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CHAPTER XXIV
Harris Collins was fi fty-two years of age. He was slender and dapper, and in appearance and comportment was so
sweet- and gentle-spirited that the impression he radiated was
almost of sissyness. He might have taught a Sunday-school,
presided over a girls’ seminary, or been a president of a humane society.
His complexion was pink and white, his hands were as soft
as the hands of his daughters, and he weighed a hundred and
twelve pounds. Moreover, he was afraid of his wife, afraid of
a policeman, afraid of physical violence, and lived in constant
dread of burglars. But the one thing he was not afraid of was
wild animals of the most ferocious sorts, such as lions, tigers,
leopards, and jaguars. He knew the game, and could conquer
the most refractory lion with a broom-handle – not outside
the cage, but inside and locked in.
It was because he knew the game and had learned it from
his father before him, a man even smaller than himself and
more fearful of all things except animals. This father, Noel
Collins, had been a successful animal trainer in England,
before emigrating to America, and in America he had continued the success and laid the foundation of the big animal
training school at Cedarwild, which his son had developed
and built up after him. So well had Harris Collins built on
his father’s foundation that the place was considered a mod-
211
JACK LONDON
el of sanitation and kindness. It entertained many visitors,
who invariably went away with their souls fi lled with ecstasy
over the atmosphere of sweetness and light that pervaded
the place. Never, however, were they permitted to see the actual training. On occasion, performances were given them by
the fi nished products which verifi ed all their other delightful and charming conclusions about the school. But had they
seen the training of raw novices, it would have been a different story. It might even have been a riot. As it was, the place
was a zoo, and free at that; for, in addition to the animals he
owned and trained and bought and sold, a large portion of
the business was devoted to boarding trained animals and
troupes of animals for owners who were out of engagements,
or for estates of such owners which were in process of settlement. From mice and rats to camels and elephants, and even,
on occasion, to a rhinoceros or a pair of hippopotamuses, he
could supply any animal on demand.
When the Circling Brothers’ big three-ring show on
a hard winter went into the hands of the receivers, he boarded the menagerie and the horses and in three months turned
a profi t of fi fteen thousand dollars. More – he mortgaged
all he possessed against the day of the auction, bought in
the trained horses and ponies, the giraffe herd and the performing elephants, and, in six months more was quit of an of
them, save the pony Repeater who turned air-springs, at another profi t of fi fteen thousand dollars. As for Repeater, he
sold the pony several months later for a sheer profi t of two
thousand. While this bankruptcy of the Circling Brothers had
been the greatest fi nancial achievement of Harris Collin’s life,
nevertheless he enjoyed no mean permanent income from his
plant, and, in addition, split fees with the owners of his board
212
MICHAEL, BROTHER OF JERRY
animals when he sent them to the winter Hippodrome shows,
and, more often than not, failed to split any fee at all when he
rented the animals to moving-picture companies.
Animal men, the country over, acknowledged him to be,
not only the richest in the business, but the king of trainers
and the grittiest man who ever went into a cage. And those
who from the inside had seen him work were agreed that he
had no soul. Yet his wife and children, and those in his small
social circle, thought otherwise. They, never seeing him at
work, were convinced that no softer-hearted, more sentimental man had ever been born. His voice was low and gentle, his
gestures were delicate, his views on life, the world, religion
and politics, the mildest. A kind word melted him. A plea won
him. He gave to all local charities, and was gravely depressed
for a week when the Titanic went down. And yet – the men in
the trained-animal game acknowledged him the nerviest and
most nerveless of the profession. And yet – his greatest fear in
the world was that his large, stout wife, at table, should crown
him with a plate of hot soup. Twice, in a tantrum, she had done
this during their earlier married life. In addition to his fear
that she might do it again, he loved her sincerely and devotedly, as he loved his children, seven of them, for whom nothing was too good or too expensive.
So well did he love them, that the four boys from the beginning he forbade from seeing him work, and planned gentler careers for them. John, the oldest, in Yale, had elected to
become a man of letters, and, in the meantime, ran his own
automobile with the corresponding standard of living such
ownership connoted in the college town of New Haven. Harold and Frederick were down at a millionaires’ sons’ academy in Pennsylvania; and Clarence, the youngest, at a prep.
213
JACK LONDON
school in Massachusetts, was divided in his choice of career
between becoming a doctor or an aviator. The three girls,
two of them twins, were pledged to be cultured into ladies.
Elsie was on the verge of graduating from Vassar. Mary and
Madeline, the twins, in the most select and most expensive of
seminaries, were preparing for Vassar. All of which required
money which Harris Collins did not grudge, but which
strained the earning capacity of his animal-training school.
