"A man is known by the company he keeps."
In the morning-room of his sister-in-law's house Groby Lington fidgeted
away the passing minutes with the demure restlessness of advanced
middle age. About a quarter of an hour would have to elapse before it
would be time to say his good-byes and make his way across the village
green to the station, with a selected escort of nephews and nieces. He
was a good-natured, kindly dispositioned man, and in theory he was
delighted to pay periodical visits to the wife and children of his dead
brother William; in practice, he infinitely preferred the comfort and
seclusion of his own house and garden, and the companionship of his
books and his parrot to these rather meaningless and tiresome
incursions into a family circle with which he had little in common. It
was not so much the spur of his own conscience that drove him to make
the occasional short journey by rail to visit his relatives, as an
obedient concession to the more insistent but vicarious conscience of
his brother, Colonel John, who was apt to accuse him of neglecting poor
old William's family. Groby usually forgot or ignored the existence of
his neighbour kinsfolk until such time as he was threatened with a
visit from the Colonel, when he would put matters straight by a hurried
pilgrimage across the few miles of intervening country to renew his
acquaintance with the young people and assume a kindly if rather forced
interest in the well-being of his sister-in-law. On this occasion he
had cut matters so fine between the timing of his exculpatory visit and
the coming of Colonel John, that he would scarcely be home before the
latter was due to arrive. Anyhow, Groby had got it over, and six or
seven months might decently elapse before he need again sacrifice his
comforts and inclinations on the altar of family sociability. He was
inclined to be distinctly cheerful as he hopped about the room, picking
up first one object, then another, and subjecting each to a brief
bird-like scrutiny.
Presently his cheerful listlessness changed sharply to an attitude of
vexed attention. In a scrap-book of drawings and caricatures belonging
to one of his nephews he had come across an unkindly clever sketch of
himself and his parrot, solemnly confronting each other in postures of
ridiculous gravity and repose, and bearing a likeness to one another
that the artist had done his utmost to accentuate. After the first
flush of annoyance had passed away, Groby laughed good-naturedly and
admitted to himself the cleverness of the drawing. Then the feeling of
resentment repossessed him, resentment not against the caricaturist who
had embodied the idea in pen and ink, but against the possible truth
that the idea represented. Was it really the case that people grew in
time to resemble the animals they kept as pets, and had he
unconsciously become more and more like the comically solemn bird that
was his constant companion? Groby was unusually silent as he walked to
the train with his escort of chattering nephews and nieces, and during
the short railway journey his mind was more and more possessed with an
introspective conviction that he had gradually settled down into a sort
of parrot-like existence. What, after all, did his daily routine amount
to but a sedate meandering and pecking and perching, in his garden,
among his fruit trees, in his wicker chair on the lawn, or by the
fireside in his library? And what was the sum total of his
conversation with chance-encountered neighbours? "Quite a spring day,
isn't it?" "It looks as though we should have some rain." "Glad to
see you about again; you must take care of yourself." "How the young
folk shoot up, don't they?" Strings of stupid, inevitable perfunctory
remarks came to his mind, remarks that were certainly not the mental
exchange of human intelligences, but mere empty parrot-talk. One might
really just as well salute one's acquaintances with "Pretty polly.
Puss, puss, miaow!" Groby began to fume against the picture of himself
as a foolish feathered fowl which his nephew's sketch had first
suggested, and which his own accusing imagination was filling in with
such unflattering detail.
"I'll give the beastly bird away," he said resentfully; though he knew
at the same time that he would do no such thing. It would look so
absurd after all the years that he had kept the parrot and made much of
it suddenly to try and find it a new home.
"Has my brother arrived?" he asked of the stable-boy, who had come with
the pony-carriage to meet him.
"Yessir, came down by the two-fifteen. Your parrot's dead." The boy
made the latter announcement with the relish which his class finds in
proclaiming a catastrophe.
"My parrot dead?" said Groby. "What caused its death?"
"The ipe," said the boy briefly.
"The ipe?" queried Groby. "Whatever's that?"
"The ipe what the Colonel brought down with him," came the rather
alarming answer.
"Do you mean to say my brother is ill?" asked Groby. "Is it something
infectious?"
"Th' Colonel's so well as ever he was," said the boy; and as no further
explanation was forthcoming Groby had to possess himself in mystified
patience till he reached home. His brother was waiting for him at the
hall door.
"Have you heard about the parrot?" he asked at once. "'Pon my soul I'm
awfully sorry. The moment he saw the monkey I'd brought down as a
surprise for you he squawked out 'Rats to you, sir!' and the blessed
monkey made one spring at him, got him by the neck and whirled him
round like a rattle. He was as dead as mutton by the time I'd got him
out of the little beggar's paws. Always been such a friendly little
beast, the monkey has, should never have thought he'd got it in him to
see red like that. Can't tell you how sorry I feel about it, and now
of course you'll hate the sight of the monkey."
