The Forsyte Saga - Volume 1
Page 128Thus they reached the lion-house.
There had been a morning fete at the Botanical Gardens, and a large
number of Forsy...'--that is, of well-dressed people who kept carriages
had brought them on to the Zoo, so as to have more, if possible, for
their money, before going back to Rutland Gate or Bryanston Square.
"Let's go on to the Zoo," they had said to each other; "it'll be great
fun!" It was a shilling day; and there would not be all those horrid
common people.
In front of the long line of cages they were collected in rows, watching
the tawny, ravenous beasts behind the bars await their only pleasure
of the four-and-twenty hours. The hungrier the beast, the greater the
fascination. But whether because the spectators envied his appetite,
Jolyon could not tell. Remarks kept falling on his ears: "That's a
nasty-looking brute, that tiger!" "Oh, what a love! Look at his little
mouth!" "Yes, he's rather nice! Don't go too near, mother."
And frequently, with little pats, one or another would clap their hands
to their pockets behind and look round, as though expecting young Jolyon
or some disinterested-looking person to relieve them of the contents.
A well-fed man in a white waistcoat said slowly through his teeth: "It's
all greed; they can't be hungry. Why, they take no exercise." At these
words a tiger snatched a piece of bleeding liver, and the fat man
laughed. His wife, in a Paris model frock and gold nose-nippers,
reproved him: "How can you laugh, Harry? Such a horrid sight!"
The circumstances of his life, though he had ceased to take a too
personal view of them, had left him subject to an intermittent contempt;
and the class to which he had belonged--the carriage class--especially
excited his sarcasm.
To shut up a lion or tiger in confinement was surely a horrible
barbarity. But no cultivated person would admit this.
The idea of its being barbarous to confine wild animals had probably
never even occurred to his father for instance; he belonged to the old
school, who considered it at once humanizing and educational to confine
baboons and panthers, holding the view, no doubt, that in course of time
they might induce these creatures not so unreasonably to die of misery
to the expense of getting others! In his eyes, as in the eyes of all
Forsytes, the pleasure of seeing these beautiful creatures in a state
of captivity far outweighed the inconvenience of imprisonment to beasts
whom God had so improvidently placed in a state of freedom! It was for
the animals good, removing them at once from the countless dangers of
open air and exercise, and enabling them to exercise their functions
in the guaranteed seclusion of a private compartment! Indeed, it was
doubtful what wild animals were made for but to be shut up in cages!