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It all happened through Zarl Osterley's monkey, Percy Macacus Rhesus y Osterley. Until Zarl took the notion to acquire him I had as little interest in monkeys as in murder. There are no monkeys in my native land, except in Zoos, and these had always seemed to me as too repellently like depraved editions of ourselves. Their mournful mien depressed me. But one day when Zarl was restless through being baulked of an Everest expedition, she said "Let's have a monkey!"

"Where would you keep the brute?" I inquired perfunctorily.

"Here, of course! With us!"

Zarl occupied a flat in a studio building in St John's Wood, London, and I spent much time with her.

"A wart hog would be ever so much more convenient and beautiful," I responded, continuing to read Julian Huxley.

"But I thought you loved animals?!!!"

"All but monkeys: and I don't love any animals in the bread crock, and on the pillows, as they must be in these town places. Animals and cleanliness can't be together in a flat!"

"But we could train a monkey to do anything."

"You'd have to hire someone to look after the beast."

This seemed final. We were in such low water that we could not even hire a char.

No more was said on the subject for a week, then Zarl remarked "I had an offer of a monkey to-day: he was a bit too big, but lovely. I'll never rest now till I have one."

I turned and looked at her--this time over a book by Osbert Sitwell. Zarl resembles a champagne glass, not alone in grace of fashioning, but in effervescent contents. The bubbles are intensely fascinating. "Surely you are not in earnest about a monkey?"

"I must have something. This is dreadful--just going to bed and getting up again--without seeing the sun rise on Kangchenjunga, or the ice break on the Lena."

"I should have thought you had enough of the sleet on the desolate bays of the Beagle Channel when you went to the Horn."

"Oh, I've forgotten that long ago. I'm going to concentrate now on going to the Lena or the Indigirka, and I must have a monkey to keep me from doddering into a complete stodge."

"A monkey would hasten that," I contended. "You've seen those old women with poodles--can't tell the women from the poodles--pathetic derelicts--ugh! A monkey would do that for you--only more so."

"A monkey would be a symbol and a promise."

"A sure promise of wrecking everything in the place, and think of the SMELL!!!"

"I never heard that monkeys smell!"

"Then you must have been very deaf in the Zoo."

"But I'd only have one."

I had visions of Zarl's establishment degenerating into a kennel. Zarl is not a Martha among housewives. That is one of her great charms; one can live with her without ceaseless petty persecution. A London interior becomes sufficiently trying with a cat or dog--but a monkey! Goodbye to our pleasant association. I comforted myself by thinking that the monkey would never materialise.

But a week later Zarl came bubbling in. "I've got a monkey!"

"Where? How? What!"

"Jimmy Wengham brought five back in an aeroplane from Africa, but only one has lived, and he has kept it for me. Someone has it somewhere, and I'm going there to get it. It will be too marvellously thrilling. 'Wizard! Eh, what?' as Jimmy says."

I took a farewell glance around the fine room with its comfortable chairs, reflected that all things bright and fair are fleeting, and retreated to my own lair. But next day, as I was descending, Zarl was ascending my stairs.

"Look! I thought you'd like to see Percy--my monkey. I've had a terrible time with him. He's bitten me, and I could never confess how many things he has broken. I don't think he has been kindly treated. He has a great scar on his leg--poor little cow."

I beheld a creature the size of a half-grown kitten, only more slender, an appealing, shrinking mite that tried to creep out of sight under Zarl's furs. He shuddered and showed his teeth in a piteous grin, as if I were a big baboon that would demolish him. I can never resist any animal, even the so-called human ones, if they appear distressful, and I took this poor little soul in my arms and attempted to stroke his fur, but he shivered through every fibre at the slightest touch, and looked so woebegone that I was instantaneously and permanently enslaved.

"He's behaving very well with you," remarked Zarl. "Would you like to keep him all night? I've got a chance to be motored up to Cambridge for the week-end, and there is a professor there who might like to go down the Lena to the Arctic Sea for the goose-plucking, and to see that thinga-me-bob bird; and Percy might get in the way at the wrong moment."

I was committed to Percy for one night, for two, for three. We were left to make acquaintance as best we would. I washed all his human hands and face, and he enjoyed dabbling in the warm water and grabbing the soap. I made him clean and sweet, settled the matter of loin cloths after the fashion of Mahatma Gandhi, gave him a cup of milk to hold in his own tiny hands, got him a blanket and box, tethered him to the leg of my bed, and retired.

I peeped up now and again to see if he were there, to savour the delight of such a guest. And every time I peeped, he would be peeping too, to see what I intended. It was so amusing that I laughed aloud, cheered and entertained. Never since my teens, in the joy of new kittens, or a baby koala, or an echidna, had I felt such pleasure.

In the morning he came to bed to be cuddled, a warm delicately-fashioned little thing of sensitive texture. How ignorant I had been to think of a monkey only as ugly or evil-smelling! Here were beauty and grace to nourish the aesthetic appetite.

In the days that followed, Percy settled in. I had been thoroughly grounded by my mother in the ethics of pets. She always said, "Unless you are willing to do everything for either a child or an animal, you do not really love it; you only love yourself and the sensuous pleasure to be derived from it." The world is full of the less thorough kind of lovers. There is little competition on the other plane, so Percy quickly developed into a personality, with me as a coolie on the end of his string. A flatette was vacated in Zarl's building and I moved there to be near him. We devoted ourselves to making him happy, and to surrounding him with that affection said to be necessary for the flowering of a monkey's genius. This was due to one exiled from his own sunny country to make a toy for people who should have known better. He devoured as much time as cross-word puzzles or bridge--more than we could afford--and was an expensive luxury for hard-working women; but in an age of people rendered superfluous by machines, the teeth were drawn from the rebuke that we would have been better employed as mothers dragging up infants to degenerate in uselessness.

Fulminations against a mischievous, unfaithful, troublesome invention of sheer pestiferation collapsed. Percy had only to dance before us, or to hold out a confiding hand, to break loose and jump into bed with us, or cry if we left him alone, and our hearts were softened.

In the way of sirens of either sex and of any size or shape he was irresistible--a continual nuisance and a perpetual delight. He was a "wow" in several sets, a favourite in the Parks and on many buses and in the Underground. To his popularity and my infatuation can be attributed my connection with what is here recorded.