A Man in the Zoo

by David Garnett

There is in this a possible explanation of the often recorded fact that it is particularly easy for convicts to make friends with mice and rats in prison.

For the rest of that week crowds collected round the new Ape-house every day, and the queue for admittance was longer than that at the pit of Drury Lane Theatre on a first night.

Thousands of people paid for admission to the Gardens and waited patiently for hours in order to catch a glimpse of the new creature which the Society had acquired, and none were really disappointed when they had seen him, although many professed to be so. For everyone went away with what people are most grateful for having—that is, a new subject for conversation, something that everyone could discuss and have an opinion about, viz., the propriety of exhibiting a man. Not that this discussion was confined to those who had actually been successful in catching a glimpse of him. On the contrary it raged in every train, in every drawing-room, and in the columns of every newspaper in England. Jokes on the subject were made at public dinners, and at music-halls, and Mr. Cromartie was referred to continually in Punch, sometimes in a facetious manner. Sermons were preached about him, and a Labour member in the House of Commons said that when the working classes came into power the rich would be put “alongside the Man in the Zoo, where they properly belonged.”

What was the strangest thing was that everyone held the view either that a man ought to be exhibited, or that he ought not to be exhibited, and that after a week’s time there were not half a dozen men in England who believed no moral principle to be involved in the matter.

Mr. Cromartie cared less than nothing for all these discussions of which he was the subject; it was no more to him indeed what men said about him than if he had been the ape in the cage beside his own. Indeed it was really less, for had the ape been able to understand that thousands of people were talking about it, the creature would have been as much puffed up with pride as now it was mortified with jealousy that its neighbour should draw so vast a crowd.

Mr. Cromartie told himself he cared nothing for the world of men now. As he looked through the meshes of his cage at the excited faces watching him, it cost him an effort to listen to what was being said of him, and after a while his attention wandered even against his will, for he cared nothing for mankind and cared nothing for what they said.

Yet while he told himself that with some complacency, something came into his mind which threw him into such disorder that he looked about him for a minute as if he were distracted, and then ran as if in terror into his hiding-place, his place of refuge, his bedroom, which he had not sheltered in before, at least not in that way.

“What if I should see Josephine among them?” he asked himself aloud, and the thought of her coming was so actual to him that it seemed as if she were at that moment entering the house, and then were there at the bars already.

“What can I do?” he asked himself. “I can do nothing. What can I say? I can say nothing. No, I must not speak to her, I will not look at her. When I see her I will sit down in my armchair and look on the floor until she is gone, that is, if I have the strength. What will become of me if she should come? And perhaps she will come every day and will be always there watching me through the bars, and will call out and insult me as some do already. How could I bear that?”

Then he asked himself why should she come at all, and began to persuade himself that there was no reason why she should visit him, and that it was the most irrational fear that could seize hold of him—but it would not do.