“These Mappin Terraces at the Zoological Gardens are a great improvement
on the old style of wild-beast cage,” said Mrs. James Gurtleberry,
putting down an illustrated paper; “they give one the illusion of seeing
the animals in their natural surroundings. I wonder how much of the
illusion is passed on to the animals?”
“That would depend on the animal,” said her niece; “a jungle-fowl, for
instance, would no doubt think its lawful jungle surroundings were
faithfully reproduced if you gave it a sufficiency of wives, a goodly
variety of seed food and ants’ eggs, a commodious bank of loose earth to
dust itself in, a convenient roosting tree, and a rival or two to make
matters interesting. Of course there ought to be jungle-cats and birds
of prey and other agencies of sudden death to add to the illusion of
liberty, but the bird’s own imagination is capable of inventing
those—look how a domestic fowl will squawk an alarm note if a rook or
wood pigeon passes over its run when it has chickens.”
“You think, then, they really do have a sort of illusion, if you give
them space enough—”
“In a few cases only. Nothing will make me believe that an acre or so of
concrete enclosure will make up to a wolf or a tiger-cat for the range of
night prowling that would belong to it in a wild state. Think of the
dictionary of sound and scent and recollection that unfolds before a real
wild beast as it comes out from its lair every evening, with the
knowledge that in a few minutes it will be hieing along to some distant
hunting ground where all the joy and fury of the chase awaits it; think
of the crowded sensations of the brain when every rustle, every cry,
every bent twig, and every whiff across the nostrils means something,
something to do with life and death and dinner. Imagine the satisfaction
of stealing down to your own particular drinking spot, choosing your own
particular tree to scrape your claws on, finding your own particular bed
of dried grass to roll on. Then, in the place of all that, put a
concrete promenade, which will be of exactly the same dimensions whether
you race or crawl across it, coated with stale, unvarying scents and
surrounded with cries and noises that have ceased to have the least
meaning or interest. As a substitute for a narrow cage the new
enclosures are excellent, but I should think they are a poor imitation of
a life of liberty.”
“It’s rather depressing to think that,” said Mrs. Gurtleberry; “they look
so spacious and so natural, but I suppose a good deal of what seems
natural to us would be meaningless to a wild animal.”
“That is where our superior powers of self-deception come in,” said the
niece; “we are able to live our unreal, stupid little lives on our
particular Mappin terrace, and persuade ourselves that we really are
untrammelled men and women leading a reasonable existence in a reasonable
sphere.”
“But good gracious,” exclaimed the aunt, bouncing into an attitude of
scandalised defence, “we are leading reasonable existences! What on
earth do you mean by trammels? We are merely trammelled by the ordinary
decent conventions of civilised society.”
“We are trammelled,” said the niece, calmly and pitilessly, “by
restrictions of income and opportunity, and above all by lack of
initiative. To some people a restricted income doesn’t matter a bit, in
fact it often seems to help as a means for getting a lot of reality out
of life; I am sure there are men and women who do their shopping in
little back streets of Paris, buying four carrots and a shred of beef for
their daily sustenance, who lead a perfectly real and eventful existence.
Lack of initiative is the thing that really cripples one, and that is
where you and I and Uncle James are so hopelessly shut in. We are just
so many animals stuck down on a Mappin terrace, with this difference in
our disfavour, that the animals are there to be looked at, while nobody
wants to look at us. As a matter of fact there would be nothing to look
at. We get colds in winter and hay fever in summer, and if a wasp
happens to sting one of us, well, that is the wasp’s initiative, not
ours; all we do is to wait for the swelling to go down. Whenever we do
climb into local fame and notice, it is by indirect methods; if it
happens to be a good flowering year for magnolias the neighbourhood
observes: ‘Have you seen the Gurtleberry’s magnolia? It is a perfect
mass of flowers,’ and we go about telling people that there are
fifty-seven blossoms as against thirty-nine the previous year.”
