A Plague of Birds
I
THIS tale that I am going to tell you is a strange and rather unbelievable one, and it will strain your credulity to the breaking point. In its weirdness it brings to mind those ‘bird droves of God’ of which Aristophanes tells us, those strange hordes of little feathered visitants that the Greeks conceived of as concealing beneath tiny feathered bodies and bright-eyed flitting preoccupation some memory of a tragic previous human existence, remembered now only in fitful restlessness and sharp piercing cries.
It all happened at the close of a rather overcast day early in September. As I stood on the porch just before dinner, admiring, as always, the lovely hushed stillness of the Hudson River and the brooding beauty of the Palisades in the subdued twilight glow, I heard the cries of birds in the heavens. Looking up, I saw a flock of chimney swifts wheeling about in the sky, and I noticed idly that, instead of being in their usual orderly wedge-shaped formation, they were wheeling about in circles, uttering sharp cries. Coming events may cast their shadows before them, but unfortunately it is usually only after the event that we remember having seen the shadow, and this time was to prove no exception. So I turned back undisturbed to my contemplation of sky, and hills, and water, and then, totally unsuspecting of what was in store for us, I went in to dinner.
We were eating that dinner — which we were destined never to finish — and talking idly, when suddenly there was a rapid beating of wings in the adjoining room. Hastily I ran in to investigate, and there I found a little chimney swift frantically hurling itself against the screened window in its frightened efforts to get out. ‘Oh,’ I cried, ‘someone must have left a door open, and this poor little thing has blundered in here! It’s terribly frightened.’
Very tenderly I seized it, and gently put the fluttering, terrified creature out of the door — utterly failing to notice that there was no door or screen open in the room through which it might have entered!
Scarcely had I resumed my seat at the table when ‘again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.’ Again I ran into the living room, followed this time by my brother. ‘ Why,’ he exclaimed, ‘there are several birds! They’re chimney swifts. It must be a nest of young ones that has fallen down the chimney.’ And even as we stood there gazing the room was suddenly filled with the beating of wings and the chirping of birds.
‘The chimney is alive with birds — they are coming into the house!’ shouted my husband. ‘We’d better get up on the roof and block the chimney to keep them out.’ And off the men dashed.
The children and I stood there stupefied, quite unable to grasp the magnitude of the calamity which was befalling our peaceful home. What a sight was this before our astonished gaze! Innumerable birds flying into the room, bringing with them thick black clouds of soot from the chimney — birds everywhere! Screaming birds beating frantically against the windows, terrified birds flying blindly and aimlessly through the house, upstairs and down, seeking some refuge, clinging to ceilings, shades, walls, picture mouldings, anything that offered even the most precarious foothold. And the soot! It settled on the furniture; the air was thick with it; the hearth was speedily covered with a black carpet that crunched underfoot.
As we stood there dismayed, I heard a loud cry from the roof. I ran out to see what new calamity might be befalling us. The promise of the overcast afternoon had been redeemed by a slight drizzle, making the tiled roof dangerously slippery, and I thought to myself fatalistically, ‘Well, they’ve fallen off the roof! That is all that was needed to make this a perfect nightmare!’ But this time my gloomy forebodings were fortunately not realized, for it was just my husband shouting down to me. ‘The chimney is alive with birds!’ he cried. ‘The last one of the flock just flew in past my head. You’d better build a fire to smoke them out.’
II
Obediently I returned to the house, picking my way through what seemed like hordes of children congregated in the living-room. Our own three boys and the dog apparently not being able to cause confusion enough, their number had been augmented by all the excited children in the neighborhood, who, attracted by seeing the birds fly down the chimney, had come to investigate.
I crunched my way over the sooty floor, and tried, but in vain, to light the fire which was laid in the fireplace. The beating of myriad wings caused a breeze which made it impossible for any flame to live, and three times my kindled blaze was instantly fanned out. I was desperate, until I finally hit on the expedient of making a human torch of myself. Standing out on the living-room floor, I held blazing newspapers at arm’s length and threw them into the fireplace, until at last I did succeed in kindling a fire, without, miraculously enough, setting myself ablaze.
