He had been so buffeted by fortune, through various climates and various
applications of his many-sidedness, that when I first met Leslie it was
difficult to believe him a fellow countryman. His speech had been welded
by the influence of alien languages to a choice cosmopolitanism. His
skin, thick and brown from blazing sunshines, puckered monkey-like about
his blue, blinking eyes. He never hurried. He was going to Hong-Kong to
build part of a dry-dock for the English Government, he said, but his
ambitions had dwindled to owning a farm somewhere in New York State and
having a regular menagerie of birds and animals.
His most enthusiastic moments of conversation were in arguing and
anecdotalizing the virtues and ratiocinations of animals and birds. The
monkey, he said, was next to man the most clever, but was inferior to
the elephant in that he had no sense of right or wrong. Furthermore,
monkeys were immodest. Next came certain breeds of dogs. Very low in the
scale he placed horses; very high, parrots.
"Concerning parrots," he said, "people are under erroneous impressions,
but copying and imitation are not unreasonable processes. Your parrot,
under his bright cynical feathers, is a modest fowl that grasps at every
opportunity of education from the best source--man. In a native state
his intelligence remains closed: the desire to be like a woodpecker or a
humming-bird does not pick at the cover. Just as a boy born in an
Indiana village and observing the houses of his neighbors might not wish
to become an architect, but if he were transported to Paris or Vienna,
to a confrontation of what is excellent in proportion, it might be that
art would stir in his spirit and, after years of imitation, would come
forth in a stately and exquisite procession of buildings. So in his
native woods the parrot recognizes nothing but color that is worthy of
his imitation. But in the habitations of man, surrounded by taste, which
is the most precious of all gifts, his ambition begins to grow, his
ignorance becomes a shame. He places his foot on the first rung of the
educational ladder. His bright colors fade, perhaps; the eyes of his
mind are turned toward brighter and more ornamental things. What
creature but a parrot devotes such long hours to the acquirement of
perfection in each trivial stage of progress? What creature remembers so
faithfully and so well? We know not what we are, you and I and the rest
of us; but if we had had the application, patience, and ambition of the
average parrot, we should be greater men. But some people say that
parrots are mean, self-centred, and malignant. They have, I admit, a
crust of cynicism which might lead to that impression, and not unjustly,
but underneath the parrot's crotchets there beats a great and benevolent
heart. Let me give you an instance:
"In '88 my luck was down, and as a first step to raising it I shipped
before the mast in an English bottom outward bound from Hong-Kong to
Java. Jaffray was the cook, a big negro who owned a savage gray
parrot--a mighty clever bird but to all intents and purposes of a most
unscrupulous and cruel nature. Many a time her cleverness at provoking a
laugh was all that saved her from sudden death. She bit whom she could;
she stole what she could. She treated us like dogs. Only Jaffray could
handle her without a weapon. Him she loved and made love to with a
sheepish and resolute abandon. From him she endured the rapid
alternations of whippings and caressings with the most stoical fortitude
and self-restraint. When he whipped her she would close her eyes and
say: 'I could bite him, but I won't. Polly's a bad girl. Hit her again,'
When the whipping was over she would say: 'Polly's sore. Poor Polly! How
I pity that poor girl!' Love-making usually succeeded a whipping in
short order, and then she was at her best. She would turn her head to
one side, cast the most laughably provoking glances, hold one claw
before her face, perhaps, like a skeleton fan, and say: 'Don't come
fooling round me. Go away, you bad man,'
"I tried my best to be friends with her. But only to prove that the
knack that I am supposed to have with birds and beasts has its
limitations. With one long day following another and opportunity
constantly at hand, I failed utterly in obtaining her friendship.
Indeed, she was so lacking in breeding as to make public mockings of my
efforts. There was no man before the mast but stood higher in her graces
than I. My only success was in keeping my temper. But it was fated that
we should be friends and comrades, drawn together by the bonds of a
common suffering.
"I will tell you the story of the wreck another time. In some ways it
was peculiar. I will only tell you now that I swam for a long time
(there was an opaque fog) and bumped my head against one of the ship's
boats. I seized the gunwale and said, 'Steady her, please, while I climb
in,' but had no answer. The boat, apparently, had torn loose from her
davits and gone voyaging alone. But as I made to climb in I was fiercely
attacked in the face by the wings, beak, and claws of Jaffray's
graceless parrot. In the first surprise and discomfiture I let go and
sank. Coming up, choking with brine and fury, I overcame resistance with
a backhanded blow, and tumbled over the gunwale into the boat. And
presently I was aware that violence had succeeded where patience had
failed. Polly sat in the stern sheets timidly cooing and offering to
shake hands. At another time I should have burst laughing at her--she
was so coy, so anxious to please. But I had just arrived from seeing my
captain's head broken to pieces by a falling spar, and a good friend of
mine stabbed by another good friend of mine, and I was nearer to tears.
