Fatinp Smith
Frant-Walsh, Joseph
55<> THE COMMONWEAL FATIMA SMITH By JOSEPH FRANT-WALSH March 24, 1926 THERE is a beloved family in our street known by the not uncommon name of Smith. It is in the patio of their home that...
...I am suddenly and painfully aware of my own utter childishness...
...Life as a parrot is indeed quite gay at times, but she finds it tiresome, too, I think...
...In this far place, I think she sees herself secure from cats...
...O, deah...
...We have talked with Mr...
...a nice girl . . . O, pretty, pretty Fatima Smith...
...With her restored equanimity and poise, she manifests a slight interest in those around her...
...In the face of such disconcerting cold-bloodedness, one is at a loss to know what to do, much less what to say...
...Smith's cigarettes and have made vain, furtive snatches at the ridiculously large oranges which, like so many golden fears, hang in patrician attitudes from potted trees upon his stone-flagged terrace...
...but— and this sweetly and honeyedly, as any be jeweled Marguerite before her mirror— "O, pretty Fatima...
...She whistles very much out of the same spirit that prompts rude children to scrape their finger-nails on rough surfaces...
...It is in the patio of their home that Fatima, the parrot, holds her noisy matins...
...she screams between paroxysms of uncontrollable mirth...
...Smith it is who usually opens the door of her cage and lifts Fatima out and up to her elevated perch...
...It is then she usually sings...
...Whereupon Fatima, removing her excessively longhandled lorgnette, turns her head in a direction not obstructed by my annoying presence, and exclaims in a voice sharp and petulant as it is sudden: "Be your age...
...Her repertoire is quite inexhaustible...
...She is, in fact, quite exhausted now, and refreshes herself with draught after draught of water from her porcelain cup...
...As they pass, they make her a quaint devoir which she has prescribed for them...
...Telephone...
...It is laughter like George Sand might have laughed behind the delicate back of young Chopin—cultivated, artful, but ironical, dreadful...
...But even before she is quite visible, we hear her coming through dim corridors beyond...
...We have gone there many times while sunlight is still fresh and clean...
...How she revels in her triumphal passage out into the glory of the sunl As she comes through the portiered doorway, she assumes a patronizing sweetness and smirks and nods her head this way and that, pretending all the while to listen with ill-affected interest to polite comments volunteered by some imaginary consort at her side...
...Not unlike that solitary lass of Wordsworth's, Fatima sings of something far, and old, and strange...
...She has, I think, some queenly boudoir of her own, wherein she allows herself to be bathed and ministered unto in other ways...
...And as she laughs, she rocks herself back and forth March 24, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL upon her perch—rocking and laughing and screaming, all the while, that most offensive of admonitions at the very top of her queer and strident voice...
...As shej is borne within her palanquin, she chatters with such extravagant incoherence as only a princess dare use...
...O, pretty Fatima Smith...
...It is with such thoughts as these in mind that, as her palanquin of brass is set upon the tiled floor, she prepares herself against a jolt, no matter how slight it be—a jar might disarray the excessively nice arrangement of her intricate dress...
...And how's my little girl today...
...We are bathed in showers of fiercely golden laughter...
...she cooes...
...Fatima is a pretty girl...
...she has chained them all together with the chains of sure captivity...
...Fatima sings in a most grotesque falsetto and moves her body about a great deal as in pantomime...
...She becomes impatient...
...As the oboes play and the tambourines shimmer and rattle in the half-light of her remote pavilion, all the conquered cats file by in long, long lines...
...Pieces of eight 1" Years from now I shall hear, like another Jim Hawkins, a parrot remembered after many years—a parrot who cries, not "Pieces of eight...
...Send it over . . . What...
...Smith seems a great deal taller than I, and the whole world itself very strange and heartless and cruel...
...I do not know where such hauteur can be acquired...
...I wonder what it can be all about...
...It clambers up the white-washed walls and scampers in among the purple bougainvillea festooned from cedar timbers at the eaves...
...And then— "What...
...Be your age...
...Fatima waits for someone to answer the imperative summons of the imaginary jangle that beats upon her hidden ears...
...but to attempt an endless existence with such qualities as an expected—nay, demanded—attribute in her is more than her innately tragic soul can long endure...
...Be your age...
...They hang down out of a shining dome of glass like beautiful promises out of some mock heaven —promises too beautiful ever to be quite fulfilled...
...We know, though we cannot see, that her fingers are very fat and pink as shrimps, and languid with the weight of such amazingly huge diamonds that to behold such would embarrass us to the point of rude and helpless laughter...
...O, pretty, pretty Fatima Smith...
...she calls...
...They are very terrible utterances, I'm sure...
...is all she says...
...We have sat upon gay chairs from Billibad and smoked the best of Mr...
...they strike into the hearts of her craning subjects like shining spears of power...
...Somewhere afar off, I think she hears the enchanting sound of oboes winding itself about an onyx column, and beneath her awkward feet, scaly with a golden scale, she feels a polished floor, and on it sees rhythmic reflections of many bright and fleeting tambourines...
