by Paul Gallico
But it was not only Zara the lioness who was involved but the other cats, some nine in number—dark-maned Nubian lions and lionesses—who also accepted him as one of their own.
Major Hoffmann, the owner and trainer of this act and an animal psychologist, was quick to see in Albert a find who could take onerous chores and duties off his hands, and overnight the odd-job hanger-on became beast man to the ten lions. He fed them, cleaned their cages, cared for them, and learned to look after them when they were ill.
It was a hard and exacting job, which soon, through the sharp business instincts of Sam Marvel, was extended to care of the entire menagerie. There were also certain difficulties with Major Hoffmann who, even though he had dealt with wild animals for all of his life and understood them, refused to credit the fact that Mr. Albert was something extra and special for whom the rules laid down were inoperative. He was continually warning him that any one of his mixed group of lions, tigers, leopards, and bears was capable of turning upon him and killing him some day.
“You bedammed blutty old fool!” he had cursed Mr. Albert when he had come upon him one time cuddling the tiger, catching them in flagrante delicto, like a pair of guilty lovers with Rajah nestling into Mr. Albert’s chest and the old man with one arm about his neck knuckling his broad forehead with the back of his hand. “What you sink you got there? A pussycat from the house, you old fool? This iss a wild animal. It iss always a wild animal. One moment it not liking your smell and you are moving too quickly or wrongly, and you got it! I catch you again and I give you a good kicking, mein lieber Herr Albert!”
There was a great deal of truth in this, according to Major Hoffmann’s experience, but the other half of the truth was that the trainer passionately loved the tiger himself and was femininely and Teutonically jealous of Mr. Albert.
Rajah now rolled over on to his stomach and faced them, paws extended, and with what might have passed for a slightly sheepish smirk on his grandly handsome countenance, as though he suddenly realised he had been acting in a kittenish and undignified manner. And now Rose was exposed to the full glory of the animal seen at close range: the massive, tawny head with the wavy black markings, which were not really stripes but dark curves which by their very irregularity lent even more beauty and excitement to the mask; the line of the body; and the muscles beneath the shining, healthy pelt were a delight to behold. There was a savage and wonderful rhythm in its very repose, in the poise of the great paws, one slightly curled inwards, and something exalting in the fires burning in the great, greenish-yellow eyes.
Rose felt her throat suddenly constricted and tears welling to the surface. Her hands were clasped before her and she cried, as though in sudden pain, “Oh dear! Why’ve you got to be shut up like that?”
“That’s right,” said Mr. Albert. “Ain’t that the truth! Now him over there—” And he arose from his stool and walked Rose over to the next cage where lay, almost in the same position as the tiger, the huge black-maned Nubian lion, looking smug and satisfied with himself. “You can’t take no such liberties with him. I don’t know who he thinks HE is. Oh, he’ll come up and rub up against me when he feels like it, Mr. Snooty King, pushing and scratching himself like as if he thinks I’m another lion, but he don’t like to be fussed with.”
“Is that his name?”
“King, that’s it. Snooty King I calls him. Look at ’im there. Like he owned the place.”
“I like Rajah better,” Rose said, “though maybe King would like to be squeezed but don’t know how to ask for it.”
“Cats,” said Mr. Albert. “A lot of people like tigers because they’re like cats. Though some people don’t like cats. Do you like ’em?”
“Yes,” said Rose, and thought of the time when she had once picked up a stray in the rain and kissed and cuddled it, and then put it down and away for ever because she had no place to take it. Then she turned to the old man and asked, “What’s your name?”
“Mr. Albert,” he replied. It was what everybody called him, except Sam Marvel whom it irritated so that he also from time to time called him M-i-s-t-e-r Albert, but only sarcastically.
He was actually Albert Something-or-Other—Griggs was the name—but nobody connected with the circus knew what it was and Albert himself hardly thought about it. It was so long ago since he had used it or anyone had known him by it.
