Dudley and Gilderoy: A Nonsense

DUDLEY & GILDEROY

A NONSENSE

by

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

LONDON ERNEST BENN LIMITED 1929

First Published in

1929

Printed

in

Great Britain

To Mrs. Muir Mackenzie owner of DUDLEY & Louis N. Parker

Poor birds! What they must suffer from imprisonment in narrow cages in which they cannot even flap their wings, and where they are compelled to sit on a hard smooth perch, far too thick to enable them to grasp it with their toes! No wonder so many of them become irascible and gloomy!

W. T. GREENE.

There was, if we may trust the Arabic chronicles as set down by that devout scholar, Damirei, no cat in the Garden of Paradise. -- AGNES REPPLIER.

THE DISCOVERY OF THE CAT LANGUAGE

(Alphonse Leon Grimaldi) … an attempt to prove that the cat is a more delicate organism and of a higher order of intelligence than any other four-footed beast … also possesses a language much like the Chinese and possibly derived from it. In the word part of the language there are, probably, not more than 600 fundamental words, all others being derivatives.

G. S. GATES, Ph.D. The Modern Cat.

The person who imagines that a parrot is a parrot and nothing more will soon find that he or she has made a very great mistake. -- W. T. GREENE, M.A. , M.D., F.Z.S. The Grey Parrot.

A SUDDEN unexpected sweetness stole over the world that morning in early March. It was as though a day, weary of waiting for its fun and glory, had hopped backwards out of its proper place in May. There was an unwonted softness in the air, a radiance of daffodils, a sound of singing. And with this sweetness about dawn came an invitation to adventure. The blood, even in sleep, ran faster.

The country house in Kent, dreaming among its well-kept gardens, was aware of it, although it gave no demonstrable proof. Too sedate and well-bred to wear its heart upon its sleeve, it yet knew a faint tremor through its ancient timbers. The Manor House, of course, was never taken by surprise; but the garden, romping through every wind-torn spring despite Head Gardeners, registered the thrill. The thrushes noticed it, slipping a wilder whistle through their song, and recent arrivals from Africa followed their example. That "wet, bird-haunted English lawn" missed nothing of importance that came at sunrise, before the noisy humans were abroad to smudge the sensitive beauty. And thus it was that even the back-lawn knew. A flock of those brave things that "come before the swallow dares and take the winds of March with beauty," these also were aware of the sudden sweetness in the air. That their golden heads turned towards the Manor House is certain. Four keen, wide-open eyes, at any rate, observed them.

Something, apparently, was astir at the unearthly hour of 5.30 a.m., though it was not the human occupants of the Elizabethan building, and assuredly not the servants. Colonel Sir Arthur and his Lady still slept audibly; Molly, their thirteen year old daughter, at the other end of the house, made no move; the younger children, lying in crumpled heaps, equally held steady; the French Governess showed no symptom of élan; and the staff, as already mentioned, gave no sign. Yet in the room containing the four keen eyes the message of adventure was recognized and accepted, accepted moreover audibly. Through the window, opened two inches at the top, a strange while not unmusical voice greeted the magic with a couple of words that were distinctly uttered:

"Cuckoo! Cuckoo!" floated down across the quiet lawns and flower-beds, though no letter to the press had yet announced the arrival of the migrant. "Cuckoo! Cuckoo!" the odd voice repeated like an echo. It was not quite the authentic note of the romantic robber-bird, nor was it quite the call of a mechanical clock. It was an individual sound.

The Day Nursery, whence it proceeded, lying away from the rest of the house in the eastern wing, held at this early hour two occupants, neither of whom slept; one, a biped, denizen of the air; the other, a quadruped, denizen of the world. The speaker was a West African Grey Parrot, a King Grey Parrot, to give him his full title, with red feathers among the grey, and his name was Dudley; the other was a common red-haired cat with a flat-topped skull, and his name was Gilderoy. Dudley belonged to Molly, Gilderoy to himself, and the Day Nursery was their home, the parrot having occupied it for years, the cat for months. It was, at any rate, their headquarters, and a headquarters, sufficiently prolonged, becomes eventually a home. The two animals were very great friends. In appearance, Dudley was dignified, solemn, austere, aristocratic, his sleek feathers glistened, he was extremely soigné. Gilderoy was -- otherwise .

It was to Dudley and Gilderoy that the invitation to adventure came at the hour of 5.30 a.m. on this sunshiny March morning, and when it came Dudley, as usual, was sedately balanced in the middle of his perch in his big handsome cage, while Gilderoy was just rousing himself from an untidy red ball on the carpet immediately below the table. His head was cocked, his torn ears pointed, his eyes, including the patched one that gave him an appearance of squinting, were wide open. His attitude to his feathered friend was significant -- he looked up. While not obsequious, since a cat may assuredly look at a King Parrot, his gaze was respectful and interested. The parrot, on the other hand, though aware he was being stared at, did not return the stare. He looked no where in particular. He gazed into space, his face expressionless. His mind, however, was not idle. He was listening.

Each animal, that is, used his predominant faculty, Dudley his acute, amazing ears, Gilderoy his all-seeing, uncanny eyes. What, between them, was neither heard nor seen was usually negligible.

Now Dudley, it must be admitted, was certainly worth looking at. Having lived so many years in the family, he was part of the household, where he was well-fed, well-cared for and well-loved, especially by his owner, Molly. He knew by heart what Molly thought about him, accepting in his modest way all the great qualities she audibly attributed to him. He especially noted the nice, wonderful things she said, about his mind, his soul, his work, for instance. He also knew, since the child studied the book audibly year by year, exactly what Professor Greene thought about him as related in The Grey Parrot, How to Manage It. If occasionally he disagreed, audibly, with Professor Greene, he was never at logger-heads with Molly. Greene he sometimes could have nipped, Molly he only kissed. For Molly recognized his greatness. Aware of his sublimity, sure that he was "unfathomably wise, "a noble fellow," she was never tired of telling him so.

It was quite natural, therefore, that Dudley knew he was worth looking at this early March morning, as Gilderoy, stretching his skinny legs, peeped up at him. Likewise, he knew that his quadruped friend considered him worth looking at. If he did not move, it was because he already stood in the mathematical centre of his perch, and at the furthest spot from the wide-spaced bars. Remaining motionless as marble, this being the least succulent stone he could think of, he watched Gilderoy steadily with one bright, glassy eye.

Gilderoy, meanwhile, innocent of all wickedness, proceeded to wash. He was evidently in an affectionate and friendly mood. He was peaceably inclined. For, while he washed, he fell to purring softly, and Dudley, noticing the sound though giving no sign that he did so, presently waddled awkwardly along his perch in his best sideways shuffle and began to peck delicately at his seed-box. He looked, using Molly's words, marvellous, lovely, adorable, and his grace of movement was, he knew quite well, incomparable.

The two pets, thus, betrayed certain of their characteristics, respectively, at the very opening of the coming adventure, and before anything unusual happened at all. Dudley was wise, cautious, critical, philosophical, and as inordinately vain as a great soul has the right to be; Gilderoy, opportunist and arriviste, took what came in life, making use of a world he cared nothing about. Aloof, independent, impervious to suggestion, his feeling towards humanity, where Dudley's attitude was one of kindly pity, held a slight disdain. If the parrot was sagacious, tolerant, immensely experienced, his friend, to put it bluntly, was an unprincipled adventurer. Dudley gave it to be understood plainly that what he did not know was not worth knowing; Gilderoy, whose life and nature were one huge secret, gave to be understood -- nothing.

Their friendship was at once a puzzle and delight, both to themselves and others. The parrot had not always appreciated the cat, whose first arrival in the family, indeed, he had deliberately ignored. Somehow the beast did not look what Dudley called " qui' ri'." Gilderoy's appearance certainly left much to be desired. Lean to scragginess, his red coat was shabby. A patch of colour over one side of his flat face gave the impression that one eye looked elsewhere. The flat face, too, could bulge grotesquely when he was excited. Both ears were torn into serrated edges. His whiskers sprayed ungracefully. He was, the Nursery decided, "as common as they make 'em," a phrase Dudley easily mastered, and he wore invariably an unpleasantly hungry look. It was some time, therefore, before the sagacious King Parrot included him in his small circle of trusted friends, a circle the Vicar, for instance, had never entered. And even now, as already seen, his love was tempered by a slight occasional anxiety, due to the fact that he, Dudley, must seem uncommonly appetizing at moments. He took his precautions at these moments. Apart, however, from this touch of insecurity, he adored his friend, though, as will appear later, he could not always approve of him.

Gilderoy, on his part, felt for the King Parrot, a sincere friendship that included a touch of respect as well. Though not, it seems, accepting the bird's own valuation of himself, he admitted to some indecipherable superiority in him, such perhaps as a quadruped might feel towards a creature that can use the air. He certainly looked up to him. Towards his grim iron mandibles he showed a hint of reverence; they frightened him. Dudley, however, he had soon decided, was old and tough, how old neither he nor anyone else ever knew, how tough he did not ever mean to know. The cat must be acquitted of mere appetite. All great friendships possess deep reserves, and with both cat and parrot these reserves included the delicate point of age. The past was also thus excluded, Gilderoy rarely referring to his earlier life, Dudley being equally reticent about his own. Each respected, as it were, his friend's wild oats.

One important matter, however, while personal in a very intimate sense, was not included in this reserve -- the matter of sex. It affected, chiefly, the parrot: Was Dudley a male or female "King" Parrot? Gilderoy, the family as well, remained inquisitive but uninformed, and if Dudley himself knew he declined to disclose his secret. It was often suggested -- by the cat, for instance -- that he did not know himself. The mystery, at any rate, was left unsolved till the appointed hour; and Gilderoy, in no faintest doubt about his own sex, used his knowledge to set off against the other's superiority.

For he rather resented this superiority. He twitted his friend occasionally. "I have had families," he boasted, strutting with tail proudly erect. To which Dudley's only comment, too cautious to commit himself, was a plain "Ah!" followed by certain sea-faring nouns and adjectives which may be indicated by "--!" For, in addition to a very large vocabulary and assortment of voices, he possessed the inestimable gift that he could utter "language" so beautifully that it sounded what her ladyship's maid called "reely naice." His "Ah! --!" given invariably in the Vicar's voice, was thus a peculiarly effective comment, as comments go.

On this particular morning, his ears noting the sparkling message of adventure, he had used Molly's silvery tones. His "Cuckoo! Cuckoo!" was, in fact, a signal to his friend on the carpet that something unusual was in the air, and that it was time to be up and doing.

Gilderoy's reply was to stop his washing. He leaped soundlessly upon the table and gazed fixedly at the parrot's smooth and glistening back as the bird pecked delicately at the tiny seeds with his great dark beak. The green eyes held no particular expression, unless perhaps a glint of admiration; he sat quietly staring at the sleek grey back. The bird indifferently continued his early snack, for in any case he always knew what went on behind him.

This pleasant scene remained undisturbed for some minutes. The least acute observer must have realized the subtle understanding sympathy that existed between the two creatures; the intimacy and affection were obvious. Apart from the slight hint of insecurity already referred to -- the caution of the parrot, the suggestion of hooliganism in the cat -- the friendship was established upon bedrock. "Deathless friends," Molly had described them, and Dudley accepted the phrase in his big way, as for years he had accepted all the complimentary things Molly said about him. For years he had absorbed like blotting paper her flood of generous praise. His great little heart swelled to bursting with the fine qualities and powers she attributed to him in his hearing. He learned them by heart, indeed. It cost him as little effort to remember "deathless friendship," as that his occasional long silences were due to absorption in the profoundest problems of philosophy and life because he was "at Work."

It was after some five minutes' of breakfast that he presently broke in with a further remark, but this time not an audible remark. Both creatures were adept in the art of creating an impression, of conveying meaning by silence, attitude and gesture. Impressions thus produced are an eloquent form of communication; and if Gilderoy could not always catch the precise sense of the spoken word, he never failed to interpret the attitude, as it were, that framed them.

Thus Dudley, using the form of intercourse his friend could not possibly misunderstand, offered his remark, without even turning round. His eyes glanced sideways.

"I am tired of this dowdy room," he announced.

Though he undoubtedly understood, the cat made no immediate rejoinder. Unlike humans, who cannot support a moment's silence in conversation and would rather all talk simultaneously than endure a pause, these animals appreciated intervals and practised them. Long pauses would separate question and answer; a statement might wait half an hour before the comment it elicited. And several minutes now passed in unbroken silence, yet without a sign of such embarrassment as humans know. Dudley's attitude was: "What I have said I have said." The cat, still sitting close to the cage, fell to washing himself again. He purred. A hind leg pointed like a ramrod at the ceiling. Then, presently, he interrupted his washing and looked up with a sudden jerk. The patched eye appeared to be gazing through the window, but actually was fixed on his friend's back. His wireless whiskers twitched:

"Let's go," he replied. He kept one paw hanging emphatically in the air.

Like many important events in life, the adventures of Dudley and Gilderoy had this simple and spontaneous origin. There was no fuss, no elaborate preparation. Sniffing the air, the cat began to knead the table-cloth with all four feet. The bird waddled slowly back to the centre of his perch and thence laboriously stepped down to the floor of the cage. His beak, with its free-moving upper mandible, clutched the bars. The stillness of the house was now broken by distant sounds of thumping on the floor upstairs. A door banged heavily. The servants, perhaps, were getting up. It was time to act. Gilderoy opened the latch of the cage skilfully with one velvet paw. The door stood wide. They waited, staring at it. Dudley cocked an eye.

Gilderoy jumped down upon the carpet.

The parrot's moment of hesitation passed. He stalked clumsily sideways through the open door, and a few seconds later, using beak and claws, he descended the table leg and reached the carpet beside his friend. The creatures stood gazing at one another in silence. It was an important, even a dramatic, moment. Who was to lead the way? Whoever went first would, of course, be first to meet the dangers.

"You look best from behind," observed Gilderoy admiringly. "Your back view, I consider, is lovely."

Dudley preened himself.

Moving forward very slowly, he turned towards the Nursery door, leading the way with complete self-confidence.

The Grey Parrot in captivity is a veritable proteus … a very sensitive creature … with surprising sharpness of intellect. … It is intensely sociable in disposition, and will mope if left much to its own society. -- W. T. GREENE.

THE servants, who had thumped the floor and banged a door, having evidently thought better of it and gone back to bed, the biped and quadruped left the Day Nursery and walked along the passage to the top of the staircase without the smallest difficulty or interruption. Where they meant to go was not yet clear. The first move, at any rate, was to get out of the house.

Side by side, they descended the broad stairs, crossed the great empty hall, still dark and smelling unpleasantly of stale tobacco, and went quietly along the corridor that led towards the pantry and the servants' quarters.

Here they paused a moment, looking quietly into each other's eyes. Their next step was important. The pace of a party is the pace of its slowest member, and Dudley being a slow mover, they had taken ten minutes to reach this point. Though Gilderoy could have covered the ground in a few seconds, he had regulated his speed tactfully, keeping behind his waddling friend. Time was passing. Another thump and bang in the distance warned them that a servant had now decided, after all, to get up. There was a sound of sulky footsteps on the kitchen stairs. The moment for decisive action had arrived. For some time, therefore, the pair stood motionless, staring into each other's eyes.

"Let's get along," signified Gilderoy at length, yet making no move himself. He turned his eyes in the direction of a narrow skylight overhead.

Dudley, of course, had noticed it long ago. He also noticed the admiration still in the cat's expression. He would continue to lead. Using a chair, a hanging cord, a convenient shelf with precious china on it, and an iron bar, he fluttered up awkwardly, scrambled through the skylight, crossed some slates, descended an ivy-clad wall, and proceeded to march proudly, if clumsily, down the gravel drive in the direction of the lodge gates. The warm early sunshine pleased him. It was good to be out. He moved at his very best pace.

"You waddle," remarked Gilderoy, his tail in the air like a ramrod. He made himself very big and protective. "I'm behind you, remember."

"My wings," replied Dudley some twenty yards later, "are clipped and I possess two feet!" He stalked on. "I only need -- two," he added presently. There was a touch of grandeur in his attitude. After another twenty yards he disposed of this idea of protection too. "I see out of the back of my head," he reminded the cat. But he did not say it sharply. Noblesse, he remembered, always obliged. To put the other in his place, and pay himself a neat compliment at the same time, was quite sufficient. "And it's a nice warm morning," he concluded, saying the words aloud in his soft gabbling little voice.

He used, that is, the method these two friends adopted to avoid unpleasantness. At the first sign of a disturbance it was their habit to change the subject. A squabble between them was thus invariably nipped in the bud. They never quarrelled. The cat, his eye on a thrush a hundred yards ahead, agreed about the nice, warm morning, and stalked along stiffly with a restraint that was evidently a self-imposed effort. He would have liked to dart and rush. The next moment, indeed, he did so. Springing furiously at a pine tree, he suddenly flew ten feet up the trunk, claws spread, tail whirling, teeth bared, and looking fiercely over his back with flattened ears as though the dogs were at his heels. For two minutes he clung to the tree in this spread-eagled fashion, then dropped to the ground again as though nothing had happened, and continued his stiff, slow walk beside his friend. Neither thrush nor parrot had shown a sign of being disturbed by this impressive performance. Gilderoy's active body needed the relief of a romp, no more than that.

"Ah!" said Dudley, when his friend caught him up again. He had used the interval to advance.

"We shall get there some time, even at this pace," said Gilderoy.

"Where?" enquired his companion.

"Where we're going to," came the rather tart reply. And, having now reached the lodge gates, they again paused and gazed into each other's eyes. The white country lane stretched in both directions as usual. At this early hour it was still deserted. Dudley, standing at right angles to it, examined it, owing to the position of his eyes, in both directions simultaneously. His companion, wholly indifferent, fell to washing an inaccessible region of his back. The windows of the Lodge were shut tight. No one was astir. And the bird shrank back a trifle towards the covering protection of the hedge where the wild roses shone. There came over him the fact that he had escaped from his safe, comfortable home. He realized it, realized that he was no longer in captivity. There were no bars about him, no little dish of seed or tin or water, the swinging bit of soft wood his beak plucked to pieces and played with was missing, so was the clean coarse gritty sand his health demanded. There was no perch along which he could retire. He took another step backwards towards the comfort of the hedge. Gilderoy, for the moment, had unaccountably disappeared. The ancient bird felt suddenly lonely. A sense of insecurity stole over him.

Gilderoy, of course, would come back in a moment, he knew; he was merely scampering after a bird or mouse, but in the meantime the sense of insecurity was undeniable. Yet this, apparently, was all he felt. He experienced no regret, no compunction, his unceremonious exit from home caused him no pang. His world, the cat's world too, did not include regret; escape was natural to it. He thought of Molly a moment -- he could go back to her when he wished; he thought of others, of Colonel Sir Arthur, for instance, of the Governess -- he need never see them again. The one called him a "damned squawker," the other was always saying "Tais-toi, Tais-toi, donc! " Beyond these cursory reflections, however, his mind did not trouble with the past. Like all animals, he concentrated on the present, and the present just now not being all it might be, he cast about for something to alleviate a certain strain he felt. Spontaneously, he chose a whistle -- the only tune he knew. The opening bars of Lead Kindly Light ran down the hedge and past the shining roses. It was a very low soft whistle, hardly audible a yard beyond his beak.

In the middle of which Gilderoy, with a scattering leap, was beside him again, appearing from nowhere, and licking his chops as though he had never been away.

"Come on, you! said the ginger cat impatiently. The bird noticed at once that his bolshevik face wore a slightly different expression. The cheeks bulged a trifle more. There was something inside him that was not there when he disappeared a moment before.

"Ready," returned the parrot, relieved to have him back, while thinking at the same time what a dreadful thing he was to look at. He began to move slowly away from the hedge behind him, but the rough ground was not easy for his little feet and the claws kept catching. His advance was circular rather, remembering that Gilderoy watched him.

"Where to?" he enquired casually, his head wrenched sideways at an extraordinary angle.

"London for me," replied Gilderoy with decision.

His friend took the Vicar's voice. "Quaite," he agreed, and marched on ahead in the thick white dust of the deserted lane. He was Leader still. He moved at a proud pace that rather endangered his balance, but could not affect his courage.

"Gilderoy watched him. "D'you know where you're going? he flashed with his whiskers, not stirring an inch himself.

"Er -- not exactly," the bird replied, indifferently. He did not stop. "London anyhow," he added.

"Wrong direction, then," Gilderoy informed him bluntly, as he stood there sniffing the air with little twitching jerks.

Dudley turned in a slow circle till he faced the other way. "For where?" he asked again gently.

"Train," said the cat, watching him with steady eyes. "You walk like nothing on earth," he commented, as his friend, turning another half-circle, drew alongside with his odd waddling gait.

"Yes, train," agreed the bird. He made a gesture that signified he was of the air and walking was a concession merely. And the pair stood motionless in the sunshine, as though nothing in the world mattered but being exactly where they were, and as though no adventure had begun at all.

Each creature, none the less, was active mentally. Their minds were extremely busy. Since they stopped all outward signs of communication, however, each kept his reflections to himself. It was a moment of privacy.

"It's going to be difficult, rather," the red cat was thinking, "this trip of ours. He's such a slow mover. He's fussy too, and his shape is a bit conspicuous." He purred gently, aware that his own appearance was perfection. His heart warmed towards his pal at the same time. "And his sex," thought ran on, "I'd like to know that!" A protective sense, never experienced towards humans, stirred strongly in him. He put all his very best into his friendship with the parrot. His patched eye glanced towards him admiringly. "Has useful ears, anyhow," he concluded. "Male or female isn't so important perhaps -- in a bird." He gave a tiny sneeze.

