‘Wait a minute,’ said Anthea quickly; ‘the game is to twist up what you want to say so that no one can understand what you’re saying except the people you want to understand it, and sometimes not them.’
‘The ancient philosophers,’ said a golden voice, ‘Well understood the art of which you speak.’
Of course it was the Phoenix, who had not been in the cupboard at all, but had been cocking a golden eye at them from the cornice during the whole conversation.
‘Pretty dickie!’ remarked the Lamb. ‘CANARY dickie!’
‘Poor misguided infant,’ said the Phoenix.
There was a painful pause; the four could not but think it likely that the Phoenix had understood their very veiled allusions, accompanied as they had been by gestures indicating the cupboard. For the Phoenix was not wanting in intelligence.
‘We were just saying—’ Cyril began, and I hope he was not going to say anything but the truth. Whatever it was he did not say it, for the Phoenix interrupted him, and all breathed more freely as it spoke.
‘I gather,’ it said, ‘that you have some tidings of a fatal nature to communicate to our degraded black brothers who run to and fro for ever yonder.’ It pointed a claw at the cupboard, where the blackbeetles lived.
‘Canary TALK,’ said the Lamb joyously; ‘go and show mammy.’
He wriggled off Anthea’s lap.