The City Jungle (12 page)

Slowly, with a reserve betokening great wisdom, he wandered through the cage, and to all the monkeys it seemed as if he were bringing them a weighty decision.

It grew more quiet. All feared his wisdom, his strength and his terrible humors.

Muffo found the little splinters of broken mirror and picked one up. Examining it as one examines anything with which he has long been familiar, he tossed it away with a gesture expressive of much superior ­disdain.

Then he seated himself on the stone ledge in the front of the cage, leaning against the bars, so that the people outside could see nothing but his broad and hairy back.

Turning his face to his people, he began to speak. “Another fraud with which to hoax us—just an attempt to divert our lively intelligence with a silly toy.” He held a splinter of the mirror between his fingertips and tossed it indifferently on the sand. “The naked ones are afraid of us!” he cried, rumbling sullenly.

“They will have to worship us!” cried the Indian ecstatically.

“Silence!” snarled Muffo harshly.

The Indian was terrified.

After another pause Muffo spoke again. “The end is coming soon in spite of the naked ones and all their cleverness.” He drew a deep breath. “The day will come!”

All the monkeys were ravished.

Chapter Seventeen

Free

I
WAS HERE ONCE YEARS AND YEARS AGO. Father and mother brought me on a Sunday.”

The young man was talking to his companion as they passed between the row of parrot-cages to the lawns with their beds of blooming flowers. The girl simply nodded and said nothing. When they reached the monument to the dead chimpanzee the young man caught her arm. “Say, that's new!” he exclaimed.

The girl laughed. “No, I've seen that ape there for ages.”

“Yes,
you've
seen it,” said the young man, “but I . . .”

“Well, why haven't you?” she asked.

“I told you I was only here once.”

“Only once?” She was astonished.

“Yes,” he repeated, “only once. As a little boy. Never again.”

“Comical,” she murmured.

He was a pallid fellow, barely thirty, with a broad-boned face in which boyishness, brutality and dreami­ness combined to produce a remarkable expression. Sometimes his brown eyes were tender and mild and longing. Sometimes they burned with a gathering rebellion and at such times they would become quite small for a moment, with something in them of crafty patience. When he took off his cap one could see that his close-cropped black hair grew low on a forehead that was not too lofty. His clothes were poor, but neat, even a bit modish. A factory worker on his Sunday off.

She wore no hat, and her bobbed, very much waved, very luxuriant blonde hair fluttered about a small, but pretty face whose rouged lips were like a silent shriek. Elsewhere she had no need of rouge. She had a short, charming snub-nose, and merry gray eyes. She wore a silk dress of Scotch plaid and a dark blue coat that just reached to her knees. This outfit revealed, while seeming to conceal, disclosing the sturdy body of a twenty-year-old girl, with its firmly modeled slender legs and small joints. There was something indolent, something wayward that was quite without shyness—in her walk, in her gestures, even in her face. In her joyous manner was the assurance of a pretty young girl who is conscious of her power. But there was also a trace of kindli­ness, of strong maternal instinct.

He read the inscription on the monument: “To Peter the Chimpanzee.” Then the date. “So they've erected a monument to the poor fellow,” he said. “But what did he die of? The inscription doesn't say.”

“Oh, you know, Max,” said the girl. “The monkeys in the zoo all die of consumption.”

“Or from imprisonment,” he added bitterly, “which comes to the same thing.” He had not released her arm. “Come, Mieze,” he growled, dragging her along. “A monument to a monkey! I'd like to know what sense there is in that. They ought to erect a monument to commemorate the crimes committed against monkeys. That would be smarter.”

Mieze gave him a little smile. “What's the use of getting excited, Max?”

A soft dreamy expression came into his eyes. “You said ‘comical' before. Why?” He was answering her previous exclamation. “It wasn't comical at all. I was really here just once. You know how it is with poor people. I was ten or twelve years old at the time. My parents happened to have a little money and that's probably why they were good to one another and also to me. Well, we came here together.”

“But Max,” Mieze quieted him, pressing the hand that held her upper arm against her body. “I didn't mean anything by it, Max.”

