On the Hen

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

NOWHERE in the lower creation does the better sex prevail so triumphantly, and maintain so clearly its segregated and individual self, as in the poultry-yard. Whatever else a hen may be, she is conscious femininity. She has a certain thrift of conduct, and a halo of all the proprieties, equal to that of any honored dame in a country parsonage. The arch debating eye with which she surveys a pleasant garden-plot after a rain is worthy of a Millamant choosing gems. Her gait and flutter while crossing before the highway wheels will remind you of some Early Victorian lady-love. She belongs to a gynæocraey, and consequently has no grievances. Taceat mulier does not keep her out of Parliament; if there be a Sunday meeting, she is there, starched and foremost; if Master Bantam be arrived at that manly period when he can be taught the discreet art of worm-hunting, it is Diana who tutors him.

The imperious gentleman who is pleased to call himself head of these stirabouts may be as great a buck and braggart as he may; until the silent partner shall lay his first egg, he is indeed a minus quantity. He may offer, if so it please his soul, what the Carolian Duchess of Newcastle calls “ the careless Neglects and Despisements of the masculine sex to the female,” but his scorn cannot carry; a cohort of empresses shall smile him down. A cock seems to have no personal estate save his beauty and his challenge-cry; all that divine Philosophy has given him for stay, among many ills, are the faithful pennons of gold and purple on his tail, and so much vocabulary as his ancestors brought out of the ark: dramatic, but painfully tautologous. No human fop, airing his maiden eloquence, could point a farce and adorn a guffaw as doth this sophomore creature on his trial crow, a sound which must move tears from stones. In fine, the superfluous lord of the henhouse is born to be ridiculous. Like Nero, he means, at least, to be an artist; but his very underlings scoff his flatting tenor, and withdraw, at the mere hint of a solo, to remoter nooks.

Hens, who are somewhat plain of face and figure, must consider what we term good looks as the sign of imbecility, seeing these from one year’s end to another on the irresponsible citizens of their commonwealth. To be fair, with them, must mean to be freckled, low of comb, beady of eye, economic of tail, and of a certain Chinese pudginess; everything, in short, that HE is not! On the same showing, a sprawling step must amount to a breach of morals, a loud accent to slander and mendacity; and a spur, once a baronial ensign, should imply nothing short of a profession of atheism.

For manners, our clucking friend takes the bell, with her air of polite semi-cynicism, born of a mood never too eager or gullible, and her strangely fascinating timidity. As in other houses where the husband and father lies heavily on the general conscience, the juvenility takes on an air of maturity and equipoise, unknown in a more even domestic atmosphere. A kitten may be a hoyden, and a young bee go over to Bacchus on his first flower; but the tenderest she-chick is a very mistress of etiquette. It talks much, in a silver key, softly, and never to the point; charming are the curvets and sallies with which it wins your eye; it would rather not feed of your delicacies, while lacking your references, but must needs fly to its parent, and first get her opinion concerning your character and the complexion of your set.

A hen’s meal-hour is a matter of Napoleonic brevity, and is so distributed as to leave her nigh twelve hours of the day for the study of chemistry and natural history, and for contemplation of the arduous affairs of state. Nothing is nicer than her choice of table dainties, nothing more delicate and epicurean, unless it be her aim, which is like that of an accomplished archer or salmon-catcher. She is not as we, who pause between the tricklings of soup for conversation, and affect languor at the entrées; or like Thoreau, of all dishes choose the nearest. With fine decisive candor, she sees what she wants, reaches for it, and, never missing her point, “ nicks the flying goodies as they pass,” two hundred neat engorgements to the minute; beautiful as the best jugglery, and, like that, never to be acquired by an alien.

Our own relationship with hens had a romantic opening: nothing less than a love-feast, in that first year of happy expatriation from town, when childhood in rural scenes was as childhood at the pantomime. Before long we became aware of the clumsy aviary, as of actors worth a glance and a nod. One day we discovered that the dressiest mother-hen had married again. She had grown uppish with her seven soprano children, to whom she had been, hitherto, kind and fond. It seems that a compliment from the pedigreed cock had turned her head. They were denizens of the same borough, though they had never been introduced. Domestic cares had engrossed her; and the sapient ladies who had made him all he was, fluttered, a beguiling bodyguard, about their prodigal prince. But he had strategies of his own. With a superb strut of approach, and a too genial wink of his long-baffled eye, he met her one morning alone, under the grapevine, and blurted out, in a tone which would have overturned the nerves of his schoolmistresses, “ You are the most beautiful widow that ever I saw! ” She giggled, and pattered off. Nevertheless, her family found her a changed little being from that moment. Inside a week, they sat, with their fourteen orphan wings pressed close together, on a separate roost; and they saw their country squire of a stepfather, snubbing all his former relatives, lead her in, and help her to crumbs and corn; and they knew that it was the wedding-breakfast.

Be it said that the young strolling audience at this curtain-raiser long looked upon the sun-saluting biped and his harem as upon the most absurd, puppetlike, and grotesque of creatures. But disdain is a ticklish sauce to first acquaintance. In the end the home-keeping fowl forced acknowledgments of their just deserts. We do, verily, take them still for odd gentry; something to be treated handsomely, if need be, and not questioned too closely. We have a true British attitude towards our foreigners, and are agreeably affected to find them alive, pert, and killable. Gravity, proper ambition, and prudence, the hen seems to possess, and admirable powers, not quite of irony, but certainly of sarcasm. But we cannot, for the life of us, get on sympathetic and clubable terms with her. Our animosities, like Tom the terrier, are ready at any moment to run full tilt into her downy shrewish synods. We are on a footing of affable courtesy — yet, one never knows! Those arched lips are but horny nippers, after all; that thin serpentine tongue is a remembrance of lost Eden; that golden hand, too, hath claws. They that can fly or swim are foes with resources. She is the ewig weibliche: one prefers to respect her.

Well, we give you joy, poor wayfarers, —

of any weapon in the midst of conspiracy, where life is but a losing fight, and every avenue looms terrible with the guillotine. Thy most hallowed ideals and uses, in our inhospitable star, are as naught, O Iphigeneia, to the Christmas market; thy very lights and livers are open to confiscation; the old largesses of eggs innumerable plead lamely, or not at all, for thee, at the farmer’s bar; the selfsame family which once held relations with thee as with a friendly power, promotes thee to be a dinner; the innocentest babe builds auguries on thy dried wish-bone; and the chance spectator (perhaps with the chicken-heart in him which thou hast outgrown) may watch thine indomitable severed mortality violently flying at a fence, or cackling posthumous defiance at this too barbarous world.