TANTALIZING, VERY.
They looked at one another again with a wild surmise. The voice was as
the voice of some long past age. Could the parrot be speaking to them in
the words of seventeenth-century English?
Even M. Peyron, who at first had received the strange discovery with
incredulity, woke up before long to the importance of this sudden and
unexpected revelation. The Tu-Kila-Kila who had taught Methuselah that
long poem or sermon, which native tradition regarded as containing the
central secret of their creed or its mysteries, and which the cruel and
cunning Tu-Kila-Kila of to-day believed to be of immense importance to
his safety--that Tu-Kila-Kila of other days was, in all probability, no
other than an English sailor. Cast on these shores, perhaps, as they
themselves had been, by the mercy of the waves, he had managed to master
the language and religion of the savages among whom he found himself
thrown; he had risen to be the representative of the cannibal god; and,
during long months or years of tedious exile, he had beguiled his leisure
by imparting to the unconscious ears of a bird the weird secret of his
success, for the benefit of any others of his own race who might be
similarly treated by fortune in future. Strange and romantic as it all
sounded, they could hardly doubt now that this was the real explanation
of the bird's command of English words. One problem alone remained to
disturb their souls. Was the bird really in possession of any local
secret and mystery at all, or was this the whole burden of the message he
had brought down across the vast abyss of time--"God save the king, and
to hell with all papists?"
Felix turned to M. Peyron in a perfect tumult of suspense. "What he
recites is long?" he said, interrogatively, with profound interest. "You
have heard him say much more than this at times? The words he has just
uttered are not those of the sermon or poem you mentioned?"
M. Peyron opened his hands expansively before him. "Oh, _mon Dieu_, no,
monsieur," he answered, with effusion. "You should hear him recite it.
He's never done. It is whole chapters--whole chapters; a perfect Henriade
in parrot-talk. When once he begins, there's no possibility of checking
or stopping him. On, on he goes. Farewell to the rest; he insists on
pouring it all forth to the very last sentence. Gabble, gabble, gabble;
chatter, chatter, chatter; pouf, pouf, pouf; boum, boum, boum; he runs
ahead eternally in one long discordant sing-song monotone. The person who
taught him must have taken entire months to teach him, a phrase at a
time, paragraph by paragraph. It is wonderful a bird's memory could hold
so much. But till now, taking it for granted he spoke only some wild
South Pacific dialect, I never paid much attention to Methuselah's
vagaries."
"Hush. He's going to speak," Muriel cried, holding up, in alarm, one
warning finger.
And the bird, his tongue-strings evidently loosened by the strange
recurrence after so many years of those familiar English sounds, "Pretty
Poll! Pretty Poll!" opened his mouth again in a loud chuckle of delight,
and cried, with persistent shrillness, "God save the king! A fig for
all arrant knaves and roundheads!"
A creepier feeling than ever came over the two English listeners at those
astounding words. "Great heavens!" Felix exclaimed to the unsuspecting
Frenchman, "he speaks in the style of the Stuarts and the Commonwealth!"
The Frenchman started. "_Époque Louis Quatorze_!" he murmured,
translating the date mentally into his own more familiar chronology. "Two
centuries since! Oh, incredible! incredible! Methuselah is old, but not
quite so much of a patriarch as that. Even Humboldt's parrot could hardly
have lived for two hundred years in the wilds of South America."
Felix regarded the venerable creature with a look of almost superstitious
awe. "Facts are facts," he answered shortly, shutting his mouth with a
little snap. "Unless this bird has been deliberately taught historical
details in an archaic diction--and a shipwrecked sailor is hardly likely
to be antiquarian enough to conceive such an idea--he is undoubtedly a
survival from the days of the Commonwealth or the Restoration. And you
say he runs on with his tale for an hour at a time! Good heavens, what
a thought! I wish we could manage to start him now. Does he begin it
often?"
"Monsieur," the Frenchman answered, "when I came here first, though
Methuselah was already very old and feeble, he was not quite a dotard,
and he used to recite it all every morning regularly. That was the hour,
I suppose, at which the master, who first taught him this lengthy
recitation, used originally to impress it upon him. In those days his
sight and his memory were far more clear than now. But by degrees, since
my arrival, he has grown dull and stupid. The natives tell me that fifty
years ago, while he was already old, he was still bright and lively, and
would recite the whole poem whenever anybody presented him with his
greatest dainty, the claw of a moora-crab. Nowadays, however, when he can
hardly eat, and hardly mumble, he is much less persistent and less
coherent than formerly. To say the truth, I have discouraged him in his
efforts, because his pertinacity annoyed me. So now he seldom gets
through all his lesson at one bout, as he used to do at the beginning.
