Michael, Brother of Jerry

J >> Jack London >> Michael, Brother of Jerry


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, to-night, 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.




CHAPTER XXXIII


For two years Michael sang his way over the United States, to fame for
himself and to fortune for Jacob Henderson. There was never any time
off. So great was his success, that Henderson refused flattering offers
to cross the Atlantic to show in Europe. But off-time did come to
Michael when Henderson fell ill of typhoid in Chicago.

It was a three-months' vacation for Michael, who, well treated but still
a prisoner, spent it in a caged kennel in Mulcachy's Animal Home.
Mulcachy, one of Harris Collins's brightest graduates, had emulated his
master by setting up in business in Chicago, where he ran everything with
the same rigid cleanliness, sanitation, and scientific cruelty. Michael
received nothing but the excellent food and the cleanliness; but, a
solitary and brooding prisoner in his cage, he could not help but sense
the atmosphere of pain and terror about him of the animals being broken
for the delight of men.

Mulcachy had originated aphorisms of his own which he continually
enunciated, among which were:

"Take it from me, when an animal won't give way to pain, it can't be
broke. Pain is the only school-teacher."

"Just as you got to take the buck out of a broncho, you've got to take
the bite out of a lion."

"You can't break animals with a feather duster. The thicker the skull
the thicker the crowbar."

"They'll always beat you in argument. First thing is to club the
argument out of them."

"Heart-bonds between trainers and animals! Son, that's dope for the
newspaper interviewer. The only heart-bond I know is a stout stick with
some iron on the end of it."

"Sure you can make 'm eat outa your hand. But the thing to watch out for
is that they don't eat your hand. A blank cartridge in the nose just
about that time is the best preventive I know."

There were days when all the air was vexed with roars and squalls of
ferocity and agony from the arena, until the last animal in the cages was
excited and ill at ease. In truth, since it was Mulcachy's boast that he
could break the best animal living, no end of the hardest cases fell to
his hand. He had built a reputation for succeeding where others failed,
and, endowed with fearlessness, callousness, and cunning, he never let
his reputation wane. There was nothing he dared not tackle, and, when he
gave up an animal, the last word was said. For it, remained nothing but
to be a cage-animal, in solitary confinement, pacing ever up and down,
embittered with all the world of man and roaring its bitterness to the
most delicious enthrillment of the pay-spectators.

During the three months spent by Michael in Mulcachy's Animal Home,
occurred two especially hard cases. Of course, the daily chant of
ordinary pain of training went on all the time through the working hours,
such as of "good" bears and lions and tigers that were made amenable
under stress, and of elephants derricked and gaffed into making the head-
stand or into the beating of a bass drum. But the two cases that were
exceptional, put a mood of depression and fear into all the listening
animals, such as humans might experience in an ante-room of hell,
listening to the flailing and the flaying of their fellows who had
preceded them into the torture-chamber.

The first was of the big Indian tiger. Free-born in the jungle, and free
all his days, master, according to his nature and prowess, of all other
living creatures including his fellow-tigers, he had come to grief in the
end; and, from the trap to the cramped cage, by elephant-back and
railroad and steamship, ever in the cramped cage, he had journeyed across
seas and continents to Mulcachy's Animal Home. Prospective buyers had
examined but not dared to purchase. But Mulcachy had been undeterred.
His own fighting blood leapt hot at sight of the magnificent striped cat.
It was a challenge of the brute in him to excel. And, two weeks of hell,
for the great tiger and for all the other animals, were required to teach
him his first lesson.

Ben Bolt he had been named, and he arrived indomitable and
irreconcilable, though almost paralysed from eight weeks of cramp in his
narrow cage which had restricted all movement. Mulcachy should have
undertaken the job immediately, but two weeks were lost by the fact that
he had got married and honeymooned for that length of time. And in that
time, in a large cage of concrete and iron, Ben Bolt had exercised and
recovered the use of his muscles, and added to his hatred of the
two-legged things, puny against him in themselves, who by trick and wile
had so helplessly imprisoned him.

So, on this morning when hell yawned for him, he was ready and eager to
meet all comers. They came, equipped with formulas, nooses, and forked
iron bars. Five of them tossed nooses in through the bars upon the floor
of his cage. He snarled and struck at the curling ropes, and for ten
minutes was a grand and impossible wild creature, lacking in nothing save
the wit and the patience possessed by the miserable two-legged things.
And then, impatient and careless of the inanimate ropes, he paused,
snarling at the men, with one hind foot resting inside a noose. The next
moment, craftily lifted up about the girth of his leg by an iron fork,
the noose tightened and the bite of it sank home into his flesh and
pride. He leaped, he roared, he was a maniac of ferocity. Again and
again, almost burning their palms, he tore the rope smoking through their
hands. But ever they took in the slack and paid it out again, until, ere
he was aware, a similar noose tightened on his foreleg. What he had done
was nothing to what he now did. But he was stupid and impatient. The
man-creatures were wise and patient, and a third leg and a fourth leg
were finally noosed, so that, with many men tailing on to the ropes, he
was dragged ignominiously on his side to the bars, and, ignominiously,
through the bars were hauled his four legs, his chiefest weapons of
offence after his terribly fanged jaws.

And then a puny man-creature, Mulcachy himself, dared openly and brazenly
to enter the cage and approach him. He sprang to be at him, or, rather,
strove so to spring, but was withstrained by his four legs through the
bars which he could not draw back and get under him. And Mulcachy knelt
beside him, dared kneel beside him, and helped the fifth noose over his
head and round his neck. Then his head was drawn to the bars as
helplessly as his legs had been drawn through. Next, Mulcachy laid hands
on him, on his head, on his ears, on his very nose within an inch of his
fangs; and he could do nothing but snarl and roar and pant for breath as
the noose shut off his breathing.

