Crowded Out! and Other Sketches | Page 6

cage hanging from the centre of the room, and in it a parrot as nearly pea-green in hue as it is possible for a parrot to be.
"Tell my friend her name, Giuseppe," said De Kock, beginning on some more asparagus.
Giuseppe stood in his patronizing way--quite the _grand seigneur_-- with the light falling on his solitaire, making it so brilliant that it fascinated and at the same time fatigued my eyes.
"The name of my parrot? Monsieur De Kock, he know that well. It is F��licit��--you catch--F��-li-ci-t��. It was the name of my wife."
Then his wife was dead. De Kock must have made a mistake.
"It is an unusual name for a bird, is not it?" said I.
"Monsieur is right. Not often--not often--you meet with a bird that name. My first wife--my first wife, gentlemen, she was English. You are English--ah. Yes. So was she. The English are like this." Giuseppe took a bottle out of the cruet-stand and set it on the table in front of him. He went on, "When an Englishman an Englishwoman argue, they say"--here he took the bottle up very slowly and gingerly and altered his voice to a mincing and conventional tone--"Is it oil or is it vinegare? Did you not say that it was vinegare? I thought that it was oil Oh! Now I see that it is vinegare."
"Bravo!" exclaimed De Kock. "And so you did not get on with the Englishwoman then I suppose, Giuseppe, and took Madame the next time?" We were both laughing heartily at the man's mimicry when once again the parrot shrieked. "But for goodness sake don't say I told you!" Giuseppe walked off to speak to it and my friend and I were left alone.
"Was F��lcit�� the name of his first or second wife!" I asked.
"Of his second, of course. Didn't you hear him say the first was an Englishwoman? The second is a tall, rather good-looking pale Frenchwoman. You may see her to-night, and on the other hand you may not, she doesn't often appear in here. I wish she did, I am rather fond of her myself, which is more than her husband is. It's pretty well known that Mr. and Mrs. Joseph do not get on comfortably. In fact, he hates her, or rather ignores her, while she doats upon him and is tremendously jealous of the parrot"
"What, that green thing?"
"Well, its a lovely parrot, you must know, and the moment it came into his possession--he has had it about three years--he seemed to transfer whatever affection he had for his wife to that creature, with a great deal beside. Why, he hugs it, and kisses it, and mows over it--look at him now!"
Sure, enough, there was Martinetti with the bird on his finger, kissing it, and otherwise making a fool of himself. He finished by actually putting it away inside his coat in a kind of breast pocket, I should imagine.
"All this is good for business, perhaps," I said.
"What, the parrot and so on? Oh, yes I daresay, that has something to do with it. Still they are a queer couple. I come here mostly on account of this Chiante wine; you can't get it so good in many places in New York, and besides I confess Monsieur and his wife interest me somewhat. And the people one see here are immensely funny. That is your English expression, isn't it? There are three actresses over there at that table with _amis intimes_; they are 'restin' now, and can cut about and dine out as much as they please. There is a French dressmaker who lives on the floor above and is to be found here every day. She is superbly built and is hopelessly ugly, isn't she? There is young Lord Gurgoyle, an Englishman like yourself, you see--what the devil is he staring at like that?"
From behind a _porti��re_ which fell across the end of the room came a woman, tall, pale, and with a peculiar air of distinction about her. Perhaps it was her very unusual pallor which so distinguished her for there was nothing absolutely fine or handsome about the countenance. It was a weak face I thought, with an ugly red mark over the upper lip, and had she not been so very pale and so exceptionally well-dressed I should not have looked at her twice. She wore a gown of black silk, dead-black, lustrous, and fitting her slender figure to perfection. It was cut square and low in the front and fell away in long folds upon the floor at the back. What an apparition she made in the midst of this noisy crowd, smoking, chatting, swearing, laughing! Especially so when I noticed that as she walked very slowly down between the tables, her lips were moving nervously and her hands clutching