Parrot Co. | Page 5

deserted swing. This sensation was quite perceptible to the
girl who leaned over the bow-rail, her handkerchief pressed to her nose,
and gazed interestedly at the steep bank, up and down which the
sweating coolies swarmed like Gargantuan rats. They clawed and
scrambled up and slid and shuffled down; and always the bank
threatened to slip and carry them all into the swirling murk below. A
dozen torches were stuck into the ground above the crumbling ledge;
she saw the flames as one sees a burning match cupped in a smoker's
hands, shedding light upon nothing save that which stands immediately
behind it.
She choked a little. Her eyes smarted. Her lips were slightly cracked,
and cold-cream seemed only to provide a surer resting place for the

impalpable dust. It had penetrated her clothes; it had percolated through
wool and linen and silk, intimately, until three baths a day had become
a welcome routine, providing it was possible to obtain water. Water.
Her tongue ran across her lips. Oh, for a drink from the old cold pure
spring at home! Tea, coffee, and bottled soda; nothing that ever touched
the thirsty spots in her throat.
She looked up at the stars and they looked down upon her, but what she
asked they could not, would not, answer. Night after night she had
asked, and night after night they had only twinkled as of old. She had
traveled now for four months, and still the doubt beset her. It was to be
a leap in the dark, with no one to tell her what was on the other side.
But why this insistent doubt? Why could she not take the leap gladly,
as a woman should who had given the affirmative to a man? With him
she was certain that she loved him, away from him she did not know
what sentiment really abided in her heart. She was wise enough to
realize that something was wrong; and there were but three months
between her and the inevitable decision. Never before had she known
other than momentary indecision; and it irked her to find that her clarity
of vision was fallible and human like the rest of her. The truth was, she
didn't know her mind. She shrugged, and the movement stirred the dust
that had gathered upon her shoulders.
What a dust-ridden, poverty-ridden, plague-ridden world she had seen!
Ignorance wedded to superstition, yet waited upon by mystery and
romance and incomparable beauty. As the Occidental thought rarely
finds analysis in the Oriental mind, so her mind could not gather and
understand this amalgamation of art and ignorance. She forgot that
another race of men had built those palaces and temples and forts and
tombs, and that they had vanished as the Greeks and Romans have
vanished, leaving only empty spaces behind, which the surviving tribes
neither fill nor comprehend.
"A rare old lot of dust; eh, Miss Chetwood? I wish we could travel by
night, but you can't trust this blooming old Irrawaddy after sundown.
Charts are so much waste-paper. You just have to know the old lady.
Bars rise in a night, shift this side and that. But the days are all right.

No dust when you get in mid-stream. What?"
"I never cease wondering how those poor coolies can carry those heavy
rice-bags," she replied to the purser.
"Oh, they are used to it," carelessly.
The great gray stack of paddy-bags seemed, in the eyes of the girl,
fairly to melt away.
"By Jove!" exclaimed the purser. "There's Parrot & Co.!" He laughed
and pointed toward one of the torches.
"Parrot & Co.? I do not understand."
"That big blond chap behind the fourth torch. Yes, there. Sometime I'll
tell you about him. Picturesque duffer."
She could have shrieked aloud, but all she did was to draw in her breath
with a gasp that went so deep it gave her heart a twinge. Her fingers
tightened upon the teak-rail. Suddenly she knew, and was ashamed of
her weakness. It was simply a remarkable likeness, nothing more than
that; it could not possibly be anything more. Still, a ghost could not
have startled her as this living man had done.
"Who is he?"
"A chap named Warrington. But over here that signifies nothing; might
just as well be Jones or Smith or Brown. We call him Parrot & Co., but
the riff-raff have another name for him. The Man Who Never Talked of
Home. For two or three seasons he's been going up and down the river.
Ragged at times, prosperous at others. Lately it's been rags. He's always
carrying that Rajputana parrot. You've seen the kind around the palaces
and forts: saber-blade wings, long tail-feathers, green and blue and
scarlet, and the ugliest little rascals going. This one is trained