CHAPTER I

IN WHICH A NEW HOME IS FOUND AND THE STATUS OF ANTHROPOID APES IS CAREFULLY DETERMINED

Having once decided--very much against my will (such as it is)--to leave my old single rooms at Mrs. Duckie's, the question where to live was before us. Far enough away to make a good walk in fine weather, was a point on which Naomi insisted first of all, and, indeed, it was because Mrs. Duckie's house was too near Queen Anne's Gate that her hostility to it was so firm.

"It's no nearer than it was before we were married," I pointed out. "In fact, just the same distance."

"Yes," said Naomi, "and look how you suffered for want of exercise." (Did I?) "No, we must live farther away from it all. That's absolutely necessary."

By "it" she meant her father's house in particular; Pall Mall; and an area bounded by the Haymarket Theatre in the South, Kreisler and Casals in the North, and Bond Street in the West; but we were to be not so far as to be more than one and tenpence (the frugal young woman's limit, with twopence for the blackguard chauffeur) in a taxi; we were to have contiguity to an open space; nice rooms; and a comfortable landlady who could cook. For we agreed that we wanted no oven responsibilities of our own, although a chafing dish was to fortify the menu on occasion.

These were not very exacting conditions, and at 7 Primrose Terrace, close to Regent's Park, we found as complete an approximation as this vale of tears and disappointment is equal to offering, the rooms being large and just vacated by an old occupant with a very high standard of comfort: a self-protective gentleman of means whom the gods had, mercifully for us, visited with a nervous breakdown, making two years' travel in warmer climes an obligation. As that sententious amateur, Herbert Trist, says, "The art of life is to succeed a good tenant."

Our landlady is a twin--two sisters, the Misses Laura and Emma Packer, unmarried, very refined, fragile, and Victorian, who are assisted in the duties of the house by a worthy rotund woman named Mrs. Wiles. One of my earliest proceedings after becoming the tenant having been to take the steps necessary for election to a fellowship of the Zoological Society of London, you may judge of my satisfaction to learn that Mrs. Wiles' husband was no other than the head keeper of the ape house. Here was a friend at court who had it in his power to make even the Zoo more agreeable.

But, once again to prevent misunderstanding, let me remark that when we say ape--Mrs. Wiles and I--we mean ape and ape only. For there are, it seems, persons so lost to nice feelings and etymological exactitude that they speak of apes and monkeys indiscriminately as though they were the same, whereas, of course, monkeys are only monkeys--gibbering unreticent shameless travesties of the worst kind of man--while apes are without tails, and have a certain patient dignity, and lay serious claim to the attention of the theorizing biologist.

"No," said Mrs. Wiles, "not monkeys. Not Wiles. I don't say as how I am overjoiced when I meet a lady, as it might be Mrs. Johnson last evening, and after she has asked me what my husband does and I've told her he's an official in the employ of the Zoological Society, she says, 'Oh, a keeper, I suppose'; and when I say, severe like, 'A head keeper,' she says, as they all do, the same two things, sometimes one first and sometimes the other, but always the same--'Oh, I hope it's not the monkey house,' and 'Could you possibly give me two tickets for next Sunday afternoon?'"

Mrs. Wiles now and then stops for breath, although, like most Londoners, she talks without apparently using any, and this, on our first exchange of confidences on the matter, enabled me to ask why she thought the monkey-house query was always propounded.

"I don't know," she said, "but I suppose it's because to most people the Zoo is monkeys first and foremost. It's the monkeys they want to see. But Wiles has nothing to do with monkeys, nothing whatever. Wiles has charge of the apes. I won't go so far as to say I don't sometimes wish it was lions or elephants, but this I will say, that, good husband as Wiles is, I don't think I could live with him if it was monkeys pure and simple--although how anyone can call them pure and simple, I can't think. Apes are different, aren't they, sir? Wiles says that apes are the next things to us. Wiles says they have brains and beautiful natures; but what gives me most peace of mind is knowing that they haven't got tails. Tails would be too much, as I often tell him. I've got a bit of writing about it which Wiles found in a dictionary, and if you'll permit me, sir, I'll bring it round and show it to you to-morrow morning. I always keep it in the Bible, handy."

Mrs. Wiles unfolded it the next morning and I read aloud these words: "In common use the word ape extends to all the tribe of monkeys and baboons, but in the zoological sense" ("Ah!" said Mrs. Wiles, smoothing her apron) "it is restricted to those higher organized species of the Linnæan genus _Simla_, which are destitute of a tail, as the ourangs, chimpanzees, and gibbons."

"There!" she said triumphantly, when I had finished.

Our opportunities for conversation with Mrs. Wiles come after breakfast, for it is one of her duties to clear away. Wiles and she appear to live close by, and she moves between the two houses, first getting Wiles his breakfast, packing him off to his apes, and "redding up" her own home; then locking her door and "redding up" the Misses Packers'; then returning to prepare Wiles's and her own dinner; and in the late afternoon returning to the Misses Packers' to help them with theirs and ours. Wonderful creatures, women! There is nothing done by men to put in the balance against such steady undeviating dreary mule-work as women cheerfully perform. At least, not in England. On the Continent you get something like it, in the small hotels where a man does everything; but not here--not in the land of public-houses.

The Misses Packer, our tutelary twins, although aware that in Mrs. Wiles they have a treasure, deprecate her volubility in our rooms. Like all consciously refined persons, they have no appreciation of character, and both Miss Laura and Miss Emma have separately apologized to us for their hireling's familiarity and hoped we will not allow her to impose upon our good nature. What is to be done with people like this?--and they are everywhere.

Miss Laura (who claims to be the older by half an hour, and has will power to justify the claim), although she has been in the lodging-house business for years and years, still affects to be ashamed of it. "I can't think what father would say if he could know what we were doing," is the burden of her life-song. "It's the last thing he would ever have wished his girls to do--keep a lodging-house." The paternal Packer, it seems, was related distantly but sufficiently to a City Sheriff, and himself was for many years a highly respected messenger in one of the older London banks. In their more daring moments his daughters have, I believe, referred to him quite easily as a banker, or at any rate have permitted the impression that he had charge of huge sums of money (as indeed he had) to go uncorrected, with the suggestion added that events were at last too much for him, and, owing to financial depression, due to vague causes, of which an iniquitous Government was the chief, he came upon heavy losses and poverty. For anyone may have a father who was a business failure; but no real lady would confess to springing from a bank messenger's loins.

Miss Emma, although less assertive than her sister (as becomes one born so long after), bleats a sympathetic chorus to the lament; and to her sister's amazement at what father would say could he only see his girls in their degrading situation, has been known to remark, "But who knows?--perhaps he does see us!" thus calling up a picture of the vigilant bank messenger at one of heaven's loopholes with but this drop of bitterness--his daughters' decline from perfect ladyhood--in an eternal cup of bliss.

They are, however, good women, the Packer sisters, and one of them cooks excellently, and if some of God's creatures have brains like dried peas and no imagination at all, the best of us are not so very wonderful.