Short Stories 1895-1926 (56 page)

‘The courtyard was as still as the garden of Eden. That less – that more – than human voice pressed steadily on – a low, minute, gushing fountain of vituperation. Bysshe was no chicken. He was pretty familiar with the various London lingoes – from Billingsgate to Soho. None the less the actual terms of this harangue, he afterwards told me, all but froze the blood in his veins. The voice ceased; and turning his head, Bysshe took a long and steady stare at the inmate of the cage. It sat there in its grey and cardinal; its curved beak closed, its glassy yellow eye motionless, and yet, it seemed, filled to its shallow brim with an inexhaustible contempt.

‘There was nothing whatever wrong with its surroundings. Bysshe made quite certain of that. Its nuts were ripe and sound, its water fresh, its sand wholesome. As I say, at the first onset of this experience Bysshe had been profoundly shocked. But that night, as he stood in his pyjamas looking in at the bird for the last time – and he had omitted to throw over its cage its customary pall – the memory of it suddenly touched his sense of humour. And he began to laugh; an oddish laugh to laugh alone. The parrot lifted one clawed foot and gently readjusted it on its perch. It leaned its head sidelong; its beak opened. And then in frozen silence it turned its back on the interrupter.

‘For days together after that the parrot was as mute as a fish – at least so long as Bysshe lay in wait for it. That it had been less taciturn in his absence he gathered one morning from the expression of his charwoman's face – an amiable old body with a fairly wide knowledge of “the world”. She had thought it best, she explained, to shut the windows. “You never know, sir, what them might think who couldn't tell a canary from a bullfinch. I've kept birds myself. But I must say, sir, I wouldn't have chose to be brought up where
he
was.” Something to that effect.

‘And Bysshe noticed that though she had not refrained from putting some little emphasis on the “he”, she had carefully omitted any indication to whom the pronoun referred.

‘“He swore, did he, Mrs Giles?”

‘“He didn't so much swear, sir, as extravastate. Never in all my life could I have credited there was such shocking things to say.”

‘Bysshe rather queerly returned the old lady's gaze. “I have heard rumours of it myself,” he replied. “It looks to me, Mrs Giles, as if we should have to get the bird another home.”

‘The interview was a little disconcerting, but had it not been for this independent evidence, Bysshe, I feel sure (judging from my own reactions, as they call them) might easily have persuaded himself to believe that his experience had been nothing but the refuse of a dream.

‘Minnie Sturgess's first appearance on the scene preceded mine by a few days. The two of them, so far as I could gather, were not exactly “engaged”. They merely, as the little irony goes, understood one another; or rather Minnie seemed so far to understand Bysshe that we all knew perfectly well they would at last drift into matrimony as inevitably as a derelict boat, I gather, having found its way out of Lake Erie will drift over the Niagara Falls.'

‘A very pretty metaphor,' remarked Judy. ‘Then come the rapids, and then – but I'm not quite sure what happens then.'

‘Don't forget, though,' cried Stella softly out of her moonshine, ‘don't forget that meanwhile the best electric light has been supplied for miles around!'

‘Ssh! Stella,' breathed Judy, thimbled finger on lip, ‘we are merely playing into his hands. Let him just blunder on.' She turned with a mockinnocent smile towards Tressider. ‘And did the parrot
swear
at Miss Sturgess?' she enquired.

‘No. Miss Sturgess came; she contemplated; she admired; she was tactful to the last degree. But the bird paid her no more polite attention than if she had been a waxwork in the basement at Madame Tussaud's. It sat perfectly still on its perch, its eight neat claws arranged four on either side of it, and out of its whitish countenance it softly surveyed the lady.

‘Naturally, she was a little nettled. She remonstrated. Hadn't Bysshe assured her that the creature talked, and wasn't it a horrid cheat to have a parrot sold to one for all that money, if it didn't? And Bysshe, relieved beyond words, that his pet had not even so much as deigned to chuckle, prevaricated. He said that a parrot that talked in season and out of season was nothing but a nuisance. Did she like its livery, and wasn't it a handsome cage?

