A Man in the Zoo

by David Garnett

“No,” said he at length, shaking his head, “I see she is bound to come. She is free to go where she likes, and one day when I look up I shall see her there, staring into my cage at me. Sooner or later it is bound to happen.” Then he asked himself what errand would send her there to look at him? Why would she come? Would it be to mock at him and torment him, or would it be because now that it was too late she repented of sending him there?

“No,” he told himself, “no, Josephine will never repent, or if she should, she would not own to it. When she does come here it will be to hurt me more than she has done already; she will come to torture me because it amuses her and I am at her mercy. Oh, God, she has no mercy in her.”

At this Mr. Cromartie who was so proud only a half-hour ago, saying he cared nothing for mankind now and nothing for what they said, began to cry and whimper like a baby, staying hidden all the while in his little bedroom. He sat there on the edge of his bed with his face buried in his hands for a quarter of an hour, and the tears running through his fingers. And all the while he was busy with this new fear of his, and saying to himself first that his life was no longer safe, that Josephine would bring a pistol and shoot him through the bars; and then his thoughts fetching about, that she cared nothing for him, and would not come to hurt him, but from mere love of notoriety and to get herself talked about by her friends or in the newspapers. At last he pulled himself somewhat together, washed his face and bathed his eyes, and then went back into his cage, where you may be sure the crowd was pretty impatient to see him after being kept waiting so long.

Once again you could see how this Mr. Cromartie “cared nothing for mankind and what they said.” For the moment that he stepped into his cage in full view of the public, from being an abject creature with his face comically twisted up to keep back his tears, he became at once quite calm and self-possessed and showed no trace of any feeling. Yet did this assumed calm show that he cared nothing for mankind? Was it because he cared nothing for mankind that he made these efforts, swallowing down the lump that was risen in his throat, holding back the tear that would have started to his eye, and strolling in with a serene smile, then knitting his brows with an affectation of thought; and was all this because he cared nothing for mankind?

The strange thing was that Mr. Cromartie should have taken three weeks to think that Josephine would certainly come and pay him a visit. For three weeks he had been thinking at every moment of the day of this girl Josephine, and, indeed, dreaming of her almost every night, but it had never come into his head that he would ever see her again. He had told himself a thousand times, “We are parted for ever,” and had never asked himself, “Why do I say this?” He had, one evening, even retraced their steps as they had wandered from one cage to another on the day that they had had their final rupture. But now all these sentimental ideas were a thousand miles away from him, who, though he lay back, yawned, and negligently cut the pages of a book from Mudie’s, was all the same terrified at the question he kept asking himself:

“When will she come? Will she come now, to-day, or perhaps to-morrow? Will she not come till next week, or not for a month?”

And his heart shrank within him as he understood that he would never know when she was coming and he would never be prepared for her.

But with all this flutter Mr. Cromartie was like a countryman coming into town a day late for the fair, for Josephine had already paid him a visit that day two hours before he had ever thought that she might do so.

When she had come Josephine did not know at all certainly why she found herself there. Every day since she had heard of the “loathsome thing” John had done she had vowed that she would never see him again, and would never think of him again. Every day she spent in thinking of him, and every day her anger drove her to walk in the direction of Regent’s Park, and all her time was occupied in thinking how she could best punish him for what he had done.

At first it had been insupportable for her. She had heard the news from her father at breakfast while he was reading The Times, and had learnt it in fragments as he chanced to read it out to her while she sat silent with the coffee machine and the egg machine in front of her, for her father stickled for his eggs being boiled very exactly. When breakfast was over she found The Times and read the account of the “Startling Acquisition by the Zoo Authorities.” She told herself then that she could never forgive or forget the insult to which she had been subjected, and that while she sat at breakfast she had grown an old woman.