In her odd impulsive fashion – her piece of sewing pressed tight to her small bosom, her two small feet as close to one another on the floor – Judy had laughed out: and the sound of it had a faint far-away resemblance to bells – bells muffled, in the sea. ‘You never, never, never speak of marriage,’ she charged Tressider, ‘without being satirical. You just love to make nonsense of us all. Now I say you have no right to. You haven’t earned the privilege. Wait till you’ve jilted Cleopatra, or left your second-best bed to – to Catherine Parr – if she was the last. Don’t you agree, Stella?’
The slight lifting at the corners of dark handsome Stella’s mouth could hardly have been described as a smile. ‘I always agree,’ she assented. ‘And surely, Mr Tressider, isn’t marriage an “institution”? Mightn’t you just as well attack a police-station? No one gets any good out of it. It only hurts.’
‘That’s just it, Stella, it only hurts. It’s water, after all, that has the best chance of wearing away stones – not horrid sledge-hammers like that.’
From his low chair, his cleft clean-shaven chin resting on his hands, Tressider for a moment or two continued to look up and across the room at Judy, now absorbedly busy again over her needlework. Time, too, wears like water; but little of its influence was perceptible there. The curtains at the French windows had been left undrawn; a moon was over the garden. It was Judy’s choice – this mingling of the two lights – natural and artificial. Hers, too, the fire, this late summer evening. She stooped forward, thrusting out a slightly trembling hand towards its flames.
‘No, it isn’t fair,’ she said, ‘there are many married people who are at least, well, endurably happy: Bill and me, for example. The real marvel is that any two ignorant, chance young things who happen to be of opposite sex should ever just go on getting older and older, more and more used to one another, and all that – and yet not want a change – not really for a single instant. I know dozens – apart from the others.’
‘Oh, I never meant to suggest that “whited” are the only kind of sepulchres,’ said Tressider. ‘I agree, too, it’s the substantial that wears longest. Second-best beds; rather than Wardour Street divans. But there are excesses – just human ones, I mean. It’s this horrible curse of asking too much. Up there they seem to have supposed that the best ratio for a human being was one quart of feeling to every pint pot. I knew a man once, for example, who, quite apart from such little Eurekas as the Dunmow flitch, never even made the attempt to become endurably happy, as you call it. Simply because of a parrot. It repeated things. It was an eavesdropper: an agent provocateur.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Judy. ‘Oh, how you amuse me! You haven’t said a single thing this evening that was not ironical. You just love to masquerade. Did you ever know a woman who talked in parables? It’s simply because, I suppose, men have such stupidly self-conscious hearts – I mean such absurdly rational minds. Isn’t it, Stella? Don’t be so reserved, you dark taciturn angel. Wouldn’t he be even nicer than he is if he would only say what he thinks? A parrot!’
Stella merely desisted from shrugging her shoulders. ‘My own opinion, Judy – judging, that is, from what Mr Tressider does say, is that it’s far better that he should never say what he thinks.’
As if itself part and parcel of Stella’s normal taciturnity, this voice of hers, when it did condescend to make itself heard, was of a low rasping timbre, like the sound of a strip of silk being torn from its piece. And it usually just left off, came to an abrupt end – as if interrupted. She turned her head out of the candle-light, as though even moonshine might be a refuge from the mere bare facts of the case. There was a pause. Judy had snatched her glance, and was now busily fishing in her work-basket for her tiny scissors.
‘Well, that’s what I say,’ she said, staring close at the narrow hem of the ludicrously tiny shirt she was hemming. ‘You men love to hide your heads in the sands. Even Bill does – and you know what a body he leaves outside. You positively prefer not to know where you are. You invent ideals and goddesses and all that sort of thing; and yet you would sooner let things slide than – than break the ice. I mean – I mean, of course, the right ice. That can’t be helped, I suppose. But what I simply cannot understand is being satirical. Here we all are, we men and women, and we just have to put up with it. In heaven,’ and the tiny click, click, click of her needle had already begun again, ‘in heaven there will be neither marriage nor giving in marriage. And poor Bill will have to – have to darn his socks himself.’
