Free Love, Let Me Not Hunger by Paul Gallico Page A

launched upon something grisly, perhaps not for a young girls ears. But she still stood silent, contemplating the animal which was lying on its side, its tail twitching.
    “Well, it was terrible,” he repeated, and then thought how awful it would be if something like that happened to this girl and that it might be better to complete the warning. “It all came off like a glove,” he said, “—the flesh, I mean, before we could get her loose.”
    But the girl was not as horrified as he had expected, for she had hardly been listening to him, and now she cried, “How could I get them to love me the way they love you?”
    The old man understood her at once: the cry, the need, the well of loneliness from which it arose, the unspoken hunger which was so akin to his own. He replied, “By loving them, not just with a little of yourself, but with everything you’ve got, so they feel it. That’s what they haven’t got amongst themselves. Our kind of love like we can feel. They don’t know what it is, but they need it.” He stopped suddenly, embarrassed by his own words and vehemence, but it quickly vanished under the glow of radiance on the face of the girl and the tears that filled her eyes. From that moment on, their bond of friendship, understanding and companionship was established.
    “What’s your name?” Mr. Albert asked.
    “Rose.”
    “You’re with Jackdaw, ain’t you?”
    “Yes.”
    Mr. Albert merely nodded and said, “You want to see the rest of the lot?”
    “Oh, yes please!”
    He took her upon a tour of the cages. In one there was a brown bear who sat up on his haunches and made clownish movements with his forepaws, his muzzle parted in such a silly grin that Rose burst into laughter.
    “That’s Hans,” said Mr. Albert. “He roller-skates. You can do anything with him. Doesn’t half like sweets, he doesn’t. Now, we had a polar bear,” he continued, “before Mr. Marvel sent her off to the Chipperfields. They come from up around the North Pole and they got a heart like ice. Wouldn’t have seen me messing around with her. You want to know something? I was scared of her, that’s what.” Then he dropped his voice to a confidential whisper. “But I didn’t tell anybody. Nobody knew it but her and me, see?”
    It seemed as though with this the old man had deliberately discarded some of the mystery which had surrounded him and acknowledged his humanity and simple mortality.
    “Yes, I see,” said Rose, and the smile she turned upon him was filled with affection.
    “Here’s Pockets,” said Mr. Albert, and showed her a small female kangaroo squatting in the straw. She had a long melancholy face and large doe’s eyes, and Rose was permitted to scratch her head.
    “See her pouch?” Mr. Albert pointed out. “That’s why she’s called Pockets. That’s where they carry their young. She had a kid a year or so ago.”
    “Oh!” Rose grieved. “What happened to it?”
    “It died. They’re hard to bring up on the bottle.”
    There was a fat old orangutan named Congo, with an alderman’s paunch, dewlaps, and protesting eyes who came over and made kissing mouths and noises at Mr. Albert. A pair of small red foxes kept moving in a perfect whirligig around their cages. There was a dwarf deer from Tanganyika, and an American coyote with a smart-alec expression about his muzzle. Rose inspected a torpid boa constrictor, a painted mandrill with a swollen behind as red as a sunset, and a cage full of ordinary rhesus monkeys. A llama with long eyelashes chewed contemplatively, and Rose was allowed to stroke her because she was gentle. There was a cage with an eagle who looked proud, fierce and untameable, but as meekly as a pet parrot lowered its head to have it scratched by the keeper.
    One by one, Rose met all of Mr. Albert’s charges, learned their names, heard some little story about each, and found her heart overflowing at the conclusion of the tour which brought them back again before the cage