Astray (2 page)

The Yankee, Elephant Bill, has some cheek. He began by informing me that Barnum’s agents tried to secure the captured King of the Zulus for exhibition, and then the cottage where Shakespeare was born; you’re only their third choice of British treasures. Well, I bristled, you can imagine.

When you wouldn’t walk into the crate no matter how we urged and pushed, even after he took the whip to your poor saggy posterior—when I’d led you round the corner and tried again half a dozen times—he rolled his eyes, said it was clear as day you’d been spoiled.

“Spoiled?” I repeated.

“Made half pet, half human,” says the American, “by all these treats and pattings and chit-chat. Is it true what the other fellows say, Scott, that you share a bottle of whiskey with the beast every night, and caterwaul like sweethearts, curled up together in his stall?”

Well, I didn’t want to dignify that kind of impertinence
with a reply. But then I thought of how you whine like a naughty child if I don’t come back from the pub by bedtime, and a dreadful thought occurred to me. “Elephants are family-minded creatures, you must know that much,” I told him. “I hope you don’t mean to leave Jumbo alone at night? He only sleeps two or three hours, on and off; he’ll need company when he wakes.”

A snort from the Yank. “I don’t bed down with nobody but human females.”

Which shows the coarseness of the man.

Settle down, Jumbo, it’s only three in the morning. No, I can’t sleep neither. I haven’t had a decent kip since that blooming crate arrived. Don’t those new violet-bottomed mandrills make an awful racket?

Over seven thousand visitors counted at the turnstile today. All because of you, Jumbo. Your sale’s been in the papers; you’d hardly credit what a fuss it’s making. Heartbroken letters from kiddies, denunciations of the trustees, offers to raise a subscription to ransom you back. It’s said the Prince of Wales has voiced his objections, and Mr. Ruskin, and some Fellows of the Society are going to court to prove the sale illegal!

I wish you could read some of the letters you’re getting every day now, from grown-ups as well as kiddies. Money enclosed, and gingerbread, not to mention cigars. (I ate the couple of dozen oysters, as I knew you wouldn’t fancy them.) A bun stuck with pins; that’s some sot’s idea of a joke. And look at this huge floral wreath for you to wear, with
a banner that says A TROPHY OF TRIUMPH OVER THE AMERICAN SLAVERS. I’ve had letters myself, some offering me bribes to “do something to prevent this,” others calling me a Judas. If they only knew the mortifications of my position!

Oh, dear, I did think today’s attempt would have gone better. It was my own idea that since you’d taken against the very sight of the crate, it should be removed from view. I told this Elephant Bill I’d lead you through the streets, the full six miles, and surely by the time you reached the docks, you’d be glad to go into your crate for a rest.

But you saw right through me, didn’t you, artful dodger? No, no tongue massage for you tonight, Badness! You somehow knew this wasn’t an ordinary stroll. Not an inch beyond the gates of the Gardens but you dropped to your knees. Playing to the crowd, rather, I thought, and how they whooped at the sight of you on all fours like some plucky martyr for the British cause. The public’s gone berserk over your
sit-down strike,
you wouldn’t believe the papers.

I almost lost my temper with you today at the gates, boy, when you wouldn’t get up for me, and yet I couldn’t help but feel a sort of pride to see you put up such a good fight.

That Yank is a nasty piece of work. When I pointed out that it might prove impossible to force you onto that ship, he muttered about putting you on low rations to damp your spirit, or even bull hooks to the ears and hot irons.

“I’ll have you know, we don’t stand for that kind of barbarism in this country,” I told him, and he grinned and said the English were more squeamish about beating their animals
than their children. He showed me a gun he carries and drawled something about getting you to New York dead or alive.

The lout was just trying to put the wind up me, of course. Primitive tactics. “Jumbo won’t be of much use to your employer if he’s in the former state,” says I coldly.

Elephant Bill shrugged, and said he didn’t know about that, Barnum could always stuff your hide and tour it as “The Conquered Briton.”

That left me speechless.

