CHAPTER XXXII
And so Michael was ultimately sold to one Jacob Henderson for two
thousand dollars. "And I'm giving him away to you at that," said
Collins. "If you don't refuse five thousand for him before six
months, I don't know anything about the show game. He'll skin
that last arithmetic dog of yours to a finish and you won't have
to show yourself and work every minute of the turn. And if you
don't insure him for fifty thousand as soon as he's made good
you'll be a fool. Why, I wouldn't ask anything better, if I was
young and footloose, than to take him out on the road myself."
Henderson proved totally different from any master Michael had
had. The man was a neutral sort of creature. He was neither good
nor evil. He neither drank, smoked, nor swore; nor did he go to
church or belong to the Y.M.C.A. He was a vegetarian without
being a bigoted one, liked moving pictures when they were
concerned with travel, and spent most of his spare time in reading
Swedenborg. He had no temper whatever. Nobody had ever witnessed
anger in him, and all said he had the patience of Job. He was
even timid of policemen, freight agents, and conductors, though he
was not afraid of them. He was not afraid of anything, any more
than was he enamoured of anything save Swedenborg. He was as
colourless of character as the neutral-coloured clothes he wore,
as the neutral-coloured hair that sprawled upon his crown, as the
neutral-coloured eyes with which he observed the world. Nor was
he a fool any more than was he a wise man or a scholar. He gave
little to life, asked little of life, and, in the show business,
was a recluse in the very heart of life.
Michael neither liked nor disliked him, but, rather, merely
accepted him. They travelled the United States over together, and
they never had a quarrel. Not once did Henderson raise his voice
sharply to Michael, and not once did Michael snarl a warning at
him. They simply endured together, existed together, because the
currents of life had drifted them together. Of course, there was
no heart-bond between them. Henderson was master. Michael was
Henderson's chattel. Michael was as dead to him as he was himself
dead to all things.
Yet Jacob Henderson was fair and square, business-like and
methodical. Once each day, when not travelling on the
interminable trains, he gave Michael a thorough bath and
thoroughly dried him afterward. He was never harsh nor hasty in
the bathing. Michael never was aware whether he liked or disliked
the bathing function. It was all one, part of his own fate in the
world as it was part of Henderson's fate to bathe him every so
often.
Michael's own work was tolerably easy, though monotonous. Leaving
out the eternal travelling, the never-ending jumps from town to
town and from city to city, he appeared on the stage once each
night for seven nights in the week and for two afternoon
performances in the week. The curtain went up, leaving him alone
on the stage in the full set that befitted a bill-topper.
Henderson stood in the wings, unseen by the audience, and looked
on. The orchestra played four of the pieces Michael had been
taught by Steward, and Michael sang them, for his modulated
howling was truly singing. He never responded to more than one
encore, which was always "Home, Sweet Home." After that, while
the audience clapped and stamped its approval and delight of the
dog Caruso, Jacob Henderson would appear on the stage, bowing and
smiling in stereotyped gladness and gratefulness, rest his right
hand on Michael's shoulders with a play-acted assumption of
comradeliness, whereupon both Henderson and Michael would bow ere
the final curtain went down.
And yet Michael was a prisoner, a life-prisoner. Fed well, bathed
well, exercised well, he never knew a moment of freedom. When
travelling, days and nights he spent in the cage, which, however,
was generous enough to allow him to stand at full height and to
turn around without too uncomfortable squirming. Sometimes, in
hotels in country towns, out of the crate he shared Henderson's
room with him. Otherwise, unless other animals were hewing on the
same circuit time, he had, outside his cage, the freedom of the
animal room attached to the particular theatre where he performed
for from three days to a week.
But there was never a chance, never a moment, when he might run
free of a cage about him, of the walls of a room restricting him,
of a chain shackled to the collar about his throat. In good
weather, in the afternoons, Henderson often took him for a walk.