Mr. Albert was one of the lonely old men of the world—kithless, kinless, friendless, homeless, the kind of person who in the present generation might be called shiftless. But actually he was not shiftless, merely shifted.
There are some people born in the wrong year at the wrong hour, whose luck and timing are so wretched that they are always at the wrong place at the wrong moment, sixth in line if there are five jobs to be had, but first on the list to be released for redundancy.
Mr. Albert’s career, if he might be said to have had one, had been simply the struggle to keep employed. A whole generation of Alberts was loosed upon the world in the 1920s, for he was born into an era in time to be interfered with by two wars. World War I took him without a trade, having come from a poor family, and released him when it was too late to learn, turning him adrift with no skills, no background and no ability for anything but filling in on odd jobs, such as dish-washer, garage helper, porter, sweeper, messenger, labourer, farm-worker and handyman. During periods of depression he simply joined the swelling ranks of the unemployed and lived on the dole or went hungry. Thus the weeks and months slipped by, unnoticed and uncounted. Middle age replaced youth; old age followed upon the heels of middle age.
Through all the long, futile years he had remained a bachelor, but again only bad luck and bad timing were to blame for there was nothing queer about Albert. When he had had a girl who was right for him he had not had a job or the money which would have enabled them to marry; and when he had a job with a little money, she would be the wrong girl and would go off and leave him for someone else. Thus Mr. Albert never had a home of his own and knew only the temporary digs and miserable quarters of the transient worker.
He could not remember when it was that he had crossed the unseen border line and become an old man, but old man he suddenly found himself one day, unloved, uncared for, with no one dependent upon him; friendless and alone in a world that had no patience for his kind or much use for his experience.
Some time during the late ’50s, Mr. Albert had landed the odd job with the Marvel Circus, which had come to the small town where he had found himself temporarily stranded and workless. Though ageing, Albert Griggs was wiry and strong and had endurance. When the circus left town he followed it. He learned to sleep curled up in one of the lorries and to cadge a meal at the wagon of one or other of the performers, and he earned his ten shillings a day at hard labour.
Then had come the only real break of his life when through that discovery of some mystery within him, the appeal to captive animals of all kinds, he had acquired a vocation, and was given a permanent job as beast man to the Marvel Circus.
It was then, too, now that he was formally connected with the show, that he adopted a Prince Albert or frock coat as a uniform commensurate with his new dignity. One of his former employers had once made him a gift of an out-moded, square-tailed black coat which somehow he had never sold or disposed of; this Mr. Albert now wore with a collarless shirt, a black string tie, and a black bowler hat.
The Mister which had grown as a permanent appendage to his name of Albert had come about through this same tatty tail coat, and which had misled Major Hoffmann to take him for some kind of gentleman gone to seed and to refer to him at first as Herr Albert. The ribald clowns quickly took to calling him Mr. Albert, and it had stuck.
There was something else that this late-in-life start promised Mr. Albert as well as something to love and be loved by, and this was permanency and a place to stay.
It was a home which under no circumstances could strictly be classified as one, since it had no four walls, exit or entrance, and was alway
s on the move, and sometimes his bed was straw and sometimes the hard ground, or the bottom of a jolting wagon with the stink of monkeys in his nostrils, or squeezed in between the bars of two adjoining cat cages; yet home it was, for he belonged. He was a member of a group, a company; when they closed ranks against the jossers and chavvies of the world without, he was on the inside. Animals and circus people were his friends.
“And this here,” explained Mr. Albert, moving on to the next one, “is Number Three. They all work together in the ring.”
Number Three was a panther, sleek, silky, black as darkest night, gliding on silent feet from one side of the cage to the other with a little upward swing at the end of each run—then return to the other side—upward swing—back again—always in the same impatient rhythm. As they stopped before it, the panther stood stock-still for an instant, contemplating them, and then resumed its loping run.
“What’s her name?” Rose asked.
