The Stranger at Green Knowe by L.M. Boston (illustrated by Peter Boston).
Title: The Stranger at Green Knowe.
Author: L.M. Boston (illustrated by Peter Boston).
Genre: Literature, fiction, children's lit, nature, refugees, animals.
Country: England, U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1961.
Summary: Ping can hardly wait to spend another vacation at the fabulous old manor house at Green Knowe. But this summer, it seems he is not the only visitor. Hanno, a beautiful, smart, and-possibly-dangerous gorilla from the London Zoo, has gone missing. Could he be hiding in the lush gardens of Green Knowe? As the searchers draw ever closer to discovering the wayward gorilla, Ping does his best to hide his new friend-and to preserve Hanno's freedom.
My rating: 7.5/10
My review:
♥ Imagine a tropical forest so vast that you could roam in it all your life without ever finding out there was anything else. Imagine it so dense that even if a man flew over it for hours, his airplane bumping on the rolling uplifts of heat, he would see nothing but the tops of trees form horizon to horizon. It is in such a forest-in the Congo-that this story must begin.
To look for the hero of the story, you must venture in the haunted gloom. Even at noon it is dark like a heavily curtained room, and at night like a closed oven. From among the roots of the trees, ropes of creeper loop up, weighing the leaf-ceiling down and tying trees together, sometimes knitting square miles into an unbroken tangle. Elsewhere, at the rocky foot of a cliff, a dell may be damp and mossy with giant ferns. If the sun finds a chink where it can slip a live ray down through the arcaded branches, it lies on the moss like an emerald. A moonbeam glitters like a bone, a tooth, or the white of an eye. A terrible silence warns explorers to keep out.
What lives there? Nobody really knows. Some say gods, some say devils, some say the souls of their ancestors, but certainly it is the home of mysterious creatures nearer to man than anything yet discovered-the awe-inspiring gorillas.
♥ A native gorilla hunt into the inner forest rarely takes place. When it does, it is an affair involving whole tribes and is so full of terror and the cruelty bred by terror that it needs all the native magic of drums, dances, offerings, prayers, and charms to see it through. They feel it as an assault on one of the forest gods to steal his power for themselves. Among the hunters are warriors covered with glory, trackers of genius, and chieftain's sons, but none of these is the hero of this book. The forest has deeper recesses where the silence is as old as time itself.
♥ To the young gorilla, the earth was as familiar and dependable as his mother. It was alive; it was bountiful; its fur of mosses and leaves was always brushing against him, sheltering him from sun and rain. It was warm and soft under his feet, and it had a pervading, reassuring, exciting smell. It was always the same and yet full of surprises. He ate as a matter of course the sugar canes he lived among like Hansel and Gretel eating their sugar-candy house, his toys were fern leaves or feathers that he put on his head, imitating his father who often covered his head when he snoozed; or sticks to bang with, or swings of tough creeper stems; or he pelted his brothers with anything that came to hand or played with them the really important game of Disappear, at which his giant father was an expert, vanishing without a sound. This was an art that every gorilla must learn young. It was their best defense. Instinctively, perhaps, a baby guessed that to be alive is to be in danger, though it was difficult to imagine any in their private paradise. But the Old Man knew, and his authority impressed him.
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♥ The Old Man's word was law and instantly understood by all. Generally it was grunts or snuffles or sniffs-with which a very great deal can be said, all that is needed for family life.
♥
♥ He put an arm around his little sister's neck, and they held feet wile the overdue rainstorm pounded refreshingly on the distant tree roof and ran down the trunks. Lightning played over the unseen sky, a mere shudder of light penetrating the trees. Thunder rolled a fanfare in praise of strength. The air was strong, embracing, and odorous, the close drumming and dashing of the rain like an extra curtain of safety drawn round them. He could hear his father grunting as he shifted his bed under a hollow tree, where the rain would not run down his neck. ..And so the family went to sleep, heaped with leaves to keep them dry. No small boy tucked up in bed could feel more secure than the little gorilla tucked in by a seemingly endless forest, dreaming of happy games on its soft, rich floor, where every day's direction is fresh and untrodden, all their own. How should he guess there was, in fact, a boundary to his world, outside which was a very different one, inhabited by vicious, greedy men, his second cousins who know no mercy toward the other side of the family.
♥
♥ "What shall we call the infant Hercules? There are too many Congos, but to call them George or Albert seems an insult to their fathers. Hercules is too long."