But always it was at the end of a chain. And almost always the
way led to some park, where Henderson fastened the other end of
the chain to the bench on which he sat and browsed Swedenborg.
Not one act of free agency was left to Michael. Other dogs ran
free, playing with one another, or behaving bellicosely. If they
approached him for purposes of investigation or acquaintance,
Henderson invariably ceased from his reading long enough to drive
them away.
A life prisoner to a lifeless gaoler, life was all grey to
Michael. His moroseness changed to a deep-seated melancholy. He
ceased to be interested in life and in the freedom of life. Not
that he regarded the play of life about him with a jaundiced eye,
but, rather, that his eyes became unseeing. Debarred from life,
he ignored life. He permitted himself to become a sheer puppet
slave, eating, taking his baths, travelling in his cage,
performing regularly, and sleeping much.
He had pride--the pride of the thoroughbred; the pride of the
North American Indian enslaved on the plantations of the West
Indies who died uncomplaining and unbroken. So Michael. He
submitted to the cage and the iron of the chain because they were
too strong for his muscles and teeth. He did his slave-task of
performance and rendered obedience to Jacob Henderson; but he
neither loved nor feared that master. And because of this his
spirit turned in on itself. He slept much, brooded much, and
suffered unprotestingly a great loneliness. Had Henderson made a
bid for his heart, he would surely have responded; but Henderson
had a heart only for the fantastic mental gyrations of Swedenborg,
and merely made his living out of Michael.
Sometimes there were hardships. Michael accepted them.
Especially hard did he find railroad travel in winter-time, when,
on occasion, fresh from the last night's performance in a town, he
remained for hours in his crate on a truck waiting for the train
that would take him to the next town of performance. There was a
night on a station platform in Minnesota, when two dogs of a
troupe, on the next truck to his, froze to death. He was himself
well frosted, and the cold bit abominably into his shoulder
wounded by the leopard; but a better constitution and better
general care of him enabled him to survive.
Compared with other show animals, he was well treated. And much
of the ill-treatment accorded other animals on the same turn with
him he did not comprehend or guess. One turn, with which he
played for three months, was a scandal amongst all vaudeville
performers. Even the hardiest of them heartily disliked the turn
and the man, although Duckworth, and Duckworth's Trained Cats and
Rats, were an invariable popular success.
"Trained cats!" sniffed dainty little Pearl La Pearle, the
bicyclist. "Crushed cats, that's what they are. All the cat has
been beaten out of their blood, and they've become rats. You
can't tell me. I know."
"Trained rats!" Manuel Fonseca, the contortionist, exploded in the
bar-room of the Hotel Annandale, after refusing to drink with
Duckworth. "Doped rats, believe me. Why don't they jump off when
they crawl along the tight rope with a cat in front and a cat
behind? Because they ain't got the life in 'm to jump. They're
doped, straight doped when they're fresh, and starved afterward so
as to making a saving on the dope. They never are fed. You can't
tell me. I know. Else why does he use up anywhere to forty or
fifty rats a week! I know his express shipments, when he can't
buy 'm in the towns."
"My Gawd!" protested Miss Merle Merryweather, the Accordion Girl,
who looked like sixteen on the stage, but who, in private life
among her grand-children, acknowledged forty-eight. "My Gawd, how
the public can fall for it gets my honest-to-Gawd goat. I looked
myself yesterday morning early. Out of thirty rats there were
seven dead,--starved to death. He never feeds them. They're
dying rats, dying of starvation, when they crawl along that rope.
That's why they crawl. If they had a bit of bread and cheese in
their tummies they'd jump and run to get away from the cats.
They're dying, they're dying right there on the rope, trying to
crawl as a dying man would try to crawl away from a tiger that was
eating him. And my Gawd! The bonehead audience sits there and
applauds the show as an educational act!"
