Then he drew off the handkerchief and held the parrot up to the Doctor. Certainly it was a great effect, and at first the Doctor was evidently far too astonished to be much obliged to Mathers. He didn't take the parrot—on the contrary, he fell back a pace or two, and his astonishment seemed slowly to change to a sort of wild horror. First he looked at the parrot, then he looked at Mathers, then he regularly glared at the parrot again. Seen from a distance the effect of the parrot was not good. Evidently we had lost more feathers than we thought, and its back had got a lump between the shoulders, more really like a vulture than a parrot. Still, of course one could recognize it.
Mathers held it up; then, getting frightened, he put it down on a form, and I knew, from the trembling way he began to handle my handkerchief that if the Doctor didn't speak pretty soon, Mathers would blub in public.
These silences of the Doctor's are well known as awful. You can hear a pin drop in them; and during them his eyes roll round and round in the sockets, like Catherine wheels, but much slower.
At last he spoke.
"Am I to understand, boy Mathers, that unaided you—you dug up, or disinterred, that unfortunate fowl and then sought to impart to it this bizarre, this grotesque, this indelicate semblance of life?"
Mathers said he was to understand that. He added with a shaking voice—
"I did it to give you pleasure, sir—on my honour."
The Doctor looked at Mathers minimus much puzzled.
"It is hard to conceive that even an immature mind, such as you possess, could suppose that pleasure would result to any intelligent being from so pitiful and indecent an achievement," he said. "The boy who tore this wretched bird from its last resting-place and set it up to caricature the entire race of Psittacus erythacus—— However, this is no time to investigate your conduct, Mathers. You will join me after evening school in the study."
Then he looked at the parrot again and cleared his throat. Mathers slunk away to his seat, and as he did so, suddenly the Doctor started and seemed to 'point,' like a sporting dog. I think he had discovered there was more than met the eye about the parrot. He called up Macmullen, who happened to catch his gaze, and told him to take 'Joe' to the gardener.