"Not at all," said Groby sincerely. A few hours earlier the tragic end
which had befallen his parrot would have presented itself to him as a
calamity; now it arrived almost as a polite attention on the part of
the Fates.
"The bird was getting old, you know," he went on, in explanation of his
obvious lack of decent regret at the loss of his pet. "I was really
beginning to wonder if it was an unmixed kindness to let him go on
living till he succumbed to old age. What a charming little monkey!"
he added, when he was introduced to the culprit.
The new-comer was a small, long-tailed monkey from the Western
Hemisphere, with a gentle, half-shy, half-trusting manner that
instantly captured Groby's confidence; a student of simian character
might have seen in the fitful red light in its eyes some indication of
the underlying temper which the parrot had so rashly put to the test
with such dramatic consequences for itself. The servants, who had come
to regard the defunct bird as a regular member of the household, and
one who gave really very little trouble, were scandalized to find his
bloodthirsty aggressor installed in his place as an honoured domestic
pet.
"A nasty heathen ipe what don't never say nothing sensible and
cheerful, same as pore Polly did," was the unfavourable verdict of the
kitchen quarters.
* * * * *
One Sunday morning, some twelve or fourteen months after the visit of
Colonel John and the parrot-tragedy, Miss Wepley sat decorously in her
pew in the parish church, immediately in front of that occupied by
Groby Lington. She was, comparatively speaking a new-comer in the
neighbourhood, and was not personally acquainted with her
fellow-worshipper in the seat behind, but for the past two years the
Sunday morning service had brought them regularly within each other's
sphere of consciousness. Without having paid particular attention to
the subject, she could probably have given a correct rendering of the
way in which he pronounced certain words occurring in the responses,
while he was well aware of the trivial fact that, in addition to her
prayer book and handkerchief, a small paper packet of throat lozenges
always reposed on the seat beside her. Miss Wepley rarely had recourse
to her lozenges, but in case she should be taken with a fit of coughing
she wished to have the emergency duly provided for. On this particular
Sunday the lozenges occasioned an unusual diversion in the even tenor
of her devotions, far more disturbing to her personally than a
prolonged attack of coughing would have been. As she rose to take part
in the singing of the first hymn, she fancied that she saw the hand of
her neighbour, who was alone in the pew behind her, make a furtive
downward grab at the packet lying on the seat; on turning sharply round
she found that the packet had certainly disappeared, but Mr. Lington
was to all outward seeming serenely intent on his hymnbook. No amount
of interrogatory glaring on the part of the despoiled lady could bring
the least shade of conscious guilt to his face.
"Worse was to follow," as she remarked afterwards to a scandalized
audience of friends and acquaintances. "I had scarcely knelt in prayer
when a lozenge, one of my lozenges, came whizzing into the pew, just
under my nose. I turned round and stared, but Mr. Lington had his eyes
closed and his lips moving as though engaged in prayer. The moment I
resumed my devotions another lozenge came rattling in, and then
another. I took no notice for awhile, and then turned round suddenly
just as the dreadful man was about to flip another one at me. He
hastily pretended to be turning over the leaves of his book, but I was
not to be taken in that time. He saw that he had been discovered and no
more lozenges came. Of course I have changed my pew."
"No gentleman would have acted in such a disgraceful manner," said one
of her listeners; "and yet Mr. Lington used to be so respected by
everybody. He seems to have behaved like a little ill-bred schoolboy."
"He behaved like a monkey," said Miss Wepley.
Her unfavourable verdict was echoed in other quarters about the same
time. Groby Lington had never been a hero in the eyes of his personal
retainers, but he had shared the approval accorded to his defunct
parrot as a cheerful, well-dispositioned body, who gave no particular
trouble. Of late months, however, this character would hardly have
been endorsed by the members of his domestic establishment. The stolid
stable-boy, who had first announced to him the tragic end of his
feathered pet, was one of the first to give voice to the murmurs of
disapproval which became rampant and general in the servants' quarters,
and he had fairly substantial grounds for his disaffection. In a burst
of hot summer weather he had obtained permission to bathe in a
modest-sized pond in the orchard, and thither one afternoon Groby had
bent his steps, attracted by loud imprecations of anger mingled with
the shriller chattering of monkey-language. He beheld his plump
diminutive servitor, clad only in a waistcoat and a pair of socks,
storming ineffectually at the monkey which was seated on a low branch
of an apple tree, abstractedly fingering the remainder of the boy's
outfit, which he had removed just out of has reach.
"The ipe's been an' took my clothes;" whined the boy, with the passion
of his kind for explaining the obvious. His incomplete toilet effect
rather embarrassed him, but he hailed the arrival of Groby with relief,
as promising moral and material support in his efforts to get back his
raided garments. The monkey had ceased its defiant jabbering, and
doubtless with a little coaxing from its master it would hand back the
plunder.
