Tales of To-day and Other Days. Various Authors

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СКАЧАТЬ never wore such a beatific air. She was so plump, so rotund and comfortable, with her well-filled stomach and her fluffy feathers, that one would have taken her for a pâté from which the crust had been eaten off. I crept furtively up to her. "She won't wake up," I said to myself, "and even if she does, such a jolly, fat old lady can't help but be good-natured." She did not turn out as I expected, however. She lazily opened her eyes half-way, and heaving a faint sigh, said:

      "You are crowding me, young fellow; clear out of here."

      At the same instant I heard my name called; it was a band of thrushes up in the top of a mountain-ash who were making signals to me to come to them. "There are some charitable souls, at last," thought I. They made room for me, laughing as if they were crazy, and I slipped into the midst of the feathered group as expeditiously as ever you saw a billet-doux disappear in a muff. It soon became evident to me, however, that the ladies had been partaking of the fruit of the vine more liberally than was good for them; it was as much as they could do to keep themselves from falling off their perches, and their equivocal pleasantries, their uproarious bursts of laughter and their indecent songs compelled me to leave their company.

      I was beginning to despair, and was about to search ​for some lonely corner where I might lay my head when a nightingale began to sing. Instantly silence reigned throughout the grove. Ah! how pure was her voice! Her very melancholy, how sweet did it appear! Far from disturbing the slumbers of others, her tuneful strains seemed to soothe them. No one thought of bidding her be silent, no one took it ill that she selected that hour for singing her song; her father did not beat her, her friends did not fly from her presence.

      "It is I alone, then," I cried, "to whom it is not given to be happy! Let us go, let us fly from this cruel world! Better is it to seek my way amid the shades of night and run the risk of making a meal for some wandering owl, than to linger here and have my heart lacerated by the spectacle of others' happiness!"

      Upon this reflection I started forth, and for a long time wandered without definite aim. The first light of breaking day revealed to me the towers of Notre Dame. Quick as a flash I reached them and from them scanned the horizon; it was long before I recognized our garden. I winged my way to it, swifter than the wind. Alas! it was empty. It was in vain that I called upon my parents: no one responded. The tree where my father had his seat, the bush, my mother's home, the beloved porringer, all had disappeared. The fatal ax had leveled all, and in place of the verdant alley where I was born there remained only a pile of firewood.

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      The first thing that I did was to search through all the gardens of the neighborhood for my parents, but ​it was only labor lost; they had doubtless taken refuge in some distant quarter and I never heard of them more.

      Sick at heart, I went and perched upon the gutter that had been my first place of exile when driven from my home by my father's cruelty. There I spent days and nights bewailing my sad existence; I could not sleep, I ate scarcely anything; my grief had nearly caused my death.

      One day when, as usual, I was giving way to my sorrowful meditations, I thought aloud and said:

      "So, then, I am not a blackbird, since my father pulled out my feathers; nor a pigeon, since I fell by the way when I tried to fly to Belgium; nor a Russian pie, since the little marquise stopped her ears as soon as I opened my beak; nor a turtle-dove, since Gourouli, even that good, kind Gourouli, could not help snoring like a trooper while I was singing; nor a parrot, since Kacatogan would not condescend to listen to me; nor a bird of any kind whatever, in fine, since they allowed me to sleep by myself at Morfontaine. And yet I have feathers on my body; those appendages are claws, those are wings. I am not a monster, witness Gourouli and the little marquise herself, who seemed to look on me with eyes of favor. To what inscrutable reason is it owing that these feathers, wings, and claws compose a whole that is nothing more nor less than a nameless mystery? I wonder if I am not——"

      I was pursuing my lamentations in this strain when I was interrupted by two women quarreling in the street.

      "Ay! parbleu!" one of them said to the other, "if ​you succeed in doing it I will make you a present of a white blackbird!"

      "Great Heavens!" I exclaimed; "that decides it. I am the son of a blackbird and I am white; I am a white blackbird!"

      This discovery, as may well be imagined, modified my ideas considerably. I at once ceased to bewail my fate and began to hold up my head and strut about the gutter, looking out on the world with the air of a conquerer.

      "It is no small matter to be a white blackbird," said I to myself; "you don't find them growing on every bush. It was a fine thing for me to do, forsooth, to grieve myself to death because I could find no one like me; it is always so with genius; it is my case! It was my wish to fly from the world; now I will astonish it! Since I am that peerless bird whose existence is denied by the vulgar herd, it is my duty, as it is my intention, to bear myself accordingly and look down on the rest of the feathered tribe, with a pride as great as their vaunted Phœnix. I must buy myself Alfieri's memoirs and Lord Byron's poems; those noble works will inspire in me a towering haughtiness in addition to that which God has endowed me with. Yes, if so it may be, I mean to add to the prestige which is mine by birth. Nature has willed that I should be rare, I will make myself mysterious. It shall be a favor, a glory, to look on me—— And why not, indeed," I added, lowering my voice, "exhibit myself, just simply for money?

      "Fie on it! What an ignoble thought! I will write a poem, like Kacatogan, not in one canto, but in twenty-four, like other great men; that is not ​enough; there shall be forty-eight, with notes and an appendix! The whole universe must know of my existence. I will not fail to make my verse tell the pitiful tale of my loneliness, but it shall be done in such a way that the happiest shall envy me. Since Heaven has denied me a mate I will defame most horribly the mates of all my acquaintance; I will demonstrate that all the grapes are green except those that are for my eating. Let the nightingales look out for themselves; I will prove, as sure as two and two make four, that their complainings give rise to heart disease and that their wares are worthless. I must go and find Charpentier. First of all I want to make for myself a strong literary position. I mean to have a court around me, composed not of journalists alone, but of real authors, and even of literary women. I will write a rôle for Mlle. Rachel and, if she declines to act it, I will trumpet it through the land that there are old actresses in the provinces who are her superiors in talent. I will go to Venice, and there, on the banks of the Grand Canal, in the heart of that fairy-like city, I will hire the beautiful Mocenigo Palace that costs four livres and ten sous a day; there I will drink in the inspiration of all the memories that the author of "Lara" must have left there. From the depths of my solitude I will inundate the world with a deluge of terza rima, copied from the verse of Spenser, in which my great soul shall find solace; the grove shall do me reverence, tomtits shall sigh, turtle-doves coo, woodcocks shed bitter tears, and all the old owls shriek enviously. As regards my personal being, however, I will be inexorable and permit no amorous advances, Vainly will the unfortunate ​females, who shall have been seduced by my sublime strains, approach me with prayers and supplications to have pity on them; my only answer to it all will be: 'Pshaw!' Oh, glory without end! My manuscripts shall sell for their weight in gold, my books shall cross the sea; fame and fortune shall pursue me everywhere; I alone will appear indifferent to the murmur of the multitude that shall crowd about me. In a single word, I will be a perfect white blackbird, a veritable eccentric author, feasted, petted, admired, and envied, but always grumbling and ever insupportable."

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