Authors: Gerald Durrell
‘We can’t let the poor little things starve,’ protested Margo.
‘I don’t see that it would do any harm to keep them,’ said Mother.
‘You’ll regret it,’ said Larry; ‘it’s asking for trouble. Every room in the house will be rifled. We’ll have to bury all our valuables and post an armed guard over them. It’s lunacy.’
‘Don’t be silly, dear,’ said Mother soothingly. ‘We can keep them in a cage and only let them out for exercise.’
‘Exercise!’ exclaimed Larry. ‘I suppose you’ll call it exercise when they’re flapping round the house with hundred-drachma notes in their filthy beaks.’
I promised faithfully that the magpies should not, in any circumstance, be allowed to steal. Larry gave me a withering look. I pointed out that the birds had still to be named, but nobody could think of anything suitable. We stood and stared at the quivering babies, but nothing suggested itself.
‘Whats you goings to do with them bastards?’ asked Spiro.
Somewhat acidly I said that I intended to keep them as pets, and that, furthermore, they were not bastards, but magpies.
‘
Whats
you calls them?’ asked Spiro, scowling.
‘Magpies, Spiro, magpies,’ said Mother, enunciating slowly and clearly.
Spiro turned this new addition to his English vocabulary over in his mind, repeating it to himself, getting it firmly embedded.
‘Magenpies,’ he said at last, ‘magenpies, eh?’
‘Magpies, Spiro,’ corrected Margo.
‘Thats what I says,’ said Spiro indignantly, ‘magenpies.’
So from that moment we gave up trying to find a name for them and they became known simply as the Magenpies.
By the time the Magenpies had gorged themselves to a size where they were fully fledged, Larry had become so used to seeing them around that he had forgotten their allegedly criminal habits. Fat, glossy, and garrulous, squatting on top of their basket and flapping their wings vigorously, the Magenpies looked the very picture of innocence. All went well until they learned to fly. The early stages consisted in leaping off the table on the veranda, flapping their wings frantically, and gliding down to crash onto the stone flags some fifteen feet away. Their courage grew with the strength of their wings, and before very long they accomplished their first real flight, a merry-go-round affair around the villa. They looked so lovely, their long tails glittering in the sun, their wings hissing as they swooped down to fly under the vine, that I called the family out to have a look at them. Aware of their audience, the Magenpies flew faster and faster, chasing each other, diving within inches of the wall before banking to one side, and doing acrobatics on the branches of the magnolia tree. Eventually one of them, made over-confident by our applause, misjudged his distance, crashed into the grape-vine, and fell onto the veranda, no longer a bold, swerving ace of the air, but a woebegone bundle of feathers that opened its mouth and wheezed plaintively at me when I picked it up and soothed it. But, once having mastered their wings, the Magenpies quickly mapped out the villa and then they were all set for their banditry.
The kitchen, they knew, was an excellent place to visit, providing they stayed on the doorstep and did not venture inside; the drawing-room and dining-room they never entered if someone was there; of the bedrooms they knew that the only one in which they were assured of a warm welcome was mine. They would certainly fly into Mother’s or Margo’s, but they were constantly being told not to do things, and they found this boring. Leslie
would allow them on his window-sill but no farther, but they gave up visiting him after the day he let off a gun by accident. It unnerved them, and I think they had a vague idea that Leslie had made an attempt on their lives. But the bedroom that really intrigued and fascinated them was, of course, Larry’s, and I think this was because they never managed to get a good look inside. Before they had even touched down on the window-sill they would be greeted with such roars of rage, followed by a rapidly discharged shower of missiles, that they would be forced to flap rapidly away to the safety of the magnolia tree. They could not understand Larry’s attitude at all; they decided that – since he made such a fuss – it must be that he had something to hide, and that it was their duty to find out what it was. They chose their time carefully, waiting patiently until one afternoon Larry went off for a swim and left his window open.
I did not discover what the Magenpies had been up to until Larry came back; I had missed the birds, but thought they had flown down the hill to steal some grapes. They were obviously well aware that they were doing wrong, for though normally loquacious they carried out their raid in silence, and (according to Larry) took it in turns to do sentry duty on the window-sill. As he came up the hill he saw, to his horror, one of them sitting on the sill, and shouted wrathfully at it. The bird gave a chuck of alarm and the other one flew out of the room and joined it; they flapped off into the magnolia tree, chuckling hoarsely, like schoolboys caught raiding an orchard. Larry burst into the house, and swept up to his room, grabbing me
en route
. When he opened the door Larry uttered a moan like a soul in torment.
