The Rat With the Silver Bell

HAVE heard the tale of a rat which has much impressed me. The main points of the story are fact. There really was a rat that wore a silver bell! Though I have a certain respect for my imagination, I do not think so highly of it as to believe that I could evolve anything so delightfully fantastic as that. Yes, there really was a rat that wore a silver bell! I have a friend who knows well the one who can validly vouch for it, since that one was instrumental in the fact's accomplishment.

The introductory circumstances are somewhat hazy in my memory. I believe it was a family quite out of the ordinary, whose mother was its leading spirit; a woman of much insight, so much insight, in fact, that she was perpetually gentle. Consistently, then, and very especially, she was gentle with animals, and had an affection and respect for them not unallied, I should say, with the classic affection and respect of Saint Francis, for his little brothers, the birds and the fishes and the Wolf of Gubbio.

One instance of her gentleness stands out in my memory, in the recital. One of the little girls of the family had, by I know not what devious device, got hold of a small mouse by the tail. By this effective control she was able to souse the little creature in a pan of water and watch its reactions. Then, when it was tired of trying frantically to swim away from its own retained tail, the merciless small giantess would lift it free of the water for another chance at recovery, and when it was sufficiently recovered would again souse it into the pan of water. It might be said, if not altogether classically, that neither Tantalus nor Prometheus nor Ixion nor other much-tried gentlemen of fable had anything on this small, much-tried creature of real life.

Then, mercifully enough, enters the mother of the family! I am told she neither railed nor reproved—not, at least, by word of mouth.

She only took the little creature with all the gentleness of which she was capable, made it safe and snug in a flannel petticoat, and set it near the fire, there to recuperate bodily and to recover, if it might be, partially some former faith in mankind.

Whether this was a turning point in the career of the young person who had amused herself with sousing the little creature, I do not know. I should judge by what follows that it was. For there follows the rat with the silver bell!

He had been caught not in a trap of snapping jaws, but in one of those falsely alluring ones which offer easy access to cheese and then, when the cheese is all eaten, present nothing but pointed spikes by way of exit. This spares the enticed rat any bodily cruelty, of course, but may be, I should think, a fruitful source of rat mental anguish. What will the family at home be thinking of this long detention? What worry for them! What anxiety for the prisoner! Rats are certainly not without inventiveness, but here was a difficult problem; and for rats whose philosophy is probably not of a very high order—wire bars do make both a prison and a cage.

Then came the discovery of him by the children of the household. Their idea was to tame him. Whether the gentle mother was away from home, or whether she was at home and approved of the taming, I do not know. Perhaps she thought the taming of the rat might serve incidentally for the taming of the children. That I leave to conjecture. I only know that under repeated efforts and ample replenishments of cheese and nuts, the rat became extraordinarily friendly. He was kept in confinement, to be sure, but little by little they let him out in a larger space, and he would of his own accord go back into his cage to sleep. So he became, in time, a tamed rat, tamed by education; a rat of a really superior order and experience.

By and by, whether it was that the novelty wore off, or whether it was qualms of conscience that overtook the young Brobdignagians who had educated him, I do not know, but it was determined to set him free. Before parting with him, however, one of them—it must have been that he or she was a silver-tongued poet in the making—thought of a tiny silver bell that was available; the sort of bell that would be used to ring fairies to dinner if there were fairies, and if they partook of dinner. This bell should be tied about the rat's neck—then they would know if he came back.

He did. In the night that closed down as big as eternity all about him, the children in their beds would sometimes hear a faint, exquisite, silvery twinkling tinkle, as though a tiny fairy star lost to the eye were to become suddenly audible. And that little sound would move about in the universe and pause: move about again, here and there, and finally take itself off, off, off—with the most delicate gradations of distance—disappearing finally altogether. This happened for days, for weeks—but at last at larger intervals—and finally the silver bell tinkled about for the last time, and then was heard no more.

So far the facts. But who with a heart so dead, given those facts, but could draw the proper inference!

He had been absent long; he had no doubt been given up. and probably mourned (by his family at least) for dead. It began to be remembered even by those formerly indifferent to him that he had had certain virtues; and as his absence lengthened these grew, as gossip and snowballs do, with much rolling about—until the lost citizen was very nearly the lost hero.

Then, by and by, on a wonderful night he returned to them, wearing an insignia and distinction that baffled even the oldest and most experienced. As he moved, music moved with him! What was this! By what miraculous merit was he so distinguished above his kind?

He became at once a seer, a prophet! They came to him for advice; they lavished honors on him; they wanted to make him a general, a leader, and more or less of a god! They would have had a grand procession in his honor—and would gladly have fought one another for his favor. But the trouble was this—he had been fatally unfitted to be a hero, a leader, a general by his gentle experience, which, we might say, was symbolized by the bell. Those gentle Brobdignagian children, though they had bestowed on him this wonder that was beauty and silver sound, had bestowed on him also, it should not be forgotten, a taste for gentleness. He no longer believed in biting his enemy's throat for death when a quarrel was afoot; in fact, he had now a way of retiring into a corner, he and his bell. When the rest scampered and squeaked and swore and had a "rough house" afoot—at a time when he could have rung his silver bell madly and with great effect among them, he would sit instead, looking on, hardly breathing, for fear of adding even so much as a tinkle to the turmoil. Now this is no way, as everybody knows, for a public favorite to behave.

His downfall began with mockery on the part of one of the others. He should no doubt have shaken his bell furiously at the first sign of the insolence of the upstart, shaken it like a terrible silver menace. But he did not. The Brobdignagians had worked a spell on him during the time of his sojourn with them. So he continued in their tradition, a stranger to himself and to his kind.

From time to time, when he could slip away in rat daytime (which is to say the night), he would go back to the Brobdignagians' country, but he never found any of them about, and in the rat night time (that is to say the day) he was expected to be at home; and if he had made off, the silver bell, like the giant's harp in the fairy tale, would have cried out and betrayed him.

So matters went from bad to worse. His enemies and detractors multiplied and the little gay sound of the bell grew more and more tentative as his steps became more and more hesitant and cautious. The quieter he sat, the less the bell rang; the less the bell rang, the less he was mocked.

He slipped back again in rat daytime (that is to say at night), hoping for a glimpse of his old teachers, but they were not about. He paused, one little foot held up hesitant. He thought he heard one of them laugh softly! Then he held his breath and so did they, each listening almost painfully for the other. Then he made off, away from them for the last time, with that little silver sound, his little bell tinkling, tinkling tentatively as he went.

Of course, his people never reformed; of course he was never again a hero to them. The bell, I should think, may have become in time a positive danger, and I have it on good recommendation of my logic that a cat perhaps finally silenced its silver note for good and all. Yet to me—and I believe to any who read of him—he will always be remembered affectionately as the rat who wore the silver bell. Sunt lachrymæ rerum.

Perhaps the worst of the tale is that everyone who reads it is going to read his own theory and interpretation into it; and maybe not one in twenty will really enter into and understand the theory and mentality of the rat, concerning which I, myself, often as I have thought about him, am still much at sea.