Maria Thompson Daviess - The Golden Bird

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"Well, how do you do, sweeties, and where did you get this model hen-house?
Trap nests! I wouldn't have believed it of you!" said Adam to the Leghorn
family and me inclusive.

"I didn't do it all," I faltered as I experienced a terrific temptation to
lie silently and claim all of the affectionate praise that was beaming from
Pan's eyes upon all of us, but I fought and conquered it with nobility.
"Matthew Berry came out and did about--no, a little more than half of it.
But I did all I could," I added, with a pathetic appeal for his
approbation.

"Well, half of the job is more than the world could expect of the beautiful
Ann Craddock, who sits in the front of Gale Beacon's box at the
Metropolitan," answered Pan, with a little flute of laughter in his voice
that matched the crimson crests which stood more rampant than ever across
the tips of his ears.

"Why, where--who are you and--" I asked in astonishment as I followed him
into the last of the sunset glow coming across the front of the barn.

CHAPTER VI

"I'm just Adam and I go many places," he answered with more of the
intoxicating crooning laughter.

"Rufus says that red-headed Peckerwoods go to the devil on Fridays," I
retorted to the raillery of the Pan laugh.

"It _was_ Friday and she didn't sing Delilah to my notion. Did she to
yours?" he asked, this time with a smile that was even more interesting
than the laugh. "Come over and sit with me by the spring-house and let's
discuss grand opera while I eat my supper and wait until I think it is safe
to give the ewe some mash.

"I will if you'll invite me to the supper; I can't face another swine and
muffin meal," I answered as I followed him down a path that led west from
the barn-door.

"I've got two apples and a double handful of black walnut kernels. The
drinks from the spring are on you," he answered as he led me down through a
thicket of slim trees that were sending out a queer fragrance to a huge old
stone spring-house from which gushed a stream of water. "Just these two
spring days are bringing out the locust buds almost before time. Smell
'em!" he said as he looked up into the tops of the slim trees, which were
showing a pink-green tinge of color in the red sunset rays.

"Oh," I said softly as I clasped my hands to my breast and breathed in
deep, "I'm glad, glad I didn't have to let them sell it. I love it. I love
it!"

"Sell it?" asked Adam as he brushed a rug of dry leaves from under the
bushes upon one of the huge slabs of rock before the door of the
spring-house for me to sit on, and took two apples from his pocket.

"Yes, and I'll work both my fingers and toes to the bone before I'll give
it up," I answered as I crouched down beside him on the leaves and began to
munch at the apple, which he had polished on the sleeve of his soft, gray,
flannel shirt before he handed it to me.

While we dined on the two red apples, the tangy nuts, and a few hard
crackers that, I think, were dog-biscuits, I told him all about it, up to
my defiance and assumption of the management of Elmnest in the library
after dinner.

"I _can_ keep us from starving until I learn chickens, can't I?" I asked
after the recital, and I crouched a little closer to him on the rock, for
black shadows were coming in between the trees and into my consciousness,
and all the pink moonlight had faded as a rosy dream, leaving the world
about us silver gray.

"I wonder just how much genuine land passion there is in the hearts of
women?" said Adam, softly answering my question with another. "The duration
of race life depends upon it really."

"I don't know what you are talking about, but I understand you," I answered
him hotly. "Also I know that I love that old sheep more than you do, and
I'm going to get in line with my egg-basket when the United States begins
mustering in forces to fight, no matter what it is to be. I wish I could
say it like I feel it to that Mr. Secretary Evan Baldwin, who forgets that
women are the natural--the nutritive sex."

"I wish you could," said kind Adam, with one of Pan's railing laughs.

"Don't laugh at me--I'm getting born all over, and it is hard," I said with
a sob in my throat.

"Forgive me! I'm not really laughing--it's just a form--form of the
Peckerwood's nature-worship," he answered as he took my hand in his warm
one for a second. "Let's go finish up with old sheep mother," he added as
he began to pad swiftly away up the path, drawing me after him.

"Yes, I _am_ growing inside," I assured myself as I for the second night
fell asleep on the soft bosom of my family tradition of four posts.

One of the most bromidic performances that human beings indulge in
anywhere from their thirty-fifth to eightieth years is to sigh, look wise,
and make this remark: "If I could only begin life over again, knowing what
I do now!"

I'm never going to be impressed by that again, and I'm going to answer
straight out from the shoulder, "Well, it would be a great strain to you if
you found yourself doing it."