Her eyes lifted an instant, and glanced away so swiftly that it seemed to Tressider he caught no less fleeting a glimpse of their blue than that usually afforded of a kingfisher’s wing. ‘But what,’ she went on hastily, ‘what about the parrot – the agent provocateur? What about the parrot, Stella? Let’s make him tell us about the parrot.’
‘Yes,’ concurred Stella. ‘I should, of course, very much indeed enjoy hearing about the parrot. I just love natural history.’
‘You ought really, of course,’ said Tressider, ‘to have heard the story from a friend of my sister Kate’s – Minnie Sturgess. It was she who was responsible for the tragic – the absurd – finale. It was she who cut the tether, or rather the painter. The kind of woman that simply can’t take things easy. Intuitions, no end; but mostly of a raw hostile order. Anyhow, they weren’t of much use in the case of a man like – well, like my friend with the parrot.’
‘We will call him Bysshe,’ said Judy. ‘It has romantic associations. Go on, Mr Satirist.’
‘Bysshe, then,’ said Tressider. ‘Well, this Bysshe was a lanky, square-headed, black-eyed fellow. Something, I believe, in the ship-broking line, though with a little money of his own. A bit over thirty, and a bachelor from the thatch on his head to the inch-thick soles of his shoes. If his mother had lived – he was one of those “mother’s boys” which the novelists used to be so fond of – Minnie Sturgess might perhaps herself have survived into his life, to keep, and, I wouldn’t mind betting, even to prize the parrot. She would at any rate have learned the tact with which to dispose of it without undue friction. Minnie survived, in actual fact, to keep a small boarding-house at Ramsgate, though whether she is there now only the local directory could relate. As for Bysshe – well, I don’t know, as a matter of fact, how long he survived. In Kate’s view, the two of them were born to make each other unhappy. So Providence, to cut things short, supplied the parrot. But then Kate is something of a philosopher. And I have no views myself.’
‘Did you ever see the parrot?’ queried Judy, her left eye screwed up a little as she threaded an almost invisible needle. ‘I remember an old servant of my mother’s once had one, and it used to make love to her the very instant it supposed they were alone. But she, poor soul, wasn’t too bright in her wits.’
‘Oh,’ said Tressider, ‘Bysshe was right enough in his wits. It was merely one of his many queer harmless habits – and he had plenty of spare time left over from his ship-broking – to moon about the city. He suffered from indigestion, or thought he did, and used to lunch on apples or nuts which, so far as he was concerned, did not require for their enjoyment a sitting posture. He was a genuine lover of London, though; knew as much about its churches and streets, taverns and relics as old Stowe or Pepys himself. Possibly, too, if his digestion had been a reasonable one, Minnie and he might have made each other’s lives miserable to the end of the chapter; since in that case, he would never have found himself loafing about one particular morning in Leadenhall Market; and so would never have set eyes on the parrot. Anyhow, that’s how it all began.
‘It was a sweltering day – clear black shadows, black as your hat, shafting clean across the narrow courts, and the air crammed with flavours characteristic of those parts – meat, poultry, sawdust, cats, straw, soot, and old bricks baking in the sun. He had meandered into one of the livestock alleys – mainly dogs, cats, poultry, with an occasional jackdaw, owl or raven. That kind of thing. And there, in a low entry, lounged the proprietor of one of its shops – a man with a face and head as hairless almost as a bladder of lard, and with eyes like a ferret.
‘He was two steps up from the pavement, had a straw in the corner of his mouth, and was looking at Bysshe. And Bysshe was looking at one of his protégés, the edge of its cage glinting in a sunbeam, and the bird – or whatever you like to call it – mum and dreaming inside. Bysshe had finished his lunch, and was in a reflective mood. He stared on at the parrot almost to the point of vacancy.
