… And now he’s gone. I shall never have another bird, another pet of any kind. How could I? When I found him, lying on his back, with his eye dim and his claws wrung, when I realised that never again should I hear my darling sing, something seemed to die in me. My breast felt hollow, as if it was his cage. I shall get over it. Of course. I must. One can get over anything in time. And people always say I have a cheerful disposition. They are quite right. I thank God I have.
… All the same, without being morbid, or giving way to — to memories and so on, I must confess that there does seem to me something sad in life. It is hard to say what it is. I don’t mean the sorrow that we all know, like illness and poverty and death. No, it is something different. It is there, deep down, deep down, part of one, like one’s breathing. However hard I work and tire myself I have only to stop to know it is there, waiting. I often wonder if everybody feels the same. One can never know. But isn’t it extraordinary that under his sweet, joyful little singing it was just this — sadness? — Ah, what is it? — that I heard.
This is the last completed story by Katherine Mansfield and the fragility of the subject matter communicates the lastness of this as a ‘last text.’ Dismissing her stories as ‘birds bred in cages’ to her cousin, the Countess Russell and with the parallel perhaps between her fatally damaged lungs unable to ‘wing’ their way to freedom and health, this story is more elegy than fiction. Like Mrs Dalloway too in Woolf’s later novel, there is a palpable sense of the ‘well of tears’ situated at the heart of the self. Exile, the transience of affection and the impending certainity of extinction are concentrated in this story which uses monolgue to simultaneously suggest voicedness and silence. We are the only listeners to this tale. Again and again in Mansfield, individuals speak out of their solitude, gifted momentarily by knowledge that illuminates and then silences once more.