdemalion slowly dropped his wistful hands, sighing dutifully, "Yes, m'm."

The chicken-bearer's dignified progress, "cheep, cheep, cheep," across the Common and Public Gardens and through the Back Bay section, afforded her a new gauge for testing human nature. Colonial Dames who looked an aristocratic rebuke she put lower in the scale of sympathy than the Italian organ-grinder whose black eyes laughed frankly into hers, while the maid who opened a door in Newbury street, where Joy-of-Life had a call to make, fell with her shocked, contemptuous stare quite under passing rank.

It was late in the evening before I heard upon the stairs a welcome tread, mounting to that queer accompaniment of cheep, cheep, cheep, now pitched upon a key, had we but ears to hear, of acute distress. My delight in greeting the chicken was not reciprocated, and no wonder. Our unconscious, ignorant crimes against his frail little being had already begun. Joy-of-Life, ever most tender toward the weak, enjoyed, moreover, the advantage of having been reared upon a farm, where she had often watched the life of coop and poultry-yard, but not even she was wise enough to give that chicken comfort.

She had carefully seen to it, all the journey through, that he had oxygen enough. The March wind blew so harshly that she had wanted to shelter the fairy chalet under her cloak, but had feared that the yellow bill, forever thrusting itself through the small casement, would gasp for air. Air! That is the least of a chicken's wants. With all his baby energy, Microbe, as we promptly christened him, had called for heat, heat, heat, and had not been understood. Those thin pasteboard walls and that shred of cotton-wool had left him practically naked to the blast, and he was chilled--poor innocent--to the bone.

And still, in our big, human obtuseness, we did not comprehend. We brought him meal mixed with cold water--an atrocious diet from which he angrily turned away. All at cross purposes, we flattered him foolishly in our alien tongue, while he remonstrated passionately in his. At last the warmth of the room and very weariness quieted that incorrigible cheep a little, and he was put downstairs out of invalid hearing, with a strip of batting cast, like a snowdrift, over his jaunty dwelling.

The family went snugly to bed, while the furnace fire burned lower and lower and the chill of the small hours stole through the house. A less mettlesome chicken, overwhelmed with the loneliness and cruel cold, would have yielded up its accusing little ghost then and there, but this mite had a marvelous spirit of his own and struggled against fate like a De Wet.

In that heavy hour before the dawn, Joy-of-Life was roused from sleep by such desperate chicken shrieks, "Yep, yep, yep! Help, help, help!" that no doors could shut them out. Shivering in her dressing-gown she went down to our unhappy fosterling, who lay stiff and straight, with head thrust forward and legs stretched back, apparently in articulo mortis. The rigid bit of body was cold to her touch, and the only hopeful sign was that shrill, protesting chirp, into which all remaining vitality seemed to be forced. Holding the downy ball compassionately between her palms, this ineffectual giantess--from Microbe's point of view--reflected on the possibilities of the situation only to be baffled. The kitchen fire was out, the oven had not a hint of warmth in it, there was no hot water for the rubber bag. Besides, the chicken seemed too far gone for restoration, and she guiltily smothered him away under the fold of cotton batting and retreated to her chamber. But Microbe had by no means surrendered his sacred little claims to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The persistent prick of his muffled, frantic cries drove sleep from her pillow. She rose once more and, by inspiration, carried the diminutive mansion down cellar, where she placed it on top of the furnace! Instantly the genial heat reached that exhausted chick, who had battled for it so valiantly and long. The white-barred lids slipped up over the round black eyes--for chickens literally "shut their peepers up"--and he was asleep before his rescuer had turned away.

Joy-of-Life did not believe such a day-old atom of mortality could survive this woeful night. She came to my bedside at the breakfast hour and prepared me solemnly for word of Microbe's premature decease. But little did we know as yet the meaning of that maligned phrase "chicken-hearted." She descended at a funereal pace to the cellar, but with the sound of her swift returning feet I laughed to hear, clearer from stair to stair, an eager, spirited little pipe, "Chip, chip, chip! What's up now? Where are we going on this trip, trip?"

Such a wide-awake, enterprising speck of poultry it was that Joy-of-Life proudly set upon the counterpane! He gave prompt proof of his activity by scrambling madly for my plate, and fluttered down, with yellow winglets spread, exactly in the center of my slice of toast.

"It's spring chicken on toast he's giving yez," cried our delighted Mary, and in honor of that ready display of Irish humor, his name was forthwith abbreviated to Mike.