“In Coronation year there were as many as sixty,” put in the aunt, “your
uncle has kept a record for the last eight years.”
“Doesn’t it ever strike you,” continued the niece relentlessly, “that if
we moved away from here or were blotted out of existence our local claim
to fame would pass on automatically to whoever happened to take the house
and garden? People would say to one another, ‘Have you seen the
Smith-Jenkins’ magnolia? It is a perfect mass of flowers,’ or else
‘Smith-Jenkins tells me there won’t be a single blossom on their magnolia
this year; the east winds have turned all the buds black.’ Now if, when
we had gone, people still associated our names with the magnolia tree, no
matter who temporarily possessed it, if they said, ‘Ah, that’s the tree
on which the Gurtleberrys hung their cook because she sent up the wrong
kind of sauce with the asparagus,’ that would be something really due to
our own initiative, apart from anything east winds or magnolia vitality
might have to say in the matter.”
“We should never do such a thing,” said the aunt.
The niece gave a reluctant sigh.
“I can’t imagine it,” she admitted. “Of course,” she continued, “there
are heaps of ways of leading a real existence without committing
sensational deeds of violence. It’s the dreadful little everyday acts of
pretended importance that give the Mappin stamp to our life. It would be
entertaining, if it wasn’t so pathetically tragic, to hear Uncle James
fuss in here in the morning and announce, ‘I must just go down into the
town and find out what the men there are saying about Mexico. Matters
are beginning to look serious there.’ Then he patters away into the
town, and talks in a highly serious voice to the tobacconist,
incidentally buying an ounce of tobacco; perhaps he meets one or two
others of the world’s thinkers and talks to them in a highly serious
voice, then he patters back here and announces with increased importance,
‘I’ve just been talking to some men in the town about the condition of
affairs in Mexico. They agree with the view that I have formed, that
things there will have to get worse before they get better.’ Of course
nobody in the town cared in the least little bit what his views about
Mexico were or whether he had any. The tobacconist wasn’t even fluttered
at his buying the ounce of tobacco; he knows that he purchases the same
quantity of the same sort of tobacco every week. Uncle James might just
as well have lain on his back in the garden and chattered to the lilac
tree about the habits of caterpillars.”
“I really will not listen to such things about your uncle,” protested
Mrs. James Gurtleberry angrily.
“My own case is just as bad and just as tragic,” said the niece,
dispassionately; “nearly everything about me is conventional
make-believe. I’m not a good dancer, and no one could honestly call me
good-looking, but when I go to one of our dull little local dances I’m
conventionally supposed to ‘have a heavenly time,’ to attract the ardent
homage of the local cavaliers, and to go home with my head awhirl with
pleasurable recollections. As a matter of fact, I’ve merely put in some
hours of indifferent dancing, drunk some badly-made claret cup, and
listened to an enormous amount of laborious light conversation. A
moonlight hen-stealing raid with the merry-eyed curate would be
infinitely more exciting; imagine the pleasure of carrying off all those
white minorcas that the Chibfords are always bragging about. When we had
disposed of them we could give the proceeds to a charity, so there would
be nothing really wrong about it. But nothing of that sort lies within
the Mappined limits of my life. One of these days somebody dull and
decorous and undistinguished will ‘make himself agreeable’ to me at a
tennis party, as the saying is, and all the dull old gossips of the
neighbourhood will begin to ask when we are to be engaged, and at last we
shall be engaged, and people will give us butter-dishes and
blotting-cases and framed pictures of young women feeding swans. Hullo,
Uncle, are you going out?”
“I’m just going down to the town,” announced Mr. James Gurtleberry, with
an air of some importance: “I want to hear what people are saying about
Albania. Affairs there are beginning to take on a very serious look.
It’s my opinion that we haven’t seen the worst of things yet.”
In this he was probably right, but there was nothing in the immediate or
prospective condition of Albania to warrant Mrs. Gurtleberry in bursting
into tears.