The Spread Eagle and Other Stories

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"I can't explain it," said McTavish. "But even if I never have seen
her--I love her."

"I have heard of love at first sight--" began Miss MacNish.

But he interrupted eagerly. "You haven't ever experienced it, have you?"

"Of course, I haven't," she exclaimed indignantly. "I've heard of
it--_often_. But I have never heard of love without any sight at all."

"Love is blind," said McTavish.

"Now, who's quibbling?"

"Just because," he said, "you've never heard of a thing, away off here
in your wild Highlands, is a mighty poor proof that it doesn't exist. I
suppose you don't believe in predestination. I've always known," he said
grandly, "that I should marry my cousin--even against her will and
better judgment. You don't more than half believe me, do you?"

"Well, not more than half," Miss MacNish smiled.

"It's the truth," he said; "I will bet you ten pounds it's the truth."

Miss MacNish looked at him indignantly, and in the midst of the look she
sighed. "I don't bet," said she.

McTavish lowered his glance until it rested upon his own highly polished
brown boots.

"Why are you looking at your boots?" asked Miss MacNish.

"Because," he said simply, "considering that I am in love with my
cousin, I don't think I ought to look at you any more. I'm afraid I got
the habit by looking at your sister; but then, as she has a husband, it
couldn't matter so much."

Miss MacNish, I'm afraid, mantled with pleasure. "My sister said
something in her letter about your wishing to see the house of your
ancestors. Miss McTavish is out now--would you like to look about
a little?"

"Dearly," said McTavish.

VI

Miss McTavish sent for Mr. Traquair. He went to her with a heavy
conscience, for as yet he had done nothing toward raising the ten
pounds. At her first words his conscience became still more laden.

"Traquair," she said, "you mustn't tell him yet."

It was all Traquair could do to keep countenance. "Then it's fortunate I
haven't," said he, "for you gave me a free hand."

"Consider it tied behind your back for the present, for a wonderful
thing is going to happen."

"Indeed," said Traquair.

"You wouldn't believe me when I tell you that the silly man is going to
fall in love with me, and ask me to marry him!"

"Although you haven't offered me a chair, my dear," said Traquair, "I
will take one."

All in a burst then, half laughing, half in a grave kind of excitement,
she told her old friend how she had played housekeeper first at Brig
O'Dread and later at Beem-Tay. And how, on the latter occasion, McTavish
had displayed his admiration so openly that there could be but the
one climax.

"And after all," she concluded, "if he thinks I'm just a housekeeper,
and falls in love with me and asks me to marry him--I'd know the man
was sincere--wouldn't I, Traquair?"

"It seems to me," said Traquair, "that I have never seen you so
thoroughly delighted with yourself."

"That is unkind. It is a wonderful thing when a girl of position, and
hedged in as I have been, finds that she is loved for herself alone and
not for her houses and lands, and her almost royal debts."

"Verra flattering," said Traquair, "na doot. And what answer will you
give?"

"Traquair," she said, "I'm not a profane girl; but I'm hanged if I
know."

"He is a very wealthy man, and I have no doubt a very kind and honest
man."

"He is a very cheeky man," smiled Miss McTavish.

"No doubt--no doubt," said Traquair; "and it would leave you to the
honest enjoyment of your houses and lands, which otherwise you propose
to hand over to him. Still, it is well for a Scot to be cautious."

"For a Scotch Scot," said Miss McTavish. "I should be an American Scot
if I married him. He tells me they are noted for their daring."

While they were thus animatedly conversing, word came that Mr. McTavish
had called in the hope of seeing Miss MacNish.

"There," said Miss McTavish, "you see! Go down to him, Traquair, and be
pleasant, until I come. Then vanish."

Traquair found McTavish smoking a thick London cigarette upon the steps
of the side entrance, and gazing happily into a little garden of dark
yew and vivid scarlet geraniums with daring edgings of brightest
blue lobelia.

"Will you be making any changes," asked Traquair, "when you come into
your own?"

McTavish looked up with a smile and handed his open cigarette case to
the older man.

"Mr. Traquair," he said, "I'm young and a stranger. I wish you could
find it in your heart to be an uncle to me."

Traquair accepted a cigarette and sat down, first assuring himself that
the stone steps were dry.

"If I were your nephew," said McTavish, "and came to you all out of
breath, and told you that I wished to marry Miss McTavish's housekeeper,
what would you say?"

