Sheila and Others/The Suppression of a Cuckoo Clock
THE SUPPRESSION OF A CUCKOO CLOCK
I NEVER go to the tool-chest in the laundry cupboard, in a hasty dive after nails of specified sizes, or the screw-driver which has such facility for getting itself lost, without recoiling under the sound of two mournful notes that make accusing appeal to me out of the horrid, rasping miscellany of that box. They proceed from the two kid-covered bellows that in happier days produced the soft coo-coo of our lamented Swiss clock.
I shudder when I hear them. It makes me think of lost souls. You may regard it a just retribution for ever possessing so childish a thing as a cuckoo-clock. But it wasn't my fault. It was a present. A relative aged seventeen, who "went over" just before the war, brought it as her chief trophy from a flying visit to Switzerland. I will not say it was entirely for her sake we adopted it. We certainly were short of clocks in our house, and a most appropriate place presented itself at the head of the front-hall stairs, so I had it hung there, quite openly. It has always seemed to me better just to take a thing of that kind in a straightforward seriousness, without explanation. Privately, I believe most people have a sneaking fondness for cuckoo-clocks. It is a relic of childhood's unsatisfied longings, and the misspent enthusiasms which, after all, makes good capital on which to begin grown-up days. It is what we yearned for and never possessed that lingers with sweetest effulgence in the memory, and who among us never yearned for a cuckoo-clock?
It was interesting to observe the different effects produced by the installation of that clock upon our friends. Some merely smiled indulgently, consenting to be amused only after finding they could do so with security from the charge of childishness. Some were ambiguous and evasive as to their real sentiments, while others disclosed a quick and self-unconscious interest in the whole thing, from the blue and white hybrid bird that made spasmodic jerks at every stroke of the hour, to the mechanism within that produced the phenomena and which I maintained should not be too ruthlessly invaded. It was generally our men visitors who took the liveliest interest in our new acquisition, which brings me to the point of my tale.
Paterfamilias was away when the clock came and was put up. He generally is away when anything really important happens. When he first noticed the clock he showed an immediate and lively interest in it. That in itself was a suspicious circumstance, had I but realized it. Pater has a large capacity for ignoring household exigencies. How often have I openly, not to say obtrusively, remarked upon sundry shutter-hinges hanging limply by one screw, or called attention to discouraged castors without exciting the least response. But with the cuckoo-clock it was different from the first. He wanted to know why it had been hung in such a dark place and what it was hung on. He created suspicion about its being exactly straight, saying that of course it wouldn't keep time if it were not, and asked every now and then what made that rumbling sound, while it was striking, when I couldn't hear any. Altogether, the amount of interest he took in it seemed unwarranted for a man who doesn't know the price of coal (even yet) and is capable of asking where we are invited to dine after we are in the taxi.
This smouldering warmth of interest presently broke into the flame of activity and the unfeeling suggestion followed that the cuckoo part of the clock be suppressed. The gong, he said, wasn't so bad, rather a sweet-toned one and would be distinctly pleasing if it weren't for that absurd cackle. This was a shock to me. I liked the soft coaxing little coo-coo, especially at night when I couldn't sleep and nothing more exhilarating came to my mind than the mounting price of beefsteak.
But a still greater shock awaited me. I went into the sitting-room one Sunday afternoon (Sunday afternoon!) to find the cuckoo-clock down, dismembered and strewn in sections all over the table and chairs. I was greeted with no apologetic explanation such as the circumstances seemed to me to call for, but with an immediate, not to say explosive demand to know where the pincers were.
I stopped short in an exclamation mark attitude, letting my astonishment fully reveal itself.
"Bring me the pincers," Pater said in unnecessarily loud tones. "This fowl is fastened in so tight I can't budge it."
"But why—" I began.
"It's perfectly simple," he interrupted argumentatively, "I can get it out, but if I don't have the pincers to bend this wire with, some of the woodwork may come off. And you may as well bring me a file too."
I never expostulate with Pater when he's in that tone of voice. For one thing it's useless, and I'm not one to batter myself on a stonewall, or its equivalent. I merely went and got the pincers, when it turned out that it was a wrench he really wanted—a small one. When I reminded him that we hadn't such a thing, he wanted to know with a quite unnecessary degree of warmth why we hadn't, and didn't even so much as answer when I inquired if the scissors would be of any use.
Difficulties seemed to increase upon him. Without the ponderous weights, which always fell off at precisely the wrong moment, the works wouldn't work of course, and when the pendulum was off, which it took every opportunity to be, they worked too much. As the clock had to be on the mantle piece so that the weights could be suspended, to manipulate it at all, it was awkward to get at, and fresh complications were continually arising.
I refrained from offering advice, or even making general remarks, a course that experience has proved wise under such circumstances. I didn't even say anything when the deer's horns and other pieces of the exterior ornamental carving began to fly off.
But Pater was less restrained. He made several remarks of a character unusual with him.
I was relieved when he got it all together again to find it would still go.
It no longer coo-cooed to us of course and Pater kept remarking what an improvement it was, but I didn't realize any myself.
The next Sunday it was the same, only more so. The glue-pot had to be found that time, and the sitting-room smelled of it for days after. I think it was that Sunday that the kid bellows came out, and the next that the blue and white bird disappeared forever from the little door-way at the top which he opened with such funny eruptive jerks. After this it became a weekly performance, a Sunday afternoon occupation to which as summer advanced, the appearance of shirt sleeves seemed to impart a questionable tone. The glue-pot had to be kept within reach, and I revoked my usual arrangement of having the sitting-room "done" on Saturdays, preferring Monday, instead, for obvious reasons.
Of course I had realized and lamented the probable end, from the first. I allowed myself to be buoyed up occasionally on a Sunday evening by Pater's evident confidence in himself and relish of the affair, but after the suppression of the cuckoo, I never felt any great sense of security in what remained.
My fears were realized. It wasn't long before the clock began to show signs of aberration. Sometimes it sounded the hours, sometimes it didn't. Suspicions got abroad of its character as a time-keeper. I noticed that Catherine went less often to the front hall to consult it by way of checking her own erratic kitchen clock, while other parts of its anatomy had followed the bird and its song to the ignominy of the tool-box. To me, there was something almost profane in this uncovering of the hidden things of—no, not nature, but mechanical devices. I am one who prefers to let well alone. But then, of course, I'm not scientific, and I'd rather see hands going round than wheels.
It was only when the brazen proposal was made to transfer the gong of the cuckoo-clock—now cuckoo, alas! no more—to the patrician brass-clock on the dining room mantel, that I put my foot down, French heel and all. There is a limit to even my endurance.
For a few months longer our erstwhile cuckoo-clock ticked spasmodically on, and then succumbed—a melancholy victim to man's curiosity and love of tools. I don't know that Pater would diagnose it so, but I know Pater in some ways better than he knows himself—far. That's my compensation.
For two years I let that hollow mask of a clock remain on the wall, mute and inglorious, its weights primly hung together at the top to be out of harm's way, its hands motionless, its countenance null and void. Last spring I included it in the annual presentation to an old-clothes man, and hung a picture over the scar its absence revealed.
I doubt if it was even missed by the master of the house.