Dudley, too, for his part was thinking deeply, and his thoughts were concerned, chiefly, with the appearance of this common cat, his companion in adventure. Whilst himself an aristocrat in every meaning of the word, he was not a snob, thank goodness. There was something in cats that he really respected and admired, something mysterious and queer and strange, but this particular cat. … He searched for terms that should be accurate yet fair, and did not find them. Something let out of a bag hardly met the case. Comparing Gilderoy's shabby looks with his own immaculate appearance, he deplored both his manners and his coat. At the same time he admired what he honestly could -- speed, silence, sight. "Hideous," he concluded, "perhaps sometimes dangerous, but I love him."

Each, having thus finished his own private reflections, respectively, turned round and began to communicate openly with the other.

There was an immense satisfaction, evidently, that they had left the Day Nursery, for both had grievances, it seemed. Dudley was sick to death of being called "Pretty Polly" in an affected voice, of being assured a hundred times a day by all sorts of people that he wanted a cracker, a thing he never did want. Gilderoy, for his part, was weary of being lifted up in sections with all his feet hanging in empty space. And both were tired of hearing the children talk about an owl and a pussycat who went to sea in a pea-green boat. Tired to death they were of this nonsense. It was time, they felt, that mention was made of a parrot and a cat. For parrots and cats were notoriously enemies, whereas this pair was friendly. But no one spoke of it. And to be taken for granted like this month after month was more than they could have put up with a moment longer.

The pair of rascals, thus, had a satisfaction in escaping, and they now communicated this happy mood to one another. They did so, looking about them over the sunny green fields starred with buttercups and daisies.

Now, communication between them, be it explained once for all, was so rapid, comprehensive, adequate, that it easily surpassed the capacity of ordinary language. Human beings, having gradually invented a series of not always musical sounds to convey what they know possess none, of course, to convey what they do not know. For the experiences of non-humans they have no words. Hence, purring and a parrot's gurglings, since they refer to another order of experience, remain, for humans, indecipherable. Into these and other gorgeous sounds, however, these creatures project their own wisdom, their inanities, their thoughts and feelings, with consummate ease. They understand one another. Gesture and attitude, the shaking of a feather, the twitching of tail or whiskers, the cock of head or angle of neck, the flick of an ear, even the movement of agile claws and toes -- these largely took the place of clumsy words. Thus, while Dudley and Gilderoy now gazed into one another's eyes, apparently uncommunicative, they were actually exchanging ideas of this high, but above all different, order. These ideas, none the less, must here be interpreted in terms humanity understands:

"Let's get on," remarked Gilderoy.

Dudley bowed his head in agreement. "Now, what do you know about trains, for instance?" he enquired sweetly.

"Enough," admitted the cat, "to take one."

"Which?" practical Dudley wanted to know.

"The first we see," was the reply. "They all reach London, I've heard, sooner or later." He glanced down the lane to the left.

The parrot, too, glanced down the lane, but to the right. He was not going to look foolish by taking the wrong direction a second time.

"Then please carry me," he signified. "The dust bothers my toes rather."

"Hop on!" agreed the other, lowering his scrawny back to an easy position. "And don't scratch or tickle."

Dudley, without further ado, fluttered on to the red back, raising a cloud of dust as he did so, and the pair then raced down the long hill towards the station. The cat went at a good speed, though out of consideration for his friend's disabilities, hardly his top speed, and the bird held on and kept his balance without undue loss of dignity. The wind blew out his tail feathers grandly.

"It's a pity you can't see me," proclaimed the tail feathers. "I look well behind, in front, and sideways too!"

Instead of answering, however, Gilderoy increased his speed, till at last the parrot felt obliged to comment audibly on this increase.

He screamed.

The cat at once erected his tail into its best ramrod position, so that it stood upright like a pole, and Dudley wriggled awkwardly backwards till he clasped it with his beak and one claw.

"You're pricking!" spat Gilderoy, and stopped so abruptly that his passenger lost something of his dignity, though not quite all of his amazing balance.

"And what's this mean? he asked, looking down his beak sideways but still clinging to the ramrod tail in case of a start as sudden as the stop.

"I've something to say to you," signalled the cat, not a bit out of breath, "and it is this!"

Dudley cocked his head to listen.

"If any one chases us," the quadruped went on, "we go in different directions, remember." He lifted one paw and shook it with extreme rapidity in the air. "One of us," he added, "may then escape."

There was no need for a bird of Dudley's acumen to ponder this, and it vexed him a little when his intelligence was underrated. His contemptuous stare conveyed his feeling plainly:

"You're as obvious as a dog. Get along now to the train."

The stare was withering. With less admirable beings a sharp reply must have precipitated a quarrel; but there was no sharp reply. The cat realized, for one thing, perhaps, that his back lay open to that iron beak.

"I see plenty of young birds about," he mentioned instead, changing the conversation and peeping towards the hedge.

And having thus dropped a suggestive yet delicate hint near home and at the same time averted an unpleasantness that threatened, he raced away again at such a speed that five minutes later they reached the little station where a train, they saw, was standing at the platform. It was, obviously, rather an early train.

Grey parrots which are able to retain a varied collection of words and sentences are the most valuable, for, notwithstanding their attainments, they will constantly acquire other accomplishments. -- W. T. GREENE.

IT was, as Dudley had observed, a lovely morning. Threads of gossamer glistened in the air. There was a smell of growing grass and flowers. Swallows darted, butterflies stood on their heads as they tumbled downwards, worms oozed and gurgled in the dew-soaked earth of the surrounding fields with sheer joy of living. There was a sparkle. There was a hush of coming glory.

The two ragamuffins halted by the coal-yard, the station facing them a dozen yards away. They felt in no hurry. Life lay before them, wide open, unrestricted. The rapture of Liberty filled their little hearts. Dudley stood on one foot, the other claw clasping his formidable beak. Gilderoy his back to the building, sniffed the blades of grass with extreme delicacy. Neither betrayed any interest in the matter immediately on hand, though both realized, of course, that very shortly they would have to deal with human beings. This apparent indifference was partly clever mental camouflage, native to their world, and partly funk.

Dudley, at any rate, spent the considerable interval that now intervened in what may be described as pulling himself together. His kindly attitude towards human beings has already been touched upon, but this tolerance included another aspect that may here be mentioned: the complacent superiority of the human race could sometimes exasperate him. When men came up against qualities in the animal world that excelled their own, they dismissed it as "instinct" and wrote books about it. Merely because they did things that animals could not do, they considered themselves superior. What they forgot, in Dudley's view, was that in another way, animals easily surpassed them for instance in not doing what they did. Thus animals were never deliberate scoundrels, liars, culpable idiots, immoral or obscene. They were also comely in nakedness and unashamed.

Something of this now passed across the parrot's mind as he held his beak and waited.

"Do you think this train will start to-day ? he enquired presently.

"We'll get in and see," came from the cat, whose eyes were following the swallows' flight above him. He had noticed milk cans on the platforms. He had been in trains before. He flattered himself that he knew his way about on the Big Lines. There was some business about tickets, for instance, he remembered vaguely. Money, too, glittering metal circles he sometimes played with, came into it as well. "There's the tickets," he managed, therefore, to inform his friend.

For another ten minutes or so neither of them made a move of any sort, after which the parrot suddenly lowered his claw and drew himself up proudly. Choosing from his immense repertoire of voices the one Colonel Sir Arthur used when moving his family to the seaside, he spoke aloud:

"Leave it to me," he announced, and stalked forward across the yard with head erect, while Gilderoy followed meekly enough, without a trace of expression on his peeping face. He moved in zigzags. They might have been total strangers. He betrayed no interest in anything about him.

They crossed the yard and approached the ticket office.

The station was empty at the moment, for at this early hour the inhabitants of Muddlepuddle were not eager to go to London. On the platform outside, however, there was a considerable bustle, with a din of milk cans being rolled about. This Country Station Porters' Game was in full swing, as Gilderoy, still admiring Dudley's back view, followed his friend slowly through the door into the Waiting Room-cum-Booking Office. Knowing himself safely inconspicuous he now watched his dressy companion waddle across like an old woman with sore feet, climb upon a packing-case that stood handy, and present himself boldly at the open window where tickets were obtained. He really looked a picture, the cat decided, as he balanced on the ledge with his head cocked sideways and one foot tucked up among his tummy feathers. It was a frontal attack the feline felt obliged to admire. He himself now lay along the wooden bench by the wall, pretending cleverly he was the Station Cat. No one would have noticed him.

"Two First Singles," announced the parrot, using his old-man's voice, which was low and rather gruff.

He stood waiting as calmly as though he had done it every morning for years and years. The secret of remaining undiscovered, he knew, was to appear quite ordinary.

The Ticket Man was standing inside, his back to the window. A pencil was stuck behind his ear. He wore spectacles, a dirty green cap, and side whiskers that resembled lichen on old wrinkled granite.

"Where to?" he asked, without interest. He did not even turn round, much less look up.

"Where the train goes," said Dudley, sharply.

"Tha's London," said the man.

"Tha's good," said Dudley.

The man drew out the tickets with a mechanical fumbling motion, stamped them, held them a moment very held close to his eyes to examine what he had stamped, handed them carelessly across the little counter, and then, while waiting for the money, raised his head for the first time and saw a large, grey, red-tailed parrot on a level with his face, its beak hanging sideways, and one brilliant eye gazing intently into his.

"Holy smoke!" he cried, opening his eyes and mouth. "What is it?"

He gasped, he paled, he took a step backwards. The pencil dropped from behind his ear, the cap fell off his head, the spectacles slipped down his nose. He stumbled over a chair behind him and collapsed in a heap against the iron stove.

"Thank you," said Dudley, using Mother's patient voice the children heard when they asked for one more story. He turned away, leaving the tickets where they were. "Now, cat!" he signalled with a shrill, peremptory gesture. "Hop for it! Quick!"

Gilderoy, though resenting being spoken to like that in public, was ready in a flash, so that the bird dropped straight down on to his back below the window-ledge, and a second later the pair were racing along the platform among the rolling milk- cans, looking for an empty carriage.

"I said Leave it to Me, didn't I?" proclaimed the bird's attitude proudly, as they scampered along.

"Use my proper name before people, please," said Gilderoy stiffly.

"Sorry," said Dudley promptly in a child's voice.

The cat accepted the apology with a twitch of the tail as, spying an open door, he scuttled up the steps with a sudden leap that nearly knocked the parrot off his back. It was a First, but also it was a Smoker. "Ugh!" exclaimed the bird, sniffing contemptuously, as he recovered his balance and stepped down. He gave one rapid look round him. "The rack, I think, for me!" he decided, and instantly scrambled up into the netting, snuggling into the dark corner so that he was very difficult to see. The cat disappeared in a flash under the heavily-cushoined seats, where not even the tip of his tail was visible.

"Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Nil nisi prius! " whispered the parrot to himself, too low to be audible, and using language acquired long before he had come to stay at the Manor House. He then relapsed into complete silence.

They were only just in time, as the roar of voices and rush of hurrying feet plainly told them, for the platform was now alive with people all hunting vociferously for a Grey Parrot and a Ginger Cat. Three workmen, a couple of porters, the driver of the milk-waggon, a farmer, an old woman, and the ticket man tore frantically up and down, crying at the top of their voices: " Hi! A grey parrot with a red tail! And a ginger cat! Which way did they go? Where are they? Who's seen 'em? Catch ' em! Catch ' em! … "

The hunt roared past the door of the carriage like a storm, and such a hullabaloo was never heard before since the Station of Muddlepuddle was first built in 1861.

"On the roof, of course!" shouted the farmer.

"That's where they are!"

"In the Guard's van," yelled the driver of the cart.

"Get along with yer! cried the porter. "They're ridin' on the haxles, I tell yer!"

"Rubbidge! screamed the old woman. "It's near the engine biler you'll find them. Why, I've kept parrots meself. It's the 'ot plaices they likes best."

"If I catch 'em," bawled the ticket man, tearing about without cap or spectacles," I'll twist their bloomin' tails off, not 'arf I won't. The lip that bird gave me!"

"No, you wouldn't, Joe," laughed the Guard, a big man with a black beard and a voice of thunder. "You'd just take 'em 'ome and love 'em. That's wot you'd do. "

The pack fell to arguing among themselves as they ran up and down, and though most of them looked into the First Class Smoker where the criminals were hiding, no one discovered them. No one, luckily, produced a dog.

"Time to get my train away now," suddenly bawled the Guard's deep bass. "I'm a minute late already. Can't wait for live stock! Stand away now! Ready!" He banged the door of the empty carriage, put the whistle to his lips, and blew a short, shrill blast. The train pulled slowly out of the station, leaving the yelling group of people still searching among the empty milk cans.

The rumble and murmur of the train was soothing, the rhythm pleasant. Dudley liked the motion with its gentle shaking to and fro. His exquisite little body yielded itself with satisfaction to the swing and bumping of the sleepers. He felt happy. "Polly … hell … hic jacet … cracker-cracker," he expressed his pleasure in his very lowest gabbling tone. No one, not even Gilderoy, could have heard him. It was one of his best tricks, self-protective, defensive, only rarely used -- to mutter extremely interesting things so low that no one could hear them.

Gilderoy, invisible under the seat, made no reply. In the first place, he had not heard; in the second, he was fast asleep, rolled up in a tight red ball.

The variety is infinite … each individual has its own idiosyncrasy. -- W. T. GREENE.

It is very difficult to tell the sex of Grey Parrots, for although the males usually declare themselves by their greater capacity for talking and whistling, some females approach them pretty nearly in this respect. W. T. GREENE.

ONLY the surface of the two Adventurers has been touched upon so far; a glimpse into their interiors, below this surface, might be of interest. Their inner world, not being our human world, is difficult to enter. Yet it is well worth the effort, to force an entrance, as it were. Human beings, in their vanity and egoism, invariably interpret what is beyond them in terms of themselves. It is inevitable, of course, since they have no other terms to use. Their own experience necessarily limits their highest flights. Their supreme deity thus, becomes anthropomorphic, the lesser deities become personifications of the forces of nature, heaven a hunting ground and hell a blazing kitchen fire. Into animals, similarly, they read their own faiths, fetiches, and foibles.

It is a disastrous method, suggesting that the childhood of the world is still at the nursery stage. Gross misunderstanding results, and the truth is missed. This apology, however, is merely what Dudley might have called en passant in the Governess's nasal voice. It is an abject apology -- to these two Adventurers. Their psychology, their means of communicating, their motives, actions, hopes and fears in all that follows must be rendered in gross human terms because we know no other way.

Moreover, if Dudley bulks larger than his incomparable comrade, it is, for a sufficiently obvious reason: namely, that a parrot stands much closer to human categories than a cat does. The cat is, in fact, not quite of this world; hunger and sex it may share with the rest of the Animal World, but nothing more. Its feelings, motives, methods, tastes, ambitions, hopes are of a different and inscrutable order. They are oblique and slanting. It has, for reasons of its own no doubt, entered this world, it has elected, so far at any rate, to remain. It is, however, different from all other living creatures on the planet. To understand, far more to describe, the soul of a cat, is beyond any faculty we possess. It remains, therefore, indescribable. A modern critic has rightly warned a writer that to use this adjective is to admit he does not "know his job." It must be used here, none the less, and precisely in this way.

Dudley, with his sense of proportion, and his linguistic knowledge acquired when he was younger, would put a clear "stet" in the margin against the erasing line. "Indescribable" would stand. He would also, similarly taught, now add to this tedious explanation: verb. sap.

Left, meanwhile, temporarily to his own devices, he fell to thinking things over in his own quiet way, an occupation at which few could equal, and none, excel him. It was his habit sometimes to do this for hours at a stretch, making no sound, nor hardly any movement, an adorable statue upon an insignificant perch. Superbly self-contained, he held his balance, mentally and physically, no matter what the uproar of the outer world might be.

With one fierce claw he would clutch his savage beak; occasionally, the small soft feathers on his neck would slightly stir; his toes, sole contact with what men call reality, would quietly open and shut; while his all-seeing -- some thought, his wicked -- eyes roved to and fro, taking in everything, yet betraying no ghost of an expression. His opinion of what he saw, none knew.

It was to Molly he owed a nice explanation of these long silences. She never would admit that they were due to mere emptiness of mind. They were constructive, even creative silences . "He's thinking his tremendous thoughts! He's working!" she informed everyone, himself included. "Dudley's got his great Work. He mustn't be disturbed …  !"

So now, while the train rumbled comfortably on its way, the rumble and the rhythm soothed him, and he began talking to himself in his gentlest voice. He fell to gabbling. It was the voice, in all his vast repertoire, most difficut to follow and understand, He used it very rarely -- when the gramaphone was playing, when the children had not teased and bored him into screaming, when no visitors stood by his cage, saying foolish things about crackers in affected voices.It was, in a word, his Happy Voice.

It had first sung its golden song, no doubt, when the world was young, the warm air scented with myriad gorgeous flowers, when nuts basked by the thousand in the sunshine, and no ridiculous bipeds swarmed and strutted everywhere as if all creation belonged to them. It was sung, above all, when he had known the rapture of sweet companionship.

"I am now," he crooned softly to himself, a lonely old bird. Lonely, yes, and old. How lonely, no one knows; how old, I know, but never tell. When I was born, and where, remain my secret. I have neither nest nor family, and, indeed, I need them not. I have no young to feed. …"

The low voice wavered a little. He shook his head, ruffling gently the smallest feathers on his lower neck.

"By the hour together I sit and dream, and my dreams are of gold and purple. … What I dream is my own affair, nor could I ever speak of it to others -- others, that is, who know so little about me that they cannot even decide which sex I honour with my patronage. I am referred to as a "He"; it is a courtesy title. These I leave in their profound and abject ignorance. I have my million dreams. I have my Work. What that Work is even Molly does not know. But I --" His voice dropped suddenly. There was an unaccountable instant of hesitation. "I -- know," he resumed. His tail feathers shivered slightly. He added in an almost inaudible whisper: "I have never seen -- an egg."

There was a pause during which the voice sank away to nothing. He seemed in the grip of some mysterious emotion. He gave no clear sign, however, as to its nature; there was no betrayal.

"Some claim, I hear, that I derive from Borneo; while others, equally positive, prefer Brazil. Both lots I classify according to my unalterable code. Similarly, I classify those who swear 'on God's truth' that I was brought here by a sailor from the 'bloody Amazon,' and those, again, who think it more distinguished to mention the Captain of a South African Liner as my sponsor. East Africa also I have heard quoted, West Africa, the disreputable Congo too. I listen and say nothing. They are welcome to the East Indies, as to Jamaica and Mauritius, who have never heard of the Cameroons, the Gaboon and the flats of the Niger estuary."

He chuckled.

"How, then, can they know of 'Pico de Papagio,' the Peak of the Parrot on Princes Island in the Gulf of Guinea, called " -- a deep sigh escaped him -- "'the Paradise of Grey Parrots'? How can they know that this mountain of 12,000 feet is covered with magnificent forests? That the trees, of huge size and height, support lianos and other climbing plants which hang about them in rich and luxuriant folds? That the density of this forest is so great that is is only with the utmost difficulty that a man can force a passage through it. … but to the parrots, the Grey Parrots, who come up there every night to roost, it presents no obstacle, but gives them, under the shelter of thick foliage, a secure and pleasant resting place?

"They cannot know. And if I use Greene's words, I do so merely because he tells the truth, and nuda est veritas et hic haec hoc . … "The Latin, uttered as a single word, was well nigh indecipherable. The discovery that it was Latin, was due to the Vicar, an Oxford man.

The gabbling, soft and musical, continued without an instant's interruption, keeping time with the rhythm of the train.

"I listen … yes, I listen," thought dwelling a moment on his supreme gift," by the hour, I sit and listen. In the daytime I balance on my tiny perch and listen; at night, when they cover my cage with a stinking shawl, I still sit and listen … and what I cannot hear is merely not worth hearing. … "

He entered a state of inspired and delicious bliss, a state of ecstasy, a form of consciousness humans cannot know.

"I hear," he went on divinely," the earth pass rolling round the sun. I hear the flowers grow. I hear the dawn slant up and kiss the fields. I hear the starlight's whisper when it meets the dew, and the clanging of the full-moon's chord against the pines. Ah, me! I hear the faint thunder of the distant galaxies, sunk in their frightful space. …"

His voice changed suddenly. A slight difference in the rhythm of the train brought him down to earth perhaps. The bumping, it seemed, had become less regular.

"Once," he went on, "I told them something," the voice shaken by the jolting of the wheels. "I warned them when the enemy aeroplanes were coming across the sea to hit them. I had heard them start. I heard -- "

The train stopped with a violent jerk, almost shaking the rapt bird from his dreary luggage-rack. He retained both balance and composure, however. One pointed toe, clutching the webbing, rubbed against its neighbour. He indulged in a tiny cough, clearing his throat, although no word was audible. He glanced down. Gilderoy's sharp muzzle was visible below the edge of the seat. The puffed red cheeks and wireless whiskers peeped up enquiringly. The cat was excited.

"A station," signalled Gilderoy. "The train's stopping. Somebody may get in. "

To a bird of Dudley's quality, the warning was superfluous, and his one eye, glancing sideways, conveyed the fact unmistakeably. Gilderoy pipped out of sight again.