"Why not Hanno-the Carthaginian fellow who saw a gorilla in the sixth century B.C.?"
♥ He made do with human company, but he did not forget. The red-faced, hair man called Blair he saw more rarely and always spat at. Had Hanno but known it, this compound that he was so anxious to escape from-this patch of grass and stones shaded by a tree and surrounded by open bushes and the tantalizing edges of the forest, pressed upon by the heavily scented air and interrogated with parrot squawks by day and the laughter of hyenas at night-was the last he was ever to know of his heritage, the elemental earth. He looked at it for a month, and then was put back into a traveling cage and sent off on a long journey by truck, by canoe, by truck again, by airplane, by train, by truck, shaken and deafened and hopeless and sick, faced only by strangers, till he was delivered more dead than alive into the kind and understanding hands of the keeper at the zoo who was to be his only friend and his guardian for life.
♥ He came through the door in a squeezing mass with the others, who ran shouting and pointing down the rows of cages, laughing and being peevishly answered back by the monkeys. Ping was no sooner inside than he was squirming with distaste. What had he in his innocence expected? A great pavilion full of palms, banana trees, and giant ferns, streamers of orchids hanging down from the ceiling smelling of everything exotic, among which the monkeys peepers and sprang as gaily as at home? Before he had become a refugee, he had watched monkeys in his own forest as European children might watch squirrels in a forest of their own, speckled with sun and shade, their bright eyes inquisitive and carefree. Certainly it had never occurred to him that an animal could be stripped of everything that went with it, of which its instincts were an inseparable part, and that you could have just its little body in a space of nothingness. As if looking at that told you anything but the nature of sorrow, which you knew anyway. Here in their ugly, empty cages the monkeys were no more tropical than a collection of London rats or dirty park pigeons. They were degraded as in a slum. Some sat frowning with empty eyes, and those that wasted their unbelievable grace of movement in leaping from perch to chain, from chain to roof, from roof to perch to chain, repeating it forever, had reduced to fidgety clockwork the limitless ballet of the trees, which is vital joy.
Ping stood there saddened. He wanted to run out, but that was no good. What he really wanted was never to have come in.
♥ At last Hanno tired and sat down. He sighed like a weary athlete and crossed his arms. Then he settled into a position of age-long patient impatience, just sitting. The very expression of his face was that of years of sitting. Ping had seen it in refugee camps. He knew that sort of thing. For the first time his attention strayed from the gorilla to focus on the cage where the prisoner yawned and rubbed his knuckles. It was smaller than he had thought. Hanno had made it look big simply because, while looking at him, the imagination could not contain him in so little space. The cage was just big enough for him to take a bound from corner to corner, or he could stretch to his full height on the platform and touch the ceiling. It was as if Ping were shut up for life in a bathroom. The walls were tiled and the floor concrete. He had a horror of concrete. It was one of his nightmares. He had lived on it in refugee camps that were often warehouses or railway sheds. That was where he had come to know and loathe it. It was either deathly cold or mercilessly hot and had a hateful feeling under one's fingers, like rust. Every time his hands or the soles of his feet came in contact with it, they remembered the warm boulders, the live turf, the leafy forest tracks, the tree trunks that you patted for pleasure and put an arm round without reasoning why, when all the country was your own.
Ping's father had been a well-to-do timber merchant. They lived in the Burmese borderland in a fine wooden house on the edge of the forest, where Ping, who was an only child, played all day long, watching the foresters or simply playing with his own imagination and the whole twinkling variety of the glades and brooks. And now he remembered acutely the day when he returned from the forest, eager and hungry, to find his father's house and the little settlement round it burned out and utterly deserted, with all the signs of violence and wanton desecration. He had run calling and calling among the charred logs and the desolate silence, till at last the little son of the steward crawled out of the pigsty where he was hiding and told him "they" had come, looking for someone who was supposed to be hidden in his father's house, and those who had not been killed had been taken away. Who had been killed, he did not know. He had heard the guns, but he was hiding all the time. Everyone had gone. The two children were afraid to stay near such a place. They had wandered away together, eating berries and mushrooms and nuts and begging in tiny villages. Sometimes they slept in deserted temples among the carved stone elephants and figures. In one of these, whose gateways and steps were mother-of-pearl and indigo in the moonlight and whose inner chambers were mysterious with looming faces and the shifting sounds of night, they found other children in the same plight. In the end it was a Buddhist monk who took them all to a mission, where they were fed and passed on. From there the life on concrete began-concrete that seems to be chosen because where it is there can be nothing else-not the tiniest covering of lichen or moss, nor the slenderest blade of grass. The most it can tolerate us green or yellow slime. It is a kind of solid nothingness; it takes nothing in, it gives nothing back.