...Thinking to please Fatima riotously, I diligently inquire of her: "Polly want a cracker...
...Then, when at length her elaborate toilette is complete, she settles and arranges herself luxuriously in her gleaming cage, to be transported out upon the patio by what are to her invisible hands, and to be revealed once more to an acclaiming and freshly-startled world...
...It rustles in between the brightly varnished green of orange tree leaves...
...Telephone...
...Smith, who is a tall, good man, about many things, both intimate and strange...
...Sweetly, langorously, "helloI" Evidently, though, difficulty in arousing an expected response is experienced, for she becomes impatient again and shouts repeatedly—"Hello, hello, hello, hello...
...We feel, too, that she is fingering strands and strands of too-large pearls—as large as eggs...
...I think it must have been such songs that the lady Scheherazade sang to herself long, long ago, after the horror and terror of all the thousand and one nights had passed, and her life, now sweeter far to her than ever, was filled with unexpected splendor...
...In Treasure Island there is the parrot, it is recalled, who cries—"Pieces of eight...
...The like of it is rarely seen nowadays, and then only in grand young women just out of school...
...She indulges in long and complicated words which no one can quite understand...
...UO, hello...
...In the midst of a scintillating discourse on some vastly amusing subject, she becomes suddenly sober and recollected...
...Send it over . . . send it over . . . some cabbage, some cabbage . . . send it over, send it over . . . What...
...Again she bursts into most violent laughter—but a different laughter now...
...I swear, I could cry, did not Fatima, capricious hostess that she is, suddenly burst forth into the most torrential and voluminous laughter I have ever heard...
...It is low, rich, and not unlike a laugh of Ethel Barrymore's...
...Indeed, our relationship is such that we have been permitted to sniff gratuitously at the expensive orchids in his greenhouse...
...It is easy to be mirthful, witty, humorous and ridiculous part of the time...
...telephone...
...In her ingenuous mind, she has outwitted all the cats upon the earth...
...How is my darling little girl...
...She watches us with narrowed eyes...
...At a time like this, there is no question but that Fatima is at least partially demented...
...Her attitude of reclining is not one assumed without thought of keeping the velvet of her impossibly verdant attire free from wrinkles, and all her bows and ruffles intact...
...Yet all the while we are conscious of a personality that projects itself abroad upon the scented morning...
...Telephone!' * She is rewarded by the activity of someone...
...Be your age...
...Poor Fatima...
...As a means of relaxation, she takes to biting the perch on which she stands—biting it deliberately and thoroughly, yet with a most pathetic melancholia of spirit...
...I know it makes her very happy to see the cats so meek and dismal in their tinkling chains...
...I am told she has even decreed that some Nubian female approach her with proper salaam after proper salaam, and that she place beneath the furthest tips of Fatima's silken wings a drop or two of some thrice-distilled attar of roses...
...O, d-e-a-h 1" Her next remark is perhaps a revelation of what thing has so deeply smitten her laughter-loving heart...
...If it should become suddenly and completely enchanted, it would hang among the gleaming verdure like many tiny bells of warm Venetian glass that do not sound...
...Fatima's whistle is a vulgar kind of whistle and is very distasteful to one's ears...
...I think she raises an excessively long-handled lorgnette and appraises all of us in silence—a silence characterized more by indifference than by contempt...
...This she accomplishes by being haughtily silent for a little while, glaring fiercely at her cup of sun-flower seeds, which impious meditation she finally abandons to preen herself, a little furtively and not without a look of shame, straightening out some fancied irregularities in her glossy garb...
...Song after song she sings for us—brief, queer little songp...
...Pretty Fatima...
...and when she has regained sufficient breath to speak at all, she provides us with no clue to her merriment...
...Once there, Fatima disdainfully encompasses herself with a quite convenient veil of imagined invisibility, and strives to impress herself anew with the lately shattered sense of her own augustness...
...Be one's age, indeed...
...I wonder, too, where it was she learned the pretty songs she sings...
...So we leave Fatima to her siesta...
...That she does not imagine it to be otherwise is evident from the mischievous glint that comes into her eyes while whistling...
...She becomes taken by a most elaborate frenzy and her laughter now is turned merely into shrieks and screams, out of which condition she glibly passes into a state of coma, moaning and sobbing to herself most pitiably...
...Not today . . . Any celery . . . celery . . . is it good...
...And then, in a voice laconic as that of any Swedish house-maid, she announces that the telephone has distinctly and positively rung...
...Fatima jabbers effusively of many things...
...Pieces of eight...
...Telephone...
...O, deah...
...We have been drawn, time after time, before the perch of her who rules the dappled hours of the day—for Fatima, the parrot, is mistress of the patio...
...She listens...
...I wonder from what place of deep retirement they bring Fatima out into the startled world...
...It splatters itself about the patio like sunlight suddenly become audible to our startled ears...
Vol. 3 • March 1926 • No. 20