"Leave it to me," was the answer he took with him. And silence descended again upon the empty carriage, the cat being literally out of sight, and the parrot so well camouflaged that few human eyes could have detected him.

The train, after shaking itself backwards and forwards with a series of sharp jerks, now finally stopped and a moment later somebody did get in -- a stout, elderly gentleman, wearing a top hat, a black tail-coat, and shiny boots. He was instantly taken in from top to toe by two pair of keenly observant eyes. He carried a polished black bag, a neatly folded umbrella, and, warm though the day was, a plaid rug across his arm. There was an air of importance about him, it was noticed. He thought himself important. To somebody, somewhere, he perhaps was important. To the black-bearded guard, at any rate, for this person now touched his cap, helped him in, said it was a fine morning, expressed a hope that he felt as well as he looked, then, pocketing a silver coin, as though it was the last thing in the world he expected, retired with a bow.

He raised his green flag and swept it about his head several times with an air of fierceness, blew his whistle as though his train could never possibly be late, smiled respectfully at the old gentleman, who did not return the smile because he had not noticed it, and finally swung himself like an athlete into the van as the train moved out, his coat-tails flying. He, too, obviously felt more important since he had become responsible for the safety of the new passenger.

With their particular gifts, respectively, the two creatures had noticed that the sight of this new passenger was not good, and that he was also a little deaf.

"You can come out if you want to," indicated a faint gurgle from the rack.

"I don't," replied the tip of a tail that jerked once beyond the seat.

They lapsed into silence. The train gathered speed.

The elderly gentleman, meanwhile, produced a pair of magnifying spectacles with horn rims, adjusted them carefully on his nose, crossed his legs, opened an enormous newspaper, and settled down comfortably behind it to read his favourite financial column. The plaid rug lay spread across his lap.

Dudley, observing him closely from his dim corner, knew what was coming; his sense of anticipation rarely failed; a faint shiver of disgust ran over his delicate nerves. The intruder, indeed, now produced a cigar from a heavily-engraved case, bit its end off, stuck it between his lips, and proceeded to light it by striking a match on a small gold matchbox. The first puff blew out, filling the carriage with a cloud of acrid smoke. He then closed the one open window, and disappeared again behind his enormous newspaper.

The situation became, in Dudley's view, intolerable. Since it was due to his superiority always to set the tone in dealing with a contretemps he gave no thought to his companion beneath the seat. He himself disliked smoke; that was enough. "Leave it to me," had been his dictum. What he had said he had said. The two friends, each busy with racial preoccupations, motionless, self-contained, concentrated, held their posts quietly, at any rate. Silence reigned, broken only by the crackle of the newspaper and the rumble of the train. The atmosphere slowly thickened. The smoker remained ignorant that he was not alone, for Dudley might have been part of the carriage decoration scheme; nor could the sharpest eye have disentangled Gilderoy from the general mess beneath the seat.

It was some minutes before anything happened, but in due course, as the train began to slow up for the next station, the grand bird started to preen himself. There were few occasions, if any, he flattered himself, to which he was not equal. An elderly gentleman smoking a cigar lay easily within his competence. He was in no hurry. He waited the right moment to take action.

The train stopped. It was a junction. There was a throng and bustle on the platform. New passengers carrying market produce in unwieldy baskets thumped to and fro. The moment for action had arrived. The bird seized it with admirable decision. Lifting his fine head a fraction of an inch and filling his lungs, he produced his gruffest, most commanding voice. It was a First Mate voice, remembered from his steamer-days of long ago:

"All change 'ere!" he bawled. "Like 'ell you do!" The shout of urgent and peremptory hurry was repeated twice. "All chinge! All chinge!"

The old gentleman sprang from his seat, dropped his newspaper, fumbled his glasses, snatched wildly at this bag and umbrella, choked thickly as he swallowed a mouthful of cigar smoke, opened the carriage door and scrambled out so fast that he nearly fell in his excitement.

"Tike yer seats! Tike yer seats, please! bawled a loud voice from nowhere.

He knew not whence it came. No one seemed in sight to help him, for everybody rushed to and fro on business of their own. He looked to the right, he looked to the left; he shouted "Guard!" he shouted "Porter!" He informed the bustling platform that he had never changed at this station in his life before, that he had taken this particular train for years, but the platform was not interested in this statement. He found no one to advise him. There was not a second to spare. He plunged about like a frightened rabbit, tripped over his rug, dropped his cigar, stumbled over the umbrella which became entangled with his short little legs, and finally bundled into another carriage just as the train started and the Guard ran up to tell him there was no need to have changed at all.

The incident was closed. In the animal world there is no idle reviewing of what is past. The present being all important, why waste time and energy dwelling upon what has gone or estimating what is yet to come? No word of praise, therefore, came from Gilderoy's lips, no demand for a recognition of his success from the parrot's beak. An exchange of thought and comment took place, yet not of the kind that humans would probably have used in similar circumstances. Gilderoy leaped into the cushioned corner just vacated, Dudley moved further along the luggage rack where he would be less cramped.

"You're not even going where you're looking," conveyed Gilderoy's stare, before curling round to sleep. He was watching his friend intently. He evidently would not settle till the bird had settled.

Dudley, busy changing his place, made no reply at first. Ignoring the stare, which was something between sneer and insult, he minded his own immediate business, and in any case it was his habit to accept even the rudest words as praise. He was, moreover, achieving a result at the moment no other living creature could have managed. The cat's comment was justified. He was moving along the webbing, each foot pointing in a different direction, his head looking down his own back, and his body, apparently, advancing the other way -- a spectacle certainly calculated to upset an ordinary mind. Gradually settling himself comfortably in the very centre of the rack, he rolled one eye solemnly down upon Gilderoy and answered the challenge of the staring red face. He used the voice that said interesting things too softly to be heard. He fell into Latin.

"Vice versa requiescat in pieces," came the gabbling murmur, continuing until the cat became a red ball of sleep. The stream of happy sound poured on and on without interruption for a long time, words such as viva voce and ad astra from time to time emerging clearly, the rest indistinguishable.

The cat lay sound asleep, Dudley felt happy and secure in his rack. No one could hear him, but he enjoyed the music of his own low gurgle. He drew upon various sources. At one time, before Colonel Sir Arthur objected, he had occupied the Library of the Manor House, and Molly had explained that his knowledge of literature was thus acquired. The Latin, however, derived from a still earlier period, how long ago none knew. Known vulgarly as "Pol" then, he had lived with a scholar, according to the child. Actually, it seems, his host was a dipsomaniac who used Latin tags in general conversation and inaccurately. Hence the bird's smattering of a dead language.

"Per contra nolens volens, 'ave a good time. Can't come in I'm dressing," he concluded at length in a loud clear tone, and closing his eyes dropped off, like Gilderoy, into a pleasant nap.

We cannot, without becoming cats, perfectly understand the cat mind. -- ST. GEORGE MIVART.

THE train, meanwhile, rumbled comfortably on past numerous little wayside stations, bearing its couple of unusual First Class Travellers to London. Even in sleep the pair were eloquent: "The houses of the great for me!" was unmistakeably conveyed by Dudley's attitude of aristocratic grace, while from the angle of the slightly cocked head came the unselfish thought for his companion: "And for you -- whom would you like to meet?" The set of the tail indicated that he had the entrée to all possible sets. It held the patronising superiority of which the supreme egoist remains ever unaware.

A red whisker on the cushions below signalled blandly, in cat sleep: "My own pals, of course. You know quite well."

For they were old friends now, this parrot and this cat; not otherwise could they have started on so great an enterprise with so few preliminaries. For six months already the intimacy had lasted. It had not begun with love at first sight, however.

The cat was originally a stray cat only. It had just "blown in" one day from nowhere, and Sir Arthur's Lady, almost hysterically partial to all animals, had at once adopted it. Whence it came to the Manor House, no one knew, but from a long way evidently, since there were no "nice houses," within miles, and the creature was most unkempt. After being washed and scrubbed with disinfectant, adorned, too, with a bit of blue ribbon round its scraggy neck, its appearance altered, some thought improved.

Liking its new home, it settled down.

"It's a sort of laundry cat," was the opinion of the youngest little girl, though no one knew exactly what that meant.

The mother agreed vaguely: "So we'd better call her Mrs. Tompkyns," the connection between name and place left unexplained. "With a P. of course," she added, being attached to details. And the name, despite its unwieldiness, had stuck.

For a week, at least, it stuck. And then Father, a large and clumsy man, not having yet noticed the new beast in the family circle -- there were always new beasts, it seemed to him! -- came in from golf one evening and tripped over it on the mat.

"Holy Gilderoy! he roared, a favourite expletive. "What's this new bit of ginger horror?" From which moment the cat was christened afresh.

"Well, you see," observed Mother to the children," it is a male anyhow. So perhaps Gilderoy is better -- on the whole."

The ginger horror had been introduced to the parrot as "Mrs. Tompkyns," with hesitation, but the caution proved unnecessary. The bird ignored it. He took not the slightest notice of the creature. The name never once passed his beak. "Tompkyns" was evidently anathema. This new name, however, he picked up at once. Evidently, he liked it. It had a sonorous sound that he could roll round his mouth. He did roll it round his mouth, and with satisfaction. He even made its syllables sound musical, lifting the "roy" into a sort of semi-chant upon a slightly higher key.

"Gilder-roy! Gilder-roy!" he would repeat over and over to himself in his lonely hours with profound enjoyment. The Day Nursery echoed to his gilder-roy-ing morning, noon, and night, bringing again, a new expression to his notice: Sir Arthur's "damned squawker."

In the confusion that followed Dudley never once lost his head. Nurse, mother, governess, and children mixed the names forgetfully, so that "Mrs. Tompkyns-Gilderoy" and "Mr. Gilderoy-Tompkyns" were often heard. Even Molly herself made mistakes, and Dudley alone remained accurate and consistent. He liked "Gilderoy" and stuck to it.

To all this fuss and fury, the cat himself remained supremely indifferent. Being sheltered and well fed, names were not important. At first he kept his distance from the handsome cage. Yet, occasionally, when the parrot was at his gilder-roy-ing, he would glance up and purr, as though, generally speaking, he knew what was going on. Dudley, at any rate, after this second christening, knew quite well what was going on; he was now intensely aware of the new creature in the family circle.

With his head twisted sideways, one claw fondling the great dangerous beak, he would gaze down upon the red cat by the hour. There was, perhaps, no particular sign of feeling, still less of intelligence, in his gaze. He merely gazed, betraying no hint of what was passing through his mind. Yet he presently allowed the new-comer close to his cage without a single gesture of annoyance or alarm. Its proximity evidently pleased him, and Gilderoy, aware of this, begun to make tentative advances. The bird then suddenly took to performing his dainty little Two Step on the perch, sure proof of finding life at the moment good; next, he began opening and shutting his claws, blinking his eyes rapidly, gurgling even, when it sat near enough for contact through the bars -- a proof, with him, of ecstasy.

Till, at last, one day, with a burst of inspired music, he produced his most penetrating shriek: " Gilder-roy! Gilder-roy!" and the new friendship became solidly established.

From this moment, indeed, dated the intimate and affectionate relationship between the two rascals. They understood one another, as has been seen. They avoided misunderstandings, as has likewise been seen, by the device of changing the subject the instant danger threatened. If Gilderoy's aloof indifference helped towards this end, so also did Dudley's habit of accepting even the grossest insults as a form of admiration. While Gilderoy, again, admired his friend's appearance as much as he admired his own, Dudley was under no illusions about the cat's get-up -- distinctive perhaps, yet without noticeable beauty. Dudley, to tell the plain truth, thought his pal looked simply frightful. He deplored, equally, his vulgarity. As he himself put it: "I prefer vice to vulgarity." For the cat's other qualities, he felt what he called "affectionate interest" of a tolerant kind.

Each now believed that he was engaged in the present adventure for his friend's benefit. Each shed, as it were, this air of willing sacrifice. Their immemorial code conveyed ideas plainly to one another, even in sleep, in silence. Their most absorbing, heated conversations, both talking at once perhaps, might thus appear to humans as motionless inactivity, while each yet knew exactly what the other felt and meant. They read easily the secret signs of code and signal that were used on earth long before strutting humans had made an appearance. And consciousness of superiority was inborn in both.

Thus, while Gilderoy, now in his cat-sleep, informed the parrot that he was going to London to see his pals, he was busy also with far, far deeper reflections -- about himself. They were in challenge a little to the bird's orgy of self-praise.

"And now, for instance," he asked himself, his subtle intelligence working easily in sleep, "what heritage have I? And whence do I derive?"

The question seemed to sting him; though his eyes did not open, there was a snappy little sneeze.

"They talk of tigers -- rubbish! They class me with the great felines -- rhodomontade!"

His cheeks puffed out so that the whiskers sprayed like water from a half-choked hose. One paw stretched slowly further across the face, as he lay in a ball. The claws opened and shut gently.

"Though curiosity, they say, can kill me, they give me nine lives," he went on, the cheeks flattening," admitting, by this very gift, their ignorance of my actual origin. The few who guessed my meaning on this undeveloped planet they burnt alive, they quartered and they racked them, they finally exterminated the whole inspired little band. Witches, wizards, sorcerers, all are gone with the broomstick into limbo. Misunderstood and unappreciated, I alone remain!"

He turned over into a three-quarter position upon his back, legs spread-eagled a little, feet hanging in the air and bent. The paw slipped from the face, uncovering the blunt unsightly nose.

"Yes, I persist. But as a mask, a symbol, a legend, a mysterious fantasy of what I really am. My true being is a hieroglyphic none can read; my pedigree, trailing down dim ages, is unknown; the inter-stellar spaces which produced me are unplumbed, and ever will be."

A single hanging paw fell to trembling; the eyelids quivered.

"My face," he went on, "remains inscrutable as of old, my gait as swift and silent, my green sight as marvellous in darkness, my voice as unearthly, my ways, generally, as ghostly and indecipherable as they always were."

His eyes opened a second; he saw the parrot in the rack, the head bent downwards a little as in an attitude of adoration -- of himself as usual -- motionless, a figure carved in stone. The sight stimulated the cat.

"They worshipped me in days gone by," his thought ran on. "Worshipped," he repeated, "worshipped. I was the favourite of Pasht. Bubastis housed me. I have lain mummied for centuries in stifling, airless heat, far underground. In my blood, my eyes, my walk, still lingers the haunting proof of this my divine service to a trumpery, unworthy race. The legend, the symbol, I now am cloak my deific origin. I have been, I remain, a deity. They call me aloof, indifferent, cold. It is the measure of their inferiority and ignorance. For who -- " he suddenly sat up erect, his green eyes shining --" who that has been worshipped can respect his worshippers?"

There came no answer, but there came a pause. Dudley made no sign or movement. If his receiving apparatus, reflected Gilderoy, caught the message, so much the better: it might reduce his self-importance a bit perhaps.

"I despise," concluded the cat, "but chiefly am indifferent to, the Race who now think they master me. Alien, aloof, heartless to their endeavours, care, affection, they describe me. Bah! Pfui!" he spat. "I am alien to their pettiness, that's all!"

He sneezed and purred simultaneously. Then, turning round carefully in a circle several times, he lay down again, tucked his blunt nose between his paws, and fell back into his cat-sleep once more.

Dudley had listened-in or had not listened-in. It was immaterial to the cat. A word, indeed, dropped down into that first-class carriage from the rack, but it was not a word that Gilderoy understood. "Arcades ambo" reached him before he plunged into real sleep. His tail twitched faintly at the tip, he made no other sign, and the train went rumbling on.

The parrot, doubtless, might have said a good deal in reply, but, if he had heard, he knew the value of restraint. Speech, indeed, was not actually essential to his enjoyment of life. If he used words, it was rather as a concession to an inferior world into which he had allowed himself to be adopted. It amused this human world to hear him talk. Equally, it amused him to see them thus amused. He used their own tricks of sound in order to deride them. The measure of their intelligence, as of his own masterly derision, was shown by the patronising judgment they passed upon his kindly efforts. "Oh, what a clever bird then! Pretty Polly! Clever, clever!" was the inadequate praise they bestowed upon his consummate parody of their idiocies.

Thus, while Gilderoy indulged his dreams, broadcasting them better than he knew, perhaps, Dudley merely turned upon the beast one glassy and apparently sightless eye. He realized that the cat was off upon his own, and let him go. He was to enjoy the Adventure, and this moment of vainglorious indulgence belonged to it. "Arcades ambo," therefore, met the case, and Dudley let it go at that.

His glassy eye, none the less, observed the feline closely. That tight red ball was always worth watching, he well knew. There were signs about it even now that betrayed a secret process, something peculiar to the cat alone. It was just this mystery that he respected in the creature. The careless attitude of the body, apparently so innocent, betrayed an inner activity that escaped him.

Gilderoy, apparently sound asleep, was actually aware of something elsewhere and otherwise. His special powers operated. Before him rose, at this moment, the Day Nursery. He heard the voices, saw the faces, twigged the excitement.

"He eat him, eat him all up," the Governess was screaming.

"Impossible," cried Molly. "There's no sign of a fight even. "

"He eat him, I tell you," the Governess repeated.

"But there are no loose feathers about, no blood," said the girl. "There's -- nothing!"

"He eat everything, that nasty red cat," asserted the other.

"The claws -- the beak -- he couldn't have eaten them!" yelled Molly.

"All, all he eat," asserted the French woman with conviction. "He always mean to. He did."

"But Gilderoy loved him," moaned Molly, tears very close.

"He love him, yes," screamed the Governess. "But he leave -- nozzing!"

Gilderoy turned over, rolled into a ball again and lay still. The parrot watched and listened, the train rolled on, thumping and rumbling to London. It drew at length into Victoria Station. It stopped. Gilderoy woke up, stretched, yawned, stuck one hind leg into the air and began to wash. Dudley, climbing down laboriously from his luggage rack, stood perched on the velvet seat and watched him closely. The bird's attitude was packed with expression:

"Cat," it said sternly," While it is natural you should admire and respect my back, I should from now onwards enjoy seeing something of your own. In other words, you lead."

For some minutes there was no exchange between them. Neither spoke. Few people, indeed, observing this quiet pair, the one washing, the other clasping a beak, could have guessed the thoughts that crowded their minds as they sat silently side by side in the empty First Class Smoking Carriage at Victoria Station. An exchange of ideas was, nevertheless, in active progress between them. While the lordly bird watched his friend's ablutions, he discerned from the way the same spot was washed over and over again that that cat's mind, like his own, was occupied with quite other matters.

With two, at any rate, one being breakfast, the other, how to pass unobserved along the crowded platform without their progress being unduly interrupted. For Gilderoy, the latter presented no problem, but Dudley's case was different. Since he could not use his wings much, he must use what offered -- convenient shoulders, trucks of piled up luggage, a man's head, a woman's hat, anything, in fact, that might help to camouflage his dressiness, so that he would not appear too conspicuous.

It was the breakfast problem they solved first. They solved it promptly, and by signals only. Gilderoy suddenly stopped washing and stared fixedly into space. One hind leg pointed to the ceiling as though it hardly belonged to his body. Next he rose on his four feet, stretched, yawned, licked his whiskers and arched his back in a semicircle. He strutted across the floor towards the seat where his friend perched, lowered his back to a more convenient line, and kept quite still while Dudley stepped down awkwardly and established himself safely about midway between the tail and head. Gilderoy then leaped with his rider through the window on the opposite side of the carriage where no platform was, and ran rapidly along the footboard in the direction of the guard's van.

"Tempus fugit, tempus fugit," exclaimed Dudley several times .

It was a precarious journey for the bird, but he balanced marvellously. They paused frequently on the way to explore empty carriages that had their windows open, with the result that Dudley made a good breakfast off scraps of biscuit, bread, fruit, and even a few pea-nuts in a paper bag some child had rejected. Leaving his friend to this latter, Gilderoy raced on to the dark luggage van where he found enough spilled milk from several dozen cans to give him an ample meal.

In less than five minutes he rejoined his parrot, whom he found engaged in tearing the paper bag fiercely into little pieces with his claws and iron beak. Dudley, to an undiscerning eye, seemed in a state of fury as he attacked the paper bag. But Gilderoy knew simulation when he saw it.

"Better get a move on," he flashed. "You've fed, I see."

They left the carriage and stepped out boldly on to the platform. Having accomplished this without disaster, they then proceeded to examine very carefully the few people now left upon this platform.

Cats know well how to conceal their purpose, to seize their opportunity, to cover their flight and to escape retribution.

M. RATON. Sur l'education du Chat Domestique.

THE train had discharged its first rush of passengers, including the old gentleman with the cigar, and the two ruffians were relieved to see that the platform was now less congested than it had been. This, too, had its dangers, however, since it rendered them more conspicuous. They stood side by side, examining its remaining freight. Both creatures assumed an air of careless nonchalance. Both knew perfectly well that they could not choose where they should go, but could only go where they were taken.

Who, then, should take them was the first question? Where, the second?

Dudley, though not afraid, yet did not feel entirely at his ease. Gilderoy walked to and fro, sniffing, perking his blunt muzzle this way and that. Suddenly his lightning eyes, all-observant as usual, picked up a significant detail. With a twitch of his tail he communicated it.

"Ah!" replied Dudley. Being able to see behind him, he did not turn his head. His comprehension was complete and instantaneous. His "ah!" conveyed that he agreed with his pal's choice.

A porter, pushing a laden truck, was approaching them from the rear, and behind him, followed the "significant detail," an elderly lady of uncertain, rather waddling gait. She moved slowly, strenuously, yet without advancing much.