"I would say," said Traquair, "that she was the daughter of a grand
family that had fallen from their high estate. I would say, 'Charge,
nephew, charge!'"

"Do you mean it!" exclaimed McTavish.

"There's no more lovely lass in the United Kingdom," said Traquair,
"than Miss--Miss--"

"MacNish," McTavish helped him; "and she would be mistress where she
had been servant. That's a curious twist of fate."

"You have made up your mind, then," said Traquair, "to claim your own?"

"By no means--yet," said McTavish. "I was only speculating. It's all in
the air. Suppose uncle, that Miss MacNish throws me down!"

"Throws you down!" Traquair was shocked.

"Well," said McTavish humbly, "you told me to charge."

"To charge," said Traquair testily, "but not to grapple."

"In my country," said McTavish, "when a girl refuses to marry a man they
call it throwing him down, giving him the sack, or handing him a lemon."

"Yours is an exceptional country," said Traquair.

Miss MacNish appeared in the doorway behind them. "I'm sorry to have
been so long," she said; "I had to give out the linen for luncheon."

McTavish flung away his cigarette, and sprang to his feet as if some one
had stuck a pin into him. Traquair, according to the schedule, vanished.

"It seemed very, very long," said McTavish.

"Miss McTavish," said Miss MacNish, "has consented to see you."

"Good Heavens!--when?"

"Now."

"But I don't want to see her _now_."

"But you told me"--Miss MacNish looked thoroughly puzzled--"you told me
just what you were going to say to her. You said it was all
predestined."

"Miss MacNish, it was not Miss McTavish I was thinking of--I'm sure it
wasn't. It was you."

"Are you proposing to me?" she asked.

"Of course, I am. Come into the garden--I can't talk on these steps,
right on top of a gravel walk with a distant vista of three gardeners
and a cartful of sand."

"I must say," said Miss MacNish, "that this is the suddenest thing that
ever happened to me."

"But you said you believed in love at first sight," McTavish explained.
"You knew yesterday what had happened to me--don't say you didn't,
because I saw you smiling to yourself. You might come into the garden
and let me say my say."

She didn't budge.

"Very well then. I will make a scene--right here--a terrible scene." He
caught her two hands in his, and drew her toward him so that the keys at
her belt jangled and clashed.

"This is preposterous!" she exclaimed.

"Not so preposterous as you think. But what's your first name?"

"I think I haven't any at the moment."

"Don't be ridiculous. There--there--"

She tore her hands from him and struck at him wildly. But he ducked
like a trained boxer.

"With everybody looking!" she cried, crimson with mortification.

"I had a cable," he said, "calling me back to America. That is why I
have to hurry over the preliminaries."

"The preliminaries," she cried, almost in tears. "Do you know who I am
that you treat me like a barmaid?"

"Ladies," said McTavish, "who masquerade as housekeepers ought to know
what to expect."

Her face was a blank of astonishment. "Traquair told," she said
indignantly. "Wait till I--"

"No," said McTavish; "the porter at Brig O'Dread told. He said that you
yourself would show me the chapel. He said not to be surprised if you
pretended to be some one else. He said you had done that kind of thing
before. He seemed nettled about something."

In spite of herself Miss McTavish laughed. "I told him," she said, "that
if you crossed my hand with silver, I would give it to him; but if you
crossed my hand with gold, I would keep it for myself. That made him
furious, and he slammed the door when he left. So you knew all along?"

"Yes--Mrs. Nevis MacNish McTavish, I did; and when you had the faint
spell in the chapel, I almost proposed then. I tell you, your voice and
your face, and the way you walked--oh, they did for this young man on
the spot! Do you know how much hunger and longing and loving can be
crowded into a few days? I do. You think I am in a hurry? It seems to me
as if there'd been millions of years of slow waiting."

"I have certainly played the fool," said Miss McTavish, "and I suppose I
have let myself in for this." Her voice was gentler. "Do you know, too,
why I turned white in the chapel?"

"Yes," he said, "I know that."

"Traquair told you."

"Yes."

"And if you hadn't liked me this way, would you have turned me out of
house and home?"

He drew her hand through his arm, and they crossed the gravel path into
the garden. "What do _you_ think?" he asked.

"I think--no," said she.

"Thank you," said he. "Do you read Tennyson?"

"No," said she, "Burns."

