Sing Sing Nights

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  The dogs were the only creatures that did not run. While a few backed off yelping with tails between their legs, a number of others growled deeply at Annesly. Then, as he stepped back in alarm, they tried to attack him, fangs bared; and it was only by beating viciously at them with his cane that he was able to drive them off, to set them one and all in terrified flight. A cat, standing on a front gate which he passed slowly by, puffed up its fur and spat fiercely at him. And now the East End side-street became suddenly filled with adults instead of children. They ringed themselves about him with, however, a generous allowance of space between themselves and him — and as he walked straightway right through the ring, it broke, melted, and the occupants thereof turned like cattle and joined the enormous throng that now formed in his wake.

  “Wot in ‘ell is it?”

  “Blimey, Ned, wot does you fink it is?”

  “H’it’s a h’animal, that’s wot it is?”

  “Dahn’t you fool yourself. Hit’s a dirty nigger with ‘air glued on ‘is face.”

  “H’it’s a bloody griller, like wot’s in the Zoo. An’ ‘e’s wearin’ pants an’ a cowt, that’s wot.”

  “Griller me h’eye! H’I’ve been abaht meself a bit. Looky th’ owld lydy. She aren’t tykin’ no chawnces. She’s got a bloomin’ brick in ‘er ‘and. Throw it, ol’ lydy, throw it ‘ard.”

  “Drive th’ stinkin’ thing off the street. Thinks it’s a toff, do it? Gettin’ a dole, I bet you, we’en it art to be in a cyge.”

  “Hi! you — wot you lookin fer? They ain’t no pub in this street. Lumme!”

  Exclamations, hoots, jeers, discussions — Annesly heard them all. And then suddenly someone threw with vicious force a brick, the sharp corner of which struck him squarely in the ribs. Only the padded fur beneath his ill-fitting coat saved him from injury, and the force of the blow sent him staggering forward. Goaded to desperation, he turned and rushed at them. And they fell away from his onslaught like leaves before a gust of autumn wind, fighting, tumbling, tripping over one another to escape. And in that instant Eustice Annesly began to see plainly that he was a thing outcast.

  And thus it was, therefore, that he walked aimlessly, hopelessly, up and down the side streets that led off the Commercial Road, till noontime, with always that immense mob dogging his every footstep, a mob that attained an increment of a new human member for every one who, satiated with the strange sight, dropped off and went back to his home. But at twelve o’clock Eustice Annesly began to feel the pangs of hunger, an overwhelming desire for a bun and a pot of tea at the least, and with a backward glance at that ever-following rabble he stepped into a spruce little restaurant with white tables and an inviting cold joint in the window. But no sooner had he opened the door than a woman, who had evidently been watching all the time from within, flew at him with a broom, like a veritable wildcat.

  “Get h’out o’ ‘ere, ye ‘orrible beast, ye freak!” she shrilled. “Do I be feedin’ the likes of ye, with yer dirty red tongue, an’ I’ll never ‘ave a customer again for a year.”

  The rabble behind him sent up a mighty jeer. He slunk wretchedly away. The mob followed. After a short while he conjured up enough courage to try another restaurant which advertised “skate and chips “for tenpence. But the result was the same: he was driven away, the very doors locked on him, the mob hooting derisively in his rear, before he had even a chance to speak. And he kept trying all the afternoon, this time boldly up and down the whole length of Commercial Road itself. But invariably he met with only one of two receptions — either terror or utter hostility — and in almost every case doors that were locked before he even put a hairy, gloved paw on their polished knobs.

  By nightfall, consequently, he was so faint from hunger that he could scarcely stand upright. So he changed his tactics, and, after slipping into the friendly opening of a mews, made his way round to the rear of a cheap eating-house whose only provender appeared, from its Commercial Road front, to be “hot jellied eels” at sixpence the bowl. The proprietor, a black, greasy-looking man, came out to the rear door, but in his free hand he held a protecting meat-cleaver threateningly upraised.

  “For God’s sake,” cried the man, trapped for life in a monkey body, “give me food! I’ll pay anything. I’ll eat out here in the rear. I — I won’t hurt you. Give me food.”

