The Diary of a Goose Girl | Page 5

a complicated product of modern civilisation on a Tuesday night, and on a Wednesday morning I awoke as a Goose Girl.
{Hens . . . go to bed at a virtuous hour: p19.jpg}
My destiny slumbered during the day, but at eight o'clock I heard a terrific squawking in the direction of the duck-ponds, and, aimlessly drifting in that direction, I came upon Phoebe trying to induce ducks and drakes, geese and ganders, to retire for the night. They have to be driven into enclosures behind fences of wire netting, fastened into little rat-proof boxes, or shut into separate coops, so as to be safe from their natural enemies, the rats and foxes; which, obeying, I suppose, the law of supply and demand, abound in this neighbourhood. The old ganders are allowed their liberty, being of such age, discretion, sagacity, and pugnacity that they can be trusted to fight their own battles.
{Ducks and geese . . . would roam the streets till morning: p20.jpg}
The intelligence of hens, though modest, is of such an order that it prompts them to go to bed at a virtuous hour of their own accord; but ducks and geese have to be materially assisted, or I believe they would roam till morning. Never did small boy detest and resist being carried off to his nursery as these dullards, young and old, detest and resist being driven to theirs. Whether they suffer from insomnia, or nightmare, or whether they simply prefer the sweet air of liberty (and death) to the odour of captivity and the coop, I have no means of knowing.
{The pole was not long enough: p21.jpg}
Phoebe stood by one of the duck-ponds, a long pole in her hand, and a helpless expression in that doughlike countenance of hers, where aimless contours and features unite to make a kind of facial blur. (What does the carrier see in it?) The pole was not long enough to reach the ducks, and Phoebe's method lacked spirit and adroitness, so that it was natural, perhaps, that they refused to leave the water, the evening being warm, with an uncommon fine sunset.
{They . . . waddle under the wrong fence: p22.jpg}
I saw the situation at once and ran to meet it with a glow of interest and anticipation. If there is anything in the world I enjoy, it is making somebody do something that he doesn't want to do; and if, when victory perches upon my banner, the somebody can be brought to say that he ought to have done it without my making him, that adds the unforgettable touch to pleasure, though seldom, alas! does it happen. Then ensued the delightful and stimulating hour that has now become a feature of the day; an hour in which the remembrance of the table-d'hote dinner at the Hydro, going on at identically the same time, only stirs me to a keener joy and gratitude.
{Honking and hissing like a bewildered orchestra: p23.jpg}
{Harried and pecked by the big geese: p24.jpg}
The ducks swim round in circles, hide under the willows, and attempt to creep into the rat-holes in the banks, a stupidity so crass that it merits instant death, which it somehow always escapes. Then they come out in couples and waddle under the wrong fence into the lower meadow, fly madly under the tool-house, pitch blindly in with the sitting hens, and out again in short order, all the time quacking and squawking, honking and hissing like a bewildered orchestra. By dint of splashing the water with poles, throwing pebbles, beating the shrubs at the pond's edges, "shooing" frantically with our skirts, crawling beneath bars to head them off, and prodding them from under bushes to urge them on, we finally get the older ones out of the water and the younger ones into some sort of relation to their various retreats; but, owing to their lack of geography, hatred of home, and general recalcitrancy, they none of them turn up in the right place and have to be sorted out. We uncover the top of the little house, or the enclosure as it may be, or reach in at the door, and, seizing the struggling victim, drag him forth and take him where he should have had the wit to go in the first instance. The weak ones get in with the strong and are in danger of being trampled; two 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