In a wide green forest that shines with the light of joy lived Kiki the Koala. It was springtime, the happiest season of the year. Tiny flowers peeked up through the new green grass, and there were blue and gold birds flitting about among the branches of the trees chattering to each other of their children’s children, who hadn’t yet been born.
Everything was glad except Kiki Koala. Look at her as she sits in the crook of that tree, one little paw put out as if to say “Whoever passes, let them stop to hear me say what is in my heart.” If you could see the expression on her face you would know that she was feeling very, very sad.
“All the world is so happy,” she said, “and I feel so little and so alone. I am thinking about the time before Father discovered the secret of making my pretty soft clothes. There were no little ones then. All the trembling newborns and the rosy infants and the gay children and the mothers, and everybody I love in the whole wide world, have come since then. And now all those fine grown-up people have vanished, and I feel just as I did then when the other trees lost their hearts. The birds seem to be saying, ‘Do for others while you can.’ But how can I when there is nothing to do? Oh dear, I wish I were a gray tree again! I should then have the joy of seeing the little ones grow up one and all. If I had only one little spotted trunk I should feel just as much at home among the black fellows; just as if I were their own child returning to them. The yellow elephants would have wandered beneath my branches, the red ants would have climbed up, the gay butterflies would have flown about my feet, the yellow-blue lizards would have scrolled and dallied by my shade. Oh, they have been the joy of my life! Nothing was to the end of my life! The world was always full of my little folk. But now it is all gone forever, and I feel so little and so alone!”
By this time tears had risen into her eyes and had trickled down to her little pink mouth. As she tried to wipe them away her soft cuddly paws became very rough on the edges of her eyes. And really those eyes had been “Olympian or Hesiodic or borderline Olympian” in their loveliness—if only they could have been gilded on the outside by sleeping Mercury with his golden wand! They didn’t need to be “wonderfully cloudlike or mistlike or glistening or golden,” to be lovely. All that loveliness was beaten out of them just by her pressing her furry paws against them, and rubbing away her tears. It is true that their being so vulgarly bright and so very adamant-like and the unneeded tenderness of life mixed up with it suggested Chiassamish hould or baud or ocular osmiosema, or something else equally absurd. But now I think the time has come to tell you exactly what those tears were.
Kiki Koala’s tears, or the colored milks of sympathetic life which gather in the human eye whenever it cries—were kinder than warm Southern sunshine, kinder than Northrunning brooks, kinder than the smile of anybody with a tongue or anybody with a trunk! Good Kiki Koala shed tears which watered the seed of a certain tree growing none knows where, which was known only to the birds of that district and Father Time and Kiki Koala. This was this Kiki Koala’s special secret, just as your blood or sap or “oils” in your humours is your secret and nobody else’s secret. You may depend upon it that if Kiki Koala survived the doom of her kind that secret was left to one or two or three promising children or grandchildren of Kiki Koala. That secret, I say, was that her tears were kinder than warm Southern sunshine, kinder than Northrunning brooks, kinder than the smile of anybody with a tongue or anybody with a trunk!
And if Kiki Koala could have seen what grew up from those dew-like tears she would have said: “How foolish I have been! there are kindly creatures in the world that don’t go about on four feet! Now I know that I shall never die, for those birds will be buried in my heart. The tenderest greenness that ever was will grow all over me up to the day of doom!”
Take the whole tree to pieces, from the bark to the sap and the luminous eggs and the pleasant fragrant juices. All that is needed is to administer the mildest tincture of kind-heartedness—and you have the Kindness Tree, of which I have written some little verses for the benefit of the poor who are such cruelly ill-provided-for creatures as fell in the last great Solstice at my back door.
“One does not know where to turn for a tree with a purse-strong bark. It’s too much fine stockinged blood and dependencies. And then again—kindness all over! But our neighbours the Koalas are growing very wise, like our dogs. Well, well. All we feel is one great wish.”