That was about what my entry into life at Elmnest, Riverfield, Harpeth,
was, and in many places it rubbed and hurt my pride; in many places at many
times it sapped my courage; in many ways it pruned and probed into my
innermost being with a searching knife to see if I really did have any
intelligence or soul, and at all times it left me with a feeling of just
having been sprouted off the cosmic. I know what I mean, but it doesn't
sound as if I did. This is the way most of it happened to me in my first
six weeks of life in the rustic.

How did I know that when you cleaned up a house that hadn't been cleaned
up for about fifteen years you must wait for ten days after you came to
that realization for a sunshiny day, and carry all the beds out in the yard
before you began, and that no matter how much awful dust and cobwebs you
swept and mopped out or how much old furniture you polished until it
reflected your face, it was all perfectly futile unless the bed-sunning
ceremony had been first observed? Just how were the ability to speak French
in the most exclusive circles of Parisian society and a cultivated
knowledge of every picture-gallery in the world going to keep me from
making a blunder that would put me down in Mrs. Pennie Addcock's mind as a
barbarian?

"Why, Mrs. Tillett and me have been getting ready all along to come and
help you beat and sun the beds the first sunshiny day and then turn to with
our buckets and mops and brooms. Now you've gone and done the wrong thing
by all this polishing before a single bed had been beat and aired." As she
spoke Mrs. Addcock surveyed my house, upon which I had spent every waking
moment of my muscular strength, assisted by Polly Corn-tassel and sometimes
Bud of the blue eyes, but not at all by Rufus, who resented the cleansing
process to such an extent that he wrapped up his jaw in a piece of old
flannel and retired to the hay-loft when Bud and Polly and I insisted on
invading the horrors of his kitchen.

"Oh, my dear Mrs. Addcock, won't you and Mrs. Tillett please forgive me for
being so ignorant and help me do it to-day?" I pleaded as I picked up a
small Tillett, who was peeping soft wooing at me from where he balanced
himself on uncertain and chubby legs against his mother's skirts.

"Well, in this case there is just nothing else to do, but turn to on the
beds now, wrong end first, but next year you'll know," she answered me with
indulgent compromise in her voice. "And I guess we'll find some broom and
mop work yet to be done. Come on, Mrs. Tillett. I guess Nancy can mind the
baby all right while we work."

"Oh, he ain't no trouble now except he wants to find out all about the
world by tasting of it. Don't let him eat a worm or sech, and he'll be all
right," answered the beaming young mother of the toddler. "And, Miss Nancy,
I was jest going to tell you that I have got a nice pattern of a plain kind
of work dress if you would like to use it," she added as she pointedly did
not look at my peasant's smock that hung in such lovely long lines that I
found myself pausing much too often before one of the mirrors in the big
living-room to admire them. Mrs. Tillett's utility costume was of blue
checked gingham and had no lines at all except top and bottom, with a belt
in between. Both ladies wore huge gingham aprons, and I must say that they
looked like the utility branch of the feminine species while I may have
resembled the ornamental. But they were dear neighbors, and the Tillett
baby and I had a very busy and happy day with the Golden Bird and his busy
family while the two missionaries did over every bed in Elmnest, even
invading the living-room and shaking out the cushions of the old couch in
the very face of one of the charges of Xerxes' army. I put his babykins in
a big feed-basket in a nest of hay, and the two lamb twins came and licked
him every now and then by way of welcome into my barn nursery. The fine
young sheep mother was now in blooming health, and the valuable progeny
were growing by the hours, most of which they spent at the maternal fount,
opposite each other and both small tails going like a new variety of
speedometer.

"I see mother ewe knows enough to hang around the lady of the barn and
feed-bins. Those lambkins are two pounds heavier than any born within a
week of them at Plunkett's," Pan had said not a week past, and both sheep
mother and I had beamed with gratified pride at his commendation.

[Illustration: I put his babykins in a big feed-basket and the lamb twins
came and welcomed him]

Then while the renovation of the four-posters went on with a happy buzz, I
busied myself in and out and about with the numberless details of care of
the Bird family. My knowledge of music earned by many long hours in the
practice of harmonics and a delighted and diligent attendance at the opera
seasons of New York, Berlin, and Paris, to say nothing of Boston and
London, had not, in my new life, in any way aided me to see that I had made
a mistake in ordering a three-hundred-egg incubator to start building a
prize flock with Mr. Golden Bird and the ten Ladies Leghorn, but in this
case Adam had guided me from off that shoal, and by telegram I had changed
the order for three fifty-egg improved metal mothers and the implements
needed in accomplishing their maternal purpose. In one of them were now
fifty beautiful white pearls that I could not refrain from visiting and
regarding through the little window in the metallic side of the metallic
mother at least several times an hour, though I knew that twice a day to
regulate the heat and fill the lamp was sufficient.