The two exiles, motionless side by side, examined her closely.

Their examination, due to immense practice, was as skilful as it was swift. Their experience of hosts and hostesses was, naturally, large, and the language of gesture an open book to them. From trivial outward signs they could read the heart; movement, facial expression, clothing, action of feet and pose of hands, these, being unconscious, gave naked indications of their owner's personality.

They noticed, thus, that the lady was considerably wrapped up. A careless observer might have suspected her of evading the Customs by wearing several silk quilts beneath her dress, but closer inspection showed that, scorning the modern figure, she merely feared the cold. This fact admitted her at once to Dudley's sympathetic heart, while Gilderoy made a special note of another thing -- a contradictory expression in her eyes. These wore a distant, five-mile gaze, yet at the same time a close shrewd scrutiny of details nearer home. She might dream and speculate, the cat twigged, but she knew where the best milk and butter were to be obtained. A kindly face, moreover, both decided. Upon the top of her head, again indifferent to modern fashion, Dudley noticed a large hat with green feathers swaying in it.

Such, then, was the "significant detail" that now surged past them slowly, moving like part of a procession that turns upon itself, while getting a little forward at the same time. It was no ordinary female, they decided.

"I like her," from the parrot, and "She'll do," from the cat flashed simultaneously between the observant pair. For a moment, however, neither made a move. They watched. Neither the porter nor the lady had noticed them. When the moment for action came each animal would follow his own instinct independently.

"She's not thinking of anything very definite just now, but of many things. Her mind, at the moment, is wandering. It's not here. She won't notice me," was Dudley's masterly deduction from what he saw as, from the cat's arched back, moving with incredible lightness, he clambered up the thick clothing and reached the lady's attractive head-gear. He landed softly and settled down, camouflaged admirably against the green feather. His head glanced round in most expressive fashion.

"The secret of a successful and elevated life," it proclaimed, "is to live on others and let them carry one to death or glory!"

"Rather," the cat's action replied," is it to remain inconspicuous, while yet attaining one's objective," as he dived unnoticed among the welter of dark bags and rugs upon the porter's truck.

The two schemers in this way proceeded along the platform past the ticket-collector, and approached a waiting taxi-cab. Here the procedure needed tact as well as physical adroitness, lest they be noticed, Gilderoy as usual having the easier role of the two. He slipped in so slyly, indeed, that not even Dudley saw how he managed it. With the bird, as with his carrier, it was a more complicated business; he crouched as low as possible, while the lady, urged by the porter from behind, her limbs hampered by the mass of clothing, climbed slowly in and flumped down in her place with a stifled gasp. There was just room for the parrot to perch upright under the ceiling. The luggage had already been piled outside and inside. They were ready to start.

Touching his cap, the porter examined his tip, pocketing it with a significant glance at the driver, and slouched heavily away. But the taxi did not start immediately.

"Any address?" enquired this red-faced man over his hunched shoulder. His voice was rather surly; he had taken note of the porter's tip.

"Yes, yes, to be sure," the fare replied rather breathlessly. "I thought I'd told you. Aurora Mansions. That's Mildew Place," she explained, leaning forward a little too suddenly for Dudley's comfort. "Pimlico," she added, lowering her voice, as though she was ashamed of mentioning it. She leaned back again with equal suddenness. She sighed nervously. She breathed heavily.

But still the taxi did not start.

"Any number -- Miss?" asked the man.

"14, 14, No. 14," cried the fare, leaning forward once more, then settling down somewhat as the sides of a boiled fruit-pudding collapse when the insides have been removed. "I thought I'd already said 14," she repeated, with half apologetic nervousness. She was evidently afraid of taxi-drivers as a class. "No. 14," she repeated with that excess which the experts declare is a sign of hysterical tendencies.

The man uttered something inaudible, ran his yellow eyes over her, glowered, then turned and started his machinery with a sudden wrench.

"I perceive," Dudley commented to himself, having noted and disliked the yellow eyes," that we shall now go like hell." He settled down cautiously, digging himself in, yet too cleverly for the presure to be felt. His comment, meanwhile, had reached the invisible cat. "I get you," signalled the wireless whiskers. Speed was a matter of complete indifference to him. The personality of the fare, on the other hand, might mean much. "The frump's all right," he added.

It was just this kind of commonness and lack of tone the fine old bird disliked in his companion. He shifted a foot, a faint shiver ran down his breast feathers. "I shall assist the lady," fell courteously from his face, "should the opportunity arise. As it well may."

"How?" asked the cat.

"Leave it to me," the bird flashed laconically, and retired behind his beak as from a futile discussion.

London life, obviously, was already sharpening their wits, extending their vocabulary as well. The change would benefit his friend and might modify his coarseness. His own Work, he felt convinced, would benefit too. Pleased with his position at the moment, he fell to pondering. His own powers, for instance, delighted him. He possessed, came the pleasant reflection, as many voices as qualities of language. He could welcome or dismiss, as he deemed a particular situation demanded. Chuckling to himself, he remembered dismissing the Vicar, whose wheedling voice and stale odour of gaspers he detested. He had kept an obstinate silence for a long period while the cleric tried to make him speak. "But Polly is not talkative to-day; we must not bother the bird," in that wheedling tone at length exasperated him to the point where he really had to deal with the man. He used his loudest voice and with startling suddenness: "Goodbye, for the present! Goodbye, for the present!" was followed by a string of words that derived from sailors in far Southern Seas. And the shawl flung quickly over his cage was the very thing he wanted, for it shut out the man he loathed. As for the language that he offered, it was a sample merely, a test as it were. The fact that the Vicar hastily withdrew betrayed him. If dirt, the parrot held, is matter in the wrong place, language called "bad" is only language wrongly uttered. That He uttered it divinely, he knew perfectly well; he also knew, by the tone of voice, when phrases criticised him and therefore were not worth learning. The Vicar's "deep-learned in books but shallow in himself," in reply to Molly's praise of his own scholarly attainments, he had not even troubled to commit to memory.

While reflection pursued thus its pleasant course, the taxi was getting under way. Making angry and vicious noises with its gears, it started slowly at first, but once out of the station yard it began to gather speed. It took a curious route, the lady noticed, but at first she did not interfere. She fidgetted and made grunting noises in her throat, leaning forward on a sudden impulse, then flopping back again, movements that incommoded the bird perched upon her hat. But she took no action. Once, finding her courage, she began: "But you're going miles out of your way the way you're going. … !" but her voice, dying away in the throat, was not loud enough to reach the man. Evidently, she was of the kind that must be worked up into a nervous anger before the point of action -- invariably of exaggerated, explosive sort -- was reached.

Owing to the size of the hat, its wearer was forced to bend her head, and Dudley found himself rather cramped, compelled to lower his proud neck and shoulders lest his skull knock against the ceiling as the ramshackle vehicle banged and tore along. Having, luckily, no crest, he managed fairly well, however, turning his head completely round and burying back and forehead among the feathers some way down his back. "Stet, stet, stet," he murmured to himself, maintaining his position with extreme difficulty, yet with adorable poise and grace as usual.

The taxi rattled; it shaved an island; it elicited language from the driver of a horse-van whose load they scraped perilously past; it swerved from side to side; it rocked.

They were racing at high speed up Constitution Hill, hardly the shortest route from Victoria to Pimlico, when the fare made her first real effort. "Please go more slowly," she cried, more air than actual sound in her voice. She tapped feebly on the glass. She hoped the driver would both hear and not hear; as though not quite sure whether she feared most the man or the smash. The man made no sign that he heard, for the vehicle rose almost on two wheels immediately, making the lady gasp with terror and clutch wildly at the window straps.

Dudley's skull, still buried among the feathers of his back, received a bump. The moment for giving his promised "assistance," he decided, had arrived. He raised his grand head slowly; cool and collected, he was; his eye noticed Gilderoy's red whiskers above a rug; he filled his lungs:

"Blastyergizzard! Aurora borealis! Swineswine! Dudleydudleydudley . …!" he shouted in a male tone of fury. Expressions that followed he chose from the wife of a policeman he had once known, while the tone changed abruptly to an imitation of the fare. The voice, his loudest, rose easily above the rattle of the taxi.

The effect was immediate, and it was two-fold.

The lady collapsed backwards with such violence that the bird was nearly dislodged from his perch, and the driver jerked round with such startled suddenness that his hand, for an instant, dropped the wheel, leaving the taxi to its own devices. The choice between a lamp-post and an omnibus confronted it. Before it could decide, however, the man's hand automatically dropped back upon the wheel; his foot, also automatically, found a brake; and a traffic block, obeying a white-clad arm, brought the vehicle to a grinding stop in the very nick of time. They were by St. George's Hospital, with the gates of the safer Park beyond. "Umph! Cuckoo!" reflected Dudley, noticing the hospital. The red whiskers had vanished, a flying leap having been thus avoided at the last minute.

The driver now looked round, his red face peering into the taxi with a bewildered expression. He searched for the owner of the recent male voice. His mouth opened and shut, but emitted no sound. Puzzled he certainly was, a little subdued as well, frightened even. Never before had he heard such language from a female fare. His bewilderment increased still more when he heard this fare now inform him, with the false courage of incipient hysteria, that she would "report you to the Police for bad language and assault and give the number of your taxi too. … !"

"Sorry, mum," he muttered, poking his head round the window. "It's the old keb, that's wot it is … never worked proper since the harmistice … besides I ain't said nothink meself … yet … not a single word I ' avn't … s'elp me gawd . …"

Dudley, meanwhile, remained motionless and invisible on his perch, silent too. Masterly inactivity, he decided, was his role just then. He was a trifle puzzled himself, perhaps. He could not know that folk with hysteria in the system may persuade themselves they have spoken when not a sound has actually passed their lips. In her excitement, the fare doubtless assumed the voice from her hat was her own. Hunting for paper and pencil, meanwhile, she had dropped her reticule and stooped to recover its contents. The bird had enough to think of till she steadied down again at length. It was a moment for careful behaviour, for careful balance too, so far as he was concerned. He recalled a maxim his intoxicated scholar-host used years ago: "Live in such a way," he crooned very softly to himself, "that even the Coroner couldn't blame you!" The lady rose from searching the mat and Dudley, of course, rose with her. As she sat back in her seat, he disappeared from view again. His expression, as he sank away, was philosophical. Her own face was purple. The driver drummed black fingers impatiently on his wheel. The official white arm dropped.

The traffic-block now surged slowly forward like a single huge machine that uses its loose portions clumsily. It carried the taxi with it beneath the Arch. Once in the Park, adding another needless mile to the shortest distance, a reasonable pace brought back a pleasant sense of security to all on board.

"Ad valorem ab initio à bas les boches," murmured the parrot, in whose memory foreign words were always associated with a fuss.

"Keep quiet, can't you!" sniffed Gilderoy, entirely out of sight. It was sharply given, almost rudely.

"I enjoy the Park," remarked Dudley blandly, no window accessible to his screened eyes. The perky tail, could the cat have seen it, added distinctly: " One sees one's own sort there, of course."

The squabble that seemed imminent had been neatly avoided in the usual way. Driving safely and pleasurably through the bright sunshine, the contents of the taxi, still alive, and breathing more or less heavily, now relapsed into a comfortable silence, until the vehicle at last drew up before a row of gloomy Mansions in a side street among the purlieus of Pimlico.

"We have arrived," Dudley broke the interlude.

Gilderoy glanced through a crack of the door. "It's our slum," he said in reply.

The fare groaned wheezily and began to fumble in her capacious reticule. The driver, having gone some three miles out of his way, looked at his meter with a satisfied smirk.

Some day, when it is least expected, a Grey Parrot may suddenly wake up and begin, like the Baron's famous horn, to unwind everything that has been said to it for ever so long before. -- W. T. GREENE.

THE taxi slowly began to disgorge its varied content. Like a bundle becoming unfastened, the lady climbed out in sections, the parrot crouching low among the protective feathers on her hat. Gilderoy was already on the pavement. He stood against the area railings with an air of having known the neighbourhood all his life, looking, indeed, as though he belonged to it, with his shabby coat, his torn ear, his patched eye. His flat cheeks bulged a trifle, evidence of excitement, but the patched eye has already noted every detail of his surroundings. He had managed his exit from the taxi so cleverly that not even the observant bird had seen it. He now seemed merely a common Pimlico street cat on the prowl, indifferent to the world.

The driver had also left his perch, and Gilderoy moved up and rubbed -- carefully -- against his legs while the man stood waiting for his money. The air was electric rather. The process of a nervous old lady laying her fate to a greedy bully of a driver pursued its slow course. A gloved hand burrowed fumblingly in the depths of the capacious reticule, whose indiscriminate contents rattled; a flustered face peered anxiously about; a timid voice mumbled indistinct syllables, while the man stood silent, holding his hand out with a half insolent, half threatening air.

The biped and quadruped, one in the air, the other on the ground, watched the proceedings closely without appearing to do so, and each in his own way. They were already in swift communication:

"I got you here, you see," mentioned the bird proudly.

Gilderoy, staring down the street, gave a contemptuous sniff. Not even a milk-cart, much less a catsmeat-man, was in sight.

"Why? he asked pointedly. A memory of "the houses of the great" stirred in him possibly.

"Inter alia," returned Dudley. It was the only thing he could think off or the moment. His body, besides, being concealed, could not convey freely what he felt.

The lady was now holding out some coins, mumbling tentative phrases as she did so: ". … the way you came that way was a long way out of your way … " it sounded like, "so that makes three and tuppence" -- her hand thrust forwards -- " with fourpence for yourself … and … er … thank you." Her face was alternately flushed and pale; her head jerked as though she felt the unusual weight of her hat perhaps. But the driver's face became instantly an assorted face, contempt and a yellow fury dominating the other ingredients. For a moment he did not speak. He stood staring at the insignificant coins in his open palm.

"Get ready!" warned Gilderoy, peeping up. He made a sudden leap sideways, for the great boots had moved suspiciously.

"I was born ready," Dudley signalled back from his perch.

There was no time for more, as the man had begun to speak.

His audience, though later it grew larger, consisted at first of the two creatures and the lady. It was to the latter, however, that he addressed his inspired words. For they were inspired, his being had been stirred to its lowest depths, inspiration alone could have produced them.

The trio listened, spell-bound, as the words poured forth. They were voluble, ornate, delivered without hesitation. They described the lady's character and antecedents, referred to her appearance, the state of her health, and the length of days she might yet live. Included also was a brief impressionist picture of Aurora Mansions, and the general neighbourhood. An artist's palette is his servant, not his master, and if he sees carmine, ruby values he has a right to use them. The man evidently saw his picture couleur de rose, or, rather, sang de bœuf. The subliminal consciousness of this illiterate taximan was stirred. Freed of all limiting inhibitions, he delivered his overburdened psyche of a Message to the Race, to the female portions of the Race in particular.

This particular female member of the Race listened, and while she listened, trembled.

Her animal companions listened too, but they did not tremble. Each in his own way listened, and each had his own reactions. Gilderoy, unable to follow human speech as his educated friend could, noted his own colour rather frequently referred to, and disliked it. "Too much blood, I think," he flashed into the air. He grew angry and wanted to scratch. Slowly he began to make himself look big. His hair was up a bit.

Dudley, listening from a higher point of view, made no comment. He gave no sign of any sort. "It's a relief to him," he thought, with an understanding sigh. But his gorge was rising. He was again ready to give his assistance, when the right moment came. It came quickly enough. The man, in his opinion, went at last too far.

"Talkin' through yer ruddy 'at, I call it …  !" rang down the open street.

And, since Dudley himself occupied the hat, he resented it. His gorge could rise no further. He intervened the more readily because he felt his pedestal shaking dangerously and feared he might at any moment be flung violently to the ground. Raising his grim, aristocratic beak above the feathers, he caught his pal's patched eye. It gleamed.

"Go it!" exclaimed Gilderoy. His claws were out.

Dudley went it.

His words issued, as it seemed, from the empty air. He chose his most horrible voice, a rasping, hoarse voice acquired from a First Mate long ago. It was the driver's turn to listen. If his eloquence had been inspired, that of the parrot surpassed it easily. It made his best effort seem flat and insipid. It left him standing at the post. It was superb, it was hors concours. The adjectives, interspersed with a fortoris and de profundises, poured down Mildew Place in a flood of rattling glory. Aurora Mansions bathed rosily in a new significance. The First Mate, a master of language, would have been proud of him. A crowd began to collect, drawn by its magic to areas and windows. But no one could discover whence this hoarse male voice and his appalling language originated.

Upon two members of the audience the effect was striking and immediate. The lady, clapping her hands to her ears, began to scream. She wobbled dangerously, while the driver, recognising a master, and bewildered by a voice that apparently issued through the top of his fare's head, began to shake all over. He listened for a few moments to details about himself he had not known before; his jaw dropped; his eyes were glazed with superstitious terror; his red face blanched. And at this moment the cat, hissing and spitting, its hair erect, flew headlong towards him. He had a glimpse of blazing eyes, sharp teeth, of a red body launched towards him across the air. He could not know that a dog behind him was the actual cause of what seemed an onslaught on himself.

Giving a futile kick, and uttering the yell of those who expect to be hurt, he turned, leaped into his seat, trod on the accelerator, and leaving behind him a hoarse echo of "Lord bli' me, it's a ruddy devil, two of 'em!" hurtled down the gloomy street and disappeared at a pace no policeman, had there been one in Mildew Place, could possibly have permitted. He also left behind him several brown pennies which were his tip, and a kind lady trembling on the pavement like a circular-cut box tree in a gust of sudden wind. She shook from head to foot, her legs threatened to give way beneath her any second, but her screaming ceased, for there was no breath left to scream with.

Gilderoy approached softly, tentatively and rubbed against her elastic-sided boots. "Prrrrrr … purrrrrr … purrrr," rose to her ear from the paving stones on which she shook to and fro. His gallant attentions, since he was not quite the glory he imagined himself to be, produced an unexpected effect. Feeling his touch, the lady looked down sharply, saw a ginger quadruped against her legs, found some more breath, and fell to screaming louder than before, while her head lowered itself so abruptly that Dudley, still clinging to his dignity among the feathers, was taken by surprise, and lost his hold. Wind in branches he could have managed, since there is rhythm in it, but not these unintelligent human jerks. He missed his step. He fell, scrabbling and squawking, down the whole length of her body, clutching her clothing with beak and claws as best he could until he reached the ground.

Silence followed. For a moment all was still. Dudley, having recovered his balance -- composure he had never lost -- stood on one foot in a position of great dignity, clasping his beak with his other claw and glancing down sideways at the world. Gilderoy, a few yards away, sat washing himself against the area railings, as though the basement had been his family home for generations. But the lady, their prospective hostess, seeing suddenly a large grey parrot with a red tail which apparently she had brought forth out of nothing, wobbled like a jelly shape that is just ready to collapse. Unable to scream owing to irregular breath, she gave a gulp of terror, and a second later was flopping up the steps at a speed and with an agility only real panic could produce. She disappeared into the shadows of the gloomy entrance hall of Aurora Mansions. A door banged. Another silence fell.

It was a moment, perhaps, when humans would have used their energies to take stock of the situation, to pull themselves together as it is called, to review the facts, at any rate. Not so, however, with the animals' world, it seems. The two scallywags found it just the moment for a friendly exchange on things in general. The hullabaloo meant little to them, an occurrence that called for no special explanation. They had long ago given up attempting to explain what humans did. They made, thus, no comment on what had just taken place. They merely had a little chat.

"I shall pluck some of my breast-feathers," announced Dudley, and proceeded to do so. "And then I shall go indoors." He fell to work at once.

"I shall have lots of pals," Gilderoy mentioned, indicating the roofs with one leg, while the other pointed down the street. While washing, he had mapped the immediate neighbourhood in detail Nothing had escaped his keen roving eyes. "A busy time for me." He struck an attitude, aware that his arrival in the neighbourhood had been duly noticed by numerous sharp eyes. He believed he looked interesting and important, comely certainly.

But Dudley kept his eyes glued to his breast feathers without looking at him. He knew that his friend's appearance was not engaging at the moment, that in fact he was peculiarly unsightly. His love did not falter, but he felt ashamed of the red, bolshevik, scraggy cat. The allusion to his position, moreover, had not escaped him, the hint that he himself might be without friends here in London, lonely. The cat, reacting to the excitement of the new surroundings, he noted too, was already a bit above himself. He therefore stopped plucking at his feathers; he stood motionless, trying to look as much like unbiteable stone as possible. And, as regards the loneliness he might experience, he found a solace for that too. It was something Molly said that helped him here. His Work occurred to him.

This mysterious Work the child talked about so much, what was it really? That it was true he knew; that it lay deep down inside his sensitive being, he also knew. It had, moreover, something to do with companionship, for it was the suggestion of loneliness that now evoked it. Yes, he had some great work on hand, some mugnnm opus. … He was aware of a sudden gush of sentimental feeling, of self-pity almost. A tear rose to one eye, though he did not let it fall.

The minutes passed. A milkman's cans rattled. A postman's knock was audible far away but coming nearer. At the end of the narrow street the giant motor buses roared along the main thoroughfare, appearing and disappearing like engines of war, thundering to attack. A solitary taxi came crawling along the place. Mildew Place was awake.

"My position at the moment might be improved," decided the bird practically, conquering his other emotions.

Gilderoy caught the signal and glanced up. One eye ran down the street, the other indicated the stone staircase.

