The Wren

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Title:     The Wren
Author: Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch [More Titles by Quiller-Couch]

A LEGEND.

Early on St. Stephen's Day--which is the day after Christmas--young John Cara, son of old John Cara, the smith of Porthennis, took down his gun and went forth to kill small birds. He was not a sportsman; it hurt him to kill any living creature. But all the young men in the parish went slaughtering birds on St. Stephen's Day; and the Parson allowed there was warrant for it, because, when St. Stephen had almost escaped from prison, a small bird (by tradition a wren) had chirped, and awakened his gaolers.

Strange to say, John Cara's dislike of gunning went with a singular aptitude for it. He had a quick sense with birds; could guess their next movements just as though he read their minds; and rarely missed his aim if he took it without giving himself time to think.

Now the rest of youths, that day, chose the valley bottoms as a matter of course, and trooped about in parties, with much whacking of bushes. But John went up to Balmain--which is a high stony moor overlooking the sea--because he preferred to be alone, and also because, having studied their ways, he knew this to be the favourite winter haunt of the small birds, especially of the wrens and the titlarks.

His mother had set her heart on making a large wranny-pie (that is, wren-pie, but actually it includes all manner of birdlings). It was to be the largest in the parish. She was vain of young John's prowess, and would quote it when old John grumbled that the lad was slow as a smith. "And yet," said old John, "backward isn't the word so much as foolish. Up to a point he understands iron 'most so well as I understand it myself. Then some notion takes him, and my back's no sooner turned than he spoils his job. Always trying to make iron do what iron won't do--that's how you may put it." The wife, who was a silly woman, and (like many another such) looked down on her husband's trade, maintained that her boy ought to have been born a squire, with game of his own.

Young John went up to Balmain; and there, sure enough, he found wrens and titlarks flitting about everywhere, cheeping amid the furze-bushes on the low stone hedges and the granite boulders, where the winter rains had hollowed out little basins for themselves, little by little, working patiently for hundreds of years. The weather was cold, but still and sunny. As he climbed, the sea at first made a blue strip beyond the cliff's edge on his right, then spread into a wide blue floor, three hundred feet below him, and all the width of it twinkling. Ahead and on his left all the moorland twinkled too, with the comings and goings of the birds. The wrens mostly went about their business--whatever that might be--in a sharp, practical way, keeping silence; but the frail note of the titlarks sounded here, there, everywhere.

Young John might have shot scores of them. But, as he headed for the old mine-house of Balmain and the cromlech, or Main-Stone, which stands close beside it--and these are the only landmarks--he did not even trouble to charge his gun. For the miracle was happening already.

It began--as perhaps most miracles do--very slowly and gently, without his perceiving it; quite trivially, too, and even absurdly. It started within him, upon a thought that wren-pie was a foolish dish after all! His mother, who prided herself upon making it, did but pretend to enjoy it after it was cooked. His father did not even pretend: the mass of little bones in it cheated his appetite and spoiled his temper. From this, young John went on to consider. "Was it worth while to go on killing wrens and shamming an appetite for them, only because a wren had once informed against St. Stephen? How were _these_ wrens guilty? And, anyway, how were the titlarks guilty?" Young John reasoned it out in this simple fashion. He came to the Main-Stone, and seating himself on the turf, leaned his back against one of the blocks which support the huge monolith. He sat there for a long while, puckering his brows, his gun idle beside him. At last he said to himself, but firmly and aloud:

"Parson and the rest say 'tis true. But I can't believe it, and something inside says 'tis wrong. . . . There! I won't shoot another bird--and that settles it!"

"Halleluia!" said a tiny voice somewhere above him.

The voice, though' tiny, was shrill and positive. Young John recognised, and yet did not recognise it. He stared up at the wall of the old mine-house from which it had seemed to speak, but he could see no one. Next he thought that the word must have come from his own heart, answering a sudden gush of warmth and happiness that set his whole body glowing. It was as if winter had changed to summer, within him and without, and all in a moment. He blinked in the stronger sunshine, and felt it warm upon his eyelids.

"Halleluia!" said the voice again. It certainly came from the wall. He looked again, and, scanning it in this strange, new light, was aware of a wren in one of the crevices.

