“_A thousand little shafts of flame
Were shivered in my narrow frame._”
“_But what a tongue, and O what brains
Were in that parrot’s head;
It took two men to understand
One half the things she said._”
The two princesses in the story of Riquet with the Tuft were not more
unlike than Joey and Matilda.
The appearance of Matilda is Quakerish, and even shabby. She has an eye
like a piece of dull green marble. She is affectionate and polite, but
cold and passionless. To judge by the perfect and consistent propriety
of her demeanour she might have been a favourite pupil of Mrs. General.
Even if she swears or blows her nose she does it with an air of such
intense superiority that it seems like an answer in the Catechism.
It is small wonder that Matilda feels superior, for her intellect
is supreme. She is not proud of this, for she is too well-bred to
wish to dazzle strangers with her brilliance, and her chief flow of
conversation is reserved for the circle of her intimates. She came to
pay me a visit the other day and was very reticent. “She is too much
of a lady to talk to us,” my old nurse said; but though she would not
hastily confide, she tried to keep up our spirits by a little innocent
amusement; and after bleating like a lamb for a quarter of an hour on
end, she gave us A flat on the tuning-fork till tea time.
Now, Joey is all green and gold to the eye. He recollects the Valley
of the Amazon, and “bright and fierce and fickle is the south.” His
topaz iris waxes and wanes as the pupil grows large and onyx-like or
dwindles to a mere pin’s head. He loves passionately, and his hate,
deep as the Black Sea, is vindictive and remorseless. Music works in
him a frenzy of delight; the sight of friend or foe fills him with an
emotion which chokes utterance. Jealousy runs like swift poison in his
veins, swiftest and most poisonous when he thinks of Matilda, finished,
feminine, and intellectual, a perfect lady.
[Illustration: _Photograph by S. A. McDowall_
“The appearance of Matilda is Quakerish and even shabby.”]
Once, in time long past, there were passages between Joey and Matilda.
They were placed side by side, and as Joey looked on that demure
Quakeress, her dove colour unrelieved except by two plumes of sober
crimson; as he gazed on that marble eye while Matilda huskily and
rapidly repeated the name of the kitchen-maid, Joey was aware of an
emotion beautiful and strange. Self-control is a foreigner to that hot
southern nature, and without a pause for thought he extended a claw--it
was all he could do--to the lady.
In a moment Matilda stooped and bit it; and as he screamed with pain
and anger she dropped it and burst into a hoarse fit of laughter.
Joey never offended in this way again, but this repulse is the reason
of his deep, revengeful jealousy of Matilda.
Another simple scene recurs to my mind. Joey was in the drawing-room,
Matilda in a room just above; the doors of both were open. Joey could
therefore hear when a passing friend engaged Matilda in conversation.
His angry excitement burst all bounds at last, and “Pop goes the
Weasel,” sung with agonised fervour, came floating up the stairs.
Matilda listened with her head on one side, and then sang slowly and
impressively a few bars of a species of Gregorian chant. Silence fell
below.
Now when they sit side by side they are leagues apart. Joey is
viciously watching for any mark of preference given to Matilda, more
ready than usual to drive his beak like a sledge-hammer at the finger
of the unwary. And Matilda is calmly occupied in observing Joey. Some
time in the course of the next seventy years or so she will begin to
reproduce Joey; to indicate the way in which he spreads his tail like
a fan and grubs in seed and sand, uttering half-audible exhortations
to himself, which a stranger would take for imprecations on things in
general. How satisfying it would be to an angry man if he could say,
“Come on, Joey” in such a tone.
But they do not often sit side by side, for, though you would not
think it, Matilda occupies a lower social station than Joey. While
his home is in the drawing-room Matilda is the life and soul of the
kitchen. Does this humble Matilda? On the contrary; she knows that
the true gentlewoman is at home everywhere. If she is brought into the
drawing-room she is neither embarrassed nor elate; only a pleasant and
discreet reserve takes the place of a free flow of conversation. When
she returns to the kitchen she talks rapidly for a long time, and is
believed to be describing the things she has seen and commenting on the
conversation.[2]
[2] It must not be imagined that Matilda always confines herself to
generalities. She asked a housemaid kindly, “When are you going for
your holidays?” And on a rapid entrance and exit of the cook inquired
so politely, “And who was that?” that her companion immediately
replied, “That was Mrs. ----.”
Alas for the sterner sex! When Joey undergoes an enforced eclipse
in the pantry he abandons himself to the situation. He may be heard
whistling “Pop goes the Weasel” line by line with his attendant.
But this is no honest geniality; for if he is carried back to the
drawing-room, and finds waiting for him a friend of higher social
station, he turns and bites, if he can, the hand that late has fed
him. Perhaps it is Matilda’s intellectual interests that preserve
her from such vulgarity. She devotes herself to observation for the
education of her mind, and when she is not observing she is recording
the results of observation. The reproduction of simple sounds comes
quickly, for she is a slave to realism. The screams of the peacock, the
failing note of the cuckoo, cuck-cuck-oo, the angry mew of the cat, are
rapidly and all too accurately reproduced. So, too, the kitchen-maid,
before she had served her apprenticeship, was wont to hear her own
sad name in corners cried in tones of growing exasperation. We were
then living in a town; Matilda’s apartment gave on the street, and the
errand boys helped her out with the performance.
