The two princesses in the story of Riquet with the Tuft were not more unlike than Joey and Matilda.

The appearance of Matilda is Quakerish, and even shabby. She has an eye like a piece of dull green marble. She is affectionate and polite, but cold and passionless. To judge by the perfect and consistent propriety of her demeanour she might have been a favourite pupil of Mrs. General. Even if she swears or blows her nose she does it with an air of such intense superiority that it seems like an answer in the Catechism.

It is small wonder that Matilda feels superior, for her intellect is supreme. She is not proud of this, for she is too well-bred to wish to dazzle strangers with her brilliance, and her chief flow of conversation is reserved for the circle of her intimates. She came to pay me a visit the other day and was very reticent. “She is too much of a lady to talk to us,” my old nurse said; but though she would not hastily confide, she tried to keep up our spirits by a little innocent amusement; and after bleating like a lamb for a quarter of an hour on end, she gave us A flat on the tuning-fork till tea time.

Now, Joey is all green and gold to the eye. He recollects the Valley of the Amazon, and “bright and fierce and fickle is the south.” His topaz iris waxes and wanes as the pupil grows large and onyx-like or dwindles to a mere pin’s head. He loves passionately, and his hate, deep as the Black Sea, is vindictive and remorseless. Music works in him a frenzy of delight; the sight of friend or foe fills him with an emotion which chokes utterance. Jealousy runs like swift poison in his veins, swiftest and most poisonous when he thinks of Matilda, finished, feminine, and intellectual, a perfect lady.

Once, in time long past, there were passages between Joey and Matilda. They were placed side by side, and as Joey looked on that demure Quakeress, her dove colour unrelieved except by two plumes of sober crimson; as he gazed on that marble eye while Matilda huskily and rapidly repeated the name of the kitchen-maid, Joey was aware of an emotion beautiful and strange. Self-control is a foreigner to that hot southern nature, and without a pause for thought he extended a claw—it was all he could do—to the lady.

In a moment Matilda stooped and bit it; and as he screamed with pain and anger she dropped it and burst into a hoarse fit of laughter.

Joey never offended in this way again, but this repulse is the reason of his deep, revengeful jealousy of Matilda.

Another simple scene recurs to my mind. Joey was in the drawing-room, Matilda in a room just above; the doors of both were open. Joey could therefore hear when a passing friend engaged Matilda in conversation. His angry excitement burst all bounds at last, and “Pop goes the Weasel,” sung with agonised fervour, came floating up the stairs. Matilda listened with her head on one side, and then sang slowly and impressively a few bars of a species of Gregorian chant. Silence fell below.

Now when they sit side by side they are leagues apart. Joey is viciously watching for any mark of preference given to Matilda, more ready than usual to drive his beak like a sledge-hammer at the finger of the unwary. And Matilda is calmly occupied in observing Joey. Some time in the course of the next seventy years or so she will begin to reproduce Joey; to indicate the way in which he spreads his tail like a fan and grubs in seed and sand, uttering half-audible exhortations to himself, which a stranger would take for imprecations on things in general. How satisfying it would be to an angry man if he could say, “Come on, Joey” in such a tone.

But they do not often sit side by side, for, though you would not think it, Matilda occupies a lower social station than Joey. While his home is in the drawing-room Matilda is the life and soul of the kitchen. Does this humble Matilda? On the contrary; she knows that the true gentlewoman is at home everywhere. If she is brought into the drawing-room she is neither embarrassed nor elate; only a pleasant and discreet reserve takes the place of a free flow of conversation. When she returns to the kitchen she talks rapidly for a long time, and is believed to be describing the things she has seen and commenting on the conversation.[2]

Alas for the sterner sex! When Joey undergoes an enforced eclipse in the pantry he abandons himself to the situation. He may be heard whistling “Pop goes the Weasel” line by line with his attendant. But this is no honest geniality; for if he is carried back to the drawing-room, and finds waiting for him a friend of higher social station, he turns and bites, if he can, the hand that late has fed him. Perhaps it is Matilda’s intellectual interests that preserve her from such vulgarity. She devotes herself to observation for the education of her mind, and when she is not observing she is recording the results of observation. The reproduction of simple sounds comes quickly, for she is a slave to realism. The screams of the peacock, the failing note of the cuckoo, cuck-cuck-oo, the angry mew of the cat, are rapidly and all too accurately reproduced. So, too, the kitchen-maid, before she had served her apprenticeship, was wont to hear her own sad name in corners cried in tones of growing exasperation. We were then living in a town; Matilda’s apartment gave on the street, and the errand boys helped her out with the performance.

But, according to the law of her kind, this was a little precipitate of Matilda. She should have let the kitchen-maid grow into a cook; she should have let her live a long and honoured life, and should then have tenderly renewed memories of old days when her name would echo upstairs and down to hurry laggard steps. I cannot decide if this is a want of tact or a supreme instance of tact in Matilda. It cannot, at any rate, be a want of memory, for Matilda has just begun swearing; and as she has been with us for some years, and none of us habitually swear, this must be a sudden revival of memory. It is said to be a very clear and life-like revival.

