Wanderfoot Part 12

"We have fifty hens now: six broody hens are sitting on twelve eggs, and when they hatch out we shall have seventy-two chickens; fifty of those we will fatten and send to market at half-a-crown each (that will bring us in six pounds). The other twenty-two we will keep for laying purposes next year; added to the fifty hens we now have that will make seventy-two hens laying eggs, which we will sell for at least a shilling per dozen."

It seemed a shame to take the people's money!

The spell of hens was on them. When at last a few chickens of shamefully mongrel breed were hatched out, they might have been offspring of the dodo from the way the family crooned and gloated over them, warming them at the fireside, feeding them with wonderful concoctions, sitting in the open yard for hours to watch their antics.

The ways of the elder hens also enchanted them, and each of the fifty had a Christian name bestowed by reason of some peculiar charm or quality. There were: Grey Lady, Eagle, Crooktail, Favvy, Blind Eye, Johannesburg Moll, Flirt, Long Tom, Felix, and The Lady with the Fan, etc.

The rabbits too were spell-binders. Two respective litters were heartlessly gobbled and mutilated by does driven off their mental reservation by the sight of human beings fondling their new-born offspring. After the occurrence of these horrible tragedies, a book on rabbit-rearing was bought, and the knowledge acquired that rabbit babies should not be touched or even looked at until they creep from the hutch and show themselves. As a result of this information later litters were successful, and during the winter there were wonderful wet nights when dozens of tiny rabbits were brought for the sake of warmth and dryness into the kitchen, and the furry things with their bright wild ways popped and gambolled to the sheer delight of every one--until the morning came with the business of cleaning up after the circus!

The first disappointment came with the arrival of the prize-pen of Black Langshans. Their rectory home was in Hampshire, so the railway journey had not been long, but the sea-voyage appeared to have affected their health. They staggered forth from the battered poultry basket--four old black hags of hens, bulky and bleary as washerwomen, h.o.a.ry of ear and scaly of leg, followed by a tall slender c.o.c.k more like a phantom ostrich than a fancier's bird. He had a wild, red eye, and appeared to be suffering from a mysterious affliction in the legs, which caused him to fall fainting at every few steps he made. Haidee cheerfully dosed him with the peppercorns which were left over from the time when the chickens had pip. But nothing could rouse him from his Hamlet-like melancholy.

The hens must have been at least five years old, but happily, neither Val nor Haidee knew enough about the outward signs and symbols of fowl age to realise the trick that had been played upon them. Only, it dawned upon them slowly in the long months to come that they need never expect pink eggs from the grandmotherly old washer-women with good appet.i.tes. As for the young c.o.c.k who was to have been the ancestor of many wonderful chickens for market and prize-pen, for reasons of either ill-health or chivalry, he was celibate from birth, and could never be beguiled into taking any interest in his wives. He spent most of his life in having fainting fits, or fleeing on staggering legs from younger and l.u.s.tier birds. At other times he dreamed on one leg, his melancholy head plunged into his bosom.

Haidee got on well at school. Far from being troubled by lack of intelligence she was an exceedingly clever girl; but she hated study, and much preferred cleaning out rabbit-hutches or putting fresh straw in the hens' nests. Her pa.s.sion was for a pony. There was a little governess-car in the Stable-house, and permission with the tenants to use it. Only there was nothing to pull it. But three months after their arrival Haidee looked up from a letter from Westenra, and announced the receipt of twenty pounds for the purchase of a pony. Val stared.

"You did n't ask for it, did you, Haidee?"

"Oh, no; I just mentioned that there was a cart, and how nice it would be if there was a horse, and how I would do all the looking after it myself, and we need n't have to pay a man at all," said Haidee airy and unblushing.

Val did not reproach her, but she felt vexed that Westenra should be asked to hand out money when she, though hard-pressed, abstained to ask for anything but the price of everyday necessities. However, the pony was a great joy to Haidee, and she had an excuse at last for the stable-boy airs she loved to a.s.sume. Nothing pleased her better than to take off her skirts, and donning knickers and long boots, clean out the stable. She would swagger and swing her shovel and shout "Gittap!" and "Hey thar!" as though she had been brought up in a farmyard. Val's unconventional soul was hard to shock, but even she sometimes wondered what Westenra, who admired Vere-de-Vere repose in a woman, would say if he could hear his adopted child at her labour of love in Joy's stable.