"Quaite," observed Dudley in his gentlest tone. He waddled across the pavement and began awkwardly climbing up the first step.

Watching him with approval, the cat showed it by marching down the street close against the area railings, his tail in the air, his flat cheeks smiling, his whole body throbbing with a deep purr as his ribs rubbed the iron bars. He liked the lady who was to be his hostess; the parrot liked her, too, paying her thus the greatest compliment in their power. They felt she was kind, soft-hearted, generous, if poor; they could impose upon her. Only the poor, they knew, were generous, to the rich this virtue is denied.

Dudley, meanwhile, climbing laboriously, observed his friend disappearing down the street and promptly summoned him. He wanted help, for one thing. But he used no silent, secret signal this time. He used his army voice:

"Gilder-roy! Gilder-roy! Gilder-roy!" he bawled his loudest, ignoring the attention it must draw to himself.

So strong is the instinct for companionship in all parrots, but especially in the Greys … that perhaps this pining for society may be a factor in bringing about the death of so many of these amiable and most unhappy birds. … -- W. T. GREENE.

AT which moment the door opened and the lady reappeared, followed closely by the Hall Porter of Aurora Mansions in a dirty blue suit with tarnished gold buttons and trousers frayed into whiskers at the bottom. He wore shapeless leather slippers. He carried a cloth. The parrot, taking in these details instantly, noted also out of the back of his head that the cat had come to a halt against the railings, some twenty yards away, invisible to all but himself.

He preened himself for the admiration that he knew must come, and at the same time said something aloud that would stimulate interest and curiosity by being inaudible. It was well to conquer this couple at the start. "Cuckoo!" he gabbled in a voice too low for them to hear the words exactly. "Cuckoo!"

It was here that the creatures displayed their superiority over human beings. The latter, confronted with a sudden decision amid conflicting issues, almost invariably fail. They over-act or under-act. Their first cry is "Oh, let me think a moment first!" Only when the crisis is past do they perceive the line of action which would have met it adequately. With the world inhabited by Dudley and Gilderoy the case was different: each thought instinctively, observed all details simultaneously, came to a decision immediately, and conveyed this decision to one another without a second's delay.

These faculties, therefore, now operated as usual. The pair of rascals easily met the strain upon their wits.

They had reached London, but they had as yet no home -- Aurora Mansions if not a palace would provide a temporary pied à terre; food, warmth and protection would be assured. The cat, naturally, could manage these essentials for himself; he had the freedom, more or less, of any house he cared to enter. Dudley, on the other hand, must descend to diplomacy; he had to prepare the way. It was, besides, his nature to do things decently.

Of all which, the slow-witted humans now coming slowly down the steps, of course, knew nothing. They merely saw a large grey parrot with a red tail standing disconsolately on the lower steps, glancing up with its head cocked on one side. The cat they did not see at all, nor would a stray cat anyhow have claimed attention. So undistinguished, indeed, did Gilderoy, despite his auburn beauty, seem to the Porter and the lady, that they did not even notice his tigerish outline shoot past their legs and vanish through the open door behind them. The animal, none the less, performed this feat of leger-de-pieds with consummate ease; and, perched half-way up the stairs inside now watched the parrot's method of entering the house in his turn.

Dudley's method was not complicated. Like all great souls, he saw life closely, but he saw it whole. He desired to enter the lady's flat peaceably: he did so. Assuming that innocent air by which he somehow contrived to make his formidable mandibles look harmless, the expression in his eyes positively invited kindness. He looked, indeed, benign. One claw, held aloft in the air, opened and closed with slow precision.

"Leave it to me, Mum," the Porter reassured the nervous woman, after examining the bird cautiously from a distance. "I know them birds," and reaching down, he advanced slowly, holding out a very dirty hand with an air of confidence Dudley saw he did not feel. The cloth was flung over his arm. He wriggled his fingers about so that the grimey wrist-band of a flannel shirt showed itself. He uttered the formula "Pretty Polly! Pretty Polly want a cracker!" in what he evidently considered a most ingratiating voice. His rather bloodshot eyes ogled to the best of their ability. Dudley stood motionless as if carved in stone.

"Oh, please, mind it doesn't nip you, Porter!" warned the lady from the rear. "One can never trust those birds -- until they know you," she added with piercing insight. "Their bite is terrible, I believe!"

"It's the voice that does it, Mum," the man told her confidently. "These grey ones in partickler is very sensible to the 'uman voice," And he continued to hold his hand out and wriggle his fingers, while repeating the "Pretty Polly" formula without a pause.

Dudley, watching the man sideways, still made no movement. If there was one thing he had instantly loathed about this Hall Porter of Aurora Mansions it was the quality of his voice. It rasped him. It was worse than even the Vicar's wheedle. He disapproved likewise of his filthy hand. But above all, he despised the fellow because of his pretension that he was familiar with parrots and understood them, whereas it was obvious to Dudley that he had never met a Grey Parrot, much less a King Grey Parrot, in his life before. For that voice alone he would have nipped the nasty finger to the bone; the man's pretentions made him want to scream his loudest; the hated formula gave him a feeling of positive nausea.

He remained, for all that, diplomatic, his feelings under stern control. Great simple soul that he was, the grand bird never lost sight of his objective for a moment. He desired to enter Aurora Mansions peaceably and without a fuss; he now took immediate steps to do so.

They were decided, though not entirely straightward steps. With a sideways movement, but one of matchless grace, he avoided the filthy hand and wriggling fingers, and planted his feet, each in turn and delicately, upon the man's sleeve just above the objectionable wrist-band. He wiped them first, it seemed, upon the cloth. He then, deliberately but very slowly, marched up the whole length of the arm, and planted himself securely upon the blue shoulder, where a strip of spotty brass announced that the coat was actually a uniform. Settling himself, he stood motionless, gazing down into the lady's upturned countenance. She had watched the proceedings with the greatest intentness, anxiety and admiration about equally mixed. Dudley, with an expressionless eye, now returned her stare.

He did more than that, however -- he at once introduced himself. And he did this in his own inimitable way: he uttered aloud the most gracious and lovely word he knew, the very sweetest, yet too low to be clearly audible:

"Dudleydudleydudley," he mumbled affably, for what could be more beautiful than his own name, he felt?

"There you are, Mum," exclaimed the porter proudly in his best shilling voice, though his head shrank a trifle to one side, the dreaded beak being within an inch of his ears and cheek.

"Dudleydudleydudley " crooned the parrot in his softest tone," nolimetangere … cuckoocuckoo …  !" controlling a fierce desire to bite the ugly neck until it bled, and winning both the Porter's and the lady's hearts, as he intended, at a single stroke.

"An' a fine talker, too!" the man explained. "That was Spanish he used just then. Pretty Polly! Pretty Polly!"

He turned and led the way upstairs to the first floor flat, followed by the admiring tenant, who in due course, the man hanging about until his purpose reached her brain, fumbled for the expected coin. Passing red Gilderoy, who had already assured himself that no tame cat lived in the flat, they entered a rather dark apartment containing a kitchen, a narrow passage, a tiny hall, and four or five diminutive but fairly pleasant rooms. The place was nicely furnished, the tenant obviously a woman of taste, if of humble means.

"'Ave you anything in the wy of a caige, Mum?" enquired the Hall Porter. He had lowered the parrot on to a table where it began to bite the cloth.

The lady mentioned an empty canary cage somewhere in a cupboard, and this having been produced after considerable search, blown into by the objectionable porter to get the dust out, and a tiny perch made secure, Dudley, bending his proud head, stepped silently into it with as much dignity as its space permitted.

"Any time you want a bit of 'elp with the bird, Mum," mentioned the porter, departing with his shilling in his pocket. "I understand them parrots, you see."

The lady thanked him. "I must advertise," she began, "it's been lost or stolen or something," and then, having provided a saucer of water and sent out her char-cook-general, to buy some seed, she flopped into a chair and stared at her new possession in a state of semi-collapse.

The new possession, not far from a state of collapse himself, did not return the stare. Although he liked her, as already stated, he did not care especially about her appearance. He felt she was ineffective somewhere … this tiny cage, for instance, with its odour of long disuse … water in a saucer … seed of indifferent quality … a general air of being mastered by her surroundings instead of, as with himself, the opposite. He, therefore, did not return her stare, nor, indeed, take any notice of her at all. Tasting the meal provided, he retired into himself. He clutched his thin perch with one foot, raised the other into his tummy feathers, made up his mind that this would be a temporary visit only, and decided that the next time the Porter put his hand within reach he would bite it to the bone.

He remained silent, he did not even produce his infinitesimal gabble, he neither swore, nor sang, nor whistled, nor did any language occur to him at the moment as worth uttering. Something poignant, however, was going on inside him, for he trembled slightly. His breast feathers quivered. The recent excitement, though mastered, had been considerable. It had deeply stirred him. He remembered things Molly had said … he thought of his Work … there was some great thing he had to do … some important production … consummation of his long life, as it were. … He saw a green sea of foliage waving in the wind and sloping upwards into a sky of turquoise blue .. he saw a hollowed limb, a nest … he heard a squawk that to him was the sweetest music in the world … he felt … he felt …

A glimpse of something red caught his eye, interrupting these stimulating but rather confused reflections, and he gulped down his emotion promptly. It was a bit of Gilderoy that projected from beneath the divan on to which his hostess had collapsed a few moments before. This fragment of a hind paw alone was visible. It set his mind working in a new direction."I've got him here safely," he reflected. "He may now enjoy himself in his own way."

This, plainly, was the cat's intention, and his independence had already asserted itself. He had made himself quite at home.

The first part of their adventure was over, yet each knew quite well that they stood on the threshold of another. A life of danger and excitement, of change and novelty, had begun, though neither could guess what might further be in store for them.

"Leave it to me," was Dudley's attitude on his tiny perch in the cramped cage. And if Gilderoy made no reply it was because he was sound asleep. Their hostess, Dudley perceived, seemed in danger of dropping off herself. He therefore closed his own eyes too, and prepared for the recuperative nap his morning's exertions demanded and deserved.

"Good-night, Dudley, kiss Mother -- good-bye for the present," he murmured under his breath. And the flood of golden dreams then rose and swamped him.

Occasionally it will happen that an otherwise tractable bird will pick up words of an objectionable character.

W. T. GREENE.

JUSTICE is not done to the ease and completeness with which animals understand their surroundings, their human surroundings especially, and draw intelligent deductions therefrom. The superior complacency of the human withholds here credit that is overdue. They judge us with uncanny accuracy, see into us with far deeper insight than we suppose.

They achieve this, largely, by omitting what is unimportant; they concentrate upon essentials only. Perceiving the outstanding characteristic, they grab it, concentrate on it with the one pointedness of the yogi, then act upon it. Their slogan, "Do it Now," was borrowed by America centuries later. The sub-human world is marvellously practical. It does not shilly-shally. It knows what it wants -- and does it. And its knowledge comes from understanding its environment.

The ruthless wasp, wishing its young to have fresh food at birth -- forthwith stings its prey into a state of paralysis and leaves it to be eaten alive; birds finding their insect-food growing scarce -- instantly flit to Abyssinia where it is plentiful; eels preferring to breed in very deep water, promptly slip down their British streams growing bigger eyes en route, for a run of several thousand miles into the unlit ocean depths, cuckoos …

But, trespassing on Dudley's private wisdom here, it is only useful to remark that he did not use one of his favourite expressions idly. "Cuckoo" was a symbol. Both creatures, omitting what was not important, had picked out the essential point about their hostess -- that she was kindly and generous to the point of being easily imposed upon by others. And if Gilderoy turned up his blunt nose at Mildew Place as being hardly among the "houses of the great," the wise old parrot had a complete reply should he care to use it -- that he referred, of course, to hearts, not coronets.

The bird, however, sizing up Mrs. de Mumbles, had experienced, as is well known to be a way with King Grey Parrots, a sudden passionate and admiring affection for this lady. Having swiftly sized her up, he then instantly adored her. It was a coup de foudre. She enlisted all his sympathies; any help or protection he could give was already hers, without price and whether she asked for it or not. He had noticed the porter's attitude, as, equally, the demeanour of the man at the station and the taxi-driver. He now divined that the char-cook-general, as others of the staff he might encounter presently, were, similarly, all -- brigands. He twigged this in the way animals do twig what's going on. Meanwhile, however, he held his beak about it. Time for action was certainly not yet. He possessed facile princeps that mysterious sense of "coincidence " by which parrots produce the right words at the right moment. His attitude just now, therefore, was verb sap. and Leave it to me. He was content with that.

On the threshold of losing consciousness, however, he was able to note, and with pleasure, that his friendly advances had been understood and appreciated and that his passion was reciprocated.

"He's talking -- talking to me!" he caught just before he took his happy forest slope in dream. "Oh, the adorable bird! What a darling! I shall simply love him!" Then, following him into sleep, as he was carried gently across the corridor: " It'll be warmer for him in my bedroom … and I must get him a bigger cage … "

Warmer it certainly was, he dreamily observed, since a large coal fire burned fiercely and all the windows were tightly closed.

Mrs. de Mumbles -- Leopold -- born of a Russian mother, was the widow of a rich and distinguished man, so occupied with his distinction during life that he omitted to leave her enough to live on after his death. Ignoring this fact, however, she flatly refused to change her scale of existence. She was, therefore, invariably in debt, even for butter, medicine, milk and fish. Her scheme of life, moreover, did not include boredom as an ingredient. Her flat, for all its murk, its lack of space, was a social centre of sorts, herself its attracting focus. She possessed that vitality which defies the years; she radiated kindness, sympathy, love of her fellow-men, provided they were interesting. Her joie de vivre was seen as quenchless. She was young. Divested now of numerous outer wrappings, it was obvious that, if oddly shaped, she was yet of a neat and lively figure. Also, as the parrot was quick to discover even in sleep, she was voluble, particularly on the telephone, which he labelled at the very start with faultless diagnosis her "sine qua non."

The service of the flat, to glance ahead a moment, was irregular, exotic, uneconomical; instead of one efficient servant, there was a horde of helpers, called in as occasion required, and, naturally, self-helpers, too. Chief of these, and the one fixture, however, was the char-cook-general, Mrs. Dibbs, wife of a Kilburn policeman. And Maria, semi-permanent helper, was their daughter.

Now Dudley, with his instinctive discernment developed by long experience, disliked Mrs. Dibbs and Maria as whole-heartedly as he liked their mistress. From the latter's habit of talking to herself, regardless who was present, he quickly selected a word he felt described them faithfully. Thief he already knew, of course, but " ce sont tous des brigands," being in constant use, supplied him with this extra word. He soon came to use the two together, adding a sea-faring adjective that mixed rather well, he thought: " -- thief brigand," had a sonorous quality that pleased him.

It was the telephone that dragged him back from his dream of scented forests where he was at peace. During his happy nap preparations for a tea party that afternoon had been in progress, and he woke to a consciousness that the bedroom was rather crowded. Mrs. Dibbs and Maria were admiring him, the porter, holding a larger cage, was at the door. Maria, he instantly realized, was a horror. The porter he had already judged. Gilderoy, the bird noticed the moment he opened his eyes, was nowhere.

His eye, wandering further, took in other details swiftly. One side of the room, thus, consisted almost entirely of bottles. These were of every conceivable shape and size, pasted with multicoloured labels from a startling red to a dingy pink, and containing liquids, powders, pills, salts, crystals and cachets. They were medicine bottles, evidently; the shelves of an open cabinet were packed; the wall was like a chemist's shop. His hostess, the parrot drew the obvious deduction, was ill, very ill, ill with countless complaints. And this intensified his sympathy with her. Was not he himself, as Greene mentioned, liable to plague, dysentry, pneumonia and fits! He could have a cough and take drops for it as well as anyone.

On the other side of the room he saw a tall-boy, books arranged neatly on the top; there were not many of these, but they were well thumbed, evidently in constant use. Having lived himself for years in a library, he knew how revealing books were of their owner's character, and he now noted with interest the lady's sources of daily inspiration. There was, thus, a telephone book, a peerage, a Christian Science Bible, a stout volume of Your Health and How to Keep it, and a Who's Who. At the end of the rack, leaning away from these well-thumbed volumes, as if contemptuously, was a stately book whose pages seemed uncut. Glisteningly new, it bore Cambridge University Press upon its back, and its title was Plato: The Symposium and The Pheadrus. It looked, Dudley decided, extremely handsome.

Next he fell to examining his new cage. It held a water receptacle, a seed-pan, a good thick perch, but no bit of hard wood for him to bite. It was clean and airy, however. He began exploring it. Climbing to the top, he clung to the curved bars and swinging gently with his head to the floor, regarded the world upside down, and found it good.

"Dudleydudleydudleydudley," he commented in his happy little voice.

Mrs. de Mumbles, being at the telephone, did not notice the remark, but Mrs. Dibbs, coming in at that moment to fuss about and see how things lay -- loose little things, as it were -- forgot her original intention and came up to observe the bird at close quarters.

"Ain't you just a luffely birdie!" she mumbled, smiling at him. "And such a 'andsome red tile you've got, 'aven't you now!"

Her perfume, as her quality of voice, offended Dudley, so that he made no reply, merely returning her stare from his upside down position. His frigid glare must have disconcerted anyone less thick-skinned. He looked through her as though she was not there. He ignored her. He was studying her, none the less; his mind was not idle; he was debating whether it was worth while to say anything. And while reviewing various phrases, yet selecting none, Mrs. Dibbs, as was only right, continued her flow of admiring praise.

Her mumbled utterance, however, was completely drowned by a torrent of vociferous speech across the room.

"Hullo! Are you there? … Who's speaking? … No, I'm Mrs. de Mumbles … Wrong number … Ring off, please. Exchange, I asked for Mayfair not Victoria. … Bother! You've cut me off again. … Hullo! Give me the supervisor. … Ce sont tous des brigands! Hullo! Hullo …  !"

She turned slowly like a top while her song continued, till the long cord entangled her, and Dudley, watching with his other eye, wondered what this particular illness was and which bottle she would presently seize from the cabinet and gulp down with a wry grimace. For he knew illness when he saw it, and all his sympathy was stirred.

"Any hope, Doctor?" he gabbled softly, choosing a sick-room phrase from earlier days. "'Ave a good time!"

"I shall complain to the directors! This service is atrocious! That's the third time you've given me the wrong number …  !" drowned his little offering, as the lady began to turn in the opposite direction, passionately unwinding herself again. And it was as she turned, presenting her back to the room for a moment, that Dudley saw a thick, dirty hand move cautiously towards the tall-boy behind him, where the pile of coppers lay ready for the telephone box. He watched this hand, he saw the fingers stretch, he observed them push two pennies close to the edge, he heard the coins fall soundlessly on to the soft floor carpet, and the same moment the hand was quickly withdrawn, and the cumbrous figure of Mrs. Dibbs stooped to pick them up. But she did not replace them on the tall-boy, the hand went towards her apron pocket instead. At which instant, using his marvellous sense of coincidence, Dudley produced a loud sentence that, he felt, was appropriate: " -- thief! -- thief, brigand!" he bawled in a rough male voice.

Startled out of her wits, trembling, she jerked herself upright. She said things. She was under the impression that she spoke under her breath, but her excitement was such that her language was audible far beyond the cage. Mrs. de Mumbles heard and turned sharply, her telephoning finished for the moment. She was angry. The char-cook-general faced her smilingly.

"'e's talking, mum," she said calmly.

"Oh, it's the parrot!" exclaimed her mistress. "I thought at first it was --" She stopped abruptly. A char was difficult to replace, wages were owing, too. "It is a talker, isn't it?" she finished blandly.

"Gilder-roy! Gilder-roy!" screamed Dudley in his shrillest tone.

"Oh, dear, we must stop that squawking," cried Mrs. de Mumbles, clapping her hand to her ears . "I wonder what he wants!" When she uncovered again the word "thief " was once more in the air.

Mrs. de Mumbles smiled in spite of herself, and Mrs. Dibbs observed the smile.

"It keeps on saying 'Gilderoy,' mum," she informed her employer, getting her word in first," so that's per'aps the name of the family where 'e lives. If it was put in the advertisement -- ."

"Thief, brigandthief!" yelled the parrot simultaneously.

"These birds 'as their naughty wyes, I've 'eard too, mum," Mrs. Dibbs tried to drown him. "They steal a bit sometimes. 'E's been told off before now, I shouldn't wonder."

The front door bell rang, the telephone bell rang, Maria, who was very big, stumped heavily down the passage, Mrs. Dibbs said in a loud voice, "There's the bell, mum," and Mrs. de Mumbles groaned audibly, making impatient observations to herself about callers, brigands, bells, having no time to get ready, and feeling very ill. She jerked across to the telephone. While waiting for the call, she kept repeating "Hullo, Hullo, Hullo! Is that you? Who are you? Supervisor, supervisor!" and staring straight at the parrot as she did so.

Accepting the compliment, and making a note of certain of these words for future use, Dudley realized that the little scene was ended. He had established himself as protector, at any rate. He and his hostess were friends and allies. The relationship was settled, and that was sufficient for the moment. He might now resume his interrupted nap again. He promptly did so. A moment later, eyes closed tight, feet planted securely in the centre of his nice thick perch, he floated back to the green branches with a forest of green leaves. A scented wind blew softly through his feathers, the sun was hot, countless pals and cronies squawked to him across the pleasant shade. One in particular, with bright eyes and gorgeous tail, floated down towards him through the sparkling air and perched on the swaying bough at his side. They were close enough to touch beaks and feathers. He caught the plash of a purple sea far, far below. His golden dreams rose up and swamped him. He dreamed of his mysterious Work …

It will soon (in captivity) develop a surprising sharpness of intellect. -- W. T. GREENE.

