“Are you interested in the girls?” asked the negro. “They come and watch me all the morning, and they do stare so ... he, he, he.”
“No, I’m not interested,” said Mr. Cromartie. Nobody could have mistaken the desperate sincerity in his voice.
“I’m glad to hear that,” said Tennison, at once restored to his former heartiness and buoyancy of manner.
“That is how I feel myself, just how I feel. I have no interest in women at all. Only my poor old mammy, my old black mammy, she was of the very best, the very best she was. A mother is the best friend you have through life—the best friend you can make. My mother was ignorant, she could not read, neither could she write, but she knew almost all of the whole Bible by heart, and I first learnt of Salvation from my mother’s lips. When I was five years old she taught me the Holy Words of Glory, and I repeated them after her text by text. She was the best friend I shall ever have.
“But other women—no, sir. I have no use for them. They are just a temptation in a man’s life, a temptation to make him forget his true manhood. And the worst of it is that the more you shun them the more they do run after you. That’s a fact.
“No, I am very much safer and better off here shut up alongside of you, with this wire netting and bars to fence off the women, and I guess you feel the same way as I do. Don’t you, Mr. Cromartie?” Cromartie suddenly looked up and saw the person who had been addressing him.
“Who are you?” he asked, and then, looking rather wildly, he walked out of his cage into his back room, where he lay down feeling very exhausted.
He was still very weak from his illness, and the close atmosphere of the Ape-house gave him a headache. Every moment he had now to exercise self-control, and it was more and more exhausting for him to do so. Very often he did what he did on this occasion, and this was to lie down to rest in his back room and then burst into tears, quite without any restraint, and though he laughed at himself afterwards, the act of weeping comforted him, although it left him weaker than before and more inclined to weep again.
But the pricks and troubles of the outside world meant very little to Mr. Cromartie just then. He could not help thinking the whole time of Josephine.
For so long he had believed that there were so many insuperable obstacles which would prevent them ever being happy together, that the additional fact of his being shut up in the Zoo was a relief to him. But now that he felt so weak it was an extra strain, and especially now as he was beginning to wonder if Josephine and he could not be happy together for a little while.