The Magenpies had been through the room as thoroughly as any Secret Service agent searching for missing plans. Piles of manuscript and typing paper lay scattered about the floor like drifts of autumn leaves, most of them with an attractive pattern of holes punched in them. The Magenpies never could resist paper. The typewriter stood stolidly on the table, looking like a
disembowelled horse in a bull ring, its ribbon coiling out of its interior, its keys bespattered with droppings. The carpet, bed, and table were aglitter with a layer of paper clips like frost. The Magenpies, obviously suspecting Larry of being a dope smuggler, had fought valiantly with the tin of bicarbonate of soda, and had scattered its contents along a line of books, so that they looked like a snow-covered mountain range. The table, the floor, the manuscript, the bed, and especially the pillow, were decorated with an artistic and unusual chain of footprints in green and red ink. It seemed almost as though each bird had overturned his favourite colour and walked in it. The bottle of blue ink, which would not have been so noticeable, was untouched.
‘This is the last straw,’ said Larry in a shaking voice, ‘positively the last straw. Either you do something about those birds or I will personally wring their necks.’
I protested that he could hardly blame the Magenpies. They were interested in things, I explained; they couldn’t help it, they were just made like that. All members of the crow tribe, I went on, warming to my defence work, were naturally curious. They didn’t know they were doing wrong.
‘I did not ask for a lecture on the crow tribe,’ said Larry ominously, ‘and I am not interested in the moral sense of magpies, either inherited or acquired. I am just telling you that you will have to either get rid of them or lock them up; otherwise I shall tear them wing from wing.’
The rest of the family, finding they could not siesta with the argument going on, assembled to find out the trouble.
‘Good heavens! Dear, what
have
you been doing?’ asked Mother, peering round the wrecked room.
‘Mother, I am in no mood to answer imbecile questions.’
‘Must be the Magenpies,’ said Leslie, with the relish of a prophet proved right. ‘Anything missing?’
‘No, nothing missing,’ said Larry bitterly; ‘they spared me that.’
‘They’ve made an awful mess of your papers,’ observed Margo.
Larry stared at her for a moment, breathing deeply. ‘What a masterly understatement,’ he said at last; ‘you are always ready with the apt platitude to sum up a catastrophe. How I envy you your ability to be inarticulate in the face of Fate.’
‘There’s no need to be rude,’ said Margo.
‘Larry didn’t mean it, dear,’ explained Mother untruthfully; ‘he’s naturally upset.’
‘Upset?
Upset?
Those scab-ridden vultures come flapping in here like a pair of critics and tear and bespatter my manuscript before it’s even finished, and you say I’m
upset?
’
‘It’s
very
annoying, dear,’ said Mother, in an attempt to be vehement about the incident, ‘but I’m sure they didn’t mean it. After all, they don’t understand… they’re only birds.’
‘Now don’t you start,’ said Larry fiercely. ‘I’ve already been treated to a discourse on the sense of right and wrong in the crow tribe. Its disgusting the way this family carries on over animals; all this anthropomorphic slush that’s drooled out as an excuse. Why don’t you all become magpie worshippers, and erect a prison to pray in? The way
you
all carry on one would think that
I
was to blame, and that it’s
my
fault that my room looks as though it’s been plundered by Attila the Hun. Well, I’m telling you: if something isn’t done about those birds right away, I shall deal with them myself.’
Larry looked so murderous that I decided it would probably be safer if the Magenpies were removed from danger, so I lured them into my bedroom with the aid of a raw egg and locked them up in their basket while I considered the best thing to do. It was obvious that they would have to go into a cage of sorts, but I wanted a really large one for them, and I did not feel that I could cope with the building of a really big aviary by myself. It was useless asking the family to help me, so I decided that I would have to inveigle Mr Kralefsky into the constructional work. He could come out and spend the day, and once the cage
was finished he would have the opportunity of teaching me how to wrestle. I had waited a long time for a favourable opportunity of getting these wrestling lessons, and this seemed to me to be ideal. Mr Kralefsky’s ability to wrestle was only one of his many hidden accomplishments, as I had found out.
