The Diary of a Goose Girl | Page 6

May goslings that look almost full-grown have run into a house
with a brood of ducklings a week old. There are twenty-seven crowded
into one coop, five in another, nineteen in another; the gosling with one
leg has to come out, and the duckling threatened with the gapes; their
place is with the "invaleeds," as Phoebe calls them, but they never learn
the location of the hospital, nor have the slightest scruple about
spreading contagious diseases.
{In solitary splendour: p25.jpg}
Finally, when we have separated and sorted exhaustively, an operation
in which Phoebe shows a delicacy of discrimination and a fearlessness
of attack amounting to genius, we count the entire number and find

several missing. Searching for their animate or inanimate bodies, we
"scoop" one from under the tool-house, chance upon two more who are
being harried and pecked by the big geese in the lower meadow, and
discover one sailing by himself in solitary splendour in the middle of
the deserted pond, a look of evil triumph in his bead-like eye. Still we
lack one young duckling, and he at length is found dead by the hedge.
A rat has evidently seized him and choked him at a single throttle, but
in such haste that he has not had time to carry away the tiny body.
"Poor think!" says Phoebe tearfully; "it looks as if it was 'it with some
kind of a wepping. I don't know whatever to do with the rats, they're
gettin' that fearocious!"
Before I was admitted into daily contact with the living goose (my
previous intercourse with him having been carried on when gravy and
stuffing obscured his true personality), I thought him a very Dreyfus
among fowls, a sorely slandered bird, to whom justice had never been
done; for even the gentle Darwin is hard upon him. My opinion is
undergoing some slight modifications, but I withhold judgment at
present, hoping that some of the follies, faults, vagaries, and limitations
that I observe in Phoebe's geese may be due to Phoebe's educational
methods, which were, before my advent, those of the darkest ages.
CHAPTER IV
{Dryshod warnings which are never heeded: p27.jpg}
July 9th.
By the time the ducks and geese are incarcerated for the night, the
reasonable, sensible, practical-minded hens--especially those whose
mentality is increased and whose virtue is heightened by the
responsibilities of motherhood--have gone into their own particular rat-
proof boxes, where they are waiting in a semi-somnolent state to have
the wire doors closed, the bricks set against them, and the bits of
sacking flung over the tops to keep out the draught. We have a great
many young families, both ducklings and chicks, but we have no duck
mothers at present. The variety of bird which Phoebe seems to have

bred during the past year may be called the New Duck, with certain
radical ideas about woman's sphere. What will happen to Thornycroft if
we develop a New Hen and a New Cow, my imagination fails to
conceive. There does not seem to be the slightest danger for the
moment, however, and our hens lay and sit and sit and lay as if laying
and sitting were the twin purposes of life.
{The mother goes off to bed: p28.jpg}
The nature of the hen seems to broaden with the duties of maternity,
but I think myself that we presume a little upon her amiability and
natural motherliness. It is one thing to desire a family of one's own, to
lay eggs with that idea in view, to sit upon them three long weeks and
hatch out and bring up a nice brood of chicks. It must be quite another
to have one's eggs abstracted day by day and eaten by a callous public,
the nest filled with deceitful substitutes, and at the end of a dull and
weary period of hatching to bring into the world another person's
children--children, too, of the wrong size, the wrong kind of bills and
feet, and, still more subtle grievance, the wrong kind of instincts,
leading them to a dangerous aquatic career, one which the mother may
not enter to guide, guard, and teach; one on the brink of which she must
ever stand, uttering dryshod warnings which are never heeded. They
grow used to this strange order of things after a bit, it is true, and are
less anxious and excited. When the duck-brood returns safely again and
again from what the hen-mother thinks will prove a watery grave, she
becomes accustomed to the situation, I suppose. I find that at night she
stands by the pond for what she considers a decent, self-respecting
length of time, calling the ducklings out of the water; then, if they
refuse to come, the mother goes off to bed and leaves them to
Providence, or Phoebe.