He paid no attention. “Probably I would never have come here otherwise. My mother took sick a few weeks later and by autumn she was dead. I had to go to school shortly after and my father . . .” He was silent for a while and a little fire flickered in his half-closed eyes. “Well,” he added, “when you begin to work, you don't think about such things.” His sweeping gesture included the whole park.

They were approaching the cages, moving in the stream of visitors, when Max stopped. “Ah,” he said softly, “ah, the trees, the free green leaves, and the free sky above. Ah, it does you good, it's fine, that's what people need. . . .”

He gazed up at the tree tops, at the blue sky and the white and golden clouds floating overhead; his face was quite innocent and boyish. “Look, the flowers, Mieze,” he whispered close to her ear, “look, the flowers in the beds. I wish that stupid monument hadn't been there.”

“You're a monkey yourself,” she said.

“No,” he shook his head, “you can't imagine what it's like.” He interrupted himself. “Thank God, you have no idea. But when you haven't seen all this for two years, when you've all but forgotten it, how beautiful the world is!”

“So it's all the flowers and trees,” laughed Mieze, “and I'm nobody. Ouch!” she cried. He had dug his ­finger into her arm. “Stop, Max! Are you crazy?”

He stopped. But he really was quite crazy.

Suddenly he stopped short, completely sobered, an entirely different person. His cheeks had gone pale and his manner was surly as he dragged Mieze quickly down a side path.

“What is it?” she asked frightened. He did not answer. “What is it?” she asked again, more agitated. For a long time he said nothing. She did not dare utter another word, but simply saw out of the corner of her eye how his eyes narrowed, became crafty and filled with suffering. When he had collected himself again, when his chalk-white face had resumed its accustomed pallor, he said in an offhand tone, “It was somebody I don't want to meet, one of them from in there . . . you know. . . .”

She understood and said nothing.

“He was let out three weeks before me, the dirty dog,” he said after a pause.

“What do you care?” asked Mieze loftily.

“Nothing at all! But for all that, I don't want to meet him, the cheap safe-cracker!” He was angry. “That fellow said that I'd never find a job again! Why? Because of what happened to me? Can I help that? Tell me, am I a criminal because of that?”

“You did it in self-defense,” said Mieze gravely.

“Exactly,” cried Max in a rage, “exactly. If I hadn't had my knife, Tony would have made a cripple of me or killed me. He's a wild man. I'm sorry that it had to be that way, but better him than me!”

Mieze pressed his hand. “You were in there nearly two years,” she said sadly.

“There, you see!” Max was tremendously angry. “And I don't want to meet anybody from in there out here! Nobody! Those scoundrels! They'd like to pull you in with them all right! That dog I just avoided was always trying to get me to work with him. Huh, he calls that
work
!”

Mieze soothed him. “Be quiet, my love, don't think about it! Be happy that it's over!”

“I
am
happy,” he shouted almost hilariously.

“We're together again,” laughed Mieze.

Max said nothing, looked at her and laughed happily. They walked along and came to the enclosures of the giraffes and the elephant.

“I've never seen such creatures since I was a little boy,” he said.

“It always seems to me as if I were seeing fairy tales come true,” said Mieze. “They can't be real!”

“What are they then?” asked Max. “They're just as real as you or me.”

They stood for a while watching the animals in silence, then went on.

“Speaking of fairy tales,” he said, “my spending a whole day here with my parents, which was real enough, seems like a fairy tale to me now. I try to recall my mother or my father—I can't do it! I can't see either one of them. I can't remember anything at all, not a thing! And yet it was a day just like this.”

“Look, over there!” cried Mieze. “The monkey house!” She hurried over and he followed her. Then they stood for a long time wedged in among the crowd, watching the antics of the long-tailed monkeys, baboons and lemurs.

Mieze laughed aloud several times at the gymnastics, the leaping, the pursuits, the stratagems, the mistreatment and the bravery of the little monkeys, at their squeakings, barkings and vociferous growls.

Max did not move a muscle of his face.

“It's the same wherever you go,” he said when they left. “The strong beat the weak and take the food out of their mouths!” There was a gentle irony in his tone as he said, “You could almost believe it's a welfare institution.”