But the audience! "Wonderful things kindness will do with
animals," said a member of one, a banker and a deacon. "Even
human love can be taught to them by kindness. The cat and the rat
have been enemies since the world began. Yet here, tonight, we
have seen them doing highly trained feats together, and neither a
cat committed one hostile or overt act against a rat, nor ever a
rat showed it was afraid of a cat. Human kindness! The power of
human kindness!"
"The lion and the lamb," said another. "We have it that when the
millennium comes the lion and the lamb will lie down together--and
outside each other, my dear, outside each other. And this is a
forecast, a proving up, by man, ahead of the day. Cats and rats!
Think of it. And it shows conclusively the power of kindness. I
shall see to it at once that we get pets for our own children, our
palm branches. They shall learn kindness early, to the dog, the
cat, yes, even the rat, and the pretty linnet in its cage."
"But," said his dear, beside him, "you remember what Blake said:
"'A Robin Redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.'"
"Ah--but not when it is treated truly with kindness, my dear. I
shall immediately order some rabbits, and a canary or two, and--
what sort of a dog would you prefer our dear little ones to have
to play with, my sweet?"
And his dear looked at him in all his imperturbable, complacent
self-consciousness of kindness, and saw herself the little rural
school-teacher who, with Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Lord Byron as her
idols, and with the dream of herself writing "Poems of Passion,"
had come up to Topeka Town to be beaten by the game into marrying
the solid, substantial business man beside her, who enjoyed
delight in the spectacle of cats and rats walking the tight-rope
in amity, and who was blissfully unaware that she was the Robin
Redbreast in a cage that put all heaven in a rage.
"The rats are bad enough," said Miss Merle Merryweather. "But
look how he uses up the cats. He's had three die on him in the
last two weeks to my certain knowledge. They're only alley-cats,
but they've got feelings. It's that boxing match that does for
them."
The boxing match, sure always of a great hand from the audience,
invariably concluded Duckworth's turn. Two cats, with small
boxing-gloves, were put on a table for a friendly bout.
Naturally, the cats that performed with the rats were too cowed
for this. It was the fresh cats he used, the ones with spunk and
spirit . . . until they lost all spunk and spirit or sickened and
died. To the audience it was a side-splitting, playful encounter
between four-legged creatures who thus displayed a ridiculous
resemblance to superior, two-legged man. But it was not playful
to the cats. They were always excited into starting a real fight
with each other off stage just before they were brought on. In
the blows they struck were anger and pain and bewilderment and
fear. And the gloves just would come off, so that they were
ripping and tearing at each other, biting as well as making the
fur fly, like furies, when the curtain went down. In the eyes of
the audience this apparent impromptu was always the ultimate
scream, and the laughter and applause would compel the curtain up
again to reveal Duckworth and an assistant stage-hand, as if
caught by surprise, fanning the two belligerents with towels.
But the cats themselves were so continually torn and scratched
that the wounds never had a chance to heal and became infected
until they were a mass of sores. On occasion they died, or, when
they had become too abjectly spiritless to attack even a rat, were
set to work on the tight-rope with the doped starved rats that
were too near dead to run away from them. And, as Miss Merle
Merryweather said: the bonehead audiences, tickled to death,
applauded Duckworth's Trained Cats and Rats as an educational act!
A big chimpanzee that covered one of the circuits with Michael had
an antipathy for clothes. Like a horse that fights the putting on
of the bridle, and, after it is on, takes no further notice of it,
so the big chimpanzee fought the putting on the clothes. Once on,
it was ready to go out on the stage and through its turn. But the
rub was in putting on the clothes. It took the owner and two
stage-hands, pulling him up to a ring in the wall and throttling
him, to dress him--and this, despite the fact that the owner had
long since knocked out his incisors.
All this cruelty Michael sensed without knowing. And he accepted
it as the way of life, as he accepted the daylight and the dark,
the bite of the frost on bleak and windy station platforms, the
mysterious land of Otherwhere that he knew in dreams and song, the
equally mysterious Nothingness into which had vanished Meringe
Plantation and ships and oceans and men and Steward.