‘“Nice dawg there,” insinuated an insolent voice above his head.
‘He looked up, and for a moment absently surveyed the speaker. “Does it talk?” enquired Bysshe. The owner of the bird merely continued to chew his straw.
‘“How do you teach them?” Bysshe persisted. “You clip or snip their tongues, or something, don’t you?”
‘An intensely violent look came into the fellow’s eyes. “If you was to try to slit that bird’s tongue,’ he said, “you might as well order your corfin here and now.”
‘Bysshe’s glance returned to the cage. Apart from an occasional almost imperceptible obscuring of its scale-like, shuttered eyes, its inmate might just as well have been stuffed. It sat there stagnantly surveying Bysshe as if he were one of the less intelligent apes. To start with, Bysshe didn’t much like the look of the man. Naturally. Nor did he much like the look of the parrot. It was merely the following of an indolent habit that suggested his asking its price.
‘He once more turned his attention from wizard-like bird to beast-like man. “What’s the price of the thing?” he enquired; “and if I particularly wanted him to talk, could you make him?” The man rapidly shifted his straw from one corner of his mouth to the other.
‘“The feller,” he replied, “that says that he could make that bird do anything but give up the ghost, is a liar.”
‘Bysshe, when he told me about the deal, supplied the missing adjective. Still, such is life. The price was 25s. And as Bysshe had no more idea of the bird’s value than that of an Egyptian pyramid, he didn’t know whether he was getting a bargain or not. Nor did he attempt to beat the man down. He asked him a few questions about the proper food and treatment of the creature. Whereupon, squeezing one or two of his remaining lunch nuts between the bars, he picked up the cage by its ring, turned out of the shadowy coolness of the market into the burning glitter of Leadenhall Street, mounted on to the top of a bus, and bore his captive home.
‘He had rooms in Clifford’s Inn; and through the window the bird, if it so pleased, could feast its eyes on the greens and shadows of a magnificent plane-tree. The rooms were old – faded yellow panelling and a moulded cornice. It was quiet. Bysshe had few friends, and his pet therefore could have enjoyed – even if it wanted any – little company. Bysshe bought it a handsome new cage, with slight architectural advantages, and was as perfectly ready to enjoy its silent society as he expected the bird to be prepared to enjoy his.’
Stella gently withdrew her dark eyes from the moonlit garden, and stole a longish look at Tressider’s face.
‘I agree, Stella,’ cried Judy breaking in. ‘He is being rather a long time coming to what I suppose will be the point.’
‘So are most little human tragedies,’ retorted Tressider. ‘But there’s one point I have left out. I said “silent” society; and that at first was all Bysshe got. But I gathered that though there had been the usual din in the market the day of the bargain, it was some odd nondescript slight sound or other that had first caught his attention. A kind of call-note which appeared to have come out of the cage. Without being quite conscious of it, it seems to have been this faint rumour, at least as much as anything else, that persuaded him to invest in the bird.
‘Well, anyhow, as he sat reading one evening – he had rather an odd and esoteric taste in books – there proceeded out of the cage one or two clear disjointed notes. Just a fragment of sound to which you could give no description or character except that it was unlike most of those which one expects from a similiar source. Bysshe had instantly relapsed from one stage of stillness to another. Compared with what came after, this was nothing – mere “recording” as the bird-fanciers say. But it set Bysshe on the qui vive. For a while he listened intently. There was no response. And he had again almost forgotten the presence of the parrot when, hours afterwards, from the gloom that had crept into its corner, there softly broke out of the cage, no mere snatch of an inarticulate bel canto, but a low, slow, steady gush of indescribable abuse.
‘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.
‘“It talks a little now” Bysshe had confided to her.
‘And the lady had at once given her case away by retaliating that what it might do in the small hours, or with only a gentleman present, was no concern of hers.
‘Then Bysshe asked if the parrot had ever engaged in song – “like a bullfinch, you know”. And the lady’s expression implied that his question had confirmed her suspicions of his sanity.