God made the cat that man might have the pleasure of caressing the tiger. -- M. MÉRY.

MEANWHILE the business in the flat went on in earnest. The Press said the season had begun, and Mrs. de Mumbles had come up from the country to prepare for one of her famous tea parties. There was much to be done. From the point of view of the helpers, permanent and otherwise, she herself was the chief thing to be "done"; but she was too occupied with her own immediate duties to bother about this. The invitations had gone out. She had to get herself ready.

These duties she performed to the incessant accompaniment of front door and telephone bells. Adroit from long practice, a certain system somehow emerged from the confusion. The noise, being continuous, did not disturb the dreaming bird who, even in sleep, kept one eye open, and both ears certainly. At intervals, thus, though too softly, sweetly, to be audible, he would say "Cuckoo" and "Hullo," the latter sometimes extended into "Hullo, supervisor." Mrs. Dibbs and Maria threw him vicious glances in passing. They, too, had their plans. Pickings on entertainment days were good. Mrs. Dibbs he had at once christened "Ma."

The stream of callers continued steadily till noon. A female secretary, engaged for these occasions, arrived to check over the morning's post quota of acceptances and refusals; a masseur, to keep Modom's body supple; an old Hungarian woman to manicure her nails; a coiffeur to arrange her hair. The confectioner brought cakes, the milkman cream, the florist flowers, all demanding cash payment at the door. There were scenes, long noisy arguments, language of a kind, and then the difficulty of settling these trifling sums in cash, for no one ever had any change, and pencils for signing receipts were also lacking. Coiffeur, masseur or manicurist supplied these requisites. There was a steady coming and going of messenger boys, and not a few tradesmen who refused to leave goods until "amounts previously owing were settled in cash. Telegrams arrived as well, and a man with six extra chairs. Maria, who had "Jest looked in in case Mother wanted a 'and," supervised the arrangement of these latter in corridor and drawing-room, while Mrs. Dibbs, with her gift of ready talk, managed the more obstinate among the collectors. It was a lively and tumultuous morning. Towards noon arrived, too, a smart maid, borrowed from a friend, who was to announce the guests, and her married sister, who was to preside behind the tea and coffee tables.

When the day was over, none of these would retire without their pay in cash, nor without various pickings of one sort or another. Maria, in particular, invariably withdrew to Kilburn, her naturally ungainly figure swollen to conspicuous proportions. Even jampots had been known to retire with her -- before Dudley came on his kindly little visit.

Mrs. de Mumbles, though aware of the general situation, accepted it with a kind of tolerant grumbling. Perhaps she was too lazy, perhaps she wanted her energy for other things, or it may be she felt herself unable to cope with it. She had allowed the system to grow upon her till it seemed impossible to put it right without involving a disruption of the little impecunious household. She would be servantless, no shops would bring supplies. What fluid money she had available she needed for telephones, messenger boys and helpers. Live and let live, was the result.

"They'll all adore the parrot," she observed at intervals. Dudley would be a great addition to her party, a kind of surprise. "They'll think I've taken to a pet," she chuckled. "And he's such a handsome bird, too. I wonder where he escaped from, the rascal!"

"'e's a biter, mum," ventured Maria, in the room at the moment.

"A biter?" cried Mrs. de Mumbles. "How do you know?"

"You can tell from 'is eye," Maria informed her. "It's a wicked eye 'e's got."

"Do they hurt?"

"To the bone, mum, with a reel biter," returned Maria, beginning a long story about blood poisoning.

"Then you'd better not go near him," Mrs. de Mumbles cut her short. "Parrots know whom they like. They don't trust everybody." She still chuckled inwardly over the bird's recent announcement. "I wonder whether he's a male or a female?"

"Oh, male, mum, I shouldn't wonder," said Maria, choosing instantly. It seemed safer on the whole, she thought. "'E looks a 'e," she added. "The language, too."

"Then he won't breed in here," suggested Mrs. de Mumbles vaguely.

"Not 'ardly, Mum," agreed Maria, "though some birds, I've eard, do lay in captivity, when they've got a mind to."

"What -- eggs?" enquired the other, surprised.

"Before dying," Maria informed her. "It's a sign of death, they say, because my father, 'e knew a bird once … "

"Please see about the chairs, the extra chairs," Mrs. de Mumbles again cut her short. She was listening to something the manicurist was saying about the bird's great beak. When beaks grew too long, the old Hungarian explained, they had to be cut, or the bird could not bite its food. She didn't do that sort of thing herself, but she knew a man who might see to it, perhaps. Most of the visitors to the bedroom that morning had something to say about the new visitor. The coiffeur, praising the plumage, asserted that it needed oil. He had some very special oil for feathers he could send along. The masseur spoke about parrot muscles which, he explained, were "subjec' to stiffening owing to catarrh." Parrots were very liable to chills and rheumatism. The majority of telephone calls, too, included something about the bird, so that Mrs. de Mumbles came to the conclusion her unasked visitor was a distinct acquisition that she must try and keep. Its food would not cost much, the cage she had already. And, luckily, she kept no cat. For several telephone calls had referred to the danger of the London cats.

The gist of all this idle chat had been duly absorbed by its principal subject, for Dudley's hearing, as explained, was marvellous, even in sleep. It was flattering, he accepted it with modest pleasure. To be the centre of interest was his natural due.

It was a reference to the London cats that first drew him away from his happy forest of dream and turned attention to something other than his own person. Cats -- London cats -- Gilderoy! Where, all this long time, was Gilderoy, he asked himself? But he found no answer, he dismissed the matter from his thoughts at once. His eyes opened for a second, encountering the head of his hostess being coiffed a few feet away, and gazing a moment at her, a phrase from the intoxicated scholar's household occurred to him. "Absit omen," he said very softly, then closed his eyes again and returned to his companions in the trees, preening his feathers a little before he did so.

Gilderoy, meanwhile, had made the most of his opportunities by leaving the flat -- he knew an "appartment" when he saw one -- and inspecting the roofs in the immediate neighbourhood. No one had yet noticed his presence. He made his exit by the kitchen window from what he considered an overcrowded dwelling. Before he did so a mouse in a quieter bedroom had also left the flat, and his tongue had sampled the quality of the London milk as well. He was feeling his oats accordingly, and the London roofs this fine March morning afforded him fresh air and entertainment. He felt pleasantly stimulated, full of beans he called it. Later, of course, he would have to be introduced to his hostess and the staff, and the parrot's help might be needed. He knew the bird would be the centre of attraction at first, and he was best out of the way till this nonsense was over. He resented a little, perhaps, his friend's habit of monopolising interest, but his native indifference soon mastered this. The fuss people made about the old bird he considered absurd. He must be a female after all, he decided.

His red head occupied with these reflections, his patched eye keenly roaming, he explored the roofs within easy access, observing numerous other cats where human eyes, among this forest of chimneys, would have seen no living outline. He judged these instantly, picking out friends and enemies, and knowing male or female at a single glance. Exits and entrances he likewise noted, ways of escape and corners where to hide. Nothing eluded his vigilant optics. His whiskers twitched, his tail went up, he shook his paws like lightning. He yawned, he stretched, he turned in slow examining circles. Occasionally his eyes peeped upwards into the air where swallows darted and pigeons wheeled from loftier buildings. But no expression showed on the flat ugly face. The soft blunt muzzle quivered very slightly, the bright unwinking eyes took in the facts. No more than that. Observation was detailed, absolute, comprehensive, but no action resulted.

For Gilderoy, despite his appearance, felt that birds were a line of adventure it was nicer not to explore too closely. It led too near home. Instinct, of course, was instinct, yet he recognised here a danger zone. He had a feathered friend; friendship and appetite, unless some day the force majeure of exceptional circumstances insisted otherwise, he must not combine. The claims of friendship, though irksome sometimes, must be respected. Gilderoy did respect them. He was a decent beast. There was a kind of intimacy that intruded too closely upon privacy. He drew a line. Dudley, in any case, he felt sure, was pretty tough. His age alone was unattractive.

Choosing now a dizzy edge, with a drop of fifty feet into a courtyard below him, he dozed comfortably in the morning sunshine. The grin of content seemed carved upon his flat face. The cheeks were not puffed, the whiskers motionless, the tail lay coiled among his tucked-in feet. It's tip hung in space. There was nothing to distinguish him from an ordinary stray London cat, numerous specimens of which were doing precisely what he was doing. All the Mildew Place cats, it seemed, were taking their morning sunshine on the tiles. Each one of the horde had, likewise, noticed Gilderoy and sized him up in a twinkling. He was not to be trifled with, they saw. The London freemasonry was a highly developed organism.

"None of them's got a King Parrot for a pal," was Gilderoy's last reflection under his flat-topped skull as he dropped away into a pleasant cat-sleep on his dizzy edge.

And while the two uninvited visitors was thus each minding his own business in his own quiet way, behaving admirably, the Tea Party in the flat below began to move. The table was spread, the guests arrived, Mrs. de Mumbles receiving them, the flood of conversation roared. To Dudley, listening, it was like the roar he once knew on the parrot's peak in Princes Island, when the whole vast spread of his native forest, stretching to the sky, echoed with the squawking, screaming concourse of collective speech.

His cage was placed where all could see him, and the story of his capture, exaggerated out of all recognition, was given over and over again, gaining new detail with each repetition. He had, apparently, bitten the porter, made countless eloquent remarks, had whistled, sung, spoken several languages, and, since he was now happy and comfortable, had obviously escaped from a home where he was not kindly treated. Dudley, the Grey King Parrot with the red tail, was admired, petted, coaxed to speak, then abused for his obstinate silence, by numerous visitors of either sex.

"Why should he talk if he doesn't want to?" said a big, eye-glassed man from one of the embassies.

"They know when they're well off," commented a lady. "They're uncanny birds. My husband once … " and she slipped into an interminable and pointless story about a bird that proved to have been, after all, a mere cockatoo.

"They live for ages," remarked another, "some say for a thousand years --"

"And no one," interrupted a third, "ever knows their sex, I'm told."

"Because both sexes lay eggs," commented a fourth, "even in captivity."

"It's lucky you don't keep a cat, Mrs. de Mumbles," from a fifth, "proverbial enemies, aren't they?"

Dudley, listening to the chorus of chat that never ceased, gave no sign that he did so. Aware that he was the observed of all observers, he remained adorable, but silent. He kept himself to himself; it was quite enough that he offered himself for admiration. Mute and dignified, he watched the game, the one unpardonable fault in which, he noticed, was to be without speech. To have nothing to say was unforgiveable. The players, even when they said nothing, always talked, and it was better to talk all at once than not to utter anything. Yet Dudley, if superior, did not emphasize it; if bored, he did not show it. He watched ringed fingers thrust tentatively between the bars; heard female voices assume a childish babbling tone as though they addressed a baby in its perambulator; listened also to numerous remarks about parrots in general, and about himself in particular that showed abysmal ignorance, yet he betrayed no hint of what he thought about it all. If depressed and weary, he mastered himself and the situation in this happy way -- by an impenetrable silence that was not without its grandeur.

Occasionally, without visibly moving his beak, he gabbled to himself, but so low that his "adnauseamadnauseamadnauseam " was not audible; and beyond this heavenly gabble he uttered no single sound -- nor meant to until the right moment had arrived, and this right moment, it turned out, was the tail of the noisy overcrowded party.

The majority of the guests had left; the rest hovered in the narrow hall over endlessly lingering goodbyes. These, as in his own practice, should have been brief, effective, neat, but this final little group made them verbose, incoherent, silly. A good exit-sentence seemed beyond them, they hovered over mumbled insincerities; the bow-out smile of their hostess, produced at the wrong moment, became a set grimace, so that Dudley, watching the prolonged performance, having already disliked the entire gathering, now positively felt loathing for its disappearing tail. Would it never end, this wriggling, noisy tail?

With the dignity due to perfect inner and outer poise, he observed the wearisome detail from the middle of his perch, the head cocked a trifle sideways, eyes boldly glittering, alert but undemonstrative. "I," his attitude suggested, "when I've had enough, just withdraw with my little bow and my kindly smile. If I add a word, it is a brief one, plain perhaps, but courteous. And on this, I retire!"

Several of these guests included him in their long farewells, waving a hand, a glove, or tweaking the bars of his cage. He was voted a "fine bird, but uninteresting because he wouldn't perform." A performance, certainly, he had not granted, for like any other artist he was not to be won too easily. Thus, only at the eleventh hour did he grant his favours to the late group in the hall, considering that the right moment had come at last.

He now, therefore, suddenly produced one of his best numbers with startling abruptness, entirely unprovoked, and without a hint of warning. So unexpected was it, indeed, that the women sprang back, taken completely by surprise. One of them screamed, a second stopped her ears and shut her eyes tightly but left her mouth wide open. The others, male and female, gasped and stared. Dudley, as intended, had made a really great impression.

His opening note was a penetrating shriek of such violence that the rubbish and bric-à-brac hanging on the walls positively rattled. This piercing shriek, rising and falling, was repeated seven times, and immediately following it, but in gentler and more musical tones, came the syllables he loved so dearly :

"Gilder-roy! Gilder-roy! Gilder-roy!"

There was affection in the voice, there was longing, passion, there was a note of summons, but there was a note of warning, too. Seven times in rapid succession the lordly bird produced this poignant call.

And the owner of the name, having long since left his dizzy edge and now biding his time in a cramped space beneath a plush sofa, heard it, and knew his hour had struck. His friend had not forgotten, much less failed him. It was the psychological moment for his introduction. His uncanny instinct guided him infallibly. If he now showed himself it must be obvious to all that he was the parrot's friend, and as a result he would not be kicked out into the street. On the contrary, he would be welcomed. He decided to act.

Gilderoy, therefore, in all his ginger frightfulness, puffed cheeks, torn ears, sprayed whiskers, flat skull, lean skinny back and unkempt tail -- Gilderoy, in his blaze of auburn beauty, his patched eye squinting more than ever -- emerged. He came into full view, marched across the hall, neatly picking his way between brown and buckled shoes, leaped soundlessly on to the table where the cage stood and then, to the amazement of everybody, deftly inserted a velvet paw between the bars within easy reach of the parrot's deadly mandibles.

There was a collective gasp. There was a hush of admiration.

It was the signal for a fresh outburst of human voices. Surprise, laughter, approval and dismay, each had its turn. One lady, subject to cat-phobia, stifled a scream and took her departure instantly, hardly finding breath to say good-bye; a second having already collapsed upon a broken chair, collapsed upon it again; others cried loudly: "A cat! A red cat! There's going to be a fight!" and asked where it came from.

Gilderoy's move, that is, produced exactly the impression he had calculated.

"Why, I do believe they know each other!" cried a discerning artist in a stock collar. "Gilderoy, of course, must be the cat's name. Look at them, will you? Just look at them!"

"Don't touch them! Don't interfere!" exclaimed others. "Just watch!"

For Dudley, faithful comrade that he was, rose gallantly to the occasion. He had known the warning call would reach the cat no matter where he hid, and his friend's trick was plain as day to him. He did not fail that friend now. Ashamed, perhaps, of his ruffianly appearance among these well-dressed folk, he played the game. "Dudley," as he loved to assure himself, "is not a snob."

When the velvet paw, therefore, came toward him through the bars, he gazed down at it with a moment or two of careful contemplation, then edged delicately along the perch until he reached it, lowered his dangerous beak very slowly, felt the paw with a tiny rubbing motion to and fro, and -- tenderly kissed it.

"Good-bye for the present," he then remarked in a quiet version of the Vicar's voice, but so low that no one seemed to hear him. The chorus, besides, drowned all except the most penetrating tones. The entire group applauded, the men drawing attention to the fact that the animals were obviously, if mysteriously, good friends, the women giving birth to expressions of ecstatic adoration that betrayed the maternal instinct lurking even in the dimmest females. During which, Red Gilderoy, dropping smartly from the table, arched his ugly back, stiffened his skinny tail into a ramrod, lifted his patched eye heavenwards and, purring loudly, began to rub himself affectionately to and fro against his hostess's pink silk stockings.

It was an inspired performance, and Dudley watched it with a philosopher's attention and the silence of a saint. Loyal thoroughbred that he was, he did nothing to divert attention from his pal. It was the cat's entrance, his sense of drama alone forbade.

"And where did you come from?" asked Mrs. de Mumbles in a friendly voice, for she liked animals. "I've never seen you before!" She stopped to stroke his back. "If you two are really friends I shall keep you, too, I suppose!"

No answer came, but Gilderoy increased his attentions, Dudley's self-obliterating silence deepened. Soon after which, though not soon enough for Mrs. de Mumbles who had to dress for an early theatre-dinner, the group took its final leave, voting the Parrot and Cat tea party an original and delightful entertainment.

Mrs. de Mumbles found herself, relatively speaking, alone; she had half-an-hour to dress for dinner; she found time, none the less, to give orders for the immediate welfare of her new visitor. One by one the "brigands" disappeared into the street, with their pay in cash, and various extras in their pockets … and ten minutes later Gilderoy was gorging himself with milk under Mrs. Dibbs' eye in the kitchen, she being partial to cats, while Dudley was crooning to himself in semi-darkness beneath a spotty and odoriferous table-cloth spread over his cage.

Mrs. de Mumbles, meanwhile, was gradually emerging from a larva-state, through a tight chrysalis binding sheath, into the full-blown glory of a dazzling night-moth. Her friends had sent their car. Nearly an hour later she took her departure, her last half-crown in her hand for the chauffeur, and in her mind a diverting story few of that afternoon's guests would have recognised, to explain her "unforgiveable lateness." Her last word had been a direction, foolish but well-meant, for the comfort and welfare of her new visitors.

"Cuckoo!" murmured Dudley and whistled two bars of his hymn.

The apartment fell gradually into a comfortable and soothing silence. Mother and daughter, after prolonged but fruitless attempts to make "Polly" perform, solaced themselves, first by cursing it as a "stupid beast," and then by eating as many of the sugared cakes and creamy chocolates as they calculated would not be missed. After which, having placed a basket for the "common-looking Tom," they, too, retired, Mrs. Ma Dibbs to her bed, Maria, with bursting pockets, to her policeman father's home in Kilburn, N.W.I.

The Grey Parrot delights to dwell in companies. … This instinct for companionship, so strong in all parrots, is especially strong in the Greys. -- W. T. GREENE.

Thine is the lore of Ra and Rameses.

GRAHAM TOMSON.

THE stillness deepened. An air of expectancy reigned over the silent flat, its focus in this deserted kitchen. It was the moment the two scoundrels had been waiting for -- their first free night away from home.

There was already a change in them, something new, an alteration for the better, an improvement, yes. It must be recognised, it must be acknowledged frankly. London life had affected them, each in his own way; it had intensified their processes. They were geared up, their wits sharpened, the intelligence of both biped and quadruped at its top notch now. This effect of cosmopolitan, of metropolitan, life was distinctly noticeable. The friction with so many other minds, after the monotonous lethargy of country existence, told at once.

If this result showed in the cat by deepening his instinct chiefly, until the mass of feline faculties accumulated through the centuries were in marvellously sharpened working order, it showed, with the parrot, in his predominant characteristic -- his mind. Dudley, in fact, found his entire store of experience ready to his claw and beak. All that life had so carefully stored for nearly a hundred years lay within instant reach. His riches of memory, his remarkable gift of speech, his powers of expression burst into full flower. He found he could draw instantly upon any item that he needed. London acted like a forcing house. He summed up in himself, it seemed, the whole collective wisdom of his race. He became the Super King Parrot. His earliest years in the great forest, his sea-faring days, his long period of study with the intoxicated scholar, his intervals in the library of another house, his quiet villègiature with Molly at the Muddlepuddle Manor -- all these, respectively, and as occasion required, gave up their dead.

And this brightening of intelligence, this intensification of consciousness due to the effect of London's crowded life upon the pair, must be recognised now once for all, since it explains the greater scope and freedom of the creatures' intercourse with one another. There seemed, henceforth, little, by way of idea and exchange of thought, they could not communicate.

This exchange seemed conveyed largely by the eyes, where humans, watching them, might have noticed nothing but a fixed empty stare. It was not so, however. Dudley and Gilderoy had expressionless, but never vacant eyes. Gesture, attitute and silence played their part as well, wireless whiskers and eloquent tail-feathers, while Dudley freely used his many-tongued voice. But eyes, perhaps, said most.

Thus, the deepening silence now over Mrs. de Mumbles' kitchen was not an empty silence Gilderoy, slowly uncurling himself from an affectation of innocent sleep, looked cleverly about him. The kitchen lay clean and clear, its utensils glittering in a silvery stream, the rising moon poured through the window above the tradesmen's lift. It was an open window. At his side stood the table with Dudley's cage upon it, shrouded by the spotty cloth. The cat, having taken in every detail at a glance, rose, arched his back, stretched his legs, yawned widely, and began to purr. They were short, sharp, eager purrs, of the kind that usually preceded vigorous action. They were, in fact, an announcement. Gilderoy had a definite end in view. He was about to do something.

The parrot heard these warning purrs, for he, too, was wide awake in his obscure retreat. At the moment, however, he permitted himself no response. He felt a trifle uneasy; he knew that what was coming would leave him out of it, at a disadvantage somehow. He maintained, therefore, that profound silence of which he was past-master, since doing, saying nothing lessened the chances of putting oneself in the wrong. From the occasional pauses in the purring, he guessed that Gilderoy was washing busily, and this washing, he knew, was significant. The cat, he divined, intended action presently of a very decided kind.

