“Is it to tell me this that you have written to me to come?” I asked with a certain animation.
“Yes. And if you had as much sense as the talking parrot I owned once you would have read between the lines that all I wanted you here for was to tell you what I think of you.”
“Well, tell me what you think of me.”
“I would in a moment if I could be half as impertinent as you are.”
“What unexpected modesty,” I said.
“These, I suppose, are your sea manners.”
“I wouldn’t put up with half that nonsense from anybody at sea. Don’t you remember you told me yourself to go away? What was I to do?”
“How stupid you are. I don’t mean that you pretend. You really are. Do you understand what I say? I will spell it for you. S-t-u-p-i-d. Ah, now I feel better. Oh, amigo George, my dear fellow-conspirator for the king—the king. Such a king! Vive le Roi! Come, why don’t you shout Vive le Roi, too?”
“I am not your parrot,” I said.
“No, he never sulked. He was a charming, good-mannered bird, accustomed to the best society, whereas you, I suppose, are nothing but a heartless vagabond like myself.”
“I daresay you are, but I suppose nobody had the insolence to tell you that to your face.”
“Well, very nearly. It was what it amounted to. I am not stupid. There is no need to spell out simple words for me. It just came out. Don Juan struggled desperately to keep the truth in. It was most pathetic. And yet he couldn’t help himself. He talked very much like a parrot.”
“Of the best society,” I suggested.
“Yes, the most honourable of parrots. I don’t like parrot-talk. It sounds so uncanny. Had I lived in the Middle Ages I am certain I would have believed that a talking bird must be possessed by the devil. I am sure Therese would believe that now. My own sister! She would cross herself many times and simply quake with terror.”
“But you were not terrified,” I said. “May I ask when that interesting communication took place?”
“Yesterday, just before you blundered in here of all days in the year. I was sorry for him.”
“Why tell me this? I couldn’t help noticing it. I regretted I hadn’t my umbrella with me.”
“Those unforgiven tears! Oh, you simple soul! Don’t you know that people never cry for anybody but themselves? … Amigo George, tell me—what are we doing in this world?”
“Do you mean all the people, everybody?”
“No, only people like you and me. Simple people, in this world which is eaten up with charlatanism of all sorts so that even we, the simple, don’t know any longer how to trust each other.”
“Don’t we? Then why don’t you trust him? You are dying to do so, don’t you know?”
She dropped her chin on her breast and from under her straight eyebrows the deep blue eyes remained fixed on me, impersonally, as if without thought.
“What have you been doing since you left me yesterday?” she asked.
“The first thing I remember I abused your sister horribly this morning.”
“And how did she take it?”
“Like a warm shower in spring. She drank it all in and unfolded her petals.”
“What poetical expressions he uses! That girl is more perverted than one would think possible, considering what she is and whence she came. It’s true that I, too, come from the same spot.”
“She is slightly crazy. I am a great favourite with her. I don’t say this to boast.”
“It must be very comforting.”
“Yes, it has cheered me immensely. Then after a morning of delightful musings on one thing and another I went to lunch with a charming lady and spent most of the afternoon talking with her.”
Doña Rita raised her head.
“A lady! Women seem such mysterious creatures to me. I don’t know them. Did you abuse her? Did she—how did you say that?—unfold her petals, too? Was she really and truly … ?”
“She is simply perfection in her way and the conversation was by no means banal. I fancy that if your late parrot had heard it, he would have fallen off his perch. For after all, in that Allègre Pavilion, my dear Rita, you were but a crowd of glorified bourgeois.”
She was beautifully animated now. In her motionless blue eyes like melted sapphires, around those red lips that almost without moving could breathe enchanting sounds into the world, there was a play of light, that mysterious ripple of gaiety that seemed always to run and faintly quiver under her skin even in her gravest moods; just as in her rare moments of gaiety its warmth and radiance seemed to come to one through infinite sadness, like the sunlight of our life hiding the invincible darkness in which the universe must work out its impenetrable destiny.
“Now I think of it! … Perhaps that’s the reason I never could feel perfectly serious while they were demolishing the world about my ears. I fancy now that I could tell beforehand what each of them was going to say. They were repeating the same words over and over again, those great clever men, very much like parrots who also seem to know what they say. That doesn’t apply to the master of the house, who never talked much. He sat there mostly silent and looming up three sizes bigger than any of them.”
“The ruler of the aviary,” I muttered viciously.
“It annoys you that I should talk of that time?” she asked in a tender voice. “Well, I won’t, except for once to say that you must not make a mistake: in that aviary he was the man. I know because he used to talk to me afterwards sometimes. Strange! For six years he seemed to carry all the world and me with it in his hand. …”
“He dominates you yet,” I shouted.
She shook her head innocently as a child would do.
“No, no. You brought him into the conversation