It compelled him to work the harder, although his wife and
the four sons and three daughters did not dream that he actually worked at all. Their idea was that by virtue of superior wisdom he merely superintended, and they would have
been terribly shocked could they have seen him, club in hand,
thrashing forty mongrel dogs, in the process of training, which
had become excited and out of hand.
A great deal of the work was done by his assistants, but it
was Harris Collins who taught them continually what to do
and how to do it, and who himself, on more important animals, did the work and showed them how. His assistants were
almost invariably youths from the reform schools, and he
picked them with skilful eye and intuition. Control of them,
under their paroles, with intelligence and coldness on their
part, were the conditions and qualities he sought, and such
combination, as a matter of course, carried with it cruelty. Hot
blood, generous impulses, sentimentality, were qualities he did
not want for his business; and the Cedarwild Animal School
was business from the fi rst tick of the clock to the last bite of
the lash. In short, Harris Collins, in the totality of results, was
guilty of causing more misery and pain to animals than all
laboratories of vivisection in Christendom.
214
MICHAEL, BROTHER OF JERRY
And into this animal hell Michael descended – although
his arrival was horizontal, across three thousand fi ve hundred
miles, in the same crate in which he had been placed at the New
Washington Hotel in Seattle. Never once had he been out of
the crate during the entire journey, and fi lthiness, as well
as wretchedness, characterized his condition. Thanks to his
general good health, the wound of the amputated toe was in
the process of uneventful healing. But dirt clung to him, and
he was infested with fl eas.
Cedarwild, to look at, was anything save a hell. Velvet
lawns, gravelled walks and drives, and fl owers formally growing, led up to the group of long low buildings, some of frame
and some of concrete. But Michael was not received by Harris
Collins, who, at the moment, sat in his private offi ce, Harry
Del Mar’s last telegram on his desk, writing a memorandum to
his secretary to query the railroad and the express companies
for the whereabouts of a dog, crated and shipped by one, Harry Del Mar, from Seattle and consigned to Cedarwild. It was
a pallid-eyed youth of eighteen in overalls who received Michael, receipted for him to the expressman, and carried his
crate into a slope-fl oored concrete room that smelled offensively and chemically clean.
Michael was impressed by his surroundings but not attracted by the youth, who rolled up his sleeves and encased
himself in large oilskin apron before he opened the crate. Michael sprang out and staggered about on legs which had not
walked for days. This particular two-legged god was uninteresting. He was as cold as the concrete fl oor, as methodical as
a machine; and in such fashion he went about the washing,
scrubbing, and disinfecting of Michael. For Harris Collins was
scientifi c and antiseptic to the last word in his handling of
215
JACK LONDON
animals, and Michael was scientifi cally made clean, without
deliberate harshness, but without any slightest hint of gentleness or consideration.
Naturally, he did not understand. On top of all he had
already experienced, not even knowing executioners and execution chambers, for all he knew this bare room of cement
and chemical smell might well be the place of the ultimate
life-disaster and this youth the god who was to send him into
the dark which had engulfed all he had known and loved.
What Michael did know beyond the shadow of any doubt
was that it was all coldly ominous and terribly strange. He
endured the hand of the youth-god on the scruff of his neck,
after the collar had been unbuckled; but when the hose was
turned on him, he resented and resisted. The youth, merely
working by formula, tightened the safe grip on the scruff of
Michael’s neck and lifted him clear of the fl oor, at the same
time, with the other hand, directing the stream of water into
his mouth and increasing it to full force by the nozzle control.
Michael fought, and was well drowned for his pains, until he
gasped and strangled helplessly.
After that he resisted no more, and was washed out and
scrubbed out and cleansed out with the hose, a big bristly
brush, and much carbolic soap, the lather of which got into
and stung his eyes and nose, causing him to weep copiously
and sneeze violently. Apprehensive of what might at any moment happen to him, but by this time aware that the youth was
neither positive nor negative for kindness or harm, Michael
continued to endure without further battling, until, clean and
comfortable, he was put away into a pen, sweet and wholesome,
where he slept and for the time being forgot. The place was
the hospital, or segregation ward, and a week of imprisonment
216
MICHAEL, BROTHER OF JERRY
was spent therein, in which nothing happened in the way of
development of germ diseases, and nothing happened to him
except regular good food, pure drinking-water, and absolute
isolation from contact with all life save the youth-god who,
like an automaton, attended on him.