But, according to the law of her kind, this was a little precipitate
of Matilda. She should have let the kitchen-maid grow into a cook; she
should have let her live a long and honoured life, and should then have
tenderly renewed memories of old days when her name would echo upstairs
and down to hurry laggard steps. I cannot decide if this is a want of
tact or a supreme instance of tact in Matilda. It cannot, at any rate,
be a want of memory, for Matilda has just begun swearing; and as she
has been with us for some years, and none of us habitually swear, this
must be a sudden revival of memory. It is said to be a very clear and
life-like revival.
Probably as for Lovelace, so for Matilda, stone walls would not a
prison make, for iron bars do not make any thing like a cage. She
drags the door upwards with her beak, and holds it with her claw while
she squeezes through like an egg sucked through a bottle-neck. This
performance drives Joey to the verge of mania. He, too, pulls up his
door, but he does not know how to hold it, and it bangs down again and
leaves him voiceless with rage, while Matilda is running about as gay
as a lark.
But the other day I found Matilda securely imprisoned. Her door was
bound with red tape. As mere knots can present no difficulty to an
intellect like hers, it was certainly the symbolism which she respected.
Yet with all these qualities of mind and character, there are one or
two points in which Joey excels. Joey wets his sugar. He deliberately
dips first one end and then the other into his drinking-trough, and
when it is half dissolved he eats it. He tried to soften a piece of
wood in the same way the other day--how fruitlessly Matilda knows.
Joey has a perch made out of the branch of a tree, and from his perch
his toys depend on pieces of string and tape; he owns a cardboard
matchbox, and an old tin pencil, and such-like treasures. One by one he
ruthlessly destroys these, so some strings are always hanging empty.
But sitting above them, Joey can test which are empty by their weight,
and pulls up only the heavy strings. It is not, however, in practical
matters that Joey is seen to the best advantage. His is the artist’s
temperament; he has a soul for music. Given a braying harmonium and
Joey loose, his foes are scattered; but the piano is, so to speak,
his forte. “I am convinced,” as Lady Catherine de Burgh says, that
Joey would have been a delightful performer had his health allowed him
to apply. As it is, he attends chiefly to the cultivation of the
voice. He seats himself on the shoulder of the meanest performer, or
marches up and down from shoulder to wrist; he spreads his tail like
a fan; he swells to twice his usual size; his eye goes in and out
like the magic-lantern star which sends happy little children to bed
with the nightmare. Then the performer plays a weird Scotch air, such
as the “Lyke-wake dirge” (one of Joey’s favourite pieces), whistling
the while, and Joey bursts into song. He does not whistle as when he
is performing “Pop goes the Weasel,” but he sings with a piercing,
strident voice, high and low, pitching with singular skill somewhere
near the note, grace notes thrown in according to taste. After Scotch
songs give him Wagner hot and loud. In the middle of a performance of
the Preislied a stranger once called; but he was happily a reticent
man....
[Illustration: _Photograph by S. A. McDowall_
“Joey has a perch made out of the branch of a tree.”]
But above all there is this: Joey has a heart. It is not a very
admirable heart. Its fickleness is beyond description; he hates
more hotly than he loves; but the heart is there. He will hear his
friend’s voice in the house and get mad with anticipation, piping
broken fragments of indescribable song. He will follow such an one
with low, skimming flight, and will bite any hand except the dearest
that tries to bring him back. He is easily deceived--a lovable
fault--and a deep voice or a rough sleeve will make him tolerate a
woman under the impression that homespun means a man. But where his
heart is concerned pretence is vain, and I can imagine Joey dying of
a broken heart, though I can imagine him more easily still dying of a
bad temper. But Matilda’s heart is warranted unbreakable, and is as
cold and hard as her marble eye. And I sometimes fear that Matilda is
growing a little coarse: a new cook came the other day, and was taken
to the cage because the parrot “generally has something to say to a
stranger.” She burst into a long harangue, of which the only word that
could be distinguished was “forget” (it is thought she was declaring
her unalterable devotion to the predecessor); but she ended all too
plainly, “I don’t care for you.” Her new hostess firmly replied, “And I
don’t care for you,” upon which Matilda screamed loudly.
If there is any truth in re-incarnation, it must be that cynics revisit
this world as parrots. The punishment would be horribly appropriate.
The man who has disbelieved in the reality of the higher emotions shall
have these emotions, but be able to express them only in broad farce.
An artist, ardent, vindictive, and cynical has been travestied with the
form of Joey. He is animated with the passion which made him plunge
his stiletto into an enemy’s heart, as in his re-incarnation he tries
to drive his beak into a hand. He is met by iron bars and a mocking
laugh. Dusk gathers over the sky, that mysterious, familiar beauty
stirs his heart; forgetting and forgiving, and he hopes forgiven, he
would say good-night to his friends. But the whisper comes in cockney
intonation, “Jowey, well, Jowey.” He hears the voice of a friend, and
would hail him, but “Pop goes the Weasel” rises to his beak. He is
kindled as of old by the Pilgrim’s March, and bursts into song. But the
voice comes hoarse and comic, and laughter greets the kindling eye. All
the highest, the best, the strongest feelings of his nature turn in
expression into broad comedy, and the reason is that when he was a man
he felt these emotions and profaned them by cynicism.
I once met a decrepit old woman who lived on 7_s._ 6_d._ a week. She
took a rapid review of the Universe and Life, and closed it by telling
me that “things was just about coming to a Grand Pitch.” _She_ will
never be a parrot.