A few days after the death of Elisheba the keeper put a young monkey in the cage with him, for company. This gave him some relief from the monotony of his own society, but never quite filled the place of the lost one. With this little friend, however, he amused himself in many ways. He nursed it so zealously and hugged it so tightly that the poor little monkey was often glad to escape from him in order to have a rest. But the task of catching it again afforded him almost as much pleasure as he found in nursing it.
Thus for a few weeks he passed his time; then he was seized by a sudden cold, which in a few days developed into an acute type of pneumonia. I was in London at the time and was not aware of his sickness; but feeling anxious about him, I wrote to Dr. Cross, in whose care he was left, and received a note in reply, stating that Aaron was very ill and not expected to live. I prepared to go to visit him the next day, but just before I left the hotel I received a telegram stating that he was dead. The news contained in the letter was a greater shock to me than that in the telegram, for which in part the former had prepared me; but no one can imagine how deeply these evil tidings affected me. I could not bring myself to a full sense of the fact. I was unwilling to believe that I had been thus deprived of my devoted friend. I could not realize that fate could be so cruel to me; but, alas! it was true.
Not having been present during his short illness or at the time of his death, I cannot relate any of the scenes accompanying them; but the kind old keeper who attended him declares that he never became reconciled to the death of Elisheba, and that his loneliness preyed upon him almost as much as the disease. When I looked upon his cold, lifeless body, I felt that I was indeed bereft of one of the dearest and most loyal pets that any mortal had ever known. His fidelity to me had been shown in a hundred ways, and his affections had never wavered. How could any one requite such integrity with anything unkind?
To those who possess the higher instincts of humanity it will not be thought absurd in me to confess that the conduct of these creatures awoke in me a feeling more exalted than a mere sense of kindness. It touched some chord of nature that yields a richer tone. But only those who have known such pets as I have known them can feel towards them as I have felt.
I have no desire to bias the calm judgment or bribe the sentiment of him who scorns the love of nature, by clothing these humble creatures in the garb of human dignity; but to him who is not so imbued with self-conceit as to be blind to all evidence and deaf to all reason, it must appear that they are gifted with faculties and passions like to those of man; differing in degree, but not in kind. Moved by such conviction, who could fail to pity that poor, lone captive in his iron cell, far from his native land, slowly dying? It may be a mere freak of sentiment that I regret not having been with him to soothe and comfort his last hours, but I do regret it deeply. He had the right to expect it of me, as a duty.
Poor little Aaron! In the brief span of half a year he had seen his own mother die at the hands of the cruel hunters; he had been seized and sold into captivity; he had seen the lingering torch of life go out of the frail body of Moses; he had watched the demon of death binding his cold shackles on Elisheba; and now he had himself passed through the deep shadows of that ordeal. What a sad and vast experience for one short year! He had shared with me the toils and the dangers of sea and land over many a weary mile. He seemed to feel that the death of his two friends had been a common loss to us; and if there is any one thing which more than another knits the web of sympathy about two alien hearts, it is the experience of a common grief.
Thus ended the career of my kulu-kamba friend, the last of my chimpanzee pets. In him were centered many cherished hopes; but they did not perish with him, for I shall some day find another one of his kind in whom I may realize all that I had hoped for in him. I cannot expect to find a specimen of superior qualities, for he was certainly one of the jolliest and one of the wisest of his race. However fine and intelligent his successor may be, he can never supplant either Moses or Aaron in my affections; for these two little heroes shared with me so many of the sad vicissitudes of time and fortune that I should be an ingrate to forget them or allow the deeds of others to dim the glory of their memory. I have all of them preserved, and when I look at them the past comes back to me, and I recall so vividly the scenes in which they played the leading rôles; it is like the panorama of their lives.
CHAPTER XVIII
Other Chimpanzees—The Village Pet—A Chimpanzee as Diner-Out—Notable Specimens in Captivity
Among the number of chimpanzees that I have seen are some whose actions are worthy of record; but as many of them were the repetitions of similar acts of other specimens which are elsewhere described, I shall omit mention of them and relate only such other acts as may tend to widen the circle of our knowledge, and more fully illustrate the mental range of this interesting tribe of apes.