“Him,” Mr. Albert corrected. “It’s a he.” And then added, “Bagheera.”
“Bagheera! What does that mean?”
“I don’t know! It’s supposed to be something out of a book.”
Rose asked, “Do you pet him too?” And then added in a half-whisper, “I’d be afraid to.”
Mr. Albert regarded the black panther fondly and foolishly. “He thinks he’s a devil,” he said. “The major—that’s Major Hoffmann that was—said his heart was as black as his head, but don’t you believe it. Look here!” He said, “Hoi!” rolled up his sleeve and stuck his bare arm through the bars.
In a movement that was so quick the eye could hardly register it, the panther whipped about, dropped onto his side, and clamped both forepaws about the arm of the old man and lay holding it tightly while with his back legs he made jerky, kicking motions. But his claws were retracted, and at the same time he was rubbing his head and ears against the bony elbow of Mr. Albert.
The sight put Rose into a kind of an ecstasy of delight and yearning for some kind of contact with the beautiful cat. She said, “Kin I—couldn’t I touch him, just once?”
“Well, no,” replied Mr. Albert. “You could catch your sleeve like in a claw and that makes ’em frantic. You notice I rolled mine up first.” He freed his arm by pushing it still farther through the bars to create slack to the panther’s embrace and then gently withdrew it. “You never pull away quick from a cat,” he explained. “That makes ’em hold on. You kinda go with him, see?”
Rose was regarding Mr. Albert with marvel and admiration and the old man warmed to her and the glance.
“If you come around,” Mr. Albert said, “you want to be careful not to go too close to their cages, like we’ve got a sign up saying not to. They could get a claw into your sleeve or dress—see, it’s coloured like and moving, and they’re like children and they make a pass at it. And when they catch a claw or something they get scared. They don’t mean anything but when they’re frightened they just got no place to go like when they’re at home. See what I mean?”
Rose made no reply. Her lips were parted and there was a shining in her eyes almost to match those of the big cats.
“There was a woman last year in Alvington,” Mr. Albert continued, “pushed up against the bars calling him baby names. She had a bracelet with dangles that was shiny. Bags there struck at it and got a claw caught. So then he pulled her arm inside the cage and still couldn’t get it loose. It was awful.”
He paused now, realising that he had launched upon something grisly, perhaps not for a young girls ears. But she still stood silent, contemplating the animal which was lying on its side, its tail twitching.
“Well, it was terrible,” he repeated, and then thought how awful it would be if something like that happened to this girl and that it might be better to complete the warning. “It all came off like a glove,” he said, “—the flesh, I mean, before we could get her loose.”
But the girl was not as horrified as he had expected, for she had hardly been listening to him, and now she cried, “How could I get them to love me the way they love you?”
The old man understood her at once: the cry, the need, the well of loneliness from which it arose, the unspoken hunger which was so akin to his own. He replied, “By loving them, not just with a little of yourself, but with everything you’ve got, so they feel it. That’s what they haven’t got amongst themselves. Our kind of love like we can feel. They don’t know what it is, but they need it.” He stopped suddenly, embarrassed by his own words and vehemence, but it quickly vanished under the glow of radiance on the face of the girl and the tears that filled her eyes. From that moment on, their bond of friendship, understanding and companionship was established.
“What’s your name?” Mr. Albert asked.
“Rose.”
“You’re with Jackdaw, ain’t you?”
“Yes.”
Mr. Albert merely nodded and said, “You want to see the rest of the lot?”
“Oh, yes please!”
He took her upon a tour of the cages. In one there was a brown bear who sat up on his haunches and made clownish movements with his forepaws, his muzzle parted in such a silly grin that Rose burst into laughter.
“That’s Hans,” said Mr. Albert. “He roller-skates. You can do anything with him. Doesn’t half like sweets, he doesn’t. Now, we had a polar bear,” he continued, “before Mr. Marvel sent her off to the Chipperfields. They come from up around the North Pole and they got a heart like ice. Wouldn’t have seen me messing around with her. You want to know something? I was scared of her, that’s what.” Then he dropped his voice to a confidential whisper. “But I didn’t tell anybody. Nobody knew it but her and me, see?”