A compensating feature was that the girl was in superb health, and fortunately, there were no prim people at hand to be shocked. Indeed, as far as society was concerned Cliff Farm might have been situated at the Antipodes. No one came to call, and not a soul in the island suspected that the well-known writer, "Wanderfoot," was living peacefully among them, feeding bran mashes to a pony and setting broody hens.

The only people who interested themselves in the occupants of Cliff Farm were the louts from the neighbouring farm, and their interest could very well have been dispensed with. When they looked over the hedge, and found Haidee in long boots and knickers, whistling as she cleaned out the stable, they stood sn.i.g.g.e.ring; and when Val took pot shots with her rook rifle at the crows that picked the buds from the fruit-trees, they made it their business to find out if she had a gun licence. The genus lout is of much the same kidney all the world over. In Jersey the farmers have a great objection to "gentlemen farmers," and as Val seemed to come under that heading, they disliked her accordingly. Little she recked as long as they did not openly interfere. But she and Haidee were sometimes nervous in their lonely house, and Val would often get up in the night and fire a shot out the window, just to let stray loafers know that they were not afraid. Eventually they got a couple of dogs, and were more at ease.

Their nearest neighbour, Scone, was a gross-looking man, with coa.r.s.e ears and little pig-eyes; yet apparently he had the best kind of heart inside his ungainly body, for he was all good advice and helpful words to the occupants of Cliff Farm. He advised Val to keep a pig to eat her "waste," and incidentally volunteered to supply her with one from a litter of his own. Later he offered to take her chickens and eggs to market on condition that she bought her b.u.t.ter and milk from him.

It was not until long afterwards that she discovered what mean advantage had been taken of her trusting belief in the inherent decency of man.

These farming people disliked her. She was not one of them, and that was enough to call forth all their malice and ill-will. Scone had charged double what a pig would have cost at the market, and jested with his cronies on the subject. Also through his kind ministrations she was paying a penny more per quart for milk than any one in the island and receiving twopence less per dozen for her eggs.

However, this knowledge came later. For the time Farmer Scone was all unction and good advice, and Mrs. Scone came often to the house to give Val the benefit of her knowledge of chickens. She was a common little woman, with a mouth full of decayed teeth, and a purple nose, but Val looked upon her as a type, and she never disdained to know types.

Besides, Mrs. Scone was an oracle on chickens, or so she professed.

Certainly most of her statements as to food, etc., were at variance with the poultry journals, but she sounded very practical and convincing, and Val had never had experience of people who from sheer malice give wrong advice, and was far from suspecting the depths of meanness that can lie in an ignorant mind.

It was Mrs. Scone who advised her to rear capons for the market. Said she:

"_That's_ the thing to do with your c.o.c.kerels. I have no time to try it myself, but you are so clever, Mrs. Westenra, and would be sure to make it pay. Turn your c.o.c.kerels into capons. It is the most profitable business going."

"Capons?" said Val, vague-eyed. "I always thought capons were fish, and that monks ate them for Friday's dinner."

"Oh, dear me, no, they are not fish, though monks will eat them fast enough if they get the chance--any one will, they 're delicious. You 'll get from seven shillings and sixpence to ten shillings for them any day in the week," averred Mrs. Scone, and proceeded to explain to the open-mouthed Val and Haidee the process of caponising.

"So simple. Just cut a small slit above the wing of each bird with a pair of special scissors which you buy; then you hook up and remove the two little glands that lie along the backbone, and there you have your capon!--instead of a young c.o.c.kerel that is always tearing about the run fighting and eating his head off without putting on any fat."

Val was deeply intrigued. c.o.c.kerels had become one of her problems.

More than half the chickens upon which she had counted for spring eggs had either succ.u.mbed to the pip, or never hatched out at all; of the remainder the larger proportion had turned out to be of male s.e.x.

Rose-coloured dreams of getting into touch with the Jesuit College on the hill above St. Helier and doing a flourishing business with the monks now floated through her mind. But she shivered at the thought of the caponising operation. She was physically incapable of cutting anything, even the head off a dead fish.

"Oh, I couldn't," she said, "at least I don't think I could."

"A pity!" said Mrs. Scone. "There's a fortune in it for them as will do it--a mint of money."

