I have no clue at all to what the real grievance of the peacock is, though his history, so far as one can piece together fragmentary records, contains all the materials of a tragedy.

Down in the orchard is a great cage made of galvanised wire; a high perch runs across it, and it stands in a sunny, sheltered corner, where it was prepared for the peacock and his hen. Now the galvanised wire is rusty and torn, the woodwork is broken, the cage is patched up now and again to seclude a nesting hen or scratching brood of chickens, or to give temporary lodging to a dainty pair of bantams, and a vegetable marrow ripens its striped gourds in the sunshine. But all alone the peacock, lame on one foot, limps through the farmyard, and haunts the pigeon tower on the hill; while tradition tells of a day when he alighted on the engine of a moving train, and rumour hints at dark deeds in the past, the scared and blighted life of pea-hen, and a holocaust of young pheasants.

Yet he seems harmless enough, this limping fellow, harmless but embittered. Sometimes evening after evening he will follow me to the fowl-yard and wait for his own portion, drumming out an odd hard note, like the tap of a wooden mallet. Again he disappears, and for days we do not see him. Sometimes he comes to be fed under the windows or at the kitchen door, and will take food even from our hands, but with the distrustful air of one over-persuaded by raisins and lemon-peel.

Sometimes he seems but a mean, faint-hearted creature, running from us with the doubly mincing motion of the lame foot and the horizontal tail, as each separate feather beats upon the air; and again he appears, as when I first saw him, posed for a Japanese picture, high in a flowering cherry with his train, bronze, emerald and indigo, flowing down out of fairy-like clusters of flowers.

But to a peacock “all the world’s a stage.” If he does but sit meditating at evening on the low garden wall, the flowers below, the dark shrub to the left, the hedgerow elms beyond, with the slope of a field against a primrose sky, all these at once become a fitting background to the crested head and trailing tail. As he stands so, the silhouetted outline shows curves strangely like those of some great cat. Just so Ra’s head erects itself; so slope his neck and back, and so the tail lies out in a free curve over the hind leg stretched back. Is there such a thing as a protective outline, and does the silly peacock owe his safety partly to this?

If his very pose is dramatic, much more so is his sudden entrance on the scene. All round the house in summer nights comes the whirring of the owls. Now there seems to be a heavy sleeper under one’s very window, now the sound purrs out from the walnut tree across the lawn, now from the bell tower or the ivy on the chimney stack.

So one night we went exploring in the moonlight. Shadows of elms flecked the road where the White Lady is said to ride on November nights. A fir tree stood up in dark masses; thick shadows lay on the grass under the walnut tree. Round the side of the farm buildings an unexpected pool flashed into whiteness; the imagination was on the stretch to see an old owl flap out from under the eaves, and shoot by with silent wing; when suddenly from overhead came a flutter and crash of branches, and a great creature swooped down and fled by with train streaming behind.

It is but seldom he can cause so much sensation; and for the most part he walks alone behind the hedge, peering through at the barn-door fowls, as an anxious exhibitor at a fair peers out from his van to count the sordid crowd collecting.

Towards feeding time, when the fowls begin to gather, the peacock, if he can, pens a few hens into a corner by the woodshed and begins to posture before them, making a harmony of green and gold against the greening lichened wood behind. And the dance, Il Pavone[4], is a stately affair. He lifts the tail, separating each layer of feathers from the next; each feather of each layer from its neighbour, and the whole train flashes sapphire and emerald. Then with another sibilant shake, feather striking against feather, it is raised upright; the wings showing chocolate wing feathers are drooped almost to the ground, raised and drooped two or three times with a quick flutter, and he begins to turn, conscious that he has an audience behind as well as before. As he turns full face the beauty of outline of the eyeless feathers is made clear; one is apt to think when one finds them, that these are eyed-feathers spoilt; but now they are seen to fringe the entire tail, each ending like a shallow crescent with the horns outwards, so that, instead of the scalloped edging which the eyed patterns would give, these show a fine outline, airy and regular. So raised, too, the fringe up each feather is copper-coloured, the eyes stand out separately in long curved rows, the tail falls away from each side below him in convex curve, and it is here that the feathers with metallic green fringe grow, forming completely a shining curve away from the body. The tail is raised so high that the definite scales of the emerald feathers on the back flow into it; in the front view the wings are hidden. As a single note to a melody, so is the beauty of a peacock’s feather to the beauty of a peacock’s tail.

Then he turns again towards the fowls, showing to us behind his drooping wings and the skeleton white rays of the feathers on the back. He curves this over his head until it looks like an umbrella turned inside out, and advances upon them with dainty steps; but the fowls dully preen their feathers and run away.

What we call the tail is only the tail covert, and the back view shows the real tail is of stiff feathers, arranged, when these are spread, in an inverted heart shape. Then comes a sudden noise like a loud sneeze, repeated again and again before one can see that it is caused by the sharp striking of the tail feathers against each other and the tail covert—and again he turns and paces.

He made a long solitary parade the other day on the grass, and finally crept through the hedge and into the poultry yard, where we followed him to discover that the whole elaborate proceeding had been carried on for the sake of one dull black hen, in a flurry about the egg she had left behind her.

He was waiting for these fowls the other day while, pending dinner, they had come to dig up a tulip bed. They were routed with ignominy and rushed home past him, indifferent to his presence; and as the pursuer turned he sent out after her an angry, discordant, mocking scream.

The bird is but a false prophet. He screams like a cheap trumpet out of tune when the dog barks, or children shout; and when all is still he fills the air with shrieks, till the superstitious tremble and the scientific say there will be rain to-morrow.

But the morrow rises with cloudless sky and fortunes, and the bird is again discredited. We impute his mistake to the fact that he revels in pessimism.

All of which shows the peacock seen sub specie humanitatis and brings us not a whit nearer to what he is thinking, or rather is not thinking, in the small emptiness of his coroneted head. After all, there is very little head, and the tale of a peacock is mainly the story of his tail.