McTavish sighed helplessly. Then a light of mischief came into his eye.
"As _Burns_ says," said he:

"'If you are not the heiress born,
And I,' said he, 'the lawful heir,
We two will wed to-morrow morn,
And you shall still be Lady Clare,'"

"I love every word Burns wrote," she said enthusiastically, and
McTavish, though successful, was ashamed.

"McTavish," she said, "the other day, when I felt that I had to get here
before you, I promised my driver ten pounds if he beat your car,"

"Yes," said McTavish, "I guessed what was up, and told my man to go
slower. It wasn't the psychological moment for either of us to break our
necks, was it?"

"No; but I promised the man ten pound, McTavish--and I hay'na got it."

"Ten pounds ought to have a certain purchasing power," said he.

"Then shut your eyes," she commanded.

"And after all," she said, "you'll be _The_ McTavish, won't you?"

"I will not," he said. "Do you think I'm going to take you back to
America with me Saturday, and have all my friends in New York point
their fingers at me, and call me--_The_?"

THE PARROT

He had been so buffeted by fortune, through various climates and various
applications of his many-sidedness, that when I first met Leslie it was
difficult to believe him a fellow countryman. His speech had been welded
by the influence of alien languages to a choice cosmopolitanism. His
skin, thick and brown from blazing sunshines, puckered monkey-like about
his blue, blinking eyes. He never hurried. He was going to Hong-Kong to
build part of a dry-dock for the English Government, he said, but his
ambitions had dwindled to owning a farm somewhere in New York State and
having a regular menagerie of birds and animals.

His most enthusiastic moments of conversation were in arguing and
anecdotalizing the virtues and ratiocinations of animals and birds. The
monkey, he said, was next to man the most clever, but was inferior to
the elephant in that he had no sense of right or wrong. Furthermore,
monkeys were immodest. Next came certain breeds of dogs. Very low in the
scale he placed horses; very high, parrots.

"Concerning parrots," he said, "people are under erroneous impressions,
but copying and imitation are not unreasonable processes. Your parrot,
under his bright cynical feathers, is a modest fowl that grasps at every
opportunity of education from the best source--man. In a native state
his intelligence remains closed: the desire to be like a woodpecker or a
humming-bird does not pick at the cover. Just as a boy born in an
Indiana village and observing the houses of his neighbors might not wish
to become an architect, but if he were transported to Paris or Vienna,
to a confrontation of what is excellent in proportion, it might be that
art would stir in his spirit and, after years of imitation, would come
forth in a stately and exquisite procession of buildings. So in his
native woods the parrot recognizes nothing but color that is worthy of
his imitation. But in the habitations of man, surrounded by taste, which
is the most precious of all gifts, his ambition begins to grow, his
ignorance becomes a shame. He places his foot on the first rung of the
educational ladder. His bright colors fade, perhaps; the eyes of his
mind are turned toward brighter and more ornamental things. What
creature but a parrot devotes such long hours to the acquirement of
perfection in each trivial stage of progress? What creature remembers so
faithfully and so well? We know not what we are, you and I and the rest
of us; but if we had had the application, patience, and ambition of the
average parrot, we should be greater men. But some people say that
parrots are mean, self-centred, and malignant. They have, I admit, a
crust of cynicism which might lead to that impression, and not unjustly,
but underneath the parrot's crotchets there beats a great and benevolent
heart. Let me give you an instance:

"In '88 my luck was down, and as a first step to raising it I shipped
before the mast in an English bottom outward bound from Hong-Kong to
Java. Jaffray was the cook, a big negro who owned a savage gray
parrot--a mighty clever bird but to all intents and purposes of a most
unscrupulous and cruel nature. Many a time her cleverness at provoking a
laugh was all that saved her from sudden death. She bit whom she could;
she stole what she could. She treated us like dogs. Only Jaffray could
handle her without a weapon. Him she loved and made love to with a
sheepish and resolute abandon. From him she endured the rapid
alternations of whippings and caressings with the most stoical fortitude
and self-restraint. When he whipped her she would close her eyes and
say: 'I could bite him, but I won't. Polly's a bad girl. Hit her again,'
When the whipping was over she would say: 'Polly's sore. Poor Polly! How
I pity that poor girl!' Love-making usually succeeded a whipping in
short order, and then she was at her best. She would turn her head to
one side, cast the most laughably provoking glances, hold one claw
before her face, perhaps, like a skeleton fan, and say: 'Don't come
fooling round me. Go away, you bad man,'

"I tried my best to be friends with her. But only to prove that the
knack that I am supposed to have with birds and beasts has its
limitations. With one long day following another and opportunity
constantly at hand, I failed utterly in obtaining her friendship.
Indeed, she was so lacking in breeding as to make public mockings of my
efforts. There was no man before the mast but stood higher in her graces
than I. My only success was in keeping my temper. But it was fated that
we should be friends and comrades, drawn together by the bonds of a
common suffering.

