V.—A CHAT WITH A COMMON MONKEY
"GOOD morning, Bhunder. How are you?”
“Oh, I don't know. About as well as I deserve to be, I suppose.”
“Well, that's dismal, anyhow. But you are looking very bothered; what is it?”
“As a fact I am bothered, and I'd like to ask you something”; saying which it stretched out a hind leg, and, catching hold of a smaller monkey that happened to be passing, dragged it to it and proceeded solemnly to examine its captive's fur. “Something very particular,” and it scratched itself behind contemplatively; “very particular,” and its eyes wandered all over the Monkey-house like a boy's when he searches the schoolroom ceiling for the answer to a question. “Very particular,” and then it relapsed into fur-hunting again.
“Well, what is it?”
“Lor! How you do hurry one! Life isn't worth living in such a fuss. Couldn't you see I was thinking?
“About what?”
“There you go again, hustling and worrying one. I was trying to remember what it was.”
“What what was?”
“Oh, dear, oh, dear; can't you stop bothering? If you can't listen patiently you had better go away, and I'll ask somebody else when I can think of it.”
“But you said it was something very particular.”
“So it was,” snappishly.
“And you can't remember it?”
“No, I can't”; and then, thoughtfully, “isn't it always particular things you can't remember?”
Which was true. So I waited for a while and then I went away. The monkey never even turned its head round, and the last I saw of it was its scratching its spine in a recollective, memory-searching sort of way. As I came round again it was again examining the little monkey, but as I approached it looked up.
“What, back again?”
“Yes. Have you thought of that very particular thing again?”
“No. Do you often think of anything very particular more than once a day?”
This was rather a poser.
And then, after a pause, “Why don't you scratch something? You wouldn't talk so much if you did?”
“Scratch what?”
“Scratch yourself.”
“I don't scratch.”
“Don't you? Not when you are all by yourself, eh?”
And after a pause, “Or scratch another monkey.”
“Thanks; I don't scratch monkeys.”
“Don't you. Then get scratched.”
And the monkey coolly walked off to the other side of the cage, and was soon profoundly interested in another companion's fur.
But I didn't like being put off in this way, so I followed.
“What is the good,” I asked, “of scratching each other?”
“Well, it keeps two people quiet and out of mischief. Do you know anything else that does? Besides, what would you do if you didn't scratch?”
I confess I was puzzled, and after an awkward pause, during which the monkey eyed me with a sidelong glance and solemnly tickled its own ribs, I said, “Why not play more?”
“Play more! What is the use of playing when you come down always again on the same old straw? What is the use of pretending to swing, or of leaping from perch to perch? We never get anywhere by doing it, only against the wires. And we're all sick of each other. Oh, dear me!” and the monkey yawned.
[Illustration: “'WELL, IT KEEPS TWO PEOPLE QUIET AND OUT OF MISCHIEF.'”]
“But what do you want?”
“Want!” and it turned fiercely on me. “Want! I want freedom. When I get on the swing I think of the boughs of a tree, and the next minute the mockery of it makes the motion hateful, and I get off. Do you not see that we never do anything for long together?”
“Yes, everybody has noticed that?”
“Well, that is the reason. We hate the mockery of it all. Oh! to get back to India!” and it stopped scratching the other monkey and took up a straw and began twiddling it about nervously in its two hands and throwing quick, furtive glances from side to side. And then it sidled up into the corner, and, putting down its hand into a little crack, pulled up a fragment of old plantain peel and sniffed it, and while it did so its eyes rested in quiet meditation upon the tubs of plantain trees by the door. “I often sit here thinking, and this piece of peel helps me, and the rustle of those plantain leaves helps me, and the sunshine out of doors, where I can see the sarus-cranes that came from India with me walking about, and hear the old familiar cry of the pea-fowl. They oughtn't to bring us away from India when we're grown up. There are plenty of little ones they might steal who would never miss India at all.”
And the monkey kept taking up the little piece of peel and sniffing it, and putting it behind it again in what might have seemed aimless monkey-fashion. But the aimlessness was careful acting, for a score of eyes were fidgeting all over the cage, and anything like purpose would have attracted attention at once and the plantain peel would have been lost in a general scramble.
“Do you remember India then?”
