CLARENCE
By H. R. JUKES
ACTUALLY, I suppose, Clarence might even have been Long John Silver's parrot—Cap'n Flint under a more respectable name. They live to a great age, I believe, and ',tevenson doesn't tell us what became of the bird. At all events it soon became obvious that this new addition to my household must have had quite a lot to do with sailormen.
Apart from such conventional nautical expressions as " Avast " and " Heave-ho " his conversation seemed mainly to consist of words generally denoted in print by a row of stars. His normal reaction to the usual polite overtures of admiring visitors was a guttural request for them to " Get to hell out o' this!"
The dealer assured me that he had got the bird from a ,lergyman, to whom in turn it had been bequeathed by a recently-deceased ship's captain whom, for some reason or other, the Government had seen fit to have hanged one morning before breakfast. The clergyman, I came to the conclusion, had probably been handicapped a bit by having no roof to his mouth, but my feathered friend's previous owner, the sailorman, could have suffered from no such impediment.
My first intimation of the bird's real capabilities arose, however, when, after three days thoughtful silence, mostly spent in a bleakly critical regard of my prize Persian sensu- ously reclining, as was her wont, in her favourite corner of the couch, he suddenly gave vent, slowly, clearly and dis- passionately, to an obviously carefully chosen stream of indelicate witticisms, reflecting, with a Rabelaisan luxury of unprintable metaphor, upon the maternal infidelities of the said quadruped's female progenitors during the last ten generations. The flaws in her ancestry were picked out with a mastery of picturesque detail unrivalled, I should imagine, throughout the seven seas. It held me spellbound. I even forgot to close the window. The peroration, as usual, con- sisted of the now already well-known demand that the addressee should go elsewhere.
The dealer flatly refused to have him back, even in view of the considerable sacrifice offered on my part in the way of exchange. In his own defence he stressed the bird's clerical associations ; eyeing me, I thought, a trifle askance when, in the course of a passing reference to nautical terms of speech, I happened to let fall an admission of my own late connexion with the Navy. The worthy man was, I imagine, quite genuinely sympathetic, but he informed me that his shop was in a public thoroughfare and that, if he took the bird back in its present degenerate frame of mind, he would be running the risk of what he called " forty shillings or a month " every time a policeman chanced to pass. There was some allusion, too, I believe, to vacancies on the local branch of the Purity League, but I forget just what he said.
I walked home in thoughtful mood ; and indeed for some days I was sorely perturbed as to what to do with my poten- tially volatile purchase. I was thrown into a considerable state of flux whenever a visitor was announced. As the door Opened Clarence would turn a beady and salacious eye in my direction, leering horribly over his shoulder as though to remind me of the latent possibilities of the situation. I never knew what he might do. The intelligence of that bird bordered on the malignant.
Between visits he spent most of his time either pulling feathers out of his already decrepit fuselage or leaning morosely against the side of his cage and muttering to him- self, I think in Welsh. His eyes gleamed with a strange fire. He listened coldly to all advances at such times, merely reply- ing by a series of repulsive Scottish noises at the back of his throat.
I kept him three months. Then one day, in reply to a polite inquiry as to the state of his health made by a new, unsuspecting and red-haired parlourmaid, he let loose a wad of oratory which would have made a bargee's flesh crawl. It was a speech calculated to stimulate repartee. The outraged virgin swiped at him with her brush.
The cage fell over and the door shot open. Clarence was free. By the exercise of a clever bit of top-spin he successfully negotiated the partly-opened window and, still pursued by the maddened parlourmaid, made his way down the garden, over the shrubbery and into the wood.
A search proved unavailing. There was an on dit down in the village that he bad been seen the next morning at a spot almost two miles away and that a tramp had expressed to the police his embarrassment at some language he had heard coming from behind the wall of the Vicarage garden, but we did not follow up the clues. An air of peace descended upon my house. In less than a week Clarence was but a vague and ever less disturbing memory.
Perhaps this was in part due to my thoughts being some- what preoccupied by the increasingly frequent visits of a fox to my poultry run. I am a fervent admirer of the gentleman in russet as a rule, but this fellow's tastes in poultry ran rather too near my own for my unqualified and continued acquiescence. He worked by daylight, so far as we could tell just picking up an odd pullet now and then when she wandered too near the hedgerows.
I only caught sight of the marauder once. I thought I had him. I was up a fruit tree at the time, doing what I hoped might eventually prove to be a bit of judicious prun- ing. In my contorted attitude I dare say I looked like a rather badly warped bit of the trunk, but be that as it may, I saw the fox sneaking along the ditch bottom and actually making towards me. It looked as though the hen house itself was his object—almost under the tree in which I was.
The door stood open. Perhaps he was after one of the birds actually engaged at the moment in giving me a token of her affection. If he went in I might trap him. Then bag him and take him away into enemy country. He came on, more slowly now, stopping every now and then and sniffing sus- piciously. But my machan was too high ; my scent must have passed clean over him. He came on again. He began to crawl towards the hut. Would he go in—would he? My heart was thumping so hard that I was afraid it would shake me out of the tree. He hesitated on the step. . . . I prepared to make my spring. . . . Tentatively he stretched one paw forward. . . .
And then came a sudden loud interruption which threw the fox over in a series of backward somersaults and toppled me down to the ground with a bump. From the dark Interior of the hen house, all in one breath, came a vociferous string of perfectly shocking fo'c'stle swearwords and the shrieking command to " get to hell out o' this!"
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