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Another time, when taunted by the old woman, she went still further and declared that Lantier was as much her husband as was Coupeau that he was the father of two of her children. She talked a little twaddle about the laws of nature, and a shrewd observer would have seen that she parrotlike was repeating the words that some other person had put into her mouth.
And then she understood she knew that the bent figure which had already turned back to its bench had only repeated her words, parrotlike; she knew that he had only pieced together a recollection of the absence which her vigil before the window had meant on a former occasion and repeated her own words of that other night.
"In this place?" asked Ersten, with parrotlike perfection. A lump came into Heinrich Schnitt's throat. He struggled with that lump, but the simple word "Yes" would not come. "I say yes; but I don't " Johnny jerked him violently by the sleeve. "He said 'Yes'," he informed Ersten. "Well, maybe," Ersten was decent enough to admit.
Some of the men wearing Texan hats laugh at the plump arms and pendulous breasts of the woman who fainted. "Gentlemen, a well-dressed man stole my suitcase at the station in Silao! All my life's savings ... I haven't got enough to feed my little boy now! ..." The old woman speaks rapidly, parrotlike, sighing and sobbing. Her sharp eyes peer about on all sides.
As the family were sitting around the kitchen table, on which was placed the humble tallow candle by which the room was lighted, there was heard a scraping at the door, and presently a knock. Mr. Walton answered it in person, and admitted the thin figure and sharp, calculating face of Squire Green. "How are you, neighbor?" he said, looking about him with his parrotlike glance.
He folded his arms upon his breast, and in a sing-song voice, curiously unlike any other I had ever heard, answered parrotlike: "This is the word of the master: Take to the fair-haired lady the broken coin, my sign, and she will remember her word to me. Verily, for the sign's sake, she will follow without fear." "The master is not ill, then?" "In his body he is well.
They were not evolved out of other ideas, nor gathered up from obvious sources and repeated by her brain, parrotlike, as with so many of us. They came to her slowly from some reservoir of her being, came painfully, strugglingly, and often were accompanied to their birth by an inner glow of emotional illumination like the present when she saw herself and her child living the life of Clark's Field.
Just take care of your mother, Miss Allis. I'll have your father about in a jiffy." "He's jest stunned; that's all!" added Mike, with his kindly, parrotlike repetition. It seemed a million years to the wife that she waited for the doctor's outcoming. Twice she cried in anguish to Allis that she must go in; must see her husband. "He may die," she pleaded, "and I may never see his eyes again.
But that did not matter; he had achieved smartness; the Figaro had printed his name twice. And with his meager neck sticking up between the turndown points of his collar and his figure squeezed into all too short a coat, he would swagger about, uttering his parrotlike exclamations and affecting a solemn listlessness suggestive of an emotionless marionette.
Here and there across the land little flares, one running into the other, like wildfire on the plains, and then the upheaval. As in Russia, so now in Germany; later, England and France and here. The proletariat was gaining power. He was no fool, this individual. He knew his clay, the day labourer, with his parrotlike mentality.
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