Will we take a stroll round the Gardens this morning before the gates open? Over eighteen thousand visitors yesterday, and as many expected today, to catch what might be a last glimpse of you. Such queues for the rides! We could charge a guinea apiece if we chose, not that we would.

Let’s you and me go and take a look at your crate. It’s nothing to be afraid of, idiot boy; only a big box. Look, some fresh writing since yesterday:
Jumbo don’t go,
that’s kind. More flowers. Dollies, books, even. See that woman on her knees outside the gates? A lunatic, but the civil kind. She’s handing out leaflets and praying for divine intervention to stop your departure.

But the thing is, lad, you’re going to have to go sooner or later. You know that, don’t you? There comes a time in every man’s life when he must knuckle down and do the necessary. The judge has ruled your sale was legal. Barnum’s told the
Daily Telegraph
he won’t reconsider, not for a hundred thousand pounds. So the cruel fact is that our days together
are numbered. Why not step on into your crate now, this very minute, get the wrench of parting over, since it must come to that in the end? Quick, now, as a favor to your sorrowful pa? Argh! Be that way, then; suit yourself, but don’t blame me if the Yank comes at you with hooks and irons.

It’s like trying to move a mountain, sometimes. Am I your master or your servant, that’s what I want to know? It’s a queer business.

That superintendent! To think I used to be amused by his little ways, almost fond of the old gent. Well, a colder fish I never met. Sits there in his dusty top hat and frock coat flecked with hippopotami’s whatsits, tells me he’s giving me a little holiday.

“A holiday?” I was taken aback, as you can imagine. I haven’t taken a day off in years, you’d never stand for it.

He fixes me with his yellowing eyes and tells me that my temporary removal will allow Mr. Newman to accustom himself to the elephant’s habits and tastes before departure.

“You know Jumbo’s tastes already,” I protest. “He can’t stand that Yank. And if the fellow dares to try cruel measures, word will get out and you’ll have the police down on you like a shot, spark off riots, I shouldn’t wonder.”

Which sends the superintendent off on a rant about how I’ve been conspicuously unwilling to get you into that crate.

“Oh, I like that,” says I. “I’ve only loaded the unfortunate creature with shackles, pushed and roared to drive all six and a half tons of him into that blooming trap, so how is it my fault if he won’t go?”

He fixes me with a stare. “Mr. Newman informs me that you must be engaging in sabotage, by giving the elephant secret signals. I have suspected as much on previous occasions, when I sent you perfectly competent assistants and Jumbo ran amok and knocked them down like ninepins.”

“Secret signals?” I repeat, flabbergasted.

“All I know is that your hold over that beast is uncanny,” says the superintendent between his teeth.

Uncanny? What’s uncanny about it? Nothing more natural than that you’d have a certain regard for your pa, after he’s seen to all your little wants day and night for the last seventeen years. Why does the lamb love Mary so, and all that rot.

Well, boy, at that moment I hear a little click in my head. It’s like at the halls when a scene flies up and another one descends. I suddenly say—prepare yourself, lad—I say, “Then why don’t you send a telegraph to this Barnum and tell him to take me too?”

The superintendent blinks.

“I’m offering my services as Jumbo’s keeper,” says I, “as long as his terms are liberal.”

“What makes you imagine Mr. Barnum would hire such a stubborn devil as you, Scott?”

That threw me, but only for a second. “Because he must be a stubborn devil himself to have paid two thousand pounds for an elephant he can’t get onto the ship.”

A long stare, and the superintendent says, “I knew I was right. You have been thwarting me all along, using covert devices to keep Jumbo in the zoo.”

I smirked, letting him believe it. Covert devices, my eye! To the impure, all things are impure. “Just you send that telegraph,” I told him, “and you’ll be soon rid of both of us.”