‘Portsmouth turned out another bad egg. He tracked down the shop, but the proprietor had died of dropsy a week before. Still, his daughter confessed that if the parrot was the parrot she had in mind – though she had never heard it talking in particular – then it may have been resident in the shop for something under a year. At this a ray of hope struck down on the squalid scene, and Bysshe enquired if the late proprietor had ever indulged in “musical evenings”.
‘There was a young lady living not many doors down the street, he was informed, who taught the pianoforte, and who led a Mixed Methodist Choir. Bysshe had accordingly spent the greater part of that evening beneath the young lady’s lighted window – providentially an inch or two ajar – while in successive keys she practised her scales. And for bonne bouche she had at last rewarded the eavesdropper with a rendering of “Hold the Fort”; but, alas, in tones of a pitch and volume which no mere mimic, feathered or otherwise, could hope to recapture.
‘Bysshe could get no further for the present. As I say, he never did. His parrot’s past had proved irrevocable. And apart from the hint of the prehistoric in all its species, even the age of this particular specimen remained a mystery. Destiny may, of course, have seduced it to that slum in Portsmouth from the Islands of the Blest. That would, at any rate, account for the critical side of its repertory. It may have taken flight clean out of a fairy-tale, leaving its rarer colours behind it. So at least one can imagine Snow-white singing over her bed-making in the house of the dwarfs. It may have had Belial for owner and then St Lucy; or vice versa. It may have been a fallen Parrot. But it doesn’t matter.
‘The only point worth bothering about is that Bysshe couldn’t get its original out of his head – the original he had invented, I mean. Parrots don’t learn to sing or to swear in an afternoon. Positive months of intercourse must have been necessary even for a fowl as intelligent as that. And so, poor Bysshe lived in constant torture. Where was she now – this impossible She? And where and whose the tongue that seemed to be vocal of the very rot to which all things living in this delightful world are – well – doomed, you know?
‘Anyhow, Bysshe gave up the quest; and lived on in a furious, implacable dream. The one thing he couldn’t do was to exorcize this ghost in him. He shut himself up in his chambers for days together, and the autumnal evenings rapidly lengthened. He existed in a condition of abject nausea of expectation; and in as abject a terror of having that expectation fulfilled. Nothing on earth would cajole or intimidate the bird, though Bysshe cursed it at one moment and at the next lavished upon it all the spices of the East. Cajoled it, I mean, to the extent of persuading it to embark on its programme unless the spirit moved it.
‘It’s an almost tragic thought too – for his loathing of the parrot now exceeded all bounds – that, far from returning these sentiments, the creature seemed to have fallen head over ears in love with his keeper. It would squat on its perch, muttering inarticulate endearments, or, sidling stealthily with beak and claw from base to keystone of its dome-shaped cage, would ogle him with an eye as amorous and amiable as the dumb thing could make it. And only dumb things of course can ever really be in love. There’s a genuine pathos there, though Bysshe was immune to it.
‘And now, when the old black Stygian flood set in anew, the bird no longer swore at him; it swore with him. And it so dispersed its favours that Bysshe up to the very last was never able to settle with any certainty which part of its programme came first – the paradisal aria or the other. You couldn’t anticipate the creature. It chose its own moments – and these invariably unexpected. When gigantic storm-clouds were heaping themselves above the hill of the Strand, out of that menacing hush its amazing incantation would steal upon the air. In the balmiest hours of St Martin’s summer, Bysshe would hurriedly spring to his windows to cut off the foul stream that came sliding out of that minute throat like the sluggish lees of a volcanic eruption.
‘It was no good. You can’t pin down human nature. Luckily Bysshe did not depend on his ship-broking. If he had, his parrot would have put him in the Workhouse. It’s bad enough, so I am told, to fall in love with the tangible, with a creature owning a heart that you can at least believe in, or besiege, or at times hope to break. But to be infatuated by a second-hand voice and to share its decoy with the company of a friend possessing a tongue that might shock Beelzebub himself – well, that, I gather, is an even less pleasant experience.’