"I don't believe I'll be able to stand seeing them hop out," I remarked to
Baby Tillett, the lambkins, and the good old red ally, who was patiently
seated on a box over fifteen of the pearls. Adam had kept the poor old
darling covering some white china eggs for nearly two weeks before he gave
her the pearls on the same day we put the forty-five in the interior of her
metal rival. I didn't at first understand his sinister purpose in thus
holding her back until the metal rival could get an even start, but I did
later.

"I hope you have a mighty good hatching, Nancy, but I have no faith in
half-way measures, and a tin box is a half-way measure for a hen, just as
cleaning house without bed-sunning is trifling," said Mrs. Addcock, with a
final prod as she came out to the barn with Mrs. Tillett to reclaim Baby
Tillett.

"You ain't married, Miss Nancy, and you won't understand how babies need
mothers, even the chicken kind," said Mrs. Tillett, as she cuddled Baby
Tillett gurglingly against her shoulder and followed in the wake of Mrs.
Addcock with the mops and buckets down the walk and around the house.

I stood beside the tin triumph of science, with my baby lambs licking at my
hands, while Mrs. Ewe nuzzled for corn in one of my huge pockets, and a
baby collie, which Pan had brought the week before, when her eyes were
scarcely open, tumbled about my feet, and looked after the retreating
women--and I did understand.

"Still, I'll do the best I can by your--your progeny, Mr. G. Bird," I said
as the great big, white old fellow came and pecked in my pocket for corn in
perfect friendliness with Mrs. Ewe.

I was called upon to keep my promise in less than a week. It might have
been a tragedy if Bess Rutherford's practical sense had not helped save my
affections from a panic. This is how it happened.

"Yes, chicken culture is a germ that spreads by contagion. I'm not at all
surprised at your friends," Adam had answered when I had appealed to him to
know if I could sell Bess Rutherford just six of the baby chicks, when they
came out, for her to begin a brood in a new back-yard system, only Bess is
so progressive that she is having a nice big place in the conservatory that
opens out of her living-room cleared for them to run about out of their tin
mother when they want to. She says she believes eternal vigilance is the
price of success with poultry as the book she bought, which is different
from mine, says, and Bess decided that she wanted her chickens where she
could go in to see them comfortably when she came from parties and things
without having to go around in the back yard, which is the most lovely
garden in Hayesville anyway, in her slippers and party clothes. "I'd sell
her the chicks at twenty dollars apiece, and that's cheap if they produce
as they ought to with their blood and such--such care as she intends to
bestow on them. The twenty-dollar price will either cure her or start an
idle woman into a producer," said Adam, in answer to my request, as he cut
me out a pair of shoes from a piece of hide like that which the shoes upon
his own feet were made from. It was raining, and I sat at his feet in the
barn and laboriously sewed what he had cut.

I told Bess what Adam said, and she paid me the hundred and twenty dollars
right on the spot, and then insisted on opening the incubator at the
regular time for the ten minutes the book directs, to cool off the eggs
night and morning, and putting her monogram on six of the eggs. To do this
she decided to stay all night, and telephoned her maid, Annette, to pack
her bag and let Matthew bring it out to her when he came to help Polly
Corn-tassel put their first batch of eggs into their incubator. Matthew had
bought twenty hens and two nice brotherly roosters, and they had almost
caught up with me in the number of their brown babies on the whole shells.
Matthew had been coming out night and morning ever since he had brought
out his and the Beesleys' poultry and had either had supper with us at
Elmnest or we had both got riz biscuits and peach preserves and chicken
fried with Aunt Mary and Uncle Silas and Polly and Bud. I had subjugated
Rufus into cooking a few canned things, for which I had traded one of his
pig jaws at the bank-post-office-grocery emporium, and Uncle Silas had
thrown in a few potatoes, and Adam had brought me a great bag of white
beans from across Paradise Ridge, so the diet at Elmnest had changed
slightly. The absorbed twins had never noticed it at all; only they
displayed more hearty vigor in attacking the problems of literature and
history that absorbed them. Also almost every day Pan brought me young
green things that were sprouting in the woods, and I cooked them for him in
an old iron pot down by the spring-house and had supper with him.