"I will tell you the story of the wreck another time. In some ways it
was peculiar. I will only tell you now that I swam for a long time
(there was an opaque fog) and bumped my head against one of the ship's
boats. I seized the gunwale and said, 'Steady her, please, while I climb
in,' but had no answer. The boat, apparently, had torn loose from her
davits and gone voyaging alone. But as I made to climb in I was fiercely
attacked in the face by the wings, beak, and claws of Jaffray's
graceless parrot. In the first surprise and discomfiture I let go and
sank. Coming up, choking with brine and fury, I overcame resistance with
a backhanded blow, and tumbled over the gunwale into the boat. And
presently I was aware that violence had succeeded where patience had
failed. Polly sat in the stern sheets timidly cooing and offering to
shake hands. At another time I should have burst laughing at her--she
was so coy, so anxious to please. But I had just arrived from seeing my
captain's head broken to pieces by a falling spar, and a good friend of
mine stabbed by another good friend of mine, and I was nearer to tears.

"It was cold for that part of the world, and rain fell heavily from time
to time. Polly complained bitterly all night and said that she would
take her death o' cold, but in the morning (I had fallen asleep) she
waked me in her pleasantest and most satisfied voice, saying, 'Tumble up
for breakfast.' I pulled myself out of the rain-water into which I had
slipped, and sat up. The sky and sea were clear from one horizon to the
other and the sun was beginning to scorch.

"'Bully and warm, ain't it?' said Polly.

"'Right you are, old girl,' said I.

"She perched on my shoulder and began to oil and arrange her draggled
feathers.

"'What a hell of a wreck that was!' she said suddenly, and, after a
pause: 'Where's my nigger?'

"'He's forsaken you, old girl,' said I, 'for Mother Carey's chickens.'

"'Poor Polly,' said she; 'how I pity that poor girl!'

"Now I don't advance for a moment the theory that she understood all
that she said, nor even a part of what I said. But her statements and
answers were often wonderfully apt. Have you ever known one of those
tremendously clever deaf people whom you may talk with for a long time
before discovering that they are deaf? Talking with poor Jaffray's
parrot was like that. It was only occasionally--not often, mind--that
her phrases argued an utter lack of reasoning power. She had been
educated to what I suppose to be a point very close to the limit of a
parrot's powers. At a fair count she had memorized a hundred and fifty
sentences, a dozen songs, and twenty or thirty tunes to whistle. Many
savages have not larger vocabularies; many highborn ladies have a less
gentle and cultivated enunciation. Let me tell you that had I been alone
in that boat, a young man, as I then was, who saw his ambitions and
energies doomed to a watery and abrupt finish, with a brief interval of
starvation to face, I might easily have gone mad. But I was saved from
that because I had somebody to talk to. And to receive confidence and
complaint the parrot was better fitted than a human being, better fitted
than a woman, for she placed no bar of reticence, and I could despair as
I pleased and on my own terms.

"My clothes dried during the first day, and at night she would creep
under my coat to sleep. At first I was afraid that during
unconsciousness I should roll on her. But she was too wary for that. If
I showed a tendency to sprawl or turn over, she would wake and pierce my
ears with a sharp 'Take your time! Take your time!'

"At sunrise every day she would wake me with a hearty 'Tumble up for
breakfast.'

"Unfortunately there was never any breakfast to be had, but the
rain-water in the bottom of the boat, warm as it was and tasting of
rotting wood, saved us from more frightful trial.

"Here is a curious fact: After the second night I realized and counted
every hour in all its misery of hunger and duration, yet I cannot, to
save my soul, remember how many days and nights passed between the wreck
and that singular argument for a parrot's power of reasoning that was to
be advanced to me. It suffices to know that many days and nights went by
before we began to die of hunger.