But then how bitterly I regretted my success! What a sickening holocaust it was! We had completely forgotten that birds must fly in spirals when going against gravity, and that the flues were too narrow to permit them to do this. Consequently into the room the poor miserable little things had to come, those that did not drop with singed wings from their poor foothold on the bricks right into the blazing twigs.
Sick at heart, I now tried as hard to beat out the fire as I had previously tried to light it, to the heartbreaking accompaniment of the thud of little burned bodies dropping into the fire, the smell of scorched feathers, the terrible mad beating of wings, the shrill frightened cries of the poor bewildered creatures. Blindly they flew all through the house, seeking some safe place to alight. Too bewildered to see the doors and windows that we had flung open, they clung with their claws to any spot on wall or window that seemed to offer shelter. We brandished brooms, we swept them off ceilings, we dislodged them from pictures and window blinds, we tore their desperately clinging claws from screens, we ejected them by handfuls. Completely panic-stricken, they yet seemed determined to spend the night with us, and flew back into the house through any opening they could find; when unable to do so, they clung to the outside of the screens, uttering pitiful cries.
But by this time we were almost beyond compassion. We had about run the gamut of human emotions, and the tender sympathy with which we had put out the first bird had changed to an irritated detaching of the sharp claws which clung so determinedly to wall or hand or clothing, and a rude hurling of the bird into the outer air, with the parting savage invocation to ‘Get out, and stay out, you brute!’
And what a sight the house was — soot, bird tracks, claw marks, blackness, disorder everywhere! No fire could have wrecked a house more completely. I literally did not know where to begin. I felt completely crushed, and the accursed monotonous chirping still issuing from the fireplace got on my nerves terribly. I yearned wildly to be a second Nora, and with an even more reverberating slam than hers to shut the door behind me, to return to that house nevermore! But Nora was in the theatre, and I was in the everyday world — though a rather nightmarish one it seemed just then! So, instead of any dramatic gesture, I wearily fell to, in the attempt to repair some of the damage.
The first thing to do was to block up the fireplace so that at least no more birds could come into the room that night. Then we attempted to clean up the soot, but it was like trying to sweep up the sands of the ocean. There was no inch of the house, upstairs or down, that was not infiltrated and covered with a blanket of it. We swept it up once, but in a twinkling everything was as black as before. The air was full of it, it was all over our clothing, our feet tracked it through the house wherever we walked.
And the dog had contributed his share to the general mélée. At first, tremendously excited by this strange occurrence, he had caught birds in his mouth when he could, and had most reluctantly relinquished his hold only when we insisted. He had followed us with a savage gleam in his eyes as we caught birds and hurled them out of door and window. He had leaped after them on window seat and chairs, he had jumped up on the wall to try to reach them, and everywhere there were sooty paw marks. But after a time he must have become depressed by the disparity in numbers and by the total impossibility of any one lone dog’s making an impression on such a horde, and he had quietly and sadly crept away. We discovered later where he had gone. It was to his favorite place of refuge in moments of great stress, such as thunderstorms or the Fourth of July — namely, my clothes closet. There he had peacefully gone to sleep on my white shoes, after having first, like Epaminondas with the pies, been careful to step right on the centre of everything in sight, and there was nothing that did not bear the marks of four tremendous sooty paws.
III
The next morning we awoke to brilliant sunshine, and the chirping of birds, but what different sentiments that once-happy sound now engendered in our breasts! With what dismay did we realize that most of that cheerful noise was issuing, not from the bright outdoors, but from our luckless home! My husband, on first waking, listened carefully, and, when he heard from downstairs the now familiar ‘Cheep, cheep,’ turned over for another forty winks, murmuring to himself, ‘No laboratory for you to-day.’ And those who knew him could gauge by that the magnitude of the calamity that had befallen us, for nothing short of battle, murder, and sudden death had ever before been known to keep him home from the laboratory on a week day.
