“Oh, yes, yes. But the loss of a leg”—the daddy-long-legs looked down slantwise—“is apt to embitter one, rather.”
“I see,” said Maya.
“One evening I was sitting on a window-frame as usual, prepared for the chase, and the man was sitting at the table, his two bottles before him, trying to produce something. It annoyed me dreadfully that a whole swarm of little flies and gnats, upon which I depend for my subsistence, had settled upon the artificial sun and were staring into it in that crude, stupid, uneducated way of theirs.”
“Well,” observed Maya, “I think I’d look at a thing like that myself.”
“Look, for all I care. But to look and to stare like an idiot are two entirely different things. Just watch once and see the silly jig they dance around a lamp. It’s nothing for them to butt their heads about twenty times. Some of them keep it up until they burn their wings. And all the time they stare and stare at the light.”
“Poor creatures! Evidently they lose their wits.”
“Then they had better stay outside on the window-frame or under the leaves. They’re safe from the lamp there, and that’s where I can catch them.—Well, on that fateful night I saw from my position on the window-frame that some gnats were lying scattered on the table beside the lamp drawing their last breath. The man did not seem to notice or care about them, so I decided to go and take them myself. That’s perfectly natural, isn’t it?”
“Perfectly.”
“And yet, it was my undoing. I crept up the leg of the table, very softly, on my guard, until I could peep over the edge. The man seemed dreadfully big. I watched him working. Then, slowly, very slowly, carefully lifting one leg at a time, I crossed over to the lamp. As long as I was covered by the bottle all went well, but I had scarcely turned the corner, when the man looked up and grabbed me. He lifted me by one of my legs, dangled me in front of his huge eyes, and said: ‘See what’s here, just see what’s here.’ And he grinned—the brute!—he grinned with his whole face, as though it were a laughing matter.”
Hannibal sighed, and little Maya kept quite still. Her head was in a whirl.