As stated, however, the astute and philosophic bird permitted himself no immediate recognition of his friend's preparations; no acknowledgement escaped him; he would not be precipitate. No hint of his own opinion, much less of his own intentions, broke the silence.

"Never enjoys himself!" reflected the cat on the floor below. "Can't -- I suppose." To which again, no reply was forthcoming, since Dudley behind his cloth could not see the shining eye that conveyed the comment, and thus had not received it.

"Work?" came from the floor a few minutes later, half challenge and half sneer. The cat, apparently, wanted a sign of some sort from his pal and used the best method to obtain it. As the whiskers sent the message this time, Dudley caught it. He noted the tone as well. There was a pause.

Any reference to his Work touched curiously deep emotions in the King Parrot's breast. A faint quiver ran along his nerves. The little heart almost missed a beat. He was considering his reply.

"If I can't work here," he replied evasively some minutes later, his voice very low, yet admirably controlled, "I can't work --"

He hesitated. Two words occurred to him.

"Nowhere," he concluded, rejecting "anywhere" as less emphatic.

He moved slowly along his perch and pecked a corner of the cloth aside so that he could now see his friend, a bit of the kitchen as well. The moonlight caught his noble head, his beak, and one penetrating eye. Thus partially visible, the coloured cloth about him as a robe, he appeared both impressive and mysterious. Clothed with wisdom and authority, he looked. For some minutes he gazed down his aristocratic beak at his friend, whose assiduous washing he found increasingly suspicious. And, indeed, Red Gilderoy's attitude just then was not exactly a drawing-room attitude, nor, strictly speaking, was it comme il faut even in a kitchen. His position was one possible, perhaps, to felines only, as of the acrobat artist who glances at the world backwards along his own spine. One fore-leg rose straight into the air, while a hind-leg projected at right angles.

Dudley prolonged his inspection.

"I perceive," he stated with cold disapproval presently," that you have an end in view." He relapsed into silence with his air of "What I have said, I have said."

Uncertain whether the remark was anatomical or psychological, Gilderoy chose the latter. He was out of his depth when Dudley indulged this highbrow mood. His friend was being rude to him somewhere, though he didn't quite know where.

"Umph!" came his brief, contemptuous purr. And he went on washing, not even turning his head. His mind was made up. He had, obviously an end in view. A twitch of the upright leg now informed his friend what this purpose was:

"The tiles to-night -- for me!" he announced, sitting up suddenly, his green eyes blazing. The tip of his tail twitched fiercely to and fro. He glared into empty space.

An ominous silence followed this ultimatum. Dudley became prey to a critical, a superior mood. Faithful by nature, he felt small sympathy with promiscuous amours. His own life was austere, though, as a rude man in the library once reminded him, when a week-end flirtation involved a trip to West Africa, enthusiasm must be high, reflection steady, before starting on the journey. Sex, too, should be definitely ascertained in advance.

"I, for my part," he now observed, "am chaste." It was offered as a statement of indubitable scientific accuracy.

"By what?" asked Gilderoy, without looking up.

"Stet," said Dudley sharply, believing it meant a snub, then slipping into the confused gabble in which it was his aggravating way to say extremely interesting things too softly to be audible. Two words alone emerged clearly towards the end: habeas corpus, which he considered even more annihilating than "stet."

He was offended, wounded, disappointed. With so much trouble and effort he had brought his pal to London! And now …  !

With an air of intense morality about him, he withdrew slowly along his perch till the spotty table-cloth concealed him. But he was of too generous a nature to feel hurt for long. He reflected for some minutes, then forgave. Cats, he told himself, after all is said and done, are cats, and tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner. There was nothing he did not understand, he remembered. Adventures, for some, are in the blood, though, of course, the finest adventures are those enjoyed -- er -- "by oneself."

He preened himself a little, comforted, taking a new pose upon his perch. The tail feathers spread out slightly. And Gilderoy, aware of the gist of his friend's reflections, if unable to follow them in detail, noted the altered attitude. He interpreted it with a general accuracy. A thousand stinging replies were open to him, of course, but instead he merely changed the conversation. He was too pre-occupied, perhaps, to be clever at his pal's expense.

"The night is find and dry," he signalled. "My friends expect me." He took a quick lick at an empty saucer. "Here's to Loose Moments," flashed his green eye.

There was a short sharp purr, a thud. He had made his exit through the half-opened window.

"Good-bye for the present," from Dudley, greeted the disappearing tail, followed by a mumbled "O si sic omnes and cuckoo bloody hell ab initio … " and a softly whistled "lead kindly light." He closed his eyes. He sighed. His claws opened and shut. His tail feathers, since there was none to admire them, drew in. He composed himself. He had, of course, his dreams which never failed him.

It was some time, however, before he allowed his dreams to master him. Recent events, the exit of the cat in particular, stirred deep reflections in his breast, as the occasional faint shivering of the smaller feathers betrayed. That reference to his Work had stirred mysterious emotions that still troubled him profoundly.

What was this "Work" he had to do? What was its nature? Did Molly herself know? It occupied him intensely, but in some remote portion of his being he could not quite reach. He both knew, yet did not know. What could it be …  ?

The wheels of reflection turned and whirred incessantly in his active mind, yet the secret remained hidden from him. Any reference to his loneliness, to his lack of companionship, to his isolation from his kind, to anything racial in a word, seemed to bear upon it. There was something he had to do, to achieve, to consummate, some job of importance to his race, a significant spot of work he owed as a duty to his kind and ought to achieve before he left the earth, or else admit that he lived in vain. When Molly told all and sundry that he had some tremendous Work on hand, she talked more wisely than she knew. Only, what was this WORK exactly?

He approached the matter indirectly now, aware from long experience that a frontal attack had no effect. A gentle yearning crept into his mood. His outlook over the narrow strip of moon-lit kitchen visible to him was tinged with mournfulness, his mood a minor one.

"What I really miss," he told himself, facing the naked truth, "is, perhaps, companionship. I have no pal. Gilderoy," he hastened to add, loyal to him even in his absence, "is all right, of course, but he's a quadruped, and has no wings."

He paused to nibble at his soft breast feathers a moment.

"In the daytime," he went on presently, "it's all right. I am all right, qui' all ri', I mean." He thought over the statement for several minutes, before he passed it. "It's the evenings," he added with emphasis. "In the evenings, I should enjoy someone to talk to, someone who knows -- er -- nearly as much as I do --" he gave a subdued little cough, a perfect imitation of the "ahem!" the Muddlepuddle butler used when he was about to prevaricate -- "to someone, at any rate," his tone more wistful now, "who has heard as much as I have heard. My evenings, I admit, are lonely."

The low voice trembled.

"Gilderoy," he went on softly, "has his own pals -- everywhere, but I," and his voice shook, "I am an exile. I dwell alone."

To divert attention from himself, he suddenly clasped his beak, one eye peeping downwards between his claws. But the rising emotion would not be denied.

"No one invites me -- never," he ended with a gulping sob that shook his little figure from head to foot, "I never have a party -- ever!"

The broken voice, the modulations of self-pity, the appeal for sympathy, above all the sob, were given, strange to say, in a distinctly female tone; they were, in fact, a perfect imitation of sounds produced in the country by Her Ladyship sometimes when Colonel Sir Arthur, forgetting Dudley's presence, thought himself alone with her. It was natural, therefore, that as a means of controlling his emotion, he now added in a gruff male voice: "Cut it out, my dear! For God's sake cut it out! Sob-stuff doesn't work with me! Cut it out, I say! Last week you were out six nights in the seven!"

Upon which the consistent bird immediately obeyed his own injunction, turning his attention to other matters. He pecked aside the spotty cloth that shut off his world. The moonlight, he saw, had climbed much higher up the wall. The china, pots and pans now glistened on the shelves. He noted tea-pots hanging by the handles; huge soup-tureens, countless jugs and cups. From inspecting these his eye wandered back to nearer home. He fell to considering his more immediate surroundings with close attention -- the interior of his somewhat bleak and dreary cage. Its severity he approved, it matched the ascetic sternness of his nature, of his present life, at any rate.

"My home," he told himself," is simple, because I prefer it so. "He indulged in a very light guffaw. "I have reduced life to its simplest terms," he conveyed by a cock of the head, a turn of the sleek neck. "I need essentials only."

He thought profoundly for some moments.

"To do without," he then pronounced, "is the secret of a happy life. Dudley, my bird," he added, after another passing guffaw, "what you can do without is added to you. And that's why I have everything," he chuckled, "per contra carpe diem blast yer gizzard dam."

His roaming eyes glanced about him at the meagre kitchen furniture, while thought wandered reminiscently to other days and other scenes. His long past presented a series of every sort and kind of home. He reviewed them swiftly, shaking his head gently as he did so. Every degree of comfort and discomfort had been his. He had stayed -- who more? -- in the houses of the great, the connoisseurs, the "tastey," and had experienced that priceless furniture which, being useless, was also comfortless. He had known ancient drawers that would not open, precious chairs intended to be worshipped but not sat in, Period tables and secretaires that shook and rattled when writers, their legs spread-eagled of necessity, tried to use them, and an assortment of antique "lovelies" that adorned the room, yet added teasingly to the nervous discomfort of its occupant. Hours, days, weeks he had spent in chambers that were museums merely, inducing an attitude of prayer rather than a state of soothing hospitality. Vulgar, pretentious, he considered this sacrifice of a living-room to a collector's vanity.

A faint snort passed his tiny delicate nostrils as he thought of it. Having beauty in himself, he, for one, did not need its excessive externalisation. Honest stuff he approved, but it must be solid, useful, practical, above all, comfortable.

He glanced round with a shiver of refined appreciation at the floor, the perch, the shining bars, the little gate. His eye caught the seed-pan with approval. It was one he could easily and comfortably get his beak into -- useful, in good taste. "Genuine stuff!" he commented, and climbed down and took a snack. He took a sip of water, too.

"Nice," he approved in a tiny voice, passing his club-shaped tongue round the cavities of his big, hollow beak, as memory brought a passing picture of her ladyship's maid for a moment, the smart young woman who offered him chocolates sometimes. "Yes, naice, distinctly naice."

Having dealt thus with his immediate surroundings, explaining them adequately to himself, he crawled back to the centre of his perch again, and turned his attention to other matters altogether. He closed his eyes …

The hours passed. The flat became lapped in deeper and ever-deeper silence. The moonlight drew its pool of silver higher and higher up the wall. The patched linoleum floor now lay in shadow.

While Mrs. de Mumbles, at some gay supper table, led her effervescent chatter in the direction of health, disease, smart life and being in the swim, survival of the soul, dressmakers, and eternity, Dudley, marvellous, mysterious Grey King Parrot, dealt firmly and practically with time.

He fell, that is to say, into a sound deep sleep.

Balanced on his perch as few bipeds know how to balance, his head lay down his spine, in a position few bipeds could achieve. His delicate, slim body was erect, yet every muscle in it relaxed and resting. He dominated his surroundings with magisterial and consummate ease, a masterpiece that no one, alas, was present to admire.

As ever, therefore, even in deep slumber, he admired himself.

The cat is not a commonplace creature when it loves. -- FEE.

He stood, an ebon crescent, flouting that ivory moon, Then raised the pibroch of his race, the Song without a Tune.

THE hours slipped away, while moonlight and silence reigned supreme. Under their magic influence even the pokey kitchen took on an air of some oriental palace. The cage itself, whose spotty cloth almost assumed the faded wonder of old tapestry, borrowed the semblance of a kiosque, a domed retreat of peace some Eastern potentate had built for contemplation or for secret pleasure. Moonlight, that transmutes dross into precious metal, transmuted Mrs. de Mumbles' kitchen in this way. The cage and its contents were certainly transfigured. They wore an atmosphere of dream and fantasy.

This atmosphere affected, naturally, the happy sleep of the sensitive and gifted bird. He dreamed of far blue seas, of silvery foam upon a shore of golden sand; of azure skies, of sparkling, care-free flights from tree to tree. Above him the vast slope of myriad green branches swept to heaven; below him in great conches, mother-of-pearl and opal, he caught the music of the sea's great liberty, the joy of playing fish that leaped to taste the sunshine, then splashed again. This sweetness of life, the wonder of it, this wondrous, gay, careless sense of liberty, poured through him like an electric flood. He heard the leagues of forest rustling; he dreamed of song, of laughter, of little beaks that opened wide for food, of warm soft feathers pressed tenderly against his own breast, of nesting time, of eggs …

Then, gradually, into his happy dream, another ingredient came creeping, imperceptibly at first and unawares, darkening its glory, but presently with more definite effect. The bird's golden fantasy grew troubled, insecure; there fell, as it were, a shadow on that brilliant landscape. The sea turned sombre, the stainless sky took on a hint of cloud. And the sleeping parrot perceived this change by means of his supreme gift of hearing. The disturbing new ingredient was sound. It stole upon him, apparently, from the deep undergrowth of enormous forest, or was it perhaps from even further away than that? It was neither a pleasant nor a soothing sound, although it held a kind of wild, harsh rhythm some might possibly have called musical.

Long past midnight it was when these bursts of primitive, half-savage music entered the kitchen with the moonlight and troubled Dudley's dreams. He stirred in his sleep; he woke; not gradually and in spots as human beings wake -- the whole of him passed from the unconscious to the conscious with a single rush. He was instantly awake all over, every nerve alert, every muscle taut, every sense and faculty at the acme of their effectiveness in a single second.

Above all, withdrawing his head from his spine so that he now faced the world, he -- listened.

The raucous, half-savage music came through the window from the world of roofs outside. From the desert of tiles this primitive jangle pierced the still night and banged his happy peace away. He heard singing, challenge, battle-cries; there were love-notes, too, abandoned, in poor taste, Dudley thought, without modesty or restraint. Saturnalia, he realized, were in progress, high above the sleeping world. On the dewy tiles, in the shadow of portentous yet protective chimneys, an orgy ran its course beneath the great shocked moon.

Listening, he shivered slightly. Plucked straight from his sweetly fantasy of Liberty, this license, as he felt it, jarred him. For, high above the general chorus, he now heard Gilderoy's voice, his singing voice, than which Dudley knew no more horrible sound in all his vast experience of life. Worse yet, it was the cat's erotic singing voice. Red Gilderoy, bolshevik of most abandoned type, when he cast restraint aside, was singing a love-song to some shadowy mate.

The grey parrot with the red tail listened with his greatest concentration. His reactions at first were confused, his feelings thrown into considerable disorder; and a second shudder, more pronounced than the first, ran down his perfect little body. Nothing proclaimed more plainly how deeply he was stirred than the fact that, physically as well as mentally, his balance was affected. He wobbled, saving himself only by a deft movement in the nick of time. He broke into audible and rapid speech, the utterance both troubled and indifferently spaced:

"Gotohellcutitout! Doctoranyhope? Goodmorningdudleynildesperandumgilder-roy! Cutitoutcuckooitdoesn'tworkwithmeblastyoududley!" he gabbled with tremendous speed, using a mixture of tones and voices, both male and female.

This confusion, however, lasted for a moment only, and he was speedily master of himself again, the recovered self-control showing itself by silence and immobility. Clasping his iron beak with one claw, he gazed steadily at the strip of moonlight which filtered through the worn cloth over his cage. He was seen at his most effective thus. There stole over his dim outline an appearance that magnified him, something of infinity, something inscrutable and magnificent, without beginning and without end, yet something so perfectly proportioned that it was suggestive beyond all possible words. Had Rodin seen him at this moment a finer, if a different, chef d'oeuvre would have enriched the world.

Stirred to the depths, the parrot's mind was working. He was thinking -- creatively …

The wisdom of this self-effacing King Grey Parrot from the Pico de Papagio was nowhere more apparent, perhaps, than in his frank recognition of what he conceived to be certain fundamental facts of life. These were based, of course, upon his study of the race which had adopted him. He, thus, recognised two human faculties to which no limit could be set: credulity and the power of self-deception. People believed what they wanted to believe. Nor did he make that common mistake, due to lack of humour, of excluding himself; he applied his dictum to himself, as well as to Gilderoy. Believing he was of irresistable beauty, he understood that Gilderoy thought similarly. The cat, he meant by this, found Dudley beautiful.

Another fundamental fact experience had taught him was that no friendship is always and entirely secure. This seemed particularly applicable to the present moment. No friendship in the whole world, as he now considered the point more closely, is permanently secure.

Life being a process of evolution, all forms as yet imperfect, there is a point where resistance is overcome, where even the noblest traits break down. The honest will steal, the honourable betray, the personal confidante -- the pronoun was his own -- disgorge her horde of private, trustfully-given intimacies, the virtuous indulge. A stronger emotion must always overcome a weaker one, as the seasick, informed that the ship is about to sink, forget their nausea before the more powerful attack of fear.

Even gentle-men, Dudley was aware, before the assault of prolonged hunger, had been known to devour their own kind with appetite and relish. From his tree-top in earlier days he had looked down upon a feast or two. He knew.

Trust in a pal, therefore, which accepts blindly -- swallows -- everything at face value, he considered naive, and upon this fundamental weakness the parrot now turned the full powers of his mind. The flowering of this mind, the stores of memory easily accessible, have already been referred to. He was very practical about it. If his love for Red Gilderoy was steady, his trust, on the other hand, was qualified by the limits his wisdom set to it. There were moments when the fire in the cat's eyes became neither more nor less than a red lamp of warning, since it announced the birth of an emotion so fundamental as to be threatening, possibly overmastering. All other traits, even the noblest, might yield to its assault. If friendship is built upon moral qualities, appetite remains ever instinctive and all-devouring.

In that "all" and "devouring" Dudley perceived, he himself might easily be included. Appetite, though its reign were brief, would provide no leisure for reflection afterwards. So far as he was concerned, it would be too late.

Listening now to his pal's discordant love-songs on the tiles, he recognized the noise as instinctive and elemental. The red lamps, he knew, were well alight in Gilderoy's bloodshot eyes. The sweet yearning for union, for companionship, which had lately throbbed in his own little breast quickly waned before the assault of a stronger and more sinister feeling. No union, he realized, could be more complete than that between the eater and his meal. The cat and the swallowed -- er -- mouse, have become absolutely one.

To put it bluntly, Dudley felt scared. This union-business was unpleasant. And his faculties, now working at top-notch, his sense of coincidence helping, revived a memory opportunely -- a sallow faced French governess reading poetry aloud to herself when he was "asleep" in his cage. It was doubtless her tone of voice, rather than a full understanding of the actual words, that made him remember it:

Nuzzing in zis world is single, All zings, by a law divine, In anozzer's being mingle; Wy not I wiz zine?

And it was the last line he now crooned over and over to himself, as one who whistles to keep his courage up, as he listened to Gilderoy and visualized his sharp teeth and gleaming eyes beneath the moon outside.

Hearing the half-savage orgy, he was glad that he sat inside his cage, secure from any tactile attention on the part of his otherwise trusted friend. What there might be to eat upon the tiles, the bird could not know. Gilderoy might, of course, have satisfied himself already with something, and return his own attractive self again. The parrot took no chances. He now edged sideways along his perch, taking up a position as far removed as possible from all the bars at once. Before settling down, however, he rubbed his formidable mandibles to and fro against the metal rods, sharpening and polishing his beak. His mind worked brilliantly, furiously. Nothing, alas, he discovered, can be larger than its own container. The cage, he considered, was a trifle small. Planted firmly in the geometrical centre, and as far removed from the outside world as possible, he waited. He mastered a slight inner trembling, so that it remained inside. "Tempusedaxrerum coeterisparibus," he whispered, "and the more I can look like a very hard stone, the better." He did so.

How long he stood thus is difficult to say, but that it was half an hour at least seems certain from the subsequent position of the moon. A faint sound first disturbed his reverie, even before the huge shadow fell upon the cage. The parrot was alert and ready, therefore, for anything that might happen. He perceived instantly that a moving outline cast this shadow; it was a living shape; and this living, moving shape stood on the window-ledge, silhouetted against the moon, now sunk well towards the horizon of the roofs. The outline was thus magnified.

"That's Gilderoy," decided the observant bird.

He did not move; he kept stone-still upon his perch; his head was cocked at an angle, which enabled both eyes, instead of merely one, to watch the situation. The cat, he noticed, was engaged in an occupation he particularly disliked. He was licking his chops. He looked, against the sky, enormous, and Dudley wished passionately that he himself were bigger. Yet even diminutive size, he remembered, if perfectly proportioned, may be as impressive as the bulk of mountains. And this comforted him a little. He shifted one claw a fraction of an inch.

Gilderoy instantly noticed the movement and looked up sharply. He stopped licking his chops. He stared fixedly. But if Dudley believed himself prepared for anything that might happen, he was not prepared for what then did happen. He was the first to admit it. None of his accumulated wisdom afforded a word of guidance in such an eventuality.

Gilderoy, perched on the window-sill, began to sing.

Lifting his flat-topped head so that it was silhoutted against the lovely moon, the torn ear more noticeably torn than before, the whiskers, so to speak, all over the place, he opened his mouth to its full extent, flung back neck and shoulders, and yowled his song into the night, but distinctly at the parrot:

Oh, sexless bird, When you're interred, The world will lose A great recluse!

O saintly life That knows no wife, No pretty leg, Nor e'en an egg!

Chaste and aloof, You scorn all proof How, where, or when, Or cock -- or hen!