Probably as for Lovelace, so for Matilda, stone walls would not a prison make, for iron bars do not make any thing like a cage. She drags the door upwards with her beak, and holds it with her claw while she squeezes through like an egg sucked through a bottle-neck. This performance drives Joey to the verge of mania. He, too, pulls up his door, but he does not know how to hold it, and it bangs down again and leaves him voiceless with rage, while Matilda is running about as gay as a lark.

But the other day I found Matilda securely imprisoned. Her door was bound with red tape. As mere knots can present no difficulty to an intellect like hers, it was certainly the symbolism which she respected.

Yet with all these qualities of mind and character, there are one or two points in which Joey excels. Joey wets his sugar. He deliberately dips first one end and then the other into his drinking-trough, and when it is half dissolved he eats it. He tried to soften a piece of wood in the same way the other day—how fruitlessly Matilda knows. Joey has a perch made out of the branch of a tree, and from his perch his toys depend on pieces of string and tape; he owns a cardboard matchbox, and an old tin pencil, and such-like treasures. One by one he ruthlessly destroys these, so some strings are always hanging empty. But sitting above them, Joey can test which are empty by their weight, and pulls up only the heavy strings. It is not, however, in practical matters that Joey is seen to the best advantage. His is the artist’s temperament; he has a soul for music. Given a braying harmonium and Joey loose, his foes are scattered; but the piano is, so to speak, his forte. “I am convinced,” as Lady Catherine de Burgh says, that Joey would have been a delightful performer had his health allowed him to apply. As it is, he attends chiefly to the cultivation of the voice. He seats himself on the shoulder of the meanest performer, or marches up and down from shoulder to wrist; he spreads his tail like a fan; he swells to twice his usual size; his eye goes in and out like the magic-lantern star which sends happy little children to bed with the nightmare. Then the performer plays a weird Scotch air, such as the “Lyke-wake dirge” (one of Joey’s favourite pieces), whistling the while, and Joey bursts into song. He does not whistle as when he is performing “Pop goes the Weasel,” but he sings with a piercing, strident voice, high and low, pitching with singular skill somewhere near the note, grace notes thrown in according to taste. After Scotch songs give him Wagner hot and loud. In the middle of a performance of the Preislied a stranger once called; but he was happily a reticent man....

But above all there is this: Joey has a heart. It is not a very admirable heart. Its fickleness is beyond description; he hates more hotly than he loves; but the heart is there. He will hear his friend’s voice in the house and get mad with anticipation, piping broken fragments of indescribable song. He will follow such an one with low, skimming flight, and will bite any hand except the dearest that tries to bring him back. He is easily deceived—a lovable fault—and a deep voice or a rough sleeve will make him tolerate a woman under the impression that homespun means a man. But where his heart is concerned pretence is vain, and I can imagine Joey dying of a broken heart, though I can imagine him more easily still dying of a bad temper. But Matilda’s heart is warranted unbreakable, and is as cold and hard as her marble eye. And I sometimes fear that Matilda is growing a little coarse: a new cook came the other day, and was taken to the cage because the parrot “generally has something to say to a stranger.” She burst into a long harangue, of which the only word that could be distinguished was “forget” (it is thought she was declaring her unalterable devotion to the predecessor); but she ended all too plainly, “I don’t care for you.” Her new hostess firmly replied, “And I don’t care for you,” upon which Matilda screamed loudly.

If there is any truth in re-incarnation, it must be that cynics revisit this world as parrots. The punishment would be horribly appropriate. The man who has disbelieved in the reality of the higher emotions shall have these emotions, but be able to express them only in broad farce. An artist, ardent, vindictive, and cynical has been travestied with the form of Joey. He is animated with the passion which made him plunge his stiletto into an enemy’s heart, as in his re-incarnation he tries to drive his beak into a hand. He is met by iron bars and a mocking laugh. Dusk gathers over the sky, that mysterious, familiar beauty stirs his heart; forgetting and forgiving, and he hopes forgiven, he would say good-night to his friends. But the whisper comes in cockney intonation, “Jowey, well, Jowey.” He hears the voice of a friend, and would hail him, but “Pop goes the Weasel” rises to his beak. He is kindled as of old by the Pilgrim’s March, and bursts into song. But the voice comes hoarse and comic, and laughter greets the kindling eye. All the highest, the best, the strongest feelings of his nature turn in expression into broad comedy, and the reason is that when he was a man he felt these emotions and profaned them by cynicism.

I once met a decrepit old woman who lived on 7s. 6d. a week. She took a rapid review of the Universe and Life, and closed it by telling me that “things was just about coming to a Grand Pitch.” She will never be a parrot.