I Know a Secret/Chapter 19

by Christopher Darlington Morley

Story of the Thrush's Nest

THE story that most impressed the Real Estate Man, that evening at Lloyds Neck, was the one about the Thrush's Nest. It was first told by Mr. Mistletoe when they invited him out to the Grape Arbor Tea Room, and all the animals knew that it was perfectly true. It would be a good thing if all Real Estate Men would read this story, because it tells what happens to people who live in houses that are too big for them and too expensive to keep up.

The thrush lived near Mr. Mistletoe's lawn. As we have said before, lawn is too smooth a word. That was the spring all the workmen were there, and a spread of grass constantly trafficked over by ten children (four Mistletoes and half a dozen neighbours) and any number of dogs, plumbers, ash men, masons, carpenters and cesspool drainers, washed out by Long Island thunderstorms and sliced into divots by croquet mallets, is likely to be a little untidy. And so it was. Mr. Mistletoe tried hard, but his face had a discouraged look. Almost any fine evening towards katydid time you could see him out there, picking up pebbles Blythe had thrown for the kittens to chase, or bones that Donny had discarded, or looking for the croquet hoop.

But the thrush didn't mind all this. She even seemed to admire the place, and that spring the weather was so moist that there were plenty of worms. A worm means to a thrush much what a hot frankfurter means to a hungry child on a picnic—except that to her it looks like a hot dog five or six feet long.

At one side of his garden Mr. Mistletoe had put up a deck tennis court. Deck tennis is a kind of miniature tennis they play on board ship, not with rackets and a ball but by throwing and catching a rubber quoit which is tossed across the net. The rules and scoring are just like tennis, and the court is like a tennis court but smaller. Mr. Mistletoe had marked it out very carefully with narrow white tape neatly held down by staples. But in one place this tape had got broken, so there was a loose end.

It was the time of year when birds are building nests. The thrush had just picked out a good site for hers, in the big oak tree above the drive, and then that loose white end of tape caught her eye. So while Mr. Mistletoe was loitering about the garden with nothing particular to do—and that was unusual, for people with four children generally have something definite to do, and someone to whom it ought to be done—he saw the thrush tugging fiercely at the piece of tape. There was something really very comic about the violence of her efforts. She braced her feet and jerked as hard as possible, many times in quick succession. But it wouldn't come. She would pause, pant a little, and you could see her speckled bosom heave. She was a stout matronly thrush, probably not as flexible as she had been once. You could almost hear her say to herself, "Well, for goodness sake!" when the tape wouldn't budge. Then she would try again. She did not know about the staples Mr. Mistletoe had so carefully hammered into the ground.

Mr. Mistletoe and the whole family admired her from a distance. She was so much in earnest that it seemed a pity to disappoint her. Mr. Mistletoe sent Christopher indoors for the big pair of scissors. They cut off the loose end, and then kept away at a polite distance. Sure enough, the thrush flew down from the tree where she had been watching, seized the ribbon, and flew off, so much excited, she forgot to say Thank you. And a few moments later, there she was again, hauling at the rest of the tape as hard as ever.

Perhaps it was generous of Mr. Mistletoe, or perhaps it was merely silly, but to see how much tape the thrush would use he sacrificed his whole deck tennis court. He hasn't played deck tennis since. There must have been two hundred feet of tape, but they cut it all up into pieces and she took every bit. It was a great afternoon for her. She must have thought she had found a tapemine. So that the stout thrush wouldn't even have to stoop, Mr. Mistletoe hung all the tapes on the Nervous Prostration wire that runs between two trees. She flew busily to and fro, carrying the streamers to the oak tree on the other side of the house.

The kittens, of course, knew about the Nervous Prostration wire, but the Real Estate Man, when Fourchette told this story, asked what it was.

The Nervous Prostration wire was a relic of the time when Donny was not well and had such a spell of peevishness. He growled so much, and made himself so disagreeable to delivery men and visitors, and seemed to have such an appetite for trousers, that everyone got worried about him. They took him over to see a doctor who runs a boarding house for dogs in Sea Cliff, and the doctor felt his pulses. (A dog has four pulses, one in each leg, and he felt them all.) Then the doctor looked at his eyes and his tongue and talked to him, and finally he asked about the conditions of Donny's home life.

Mr. Mistletoe attempted to describe the conditions of Donny's life, as well as one can ever describe such delicate matters to a stranger. He told the doctor about the children, and how Donny's time was spent, and finally the doctor said: "This dog has a kind of nervous prostration. He's not as young as he was, and your children are evidently too lively for him. They tire him out."

Mr. Mistletoe thought that that was quite possible, and said he had sometimes felt that way himself.

"You must see that Donny gets more quiet," said the doctor. "He ought to take a bromide tablet every day, and he must have a quiet nap after lunch. It would be a good thing to keep him chained up part of the time, in a shady place, so he won't be always on the go. Put a wire between two trees, so his chain can slide along it, that will give him room to move about a bit."

The wire was put there, and was known as the Nervous Prostration wire. Donny used to brag about all this a good deal, and sometimes I believe Mr. Mistletoe envied him when he saw him resting in the shade. Donny soon got better, and the wire was no longer used.

 

But this story is about the thrush. As we were saying, she took every bit of tape. She used it to build a nest that was a source of scandal to all the other birds. It was almost as big as a beehive, very disorderly and pretentious. Even Abe Blackbird, the lawyer, who rarely meddled in other people's affairs, warned her against making a nest of that sort. But she had been so puffed up with ambition that she was determined to have the biggest and most prominent home in the Roslyn Estates. She even persuaded a photographer to come and make a picture postcard of it, as they do of the handsomer houses.

During the time that she was raising her children Mr. Mistletoe was abroad, so he never knew how they got on. Mr. and Mrs. Mistletoe, after watching Donny taking it easy under the trees, decided that they also deserved a holiday. For if the children could give a big sheep dog Nervous Prostration, you can imagine what they could do to their parents. And when Mr. and Mrs. Mistletoe came home again, as soon as they had counted up the children and made sure that everything was all right, they asked about the thrush's nest. There was sad news to be told. The big nest had not been a success. It was draughty, inconvenient, and insecure. In the August thunderstorm season the whole untidy bundle had blown away in ruin and wreck. The young thrushes had been cast upon the world, and the stout matronly thrush was working somewhere as a stenographer.

 

It is a sad story and a true one, and as Mr. Mistletoe always added, it was his own fault. He should have let that stout thrush take only afew strips of tape, not the whole thing at once. Of course she was a little bit crazed with the sentimental excitement of the nesting season, and he should have protected her against her own folly. Perhaps the same thing is true in building a mind. A mind is only a little nest in the infinite oak-tree of life; but it needs to be comfortable and secure, a place where you can hatch eggs of thought; and it must be strong enough not to be blown away in sudden thunder-squalls. Education, I suppose, is like that tape. You can't pull it out of the ground unless some one loosens it for you, but the good parent or teacher will parcel it out gradually in convenient shreds. He won't chop up too much of it at once.

And education differs from that tape in one very important way. There's no end to it.