"It was cold for that part of the world, and rain fell heavily from time
to time. Polly complained bitterly all night and said that she would
take her death o' cold, but in the morning (I had fallen asleep) she
waked me in her pleasantest and most satisfied voice, saying, 'Tumble up
for breakfast.' I pulled myself out of the rain-water into which I had
slipped, and sat up. The sky and sea were clear from one horizon to the
other and the sun was beginning to scorch.
"'Bully and warm, ain't it?' said Polly.
"'Right you are, old girl,' said I.
"She perched on my shoulder and began to oil and arrange her draggled
feathers.
"'What a hell of a wreck that was!' she said suddenly, and, after a
pause: 'Where's my nigger?'
"'He's forsaken you, old girl,' said I, 'for Mother Carey's chickens.'
"'Poor Polly,' said she; 'how I pity that poor girl!'
"Now I don't advance for a moment the theory that she understood all
that she said, nor even a part of what I said. But her statements and
answers were often wonderfully apt. Have you ever known one of those
tremendously clever deaf people whom you may talk with for a long time
before discovering that they are deaf? Talking with poor Jaffray's
parrot was like that. It was only occasionally--not often, mind--that
her phrases argued an utter lack of reasoning power. She had been
educated to what I suppose to be a point very close to the limit of a
parrot's powers. At a fair count she had memorized a hundred and fifty
sentences, a dozen songs, and twenty or thirty tunes to whistle. Many
savages have not larger vocabularies; many highborn ladies have a less
gentle and cultivated enunciation. Let me tell you that had I been alone
in that boat, a young man, as I then was, who saw his ambitions and
energies doomed to a watery and abrupt finish, with a brief interval of
starvation to face, I might easily have gone mad. But I was saved from
that because I had somebody to talk to. And to receive confidence and
complaint the parrot was better fitted than a human being, better fitted
than a woman, for she placed no bar of reticence, and I could despair as
I pleased and on my own terms.
"My clothes dried during the first day, and at night she would creep
under my coat to sleep. At first I was afraid that during
unconsciousness I should roll on her. But she was too wary for that. If
I showed a tendency to sprawl or turn over, she would wake and pierce my
ears with a sharp 'Take your time! Take your time!'
"At sunrise every day she would wake me with a hearty 'Tumble up for
breakfast.'
"Unfortunately there was never any breakfast to be had, but the
rain-water in the bottom of the boat, warm as it was and tasting of
rotting wood, saved us from more frightful trial.
"Here is a curious fact: After the second night I realized and counted
every hour in all its misery of hunger and duration, yet I cannot, to
save my soul, remember how many days and nights passed between the wreck
and that singular argument for a parrot's power of reasoning that was to
be advanced to me. It suffices to know that many days and nights went by
before we began to die of hunger.
"In what remained of the rain-water (with the slow oscillations of the
boat it swashed about and left deposits of slime on her boards) I caught
from time to time glimpses of my face as affected by starvation. And it
may interest you to know that it was not the leanness of my face that
appalled me but the wickedness of it. All the sins I had ever sinned,
all the lies I had told, all the meannesses I had done, the drunks I
had been on, the lusts I had sated, came back to me from the
bilge-water. And I knew that if I died then and there I should go
straight to hell if there was one. I made divers trials at repentance
but was not able to concentrate my mind upon them. I could see but one
hope of salvation--to die as I had not lived--like a gentleman. It was
not a voluminous duty, owing to the limits set upon conduct by the
situation, but it was obvious. Whatever pangs I should experience in the
stages of dissolution, I must spare Polly.
"In view of what occurred it is sufficiently obvious that I read my duty
wrongly. For, when I was encouraging myself to spare the bird I should
rather have been planning to save her. She, too, must have been
suffering frightfully from the long-continued lack of her customary
diet, but it seems that while enduring it she was scheming to save me.
"She had been sitting disconsolately on the gunwale when the means
struck suddenly into her tortuously working mind and acted upon her
demeanor like a sight of sunflower seeds, of which she was prodigiously
fond. If I follow her reasoning correctly it was this. The man who has
been so nice to me needs food. He can't find it for himself; therefore I
must find it for him. Thus far she reasoned. And then, unfortunately,
trusting too much to a generous instinct, and disregarding the most
obvious and simple calculation, she omitted the act of turning around,
and instead of laying the egg that was to save me in the boat, she laid
it in the ocean. It sank."
* * * * *
Long voyages make for dulness. I had listened to the above narrative
with so much interest as to lose for a moment my sense of what was
patent. In the same absurd way that one man says to another whom he
knows perfectly well, "What--is this you?" I said to Leslie very
eagerly, "Were you saved?" And he answered, "No; we were both drowned."