  Evidently seeing a glorious opportunity to mulct a queer being who had strayed from some travelling side-show, the proprietor kindly offered, cleaver still upraised, to provide all the bowls of hot jellied eels that would be desired — at four shillings the bowl! Without any hesitation or discussion whatever, Eustice Annesly reached down into his pocket and handed over four shillings from his capital of eight pounds odd. A moment later he was gratefully seated on an old, battered ashpail, devouring the tin pie-dishful of jellied eels that was handed him at the door in exchange for his money.

  Wherever he walked that night, the crowds still continued to follow him up and down the streets. And at every place he tried to negotiate for a bed, he was met by a reception similar to that he had met with in his effort to secure food. The doors of a very decent hostelry in York Road were locked with alacrity as he ascended the steps — to open no more. A Chinaman, with club studded with sharpened iron spikes, drove him menacingly away from an Asiatic sailors’ boarding-house in Pennyfields. He was cursed at — through the upper windows only — of the cheapest lodging-house in the cheapest part of the Limehouse Basin.

  He thought desperately of going to the other extreme — of trying his luck at the Cecil, at the Savoy; then he looked down at himself and thought desperately of his scant eight pounds capital, already dwindling; for a moment, too, he held thoughts of going back to that little haven of refuge in Guildford Street — but his remembrance of those dignified individuals who inhabited it caused him to shake his head, for he realised but too well that that step was now impossible. And so he continued walking, walking.

  Thus nine o’clock, ten o’clock, eleven o’clock came. Then the crowds that had been following him since early that day began to melt away. By midnight he was walking the East End alone. At twelve-thirty he was fortunate enough, by ringing door-bell after door-bell, to stumble on a sympathetic female lodging-house keeper who, at least listening to his plea through the barred door, gave him permission to sleep on a dirty mattress in her wood shed — for five shillings, cash in advance.

  And thus ended his first day, huddled on a damp mattress, his fur under his ill-fitting suit the chief protection against the cold night air of London.

  Followed more days, days like the first, days of sixpenny meals at four shillings — nights of rest on that foul mattress — at five shillings the night! And thus, naturally, at this rate of expenditure, his capital melted away. After seven days had passed — seven hideous days of barking dogs, gaping crowds, rearing horses, and threatening police — he realised, with a sinking heart, that he had reached the jumping-off place, for his money was reduced to a lone one-pound note. Scarnum was right, after all.

  The circus, with its people of freakdom and its side-show platforms, was the only life left for him — his last refuge. So he made his way boldly in a cab to High Holborn, walked quickly into a large periodical store that he had patronised in days that were now gone for ever, and purchased a copy of the English Carnival Review, the publication that Scarnum had claimed was devoted entirely to the interests of shows and outdoor exhibitions. In the department set aside ior routes and dates, he found that Scarnum’s American Circus was playing in the town of Marseilles, France. And with this information in his possession he bade his waiting cab carry him to the Western Union telegraph office, off Trafalgar Square, which he resolutely entered and over whose polished counter he sent the brief wire:

  SCARNUM, Marseilles, France.

  Will join. How about transportation?

  GRILLO.

  Not thirty minutes later the answer to his wire came clicking back:

  GRILLO, Western Union Office, Trafalgar
Square, London.

  Position and salary O.K. Am wiring ticket and Channel passage. Show goes back to America next week.

  SCARNUM.

  It was the most welcome message Eustice Annesly had ever received. The outcast was to be taken in, to be made a peer of his fellows.

  CHAPTER LI

  A REMARKABLE EXPERIMENT

  To Eustice Annesly’s dismay, life with the circus proved scarcely better than life on the outside. Not one of the freaks — every one of which at least possessed a human body, even though deformed, diseased or abnormal — evinced a desire to have anything more to do with him than was absolutely necessary. So far as actual association with him went, it appeared to them to be unthinkable, even to such a monstrous thing as the Human Spider, a poor, ignorant, illiterate creature from the Kentucky hills, whose legs and trunk, due to a childhood attack of untreated anterior poliomyelitis, a spinal cord disease, had withered away so completely that, by means of his powerfully muscled arms, he walked inverted on his hands. And because of this kingly isolation which he had literally thrust upon him, Annesly suffered a loneliness endurable only because of an occasional chat with Scarnum.

