“How much is it?” he asked.
“Twelve hundred pounds,” I said.
“And how much have you collected already?”
“Two hundred pounds.”
“Well,” said Major Domo, “you’d better come along this afternoon and I’ll find you the balance.”
To say I was speechless means nothing. When I had gone to the telephone I thought there might be a chance of getting twenty-five pounds, possibly even fifty. A hundred would have been beyond the dreams of avarice. And here was Major Domo handing me a baby gorilla on a platter, so to speak. I stammered my thanks, slammed down the telephone, and rushed round the zoo, telling everyone of the fact that we were going to have a baby gorilla.
The great day came and I flew over to London Airport to collect the ape. My one fear now was that when I arrived there it would turn out to be a chimpanzee after all. The dealer met me and escorted me to a room in the animal shelter of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. He threw open the door, and the first thing I saw was a couple of baby chimpanzees sitting on a table meditatively chewing bananas. My heart sank, and I had visions of having to go back to Jersey empty-handed. But the dealer walked over to a crate in the corner and opened the door, and N’Pongo walked into my life.
He stood about eighteen inches high and was quite the most handsome and healthy looking baby gorilla I had ever seen. He strolled stockily across the room towards me and then held up his arms to be lifted up. I was amazed at how heavy he was for his size, and I soon realized that this was all solid bone and muscle; there was not a spare ounce of fat on him. His light-chocolate-coloured fur was thick and soft, and the skin on his hands, feet, and face was soft and glossy as patent leather. His eyes were small and deep-set, twinkling like chips of coal. He lay back in my arms and studied me carefully with an unwinking stare, and then lifted a fat and gentle forefinger and investigated my beard. I tickled his ribs and he wriggled about in my arms, giggling hoarsely, his eyes shining with amusement. I sat him down on a convenient table and handed him a banana, which he accepted with little bear-like growlings of pleasure, and ate very daintily compared to the chimpanzees, who were stuffing their mouths as full as they could. I wrote out the cheque and then we bundled N’Pongo—growling protests—back into the crate, and went off to catch the plane for Jersey.
When we landed at the airport I took N’Pongo out of his crate and we drove to the zoo with him sitting on my lap, taking a great interest in the cows we passed, and occasionally turning round so that he could peer up into my face. When we arrived I carried him up to our flat, for his cage was not quite ready and I had decided that he would have to spend a couple of days in our guest-room. His grave, courteous manner and his rather sad expression immediately won over both Jacquie and my mother, and before long he was lolling back on the sofa while they plied him with delicacies, and the staff came upstairs one by one to pay homage to him as if he were some black potentate. Having previously suffered by keeping Chumley the chimpanzee in the house, I knew from bitter experience that there was nothing like an ape for turning a civilized room into something closely resembling a bomb-site in an incredibly short space of time, so I watched N’Pongo like a hawk. When he became bored with lying on the sofa, he decided to make a circuit of the room to examine anything of interest. So he walked slowly round like a small black professor in a museum, pausing now to look at a picture, now to stroke an ornament, but doing it so gently that there was never any danger that he would break anything. After the attitude I was used to with Chumley, I was captivated by N’Pongo’s beautiful behaviour. You would have thought that he had been brought up in a house, to watch him. Apart from a slight hiatus when he wet the floor (and he could not be expected to know that this was not done in the best circles), his behaviour was exemplary—so much so that, by the time we put him to bed, my mother was doing her best to try to persuade me to keep him in the house permanently. I had, however, learned my lesson with Chumley, and I turned a deaf ear to her pleas.
N’Pongo, of course, did not leave the guest-room in the condition that he found it, but this was only to be expected. Although his manners were exemplary, he was only a baby and could not be expected automatically to assume civilized behaviour because he was living in the house. So the guestroom, when he left it, bore numerous traces of his presence; on one wall, for instance, was something that resembled a map of Japan drawn by one of the more inebriated ancient mariners. This was nicely executed in scarlet and was due to the fact that I had thought N’Pongo might like some tinned raspberries. He had liked them, and his enthusiasm at this new addition to his diet has resulted in the map of Japan. There was also straw. Next to paraffin, I know of no other commodity that manages to worm its way—in a positively parasitic fashion—into every nook and cranny before you are aware of it. For months after N’Pongo’s sojourn in our guest-room we were apologizing to guests for the floor which, in spite of hoovering, looked like a sixteenth-century alehouse. There was also the fact that the handle on the door drooped at rather a depressed angle since N’Pongo, after receiving his meal, had attempted to follow me out of the room. Knowing that the handle by some magical means opened and closed the door, but not knowing exactly how to manipulate it, he had merely pulled it downwards with all his strength. As I tried, unsuccessfully, to bend the handle back into position again, I reflected that N’Pongo was only about two years old and that his strength would increase in proportion to his size.
One of the things which particularly interested me about him was his different approach to a problem or a situation. If, for example, a baby chimpanzee is used to being brought out of its cage, on being reincarcerated it will carry on like one of the more loquacious heroines in a Greek tragedy, tearing its hair, rolling with rage on the floor, screaming at the top of its voice, and drumming its heels on every available bit of woodwork. N’Pongo was quite otherwise. Although deploring it, he would accept the necessity of being locked up again in his cage. He would try his best to divert you from this course of action, but when he realized that it had become inevitable he would submit with good grace. His only protest would be a couple of sharp and faintly peevish screams as he saw you disappear, whereas the average chimpanzee of his age and with his background would have gone on having hysterics for a considerable length of time. Owing to his attractive appearance and disposition, his good manners, and his very well-developed sense of humour, N’Pongo was in a very short space of time the darling of the zoo. Every fine afternoon he was brought out on to the lawn in front of the yew hedge, and there he would show off to his admirers, either lolling in the grass with a bored expression on his face, or, with a wicked gleam in his eye, working out how he could pose for his photograph to be taken by some earnest visitor and then rush forward at the crucial moment, grasp the unfortunate person’s leg, and push it from under him—a task that gave him immense amusement and generally resulted in the visitor sustaining a slipped disc and having an excellent picture of a completely empty section of lawn.
Within twelve months N’Pongo had almost doubled his size, and I felt it was now time to try, by fair means or foul, to obtain a mate for him. Unless they lack finances, I have no use for zoos that acquire animals purely for exhibition and make no effort to provide them with a mate; this applies particularly to apes. The problem does not arise while they are young, for they accept the human beings around them as their adopted, if slightly eccentric, family. Then comes the time when they are so powerful that you do not, if you have any intelligence, treat them in the same intimate way. When a gorilla or chimpanzee or an orang-utan at the age of three or four pulls your legs from under you, or jumps from a considerable height onto the back of your neck, it tests your stamina to the full and is done because you are the only companion with whom he can play. If he is left on his own, and is a nice-natured ape, he will try to play the same games with you when he is eleven or twelve; this means a broken leg or a broken neck. So if this friendly, exuberant animal is kept on his own and deprived of both the company of his own kind and that of human beings, you can hardly be surprised if he turns into a morose and melancholy creature. Not wanting to see N’Pongo degenerate into one of those magnificent but sad and lonely anthropoids that I have seen in many zoos (including some that had ample resources for providing a mate), I thought the time had come to try to procure a wife for N’Pongo, even though I knew that our funds would probably not stretch that far.