On this unresponsive surface Hanno now sat an could not even crumble it under his fingers. He had a pile of straw in one corner, but otherwise nothing, nothing at all. Here there was neither sunrise nor sunset, mist nor dew nor the smell of changing seasons, nor change of any kind at all, but always his captive body with the primeval vitality that was the birthright of his race, turning and turning upon itself in a few square yards of empty space. Yet there was no breaking down his passion. For as long as Ping's lifetime, he had been here unreconciled.
♥ "Hanno," Ping said in his gentlest voice, for Ping had, as it were, fallen in love. The world contained something so wonderful to him that everything was altered. It was not only that Hanno existed, a creature with the strength of a bull, the pounce of a lion, and the dignity and grief of a man-too much to take in, all the animal creation in one-but somewhere there was a country of such size, power, and mystery that gorillas were a sample of what it produced in secret, where everything else would be on the same scale. The world always had surprises, and between every surprise there were other surprises. There was no end to what might be. Something like this Ping felt without words, losing all sense of time, while people of all kinds drifted past the cages.
♥
♥ "Anyway, a caged animal can't be normal. You never know what they'll do."
♥ He took everything in his stride, and if he did not like what was there, he called upon his fancy to supply him with something more entertaining. However, his meeting with Hanno had left him feeling troubled, excited, and bewildered, a very small person with long, long thoughts and the very oddest hero-worship.
♥ Ping went off to school as lively as a trout in a stream. The world was full of surprises and possibilities. So long as you weren't in a cage.
♥
She laid her glassed down on a childish-looking envelope. Through the lenses the writing was magnified. It almost stood up off the paper. The words Green Knowe struck her as having been written with more than care. There was something about them that suggested that to the writer they were words of magic importance. Was it just the way they were placed in the exact center of the envelope? She put on her glasses again and picked up the letter. Each corner was decorated with a little drawing. In the top left hand was a horse with wings, in the top right, of course, the stamp, bottom left a windmill, and bottom right a man wearing stag's antlers. Wavy lines framed the address as if it were on an island. It was neatly and beautifully done.
Mrs. Oldknow looked at it and smiled. Men with antlers are magic all the world over. So are flying horses. What about windmills? Potentially they could mean many things, but nothing special to her. She opened the letter with considerable curiosity.
♥ Somehow, century after century, while much younger castles and houses rotted or were burned down or their owners grew tired of them and cleared them away to make room for new, Green Knowe stood quietly inside its moat and its belt of trees. Its stone was crumbling a little; its roof sagged between the rafters till they showed like the ribs of an old horse. A feeling of love and enchantment settled down on it, distilled out of all the sunrises and sunsets, moonrises and moonsets and tilting constellations that went over it, as each day added to its already legendary existence. And when the very walls of the house you live in are almost impossible to believe in, you are not likely to question the probability of the things that happen there. "For every person who comes here," Mrs. Oldknow reflected, "different things happen."
♥ "I've never been in a house when somebody really lived-I mean not since I grew up. I do remember my father's house, but I've been displaced since I was six."
"So you grew up when you were six? Ida said you were quite old for your age."
"You grow up when you leave home, don't you," said Ping confidingly as between equals.
♥
He looked at the huge Chinese lantern outside the bedroom door, put there to welcome him. It was nearly as big as himself, and when he switched on the light inside it, it looked like sunshine through bamboo leaves. It hung in a little enclosed place at the top of the stairs, low enough to shine on Ping's face as he stood admiring it. But Ping could not see how much more at home the lantern looked because of him beside it.
♥ "It's the cups," he said.
They were thin blue cups without handles, patterned with glazed oval windows the size of rice grains, through which the light shone when they were held up. "At first I just felt queer and happy and didn't know why. But now I feel sure. My mother had those cups at home when I was little. I'm sure I'm not dreaming."
He put his hand out and touched the china. "How do you come to have so many things?"
"It's the house," she said. "It always seems to be by accident. But when you, for instance, come here out of the blue, look at all the things that are waiting specially for you-for I'm sure you'll find others-for you and nobody else. These are quite ordinary Chinese cups. Everybody notices them because of their windows, but for you they are your mother's."