"Those two dears are the most precious old Rips I ever beheld," said Bess
when we had retired to my room after supper on the fateful night of our
near tragedy. "You are so fortunate, Ann, to have two delicious fathers in
name only. Mine pokes into my business at all angles and insists on so much
attention from me that I don't know how I'll amount to anything in this
world. He says it takes a very fine and brainy woman to earn about ten
thousand dollars a year being affectionate and agreeable to her own father,
and that I get so much because there is no possible competition as I am an
only child, but all the same it looks like unearned money to me. Just wait
until those six little chickens begin to earn me a hundred dollars a month
like my book guarantees they will do in their second year; then I'm going
to show dad just how much I love him for himself and give him back my
bank-book."

"Still it is an awful lot of work, Bess," I remonstrated feebly, because I
knew that I couldn't have made myself believe all I had learned in just two
months at Elmnest the day I started in business.

"You know, Ann, I told you about that wonderful Evan Baldwin who has been
in Hayesville two or three times this winter, the man to whom the governor
gave the portfolio of agriculture, I believe they call it. Well, he was at
the Old Hickory ball the other night when you wouldn't come, and I told him
all about you and about buying those little chickens from you, and he was
so wonderful and sympathetic that Owen Murray sulked dreadfully. He
encouraged me entirely and told me a lot of things about some of his
experiment stations in all the different States. You thought you were going
to stagger me with that twenty-dollar price on those chicks in shell, but
he said he had paid as much as five hundred dollars apiece for a few eggs
he got from some prize chickens in England and had brought them over in a
basket in his own hand. He said he thought from what I told him about the
Golden Bird that twenty would be about right for one of his sons or
daughters. Ann, he is a perfectly delicious man, and you must meet him. It
is awful the way all the girls and women just follow him in droves, though
I'm sure he doesn't seem to notice us."

"I never want to lay eyes on him, Bess. He has insulted me and I never--"
but just here a thought struck me in my solar plexus and crinkled me
entirely up. "Oh, Bess, I forgot to fill the lamp in the incubator
to-night, and I believe the chicken eggs will be all chilled to death. What
will I do? It is near midnight and it's--it's--c--cold."

"Let's get 'em quick and maybe we can resuscitate 'em. Don't you remember
about reviving frozen people in that first-aid class we had just after the
war broke out and we didn't know whether we were in it or not? Come on,
quick!" Bess seized the quilt from the bed and descended into the back
yard, clad only in her lingerie for sleeping, a silk robe-de-chambre and
satin mules, while I followed, likewise garmented.

"Oh, dear, how cold," wailed Bess as the frosty Spring air poured around us
in our flight to the barn.

"Put the quilt around you," I chattered.

"I'm going to put all the egg chickens in it," she answered as we scuttled
into the barn out of the wind.

"The lamp is out, but the eggs still feel warm to the hand," I said as I
knelt in deep contrition beside the metal hen.

"Fill it and light it, and they'll soon warm up," advised Bess.

"There's no oil on the place. I forgot it," I again wailed.

"Isn't there room under the hen here?" asked Bess, with the brilliant mind
she inherited from Mr. Rutherford running over the speed limit, and as she
spoke she felt under the old Red Ally, who only clucked good naturedly.

"It feels like she is covering a hundred now, and there's no room for
more," said Bess, answering herself with almost a wail in her voice. "What
will we do? The book says April-hatched chickens are the best, and these
would have come out in just a few days."

And then from somewhere in my heart, which had harbored the cuddle of the
cold lamb babies against it, there rose a knowledge of first aid for the
near-baby chickens.

"Oh, Bess," I exclaimed, "let's wrap the tray of eggs up in the quilt and
take it up-stairs to bed with us. We are just as warm as the hen, and I'll
get Rufus to go for Polly at daylight to fix the lamp while we stay in bed
and huddle them until the incubator warms up, as it does in just an hour
after it's lighted."

"Ann, you are both maternal and intellectual," said Bess, with the deepest
admiration in her voice. "Let's hurry or we'll never get warmed up
ourselves."

And in very much less time than could be imagined Bess Rutherford and I
were in the middle of the four-poster, sunk deep into the feathers with the
precious pearls of life carefully imbedded between us.

