UPON AN EGG.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XIII, Issue V, 4 August 1894, Page 110

UPON AN EGG.

PRESUMABLY NOT FRESH. I pushed it away from me. I felt as though I had disturbed the graves of the longdeparted. ‘ Forgive me the sacrilege,’ said I. ‘ They sold you to me as new laid, a mere thing of yesterday. I had no idea I was opening the immemorial past. De mortuis nil nisi bonum— to you at least the quotation will be novel. Or I might call you bad, you poor mummy.’ ‘ Unhappy, pent-up, ineffectual thing?’ I said, going on with my jilted bread and butter. ‘ Poor old maid among eggs I And so it has come to this absolute failure with you. You might have been—what might you not have been ? A prize hen, fountain of a broadening stream of hens, chicks, dozens of chicks, hundreds of chicks, a surging ocean of chickens. Had you been hatched among the Early Victorian chickens that were, I presume, your contemporaries, by now you might have been a million fowl, and the delight and support of hundreds of thousands of homes. And instead you have been narrowed down to this sordid back-street tragedy, a mere offence, tempting a struggling tradesman to risk the honour of my patronage of his books for a paltry fraction of a pennyworth of profit. Why, I ask you, were you not batched ! Was it lack of courage? a fear of the unknown dangers that lie outside the shell ?’ An indescribable pity welled up in me for this lost egg, this dead end in the tree of life. The torrent of life had split and rushed by on either side of it. * And you might,’ cried I, ‘have been a Variety, a novelty, and an improvement in chickens. No chick now will ever be exactly the

chick you might have been. Only an Olive Schreiner could do full justice to your failure, you poor nun, you futile eramite, you absolute and hopeless impasse. Was it, 1 ask again, a lack of courage?’ * Perhaps a lack of opportunity ? It may be you stirred and hoped in the distant past, and the warmth to quicken you never came. Ambition may have fretted you. Indeed, now I think of it, there is something in the flavour of yon singularly suggestive of disappointed ambition. In literature, and more particularly in criticism, I can assure yon, I have met the very fellow of your quality, from literary rotten eggs whose opening came too late. They are like the genii in the “Arabian Nights,” whom Solomon, the son of David, sealed in the pot. At first he promised infinite delights to his discoverer—and his discoverer lagged. In the end be was filled with unreasonable hatied against all the feeble free, and emerged as a malignant fume, eager to wreak himself upon the world.’

A sudden thought came to me. 1 saw my egg in a new light, and all my pity changed to respect. * Surely you are a most potent egg, a gallinaceous Swift. After all, anything but pointless and childless, since yon have this strange quality of being offensive and engendering thought. Food for the mind if not food for the body—didactic if not delightful—a bit of modem literature, earnest and fundamentally real. I must try and understand yon, Ibsen Ovarum. Possibly it is a profound parable I have stumbled upon. Though I scarcely reckoned on a parable with my bread and butter. Frankly, I must confess I bought yon for the eating.’ Now that I had at last begnn to grasp the true greatness of my egg, I felt it becoming to drop the tone of half-patron-izing pity I had previously adopted. * Come,’ said I, smiling, with a dash ot raillery, over my, coffeecup ; * admit you are a humbug, you whitened sepulchre of an anticipated chick ! Until you found a congenial soul and overwhelmed me with your confidence, what a career of deception—not mean, of course, but cynical—ironical—you have been leading. What a jest it must have been to you to be sold as new-laid 1 How yon laughed in your quiet way at the mockery of life. Surely it was a worthy pair to Swift, in cassock and bands, conducting a marriage service. I can well fancy your silent scorn of the hand that put you in the bag. New-laid 1 But now I have the full humour of you. You must pardon my dulness of apprehension. I grasp your meaning now ; your quiet insistent teaching that all life is decay, and all decay is life. I fell a-musing on this perfection of art, and was so wrapt in my new teacher that at last the landlady sent the servant up to remove the breakfast things, on the theory that I had forgotten to ring.

* Shall I throw this away ?’ said the girl. * Good heavens !’ I cried. ‘ Throw it away ? Certainly not. Put it in the library.’ (The library is the corner of the room by the window.) She stared at me. She is a callous, impertinent kind of girl. *lt do smell,’ she said.

* That’s the merit of it,’ I said—• it’s irony. Go and put it on the fourth shelf near the window. There are some yellow covered books there, and Swift, some comedies by a gentleman named Ibsen, and a farce and a novel by two gentlemen named George . But there ! you don’t know one book from another ! The fourth shelf from the top, on the right hand side.’