‘Miss Sturgess took courage. She bent her veiled head and whispered a seductive “Pretty Poll”; and then having failed to arouse any response by tapping its bars with the button of her glove, she insinuated a naked fore-finger between them as if to stroke the creature's wing or to scratch its poll. And, without an instant's hesitation the parrot nipped it to the bone. She might have read that much in its air: intuition, you know. But she was a plucky creature, and didn't even whimper. And no doubt for the moment this summary punishment may seem to have drawn these two blundering humans a little closer together.

‘It was a few days after this that Bysshe and I lunched together at a restaurant in Fleet Street. And, naturally – in his reticent fashion – he told me of his prize. About three, we climbed the shallow wooden stairs up to his rooms, to see the bird. For discretion's sake – in case, that is, of chance visitors, he had shut it up in his bedroom, and rather foolishly, as I thought, had locked the door.

‘No creature of any intelligence can much enjoy existence in a cage, and to immure that cage in a kind of cell is merely to add insult to injury. Besides, even eighteenth-century door panels are not sound-proof. We stole across on tiptoe and stood for a moment listening outside the bedroom.

‘Possibly the bird had heard our muffled footsteps; or, maybe, to while solitude away, it was merely indulging in an audible reverie. I can't say. But hardly had we inclined our ears to listen, when, as if out of some vast hollow, dark and subterranean, a tongue within – unfalteringly, dispassionately – broke into speech. I have heard politicians, pill-venders and demagogues, but nothing even remotely to compare with that appalling eloquence – the ease, the abundance, the sustained unpremeditated verve! Nor was it an exhibition of mere vernacular. There were interludes, as I guessed, of a corrupt Spanish. There may have been even an Oriental leaven; even traces of the Zulu's “click” – the trend was exotic enough. But the words, the mere language were as nothing compared with the tone.

‘Curates habituated to their duties tend to read the prayers in much the same way. The inmost sense, I mean, comes out the better because the speaker is not taking any notice of it. So it was with the parrot. I can't describe the evil of the effect. One stopped thinking. One lost for the moment even the power of being shocked. A torrent of outer darkness seemed to sweep over, dowse, submerge the mind, and you just floated like a straw on its calm even flood.'

‘What was it swearing
about
? asked a cold voice.

Tressider seemed to be examining the Persian mat at his feet as if in search of inspiration. ‘I think,' he said slowly, ‘it was cursing the day of creation, with all the complexities involved in it. It was a voice out of nowhere, anathematizing with loathing a very definite somewhere. We most of us “bear up” in this world as much as possible. Not so the original owner of that unhurried speech. He had stated with perfect calm exactly what he thought about things. And I should guess that his name was Iago. But let's get back to Bysshe.

‘At the moment he was holding his square, rather ugly face sidelong, in what looked like a constrained position. Then his eyes slid round and met mine.

‘“Twenty-five shillings!” he said. “Any offers?” But there wasn't anything facetious in his look.

The voice had ceased. And with it had vanished all else but the remembrance of the execrable
tone
of its speech. And as if all Nature, including its topmost artifice, London, had paused to listen, there followed an intense hush. Then, uncertainly, as if tentatively, there broke out another voice from behind the shut door, uttering just three or four low single notes – as of somebody singing. Then these ceased too.

‘We had both of us been more or less prepared for the captive's first effort, but not I for this. This extraordinary scrap of singing – but I'll come back to it. Bysshe gently unlocked and pushed open his bedroom door and we looked in. But we knew perfectly well what we should find. The room was undisturbed, and, except for its solitary inmate, vacant. There stood Bysshe's truckle bed, his old tallboy, his empty boots, his looking-glass. And there sat the bird, motionless, unabashed, clasping its perch with its lizard-skinned claws. Apart from a slight trembling of its breast-plumage, there was no symptom whatever of anything in the least unwonted. It sidled the fraction of an inch towards its master, its beak ajar showing the small clumsy tongue, its bead-like eye firmly settled on mine; and with a peculiar aversion I stared back.

‘I stayed on with Bysshe for an hour or two, but though most of the time we sat in silence, like confederates awaiting their crucial moment, nothing happened. A sort of absentness, a slight frown, had settled on his face. And when at last I hurried off to keep some stupid appointment, I might have guessed it was not merely to hear a parrot
swear
that he had pressed me to come. Afterwards, he was less eager to share his enchantress.'

‘The voice, you mean?'

