Meanwhile Miss Layng waited.
"I thought I would get six traps, but wished to speak of it first, otherwise you might wonder to see so many on the bill at the end of the month."
In this cryptic yet crystalline fashion the problem of their fate was presented to me. There was put before me a choice, a clear choice, between the proper maintaining of an honorable household, the retaining of a housekeeper and a cook with all that this implied as to my own comfort, and—a whole community of I know not how many fathers, mothers, children, step-children, brothers, half-brothers, uncles, aunts, cousins, first cousins once removed, prophets, sibyls, lawgivers.
Need I say which I felt constrained to choose?
Six were caught the first night.
III
Six the first night! In the very midst of their rejoicings and the apparent favor of their divinity—six! What a subject for a rodent Æschylus! How they must have set themselves to ponder it! How and by what neglect or unintentional disrespect had they offended the gods, who but a while before had shone so kind! Six! And, as in the reapings of war among ourselves, these were bound to have been the best and most adventurous spirits. I paused to look at only one of them. What a sleek and likely fellow he was! What a bead of an eye! What a father of a family he would have made, nay, perhaps was!
After that I asked Miss Layng to spare me all bulletins and statistics; but by the frequency with which I came across her in the halls, or just emerging from closets, holding far from her, between horrified fingers, a small magenta trap rigged with wires and a dangling tail, I knew the number was large.
I knew, too, by signs other and quite as authentic. The riotous junketings had indeed ceased. The community was without doubt sobered, and, it may be, led to think of its sins, its gods having turned against it. There was less frolic and gladness in the world than there had been.
I confess, all this seemed to me a loss, or, more exactly, a kind of waste. The wiser and the brooding East does not throw such things away. Are there not many folk in India, of tawny skin and gentle eye, who regard the humbler orders as sacred? There in that land are not the monkeys (and I cannot believe them to be a less destructive or garrulous race) welcome to the temples? There does not Kim's sacred bull go about and select the best vegetables for himself?