Then he hopped up into my neck, cuddled down, sang a little, contented song and went off to sleep again, waking to find himself the ruler of the roost.

Word of our mutual devotion went abroad and forthwith the critics began. A high-minded friend sent word that if she heard of my lavishing any more affection on that ridiculous little rooster, she would come and wring his yellow neck, and even the Madre herself, she who had borne with my foibles longest and most indulgently, wrote in a flash of scandalous uncharity that she wished I would rest content with the wild birds that God had made, and not waste attention on an illegitimate, incubator chicken.

But "God be with trewthe qwer he be!" The foolish fact is that, in the restlessness of convalescence, when work and worry, thought and humanity must still be shooed from the threshold, I found hourly mirth and comfort in that dot of sunshine. The phenomenal mists and rains of this first April of the new century caused such a dearth of golden lights in the world that a yellow chicken acquired peculiar values. The furnace-man said he was a Wyandotte and, as a feminine household, we invariably put absolute faith in the word of our furnace-man. I do not know how Wyandottes ought to look, but I know that this was a daffodil-colored mite, with legs and feet more slender than chicken wont, and with a hundred diverting, confiding, tyrannical little ways.

I never ceased marveling at the pluck with which this Lilliputian tackled life in the midst of such Brobdingnagian surroundings. The only time I ever saw him scared was when a guest, so well acquainted with chickens as to venture on personal liberties, flourished her glove over the graveled box that served poor little Mike for his Earthly Paradise.

"Squawk! squawk!" he cried in an agitated pipe I had not heard before, and scrabbled wildly to the shelter of my hand, nestling out of sight under the palm in his favorite fashion.

"Did you hear him call hawk, hawk?" asked my erudite visitor. "We have an old biddy at home who nurses a grudge against me this week because I will not let her set, and the last time I went out into the henyard, if she didn't scream hawk, hawk, just like that, and send the chickens scuttling to cover under the barn! The hateful thing! She knew how insulted I would feel to be taken for a hawk!"

But apart from that trying occasion, Mike was a scrap of valor. No member of the family was tall enough to disconcert him. He pecked whatever he saw, from his own feet to the register, and would pounce like a baby pirate upon objects many times larger than himself, cheeping to the world his tidings of magnificent discovery. I am no pastoral linguist, but I learned the rudiments of chicken language from Mike, who was such a chatterbox that he twittered in his sleep.

Meal-times, which he liked to have occur every hour from dawn to dark, brought out his conversational fluency at its best. We tried many experiments with his diet, in obedience to many counselors. We were told that his Indian meal should be mixed with scalding water, that he was too young for this hearty dish and should be fed with dry oatmeal, that minute crumbs of bread would comfort his crop, that larger bits of bread, kindly masticated in advance, were better, that sour milk was essential, mashed potato indispensable, string beans a plausible substitute for angle-worms, that he must be given a chance to swallow gravel to assist the grinding in his wee gizzard mill, and that his cereals should be discreetly spiced with grubs and lettuce leaves and such spring dainties. Whatever we were told to do, we did. Mike's repasts were thus seasons to him of delicious excitement, and he would tear deliriously from one end of his box to the other, pecking to right and left, exclaiming in high glee, "Tweet, tweet! Something to eat! Bless my pin-feathers! Here's a treat!"

This up-to-date son of an incubator had an obstinate instinct in him which made the tap of my finger on the floor of his box equivalent to the tattoo of a hen's bill beside some scratched-up delicacy, and it was funny to see him rush to the sound, his black eyes shining with joyous expectancy. So queerly did instinct serve him that he would grab the goody as if a brood of famished brothers were on his heels and, spreading his bits of wings, race off with his prize, most indiscreetly shrilling as he went, "Twit, twit, twit! You shan't have a bit," and gobbling it down in a corner with choking precipitation.

One of the "Arrows of the Wise" carries the point, "Be not idle and you shall not be longing," and I had no chance to miss my customary vocations with this importunate cockerel demanding constant society and care.