  As for Scarnum, he was radiantly happy now that Annesly had demonstrated his willingness to become a permanent fixture of the Scarnum shows. After they began to strike the American towns where Annesly, under the professional cognomen assigned to him, had been billed in advance, the crowds became enormous. In many of the larger cities Scarnum was forced to turn people away from the tents on account of the inability of the guards to keep the throng moving.

  Packed shoulder to shoulder, the spectators stood their ground in front of Eustice Annesly’s platform, and showed no desire to leave. They stared at him, open-mouthed. Men held up their little sons, and women their little daughters, that the children might have a better view of him. University professors of anthropology brought their classes in a body to his tent. And for enduring all this he received two hundred and fifty dollars at the end of every week.

  His duties, fortunately, were very simple. By the terms of his contract, all he was compelled to do was to remain seated on the platform, rising every twenty minutes to give a short two-minute talk. In this talk, which was written by Scarnum’s Press agent, he related briefly how he had been captured in an African jungle when he was only a small monkey; how he had been traded to a missionary living on the West African coast; how the latter had slowly educated him and taught him human speech, syllable by syllable; how he had finally come to America following the death of the missionary from sleeping sickness caused by the bite of a tsetse fly.

  On account of the gigantic crowds, he realised that he could easily have coerced Scarnum into paying him five hundred dollars a week for his simple and easily performed work. But he was too heartsick, too unhappy, too full of misery to care for money itself. For of what use was money to him? Eustice Annesly — his body at least — was dead and buried. And he — or Eustice Annesly’s brain — had been imprisoned by the devilish technique of a too skilful surgeon in the body of a gorilla. What, then, could life hold out for him? Nothing — for hopes, visions, aspirations were dead, too.

  Often and often he thought of Sybil Mainwaring.

  Now and then he wondered whether the marriage had taken place between Sybil and Lord Olford. Always, for some reason, a tiny spark of hope burned in him that she had not married the nobleman — that she had suddenly come to the realisation that it was Eustice Annesly whom she loved. But, after all, he realised how futile was such a hope on his part, for Eustice Annesly was dead — and he was now only a black ape-man who could never expect to have any woman for a wife.

  The show, heading ever westward across the United States, was exhibiting in a huge tent pitched on the bank of the Mississippi River, at Burlington, Iowa, when Annesly’s last spark of hope was cruelly snuffed out. The crowd, these days and nights were even heavier than heretofore, for far to the south of this small city a farcical trial was being concluded in a tiny Tennessee country town, a trial attended by journalists from all over the world, a trial in which a young teacher of Evolution was being held to punishment for teaching that man and monkey were in some way related. Scarnum had long since added to his flamboyant lithographs taunting signs against Tennessee, and the crowds that now came to see the talking gorilla were heavier than ever before. On the night in question Annesly had just finished his last weary speech for the night. A hundred feet from the open tent door a Mississippi steamboat, with huge paddle-wheel at stern, rose and fell on the broad bosom of the river. Negroes laughed and rolled ivory dice on the broad, sloping, cobble-stoned levee, using the very light that filtered freely from the ticket-taker’s stand for their gleeful gambling. The crowds were being shoved and driven out by the guards. One by one the flickering gasoline lamps were being extinguished. An elderly man, carrying a valise, a portable typewriter and a cane, a man who had arrived too late to do more than get in for a brief glimpse of the curiosity and hear its closing words, a man whom Annesly was afterwards to learn from the ticket-taker was an English journalist who had been sent clear to Dayton, Tennessee, to cover the Scopes trial, and who on the way back to his boat at New York had made this roundabout journey merely to add to his copy a few words about the talking monkey, dropped a newspaper from his coat pocket as he left the tent uneasily consulting his time-table. From where Annesly sat he could see that it was a London Mercury; so he hopped down on all-fours from his platform to the sawdust-covered floor and rescued it. He opened it eagerly, anxious to see some news from the city where he had spent his life as Eustice Annesly, and almost the first article that caught his eye, in the two-weeks-old paper, was one whose headlines ran:

  “THE EARL OF OLFORD TAKES A WIFE

  “GEOFFREY, THE YOUTHFUL 14TH EARL OF OLFORD,

  “WEDS MISS SYBIL MAINWARING AT NOON TO-DAY.