♥ "Well you can come here as much as you like now, moonlight or sunlight. It's quite true that children are hard on gardens. But so are birds. On the other hand, it's children and birds that enjoy gardens most."
♥ "What a headful of thoughts and memories you have brought here," she said, smiling. "I have a theory that events follow ideas. I mean ordinary things happen to ordinary people, but to some people only extraordinary things happen. That's why I love to have children here, because to them nothing is ordinary."
♥ "I've seen him," said Ping as if that explained everything.
"What's he like?"
Ping was tongue-tied. What was Hanno like? At last he said, "He's like a thunderstorm. A thunderstorm in a bottle. A genie." Then he laughed. "He's out," he said.
"He was certainly born and bred in the world's most tremendous thunderstorms, crash bang every night till the earth rocks."
"He's got the arms for throwing lightning," said Ping. "I wish he didn't have to be caught."
"He sounds quite dangerous."
"He has his likes and dislikes. But the keeper isn't afraid of him. They love each other. The keeper says they don't, but I can see they do."
"Then perhaps he'll just go home like a dog that's been out on a spree, guilty but glad."
"Hanno wouldn't be guilty. He's very proud."
"He might be glad to be safe and warm and well fed."
"No," said Ping softly, "he's prouder than that."
♥ He went out first thing after breakfast to explore the thicket. This was not easy. It had originally been planted with oak and pine as a screen and background for the garden. At some time it had been felled for firewood and had spring up again, so that where one big trunk had been, there were now five smaller ones. Trees too big for sawing had been left standing. Through the centuries the birds had added seeds of yew, cherry, dog rose, hawthorn, elder, ivy, and hop till it was as impenetrable a thicket as you could hope to find, with here and there in deeper shadow a patch of clear ground under the biggest trees. Wherever there was a space left by a fallen tree, the grass and wild carrots were waist high. Ping was slender and very easy in his movements. He slid round trunks and edged through chinks and saw no sign anywhere of human intrusion. It was not like the beginning of the world-the Garden of Eden would surely have been more luscious, with pineapples and grapes-but perhaps like the end of the world when man has been and gone. The sun played with the polished and tender leaves, picking one out here and there and leaving another as a mere twiddling shadow. It streaked each bright stalk with the shadow of its neighbors. It penetrated steadily down among the trunks to warm the tumbled bedding of the earth. The birds seemed more inquisitive than resentful of Ping's quiet presence. Certainly it was a paradise for them where they themselves had planted seeds of all their favorite fruits; where the ivy climbed even the yew trees and doubled their summer dark and the winter shelter that they' offered; where the ground was never raked and those birds who prefer to take cover there could have grass huts absolutely weatherproof. Ping felt that a thousand miles, a thousand years, separated him from the International Relief Society's Intermediate Hostel. Then, softly parting with his hands the bamboo through which he had been pressing, suddenly he saw the blue and brown water of the moat, and beyond it the kind walls of Green Knowe.
♥ "I've never seen a gorilla," said one. "I don't know the difference between that and a chimpanzee."
"Oh, there;'s all the difference in the world," said another. "A chimp always strikes me as gone downhill, a really degenerate species. They sit mumbling and grinning and scratching each other, treacherous, neurotic, and hysterical. A gorilla is a stupendous creature very up and coming. He seems to belong to the dawn of his time, the origin, not the end, the elemental stuff packed with compressed vitality from whom everything is still to come."
"That's Ping's idea," put in Mrs. Oldknow. "Ping calls him a genie in a bottle."
"Chimps are supposed to be Aryan cousins. Would you say the same thing about the African and white races-that the Africans are up and coming and the whites going, going, gone?"
"I almost think I would," said the only man present. "In our big cities there is nothing at all not made by ourselves except the air. We are our own context and live by picking each others' brains. There's no vital force. Electronic Man."
"Well, but the Africans are following us as quickly as they can. They want to be electronic too."
"Then perhaps in the end, if we don't exterminate the gorillas before we exterminate ourselves, the gorilla will have his chance. He's one of the really great ones of the earth, and he's not specialized, he's versatile. It's the versatile who survive."
