OR all as respectable as you see me now, prosperous and portly, with my practice in London and my villa at Hazlemere, I once, when I was a barrister, and briefless, played a leading part in as thorough a melodrama as ever brought down the house in a Surrey-side theater.
My aunt was my one surviving relative; it was she who had paid for my schooling, given me my rare tips, and made it possible for me to take up my scholarship at Exeter. It was she whose checks supported me, more or less adequately, in my dusty rooms in the Temple. It was she who appointed me to the office of caretaker at Willow Cottage, near Grindhurst, while she went for her summer holiday to Scotland.
Willow Cottage is a very comfortable place to stay at. It is much too big for its name, a long, low, white building, crowded with furniture—legacies from different branches of our family, who, passing from the need of chairs and tables, left these to Aunt Eliza for the crowding of her cottage. Uncle Algernon left her the Chinese jars and curios, Aunt Jane full half the heavy Victorian furniture. Uncle Robert the cases of stuffed fish and foxes, and Aunt Mary the gray parrot. To the gray parrot, and thus indirectly to Aunt Mary, I owe my melodrama.
After the dusty scramble of London life in July, the quiet of the ordered household, the dewy peace of the big green garden, the long leisure of complete solitude charmed and refreshed me. I read philosophy, walked and smoked, and went so far as to make a few notes for my great projected work on the "Essential Identity of Ethic and Esthetic."
But though the gray parrot was destined to direct my fate, this was as yet unrevealed to me, and I confess that I hated the bird. She croaked, she whistled, she screamed, she sang lines of hymns in her evil, raucous voice, tremulous with suppressed chuckles. And when I implored the housemaid to remove her from her stand in the hall and take her into the kitchen, she told me it was as much as her place was worth. When I threw a coat over the cage, Polly swore till my hair stood on end, and I hastily tore off the coat, for the sake of the maid-servants. So in the long evenings before I started reading, after the servants had gone for the night to their own quarters, I used to lift Polly's cage and carry it out on to the lawn at the other side of the house: then I could work in peace.
One night the inevitable happened, and I awoke in the gray of the morning with a shock of remembrance, the remembrance that I had forgotten something. What, I wondered sleepily. Another shock, more violent and sleep-dispelling, warned me that I had forgotten to bring in the parrot. The natural man said, "Do her good," and I turned on my pillow to compose myself for sleep; but Prudence discoursed at some length on tramps, and on chills, and on the necessity of keeping the parrot's nightly airings a secret from the servants. "Suppose," said Prudence, "the confounded beast has taken cold and dies, the servants will say it was your fault." So I got into flannels and stumbled down the dim staircase and through the dark hall. All the shutters were up, and the alarm-bell on the door. I crept out through the French window in the parlor, and round through the toneless, dewy morning to the lawn. The cage was lying on its side. The parrot was gone. Never mind what I said. Directly the words were out of my mouth, my heart gave a leap, for they were answered by a flood of such swear-words as I had never heard from any but one mouth—or rather one beak. The anathema ended in a well-known hoarse chuckle.
On the laburnum-tree sat the parrot, cocking a wary eye at me.
"Come, Polly! Come, pretty Polly!" I said, advancing.
"Polly put the ket!" said the bird irrelevantly.
"Come then, Polly!" I resumed, holding out my hand. The parrot fluttered and squawked, and I stood still, shivering in the July dawn.
"Sugar, Polly, sugar," said I, advancing again. "Stand still, can't you?"
"Could I but stand where Moses stood!" sang the parrot, and flew off over the lawn. I followed.
Polly then rested, she took short flights from one tree to another, she sang lines of hymns at me, she chuckled and she screamed, but she swore no more. I am sure nothing but being covered up, or a sudden shock, such as my first remarks must have given her, would have betrayed her into such an indiscretion. She seemed to take a perverse joy in leading me slowly on; and lead me on she did, over woods and fields, and on to a by-road, where she took off from a chestnut-tree and disappeared over a high brick wall.
"I'll have you yet!" I said.