Hatched to the vain anticipation of brooding wings and crooning cluck and the restless pressure of other downy little bodies all about him, Mike was a lonesome chick and could not bear to have his sorry substitute for a mother-hen out of sight and sound a minute. His box must be within reach of my hand, whither every few minutes he would run for a snuggle and a snooze, turning a disdainful back on the elaborate hot-water-bottle and cotton-batting shelters I had been at such pains to erect. The life in him craved contact with life. If I withdrew my hand, having occasionally other uses for it, or neglected to respond to his casual remarks, my ears would suddenly be assailed by a storm of piteous chirps, the neck would stretch until two round eyes peered anxiously above his castle wall, and then, with clamber and scramble, that indomitable little spirit would achieve the impossible and land a fluttering fluff-ball against my face. When I was well enough to move from room to room Mike would dare the most terrific rumbles from his box to come chasing after, though every threshold was a towering obstacle over which a Labor Union of wings and legs could barely carry him.

After he had eaten his supper, with undiminished enthusiasm, and had drunk his fill from a butter-plate, lifting his yellow bill to heaven with every drink, and giving thanks, as all good chickens do, we used to tuck him away in a basket. At first we buried him deep under a light mass of cotton-wool, from the precise center of whose surface his head would shine out in the morning like a star set in fleecy clouds; but the chief of our advisory council warned us that the films might get into his eyes and down his gullet with disastrous results, and suggested instead the use of a retired table-scarf. Chicken in the cloth, cloth in the basket, basket on the register, the family would compose itself to listen to the "Life of Huxley," while the softest, drowsiest nest song, "Tweety-tweet! Tweety-tweet!" from the depths of the table-scarf accompanied the voice of the reader. The elfin music-box would fall silent presently, but when bedtime came, and Joy-of-Life, before taking the basket down cellar to hang it near the furnace for the night, brought it to me that I might ask, no matter how quietly, "All well, Mike?" a dreamy little note would instantly float back, "Tweety-tweet! Sleeping sweet!"

We grew so fond of our pet as to dislike to see him deprived of the natural companionship of chickenhood, and two other downy midgets--a Penciled Brahmapootra, the gift of the market-man, and a Plymouth Rock, from the Lady of Cedar Hill--were procured to bear him company. The first we dubbed Patience, as the proper associate of a Microbe, but this beautiful little fowl, whose golden face and delicately striped body gave it a wild-bird look, developed such shillalah characteristics, especially when Mike made off with the choice morsels, that his name was speedily curtailed to Pat. The Plymouth Rock was called Cluxley, in memory of our evening readings; but a meek, illogical, not to say unscientific henny-penny she proved, who would stand gazing on a dainty until one of her foster-brothers had snatched it up and then industriously go and scratch for it in all the places where it never could have been. Pat was a self-reliant, material-minded younker, and we let him go his own lively way, with the minimum of handling, but our brown Cluxley was of a clinging disposition and had an embarrassing habit of imperiling her life by stealthy excursions up loose sleeves. Mike did not welcome these birds of his own feather any too cordially and held somewhat aloof from them to the end. One of my students sent in a pair of dainty blue slippers, fortunately too small, as thus my conscience was clear in devoting them to the welfare of my immediate brood; but I always had to see to it that Mike and Pat took their siestas in separate slippers, where they would drowsily flute away in musical rivalry. Cluxley, with her customary indiscretion, bestowed herself one day in a damp rubber for her nap and caught a bad cold, which we successfully doctored with hempseed.

Mike had begun to show signs of feathers and once he tried to crow. He had become less dependent on me for intimate society, his attention being much taken up with thwarting Pat's designs on the tidbits, but he could by no means dispense with me as general protector. If I were in the room, or close beside them in a steamer chair out of doors, he was willing to ramble a bit with Pat and Cluxley, always taking the lead, but I could not slip away and leave them, even in Mary's charge, without immediate consternation, protest and pursuit on Microbe's part. He was such a humanized chicken, coming at the call of his name, loving to eat from the finger, cocking his little head so sagely when he was addressed and politely cheeping a response, that he became perilously attractive to the children of the neighborhood. Sturdy schoolboys would kiss his yellow softness on the sly and we often had to rescue him from the unskillful clutch of loving childish hands.

When a luncheon was brought to me out of doors, all three chickens would come winging and scrabbling up the rug that wrapped the sorceress of the steamer-chair and dispose themselves about the edge of the tray, chirping continuous amens to the grace steeped in ancient witchcraft:

"Spread, table, spread.
Meat, drink and bread.
Ever may I have
What I ever crave,
When I am spread.
Meat for my black cock,
And meat for my red."

Now that I was to be seen outside the house with my little brood, kindly neighbors came from all sides with offers of more chickens, but my family cares were already heavy for a convalescent, and experience had taught me that

"true happiness
Consists not in the multitude of friends,
But in the worth and choice."