Michael had yet to meet Harris Collins, although, from
a distance, often he heard his voice, not loud, but very imperative. That the owner of this voice was a high god, Michael
knew from the fi rst sound of it. Only a high god, a master over
ordinary gods, could be so imperative. Will was in that voice,
and accustomedness to command. Any dog would have so decided as quickly as Michael did. And any dog would have decided that there was no love nor lovableness in the god behind
the voice, nothing to warm one’s heart nor to adore.
CHAPTER XXV
It was at eleven in the morning that the pale youth-god put
collar and chain on Michael, led him out of the segregation
ward, and turned him over to a dark youth-god who wasted
no time of greeting on him and manifested no friendliness.
A captive at the end of a chain, on the way Michael quickly
encountered other captives going in his direction. There were
three of them, and never had he seen the like. Three slouching, ambling monsters of bears they were, and at sight of them
Michael bristled and uttered the lowest of growls; for he knew
them, out of his heredity (as a domestic cow knows her fi rst
wolf), as immemorial enemies from the wild. But he had travelled too far, seen too much, and was altogether too sensible, to
attack them. Instead, walking stiff-legged and circumspectly,
but smelling with all his nose the strange scent of the creatures, he followed at the end of his chain his own captor god.
Continually a multitude of strange scents invaded his
nostrils. Although he could not see through walls, he got
the smells he was later to identify of lions, leopards, monkeys,
baboons, and seals and sea-lions. All of which might have
stunned an ordinary dog; but the effect on him was to make
him very alert and at the same time very subdued. It was as if
he walked in a new and monstrously populous jungle and was
unacquainted with its ways and denizens.
218
MICHAEL, BROTHER OF JERRY
As he was entering the arena, he shied off to the side more
stiff-leggedly than ever, bristled all along his neck and back,
and growled deep and low in his throat. For, emerging from
the arena, came fi ve elephants. Small elephants they were,
but to him they were the hugest of monsters, in his mind
comparable only with the cow-whale of which he had caught
fl eeting glimpses when she destroyed the schooner Mary
Turner. But the elephants took no notice of him, each with its
trunk clutching the tail of the one in front of it as it had been
taught to do in making an exit.
Into the arena, he came, the bears following on his heels.
It was a sawdust circle the size of a circus ring, contained inside
a square building that was roofed over with glass. But there
were no seats about the ring, since spectators were not tolerated. Only Harris Collins and his assistants, and buyers and
sellers of animals and men in the profession, were ever permitted to behold how animals were tormented into the performance of tricks to make the public open its mouth in astonishment or laughter.
Michael forgot about the bears, who were quickly at work
on the other side of the circle from that to which he was taken.
Some men, rolling out stout bright-painted barrels which elephants could not crush by sitting on, attracted his attention
for a moment. Next, in a pause on the part of the man who
led him, he regarded with huge interest a piebald Shetland
pony. It lay on the ground. A man sat on it. And ever and anon
it lifted its head from the sawdust and kissed the man. This
was all Michael saw, yet he sensed something wrong about it.
He knew not why, had no evidence why, but he felt cruelty
and power and unfairness. What he did not see was the long
pin in the man’s hand. Each time he thrust this in the pony’s
219
JACK LONDON
shoulder, the pony, stung by the pain and refl ex action, lifted its head, and the man was deftly ready to meet the pony’s
mouth with his own mouth. To an audience the impression
would be that in such fashion the pony was expressing its affection for the master.
Not a dozen feet away another Shetland, a coal-black one,
was behaving as peculiarly as it was being treated. Ropes were
attached to its forelegs, each rope held by an assistant, who jerked on the same stoutly when a third man, standing in front of
the pony, tapped it on the knees with a short, stiff whip of rattan. Whereupon the pony went down on its knees in the sawdust in a genufl ection to the man with the whip. The pony did
not like it, sometimes so successfully resisting with spread, taut
legs and mutinous head-tossings, as to overcome the jerk of
the ropes, and, at the same time wheeling, to fall heavily on its
side or to uprear as the pull on the ropes was relaxed. But always it was lined up again to face the man who rapped its knees
with the rattan. It was being taught merely how to kneel in
the way that is ever a delight to the audiences who see only
the results of the schooling and never dream of the manner of
the schooling. For, as Michael was quickly sensing, knowledge
was here learned by pain. In short, this was the college of pain,
this Cedarwild Animal School.
Harris Collins himself nodded the dark youth-god up to
him, and turned an inquiring and estimating gaze on Michael.
“The Del Mar dog, sir”, said the youth-god.
Collins’s eyes brightened, and he looked Michael over
more carefully.
“Do you know what he can do?” he queried.
The youth shook his head.
220
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