The best way to get him on is for me to sing him one of my French songs.
That seems to excite him, or to rouse him to rivalry. Then he will put
his head on one side, listen critically for a while, smile a superior
smile, and finally begin--jabber, jabber, jabber--trying to talk me down,
as if I were a brother parrot."
"Oh, do sing now!" Muriel cried, with intense persuasion in her voice.
"I do so want to hear it." She meant, of course, the parrot's story.
But the Frenchman bowed, and laid his hand on his heart. "Ah,
mademoiselle," he said, "your wish is almost a royal command. And yet, do
you know, it is so long since I have sung, except to please myself--my
music is so rusty, old pieces you have heard--I have no accompaniment,
no score--_mais enfin_, we are all so far from Paris!"
Muriel didn't dare to undeceive him as to her meaning, lest he should
refuse to sing in real earnest, and the chance of learning the parrot's
secret might slip by them irretrievably. "Oh, monsieur," she cried,
fitting herself to his humor at once, and speaking as ceremoniously as if
she were assisting at a musical party in the Avenue Victor Hugo, "don't
decline, I beg of you, on those accounts. We are both most anxious to
hear your song. Don't disappoint us, pray. Please begin immediately."
"Ah, mademoiselle," the Frenchman said, "who could resist such an appeal?
You are altogether too flattering." And then, in the same cheery voice
that Felix had heard on the first day he visited the King of Birds' hut,
M. Peyron began, in very decent style, to pour forth the merry sounds of
his rollicking song:
"Quand on conspi-re,
Quand sans frayeur
On peut se di-re
Conspirateur--
Pour tout le mon-de
Il faut avoir
Perruque blon-de
Et collet noir."
He had hardly got as far as the end of the first stanza, however, when
Methuselah, listening, with his ear cocked up most knowingly, to the
Frenchman's song, raised his head in opposition, and, sitting bolt
upright on his perch, began to scream forth a voluble stream of words in
one unbroken flood, so fast that Muriel could hardly follow them. The
bird spoke in a thick and very harsh voice, and, what was more remarkable
still, with a distinct and extremely peculiar North Country accent. "In
the nineteenth year of the reign of his most gracious majesty, King
Charles the Second," he blurted out, viciously, with an angry look at the
Frenchman, "I, Nathaniel Cross, of the borough of Sunderland, in the
county of Doorham, in England, an able-bodied mariner, then sailing the
South Seas in the good bark Martyr Prince, of the Port of Great Grimsby,
whereof one Thomas Wells, gent., under God, was master--"
"Oh, hush, hush!" Muriel cried, unable to catch the parrot's precious
words through the emulous echo of the Frenchman's music. "Whereof one
Thomas Wells, gent., under God, was master--go on, Polly."
"Perruque blonde
Et collet noir,"
the Frenchman repeated, with a half-offended voice, finishing his stanza.
But just as he stopped, Methuselah stopped too, and, throwing back his
head in the air with a triumphant look, stared hard at his vanquished and
silenced opponent out of those blinking gray eyes of his. "I thought I'd
be too much for you!" he seemed to say, wrathfully.
"Whereof one Thomas Wells, gent., under God, was master," Muriel
suggested again, all agog with excitement. "Go on, good bird! Go on,
pretty Polly."
But Methuselah was evidently put off the scent now by the unseasonable
interruption. Instead of continuing, he threw back his head a second time
with a triumphant air and laughed aloud boisterously. "Pretty Polly," he
cried. "Pretty Polly wants a nut. Tu-Kila-Kila maroo! Pretty Poll! Pretty
Polly!"
"Sing again, for Heaven's sake!" Felix exclaimed, in a profoundly
agitated mood, explaining briefly to the Frenchman the full significance
of the words Methuselah had just begun to utter.
The Frenchman struck up his tune afresh to give the bird a start; but all
to no avail. Methuselah was evidently in no humor for talking just then.
He listened with a callous, uncritical air, bringing his white eyelids
down slowly and sleepily over his bleared gray eyes. Then he nodded his
head slowly. "No use," the Frenchman murmured, pursing his lips up
gravely. "The bird won't talk. It's going off to sleep now. Methuselah
gets visibly older every day, monsieur and mademoiselle. You are only
just in time to catch his last accents."