During this hideous caterwauling, which Dudley rendered into words in so masterly a fashion, one thing was particularly noticeable -- that the parrot, namely, at once memorized the sound, adding a new number to his repertoire. That he could have translated the dismal wail into purest poetry, while simultaneously committing the actual row to memory, proved that his faculties were functioning at their very highest. The forcing-house of London life proved, indeed, remarkable. His rendering, moreover, was inspirational and obviously from the heart, not merely free verse which is prose cut up into lines of unequal length without music or rhythm. The words, being of course his own, he accepted as complimentary, their challenge as praise, their insults as playful flattery. Was the sublime bird, perhaps, laughing at himself a little? The loving on the tiles had stirred him to the depths where his mysterious secret lay. Besides the sneer, there was pathos, passion, poignancy in the wailing song, and the language was indubitably his own.

Instinct and reason, which rarely appear together, being mutually self-destructive, now worked in combination in him, and at their highest. His face, as he listened, wore a rapt expression. He trembled. First one section of feathers shivered, then another, as catspaws of wind ruffle a lake's smooth surface in different spots. His claws opened and shut, sure sign of ecstasy. And at the end of the song he spoke, using inaudible tones he did not mean Gilderoy to hear.

What he said, however, was drowned by the noise of an attic window opening somewhere on the roof, by loud curses in an angry male voice and by the clatter of objects hurled violently in the direction of the singer. Three lumps of coal, a child's sandshoe, a chisel and a broken hair brush fell in a rattling shower on the tiles. And Dudley knew the number was ended because, though Gilderoy did not stir an inch, he twitched his ears and did not resume his song.

The shower of objects having likewise ceased, the parrot repeated his interrupted remarks:

"Gratis," he murmured, "satis," adding, as though uncertain which was best, "stet stet stet Dudleydudleydudley jamsatisgratis."

Gilderoy's ears twitched, proving that he caught the murmur, but he did not move, and Dudley's instinct warned him that he was still a bit above himself. Though his attitude on the window-sill suggested a certain weariness, the beast was still emotionally over-wrought, and therefore dangerous. The parrot observed a hint of insolence about the tail he could not approve. He decided to say something else but louder this time. He used Latin when a fuss threatened, or when he felt frightened. When the scholar used Latin, he remembered, the people he used it on rarely did anything aggressive. It made them quiet rather:

"De mortuis," he now offered in a kindly, audible voice," nonsequitur bona fides locus standi Dudleydudley Gilder-roy."

At the sound of his own name, the cat slowly turned his head towards the cage, stared fixedly a moment, then fell abruptly to licking his chops again.

There came a pause of several minutes.

"Tired a bit, physically," thought Dudley, with relief. "Can't come in," he said presently aloud. "I'm dressing errata stetstetstet -- "

He stopped in the middle, because Gilderoy likewise stopped that horrid licking of his chops. The parrot, cautious and intensely watchful, waited for the next action, which came almost at once. Gilderoy dropped suddenly from the window-sill and leaped soundlessly upon the table beside the cage. The two movements were so rapid that they seemed a single one. From where he sat, the spotty covering intervened, but though Dudley could not actually be seen, he knew that the cat was staring fixedly, peering at him closely through the semi-transparent cloth. The brilliant green eyes were appraising him. And the parrot was glad that he had recently altered his own position, yet sorry that he could not improve it still further. Being in the geometrical centre of the cage, this was impossible. He therefore contented himself with the next best what he believed was known as rigor mortis or rigor de mortuis. Whispering this under his breath, he assumed a rigid immobility, at the same time looking as old, as tough, as unappetising as his beauty would allow. His eyes seemed of glass, set in a form of stone no planetary teeth could possibly chew. Though he kept his back to the cat, he was ready for instant action.

It was at this very second that a stroke of luck came the parrot's way. He caught a whiff of fish, actually, he believed, of herring. Gilderoy, evidently, had found a dust-bin or an open attic window. The cat had eaten!

This emboldened the bird a trifle, so that he dared to move his neck, which was getting a little stiff. He at once also took on a less repellent air, preening a tiny bit, and looking less like stone. He found his courage, he found his voice as well. In order to convey what he had to say, he edged a shade round the cloth and showed himself, and he chose a sentence he had heard a thousand times and one that never failed to induce gentleness in his friend.

"Saucerofmilk! Saucerofmilk! Milkforgilderoy!" he mentioned. It was a question, more than a statement. "Hungry?" was what he really wanted to ask, but this was as near as he cared to get to it.

It worked like magic. With a short, sharp purr of pleasure, Gilderoy dropped to the floor, found the saucer placed long ago by Mrs. Dibbs, stuck his muzzle into it and fell to lapping audibly. Hearing this, and watching the performance, one of the things the cat did delicately and neatly, Dudley advanced a trifle further into view. A sigh of relief escaped him audibly. He felt a little stronger now. His nervousness had passed. It came to him, indeed, that his pal had meant no evil, thought none, that, after all, he had merely been enjoying himself upon the tiles as any other cat might have done. That kind of orgy was natural to him. He had not once thought of eating -- er -- any bird at all. Dudley, feeling a trifle ashamed of himself, edged further along his perch, showing more of himself beyond the cloth. He would allow the cat a full view of his beauty.

"Perhaps I wronged the beast after all," ran through his generous mind," though he did try make a nonsense of me, rather!"

"Good morning! Good morning!" he said pleasantly in Nannie's voice. "Have you washed behind the ears?"

The tone was conciliatory and friendly. The cat, having finished his milk to the last drop, shook his whiskers rapidly, passed a paw over his muzzle, and sprang up again beside the cage. He sat down comfortably and stared full-eyed at his friend. The next moment he lifted a front paw and shoved it just inside the bars.

"Thankmybloodystars! Fed up to the back teeth," produced Dudley in a sailor's voice, as cocking his head, he gazed down at the paw now without a sign of alarm. He moved over a few steps, lowered his beak, and rubbed it against the velvet, then withdrew again to the centre of his perch, while Gilderoy left his paw lying where it was for a full minute longer. Then he, too, withdrew, dropping soundlessly to the floor again.

A difference in the psychology of the pair of ragamuffins betrayed itself here. If Dudley's spirits rose when he was praised and admired, those of the cat remained unaffected by any compliments. To all such cozenings and sweetness, as to anything in the nature of congratulations. he was entirely indifferent. It was mere boredom, icy boredom, that made him stiffen his tail in the air, smile, purr, and strut to and fro, rubbing his sides against anything that offered, when humans adored him in affected voices. Since he liked being scratched on the throat and under the ears, or having his back stroked, he gave humans the signs that induced them to continue. When he wanted anything from them, he knew the signs he must produce in order to obtain it. He used the race, made use of it. If Dudley accepted praise with pleasure because it was, of course, his due, Gilderoy accepted it because he had an end in view. With the parrot a heart was touched and warmed; with the cat an appetite was tittilated.

He had stuck his paw between the bars, because he liked the tickling of the hard mandibles against its underside.

He now stood in the centre of the linoleum floor, half way between his basket and the door. He paused for some seconds, then sniffed, puffed out his frightful cheeks, cocked his patched eye towards the passage, and flashed a message to his pal:

"Someone's on the stairs! It's the Frump!"

Dudley, having heard her key rattling in the street door some minutes before, allowed himself a smile of inward superiority -- inward merely, because a parrot's face is not allowed by nature to show a smile outwardly. He made no reply. He snuggled his head down into the soft feathers on his back. Gilderoy, strutting delicately as though the linoleum were red-hot, entered his basket and curled up in a ball. When Mrs. de Mumbles peeped cautiously into the kitchen a few minutes later, both her visitors were, apparently, fast asleep. It was, according to the clock, just after three in the morning.

The Frump, as Gilderoy's manner plainly labelled her, did not however follow her guests' example and sleep at once. She lay in bed, thinking of her debts, her brigand servants, and of one or two new acquaintances she had made that evening, who must be invited to her next Tea Party. With her Library beside her, she lay making her little plans. She did not open the Christian Science Bible, nor consult the Telephone Book and Peerage on her counterpane, but reached out presently for her bag. She wished to make sure that the names, addresses and telephone numbers of her new friends had been correctly jotted down. The capacious receptacle of what she most valued on earth was, as ever, ready to her hand, but the fumbling among its Woolworth assortment of goods could not produce the item she wanted. Instead, after a frenzied search, she drew out another item -- a half-sheet on which was scrawled a copy of an advertisement some kind friend had helped her to compose. She read it over with approval. It has already been posted. It would appear to-morrow -- or rather, this -- morning. It did.

FOUND: Red-tailed grey parrot. Name apparently Gilderoy. Mixed language, whistles hymn tune. Owner please apply, etc.

In a neighbouring column of the same newspaper appeared a second advertisement, as follows:

LOST: Grey King Parrot with red tail. Name Dudley. Very handsome. Refined vocabulary. Whistles "Lead Kindly Light." Talks Latin. Finder please communicate. Expense refunded. Muddlepuddle, etc.

One variety especially, called the King Grey Parrot by dealers, having red feathers combined with the grey, is stated by them to make the best talker of all.

W. T. GREENE.

WAKING early next morning, but not so early that Gilderoy had not already improved the shining hour by disappearing, Dudley enjoyed himself with a little soliloquy. He had slept well; the kitchen was warm; his cage was supplied with seed, water, and a bit of hard wood -- end of a broken umbrella -- for him to bite. He felt good.

Chosen at random from his immense repertoire, the soliloquy was Language, but the bird's gift of making even the vilest words sound beautiful has already been referred to. He thought what he was saying lovely, lovely, and the entrance of Mrs. Dibbs midway through the performance, he accepted as a tribute. It was sheer admiration, she could not stay away. Her attitude, indeed, proved this, for she listened with avidity, chuckled, smiled, then held her sides till her bulky figure shook all over.

"Get on with it, my Luffeley," she chuckled, bending her tousled head to listen better. "It sounds like 'ome to me. You'd buck a corpse up, you would!"

The language did not frighten her as it had frightened the taxi-driver. She sat down to enjoy it in greater comfort.

Whereupon Dudley promptly stopped, turning one frigid eye upon her with such fixed malevolence that she grew uncomfortable and presently resumed her preparation of the early cup of tea, first for herself and then, some twenty minutes later, for her mistress.

"The milk 'adn't come, Mum," she excused the delay in the bedroom down the passage, "and that bird's languidge is somethin' 'orrible, and not fit for a married woman to 'ear." To which there was no reply, her mistress being too sleepy or too lazy to take it in. Mrs. de Mumbles, anyhow, had awakened, it seemed, in a far from happy mood. Her nerves must have been on edge, for presently Dudley was the unwilling spectator of a scene. Some fifteen minutes later it began, a quarter of an hour the parrot had passed in motionless silence, deaf and irresponsive to Mrs. Dibbs' oft-repeated: "Speak up, birdie! Give us a bit of chat! Let 'er go, my Luffeley, and don't mind me!"

Mrs. de Mumbles was heard shouting for her morning paper, screaming, in fact: "Hasn't it come yet? Why don't they bring it? I shall change the shop. This irregular service is atrocious. What a flat! What a street! What a servant !"

"It's on your bed-table, mum, with your letters," Mrs. Dibbs informed her in a lifeless tone.

"Then why couldn't you tell me so?" asked the irascible voice. "How am I to know unless you you tell me?"

"Yes, mum. I put it there with the tea."

"It was late, anyhow," asserted the other, as loud as ever.

"The milk come late, mum. The piper was earlier than usual."

"Give it me, please," said Mrs. de Mumbles crossly, and began to search through the advertisements, when the telephone rang, and she plunged headlong, even at this early hour, into a world of receivers, exchanges, supervisors, numerals, b's for butter, p's for peacocks, hulloas, can you hear me, wrong number, you've cut me off, and various other material that Dudley felt could be somehow described obiter dicta.

He did not utter the phrase, however, but kept it to himself. For about an hour, indeed, he kept everything to himself, and sat very quiet, thinking about Molly, the Vicar, Hawley the butler, the French governess, and others far away at Muddlepuddle Manor House. It was this train of thought that led him to another country-home memory, so that "Lead Kindly Light" became audible in a whistle, so dulcet that his hostess, finding herself in the passage at that moment, came in to listen.

"At 'is luffely hymn, mum," explained Mrs. Dibbs.

"I can hear," was the rather sharp reply.

They stood listening, but a moment only, and it was Dudley himself who precipitated the "scene." He was pleased to see his hostess whom he loved, while he resented being explained by the other woman whom he loathed.

She reminded him suddenly of the sea, and he changed his Number to abruptly one from his ocean days.

He did this without warning, slipping from canticle into cursing.

It was evident he was guilty of a slight mistake here.

He made the change too quickly, perhaps. Humans, he forgot at the moment, are apt to be slow in the up-take, and nine out of ten habitually say "What?" to almost every remark. Mrs. de Mumbles, at any rate, carrying her newspaper, clapped it before her face, as though by not seeing the bird she need not hear it either.

"Refined vocabulary, indeed!" she cried, visibly shocked by the appalling language. "But it's awful -- terrible!" She stopped her ears, realizing that the newspaper in front of her face could not prevent her hearing. "It's the vile servants who taught him that," she thought. "Disgusting people! All servants are vile and disgusting! Don't I know it … thieves … foul language … liars …  !

Only instead of thinking this to herself, as she imagined, she said it aloud, looking straight at Mrs. Dibbs as she did so. Her own ears being stopped, she persuaded herself that her audience likewise heard nothing. And Mrs. Dibbs, taking the remarks as personal, immediately replied. Both women talked at once, while Dudley listened, picking up what he could, and interjecting occasional observations as they occurred to him. He loved a good loud noise. He raised his own voice to meet it. He yelled "splendidemendax" and "deusexmachina," bawled "anyhopedocter," followed by his own name and Gilderoy's, but without drawing any special attention to himself. The other talkers were too interested in their own remarks it seemed, to listen to him, even when he screamed his loudest.

From the cook he gathered a few sounds he rather liked and could easily copy if he wished: "isn't right nor fair," he caught, "if one cared to tike it so a hinsult I ain't accustomed to," and "like me wiges at once, thus very di," with "ain't treating me proper" repeated many times.

"You may pack up your things and go this very morning," Mrs. de Mumbles' voice rose very distinctly. "Your things, please, this time -- not mine. "

"Your things," repeated Dudley, in a rasping tone, "not mine," for he liked the sound of the sentence.

Mrs. Dibbs became infuriated. "Are you haccusing me," she shouted, "of anything, per'aps ?"

What then followed was too confusing even for the parrot's marvellously acute hearing. Both voices shouted at once without an instant's pause. From his hostess, he selected "search warrant and Scotland Yard … Commissioner a friend of mine," and from Mrs. Dibbs he chose "slander … damages … slander … damages … I know my rights … " but if he made a note of these, he soon decided, since the pair made more noise than himself, that he would withdraw. The affair had become boring. He retired into his thoughts … from which, some half-an-hour later, he emerged to find quite another atmosphere about him and his cage. The voices were subdued, sugary almost. "We'll say no more about it," he heard, and "'arf-a-crown a week, mum, if you put it that wy'll be all right," and then "you can bring me my hot water now, Mrs. Dibbs," from his hostess as the couple finally separated.

Mrs. de Mumbles evidently emerged from the battle half-a-crown down.

"And when the messenger boy comes," cried the lady in the passage, "there's a telegram for him to take. It's about the parrot. Don't forget it."

"I'll see that I get it too, wot's more," Mrs. Dibbs observed to herself when she was alone again, and it was not the water she referred to.

"Ma! Ma! Your things, not mine! Your things, not mine, please!" exclaimed Dudley, copying his hostess's voice perfectly, while the can was filling. He stared out of the window.

"'old yer jaw!" muttered the cook, going out with the can. "I won't 'arf throttle yer, I won't."

"Arfacrown! Arfacrown! Slanderdamages ! Your things not mine! Ma! Ma!" followed her down the passage.

Thus, the morning in London town began to pass pleasantly enough, and though Dudley missed his friend, he took what fate offered. He observed and listened. To the various callers he paid little attention beyond noting them, and few of these, in any case, penetrated further than the door, which was kept on a chain. Only messenger boys were admitted inside -- diminutive creatures who sat waiting patiently in the dark corridor, whispering remarks to Dudley in the hope that he would talk, then trying to understand Mrs. de Mumbles' confusing instructions through the bedroom door. With expressionless faces and wide-open eyes, with "yes, mum""no, mum" in piping voices, the mites shot away, invariably saying "Good-bye, Polly" to Dudley as they passed the kitchen. He never replied audibly, but merely cocked his head, staring with uninterested eye. The other callers, he was glad to note, were not admitted. There were gruff-voiced men insisting upon money, still sterner men with blue papers they desired to serve personally, lads with parcels demanding cash payment, a foreigner who came by appointment to value pictures, silver, clothes, a telephone employè to mend the box, and another who wished to remove the pennies that filled it to bursting.

To these callers Mrs. Dibbs offered comments according to their kind, comments she knew were effective, since she produced them with such easy, glib conviction: Mrs. de Mumbles was ill, she was dying, she was out, she was in the country, she was abroad, or -- in extreme cases only -- she was "'aving a fit, a "little fit of sorts and the doctor's with 'er." The visitor was asked to call again -- to-morrow, next week, when she had recovered, or "it's best to write."

Besides the messenger boys, only one other caller was admitted, though after careful scrutiny -- a friend in difficulties, a woman who not only penetrated to the bedroom for a lengthy talk, but left it later with a fur coat and a silver teapot which Mrs. de Mumbles had intended selling that very day for her own pressing needs. The friend, however, came first, for Mrs. de Mumbles had a large and kindly heart.

Dudley's other faculties, all this time, of course, had not been idle; he not only observed and listened, he reflected, too. He knew, for instance, quite well what a telegram meant. That a telegram had been sent to Muddlepuddle had not escaped him. That an answer might come, he guessed. It did come. About noon, during a little siesta he was taking, he heard his hostess read it aloud to someone in her room, the masseuse, in fact, who evidently detested birds:

"Many thanks for wire sending our butler Hawley to-morrow to identify."

"You'll be well rid of it, Madam," commented the other voice. "They're noisy, treacherous things -- with a poisonous nip too -- "

"But he likes me -- this one," came the decided reply. "He's lively and very handsome. I'd keep him if I could."

"Oh, a he, is it, Madam? Ah! They're better, I believe. "

"If a man called Hawley comes," Mrs. de Mumbles shouted instructions to Mrs. Dibbs, "you can let him in. He's the butler where the bird belongs to."

Having listened thus far, Dudley then turned his head and attention in another direction -- to the window-sill, where Gilderoy now suddenly appeared.

"Miaow! Miaow!" produced the cat, and jumping down walked over to the saucer of milk that the cook had left for him, while the parrot watched him steadily with one eye that showed disapproval. It was greed, not friendship, that had brought him back. He was, besides being a most inconsiderate guest, dirty and dishevelled, Dudley noted, as he lapped his saucer dry. There was a new notch in his ear, a tuft of matted hair on the top of his flat skull had blood on it, the paws, as he drank, kept their claws out a little. His appearance, in fact, was dreadful.

But Dudley, noting all this, loved him just the same, for he saw behind externals and knew the cat felt similarly towards himself. He was a faithful pal for all his odd behaviour. It was against his nature to be direct, and all he did was slantwise.

"Ahem!" Dudley opened the conversation audibly. "Cuckoo, Gildy!

The cat shot a swift glance upwards. His friend, he perceived, had something important to communicate. He finished his milk first, however, then, licking a drop from his whiskers, he sat up and stared.

A violent conversation followed between the two ragamuffiins, although a silent one. Feathers, whiskers, tails, claws, and pose of heads and shoulders conveyed the details. Part of the time the parrot turned his back and gazed out of the window, and Gilderoy, even when most attentive, washed himself. He seemed indifference personified. "I was a sacred animal," his attitude proclaimed," before even the Ibis or the Hawk were heard of! I may listen, but I need not show that I am interested!"

Dudley, accustomed to his friend's little ways, said what he had to say with dignity. A telegram had been sent to Muddlepuddle Manor House, and an answer had been received, Hawley was coming here to "take me back." He emphatically did not say "home," nor use the personal pronoun in the plural. "Take me back," was what he stated.

Having expressed himself fully, he then closed his eyes as a sign that he had finished. He had given the warning, indicating also that he did not wish to be taken away, and that it was up to Gilderoy to help. To the flow of vehement comments the cat then offered, he paid no attention whatever, though he made sure that he heard them. Gilderoy was annoyed, and showed it by saying rude things about his friend's sex, about having brought him to town was enough without having to rescue him from the ignominy of recapture, and about many other things besides.

"It keeps warm still," Dudley changed the conversation after fifteen minutes or more. "On the whole," he added pleasantly.

"I'm sweating," agreed Gilderoy.

Dudley, detesting coarse language, assumed an air of heavy consideration.

"Somewhere," he gabbled softly, "there's a true home for each of us, I suppose."

Gilderoy, by rubbing against the skirts of Mrs. Dibbs who had just entered, conveyed that he was independent of any home, and that where he found himself at a given moment was home enough for him. But Dudley, having explained the situation and given his warning, spoke of other matters.

"A bas les Boches! Goodbye for the present! Ma! Your things not mine!" he shrieked at the hated Mrs. Dibbs, and caught the outline of his pal as he shot out again to explore the tiles. He broke into a loud guffaw. "Ma! Ma!" he roared again.