"Will he? will he?" piped another voice, pretty close behind his ear. Young John, now he had learnt that wrens can talk, had no difficulty in recognising this other voice: it was the half-hearted note of the titlark. He turned over on his side and peered into the shadow of the Main-Stone; but in vain, for the titlark is a hesitating, unhappy little soul that never quite dares to make up its mind. It used to be the friend of a race that inhabited Cornwall ages ago. It builds in their cromlechs, and its song remembers them. It is the bird, too, in whose nest the cuckoo lays; so it knows all about losing one's children and being dispossessed.

"We will give him a gift," chirruped the wren, "and send him about his business. He is the first man that has the sense to leave us to ours."

"But will he?--will he?" the titlark piped back ghostlily. "One can never be sure. I have known men long, long before ever you came here. I knew King Arthur. This rock was his table, and he dined here with seven other kings on the night after they had beaten the Danes at Vellandruchar. I hid under the stone and listened to them passing the cups, and between their talk you could hear the stream running down the valley--it turned the two mill-wheels, Vellandruchar and Vellandreath, with blood that night. Even at daybreak it ran high over the legs of the choughs walking on the beach below--that is why the choughs go red-legged to this day. . . . They are few now, but then they were many: and next spring they came and built in the rigging of the Danes' ships, left ashore--for not a Dane had escaped. But King Arthur had gone his way. Ah, he was a man!"

"Nevertheless," struck in the wren, "this is a good fellow too; and a smith, whose trade is as old as your King Arthur's. We will prosper him in it."

"What will you give him?" asked the titlark.

"He is lying at this moment on the trefoil that commands all metals. Let him look to his gun when he awakes."

"Ah!" said the titlark, "I told you that secret. I was with Teague the Smith when he discovered it. . . . But he discovered it too late; and, besides, he was a dreamer, and used it only to make crosses and charms and womanish ornaments."

"It's no use to _us_, anyhow," said the practical wren. "So let us give it away. I hate waste."

"I doubt," said the titlark, "it will be much profit to him, wonderful though it is."

"Well," said the wren, "a present's a present. Folks with a living to get must give what they can afford."

It is not wise, as a rule, to sleep on the bare ground in December. But Young John awoke warm and jolly as a sandboy. He picked up his gun. It was bent and curiously twisted in the barrel. "Hallo!" said he, and peered closely into the short turf where it had lain. . . .

When he reached home his mother cried out joyfully, seeing his game-bag and how it bulged. She cried out to a different tune when he showed her what it contained--clods and clumps of turf, matted over with a tiny close-growing plant that might have been any common moss for aught she knew (or recked) of the difference.

"But where are all the birds you promised me?"

He held out his gun--he had promised no birds, but that mattered nothing. His father took it to the lamp and glanced at it; put on his horn spectacles slowly, and peered at it. He was silent for a long while. Young John had turned inattentively from his mother's reproaches, and stood watching him.

The old man swung about at length. "When did ye contrive this?" he asked, rubbing the twist of the gun-barrel with his thumb. "And the forge not heated all this day!"

"We'll heat it to-night after supper," said Young John.

In the Church of Porthennis, up to twenty-five years ago, there stood a screen of ironwork--a marvel of arabesques and intricate traceries, with baskets of flowers, sea-monsters, Cherubim, tying the filigree-work and looping it together in knots and centres. One panel had for subject a spider midmost in a web, to visit which smiths came hundreds of miles, from all over the country, and wondered. For it was impossible to guess how iron had ever been beaten to such thinness or drawn so ductile. But unhappily-and priceless as was the secret Young John Cara had chosen to let die with him--the art of it was frail, frail as the titlark's song. His masterpiece, indeed, had in it the corruption of Celtic art. It could not endure its native weather, and rusted away almost to nothingness. When the late Sir Gilbert Aubyn, the famous neo-Gothic architect, was called in (1885) to restore Porthennis Church--or, as we say in Cornwall, to "restroy" it--he swept the remnants away. But the legend survives, _ferro perennius_.

[The end]
Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch's short story: Wren

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