Blue heaven, green earth; betwixt the two the big old cherry tree in full blossom, with the sunshine drawing the sweet, heavy scent of honey from the blooms till the air was almost sickly and even the bees were glutted. Suddenly into the honeyed sweetness burst the passionate cry of a peacock with its long-drawn tang of bitterness.
He belonged to the public park but, wearying of its confines, he had flown the fence, wandering through the little pine grove and thence into our old garden.
From head to tail he was magnificent and knew it, arrogantly flaunting his beauty as he came. Beneath the cherry tree he paused and cried again.
I, looking from the window of the old studio in the barn, close above the tree, wondered how the cherry tree felt about this rival loveliness, but the peacock seemed to draw yet more glory out of the tree, using it as a setting for himself, as he spread his tail and strutted back and forth. Presently he flew to the low roof of the barn. The grey shingles still further enhanced the beauty of his colouring as he mounted the slope with mincing steps. Then he spied the mirror formed by the folding back of the dormer window.
He ran to it with evident delight and began to peer and prance and preen before it, bending his small, lovely head this way and that, dancing and spreading his tail in a shower of glory. Then he saw me. The indifferent way in which he looked me over made me feel like the poor shabby little girl at the party. Just a careless glance, then he returned to his mirror where he remained all day as though he could not bear to part with himself.
Towards evening his appetite overcame his pride and he returned to the park.
Next day, before the dew was gone, he was back at his mirror. I heard him call in the pines and then he was up on the roof. I offered some wheat but he had breakfasted and only desired to feed his vanity.
From the sunshine he absorbed the glint and glisten, from the quiet grey roof the contrast which multiplied and offset his brilliance; from me he tried to draw admiration and flattery. His beauty pleased me but I resented his arrogance.
“Vain creature!” I said. “Pretty you’d look if they turned you inside out and showed your selfish, shabby heart.” I turned to my work, disgusted at his conceit.
He continued to come every day and I grew to like him there behind me as I worked. Sometimes I pandered to his conceit and applauded his showing off. Then he was pleased and would come and sit on the window-shelf in the far corner, gradually moving closer and closer until his head, surmounted by that glorious coronet of sparkling feathers, rested on my shoulder, and my hand had to steal out and caress it. Subtly the bird was drawing from me, as he had drawn from everything else. I knew it, but I knew also that now he was returning what he drew, tenfold. Suddenly I sensed the loneliness of this creature, hatched from an egg, brooded over by a common domestic hen. No kith, no kin: his looking-glass self the only mate he had ever known.
I learned his call. He answered from the pine wood and came hurrying. Often his call woke me in the morning.
Spring passed: the blossoms were cherries now, the bees had moved to the clover patch. The long summer days passed and the crisp autumn ones, and every day the peacock and I screeched our greeting and spent long companionable hours. Then one day I kissed his crest, put him out, and closed the window. That night I went abroad.
In my absence a parson occupied the studio and wrote sermons there. He closed the wall-cracks with newspaper to keep out the singing wind, and caught the mice in traps.
“What of my peacock?” I wrote home.
“He came once, the morning after you left. Since then he has not come at all,” was the reply. “We see him strutting in the park, delighted with admiration. He has doubtless forgotten you,” they added.
I was absent for over five years. When a young thing stays out of her own world as long as that, and comes back grown, it is hard to fit in. Some things have grown ahead of you, and you have grown ahead of others.
I ran up the rickety barn stairs to the studio. Phew! How musty and “sermony” it smelt! Even as I crossed to the window I was peeling off strips of the parson’s newspaper. I threw the dormer wide. The garden was full of November fog. “Come in, old fog, and souse out the sermons,” I cried. Everything was drab: the cherry tree, old, past bearing, had been cut down. I thought of the peacock. “Gone where good peacocks go,” I sighed, and wondered where that was.
Next morning I was busy on the floor with a pail of suds.
Hark! In my rush the suds were knocked over and trickled through the floor onto the back of the patient cow below. I leaned from the window and screeched that unwritable screech. It was answered instantly. The peacock was hurrying through the garden, unmindful of his tail, which swept the leaves and dirt. Hurrying, hurrying, not to the mirror—he could have had that all these years—but to me.
“Oh, peacock! Now I know that if they did turn you inside out your loyal heart would be lovelier than your feathers!”
How was he aware, that morning, that I had come? I do not know. That is one of the mysteries, and his secret. The park was out of earshot, and I had not been there.
What a pity this happiness could not have continued for years and years, for I hear that peacocks live to a great age. But the park belonged to the people, and the people missed the peacock.
A rumble of little grumbles arose.
What right had an individual to monopolize public property?
They complained to the keepers, who complained to the City fathers, whose fatherly instructions were “Pen the peacock”.
Locked up among the sentimental doves and the stupid owls, the peacock beat his breast against the wires in vain. His feathers and his pride were broken.
The glow and sparkle of his plumage dulled, went out. His head sagged forward, wings drooped. He remembered no more the way of brag and display, nor how to spread his tail; it dragged heavily in the dirt.
I tried to cheer him in the padlocked pen. I begged in vain for his release. He belonged to the taxpayers: the City demanded its taxes; the taxpayers demanded their pound of flesh. It gave them satisfaction to see their property securely penned before their eyes. They tried to “shoo” the peacock into strutting for them, and when they did not succeed they said, “Stupid brute! He sulks,” and turned away.
When next they came the pen was empty.
“Where is the peacock?” they asked the keeper.
“Dead.”
“So? I suppose you saved his feathers? Will you give us some?”
“They wasn’t worth the saving,” the man replied. “All the glint went off ’em when his heart broke.”
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