The Great Taboo

TANTALIZING, VERY.

They looked at one another again with a wild surmise.  The voice was as the voice of some long past age.  Could the parrot be speaking to them in the words of seventeenth-century English?

Even M. Peyron, who at first had received the strange discovery with incredulity, woke up before long to the importance of this sudden and unexpected revelation.  The Tu-Kila-Kila who had taught Methuselah that long poem or sermon, which native tradition regarded as containing the central secret of their creed or its mysteries, and which the cruel and cunning Tu-Kila-Kila of to-day believed to be of immense importance to his safety—­that Tu-Kila-Kila of other days was, in all probability, no other than an English sailor.  Cast on these shores, perhaps, as they themselves had been, by the mercy of the waves, he had managed to master the language and religion of the savages among whom he found himself thrown; he had risen to be the representative of the cannibal god; and, during long months or years of tedious exile, he had beguiled his leisure by imparting to the unconscious ears of a bird the weird secret of his success, for the benefit of any others of his own race who might be similarly treated by fortune in future.  Strange and romantic as it all sounded, they could hardly doubt now that this was the real explanation of the bird’s command of English words.  One problem alone remained to disturb their souls.  Was the bird really in possession of any local secret and mystery at all, or was this the whole burden of the message he had brought down across the vast abyss of time—­“God save the king, and to hell with all papists?”

Felix turned to M. Peyron in a perfect tumult of suspense.  “What he recites is long?” he said, interrogatively, with profound interest.  “You have heard him say much more than this at times?  The words he has just uttered are not those of the sermon or poem you mentioned?”

M. Peyron opened his hands expansively before him.  “Oh, mon Dieu, no, monsieur,” he answered, with effusion.  “You should hear him recite it.  He’s never done.  It is whole chapters—­whole chapters; a perfect Henriade in parrot-talk.  When once he begins, there’s no possibility of checking or stopping him.  On, on he goes.  Farewell to the rest; he insists on pouring it all forth to the very last sentence.  Gabble, gabble, gabble; chatter, chatter, chatter; pouf, pouf, pouf; boum, boum, boum; he runs ahead eternally in one long discordant sing-song monotone.  The person who taught him must have taken entire months to teach him, a phrase at a time, paragraph by paragraph.  It is wonderful a bird’s memory could hold so much.  But till now, taking it for granted he spoke only some wild South Pacific dialect, I never paid much attention to Methuselah’s vagaries.”

“Hush.  He’s going to speak,” Muriel cried, holding up, in alarm, one warning finger.

And the bird, his tongue-strings evidently loosened by the strange recurrence after so many years of those familiar English sounds, “Pretty Poll!  Pretty Poll!” opened his mouth again in a loud chuckle of delight, and cried, with persistent shrillness, “God save the king!  A fig for all arrant knaves and roundheads!”

A creepier feeling than ever came over the two English listeners at those astounding words.  “Great heavens!” Felix exclaimed to the unsuspecting Frenchman, “he speaks in the style of the Stuarts and the Commonwealth!”

The Frenchman started. “Époque Louis Quatorze!” he murmured, translating the date mentally into his own more familiar chronology.  “Two centuries since!  Oh, incredible! incredible!  Methuselah is old, but not quite so much of a patriarch as that.  Even Humboldt’s parrot could hardly have lived for two hundred years in the wilds of South America.”

Felix regarded the venerable creature with a look of almost superstitious awe.  “Facts are facts,” he answered shortly, shutting his mouth with a little snap.  “Unless this bird has been deliberately taught historical details in an archaic diction—­and a shipwrecked sailor is hardly likely to be antiquarian enough to conceive such an idea—­he is undoubtedly a survival from the days of the Commonwealth or the Restoration.  And you say he runs on with his tale for an hour at a time!  Good heavens, what a thought!  I wish we could manage to start him now.  Does he begin it often?”

“Monsieur,” the Frenchman answered, “when I came here first, though Methuselah was already very old and feeble, he was not quite a dotard, and he used to recite it all every morning regularly.  That was the hour, I suppose, at which the master, who first taught him this lengthy recitation, used originally to impress it upon him.  In those days his sight and his memory were far more clear than now.  But by degrees, since my arrival, he has grown dull and stupid.  The natives tell me that fifty years ago, while he was already old, he was still bright and lively, and would recite the whole poem whenever anybody presented him with his greatest dainty, the claw of a moora-crab.  Nowadays, however, when he can hardly eat, and hardly mumble, he is much less persistent and less coherent than formerly.  To say the truth, I have discouraged him in his efforts, because his pertinacity annoyed me.  So now he seldom gets through all his lesson at one bout, as he used to do at the beginning.  The best way to get him on is for me to sing him one of my French songs.  That seems to excite him, or to rouse him to rivalry.  Then he will put his head on one side, listen critically for a while, smile a superior smile, and finally begin—­jabber, jabber, jabber—­trying to talk me down, as if I were a brother parrot.”