"If I lift you up," suggested Groby, "you will just be able to reach
the clothes."
The boy agreed, and Groby clutched him firmly by the waistcoat, which
was about all there was to catch hold of, and lifted, him clear of the
ground. Then, with a deft swing he sent him crashing into a clump of
tall nettles, which closed receptively round him. The victim had not
been brought up in a school which teaches one to repress one's
emotions--if a fox had attempted to gnaw at his vitals he would have
flown to complain to the nearest hunt committee rather than have
affected an attitude of stoical indifference. On this occasion the
volume of sound which he produced under the stimulus of pain and rage
and astonishment was generous and sustained, but above his bellowings
he could distinctly hear the triumphant chattering of his enemy in the
tree, and a peal of shrill laughter from Groby.
When the boy had finished an improvised St. Vitus caracole, which would
have brought him fame on the boards of the Coliseum, and which indeed
met with ready appreciation and applause from the retreating figure of
Groby Lington, he found that the monkey had also discreetly retired,
while his clothes were scattered on the grass at the foot of the tree.
"They'm two ipes, that's what they be," he muttered angrily, and if his
judgment was severe, at least he spoke under the sting of considerable
provocation.
It was a week or two later that the parlour-maid gave notice, having
been terrified almost to tears by an outbreak of sudden temper on the
part of the master anent some underdone cutlets. "'E gnashed 'is teeth
at me, 'e did reely," she informed a sympathetic kitchen audience.
"I'd like to see 'im talk like that to me, I would," said the cook
defiantly, but her cooking from that moment showed a marked improvement.
It was seldom that Groby Lington so far detached himself from his
accustomed habits as to go and form one of a house-party, and he was
not a little piqued that Mrs. Glenduff should have stowed him away in
the musty old Georgian wing of the house, in the next room, moreover,
to Leonard Spabbink, the eminent pianist.
"He plays Liszt like an angel," had been the hostess's enthusiastic
testimonial.
"He may play him like a trout for all I care," had been Groby's mental
comment, "but I wouldn't mind betting that he snores. He's just the
sort and shape that would. And if I hear him snoring through those
ridiculous thin-panelled walls, there'll be trouble."
He did, and there was.
Groby stood it for about two and a quarter minutes, and then made his
way through the corridor into Spabbink's room. Under Groby's vigorous
measures the musician's flabby, redundant figure sat up in bewildered
semi-consciousness like an ice-cream that has been taught to beg.
Groby prodded him into complete wakefulness, and then the pettish
self-satisfied pianist fairly lost his temper and slapped his
domineering visitant on the hand. In another moment Spabbink was being
nearly stifled and very effectually gagged by a pillow-case tightly
bound round his head, while his plump pyjama'd limbs were hauled out of
bed and smacked, pinched, kicked, and bumped in a catch-as-catch-can
progress across the floor, towards the flat shallow bath in whose
utterly inadequate depths Groby perseveringly strove to drown him. For
a few moments the room was almost in darkness: Groby's candle had
overturned in an early stage of the scuffle, and its flicker scarcely
reached to the spot where splashings, smacks, muffled cries, and
splutterings, and a chatter of ape-like rage told of the struggle that
was being waged round the shores of the bath. A few instants later the
one-sided combat was brightly lit up by the flare of blazing curtains
and rapidly kindling panelling.
When the hastily aroused members of the house-party stampeded out on to
the lawn, the Georgian wing was well alight and belching forth masses
of smoke, but some moments elapsed before Groby appeared with the
half-drowned pianist in his arms, having just bethought him of the
superior drowning facilities offered by the pond at the bottom of the
lawn. The cool night air sobered his rage, and when he found that he
was innocently acclaimed as the heroic rescuer of poor Leonard
Spabbink, and loudly commended for his presence of mind in tying a wet
cloth round his head to protect him from smoke suffocation, he accepted
the situation, and subsequently gave a graphic account of his finding
the musician asleep with an overturned candle by his side and the
conflagration well started. Spabbink gave HIS version some days later,
when he had partially recovered from the shock of his midnight
castigation and immersion, but the gentle pitying smiles and evasive
comments with which his story was greeted warned him that the public
ear was not at his disposal. He refused, however, to attend the
ceremonial presentation of the Royal Humane Society's life-saving medal.
It was about this time that Groby's pet monkey fell a victim to the
disease which attacks so many of its kind when brought under the
influence of a northern climate. Its master appeared to be profoundly
affected by its loss, and never quite recovered the level of spirits
that he had recently attained. In company with the tortoise, which
Colonel John presented to him on his last visit, he potters about his
lawn and kitchen garden, with none of his erstwhile sprightliness; and
his nephews and nieces are fairly well justified in alluding to him as
"Old Uncle Groby."