Mieze caught up his irony and embroidered it. “But it's just another monkey house!”

They both had a feeling of satisfaction as if they had told the world something. Max and Mieze gazed into one another's eyes. Their hands clasped and they were perfectly happy. Mieze saw the people running to the lion house. “Look, look, something's happening there.” She began to run too. Max followed her. He was delighted at the graceful way in which she ran ahead of him, at the ingenuousness of her movements, revealing the little schoolgirl that Mieze had been not very long ago. There was a kind of hesitancy in his gait; his body, his limbs seemed to be not yet wholly free, seemed to be impeded still by fear and prison discipline. Mieze stopped and turned to him: “Hurry up! Quick, quick!”

They arrived just as Barri and Burri were being taken away from their mother. Hella's futile resistance was over. Driven on by the keeper, the two little lions were trotting awkwardly along accompanied by a crowd of excited people. Max and Mieze let the procession pass. Barri and Burri stumbled, rolled into balls and tried to go back. They struggled and while the people laughed, the keeper kept them moving in the direction he wanted. Max was in a cheerful, if slightly cynical humor. He pointed to the cubs, saying jestingly, “Proletarian childhood!”

“But don't they say,” Mieze rejoined, “that the lion is the king of beasts.”

“What do you mean, king?” said Max with a smile. “He's a prolo here!”

“Maybe,” said Mieze, “but they don't know much about such things.”

“Very likely,” Max agreed. “Just look at them. They don't know anything, of course not. But are they happy? Not so that you could notice it. Happy children have a different look. And some day they're going to run wild. Against authority, against injustice! One king is as good as another, and it won't be any joke when the wild beast awakes in the workingman!” He talked with the force of a speaker addressing a meeting.

Hella roared in her cage. A deep moan, as if something were tearing her breast.

Mieze turned to look at her, and Max followed Mieze. They were the only people standing before the cage. Hella's features were distorted with pain, while from her throat broke wild moans. Her wide open jaws revealed her dangerous fangs as she uttered the terrifying elemental sounds of despair.

In the neighboring cages, to the right and left, then farther away, the other beasts of prey took up Hella's maternal wail. The old circus-lion thundered so that the air seemed to quiver. Mibbel rumbled from a heavy heart. The tiger howled terrifyingly, voraciously, ­imperiously. From the panther came sharp, crying, howling sounds.

Mieze, who felt a little strained and a little bored, tugged at Max's arm. “Let's go.”

Unhearing, he did not even move. He was quite numbed. His face had become chalk-white again and the color had faded even from his lips. His chin quivered. He stood listening to the untamable languages of those voices of revolt. He was stirred by the impotence with which this elemental outbreak died away, unheeded and unheard.

“Jail,” he whispered, “jail. When one of them begins shouting, they all begin shouting. And not one of the keepers pays the least attention to it.”

He was whispering in the midst of the uproar about him, and became more and more aroused. “Nobody hears their ravings, not one of the righteous judges who imprisons human beings behind bars!”

Mieze was silent.

“Do they know what they're doing?” cried Max passionately. “Do they ever dream how many souls they murder, how much goodness they destroy? You can't punish and reform at the same time! They just don't go together!”

He turned to Mieze, apparently calm and rational. But she could see how upset he was. “I tell you, some of those fine gentlemen ought to sit once behind the bars. Just once. Cut off from the world, deviled, looked down upon, helpless and defenseless. They ought to try it, only for a month or two, and sit in there where a man ceases to be a man. Maybe they'd understand then that they and their jails breed more evil than all the criminals in creation! Maybe they'd understand. . . .

“Lord,” Mieze interrupted, “how worked up you are! Come, let's go! It would have been better if we hadn't come here at all.”

“Yes, let's go,” replied Max a little more calmly. “You're right. I'll simply be upset here. But it's a good thing that we came. A very good thing! These creatures,” he included all the cages in a sweeping gesture, “these creatures here are my companions in suffering, so to speak. Indeed they are! I have respect and I have pity for them. For after all,” his voice sank to a whisper, “after all I defended myself against a bully, but they never did anything, nothing at all. . . .”