The pet-shop owner thought the apex of her troubles was reached in the Customs; now that the shipment was cleared, the crates standing in the centre of the pet-shop floor, she realized that this was not so—there were the monkeys! From the pile of boxes and cages on the floor came mews, squawks, grunts—protests of creatures travel-worn and restless. If a crate was quite still, things were bad.
Finches, canaries, love-birds, parrots, Siamese cats, squirrels, and, at the bottom of the pile, monkeys, gibbering, beating their fists upon the sides of crates demanding immediate release.
“You monks must wait,” said the weary woman wondering how their bedlam was to be endured. “Your cage is not ready.” However, as makeshift she rolled an empty barrel from somewhere, nailed a heavy wire parrot cage over its top and manoeuvred the monkeys from crate to barrel. Two fair-sized monkeys rushed up into the cage, delighted with release from cramping dark, squeaking, thrusting hairy arms through the bars, grabbing hammer, nails, packets of bird-seed, the tail of a bantam rooster—anything that could be reached.
I, waiting to buy bird-seed, saw a tiny little black face pop from the dark of the barrel to be immediately pushed down by the heavy hind foot of one of the big monkeys. Time and again the little face, a tuft of surprised Kewpie hair peaked on the top of its baby head, tried to get a peep at its new environment, only to be forced back like a jack into its box.
The pathetic little face haunted me. Going to sleep I thought about it and in the night when I woke.
When morning came I went to the phone calling the pet-shop.
“Is that tiny monkey boy or girl?”
“Girl.”
Suddenly I wanted her—I wanted her tremendously. Of course, I wasn’t going to buy a monkey, but I asked, “What is her price?” My voice went squeaky with wanting. The woman understood: she had heard that “wanting squeak” before.
“Buy her. She is a very nice monkey and the big ones bully her.”
“But my family! If I paid so much money for a monkey!”
“Listen, everyone is entitled to some fun. Would you consider even trade for one of your griffon pups?” (She knew my kennel.)
Good luck forever to that understanding woman! The deal was made. She would sell a “griff” quicker than a monk.
Pearl, my kitchen maid, loved animals as I did. I told her first.
“A real monkey, glory be! How soon can I fetch it?” Within an hour Pearl was racing down the street carrying a small parrot’s travelling cage and bursting with excitement.
I heard them coming up the stairs just as we sat down to lunch—my sister Lizzie, a man whom we boarded, and I. Pearl’s face was absolutely apoplectic. She placed the cage upon the floor.
Dead silence! My sister’s eyes popped like a Peke dog’s.
“Woo!” announced a plaintive voice from the cage. “Woo, woo, woo!”
“Your new niece, Lizzie!” I said, brave in the knowledge that my home was my own, yet half scared of family criticism.
My sister pushed aside her soup. “Milly! I never, never, never thought a relative of mine would sink to a—a—a baboon!”
The boarder’s lips always leaked when he ate soup. In the intensity of his stare he entirely forgot his serviette. Soup splashed from his spoon back into his plate, plop!
“Er, er, er, er!” (Ordinarily he said “Er” only twice to climb to each sentence.)
“Er—er—er—er it’s a monkey!”
The monkey decided to investigate us. Sticking one hand and one foot out of each side of the narrow cage she propelled herself across the floor. A walking cage looked so comical that a laugh even squeezed out of Lizzie—she cut it short with, “How much did you pay for the preposterous creature?”
“Even trade for a griffon pup.”
“A griffon! The idea!”
You’d have thought that I had traded a diamond necklace for an apple, though Lizzie always pretended to despise my little dogs.
“Your house will smell! Everything in it will be smashed! Your friends will drop away—who wants to ‘hob-nob’ with a monkey!” This awful fate trailed back at me as sister Lizzie rushed down my stair returning to her own chaste house and leaving me to contemplate the wreck I had made of my life.
The boarder, who set great store on the “griffon dogs”, groaned, “Er—er, a griffon for a monkey!” and went off to his office.
Pearl and I sat on the floor thrilled by the absorbing strangeness of our new creature.
My sister Alice took the first opportunity to come from her house round the corner to inspect my new queerness.
“Everyone to his own taste,” she shrugged. “Monkeys are not mine.”
So Woo was introduced to my sisters and took her place in our family circle, no more a commercial commodity, but an element pertaining to the family life of the three Carr sisters.
Pearl and I spent that afternoon nibbling around the edge of something unknown to us. I had tamed squirrels, crows, coons, even a vulture—these creatures, like myself, were northern bred. This lightning-quick, temperamental, tropical thing belonged to a different country, different zone, different hemisphere. We were ignorant as to what liberties we dare take. If thwarted, Woo opened her mouth, exhibiting magnificent jaws of strong white teeth, jaws so wide-hinged that you could see her wisdoms (if she had any) and right down her throat. The boarder asked nervously, “Er—er—was it King Something or his son that died of monkey bite?”
I put the monkey into a large parrot cage. She snatched ungraciously all that we offered, food or play-things, grimacing back at us. When night fell she began to miss the warmth of the other monkeys, for though they had tormented her by day, they had been willing to pool cuddles at night. “Woo, woo, woo,” she cried, and could find no comfort in the hot brick I offered or in Pearl’s old sweater or in the boarder’s third-best hat.
“Er—er—tell her to curl up in the hat. Er—er—it’s a good hat.”
He said this as if I were a monkey interpreter. But I had no monkey word to comfort the lonely little beast other than to repeat her own sad wailing, “Woo, woo, woo.”
I had intended to call my monkey Jemima, but she named herself Woo that first night and Woo she remained for life.
Near midnight, she rolled herself up in Pearl’s sweater and slept. I turned out the light, tiptoed from the room. A jungle stranger had possession of the studio.
Even restricted in a cage she was a foreign, undomestic note in my humdrum house!
There was a small collar on Woo’s neck when I bought her. She had never known the pull of a chain. Any restraint, any touch of her collar infuriated her. By keeping a few links of chain always suspended from her neck I soon accustomed her to lead. Then I could take her into the garden.
Woo was teachable. Before I had owned her a week she got away from her chain in the garden.
“Good-bye, Woo!”
I was sad. I thought, of course, she would make for the woods in the Park nearby. No, Woo dashed up my stair, sat waiting on the mat to be let in. She had accepted the studio as her home. That quick response of love and trust entirely won me.
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