Sally was an Australian lemon-crested cockatoo; Jane was a green double-yellow-faced Panama parrot. They hated each other. Parrots, all parrots, are bitterly jealous. Sally was a sweet-tempered, meek bird; Jane was vicious—her orange eyes would dilate and contract their pupils in spasms of rage. Sally’s eye, round and black as a shoe button, had amazing expression but lent itself more to sentimentality than to anger. In the studio was an old wooden-backed chair, which was the parrots’ own. I perched them on its back when they were out of their cages.
First they gave each other a glare of malevolent hate, then drew close; each put out a foot, the foot nearest to her enemy; claw locked claw with a ferocious grip. There they sat, hour after hour, holding hands, each balanced on one leg. It seemed that to hold each other’s hand was to safeguard against attack. The slightest move on the part of the attacker gave the attacked warning. The birds never talked when they were foot-locked but gave each other vicious, snarling, beaky growls from time to time.
Living in a flat, as I did at that time, I dared not allow my parrots to screech, or we would have been evicted. Jane was an excellent talker; Sally spoke little but clearly; both could screech magnificently. They knew screeching was punishable either by a crack over the foot with a paintbrush, or, what they hated worse, being extinguished under a black cover and shoved into the dark closet. When I left them alone in the studio, going down the hall to my kitchen to prepare meals, both birds would set up a chorus of screams. The moment they heard my hurried returning footsteps Jane would say, “Sally! Oh, you bad Sally, stop it!” Sally glowered silently and I administered whacks impartially, knowing both equally to blame. Jane’s rebuke to Sally was in exact imitation of my own voice.
Sally was not much of a talker; all she could say was “Hello!” and “Sally is a Sally!” This brilliant statement she taught herself. I tried to make her say “Sally is a fool”, but with distinctness she corrected the statement, saying “Sally is a Sally,” then made the sound of kissing. Jane sang three songs, words and music complete. Her favourite was “We won’t go home till morning”. She finished the hurrahs off with a magnificent roll; she loved the letter “r”. She was really a clever talker, but if anyone approached the cage to look at her she stopped short, cocked her head, and, looking her admirer full in the eye, said “Oh, you old fool!” and burst into mocking laughter.
Sally adored men, from the sprucest gentleman caller to the very soiled old Chinese janitor. Sally was all for men. Let a man come into the studio and she would turn her back on me, scramble from her perch, climb up his chair and, mounting to the man’s shoulder, would lay her crested head sideways against his cheek, roll her beady black eye into his and say, in a most cuddling voice, “Sally is a Sally.” Every man fell for Sally; she pleased their vanity. They all wanted to buy her. People laughed at Jane’s chatter but they kept out of her reach. Nobody asked for Jane’s kisses; Sally kissed everyone.
Jane could assume a sweet, wheedling voice. Once a plumber annoyed me to ferocity with some bad work. He rushed pell-mell down the long stairs, my tirade of righteous indignation following. Jane’s cage was round the bend where he could not see the bird. When he got to the bottom of the stair Jane called, mocking the sugariest tones my voice possessed: “Good-bye, dear.” I could have wrung her neck! I ran to a curtained window to see how the plumber was taking it. He stood at the stair foot, mouth open, amazed.
They seemed to delight in humbling me, those birds. A new tenant came into the flat below ours. She went to a neighbour and asked, “Who is that extraordinary old woman in the flat above?”
“She is not old,” said my neighbour.
“Seventy-five if she’s a day,” replied the newcomer. “Loyal old soul, always singing ‘God Save the King’ at the top of her cracked old voice!”
“Oh, that is the parrot,” said my neighbour.
The way that Jane learned “God Save the King” was funny. I tried patiently to teach her the National Anthem, working for weeks. Apparently Jane paid no heed; not a syllable of it would she say.
I fell sick. The doctor, suspecting diphtheria, isolated me in my flat, forbidding anyone to leave or to enter. I was in bed. The birds screamed and shrieked at being alone, so I shut them into the dark closet to quiet them. A nurse was sent in. She was told to enter without knocking, that I was all alone in the flat and in bed. The woman opened the door. A dog barked; two voices said, “Hello! Hello!”
“How are you?” replied the nurse politely, and was greeted by rude laughter.