It seemed as though with this the old man had deliberately discarded some of the mystery which had surrounded him and acknowledged his humanity and simple mortality.
“Yes, I see,” said Rose, and the smile she turned upon him was filled with affection.
“Here’s Pockets,” said Mr. Albert, and showed her a small female kangaroo squatting in the straw. She had a long melancholy face and large doe’s eyes, and Rose was permitted to scratch her head.
“See her pouch?” Mr. Albert pointed out. “That’s why she’s called Pockets. That’s where they carry their young. She had a kid a year or so ago.”
“Oh!” Rose grieved. “What happened to it?”
“It died. They’re hard to bring up on the bottle.”
There was a fat old orangutan named Congo, with an alderman’s paunch, dewlaps, and protesting eyes who came over and made kissing mouths and noises at Mr. Albert. A pair of small red foxes kept moving in a perfect whirligig around their cages. There was a dwarf deer from Tanganyika, and an American coyote with a smart-alec expression about his muzzle. Rose inspected a torpid boa constrictor, a painted mandrill with a swollen behind as red as a sunset, and a cage full of ordinary rhesus monkeys. A llama with long eyelashes chewed contemplatively, and Rose was allowed to stroke her because she was gentle. There was a cage with an eagle who looked proud, fierce and untameable, but as meekly as a pet parrot lowered its head to have it scratched by the keeper.
One by one, Rose met all of Mr. Albert’s charges, learned their names, heard some little story about each, and found her heart overflowing at the conclusion of the tour which brought them back again before the cage of Rajah the tiger.
“Some day—some day,” she whispered, “I’m going to touch you.” But what she meant, what she thought, was of enfolding the head in her arms and stroking it as Mr. Albert said he had done; of bestowing upon it that which among themselves the animals did not know—the overwhelming, encompassing, and comforting warmth of human love.
“That’s right,” Mr. Albert was saying. “Of course you will. You just come around any time when I’m here and he’ll get to know you. You want to come when I’m feeding them, about six. You come at any time and I’ll help you.”
Rose said, “Thank you.” She leaned over and gave him a kiss on the white brist
le of his greyish cheek, smiled at him once more, and turned and went from the barn.
C H A P T E R
6
Shortly after her arrival at Chippenham Rose fell in love with Toby Walters.
He was so trim and appetising. Toby’s legs were long, his buttocks small and firm. Wide shoulders and trunk tapered to a flat, narrow waist. His skin was healthy; white teeth contrasted with the dark shining of hair.
The boy’s features were rugged but pleasant and youthfully mischievous, but what attracted Rose even more was his elegance and easy, happy, felicitous control over his body. Even when in the early weeks occasionally his timing was still off and he misjudged the distance and fell, it was never an ungainly collapse. He could even make a fall seem like something practised and amusing as he rolled himself quickly into a ball before hitting the ground, to somersault and come up laughing at himself.
From a distance Rose loved him longingly. Never before had her eyes been delighted by any man. For the first time she found her senses engaged by the glow of a body. The boys she had known, perforce from the same environment as she herself, were pasty, maggoty, undernourished, and the older men even worse—hairy and flabby, cold and ugly to the touch. Toby was firm, vibrant, alive, and above all, clean, clean, clean. His cleanliness drew her like a magnet and made her want to lie close to him and put her cheek to his breast.
For he was always immaculate, his rehearsal tights newly laundered, his person bathed. Ma Walters had taught her children to be scrupulously clean at all times, not alone due to living in the cramped quarters of their touring caravan, but because as a veteran show woman she was aware that if they and their costumes were always fresh and neat, this would communicate itself to the audience and add more glamour to their act.
Soon, watching Toby when he rehearsed became Rose’s secret joy.