‘Well, sir, I have, and, from that moment, I was a changed man. It is a mere toy with the showmen; to a man that can put two and two together, it is what the fall of the apple was to Newton. The first time I saw it, I did not sleep for three nights. I went into a dime show in Broadway, and there were these things, along with a Circassian lady, and, I believe, a calculating boy. I began with the fleas, and I never gave another thought to the rest. There were a dozen of them, of various sizes and nationalities—English fleas, Russian fleas, American, and so on; and there was a good deal of patter, that meant nothing, as to what each nationality could do, all winding up, of course, in honour of the Stars and Stripes. The Russian flea was big, but lazy; the English flea tough, but obstinate; the American flea all sprightliness, audacity, energy, and good sense. I soon stopped that, by making believe I was a Scotchman, when he produced a creature from its bed of wadding in a pill-box, and said it came from Mull, and was the smartest thing in his stables. I gave him a dollar, and asked him not to play the fool, and he fell to business at once. I wanted to get at the principle of the thing, you understand. The creatures were harnessed with a woman’s hair—a man’s would have been too coarse—tied round that dip in their bodies that makes a natural waist. Then, when you had them fast in this way by one end of the hair, you put the other end to whatever you wanted to set going—Queen Victoria’s coach, in cardboard, or the miller’s cart. The flea naturally tried to get away, and that was your motive power. When you wanted him to turn the treadmill, you put him up against the wheel, just like his betters and, the faster he tried to run away, the faster the thing went round. That was always the principle of it; utilise the movement of flight—a new escapement beyond anything in the watchmaker’s art. Well, sir, this showman saw nothing beyond his fleas, but, at a glance, I saw ahead of them to all animal life. Make the animals earn their living, I said to myself; work up your reflex action for the benefit of man. It would solve the labour problem: no more strikes! When once I had got my thoughts in that groove, I seemed to see nothing but loafing idleness in all Nature. Take even the working animals; what do many of them do for Man? There’s nothing serious in beaver dams, for instance, from that point of view. They are generally a mere obstruction, for want of an intelligent foreman of the works. And as for the ants, though I admit they are too small to count in business, why flatter them up? I say nothing of their useless fighting; but did an ant ever make anything to eat, or anything to wear? There, sir, when I got that idea into my head, I couldn’t read the poets, for sheer disgust at the way in which they wrote about these creatures, and missed the real point. It was the same when I went to a menagerie, and I always went when I could. It made me real sad. Think of the waste of power in a cage of apes! Nothing to be done with them but nut-cracking, and swinging on the horizontal bar—never tell me!’
He had now settled himself for a long night’s talk, and, all things considered, I was not loath to find him a listener. There might be still more in it, I thought, than even he perceived; and, as he had looked beyond the showman, others, who were not without a lingering tenderness for a beauty of life fast perishing of the malady of use, might look beyond him. Besides, now that one was fairly awake, it was so sweet to feel alive again. For, beyond the gleam of his candle, I caught a glimpse of the starry sky, and his monotone was sometimes tempered to the ear by the note of a night bird.
The bird seemed to put him in a rage. ‘Just so! Just so!’ he said with severity, apostrophising the unseen musician through the open casement. ‘How should you know better, when those who ought to know have been encouraging you all their lives? Did you ever read a book called “The Birds of the Poets,” my friend? It is just heart-breaking, if you take it from the point of view of an employer of labour. All this singing—why do they do it? Just because there’s nobody to set them to work. Who does most whistling? The loafer at the street corner. It’s pent up energy, sir, that must find a vent. That’s why there’s so much fuss about feathered love-making: they’ve got to kill time. Develop industry, and you’ll soon have less billing and cooing. Look at Spain and Italy—why it was nothing but that sort of thing till they went into manufactures. There ain’t much guitar playing in Catalonia now; and you’d better not go to Bilbao, if you’ve a taste for the castanets. Men have got to keep themselves employed; and, if they are not making cottons, or smelting iron, they’ll be fighting duels, or running off with one another’s wives. The animal kingdom is full of wasted power, that’s my point. You can’t use all of it: we haven’t got to that pitch of intelligence; but you can begin to try. Did you ever notice a cloud hanging low over the water, not a yard away, and stretching, perhaps, for miles and miles? What do you think it is? Young shrimps bounding up and down, just to show they’re glad—millions, billions, trillions of ’em. There’s power for you, if you could work it up. I don’t say you could, in this case; I don’t want to be fanciful. I only say what a fine thing, if you could: let us talk like practical men. See how the dog has sneaked out of industry. One time he used to earn his own dinner by roasting his master’s; but that’s all over now. I