CHAPTER XXIV
Harris Collins was fifty-two years of age. He was slender and
dapper, and in appearance and comportment was so sweet- and
gentle-spirited that the impression he radiated was almost of
sissyness. He might have taught a Sunday-school, presided over a
girls' seminary, or been a president of a humane society.
His complexion was pink and white, his hands were as soft as the
hands of his daughters, and he weighed a hundred and twelve
pounds. Moreover, he was afraid of his wife, afraid of a
policeman, afraid of physical violence, and lived in constant
dread of burglars. But the one thing he was not afraid of was
wild animals of the most ferocious sorts, such as lions, tigers,
leopards, and jaguars. He knew the game, and could conquer the
most refractory lion with a broom-handle--not outside the cage,
but inside and locked in.
It was because he knew the game and had learned it from his father
before him, a man even smaller than himself and more fearful of
all things except animals. This father, Noel Collins, had been a
successful animal trainer in England, before emigrating to
America, and in America he had continued the success and laid the
foundation of the big animal training school at Cedarwild, which
his son had developed and built up after him. So well had Harris
Collins built on his father's foundation that the place was
considered a model of sanitation and kindness. It entertained
many visitors, who invariably went away with their souls filled
with ecstasy over the atmosphere of sweetness and light that
pervaded the place. Never, however, were they permitted to see
the actual training. On occasion, performances were given them by
the finished products which verified all their other delightful
and charming conclusions about the school. But had they seen the
training of raw novices, it would have been a different story. It
might even have been a riot. As it was, the place was a zoo, and
free at that; for, in addition to the animals he owned and trained
and bought and sold, a large portion of the business was devoted
to boarding trained animals and troupes of animals for owners who
were out of engagements, or for estates of such owners which were
in process of settlement. From mice and rats to camels and
elephants, and even, on occasion, to a rhinoceros or a pair of
hippopotamuses, he could supply any animal on demand.
When the Circling Brothers' big three-ring show on a hard winter
went into the hands of the receivers, he boarded the menagerie and
the horses and in three months turned a profit of fifteen thousand
dollars. More--he mortgaged all he possessed against the day of
the auction, bought in the trained horses and ponies, the giraffe
herd and the performing elephants, and, in six months more was
quit of an of them, save the pony Repeater who turned air-springs,
at another profit of fifteen thousand dollars. As for Repeater,
he sold the pony several months later for a sheer profit of two
thousand. While this bankruptcy of the Circling Brothers had been
the greatest financial achievement of Harris Collin's life,
nevertheless he enjoyed no mean permanent income from his plant,
and, in addition, split fees with the owners of his board animals
when he sent them to the winter Hippodrome shows, and, more often
than not, failed to split any fee at all when he rented the
animals to moving-picture companies.
Animal men, the country over, acknowledged him to be, not only the
richest in the business, but the king of trainers and the
grittiest man who ever went into a cage. And those who from the
inside had seen him work were agreed that he had no soul. Yet his
wife and children, and those in his small social circle, thought
otherwise. They, never seeing him at work, were convinced that no
softer-hearted, more sentimental man had ever been born. His
voice was low and gentle, his gestures were delicate, his views on
life, the world, religion and politics, the mildest. A kind word
melted him. A plea won him. He gave to all local charities, and
was gravely depressed for a week when the Titanic went down. And
yet--the men in the trained-animal game acknowledged him the
nerviest and most nerveless of the profession. And yet--his
greatest fear in the world was that his large, stout wife, at
table, should crown him with a plate of hot soup. Twice, in a
tantrum, she had done this during their earlier married life. In
addition to his fear that she might do it again, he loved her
sincerely and devotedly, as he loved his children, seven of them,
for whom nothing was too good or too expensive.
So well did he love them, that the four boys from the beginning he
forbade from seeing him WORK, and planned gentler careers for
them. John, the oldest, in Yale, had elected to become a man of
letters, and, in the meantime, ran his own automobile with the
corresponding standard of living such ownership connoted in the
college town of New Haven. Harold and Frederick were down at a
millionaires' sons' academy in Pennsylvania; and Clarence, the
youngest, at a prep. school in Massachusetts, was divided in his
choice of career between becoming a doctor or an aviator. The
three girls, two of them twins, were pledged to be cultured into
ladies. Elsie was on the verge of graduating from Vassar. Mary
and Madeline, the twins, in the most select and most expensive of
seminaries, were preparing for Vassar. All of which required
money which Harris Collins did not grudge, but which strained the
earning capacity of his animal-training school. It compelled him
to work the harder, although his wife and the four sons and three
daughters did not dream that he actually worked at all. Their
idea was that by virtue of superior wisdom he merely
superintended, and they would have been terribly shocked could
they have seen him, club in hand, thrashing forty mongrel dogs, in
the process of training, which had become excited and out of hand.