♥ From where they sat, he could faintly hear the rustle of the bamboo beyond the water and the soft, unruffled cluck of the moor hen. The life of the wood was quiet and safe, forgotten and unguessed, for, he realized with a start, anybody rinsing his hands on the far side of the moat could be heard and seen from here, where they were all sitting. Ping had a fit of the dry grins and was obliged to roll over with his face to the grass, in which position he could feel his heart knocking in his ribs. And suddenly he began to wish desperately that the visitors would go, in case something went wrong. He dared not formulate it more clearly even to himself, because when the imagination is playing its highest game, it is important not to let it come out into the open, lest reason should say "Nonsense" and the tension be lost.
♥ "What is so strange about Green Knowe is that no one can feel strange here. Isn't that so, Ping? It's a real sanctuary. Nowadays everything is changing so quickly, we all feel chased about and trapped. Three years ago you might have escaped to the most unexplored part of Africa, and by now you would have there the Kariba Dam and a large town. And yet here, in the heart of industrial England, is this extraordinary place where you can draw an easy breath."
"Nine hundred years isn't so long," said Mrs. Oldknow. "It's only a breath. The sort you take when you are asleep."
"If your lungs were this big," said Ping, stretching his arms to full width, "it would be a big one."
"Quite worth taking," said Mrs. Oldknow.
♥ "Is rhododendron poisonous?"
"Very."
"What else is?" Ping asked anxiously.
"Laburnum, laurel, yew-the leaves, not the berries-deadly nightshade, foxgloves. Those are the most common."
♥ "I shall be here all day. If it is as hot as I think it's going to be, I shall just sit in the shade and be happy. You'll find me there."
♥
It was very pretty; he was charmed with it. The myriad boatshaped bamboo leaves, moored to trees by their stems, floated motionless in the air. The sun was not yet above the wood. It shone through it from behind, so that small leaves like hawthorn and yew looked black, but the floppy oak or ash, and particularly the bracken, lit up to the emerald green of lizards. The bramble arches were often a perfect curve as if done with compasses, and the leaves that hung from them were like oilcloth-shiny on top but cottony and cool underneath. Everything was still fresh from the night's mist and breathed and lifted in the warm air.
♥ ..his eye came opposite an opening between branches through which he could see the base of Ivy Cavern. He stiffened as still as a tree. Would not anyone say that that dark, hairy, knobbly piece of ivy root sticking out of the Cavern was a gorilla's foot? Thumb and all. Long strands of ivy hung down over the opening, and swarms of flies danced in the sun in front of it. Also a spider on a thread hung busily just in front of Ping's eye, confusing the view. Ping moved his head, looking first with one eye, then the other. The ivy root did not move, as if course it doesn't. He was much tempted to go and look at it near to; but if you are not sure which of two things is real, then it can be either for you. There is no point in deliberately spoiling your pleasure. He pulled up his last armful, jerking like a dog playing tug-of-war. And he completed his hut,.
♥
Is this a dream within a dream, he wondered, opening his eyes and waiting for what was to come.
At the edge of his clearing, pushing through the bamboo, was an enormous shaggy shoulder, thrust up on an arm as straight and strong as a hunter's foreleg but infinitely more dangerous and versatile-an arm, not a leg, resting on purposeful knuckles and thumb. The head must have been looking backward, for it was a long second before it came into view, crested, heavy-browed, characteristically held in a position midway between animal and man, with the black lightning-eyed face lifted, the coiled nostrils not soft like a horse's bur aristocratic, blue-black, and unyielding. Out of each side of his mouth stuck a piece of bamboo cane, looking like the porcupine quill some savages wear through their noses. He came out into the open, his tight fist grasping a cluster of canes torn up by the roots. There he stood, at large, his untried power incalculable and arbitrary.
Ping could not have moved if he had wished to. He was paralyzed with the impossibility of either belief or disbelief. In any case he was watching so passionately, nothing could have made him move.
♥ Ping could not get used to the way Hanno's arms were dual purpose, elegantly food for whatever he wanted. It gave him great advantages, which man had thrown away when he decided to become two-legged. When Hanno stood on all fours, it never suggested, as chimpanzees do, the awkward business of crawling. It was rocklike and noble, as erect as anyone could need to be.
♥ Ping had taken a sandwich for himself when he rolled the pear to Hanno. He was hungry, and his hand had helped itself. Hanno, while slobbering joyfully over his pear, fixed him with his sharp sidelong eyes.