Judy raised the hand that held her sewing, and gently rubbed her left cheek. The air was close in spite of the open window, and in spite of the cool-looking vaporous moonlight in which Stella continued to sit and soak. But neither seemed inclined to interrupt the interminable yarn. Indeed Tressider himself appeared to have grown a little tired of it. He half yawned.
‘There was nothing, you know,’ he began again, with a more pronounced drawl in his voice; ‘there was nothing of course extremely exceptional in Bysshe’s parrot’s powers, except possibly the collusion. There are numbers of historical parrots with a comparable repertory. There was the parrot for example, perfectly well accredited, that could recite a whole sonnet of Petrarch’s. There is the Grand Khan’s notorious cockatoo – though that was made of metal and precious stones. In France there are parrots that can reel off pages at a time of the academic dictionary. And there was the macaw that Luther despatched with his translation of the Bible. I’ll bet, too, Catherine Parr had a parrot – with a five-stringed lute. Whether or not; the rest is silence.
‘Minnie Sturgess naturally enough, poor thing, had been restless for weeks. The game in which she had never held any really decent cards she now saw slipping into fatuity. Bysshe was possessed. The assurance of that poisoned the very air she breathed. But possessed by what? By whom? She played on for a while, none the less, with all the courage and the skill she could muster. Bysshe indeed was even taking a tonic of her prescription – some patent food or other, when I saw him again towards the end of October. It didn’t appear to be doing him much good. Knowing as I did the cause of this vacant somnambulism – that furtive vigilant stare of his as if from some living creature hiding far back in his eyes – the desperate change in his looks was almost ridiculous.
‘“Why don’t you drown the wretched thing?” I asked him. “It’s a machine – an automaton: and half-devilish at that.” But the face he lifted to me, its ears almost visibly pricked up towards the lair of his seducer, was – well, I suppose you know what unrequited passion can make of a man.’
‘You really mean,’ cried Judy suddenly, needle in the air, ‘you really mean he was wasting away for the ghost of a voice?’
Tressider looked at her across the room. Even a stranger would have noticed the peculiar stridency of her shocked tones. Its bells were out of tune. To judge from Tressider’s face, the telling of his story had tired him a good deal.
‘I mean,’ he said, ‘things do happen like that. Though no doubt, as with John Keats, some “morbid affection” helped. What are we all but ghosts – of something? And who’s telling this story for you, pray, but your ghost of me? All it comes to is that Bysshe kept on feeding his imagination, and the effort wore him down.’
‘“Morbid affection!” ‘echoed Stella. ‘Why drag in the mortuary?’
‘And what,’ gasped Judy, ‘and what did Miss Sturgess do? Finally, I mean? And apart’ (and she added the words almost with a touch of bravado) ‘apart from the food, or patent medicine, or whatever it was?’
‘Miss Sturgess?’ Tressider echoed. ‘She played her last card; and it was a poor card, played like that. You see, poor thing, her only possible hope was to discover somehow exactly how she stood, since Bysshe had become little but a sullen recluse. She scarcely saw him now, even though so far as I can tell, there had been no open rift or quarrel between them. One may assume she had been awaiting her opportunity; and I’m not attacking her intentions. And one evening – and, mind you, as the colder weather approached, and possibly because Bysshe (though he lavished other kinds of dainties on his parrot) was incapable of showing it any spiritual sympathy, the creature was growing more and more stagnant and morose – well, one evening he had slipped out to fetch himself, I think, a bottle of wine. He was sinking into a sheer inertia – from being goaded on and on. And while on this errand he seems to have had some kind of fainting attack. Not the first of the kind. This had entailed his sitting for half an hour or so in the nearest pub; for in these later days of his obsession he had practically given up venturing further afield. All told, he couldn’t have been more than an hour away.