This gave Val pause. Had she, just because she was a coward about cutting things, any right to reject a scheme that had a mint of money in it? Was it fair to Westenra? After profound consideration, and much guileful persuasion by Haidee, always eager for experiments, she decided to at least give the idea a fair trial. So, on an afternoon, twelve of the finest c.o.c.kerels were enthusiastically chased and captured by Haidee, aided by one of Farmer Scone's farm boys kindly lent for the occasion, and put under a rabbit-hutch to await their fate. A packing case const.i.tuted the operating table and the instruments of torture lay beside it--Val had sent for a little case from London (price thirty shillings). Mrs. Scone and Haidee held the first bird on the table, and Val under the direction of the former, with white face and trembling lips, made the first slit. The c.o.c.kerel at the p.r.i.c.k of the instrument screamed like a banshee, and Val's unnerved hand fell to her side.

"Oh! how brutal it seems!" she faltered.

On the urgent advice of the others she attempted to finish the operation (with her eyes closed), but the c.o.c.kerel objected strenuously, blood flew in every direction and heart-rending shrieks tore the air. White as ashes the operator let the scissors fall and staggered to the door.

Mrs. Scone, purring solicitously, supported her into the open air.

"Dear me, dear me! What a good heart you have, to be sure, Mrs.

Westenra!"

Later, leaving Val sitting outside very sick, she returned to the operating theatre, and she, and Haidee and the farm hand between them performed on the rest of the c.o.c.kerels with such vigour that three of them died the same night, and two more a few days later; four, after a long convalescence, recovered, but stayed languid and appet.i.teless for the remainder of their existence; while the rest, after a week or two recovering their usual sprightly temperament, fought, pursued each other, and ate up all the food as gaily as before.

That was the end of the caponising business. The great scheme for supplying fat capons to the Jesuit College (not for Friday's dinner, of course, but as an article of nourishment proper to monasteries) never materialised.

Westenra in the meantime was writing grimly, and not often. From his letters Val gathered something of the strain of life at No. 700 West 68.

The place was paying better now under Miss Holland's management, but, as she had foreseen, he hated to live in such close communion with people who were nothing to him. After the first few weeks he had gone into bachelor quarters once more, not his old ones in the city, but rooms near the sanatorium. Operations were coming in well, but there were big gaps in his banking account made by the fateful year of experiment. A note of weariness often crept into his letters--and when he wrote:

"So glad you are happy--_at last_--with your fowls and rabbits. Do not let them absorb you altogether," it sounded to her very like a reproach.

Often he said, "I envy you--with the children about you." But for the most part he rejoiced that the conditions of her life should be so ideal for health and happiness. Sometimes to Haidee he would cry out boyishly:

"How I would like to be with you and Bran in the windy fields, running after the rabbits."

Like every man whose boyhood has been spent in the country, he loved fields, and rabbits, and birds--all wood and hedge creatures; could describe the eggs and whistle the note of every bird in the British Isles. Haidee wrote him long accounts of the life at Cliff Farm, and when she began to make a collection of eggs by very carefully taking only one from a nest of four or five, if ever she had any doubt on the subject of parentage Westenra was never too busy to clear up the matter by return mail.

He was obliged to economise narrowly, and the consciousness of this drove Val into a state of frenzy if obliged to spend an unexpected sou.

But never having been trained in economy she had not the faintest notion of how to practise it, except by doing without personal things herself.

No gowns; no new hats; no clothes at all, for herself. Yet somehow that did not make any difference to the bills. There was always the awful food problem, and the boot problem, and the problem of how to make hens lay without paying large grain bills, and a dozen other incidental problems!

Like a good many people, Val had supposed that fowls fed themselves.

Her brain had pictured them actively pursuing worms, and insects, and wild seeds during the intervals of laying. She found instead that they were like children in the matter of meals, always there on time. At dawn and eve, to say nothing of mid-day, she would find them standing dolorously at the back door with eyes c.o.c.ked expectantly at whoever came out. Only after a good meal did they go forth to promenade, and then it was to lay their eggs in some distant hedge where n.o.body could find them.

When the grain bills began to come in she realised that in the poultry business there was an output, as well as an intake, and that all her small profits were eaten up by the fowls.

CHAPTER X

WORRY-BELLS

"Tout homme digne de ce nom A dans le coeur un Serpent jaune Installe comme sur un trone, Qui, s'il dit: 'Je veux!' repond: 'Non!'"

BAUDELAIRE.