Quivering, not with fear but with rage, Ben Bolt perforce endured the
buckling around his throat of a thick, broad collar of leather to which
was attached a very stout and a very long trailing rope. After that,
when Mulcachy had left the cage, one by one the five nooses were artfully
manipulated off his legs and his neck. Again, after this prodigious
indignity, he was free--within his cage. He went up into the air. With
returning breath he roared his rage. He struck at the trailing rope that
offended his nerves, clawed at the trap of the collar that encased his
neck, fell, rolled over, offended his body-nerves more and more by
entangling contacts with the rope, and for half an hour exhausted himself
in the futile battle with the inanimate thing. Thus tigers are broken.

At the last, wearied, even with sensations of sickness from the nervous
strain put upon himself by his own anger, he lay down in the middle of
the floor, lashing his tail, hating with his eyes, and accepting the
clinging thing about his neck which he had learned he could not get rid
of.

To his amazement, if such a thing be possible in the mental processes of
a tiger, the rear door to his cage was thrown open and left open. He
regarded the aperture with belligerent suspicion. No one and no
threatening danger appeared in the doorway. But his suspicion grew.
Always, among these man-animals, occurred what he did not know and could
not comprehend. His preference was to remain where he was, but from
behind, through the bars of the cage, came shouts and yells, the lash of
whips, and the painful thrusts of the long iron forks. Dragging the rope
behind him, with no thought of escape, but in the hope that he would get
at his tormentors, he leaped into the rear passage that ran behind the
circle of permanent cages. The passage way was deserted and dark, but
ahead he saw light. With great leaps and roars, he rushed in that
direction, arousing a pandemonium of roars and screams from the animals
in the cages.

He bounded through the light, and into the light, dazzled by the
brightness of it, and crouched down, with long, lashing tail, to orient
himself to the situation. But it was only another and larger cage that
he was in, a very large cage, a big, bright performing-arena that was all
cage. Save for himself, the arena was deserted, although, overhead,
suspended from the roof-bars, were block-and-tackle and seven strong iron
chairs that drew his instant suspicion and caused him to roar at them.

For half an hour he roamed the arena, which was the greatest area of
restricted freedom he had known in the ten weeks of his captivity. Then,
a hooked iron rod, thrust through the bars, caught and drew the bight of
his trailing rope into the hands of the men outside. Immediately ten of
them had hold of it, and he would have charged up to the bars at them had
not, at that moment, Mulcachy entered the arena through a door on the
opposite side. No bars stood between Ben Bolt and this creature, and Ben
Bolt charged him. Even as he charged he was aware of suspicion in that
the small, fragile man-creature before him did not flee or crouch down,
but stood awaiting him.

Ben Bolt never reached him. First, with an access of caution, he
craftily ceased from his charge, and, crouching, with lashing tail,
studied the man who seemed so easily his. Mulcachy was equipped with a
long-lashed whip and a sharp-pronged fork of iron.

In his belt, loaded with blank cartridges, was a revolver.

Bellying closer to the ground, Ben Bolt advanced upon him, creeping
slowly like a cat stalking a mouse. When he came to his next pause,
which was within certain leaping distance, he crouched lower, gathered
himself for the leap, then turned his head to regard the men at his back
outside the cage. The trailing rope in their hands, to his neck, he had
forgotten.

"Now you might as well be good, old man," Mulcachy addressed him in soft,
caressing tones, taking a step toward him and holding in advance the iron
fork.

This merely incensed the huge, magnificent creature. He rumbled a low,
tense growl, flattened his ears back, and soared into the air, his paws
spread so that the claws stood out like talons, his tail behind him as
stiff and straight as a rod. Neither did the man crouch or flee, nor did
the beast attain to him. At the height of his leap the rope tightened
taut on his neck, causing him to describe a somersault and fall heavily
to the floor on his side.

Before he could regain his feet, Mulcachy was upon him, shouting to his
small audience: "Here's where we pound the argument out of him!" And
pound he did, on the nose with the butt of the whip, and jab he did, with
the iron fork to the ribs. He rained a hurricane of blows and jabs on
the animal's most sensitive parts. Ever Ben Bolt leaped to retaliate,
but was thrown by the ten men tailed on to the rope, and, each time, even
as he struck the floor on his side, Mulcachy was upon him, pounding,
smashing, jabbing. His pain was exquisite, especially that of his tender
nose. And the creature who inflicted the pain was as fierce and terrible
as he, even more so because he was more intelligent. In but few minutes,
dazed by the pain, appalled by his inability to rend and destroy the man
who inflicted it, Ben Bolt lost his courage. He fled ignominiously
before the little, two-legged creature who was more terrible than himself
who was a full-grown Royal Bengal tiger. He leaped high in the air in
sheer panic; he ran here and there, with lowered head, to avoid the rain
of pain. He even charged the sides of the arena, springing up and vainly
trying to climb the slippery vertical bars.

Ever, like an avenging devil, Mulcachy pursued and smashed and jabbed,
gritting through his teeth: "You will argue, will you? I'll teach you
what argument is! There! Take that! And that! And that!"

"Now I've got him afraid of me, and the rest ought to be easy," he
announced, resting off and panting hard from his exertions, while the
great tiger crouched and quivered and shrank back from him against the
base of the arena-bars. "Take a five-minute spell, you fellows, and
we'll got our breaths."

Lowering one of the iron chairs, and attaching it firmly in its place on
the floor, Mulcachy prepared for the teaching of the first trick. Ben
Bolt, jungle-born and jungle-reared, was to be compelled to sit in the
chair in ludicrous and tragic imitation of man-creatures. But Mulcachy
was not quite ready. The first lesson of fear of him must be reiterated
and driven home.