A great deal of the work was done by his assistants, but it was
Harris Collins who taught them continually what to do and how to
do it, and who himself, on more important animals, did the work
and showed them how. His assistants were almost invariably youths
from the reform schools, and he picked them with skilful eye and
intuition. Control of them, under their paroles, with
intelligence and coldness on their part, were the conditions and
qualities he sought, and such combination, as a matter of course,
carried with it cruelty. Hot blood, generous impulses,
sentimentality, were qualities he did not want for his business;
and the Cedarwild Animal School was business from the first tick
of the clock to the last bite of the lash. In short, Harris
Collins, in the totality of results, was guilty of causing more
misery and pain to animals than all laboratories of vivisection in
Christendom.
And into this animal hell Michael descended--although his arrival
was horizontal, across three thousand five hundred miles, in the
same crate in which he had been placed at the New Washington Hotel
in Seattle. Never once had he been out of the crate during the
entire journey, and filthiness, as well as wretchedness,
characterized his condition. Thanks to his general good health,
the wound of the amputated toe was in the process of uneventful
healing. But dirt clung to him, and he was infested with fleas.
Cedarwild, to look at, was anything save a hell. Velvet lawns,
gravelled walks and drives, and flowers formally growing, led up
to the group of long low buildings, some of frame and some of
concrete. But Michael was not received by Harris Collins, who, at
the moment, sat in his private office, Harry Del Mar's last
telegram on his desk, writing a memorandum to his secretary to
query the railroad and the express companies for the whereabouts
of a dog, crated and shipped by one, Harry Del Mar, from Seattle
and consigned to Cedarwild. It was a pallid-eyed youth of
eighteen in overalls who received Michael, receipted for him to
the expressman, and carried his crate into a slope-floored
concrete room that smelled offensively and chemically clean.
Michael was impressed by his surroundings but not attracted by the
youth, who rolled up his sleeves and encased himself in large
oilskin apron before he opened the crate. Michael sprang out and
staggered about on legs which had not walked for days. This
particular two-legged god was uninteresting. He was as cold as
the concrete floor, as methodical as a machine; and in such
fashion he went about the washing, scrubbing, and disinfecting of
Michael. For Harris Collins was scientific and antiseptic to the
last word in his handling of animals, and Michael was
scientifically made clean, without deliberate harshness, but
without any slightest hint of gentleness or consideration.
Naturally, he did not understand. On top of all he had already
experienced, not even knowing executioners and execution chambers,
for all he knew this bare room of cement and chemical smell might
well be the place of the ultimate life-disaster and this youth the
god who was to send him into the dark which had engulfed all he
had known and loved. What Michael did know beyond the shadow of
any doubt was that it was all coldly ominous and terribly strange.
He endured the hand of the youth-god on the scruff of his neck,
after the collar had been unbuckled; but when the hose was turned
on him, he resented and resisted. The youth, merely working by
formula, tightened the safe grip on the scruff of Michael's neck
and lifted him clear of the floor, at the same time, with the
other hand, directing the stream of water into his mouth and
increasing it to full force by the nozzle control. Michael
fought, and was well drowned for his pains, until he gasped and
strangled helplessly.
After that he resisted no more, and was washed out and scrubbed
out and cleansed out with the hose, a big bristly brush, and much
carbolic soap, the lather of which got into and stung his eyes and
nose, causing him to weep copiously and sneeze violently.
Apprehensive of what might at any moment happen to him, but by
this time aware that the youth was neither positive nor negative
for kindness or harm, Michael continued to endure without further
battling, until, clean and comfortable, he was put away into a
pen, sweet and wholesome, where he slept and for the time being
forgot. The place was the hospital, or segregation ward, and a
week of imprisonment was spent therein, in which nothing happened
in the way of development of germ diseases, and nothing happened
to him except regular good food, pure drinking-water, and absolute
isolation from contact with all life save the youth-god who, like
an automaton, attended on him.
Michael had yet to meet Harris Collins, although, from a distance,
often he heard his voice, not loud, but very imperative. That the
owner of this voice was a high god, Michael knew from the first
sound of it. Only a high god, a master over ordinary gods, could
be so imperative. Will was in that voice, and accustomedness to
command. Any dog would have so decided as quickly as Michael did.
And any dog would have decided that there was no love nor
lovableness in the god behind the voice, nothing to warm one's
heart nor to adore.