don’t say he costs less than the roasting-jack, but I’m talking of the principle of the thing. What is he now? A machine for licking the hand of his owner, and for barking when visitors pull the bell. It ain’t as though he washed your hand—you’ve got to wash it after him, instead—and if the help is too deaf to hear the bell, she will be too deaf to hear the dog. The dog is a humbug, and his show of affection is only a way of fooling us out of a free lunch. What does it amount to—all this running to and fro after nothing, and all this jumping about? Sheer waste of power. The Dutchmen and the Esquimaux are the only wise people; they turn it to account. Put him in harness, and he’ll soon leave off pawing your pants. As for cats, I am ashamed of them, and I am more ashamed of the human beings that encourage them in their profitless ways. In most houses, they don’t even catch the mice: it’s all done with traps. A pet animal of any kind is an economic monstrosity. Do you know how I interpret the singing of birds in their cages? They are sniggering at man to think they have done him out of their board. There’s a use for everything; why, even tortoises, if you know how to manage them, will tell you when it’s going to rain. Sir, I want to make idleness a caution to the whole animal creation—even a caution to snakes. The bloodhound—send him back into the Police service, and give him a blue overcoat for uniform, if you like. There’s power everywhere; why you’ve a perfect sledge hammer in every alligator’s tail! How about the weight of the hippopotamus for crushing cane? I’d just turn your Zoological Gardens into a factory, by thunder I would! and make every blessed animal do something for his living. No song, no supper. The squirrels would do for thread winders; the giraffes, for reaching things off shelves. You’d lose by it at starting, just as you do by prison labour, but you’d soon find out how to make it pay.’
He seemed to be growing drowsy, but I was wakeful enough, and I wanted him to go on. My curiosity seemed to gratify him, and he roused himself for a further effort.
‘You want to begin somewhere, on a small scale—in some place where there’s nobody to laugh. It’s like any other experiment; you’ll have to play with it at first, and keep your own counsel. You want a little place up in a corner; this place would do. Why not this place, eh?’ he said, sitting bolt upright, and fixing me with the inventor’s eye. ‘You are quiet; you are out of the world; you ain’t of much account in creation—you know my meaning—and you’ve no character to lose. Just think of it; one fine day you might send your little specimen of animal manufactures to a European Exhibition, and then you’d be a second hub of the universe. What do you do with your goats, for instance? Why not put ’em into harness? I mean real business, not baby play. How about a goat tramway from old Forelock’s house there, all along the Ridge, to the foot of the Point? fare, a potato, if you must carry your small change about in that way. You are just teeming with life, sir, and life is power. Your sea birds—it’s a sad sight! I know something could be done with ’em. Train up a happy family, new style—a happy factory, the whole lot, cat, and dog, and mouse, and guinea-pig, and barn-door fowl, all at work, instead of sitting on the mope, and all turning out something that would sell by the yard. Then lecture on the utilisation of reflex action all through the States. It would make your fortune as a show, and when that was played out, you could easily get up a company to run it as a business concern. You’ve no monkeys, but, lord, you are rich in sea birds! I can’t bring in the birds yet,’ he murmured, as another plaintive note of a night watcher sounded from the outside. ‘I can’t bring in the birds.’
In another instant, he had turned himself off at the main a second time, and was fast asleep.
CHAPTER XXIV.
A PARAGRAPH.
There was no sleep for me. This seemed the final stroke of treason against the happiness of sentient life. I had done my best to spoil humanity’s share of it, till Victoria entered her caveat against the crime; and here was this sleeping figure, as my logical sequel, with all animate Nature for his mark.
It was a distressing thought, and I looked round for something to drive it away. The Captain’s bundle of newspapers lay on a chair, and I took them up to read myself to sleep.
I might as well have taken coffee as an opiate. As I turned these fatal leaves, life in all its littleness seemed to beat in upon me, with a suffocating rush, from every quarter of the globe. I was in the fever-struck crowd once more, after my spiritual quarantine of months. It was as a coming back to consciousness after chloroform: my brain throbbed, every pulsation was pain. I darted from column to column, from page to page. I had lost the art of selection: one thing was as another thing, and each impression was a shock. Once again, I realised Europe and America, Asia and Africa, but only as masses in a whirl. The Ball itself, with all its continents, seemed to have suddenly whizzed my way, as I lay dreaming on a cloud in space. Every particle was in movement, as well as the mass; it was a huge rolling cheese, putrid with unwholesome being—a low-bred world, not a world at all, a mere glorified back-court, with all its cheatings, thefts, lies, cruelties, small cares, and small ambitions, multiplied into themselves, and into one another, to make a whole. The finer things alone seemed without an entry, as though, in a business reckoning, such trifles could not count.