MIGGLES

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 543, 21 December 1928, Page 3 (Supplement)

MIGGLES

f By

A. WOLSELEY BUSSELL

IGGLES was really far too disrespectful a name for such a venerable person. There were all sorts of guesses at his age; the dealer had said he was fifty, but the Farrars, who had had him only ten years, did not know for certain whether he was twenty or a hundred. His handsome grey coat with the red waistcoat gave no indication of his age; his climbing powers suggested the agility of a boy, his choleric little eye the traditional retired colonel. But his language was of all time, and on the rare occasions when he dipped into his vocabulary' of insult, a cloth was usually thrown over his cage. Generally however he spoke very little, and only what he had picked up from the Farrars; excursions into his evidently lurid past were infrequent and discouraged- And he was most inconsistent, for you might spend an afternoon trying to teach him something and he would appear to learn it slowly and with difficulty (although sometimes I have suspected from his expression that he made the process look rather more difficult than it was); yet now and then he would come out disconcertingly with some casual phrase not hammered in but picked up by chance. But for the most part his conversation consisted of a croaking “Mothaw” repeated to exasperation and only varied by a string of raucous cries like the baying of a klaxon. His pi&ce de resistance, produced only when his cage was put outside on a sunny day, was the first two lines of “Tipperary” sung In a clipped falsetto in which every word was quite clear. But either his voice could not quite compass it, or else the person who taught him had no ear, for the high note on the “ —ry” was always rendered about half a tone too high. I found out later that the Farrar daughter Mary had been his teacher. It was shortly after her death at twenty that I got to know them, and I had never met her. The parents were dour Scots, slow spoken and reticent, living with the parrot as their only companion in a large house they had bought on the old man’s retirement. His grim, lipless mouth and fierce eyebrows had little but hardness in them, and only his eyes ever betrayed a trace of tenderness. As for his wife, she was meagre and sad and talked hardly ever. She had that long stretch of lid from eye to lifted brow that gives such a look of unintelligent but tragic resignation to some women, and her sunken mouth lay between two deep furrows running from nose to chin. What the old couple’s previous history had been I never knew, nor if they had lost other children. I came to know the old man on Lodge business, and used to go up to his house for the evening now and then. I was new to the district and he had not been there for long, and consequently I found out little about him but what he himself told (which was almost nothing) and once a dark hint from a neighbour that “he had his sorrers.” But I gathered that Mary had been the flower and the light of their old age, and that Miggles was loved chiefly because he had been her pet. There was continual feud between Miggles and Mac, the big black and white tom cat. Mac would crouch watching the parrot by the hour, his eyes malevolent with frustration, while Miggles in his cage turned grave somersaults with an insulting unconcern, secure in the knowledge that his enemy could never get him. Once, they told me, Mac had tried conclusions with him, and instead of taking refuge in the impregnability- of his fortress, he had given the cat an uncomfortable indication of the power of his great beak. X only once heard him talk, besides the song and his monotonous “Mothaw.” I had come up to the Farrars’ house in the afternoon, and found that I would have to wait for the old man. As I was something of a familiar by then, Mrs. Farrar had no compunction in leaving me in order to get tea, for the little housewife scorned a servant although they could well have afforded one. I sat down on the sofa and started to read, after trying unsuccessfully to get Miggles into conversation. But after watching me steadily for five minutes without moving a feather or an eyelid, he spoke at last in a hoarse whisper that was yet ludicrously like the falsetto of his “Tipperary.” And his words were: “George, if you don’t I’ll kill myself!” He startled me, you may be sure; but I heard the old lady leaving the kitchen, and she quickly threw the cover over his cage. * * * It was not till a week afterwards that 1 came to the house again, and the first thing that I noticed was that the parrot’s cage was gone. “Why, where’s Miggles?” I asked. Old Farrar looked steadily at me and said: “Mac got him at last on Sunday.” He never moved a muscle or his face as he spoke; only the grim mouth compressed a little more when he had finished. But the old lady hr.d hurried from the room.