Apart from his mother and his birds I had discovered that Kralefsky had one great interest in life, and that was an entirely imaginary world he had evoked in his mind, a world in which rich and strange adventures were always happening, adventures in which there were only two major characters: himself (as hero) and a member of the opposite sex who was generally known as a Lady. Finding that I appeared to believe the anecdotes he related to me, he got bolder and bolder, and day by day allowed me to enter a little farther into his private paradise. It all started one morning when we were having a break for coffee and biscuits. The conversation somehow got onto dogs, and I confessed to an overwhelming desire to possess a bulldog – creatures that I found quite irresistibly ugly.
‘By Jove, yes! Bulldogs!’ said Krafelsky. ‘Fine beasts, trustworthy and brave. One cannot say the same of
bull-terriers
, unfortunately.’
He sipped his coffee and glanced at me shyly; I sensed that I was expected to draw him out, so I asked why he thought bull-terriers particularly untrustworthy.
‘Treacherous!’ he explained, wiping his mouth. ‘
Most
treacherous.’
He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and placed the tips of his fingers together, as if praying.
‘I recall that once – many years ago when I was in England – I was instrumental in saving a Lady’s life when she was attacked by one of those brutes.’
He opened his eyes and peeped at me; seeing that I was all attention, he closed them again and continued. ‘It was a fine morning in spring, and I was taking a constitutional in Hyde
Park. Being so early, there was no one else about, and the park was silent except for the bird-songs. I had walked quite some distance when I suddenly became aware of a deep, powerful baying.’
His voice sank to a thrilling whisper and, with his eyes still closed, he cocked his head on one side as if listening. So realistic was it that I, too, felt I could hear the savage, regular barks echoing among the daffodils.
‘I thought nothing of it at first. I supposed it to be some dog out enjoying itself chasing squirrels. Then, suddenly, I heard cries for help mingling with the ferocious baying.’ He stiffened in his chair, frowned, and his nostrils quivered. ‘I hurried through the trees, and suddenly came upon a terrible sight.’
He paused, and passed a hand over his brow, as though even now he could hardly bear to recall the scene.
‘There, with her back to a tree, stood a Lady. Her skirt was torn and ripped, her legs bitten and bloody, and with a deckchair she was fending off a ravening bull-terrier. The brute, froth flecking its yawning mouth, leaped and snarled, waiting for an opening. It was obvious that the Lady’s strength was ebbing. There was not a moment to be lost.’
Eyes still firmly closed, the better to see the vision, Kralefsky drew himself up in his chair, straightened his shoulders and fixed his features into an expression of sneering defiance, a devil-may-care expression – the expression of a man about to save a Lady from a bull-terrier.
‘I raised my heavy walking-stick and leaped forward, giving a loud cry to encourage the Lady. The hound, attracted by my voice, immediately sprang at me, growling horribly, and I struck it such a blow on the head that my stick broke in half. The animal, though of course dazed, was still full of strength; I stood there, defenceless, as it gathered itself and launched itself at my throat with gaping jaws.’
Kralefsky’s forehead had become quite moist during this
recital, and he paused to take out his handkerchief and pat his brow with it. I asked eagerly what had happened then. Kralefsky reunited his finger-tips and went on.
‘I did the only thing possible. It was a thousand-to-one chance, but I had to take it. As the beast leaped at my face I plunged my hand into his mouth, seized his tongue, and twisted it as hard as I could. The teeth closed on my wrist, blood spurted out, but I hung on grimly, knowing my life was at stake. The dog lashed to and fro for what seemed like an age. I was exhausted. I felt I could not hold on any longer. Then, suddenly, the brute gave a convulsive heave and went limp. I had succeeded. The creature had been suffocated by its own tongue.’
I sighed rapturously. It was a wonderful story, and might well be true. Even it if wasn’t true, it was the sort of thing that
should
happen, I felt; and I sympathized with Kralefsky if, finding that life had so far denied him a bull-terrier to strangle, he had supplied it himself. I said that I thought he had been very brave to tackle the dog in that way. Kralefsky opened his eyes, flushed with pleasure at my obvious enthusiasm, and smiled deprecatingly.