The pear was finished before the sandwich. Without warning, the thunderbolt fling that had so often been stopped by steel bars came straight at Ping. He flattened himself against his hut and watched it come, simply thinking, as if it was to be his last thought: "This is what Hanno is."
♥ Back again in the garden, he didn't know whether to linger for joy or to race from excitement. He was coming back from an earthly paradise, and whenever and whatever that is, we may be sure it is not dull. ..Everything was wonderful to him now. The heron was flapping home across the islands to the heronry; the swans climbed up on the riverbank and there raised their pointed wings high like Seraphim before folding themselves into white curves for sleep. The river was a lake of glassy fire because the sunset was still in the sky, but over the roof of Green Knowe, pale green daylight still hung with the evening star there again, and the rapt flight of bats. So many free things! And the house itself a guardian of happiness and strange thoughts, a keeper of secrets, into which he was taking one too big for him.
♥ It was cool inside the stone walls of Green Knowe. In the garden it was now dusk, a reluctant dusk that was keeping an appointment with the moon, if it could wait long enough. Ping, clean and brushed, loitered alone while he waited for his supper. He looked round him at the room, to which he felt desperately attached-desperately because a refugee belongs nowhere. The walls seemed to have forgotten they were ever quarried out of their own palace and carried away. They had settled down to being simply stone again, reared up here by some natural action, smoothed and welded by sheer age, so that even when one came in at night and shut the doors and drew the curtains, the wildness of the earth was not shut out. It was inside in its most magical form-the cave wall. In this particular cave the plates were gaily laid on a red cloth lit up with candles, whose small, active, fiery tongues made the dusk outside doubly dark and green and troubling. Ping spoke a secret into the house.
"There is a gorilla in the thicket," and he added softly, "asleep in a nest." It had been said and was received forever into the silence. The stiff fingernails of a rose branch tapped at the windowpane, and young owls to-whooed just to make the birds afraid, however well they were hidden. The house, like a perfect confidante, gave no sign that one more secret had been given it.
♥
♥ The supply of food in the biscuit tin that Mrs. Oldknow no doubt thought would last a week was all gone and would not be renewed. Ping had no pocket money with which he might have bought enough of something cheap for one day. Hanno, even if he did not poison himself, would have to move soon. And where else could he be so private and so safe? These thoughts tormented Ping, underlined as they all were with the sharp love he felt for Hanno, for his rocklike beauty and the terror of his authority, which was yet so vulnerable that a small, homeless Ping was his only safeguard. For Hanno had many aspects. If he was so dangerous that police, commandos, and hand-picked crack shots had to be put on his track, he was also cruelly displaced and wanting only to live. And Ping did not love him less because mixed with his huge splendor was a certain childishness and simplicity. He was of the same age as Oskar and had the allure of youth.
At last he thought of possible action. He did not like it at all, but what must be must.
♥
The silence in the garden was absolute and dreadful. He brought a rake and carefully raked over the ground where he had been. The moon shadow of a thief robbing his hostess raked beside him. When he had finished, he was shivering. The basket was so heavy, he needed both hands to lift it and had to stagger with it bumping against his knees. How full of everything disturbing the garden was, how empty of everything reassuring! He toiled along to the gate into the wood, glad to get under cover from the finger-pointing, spot-lighting moon.
♥ "I don't want him caught." Ping could hardly bring it out.
Mrs. Oldknow sighed in despair at the inescapability of facts. "There's nowhere for him to be. Even if he covered twenty-five miles a night, he'd never find his Africa. He'd only find Birmingham."
♥ These quick lies were told unhappily but manfully for Hanno's sake. Those who help prisoners to escape must lie.
♥ "Will you paddle me up the river today? It would be a treat for me."
This was a courtesy and a duty, and in any other circumstances a pleasure, which Ping now felt as an impossible sacrifice to ask of him. He must and yet he could not. Instead of finding the old lady's pace too slow for him-though it was a brisk little trot-he felt dragged along. They walked by the river, where the swans, revolving to be in readiness for crusts, made fan patterns on the water. The sound of ripples, the thought, as vivid as a sensation, of the cool and immediate happiness of water receiving his body as he dived, only added to his misery. All his will was elsewhere.
♥ Ping smiled mysteriously. But perhaps, she thought, all oriental smiles are a little mysterious.
♥ They went on together to the village shop, where everyone was talking gorilla. Ping listened astonished at the vagueness, the inaccuracy, and the silliness of grown-ups.
