Eden Phillpotts
The Human Boy Again
Published by Good Press, 2020
EAN 4064066096717
Table of Contents
"
TO MY DEAR FRIEND,
MARK TWAIN,
FATHER OF 'TOM SAWYER' AND
'HUCKLEBERRY FINN,'
THESE HUMAN BOYS,
WITH SINCEREST REGARD.
THE DOCTOR'S PARROT
No. II
THE DOCTOR'S PARROT
When Johnson maximus, young Corkey's cousin, left Merivale, he went to sea, and a very curious thing happened. He went into what is called the mercantile marine, which means liners, and not battleships or destroyers; still you see a good deal of the world, and have not got to fight for your country, but only for yourself. A pension is not so certain in the mercantile marine as it is in the Royal Navy; but, Johnson maximus told Corkey, when he came off a voyage from the East Indies, that he was hopeful. He had seen a good many curious things and brought home several, including a parrot, chiefly grey with a good deal of red about its tail. But what was far more wonderful than the parrot was the reason that Johnson maximus had brought it home.
He had brought it home, and also a very fine tiger's skin, as gifts to Dr. Dunstan, and when Corkey reminded him very naturally that he had always hated Dunstan as much as anybody when he was at Merivale, and been jolly thankful to leave and go on to the Worcester, training ship for the mercantile marine, Johnson maximus admitted it, but confessed that, looking back, he had found it different, and felt that Dunstan was an awfully good sort and that he owed him a great deal. But all the same, Johnson maximus never would come and see the Doctor in after life. Corkey asked him why, and he said he wanted to remember the awe and terror of the Doctor, and thought, if he ever saw him again it might not be the same; because, since the Merivale days, Johnson had seen so many queer places and things, including his own captain in the mercantile marine, who, Johnson maximus said, was himself one of the wonders of the deep.
Of course Johnson maximus left Merivale long before I came there. He was, in fact, nearly twenty when he sent the parrot by young Corkey; and it seemed that the Doctor had never had a gift from an old pupil until that time; and though Corkey said he thought the Doctor would rather have had almost anything than a parrot, still it was so; and he took the parrot and the tiger skin; and Corkey told me that Johnson maximus got a letter of four pages from Dr. Dunstan, thanking him for these things, and telling Johnson many facts about parrots in general.
The great point about the parrot was not so much its appearance as the thing that Johnson had taught it to say. Simply looked at from the parrot point of view, it was grey with a black tongue, and curious white lids to its eyes that went up and down like blinds. It climbed about its cage with its claws and bill, and had a way of eating nuts, especially walnuts, which was rather amusing. We hoped that it might have learnt some sailor words and would bring them out some day when least expected: but if it knew them it never spoke them. It only said three words, and they were rather cheek; but they were rather romantic in a way, when you knew what young Corkey knew and was able to tell me.
It was this: that Milly Dunstan and Johnson maximus were undoubtedly engaged in secret during his last term at Merivale. She was just an ordinary little squirt of a girl, with nothing to look round after but a lot of hair, and eyes that happened to be uncommonly blue by some accident; and, naturally, the moment Johnson went into the mercantile marine, she forgot him and turned her attention to other chaps, until old Dunstan sent her to a boarding-school. But she jolly soon made him let her come back again, and she was back some terms before the parrot arrived.
Then the parrot settled down and suddenly said (after it had been at Merivale four days), "Dear Milly Dunstan, dear Milly Dunstan"; and after that the wretched girl chucked about ten chaps and blubbed in secret for hours, so Corkey said, and let it be known to the sixth that she was true to Johnson maximus, because through many and many a watch on the trackless main, when he ought to have been resting from his labours in the mercantile marine, he had sat hour after hour by the parrot and repeated, doubtless many millions of times, the footling words, 'Dear Milly Dunstan.'
I don't think the Doctor was so pleased about it as Milly was. Certainly he did not cry, and Corkey said if the parrot had begun by speaking, Dr. Dunstan might have considered it cheek on Johnson's part and sent the parrot back with the four-page letter; but seeing that he had accepted it before it said "Dear Milly Dunstan," he couldn't well return it. Besides, in the meantime, Johnson maximus had set sail for South America, and Steggles foretold that he would bring another parrot back from there which he might train to say something even stronger. He told Milly so, and rose her hopes a good deal; but Steggles also told her that she needn't get excited about it, because her father would never let her marry a chap in the mercantile marine, and that sailors have a wife in every port. This was that same Steggles who did many things at Merivale in the past, but he was now exceedingly old, and expected at any time to be taken away. Many believed he was nearly eighteen, but he had nothing much to show it except experience.
The first thing to do was to give the parrot a name, and Milly told us in triumph that she had made the Doctor call it 'Joe.' Of course this was the Christian name of Johnson maximus, though I believe the Doctor had quite forgotten that. Anyway, 'Joe' is a very good name for a parrot, and everybody got very fond of him, and old Briggs lectured on him and told us that parrots reach a great age, and have often been known to live a hundred years and more, owing to their healthy diet and the number of bites they take to each mouthful, and their habit of never worrying whatever happens. Old Briggs himself is frightfully keen about fruit and nuts and such things, and I believe, in secret, he hopes he'll live a hundred years too. But nobody else does. Steggles discovered a likeness between 'Joe' and old Briggs. They shut their eyes in the same way certainly, but 'Joe's' eyes are like grey diamonds, and old Briggs's, through many years of looking through microscopes at seeds, and bits of seaweeds, and stones, and so on, have got a sort of film over them, and are not up to much now, even with two pairs of spectacles to help them.
Well, 'Joe' was as good a parrot as ever you saw, and there is no doubt that he would have outlived everybody at Merivale and got to be a sort of heirloom in Dr. Dunstan's family, if he had been spared; but after he had been there two years—at the beginning of his seventh term, in fact—the great and sorrowful death of the parrot took place; and such was the general feeling about him that there would certainly have been a public funeral if the Doctor had allowed it.
Mathers went further, and wanted it to be a military funeral and have the cadet corps out with reversed muskets; but Mathers, who is merely Mathers minimus really, though his brothers have long since left, is a chap who is like a girl in some ways, being easily made to laugh or cry. To show you the peculiar sort of ass he is, I may say that he always writes home letters of dreadful anguish at the beginning of the term, and then, when the holidays really do come, seems never to want to go home at all! Trelawny says this is contrary to nature, and will end in pure insanity for Mathers; but Fowle, on the other hand, says that Mathers is already mad. I heard Browne, the mathematical master, speak about Mathers too—to Mannering, a new under-master.