“Oh, do sing now!” Muriel cried, with intense persuasion in her voice.  “I do so want to hear it.”  She meant, of course, the parrot’s story.

But the Frenchman bowed, and laid his hand on his heart.  “Ah, mademoiselle,” he said, “your wish is almost a royal command.  And yet, do you know, it is so long since I have sung, except to please myself—­my music is so rusty, old pieces you have heard—­I have no accompaniment, no score—­mais enfin, we are all so far from Paris!”

Muriel didn’t dare to undeceive him as to her meaning, lest he should refuse to sing in real earnest, and the chance of learning the parrot’s secret might slip by them irretrievably.  “Oh, monsieur,” she cried, fitting herself to his humor at once, and speaking as ceremoniously as if she were assisting at a musical party in the Avenue Victor Hugo, “don’t decline, I beg of you, on those accounts.  We are both most anxious to hear your song.  Don’t disappoint us, pray.  Please begin immediately.”

“Ah, mademoiselle,” the Frenchman said, “who could resist such an appeal?  You are altogether too flattering.”  And then, in the same cheery voice that Felix had heard on the first day he visited the King of Birds’ hut, M. Peyron began, in very decent style, to pour forth the merry sounds of his rollicking song: 

“Quand on conspi-re,
    Quand sans frayeur
 On peut se di-re
    Conspirateur—­
 Pour tout le mon-de
    Il faut avoir
 Perruque blon-de
    Et collet noir.”

He had hardly got as far as the end of the first stanza, however, when Methuselah, listening, with his ear cocked up most knowingly, to the Frenchman’s song, raised his head in opposition, and, sitting bolt upright on his perch, began to scream forth a voluble stream of words in one unbroken flood, so fast that Muriel could hardly follow them.  The bird spoke in a thick and very harsh voice, and, what was more remarkable still, with a distinct and extremely peculiar North Country accent.  “In the nineteenth year of the reign of his most gracious majesty, King Charles the Second,” he blurted out, viciously, with an angry look at the Frenchman, “I, Nathaniel Cross, of the borough of Sunderland, in the county of Doorham, in England, an able-bodied mariner, then sailing the South Seas in the good bark Martyr Prince, of the Port of Great Grimsby, whereof one Thomas Wells, gent., under God, was master—­”

“Oh, hush, hush!” Muriel cried, unable to catch the parrot’s precious words through the emulous echo of the Frenchman’s music.  “Whereof one Thomas Wells, gent., under God, was master—­go on, Polly.”

“Perruque blonde
   Et collet noir,”

the Frenchman repeated, with a half-offended voice, finishing his stanza.

But just as he stopped, Methuselah stopped too, and, throwing back his head in the air with a triumphant look, stared hard at his vanquished and silenced opponent out of those blinking gray eyes of his.  “I thought I’d be too much for you!” he seemed to say, wrathfully.

“Whereof one Thomas Wells, gent., under God, was master,” Muriel suggested again, all agog with excitement.  “Go on, good bird!  Go on, pretty Polly.”

But Methuselah was evidently put off the scent now by the unseasonable interruption.  Instead of continuing, he threw back his head a second time with a triumphant air and laughed aloud boisterously.  “Pretty Polly,” he cried.  “Pretty Polly wants a nut.  Tu-Kila-Kila maroo!  Pretty Poll!  Pretty Polly!”

“Sing again, for Heaven’s sake!” Felix exclaimed, in a profoundly agitated mood, explaining briefly to the Frenchman the full significance of the words Methuselah had just begun to utter.

The Frenchman struck up his tune afresh to give the bird a start; but all to no avail.  Methuselah was evidently in no humor for talking just then.  He listened with a callous, uncritical air, bringing his white eyelids down slowly and sleepily over his bleared gray eyes.  Then he nodded his head slowly.  “No use,” the Frenchman murmured, pursing his lips up gravely.  “The bird won’t talk.  It’s going off to sleep now.  Methuselah gets visibly older every day, monsieur and mademoiselle.  You are only just in time to catch his last accents.”