♥ "Bless his little heart," said a fat woman with a wide beaming face, as Ping looked round offended and antagonized. "Space men is all they think of now. They don't know anything about gorillas, do you, love?"
"Yes," he answered coldly and politely. "I do. I saw Hanno in the zoo. He's a kind of a man."
♥ ..Mrs. Oldknow said, "You know, Ping, children are supposed to live in make-believe, but their play is always practicing for real things, whereas grown-ups' make-believe is a horrid triviality. What they read in the papers is only one degree different from what they see on television. Whether it is true or not hardly matters."
♥
♥
♥
♥ There was that cage waiting-that railed-in, empty square of concrete and nothingness-Ping's heart tightened till he could not breathe. Which would be worse, that Hanno should be shot or that he should go back to the cage? Hanno himself would have to choose. Would he, for the sake of the keeper from whom he had never before been parted, of his own accord go back? Ping felt convinced it would not be for food and "security." It might be for his one real friend, the keeper, for what was he, Ping, but a pretense of a young gorilla if Hanno was playing forests? He did not mind that he was nothing. He minded acutely that he could do nothing. What was going to happen would happen tomorrow.
♥
Hanno swung effortlessly up onto the bridge and overtook him midway, simply walking over him with the advantage of his four thumbs. He paused a second on the garden bank, looking back with the bright hard eyes of someone who decides to leave what he has most loved, and with a last brusque movement to Ping to follow him, disappeared into the bushes. The keeper's voice passed the spot where they had been and went on beyond.
♥ "We'll have an extra good breakfast to soothe us. But you do seem, my dear, to have been saying a little less than you know. It's better than saying more than you know, anyway."
♥
Hanno stood resting his arm against the doorpost, his great head searching the room. Her dwarfed the opening. He loomed like a natural force of the first order, causing the same thrill of recognition that a bather gives to an immense wave that has pulled up out of the ocean and suddenly towers hissing over him. It was impossible to see Hanno without taking in at the same time the dominance of the equatorial sin, the fires of the earth, the weight of silence in a thousand miles of forest, the ruthless interchange of life and death, and a millennium without time.
All this precipitated itself into the room, taking, on all fours, a more familiar form of wildness.
♥
The cow swerved in at the gate and came on at its lunatic, unnatural gallop, across the lawns straight for Ping. Just in time he came to himself and ran for dear life toward the nearest shelter, into the inner garden, toward the bole of the big yew tree. He was too out of breath to pick his feet up properly. He tripped over the yew roots and sprawled headlong in the gravel. He gave himself up and waited to feel the horns in his ribs. But out of the branches came a whirling thunderbolt, flung with a spitting snarl between him and the cow. She stopped in her tracks, head sown, swaying and uncertain. Hanno took her by the horns, his shoulder muscles twitched, and he had flipped her over on her back, her neck broken like a stick. He stood there roused and excited, ready for more, not wasting as second glance at the cow. What he did needed no confirmation.
♥ And now Hanno saw again his well-remembered enemy, the man who had taken him captive. His heart swelled with a fury that was like joy. He stood up, an avenger from a race of heroes. He was his own drummer, beating his passionate chest, his own herald with that roar so horrifying it can never be described, presenting himself for single combat against all comers and this one in particular. But before he had even launched his onslaught, the unfair bullet had entered hie heart, and all that was Hanno had ceased to exist. He lay face downward on the ground.
♥ He went indoors to hunt for Mrs. Oldknow. She had been upstairs at the front of the house, trying to make out what was going on. She had seen the cow charge across the garden, had heard the shouts, the roar, the shot. And now she saw with overwhelming relief and affection Ping walking with a deliberate jauntiness toward her, his face set like a pale pebble under its smear of blood, his eyes hard like stars in a frost.
"He's dead," he said clearly and too composedly. "It's all right. That is how much he didn't want to go back. I saw his choose."
♥ The tide of people was now pouring back into the garden. They ran helter-skelter across lawns and beds. It was a wonder where they all came from. A gorilla had died there; something they dared not meet alive could be seen now dead, without danger. This event had turned them all into primitive tribesmen running to exult. Private property had ceased to exist. But Mrs. Oldknow no longer minded. Ping was telling her what had happened.
♥ "It was Hanno who saved Ping from being gored. It was to protect Ping that he would have charged. There was no need to have shot him. It was all a mistake." In this she was wrong. Hanno had his own account to settle.
♥