Dressed in our oldest clothes, we now proceeded to attempt to clean up. The children and the dog were turned out after breakfast to the tender mercies of the neighbors, and told not to dare to return before sundown. Then we got into action.
The men began first on the fireplace. My husband sat on the hearth, head and arms reaching up the chimney, and pulled down birds by the handful, for some still clung there, even after the barrier had been removed. Their wing beating was much fainter. Many of the poor little things had died of exhaustion during the night and had dropped down in the ashes on the hearth, but those that survived flew away gratefully when released into the out-of-doors.
Then we started to clean house, and I felt that the Augean stables must have been a comparatively light task. Every inch of the house, hardwood floors and all, had to be scrubbed; the rugs had to go to the cleaners; the living-room floor had to be scrubbed three times with a fine brush to make any impression at all on the soot. The two men, the maid, and I worked all day without let-up, and at that we did nothing to remedy the condition of shades, upholstery, walls, or ceilings. Of course it was a marvelous way to get the fall house cleaning done by really intelligent help, for never again do I expect to have a scientist and a college professor to assist in the task. And the house had needed doing over, and the furniture had needed to be reupholstered, — all of which we realized as an aftermath of our visitation, — but it did seem as if Providence were taking very drastic measures to procure so comparatively slight a good!
Even then we were not quite through, though we thought we were that evening, as we rested our aching backs and shoulders and surveyed a restoration which, while it left much to be desired, seemed miraculous to me after my pessimism of the night before. In a day or so, a faint but sickening odor began to permeate the house, issuing unmistakably from the cellar. It brought to my mind what I had read about the odors emanating from the battlefields of France, and I hastily sent a distress call for the plumber. He was obviously skeptical over the phone when I told him my weird story, but he agreed to come up to investigate, and when he did, you never saw a more surprised man. He had thought my tale a cockand-bull story, a figment of my imagination, and here it was corroborated most convincingly by his findings in the cellar!
That awful night we had learned much about the predilections of our chimney swifts. We had discovered that they liked only sooty flues, for the seldom-used playroom fireplace had attracted but a few birds, who had immediately flown away. My husband had opened the doors of the furnace to release the birds imprisoned there, having heard their plaintive cries, but even then he had not exhausted all their places of refuge. For lo, tracing the dreadful smell to its source, the plumber extricated from the flue of the gas water heater numerous little dead bodies of birds that had been trapped there and had perished miserably of asphyxiation, or had been scorched to death. Half a water-pailful of bodies he removed, and the odor ceased.
IV
Well, that’s my story, a story which has been carried away by our amazed friends to retail on occasion. It has been as though the anecdote were a pebble flung into a sea of acquaintances, and as the circles widened and spread farther from the original source, the incredulity and rank unbelief grew proportionally, so that finally the reputation of the teller for veracity was the only guarantee that he might meet with even a modicum of belief.
And yet it all really happened, and, worse luck, to us! It has made a marvelous tale to tell — that small crumb of comfort we have been able to extract from our extreme tribulation. Little else, however, even though kind friends have attempted to point out to us that we should consider it a singular and to-be-savored-to-the-full mark of favor that out of all the homes on the Atlantic seaboard — nay, further, of the whole United States — we should have been singled out for such a visitation!
It was weeks before I could look on a bird with any feeling other than loathing, and I lived in momentary dread of another onslaught. Indeed, one day, as I was peacefully sitting reading, my sister shouted, ‘Look! look!’ and I ran to the window crying, ‘Where are the birds?’ And when I saw that instead of the feared visitation it was only the neighbor’s dog making off with a leg of lamb which he had just stolen from our back porch, I had an intensely relieved feeling of ‘Pooh, is that all?’ With dread I waited for the anniversary of the fatal day, recalling all the tales I had heard of that wonderful unfailing instinct which leads birds to do the same thing at the same time each year. But the birds must have retained as unpleasant memories of their visit as we did, for they have never come back, and I, for one, hope that they never do!