The jungle is full of wild fruit trees newly burgeoned, but the monkeys prefer the cultivated varieties, they have found out the improved flavour even in the young leaves. They find out everything, not merely for the purposes of honest burglary, but for the cynical satisfaction of tearing it to pieces. Thus, for one graft that a monkey devours, he pulls three out of their bandages and casts them on the ground, where they are of no further use to either men or monkeys. What you plant with infinite pains they pull up by the roots. “These people have done something; let us undo it,” is the one thought they ever think,—which shows, I suppose, that if there are politics among them they govern strictly on party lines. It makes one very ill-disposed toward them. A monkey has entered the pantry and bolted with a jam-pot even while my back was turned giving out the sugar to make more jam. A monkey has come in at the verandah door and abstracted all the bread and butter for afternoon tea, while his accomplice sat upon the paling to gibber “Cave!” This was legitimate larceny, and we put up with it. Thisbe said the poor monkey looked hungry, and she would be content with Madeira cake, adding, out of the depths of her experience, that it was a pity the monkey that took the jam hadn’t taken the bread and butter too,—they went so well together. We can be indulgent to an entirely empty monkey; we have enough in common with him to understand his behaviour, and his villainous pirate’s descent upon us is always good comedy. But when he picks the slates off the roof of your dwelling, when he privily enters your husband’s dressing-room and abstracts the razor and strop—Tiglath-Pileser, who would not lend his to a seraph!—what kind of patience is there which would be equal to the demand? Monkeys do not throw stones and break windows; one wishes they would, since that would bring them within the cognizance of the police and it might then be possible to deal with them. A monkey would hate solitary confinement above all things. Often in a troupe bounding from tree to tree overhead across the Mall there will be one with a collar and a bit of rope or chain hanging to it, escaped from capture and free again to range with his fellows the limitless lunatic asylum the good God has endowed for him in the jungle. Once he became amenable to that sort of punishment he would forsake for ever, I am sure, the haunts of men; but he is not intelligent enough, or perhaps he is too intelligent.
There are so many of them. A monkey census is obviously impossible, but I believe if it could be taken it would show that every resident official had at least one simian counterpart,—a statement which I hope will not give offence on either side. An old fakir on the top of Jakko keeps a kind of retreat for monkeys, a monastery with the most elastic rules, where indeed the domestic relations are rather encouraged than forbidden. He is their ghostly father, though responsibility for their morals seems to sit upon him lightly; he will call them out of the jungle for you in hundreds to be fed. Then you give him four annas and come away. A pious Hindoo, with sins to expiate, would doubtless give more, and the fakir would profess to spend it in grain for the monkeys. Here, by the way, we have an explanation of the incorrigibility of monkeys which has not hitherto occurred to ethnographers: they consume all the sins of the pious Hindoos. So they thrive and multiply and gambol all over this town of Simla, its house-tops and shop-fronts, its gardens and its public places, with none to make them afraid. There are two small brown ones sitting on the paling looking at me at this moment, knowing perfectly well that I will never interrupt the flow of my ideas to get up and chase them away.
Of course we try to make Atma responsible, and he declares that he persecutes them without ceasing, but we know better. He claps his hands at them and shouts, “Go, brother!” and that is all he does. And brother goes, to the next convenient branch. We have given Atma catapults and he tells us that he uses them every morning before our honours are awake, but we are certain that he hangs them on a nail. And indeed I do not think monkeys would be very shy of a house defended by mere catapults. Atma, however, has taken this business of Tiglath-Pileser’s fruit trees seriously. He had carefully protected every tree and graft with thorns, but the monkeys slid their hands in underneath, and reached up, and tore down the young shoots with great strips of the tender bark as well. He was angry at last, was Atma, and he asked for a gun.
“You would kill a monkey?” we exclaimed, “you would break your one commandment?” and Atma cast down his eyes.
“They are budmash,” said he (a wicked and perverse generation), “and they eat the work of we people. Why should they not be killed?”
“No,” said the sahib, “you are a good churchman”—or words to that effect—“I know that you will not kill a monkey.” And we both looked at him piercingly.
“Nevertheless,” said Atma, cheerfully and shamelessly recanting, “it would be well that a gun should be. A gun is a noise-making thing. These bundar-people have no shame, but it will appear to them that here a gun is, and they will not come. Also,” he added ferociously, “for that long-tail apple-eating wallah, I will put a stone in the gun.”
He had definite proposals to make about the gun; it had plainly been weighed and considered, not being a matter to be lightly undertaken. It would not be wise for the sahib to buy it in Simla, where the price would be great and the article probably inferior. By our honours’ favour he, Atma, would go to his own village, where apparently they knew a thing or two about guns, and where, since they were all poor men, guns were also cheap, and there select one for our approbation. If our honours’ liking was not, he added, the gun could be sent back, but our honours’ liking would be.
“Where is your village, worthy one?” asked Tiglath-Pileser.
Atma waved his arm across the purple masses on the western horizon. “I will come to it in three days,” he said, and Tiglath-Pileser consented.