"In what remained of the rain-water (with the slow oscillations of the
boat it swashed about and left deposits of slime on her boards) I caught
from time to time glimpses of my face as affected by starvation. And it
may interest you to know that it was not the leanness of my face that
appalled me but the wickedness of it. All the sins I had ever sinned,
all the lies I had told, all the meannesses I had done, the drunks I
had been on, the lusts I had sated, came back to me from the
bilge-water. And I knew that if I died then and there I should go
straight to hell if there was one. I made divers trials at repentance
but was not able to concentrate my mind upon them. I could see but one
hope of salvation--to die as I had not lived--like a gentleman. It was
not a voluminous duty, owing to the limits set upon conduct by the
situation, but it was obvious. Whatever pangs I should experience in the
stages of dissolution, I must spare Polly.

"In view of what occurred it is sufficiently obvious that I read my duty
wrongly. For, when I was encouraging myself to spare the bird I should
rather have been planning to save her. She, too, must have been
suffering frightfully from the long-continued lack of her customary
diet, but it seems that while enduring it she was scheming to save me.

"She had been sitting disconsolately on the gunwale when the means
struck suddenly into her tortuously working mind and acted upon her
demeanor like a sight of sunflower seeds, of which she was prodigiously
fond. If I follow her reasoning correctly it was this. The man who has
been so nice to me needs food. He can't find it for himself; therefore I
must find it for him. Thus far she reasoned. And then, unfortunately,
trusting too much to a generous instinct, and disregarding the most
obvious and simple calculation, she omitted the act of turning around,
and instead of laying the egg that was to save me in the boat, she laid
it in the ocean. It sank."

* * * * *

Long voyages make for dulness. I had listened to the above narrative
with so much interest as to lose for a moment my sense of what was
patent. In the same absurd way that one man says to another whom he
knows perfectly well, "What--is this you?" I said to Leslie very
eagerly, "Were you saved?" And he answered, "No; we were both drowned."

ON THE SPOT; OR, THE IDLER'S HOUSE-PARTY

I

Last winter was socially the most disgusting that I remember ever having
known, because everybody lost money, except Sally's father and mine. We
didn't, of course, mind how much money our friends lost--they always had
plenty left; but we hated to have them talk about it, and complain all
the time, and say that it was the President's fault, or poor John
Rockefeller's, or Senator So-and-so's, or the life insurance people's.
When a man loses money it is, as a matter of fact, almost always his own
fault. I said so at the beginning of last winter, and I say so still.
And Sally, who is too lazy to think up original remarks, copied it from
me and made no bones about saying it to all the people she knew who she
thought needed that kind of comfort. But perhaps, now that I think of
it, Sally and I may have contributed to making the winter socially
disgusting. Be that as it may, we were the greatest sufferers.

We moved to Idle Island in September. And we were so delighted with what
the architects, and landscape-gardeners, and mosquito doctors had done
to make it habitable; with the house itself, and the grape-house, and
greenhouses, and gardens, and pergolas, and marble columns from Athens,
and terraces, and in-and-out door tennis-courts, and swimming-pools, and
boat-houses, and golf links, and all the other country-place
necessities, and particularly with a line of the most comfortable
lounging-chairs and divans in the world, that we decided to spend the
winter there. Sally telephoned to my father's secretary and asked him to
spend the winter with us, and make out lists for week-end parties, and
to be generally civil and useful. The secretary said that he would be
delighted to come if he could persuade my father and mother to go abroad
for the winter; and later he called Sally up, and said that he had
persuaded them.

Well, from the first our week-end parties were failures. On the first
Friday in October the President of the United States said that he hated
cheats and liars (only he mentioned names) and the stock-market went to
smash. Saturday it was still in a messy state, and the people who came
out Saturday afternoon couldn't or wouldn't talk about anything else.
They came by the 4:30 to Stepping-Stone, and were ferried over to the
island in the motor boat. Sally and I rode down to the pier in the
jinrikishas that my father's secretary had had imported for us for a
wedding present; and, I give you my word, the motor-boat as it slowed
into the pier looked like an excursion steamer out to view the beauties
of the Hudson. Everybody on board was hidden behind a newspaper.

"Fong," said Sally to her jinrikisha man, "take me back to the house."

He turned and trotted off with her, and they disappeared under the elms.

"Just because your guests aren't interested in you," I called after her,
"is no reason why you shouldn't be interested in them."

But she didn't answer, and I was afraid I'd hurt her feelings; so I said
to my man, or horse, or horse-man--it's hard to know what to call them:

"Long Lee, you go back to the house, clip-step."

Clip-step soon overtook Sally, and I asked her what she was mad about.

"I'm mad," she said, "because none of those people have ever seen this
beautiful island before, and they wouldn't look up from their dirty old
newspapers. What's the matter with them?"

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