Occasional misgivings as to the future crossed my mind. I had often seen reposing sheep blocking up the doorways of Andalusian homes,--Easter lambs given, all gay with ribbons, to the children the year before and still withheld by family affection from their natural destiny of mutton. The Dryad looked forward with glee to my appearance on the academic platform with three full-grown fowls roosting on the back of my chair or stalking up and down the desk, picking up bits of chalk and pencil whittlings, but such embarrassments were not to be.

Mike was the first to sicken. His name may have been against him or the long confinement in the basket may have injured him. The table-scarf may have been too heavy to admit of his standing and moving during the night as a chicken should. He suddenly became crippled, as with paralysis. One morning, although he breakfasted with abundant relish, he insisted on hiding in my hand immediately after. I wanted him to run about for exercise, and twenty times put him back into his box, but he returned to me twenty-one and had his own way for a while, until Mary played the kidnapper. Coming down stairs half an hour later I heard her remonstrating with Mike, who was cheeping wildly.

"Faith, Mike, ye're that onraysonable I can't plaze yez any how. There's Pat and Cluxley as good as clover in the kitchen, but I let yez into the dining-room, and still ye're discontinted, and now I've let yez into the parlor, Mike, and not the parlor is good enough. Whativer is it that ye can be wanting?"

Poor Chicken Little! He heard my voice and started to meet me, but with such hobbling, staggering, bewildered steps that, at last, the threshold overthrew him. We did for him what we knew--and we knew nothing--that day and the next, and he sang his tuneful tweety-tweet on Monday night; but on Tuesday morning, a fortnight from his coming, when I asked for my chicken, they brought me a ghastly little form lying among primroses.

I might say that I met the loss of my tiny comrade with adult dignity and composure, but

"Syr, for lying, though I can do it,
Yet am I loth for to goo to it."

The core of my grief is the sense that my blundering devotion cut short, on the very edge of spring, that gallant little life which brought help to me in my heavy hour, and which had in it all the promise of a Chaucer chanticleer.

In deep humiliation, we forthwith gave Pat and Cluxley over to higher intelligence than ours, to a neighbor's hen who had no narrow parental prejudices, but amply gathered them in with her own brood. Pat was the beauty of the coop, but in a day or so his legs began to waver and sink under him, and he, too, never knew a Maytime. Cluxley was always the belated one and outlived him some three days, but on the fourth morning she went staggering into the undiscovered realm.

People say, "But you did well to keep your Easter chicken alive fourteen days. If the truth were known, you would find that very few of those candy-sale chickens hold out so long as that. We bought one for the children, but it was dead before Sunday. It is next to impossible to raise chickens by hand, even with experience. As to the ducklings that are coming into fashion for Easter gifts, they die sooner than chickens."

Then to our moral, for Mike's small story surely has a moral, though it does not matter in the least to Mike. I have no delusions there.

"All men are
Philosophers to their inches,"

but chickens' inches are so very few that there is no room for altruism in their philosophy. Yet the thought of how much these wee innocents may suffer from the incompetence of those who so lightly assume their fostering urges a protest against keeping Easter, the Festival of Life, by such wanton sacrifice of life. How can we reproach the Spaniards, who celebrate their Easter by the merciless bullfight, while we permit this cruelty to tender chickenhood?

A chicken's death is not more trivial than a sparrow's fall. St. Francis of Assisi would have cared.

But beneath it all lies the old, dark problem of creature existence. They are so ready to trust and love us, these feathered and furred companions of ours on the strange, bright star that whirls us all through the vast of ether to an unknown rhythm, and we, with a lordly selfishness that scoffs at question, slaughter them for our food and clothing, hunt them for our sport, make them our drudges in peace and our victims in war. I can never forget the eyes of a calf that ran to me from his butcher in Norway,--of a kid that I saw struggling away from the knife on Passover eve in Palestine. Yet such is the order of the earth. All carnivorous creatures prey upon the weaker. Water and wood and field and air are but varying scenes of the unpausing tragedy. Why, if it must be so, were these doomed animals endowed with the awful gift of suffering? And what recompense, even in the far reaches of eternity, can their Creator make to these myriad martyrs for their griefs and tortures? Is He the God of Hardy's The Dynasts, careless of mortal agonies? There dwelt a truer God in Shelley's heart, the cor cordium of him who wrote:

"I wish no living thing to suffer pain."

[The end]
Katharine Lee Bates's short story: Easter Chick

________________________________________________



GO TO TOP OF SCREEN