“Do I? If a native comes in here I can smell him at once, and the scent of him excites me so that they think I am angry. 'He can't bear those black fellows,' I hear the keeper say. But he is wrong. I am excited because I want to go with the native. I think that some day he may go back to India and perhaps I might go with him. Remember it? Have you ever been in an Indian village like Gyneepore, where I lived? It was such a little village, with only about a score of huts, and a big chabootra in the middle where all the men sat in the evening to do the talking, and a grain-dealer's store, and seven great mango trees in a clump, and a well underneath them. And there was only my family in the mango trees, and we were about thirty all told. In the morning before the sun was up and it was cool we used to come down and drink at the place where they spilled the water for us, and wait for the mats before the. doors to be lifted up and the women to come out to polish their cooking pots with dust. And they would wish us good morning; and when breakfast was finished they would come out again and give us all that was over from the meal. And we used to go all together from door to door, the little ones eating first, until we had been to every house, and then we would go—stepping over the dogs that lay dozing in the road, and nobody harming us—to the grain-dealer's, and he, miserly man, would count us carefully and would then throw us one pea each. And then we would go to the well, where the girls would spill some fresh water for us in our place 'for the love of Ram,' and we would drink and then go away into the jungle for the day. And, oh! the happy days we spent all together, picking berries and buds, and playing; till it got too hot, when we used to go to sleep all on one bough, and when the sun was slanting we would begin our day again, and feed and romp all the way home to the village, where the evening meal was being cooked; and when we had been given our little share we used to climb up into the mango tree over the chabootra and listen to the men talking and the crackle of the fire and the snoring of the hubble-bubble, till we went to sleep. We were happy then and we did no harm to any one, and no one did any harm to us. And I wish I was back in Gyneepore, where the plantains grow down by the ditch behind the cottages. When I smell this piece of peel I remember the bits of fruit the children used to give us, and can hear the rustling of the leaves every time that the wind comes in through the door and stirs those plantains in the tubs. We were not mere monkeys then, shut up in a cage. We were the “Bhunder-logue” or the village, and a part of the little community. We shared the villagers' food and warmed ourselves at their fire, and their children played with us, and when visitors came or went they always gave us a 'Ram, Ram,' as they passed. And we helped the dogs to keep watch over the village, for was it not our own home?”
“But can you not make a home here?”
[Illustration: “HERE ANOTHER MONKEY DROPPED DOWN FROM THE PERCH ABOVE.”]
“Here? No, I think not. For one thing, all the people we see here do nothing else but grin. Are they all idiots? In Gyneepore there was an idiot. He was always grinning. No; I don't think I could ever be at home in this country. Hark! did you hear that sarus trumpeting? There is danger of some kind afoot. Not a leopard I suppose?”
“There are no leopards in this country, except in cages. And that reminds me to ask if you remember how, when you used to go into the jungles by Gyneepore, you used to find your little ones missing? They had stayed behind, do you remember, with the leopard and the tiger-cat and never came home again to the mango trees by the well?”
“Yes.”
“And how often when you used to go down to the shallows in the river to drink, or to cross the stream by the bridge of stones, the little ones, and sometimes the elders too, used to be seen to fall into the water with a great splash? What made them fall in? The muggur knew, and the crocodile.”
“Quite true.”
“And have you forgotten those months in every year when the villagers had not enough to eat, and when the women would come to the doors, and turning up the cooking-pots would make believe to spill some food for you, tapping with their fingers on the empty brain and saying, 'in the name of Ram'; but not a grain fell out. And there was famine, and you used to creep about the fields where no corn grew, and in the jungles where the villagers had stripped the bushes of berries, and pick up insects or anything you could find for a meal? And your little ones used to be dying for want of food, and the jackals found them, and the vultures and the kites and the carrion-crows?”
“Yes.”
“Well, none of those things can happen now. You are certain that it will never be too cold nor too hot, that your food will never fail, and that nothing shall do you hurt.”
“I know all this quite well. You are very good to me. But I tell you this, and you may believe me. I would rather be back in Gyneepore in famine-time, feeding in panther-peopled jungles and drinking from rivers filled with crocodiles, than be here. It may be different perhaps for the other animals, nyl-ghai and antelope, but I would rather be back in India. For there I was something more than I am here—a common monkey for everybody to grin at.”
And here another monkey dropped down from the perch above, and each began to scratch the other, and with such complete concentration of attention on the work in hand that I began to wonder whether the creature had been really talking to me so seriously or whether I had only been putting my own words to the monkey's looks and gestures. As it had evidently forgotten all about me, I turned to go away.
“I say,” said the same voice again. “I have just remembered what it was that was so very particular.”
“Well, what was it?”
“It's this. Which is better—to have caught a flea and lost it, or never to have caught it at all?”
“Ah, Bhunder,” I said, “you have asked me a question to which there is no answer. Men and women have been asking it ever since the days of Eden.”
[Illustration: A Tailpiece]