‘When he returned Minnie Sturgess was standing by the window in the further corner of his room. There was still a trace of twilight in the sky and it illumined her set face near the glass. And something in that or in her attitude set him shivering. He asked her what was wrong; then noticed that her left hand was bound up, and very inadequately, with a handkerchief – one of his own.
‘She merely turned her head – and a stony one it must have appeared, I should imagine – and looked at him. He managed to repeat his question. He asked her what was the matter. I gathered that she didn’t say very much in reply, only something to the effect that in future so far as she was concerned Bysshe was entirely at liberty to enjoy the delights of the company he had chosen, and which for some time past he had evidently preferred to hers. And that now at any rate he would no longer be taunted regarding it when it wasn’t there. She had a raucous voice, and it was, I gathered, a bit of feminine sarcasm; something like that.
‘And Bysshe knew pretty well what it meant. He knew that his voices, devilish and seraphic, were now for ever silent: that their murderess was there. He sat down without answering. Mad dogs’ teeth are notoriously dangerous, Miss Sturgess went on to remark; did Bysshe know if parrots’ were? And still, I gathered, he made no reply. He just sat there, paying no attention, as if almost he had taken lessons in endurance from his late pet.
‘And then, his friend seems to have walked – or so at least I see her – in a kind of prowling semicircle round him, with eyes fixed on his face, and so out of the door. And then down the echoing shallow wooden staircase, and into the cobbled courtyard, and under the thinning plane-tree, and out into London – en route, at last, poor soul, for the boarding-house in Ramsgate.’
‘And where did Bysshe bury the thing?’ inquired Stella, as if sick to death of being satirical.
‘I never asked him that,’ said Tressider calmly. ‘Nor, so far as I have heard, did he ever catechize the desolate one regarding which precise item of the two counts of the indictment had induced her to wring the parrot’s neck. Probably the bel canto, for I don’t believe myself that a woman much cares what company the man she is in love with keeps provided that it is not too good for her.’
At this, apparently, Judy had sat bolt upright in her chair, as if in sudden fear or anxiety. And at that precise moment heavyish footsteps were heard without.
‘Hello,’ inquired a bass, unctuous, yet hardly good-humoured voice, ‘when shall you three meet again?’
It was Bill who stood in the doorway – Bill in his ineffable dinner-jacket and glossy shirt. And he all but filled it. He might almost have been a balloon, this Bill – tethered to the carpet there by his glossy patent-leather shoes – buoyant with gas.
‘He has been telling us a story about a parrot,’ said Judy in a low voice, ‘who used very bad language.’
‘Has he?’ said Bill. ‘Well, he ought to know better.’ But his eye was almost as vacant as that of Bysshe’s pet. It wandered off to rest on Judy’s other guest, Stella. ‘And what did you think of it?’ he said; ‘the bad man’s tale?’
‘Why,’ said Stella, ‘I am a little too grown-up for fairy-tales. And as for morals; I can find my own.’
‘And you, Badroulbadour?’ said Bill, widely smiling at his wife.
‘Me, Bill,’ echoed Judy firmly, her pretty cheeks flushed after her exertions. ‘Why, I have been thinking that the tiny creature who’s going to wear this shirt has ventured into a rather difficult world.’
‘And who, may I ask, is the “tiny creature”?’ drawled her husband, almost as though such a question could be a sarcasm.
Tressider’s gaze was fixed vacantly on the scrap of sewing. He appeared to be entirely aloof from this little domestic catechism – seemed to have lost interest in the evening.
‘It’s for Mollie’s little boy. He was born about three days ago,’ Judy said.
But Stella, too, appeared to have lost interest. Though her face was in shadow, her eyes could still see the moon – a moon by its slightly cindrous light now betraying that it was soon to set. And to judge from her attitude and expression, this eventuality would bring her no regret, since, as it seemed in her darker moments, the moon of her own secret waters had long ago set for ever.
1 First published in London Mercury, April 1925.