‘Yes. Can you imagine the voice of the angel in the Leonardo Madonna? – Oh well, never mind that now. A few weeks afterwards Bysshe looked me up again, and for a while we talked aimlessly and at random. He was obviously waiting for me to question him.

‘“Oh, by the way, how much did you get?” I enquired at last. He looked absolutely dead beat, his skin was a kind of muddy grey. It appeared that the tiny
motif
of
my
experience had been a mere prelude. Bysshe, it seems, had awakened a week or two after my visit in the very earliest of the morning, at the very moment when from underneath the parrot's pall had slipped solemnly out the complete aria. The words were not actually French, for he had detected something like “alone” and “grief”. But here and there they had a slight nasal timbre, and Bysshe, drinking the fatal music in, lying there in his striped pyjamas still a little dazed with sleep, had simply succumbed.

‘He had succumbed to such a degree that his sole preposterous object in life now seemed to be that of tracing the bird's ownership. Not his sole object, rather; for at every return from this preposterous quest, he spent hours in solitude, bent on the equally vain aim of discovering which in the divine order of things had come first: the invective or the charm. He had some notion that it mattered.

‘There is a bit, you remember, in one of Conrad's novels about a voice – Lena's. There is another bit in Shakespeare, and in Coleridge; in almost every poet, of course – but it doesn't matter. Four notes had been enough for me. And even if Melba in her dreams delights the listening shades on the borders of Paradise – even
they
will not have heard the best that earth can do. You see there was nothing bird-like in the parrot's piece, except the purity. It was the voice of a seraph, the voice of a marvellous fiddle (that bit of solo, for example, in Mozart's Minuet in E flat). A voice innocent of the meaning – even of the degree – of its longing; innocent, I mean, of realizing that life can't really stand – if it could comprehend it – anything so abjectly beautiful as all that; that there's a breaking-point.

‘It's difficult even to suggest the effect. Absolutely the most beautiful thing in the world a cousin of mine once told me he had ever seen was from the top of a bus. He happened to glance into the dusk of an upper room through an open window, and a naked girl stood there, her eyes looking inward in a remote dream, her shift lifted a little above her small lovely head, as she was about to put it on. Well I suppose Bysshe's experience resembled that. But there;
I,
mind you, heard only four notes of it. And now there are no more to come. And my cousin, lost in stupefaction or remorse, had kept immovably to his bus.'

Judy's sewing lay for a moment idle in her lap; her downcast eyes were fixed on it as if suddenly it had presented her with an insoluble problem.

‘But there was, of course, quite another – a farcical – side to the comedy,' Tressider pushed on. ‘Poor Bysshe's pursuit proved as ludicrous as it looks amusing. When you come to think of it, you know, we make our own idols. A silence, a still look of the eyes, a crammed instant of oblivion, and we are what's called “in love”. What Stendhal calls crystallization, doesn't he? Queer. But it's the same in everything. Not merely sex, I mean. And that, I suppose, is what happened to Bysshe.

‘Those slowish internal creatures crystallize hardest, perhaps. Out of this lost wandering voice he made – well, he embodied it. And the result wasn't in the least like poor Minnie. There was no particular tragedy in that. For Bysshe, that is. But, just like him, he tried, as I say, to track the embodiment down. And how could he tell which he'd unearth first – angel or devil. Or – both together. Think of that. Anyhow, he completely failed. First, of course, he returned to the dealer in livestock, who extorted from him a larger sum than he had paid for the parrot, as a bribe to disclose where it had come from. After which Bysshe had at once hied off to a cornchandler's at Leytonstone – a talkative man.

‘This man had bought the bird from a customer to whom he sold weekly supplies of chicken-food and canary-seed – a maiden lady in a semi-detached villa neatly matted with
ampelopsis Veitchi
.'

‘How nice!' said Judy in a hushed little voice – as if absent-mindedly.

‘Yes,' said Tressider. ‘When Bysshe at last asked her outright if the bird had ever talked while it was in her possession, a pink flush had spread over her face. She had herself tried to teach it, she told him, looking down her nose the while beneath her large gold-rimmed glasses: just “scratch-a-poll” or something of that kind. But she had failed. A seafaring nephew of some little naïvety, I should imagine. He had, she fancied, “picked it up” in Portsmouth.