"Now don't joggle," Bess commanded as we got all settled and tucked in.

"Mrs. Tillett lets little Tillett sleep with her cold nights," I murmured
drowsily.

"I don't believe it; no woman would undertake the responsibility of human
life like that," Bess answered as she tucked in a loose end of cover under
the pillow.

"Most of the world mothers sleep with their babies," Adam said when I told
him about little Tillett, "and--" I was answering when I trailed off into a
dream of walking a tight rope over a million white eggs. In the morning
Bess said she had dreamed that she was a steam roller trying to make a road
of eggs smooth enough to run her car over.

CHAPTER VII

Also Bess and I woke to find ourselves heroines. Matthew came to breakfast
after he had seen the lamps in his mock hens burning brightly, and brought
Polly with him to congratulate us on the rescue of our infant industry.
Polly had told him of our brilliant coup against old Jack Frost, and he was
all enthusiasm, as was also Uncle Cradd, while father beamed because he was
hearing me praised and thought of something else at the same time. Later
Owen Murray came out for Bess in his car, and insisted on buying six more
of the eggs, because, he said, they had now become a sporting proposition
and interested him. Bess agreed to board them to maturity in her
conservatory for him at fifty cents a day per head and let him visit them
at any time. He gave me a check immediately. He offered to buy six of
Polly's chicks at the same price, but Matthew refused to let her sell them
at all, and also Bess refused to have any mixing of breeds in her
conservatory. Polly didn't know enough to resent losing the hundred and
twenty dollars, because she had never had more than fifty cents in her
life, and Matthew didn't realize what it would have meant to her to have
that much money, because he had more than he needed all his life, so they
were all happy and laughed through one of Rufus' worst hog effusions in the
way of a meal for lunchers, but--but I had in a month learned to understand
what a dollar might mean to a man or woman, and at the thought of that two
hundred and forty dollars Mr. G. Bird and family had earned for me in their
second month of my ownership my courage arose and girded up its loins for
the long road ahead. I knew enough to know that these returns were a kind
of isolated nugget in the poultry business, and yet why not?

"We'll sell Mr. Evan Baldwin a five-hundred-dollar gold egg yet, Mr. G.
Bird," I said to myself.

After luncheon they all departed and left me to my afternoon's work.
Matthew lingered behind the others and helped me feed the old red ally and
Mrs. Ewe and Peckerwood Pup.

"I was talking to Evan Baldwin at the club after his first lecture the
other night and, Ann, I believe I'll be recruited for the plow as well as
for the machine-gun. I'm going to buy some land out there back of the
Beesleys' and raise sheep on it. He says Harpeth is losing millions a year
by not raising sheep. I'm going to live at Riverfield a lot of the time and
motor back and forth to business. Truly, Ann, the land bug has bit me
and--and it isn't just--just to come up on your blind side. But, dear, now
don't you think that it would be nice for me to live over here with you as
a perfectly sympathetic agricultural husband?"

"I needed a husband so much more yesterday to help with the pruning of the
rose-vines than I do to-day, Matthew," I answered with a laugh. Matthew's
proposals of marriage are so regular and so alike that I have to avoid
monotony in the wit of my answers.

"I'm never in time to do a single thing on this place, and I don't see how
everything gets done for you without my help. Who helps you?"

"Everybody," I answered. I had never had the courage to break Adam to
Matthew in the long weeks I had been seeing them both every day, and of
course Pan had never come out of the woods when Matthew or any of the rest
were there. "I'll tell you what you can do for me," I said, with a sudden
inspiration about getting rid of him, for the red-headed Peckerwood had
promised to come and put some kind of hoodoo earth around the peonies and
irises and pinks in my garden, also to bud some kind of a new rose on one
of the old blush ones, and I wanted the place quiet so he would venture
out of his lair. "You can go on to town and look after Polly carefully. She
is going in with Bess for the first time since their infatuation, and I
want her eyes to open gradually on the world out over Paradise Ridge."

"Ann, ought they ever to open?" asked Matthew, suddenly, with the color
coming up to the roots of his hair and burning in his ears like it still
does in Bud Corn-tassel's when he comes over to see or help me or to bring
me something from Aunt Mary, his mother. "Bess is one of the best of
friends I've got in the world, but I just--just couldn't see Corn-tassel
dancing in some man's arms in the mere hint of an evening gown that Bess
occupied while fox-trotting with Evan Baldwin at the club the other night."

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