XIII
THE MATERNAL INSTINCT

Some things there are which you may count upon for ever. The fittest will always survive, despite the million charities to aid the incompetent; the maternal instinct will always be the deepest human incentive, no matter who may gibe at the sentiment which clings about little children.

Now, if it be true that Art is the voice of the Age in which we live; that the painter paints what the eye of the Age has seen, the singer sings the songs which the Age has heard, the man of letters writes the thoughts which have passed through the mind of the Age—if all this is true, then how strange and unreal an Age this must be.

For if for one moment you chose to consider it, there are but few painters, few singers, few writers who express the immutable laws of life. Among writers most of all, perhaps, this is an age which devotes itself to the unfittest. The physically unfit, the morally unfit, the socially unfit—these are the characters which fill the pages of those who write to-day.

The old hero, the man of great strength, of great honour, of great courage, he no longer exists in literature. I am told he is old-fashioned, a copy-book individual, a puppet set in motion with no subtle movements of character, but with wires too plainly seen, worked by a hand too obviously visible. There is no Art in him, I am told. I am glad there is not. He would lose all the qualities of heroship for me if there were.

In times gone by, though, this old-fashioned hero was just as real a man as is the hero of to-day. In times gone by this hero was not unnatural, not wanting in character or humanity when he slept with the maid of his choice, a naked sword between them guarding the pricelessness of her virginity. But now—to-day—how wanting in character do you imagine would he be thought for such a deed as that? How painfully unreal?

Is this the fault of the Age? Or is it the fault of the writer? Is it that the Age cannot produce a real hero? Or is it that he is there in numbers in the midst of us and the man of letters has not the clearness of vision to see him? For it is not the fittest, but the unfittest who survives in the pages of literature now.

And thus it is also when you find treatment in fiction of that immutable law, the maternal instinct. If in the novel of to-day you meet the character of a woman with a child, you may be fairly confident that it will be shown to you sooner or later in the ensuing pages how easily she will desert it for the love of some man other than her husband, or how, loving that man, her soul will be wracked ere she bids it farewell. But, tortured or not, she will go. No matter how skilfully she is shown to repent of it later, still she will go.

Now, is that the fault of the Age, or is it the fault of the writer? In danger or in love, do women desert their children? It may happen that they do, but that is a very different matter. All that glitters is not gold—all that happens is not real. Yet it seems to be the choice of the modern writer to seize upon these isolated happenings, give them a coating of reality, and offer them to the public as life.

But life is not a narrow business where things just happen and that is all. Life is the length and breadth of this great universe where things are, in relation to the whole system of suns and moons and stars. Now the maternal instinct is a law without which this wonderfully regulated system would shatter and crumble into a thousand little pieces.

But no one extols it in this age of ours. Talk of it and you are dubbed a sentimentalist at once. Write of it and the cheap irony of critics is heaped upon you. Yet there seems no greater and no grander struggle to me than when these inevitable laws march through the invading army of vermin and of parasites to their inevitable end of victory.

The other day I witnessed a most thrilling spectacle: a mother defending her child from death—a duel where the odds against victory were legion.

In the hedge that shields my garden from the road there is a thrush’s nest. I saw her build it. She was very doubtful about me at first; played all sorts of tricks to deceive me; decoyed my attention away while her mate was a-building; sent him to distract my mind while she was putting those finishing touches to the house of which only a woman knows the secret—and knows it so well.

I think before it was completed she had lost much of her distrust in me, for I did nothing to disturb her. It was not in my mind to see what she would do if things happened. I just wanted everything to be—that was all. And so, after a time, she would hop about the lawn where I was sitting, taking me silently thereby into her confidence, making me feel that I was not such an outcast of Nature as she had supposed me to be at first.

I tried to live up to that as well as I could. Whenever I passed the nest and saw her uplifted beak, her two watchful eyes gazing alert over the rim of it, I assumed ignorance at the expense of her thinking what an unobservant fool I must be. But there were always moments when she was away from home and I, stealing to the nest, found opportunity for discovering how things were going on. Five fine blue eggs were laid at last. I think she must have guessed that I counted them, for one morning she caught me with my hand in the nest. I slunk away feeling a sorry sort of fool for my clumsy interference. She flew at once to see what I had done. I guess the terror that must have filled her heart. But when she had counted them herself and found her house in order, she came out on to the lawn and looked at me as though I were one of those strange enigmas which life sometimes offers to every one of us.

At length one day, when I called and gently put in my hand—leaving my card, as you might say—the eggs were there no longer. In place of them was a soft, warm mass like a heap of swan’s-down, palpitating with life.

I met her later on the lawn, when she perked her head up at me and as good as said:

“I suppose you know I’ve got other things to do now, besides looking beautiful.”

But I thought she looked splendid. What is more, I told her so, and it seemed just for the moment as if she understood, as if there came back into her eyes that look of grateful vanity which she wore last spring when her mate was wooing her with his songs from the elm tree across the way. But the next moment she had put all flattery behind her and was haggling with a worm, not as to price no doubt, but haggling nevertheless for possession.

Well, the household went on splendidly, until one day I saw my cat sitting on the path below the nest staring up into the bushes.

“You little devil!” I shouted, and she went galloping down the garden with a stone trundling at her heels.

I kept a closer watch after that and, one morning, hearing a great noise as of the songs of many birds while I was at my breakfast, I just stepped out to see what was happening.

I was held spellbound by what I saw. For there, on the path again below the nest, sat the cat and two yards from her—scarcely more—stood my little mother-thrush, her eyes dilated with terror, her feathers ruffled and swelling on her throat, singing—singing—singing, as though her heart would burst.

It can only last a moment, I thought. One spring and the cat will have her. But, no! Before the greatness of that courage, before the glory of that song, the cat was silenced and made impotent to move. There, within a few feet of her was her prey. With one swift rush, with one fell stroke of her velvet paw, she could have laid it low. But she was up against a law greater than that which nerves the hunter to his cunning.

For five minutes, with throat swelling and eyes like little pins of fire, the mother sang her song of fearless maternity. The glorious notes rang from her in ceaseless trills and tireless cadences. I have heard a singer at Covent Garden, when the whole house rose as one person and applauded her to the very roof, but never have I heard such a song as this, which put to silence the very laws of God that His greatest law might triumph.

For five minutes she sang and then, with crouching steps, the cat turned tail and crawled away into the garden. The thrush ceased her singing and fluttered exhausted up to the nest.

And they write of women deserting their children!