“You old fool! Ha, ha, ha!”
No one was in sight; the nurse was incensed. She came on down the hall.
Up sprang a great sheep-dog and refused her admittance to my bedroom. I quieted the dog. The nurse came in a little stiffly and began to treat my throat. Presently from the cupboard came a soft voice: “God save! God save!” I was too sick to bother. Nurse said, “I understood that you were alone in your flat?”
“I am.”
“I heard a voice very close,” said the nurse, gingerly stepping over the sheep-dog who resented her tending me.
“Parrots.”
“Oh!”
“God save! God save!” came from the dark cupboard. Jane worked back into her memory all day. By night she had reconstructed the whole first verse of the National Anthem. The nurse was highly amused.
“Too late, too late, Jane,” she said, for just the day before King Edward had died.
I tried to teach Jane to end the verse “God save King George”, but the wayward bird would make her own version: “God save George!” she sang. To the end of my owning her, that was Jane’s ending to the National Anthem: “God save George!”
She heard my pupils call me “Miss Carr”. She knew it meant me. Well, if George was not “King”, could I expect to be Miss? “Carr!” she would yell when she missed me. “Carr, where are you?”
I do not for one moment think a parrot knows the meaning of the words she says. It is just connections of persons and happenings that she puts together. If anyone rose to go out of the room, Jane invariably shouted “Well, good-bye!” For those sticky visitors who stand on one foot lingering, without the courage to make a start, this was sometimes very good. Jane would get more and more insistent, shouting “Good-bye, good-bye” till they really had to go.
Jane always got my toast crusts at breakfast. “More toast?” I would ask. Therefore all food to Jane was “toast”. When she saw anyone eat she always begged, “More toast!”
One day I locked myself into my flat, got into my bathing suit, and scrubbed my studio floor. In shoving round the furniture I shut my hand into the hinge of a folding bed. The cot-bed was piled with furniture; there was nothing to do but remove it with my left hand, drag the bed to the telephone and call to someone in the building for help.
“Line busy!” Then I remembered the locked door. No one could come to me. I would likely lose my hand. I dragged the bed down the hall. The last thing I had to haul it over was Jane’s cage, put out there to clear the room while I was scrubbing. I must have been groaning heavily as I turned the key and shouted “Help!” For a while then I remember nothing. Then I heard groans. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!” Jane’s mocking voice! For years I was to be tormented by my own groans. As long as I owned Jane, “Oh, dear!” she would moan, “Oh dear, oh dear!”, till I could have wrung her neck. It is obvious that intensity and earnestness of tone make an impression on a bird’s ear. I might have tried for months to teach her that groan. Were it only a mock groan it would not have registered.
While living in Vancouver I used often to spend a week-end in Victoria with my people. I took my creatures along, the big sheep-dog, the two parrots.
The gentle Sally was loved. Jane? Well, her singing and chatter were amusing; no one came too near her, though. Each bird had her own travelling basket. I tried to look fat and greedy as I sailed past the stewards, who shouted, “Check all hand baggage!” I wanted them to think I was carrying along snacks of lunch to consume on the trip. I could not trust the birds checked. I went to the observation room and selected as remote a chair as was available, snuggling a parrot basket on the floor close on each side of my chair. For the first hour the birds were silent. They were peeping curiously through the basket-work. By and by they got bored; then I would hear chewing and tearing of wicker; a sly kick and the chew would stop for a minute only to begin again.
The ladies near me would fidget. Men, half asleep under newspapers, stirred, recrossed their dangled leg so that it hung far from my basket. Suddenly a voice. “Hello! Sally is a Sally!” or “You old fool!” and ribald laughter. Out would pop either a green head or a yellow-crested white one from my baskets. Ladies screamed, gentlemen shoved their chairs a little further away. I took my “lunch baskets” and retired to the outer deck. The stewards thought I had gone there to eat. They were pleased that I was not going to muss crumbs in the observation room.
The birds were only half welcomed at home. They scattered seeds and screeched.
Travelling with a parrot is not always easy. Once I was travelling across Britanny and carried an African grey parrot in a box. I put the box with my other light luggage up on the rack over my head. No one was in my compartment except two merry old priests who were saying their prayers hard, clattering rosaries and looking out of the window.
