But, according to the law of her kind, this was a little precipitate of Matilda. She should have let the kitchen-maid grow into a cook; she should have let her live a long and honoured life, and should then have tenderly renewed memories of old days when her name would echo upstairs and down to hurry laggard steps. I cannot decide if this is a want of tact or a supreme instance of tact in Matilda. It cannot, at any rate, be a want of memory, for Matilda has just begun swearing; and as she has been with us for some years, and none of us habitually swear, this must be a sudden revival of memory. It is said to be a very clear and life-like revival.
Probably as for Lovelace, so for Matilda, stone walls would not a prison make, for iron bars do not make any thing like a cage. She drags the door upwards with her beak, and holds it with her claw while she squeezes through like an egg sucked through a bottle-neck. This performance drives Joey to the verge of mania. He, too, pulls up his door, but he does not know how to hold it, and it bangs down again and leaves him voiceless with rage, while Matilda is running about as gay as a lark.
But the other day I found Matilda securely imprisoned. Her door was bound with red tape. As mere knots can present no difficulty to an intellect like hers, it was certainly the symbolism which she respected.
Yet with all these qualities of mind and character, there are one or two points in which Joey excels. Joey wets his sugar. He deliberately dips first one end and then the other into his drinking-trough, and when it is half dissolved he eats it. He tried to soften a piece of wood in the same way the other day—how fruitlessly Matilda knows. Joey has a perch made out of the branch of a tree, and from his perch his toys depend on pieces of string and tape; he owns a cardboard matchbox, and an old tin pencil, and such-like treasures. One by one he ruthlessly destroys these, so some strings are always hanging empty. But sitting above them, Joey can test which are empty by their weight, and pulls up only the heavy strings. It is not, however, in practical matters that Joey is seen to the best advantage. His is the artist’s temperament; he has a soul for music. Given a braying harmonium and Joey loose, his foes are scattered; but the piano is, so to speak, his forte. “I am convinced,” as Lady Catherine de Burgh says, that Joey would have been a delightful performer had his health allowed him to apply. As it is, he attends chiefly to the cultivation of the voice. He seats himself on the shoulder of the meanest performer, or marches up and down from shoulder to wrist; he spreads his tail like a fan; he swells to twice his usual size; his eye goes in and out like the magic-lantern star which sends happy little children to bed with the nightmare. Then the performer plays a weird Scotch air, such as the “Lyke-wake dirge” (one of Joey’s favourite pieces), whistling the while, and Joey bursts into song. He does not whistle as when he is performing “Pop goes the Weasel,” but he sings with a piercing, strident voice, high and low, pitching with singular skill somewhere near the note, grace notes thrown in according to taste. After Scotch songs give him Wagner hot and loud. In the middle of a performance of the Preislied a stranger once called; but he was happily a reticent man....
Photograph by S. A. McDowall
“Joey has a perch made out of the branch of a tree.”
But above all there is this: Joey has a heart. It is not a very admirable heart. Its fickleness is beyond description; he hates more hotly than he loves; but the heart is there. He will hear his friend’s voice in the house and get mad with anticipation, piping broken fragments of indescribable song. He will follow such an one with low, skimming flight, and will bite any hand except the dearest that tries to bring him back. He is easily deceived—a lovable fault—and a deep voice or a rough sleeve will make him tolerate a woman under the impression that homespun means a man. But where his heart is concerned pretence is vain, and I can imagine Joey dying of a broken heart, though I can imagine him more easily still dying of a bad temper. But Matilda’s heart is warranted unbreakable, and is as cold and hard as her marble eye. And I sometimes fear that Matilda is growing a little coarse: a new cook came the other day, and was taken to the cage because the parrot “generally has something to say to a stranger.” She burst into a long harangue, of which the only word that could be distinguished was “forget” (it is thought she was declaring her unalterable devotion to the predecessor); but she ended all too plainly, “I don’t care for you.” Her new hostess firmly replied, “And I don’t care for you,” upon which Matilda screamed loudly.
If there is any truth in re-incarnation, it must be that cynics revisit this world as parrots. The punishment would be horribly appropriate. The man who has disbelieved in the reality of the higher emotions shall have these emotions, but be able to express them only in broad farce. An artist, ardent, vindictive, and cynical has been travestied with the form of Joey. He is animated with the passion which made him plunge his stiletto into an enemy’s heart, as in his re-incarnation he tries to drive his beak into a hand. He is met by iron bars and a mocking laugh. Dusk gathers over the sky, that mysterious, familiar beauty stirs his heart; forgetting and forgiving, and he hopes forgiven, he would say good-night to his friends. But the whisper comes in cockney intonation, “Jowey, well, Jowey.” He hears the voice of a friend, and would hail him, but “Pop goes the Weasel” rises to his beak. He is kindled as of old by the Pilgrim’s March, and bursts into song. But the voice comes hoarse and comic, and laughter greets the kindling eye. All the highest, the best, the strongest feelings of his nature turn in expression into broad comedy, and the reason is that when he was a man he felt these emotions and profaned them by cynicism.