  “Society turns out in full to attend the brilliant

  “ceremony held in St. George’s, Hanover Square.

  “London’s democratic young Earl adds a rare beauty

  “to his private fortune of a million pounds sterling.”

  That night, in his bunk in the animal car, Eustice Annesly’s eyes, animal orbs as they were, little and beady and black, demonstrated for the first time that they could supply a copious flow of tears. In fact, it was not until next morning that he had composed himself even to the point where he could finish the article.

  From that time on he sank into deeper and deeper gloom. An idea, at first not to be considered for a second, began to recur to him with greater and greater persistency. And on the last day of October, the date on which Scarnum’s Circus always disbanded and went into winter quarters, he arrived at a definite decision regarding his plans for the future.

  With his accumulated salary strapped in a chamois-skin belt around his wait, he travelled to the nearest railroad division point. There he hired a private car for four hundred dollars and rode dejectedly across America’s mid-west to New York. As soon as the train reached its destination he engaged a taxi-cab at the very door of the Grand Central Station and ordered the driver to carry him to the main offices of the Cunard Steamship Line. From here he emerged a few moments later, minus another four hundred dollars, but in the breast-pocket of his coat a fully-paid first-class passage, via private suite, from New York to Southampton, England. Within ten minutes he was at the Cunard Pier at the foot of Sixteenth Street, where three giant funnels, reaching high above the pier itself, and belching black smoke, marked the imminent departure of another leviathan of the seas. One hour later the ship, now out of the river, threw off its tug lines and headed into the open sea on its own steam; he sat alone and dejected in his private suite, staring unseeingly out at the dancing blue waves through the porthole.

  Followed six days in which he never even went on deck — six days in which his meals were brought to him by a very nervous steward. Then Southampton. A special train, wirelessed for by him when his ship was but one day out from England,
awaited him in the huge train-shed, puffing alongside the very boat-train itself. Almost an hour and a half later, a full twenty minutes before the arrival of the actual boat-train which followed him, he was threading his way hurriedly through Waterloo station — dear familiar sights were meeting his eyes — and climbing once more into an English taxi. And still ten minutes later he was being whirled up to the tiny door of the little Charing Cross Emergency Hospital which had turned the channel of his existence into a path that he had never dreamed of in years gone by. And when at last he stepped into the tiny reception-room, no less a person than old Dr. Michaelovitch himself stepped forward to greet him.

  “Why, why,” the old surgeon began, surprised, “is it really — ”

  “Yes,” Annesly interrupted bitterly, “it’s the man whose life you ruined by your damnable surgical ingenuity. I promised you five months ago that I would try life under the new conditions. I’ve done so — and failed to find it anything but a living hell.” He snapped open his money belt and flung it on Michaelovitch’s desk. “There — that belt contains nearly four thousand American dollars. It’s yours to use for charity — or for medical research — as you see fit.”

  “But — but — yourself?” Michaelovitch asked.

  “I’ve determined to end it all, to kill myself.”

  For a long time the medical man stared gravely at him. Finally he spoke: “I can plainly see by your tone of voice that you are desperate; that you mean what you say. And I realise now that any arguments on my part will be useless. You may not have known it, for a good many months I have been thinking of you — and of your case — and of how you were ‘making out’ over there in America. There was an article about the Scopes evolution case — in the London Mercury, I think it was — and the writer of it who had been over there mentioned the existence of a talking ape he had seen for a few minutes in a travelling show somewhere in the State of Iowa — an ape similar to the one which lived in the East End here for a week last spring. So I realised full well, of course, that that was you.” Michaelovitch paused gravely. “But now let me ask you a question — and think well, mighty well, before you reply. Are you willing to take a chance of losing your life entirely in order to regain your position in a human body?”