Presently Rebecca, my parrot, began to meow like a cat. The priests looked about and into every corner of the carriage. I could not talk French but I laughed and pointed to my box. “Peroquet,” I said, and the priests, bowing, resumed their devotions. We stopped at a station. An old woman got into our compartment with a huge basket of vegetables and a plucked fowl lying over the top, its head dangling. The ticket man came. Rebecca started meowing furiously. There followed an excited argument between the ticket collector and the old woman with the basket.
He seized the fowl and made her empty every carrot, onion, and potato onto the floor of the compartment. He shook the basket and then his head. The indignant old woman repacked. Next he attacked a woman with a young baby who had also got into the train at the same stop. He lifted the child and looked behind it and behind the woman. He gesticulated and raved. He now attacked me. I pointed to my tongue and shook my head. The man said “Bah!” and began to meow.
Then the old priests laid down their rosaries and roared till tears ran down their cheeks. They pointed first at me and then to Rebecca’s box up on the rack. The ticket collector peeped into the box and laughed too. He went away. It seems you may travel with a bird but you may not travel with a cat or dog in France.
One night I was making the trip from Victoria back to Vancouver. I had been late in securing my berth; all that was available was a top in a three-berth room. Sally was with me but not Jane. It was a very rough night. The boat pitched and tossed. It took several tries before I landed safely in my berth. I took Sally’s basket up with me: I could not leave her rolling around on the floor. I strapped her basket to the wooden open-work of the ventilator. On one side of our room a man coughed all night, on the other a woman, a violent case, was being taken up to the Insane Asylum by two keepers. She swore, cursed, and screamed.
Wind shrieked; our empty shoes clattered around the floor, hats too, and tooth brushes. In the middle of the hubbub came a small, sweet voice: “Sally is a Sally!” I gave the basket a sly kick. “Sally is a Sally! Sally is a Sally!” The voice got louder and more insistent. The woman in the bottom berth scragged her neck up to the woman in the middle. “As if,” she whispered loud above the turmoil, “that top-berth woman must add to the row by talking in her sleep!”
“Hush, Sally!” Suddenly it occurred to me that the bird was cold. I took her basket under the covers and she stilled.
Sally, after a number of years, got a chill and died. The robust Jane lived on and on; every year of the fifteen she was in my possession her temper got worse. One day, in a fit of violent jealousy because I was tending a sick puppy, she flashed across the room and nearly tore my eye out. Another time she ripped the tip off my finger. Her rages came in a flash. The orange eyes would dilate and contract in fury and then she would strike.
“Enough, Jane!” I put her up for sale.
A woman came in answer to my advertisement. Jane looked her up and down. “Oh, you old fool!” Jane exclaimed, and began to laugh in cackling peals.
“I’ll buy that bird,” said the woman, much impressed “Clever!”
“She is wicked,” I said. “That is why I am selling her. A wicked bird!”
“All parrots is wicked,” replied the woman fingering an ear. “See that?” she pointed to a hole in one ear. “A parrot bit that out!” Jane changed hands.
A few years later I happened to see the woman on a street-car.
“Have you still got Jane?”
“Nope! Sold her to a poultryman. Jane adored my son. After he went to sea she was morose and evil. I was obliged to get rid of her.”
I went to the poultryman, anxious to know the end of Jane.
“Have you a green parrot called Jane?”
“That malignant varmint? No. Sold her to a party out of town.” His one hand crept to the other smoothing an ugly scar. “ ’Ot one that. Ef that bird got ’otter with years, she’s burnt herself long back. They do say as parrots lives long,” he shrugged.
“I owned Jane for fifteen years,” I said.
“Did, eh? No lady’s bird! God save George!” He slapped his knee and chuckled. “Some bird that!”
“Looks pretty old and scraggy to me,” said a sharp voice.
The poulterer and I turned. A customer was fingering a fowl upon the counter. It was the woman to whom I had sold Jane.
“I wan’t mentioning that particular fowl, mum.” He recognized the woman.
“God save George!” he chuckled.
“You old fool!” the woman giggled back.
The three of us doubled over laughing!
I never heard of Jane again.
0 comments