Love, Let Me Not Hunger (7 page)

C H A P T E R
5

O
n one of her earliest exploratory wanderings through this new, unfamiliar, and exciting world, Rose poked into the great, peak-roofed barn that stood apart from the main building housing the training ring. One of the large double doors was slightly ajar and from within came a concert of weird unmusical sounds: grunts, coughs, squeaks, shrieks, chitterings, barks, and whines.

She slipped inside and was struck almost as by a physical force with a new smell, one she had never encountered before. It was sharp, pungent, and ammoniac, compounded of urine and all the effluvia and admixture of scent glands of various kinds and species of animals, odours which were like a language between themselves, and which when borne on the winds of distant plains or forests advertised their presence and made them known to one another.

The enclosure was hot and stuffy from the many oil heaters burning in it to raise the temperature from the bitter February sharpness without to a cosy and comfortable fug. A row of cages mounted on long circus wagons extended the full length of the barn and around to one half of the end, for the bulk of Sam Marvel’s zoo had already been disposed of by lease, contract, or sale, and these remaining were the ones that would accompany the circus on its forthcoming invasion of the Continent.

Rose’s eyes had first to accustom themselves to the meagre light. Only half a dozen electric bulbs were burning, and very little filtered in through the windows let into the roof and the sides, for as usual the damp, thick, yellowish winter fog prevailed. Besides which, the harsh, ammoniac smell stung her eyeballs. She was aware only of vague shapes and forms within the cages, some motionless as if dead, others pacing with a kind of gliding movement; but then as she became more accustomed to this new and strange environment her attention became focused upon one cage at the end of the barn and the only human being within sight.

This was an old man with white hair and drooping white moustache. He was clad in khaki-coloured overalls and jacket which was unbuttoned to reveal the singlet beneath and the white hairs on the scrawny chest. He was seated on a stool reading a newspaper through steel-rimmed spectacles which he had set on the end of his nose. But the astonishing feature about him was that his left arm was inserted through the bars of the cage. As Rose approached closer, she saw that the beast lying on its side in the enclosure was a tiger and that the old man, while he was reading his newspaper, was massaging its shoulder blade with regular and soothing strokes of his knotty but muscular hand.

The tiger, whose state of bliss as the result of the stroking was penetrated by the sound of footsteps and the arrival of another presence, raised its head from the floor of the cage to see. For a moment, he stared at her with great, amber, interested eyes that seemed to burn with a flame of their own beyond the reflection of the artificial lighting. A rose-coloured tongue emerged to curl for an instant around the triangle of his nose. His mouth then opened in a cavernous yawn, accompanied by a kind of moaning grumble, revealing the yellow ivory of his fangs, and thereafter, with a thud that shook the cage, he let his head fall back once more to the floor to continue his enjoyment.

Rose gasped, “Oh! Ain’t he beautiful!” It was the first time ever that she had seen a tiger.

The old man put his paper down on to the dirt floor of the barn and pushed his spectacles further up the bridge of his nose, but did not leave off his attentions to the shoulder of the beast. After having inspected Rose, he said, “You’re new, ain’t you?” And then added, “Yup, ain’t he? Ain’t he an old fellow?” This last was said half to the tiger and half to Rose.

The girl watched, fascinated, the slow, gentle, rhythmical movements of the old man’s hand on the glossy orange and black marked fur, and saw the muscles rippling beneath in response to the movement of the fingers.

“Oh,” she queried, “could
I
do that?”

The old man looked dubiously from the tiger to Rose and back to the tiger again and replied, “Well, I wouldn’t just yet. Not until he knows you. He don’t know you, see. He knows me.”

“What’s his name?”

“Rajah.”

“Rajah! What does it mean?”

“Well, a kind of king or emperor-like in India.”

“India? Is that where he comes from?”

“That’s right, miss.” He left off stroking the tiger now for a moment, withdrawing his arm from the cage. Rajah, with a sudden movement and a switch of his tail, rolled over on his back with his paws in the air and wriggled his body twice, emitting a low, melodious groan.

“Ah!” cried Rose. “I want to
squeeze
him!”

“I do,” said the old man. “Sometimes when nobody is around and I go in to clean his cage. He lets me. I go over and take his big old head in my arms and give him a proper squeeze. He’s a funny old cat. Tigers don’t like people touching ’em, but he don’t seem to mind about me.”

This was indeed true and no one appeared to know why. It was simply a part of the astonishing phenomenon of Mr. Albert, the beast man.

It had happened some time ago just before the old man turned seventy after a life which, from every point of view, had to be accounted as a total failure. Working around the Marvel Circus where extra hands were needed to hammer tent stakes or fetch and carry, he had quite by accident discovered a most amazing affinity to wild animals.

Passing by one of the cages on the way to bring something or other for the tent boss, he had paused to admire one of the lionesses in the big mixed-cat act presented by Major Fritz Hoffmann, the German
dompteur.
Her name was Zara and she was a lovely-looking specimen, lithe, sleek, well groomed. He stood there for an instant, captivated by her beauty and smiling at her, when to his surprise he saw that she was smiling right back at him. Or at least that is how it appeared, for her great mouth was open, her tongue lolling to one side, and she seemed to be grinning from ear to ear.

“Well!” Mr. Albert had said. “Well, old girl.” And his voice was so cheerful and chuckly that the lioness responded by wriggling her whole body with a kind of unconscious joy and batted her two paws on the floor of the cage. Then she gave a low cat purr and thrust her head forward.

“Well,” Mr. Albert had said again. “Well, you silly old thing!” and fearlessly rubbed her between the ears and then under the chin, and Zara quite turned herself inside out with love. She evidently regarded Mr. Albert as some superior kind of lion and behaved most kittenishly and ridiculously, prostrating herself before him, rolling over, her throat vibrating with delight.

Mr. Albert did not look like a lion at all. His grey, thinning hair was plastered down one side of his head. He had a drooping moustache which he had first acquired as an infantryman of a Kentish regiment in the First World War and never thereafter relinquished, and with this went a pair of washed-out blue eyes which still managed to retain some innocence, and a weak chin. What he did have was an engaging smile and a vast, empty heart yearning for something or someone to belong to.

The love affair of Zara, the lioness, and Albert Griggs was mutual. He was enthralled and enchanted with this wild creature who cared for him and returned her affection besottedly. He would spend all of his free time in front of her cage with his arm through the bars scratching her belly or pulling her ears, and the skin of his wrists was rubbed raw from the love licks of her rasping tongue.

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.