Such Is Life Joseph Furphy (ebook reader screen .TXT) 📖

abhors. He can eat nothing but fish; and, since he suffers under the disadvantage of being unable to dive, wade, or swim, someone else must catch the fish for him. The penguin does this, and does it with a listless ease which would excite the envy of the man-o’-war hawk if the unceasing anguish of hunger allowed the latter any respite for thought.

The penguin also lives on fish, but there the resemblance happily ends. In every other respect he presents a pointed antithesis to the man-o’-war hawk; and that is the only pointed thing about him, for he consists wholly of a comfortable body, a blunt neb, and a pair of small, sleepy eyes. He has no neck, for he never requires to look round; no wings, for he never requires to fly; no feet, for he stands firmly on one end, like a 50 lb. bag of flour, which, indeed, he closely resembles. His life is unadventurous; some might call it monotonous. He takes his position on a smooth rock, protected from cold by the beautiful padded surtout which clothes him from neb to base, and from heat by the cool, limpid wave, softly lap-lapping against the impenetrable feathers. He feels like a stove in the winter, and like a water-bag in the summer. When, from a sort of drowsy, felicitous wantonness⁠—for he never requires to act either on reason or impulse⁠—he desires to visit an adjacent island, he simply allows the tide to encircle him to about two-thirds his total altitude; then, by the floatative property of his peerless physique, and by the mere volition of will, he transports himself whither he lists.

He has few wants, and no ambition. Dreaming the happy hours away⁠—that is his idea. He knows barely enough to be aware that with much wisdom cometh much sorrow; therefore, no Pierian spring, no tree of knowledge, thank you all the same. He is right enough as he is; the perpetual sabbath of absolute negation is good enough for him. His motto is, “Happy the bird that has no history.” Once a day, he experiences a crisp, triumphant appetite, which differs from hunger as melody differs from discord; then he slowly half-unveils his currant-like eyes, and selects from the finny multitudes swimming around him, such a fish as for size, flavour, and general applicability, will best administer to his bodily requirements, and gratify his epicurean taste.

Whilst he is in the act of dipping his neb in the water to help himself to the fish, a man-o’-war hawk espies him from a distance of, say, five miles. Emitting a quivering shriek of hunger, the strong-winged sufferer cleaves the intervening air with the speed of a telegram, and has siezed and swallowed the fish before his own belated shriek arrives.

The penguin, living in total ignorance of the man-o’-war hawk’s existence, vaguely and half-amusedly apprehends his deprivation. In this way. You have heard the boardinghouse girl rap at your bedroom door, and tell you that breakfast is on the table. You have thought to yourself: Now I’m turning out; now I’m putting on my ⸻; now, my socks; now⁠—Why, I’m in bed still, and no nearer breakfast than at first! Here we have a reproduction of the penguin’s train of thought, plus the slight shock of surprise which marks your own relatively imperfect organisation. The whole thing doesn’t amount to a crumpled rose-leaf beneath the penguin’s base; so he apathetically depresses his dreamy eyes in casual quest of another fish.

Now if the feathered martyr could only wait one minute, he might obtain the second morsel on the same terms as the first; but Nature has so constructed him that, in his estimation, the most important of all economies is the economy of time; and his Dollond eye has descried another penguin, seven miles distant, in the very act of dipping for a fish. Can he make the return trip? He must chance it. He negotiates with lightning speed the interspace between his tortured stomach and the second penguin’s provender, whilst his own steam-siren screech of famine comes feebly halting after, and blends with the desolate plop of his prey into the abysmal emptiness of his ever-yearning epigastrium. Then, wheeling madly round⁠—his Connemara complaint freshly whetted by what he has taken⁠—he sees the first penguin dropping asleep as the fish he has just caught slides down head-foremost, to be assimilated by the simple clockwork of his interior.

Too late, by full fifteen seconds! and the wild despair of lost opportunity lends a horrid eeriness to the banshee utterance with which the man-o’-war hawk greets this crushing discovery, barbed, as it is, by the prior knowledge that every penguin within twenty miles is in Nirvana for the present. Now he must wait⁠—ah! heavens, wait!⁠—while one with moderate haste might tell a hundred. By that time, the bird beside him will have caught another fish; and though it be only⁠—By my faith, he must wait longer; for the penguin, concluding that his own appetite will be more finely matured by another half-hour’s sleep, is just dozing off. Woe for the man-o’-war hawk! he must decide on something without delay, and he must do that something quickly⁠—quickly⁠—quickly⁠—for there will be loafing enough in the grave, as the great American moralist says.

But, five hundred miles away across the restless, hungry waste of waters is another rock, where penguins steep themselves in sinless voluptuousness; and, with one prolonged, earsplitting yell, wrung from him by the still-increasing torment of his fell disease, the unhappy bird expands his Paradise-Lost pinions, and, with the speed of a comet passing its perihelion, sweeps away to that rock; for, like Louis XVI, he knows geography.

After listening with much interest to the description here loosely paraphrased, I fell asleep with the half-formed longing to be a penguin, and the liveliest gratitude that I was not a man-o’-war hawk.

Next morning, whilst I caught and equipped my horses, Jack tailed his own two into the catching-yard. Every Runnymede boundary man was expected to find