Now, now, boy, let me explain. Doesn’t it strike you that we’ve had enough of England? Whoa! No chucking your filth on the walls, that’s a low habit. Hear me out. I know what a patriotic heart you’ve got—specially considering you come from the French Sudan, not our Empire at all—but how have you been repaid? Yes, the plain people dote on you, but it strikes me that you’ve grown out of these cramped quarters. If the Society’s condemned you to transportation for smashing a few walls and shocking a few members’ wives, why, then—let’s up stakes and be off to pastures new, I say. You’re not twenty-one yet, and I’m not fifty. We’re self-made prodigies, come up from nothing and now headline news. We can make a fresh start in the land of the free and home of the brave. We’ll be ten times as famous, and won’t England feel the loss of us, won’t Victoria weep!

I expect the superintendent will call me in right after lunch, the wonders of modern telegraphy being what they are. (Whatever Barnum offers me, I’ll accept it. The Society can kiss my you-know-exactly-what-I-mean.) I’ll come straight back here and lead you out to the crate. Now, whatever you do, Jumbo, don’t make a liar of me. I don’t have any secret signals or hidden powers; all I can think to do is to walk into the crate first, and turn, and open my arms and call you. Trust me, dearest boy, and I’ll see you safe across the ocean, and stay by your side for better for worse, and take a father’s and mother’s care of you till the end. Are you with me?

Man and Boy

This story is based on almost daily reports in the
Times
of London between January and April 1882, as well as Superintendent Abraham Bartlett’s hostile account in his
Wild Animals in Captivity
(1898), and the ghostwritten 1885
Autobiography of Matthew Scott, Jumbo’s Keeper.
Even after Matthew Scott persuaded Jumbo into his crate, the controversy—nicknamed “Jumbomania” or “the Jumbo movement”—lingered for several months on both sides of the Atlantic, inspiring songs, poems, jokes, cartoons, advertisements, and the sale of “Jumbo” cigars, collars, fans, earrings, perfume, and ice cream.

Jumbo toured with Barnum’s troupe over four very successful seasons (and showed no further sign of the aggression that dental analysis now suggests can be blamed on impacted molars, due to his low-fiber diet). In 1885, as Scott led him across a railway track after a performance in St. Thomas, Ontario, the elephant was killed by an unscheduled freight train. Barnum rehired Scott for one more season to introduce audiences to Jumbo’s stuffed hide. Despite pressure to return to England, Scott hung on near the circus’s winter headquarters in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he died in 1914 in the almshouse, aged around eighty. Jumbo’s hide was lost in a fire, but his skeleton lies in storage at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York.

LONDON

1854

ONWARD

C
aroline always prepares Fred’s breakfast herself. Her young brother’s looking sallow around the eyes. “We saved you the last of the kippers,” she says in a tone airy enough to give the impression that she and Pet had their fill of kippers before he came down this morning.

Mouth full, Fred sings to his niece in his surprising bass.

His brow is wet with honest sweat,

He earns whate’er he can

And looks the whole world in the face

For he owes not any man.

Pet giggles at the face he’s pulling. Caroline slides her last triangle of toast the child’s way. Pet’s worn that striped frock since spring. Is she undersized for two years old? But then girls are generally smaller. Are the children Caroline sees thronging the parks equally twiglike under their elaborate coats? “Where did you pick that one up?” she asks Fred.

“A fellow at the office.”

“Again, again,” insists Pet: her new word this week.

Caroline catches herself watching the clock.

Fred launches into song again as he rises to his feet and brushes the crumbs from his waistcoat with a manner oddly middle-aged for twenty-three.

Toiling,—rejoicing,—sorrowing,

Onward through life he goes …

“Come, now, Pet, let Uncle get his coat on.” Fred mustn’t be late, but that’s not it: Caroline wants him gone so she can tackle the day. The child, windmill-armed, slaps imaginary dust out of her uncle’s trousers while her mother adjusts his collar. Not that there’s any real prospect of advancement from the ranks of draftsmen, but still, no harm in looking dapper. She nearly made an architect of him, so very nearly; another few years would have done it.
Nearly never knit a sock,
as their mother used to say in sober moments.

“Bye-bye,” chants Pet, “bye-bye, bye-bye.”

Fred always leaves to catch his omnibus with a cheerful expression. Does he like his work? she wonders. Or does he just put a brave face on it for twenty-five shillings a week?