The Old Men at the Zoo [antikvár]

IA TALL STORYI OPENED the large central window of my office room to its full on that fine early May morning. Then I stood for a few moments, breathing in the soft, warm air that was charged with the scent of white lilacs below. The graceful flamingos, shaded from flushed white to a robust tinned salmon, humped and coiled on their long stilts ; a Florida pelican picked and nuzzled comically with its orange pouched bill among its drab brownish wing feathers ; the herring gulls surprised me, as they did every day, by their size and their viciously hooked beaks. To command one's chosen view of the brute creation was one of the unexpected advantages I had secured by taking on the newly instituted post of Administrative Secretary at the London Zoo three years before. A word with the Director and with Matthew Price, the Curator of Birds, had resulted in a new waders' enclosure opposite my window, replacing a pen for capybaras, creatures interesting perhaps as the largest of the rodents, but, with their ungainly coarse-haired bodies, hardly ornamental for everyday view. Young men with administrative experience and high recommendations from the Treasury were not to be had every day at a nominal salary. The Zoo authorities had been very indulgent to a number of 'milord' whims that were perhaps more in keeping with an aesthetic undergraduate than with an administrator of thirty-five.English springtime that year had been at its loveliest. Gentle, sweet enough, to banish all bogeys, to bridge all chasms. The lilac scent came heavy with a sudden gust of wind, sensual, almost ruttish. A blackbird sang near by. Blackbirds, gentle, sweet, ruttish. I punctured the rhapsody with a little bathos. Most delicious, springtime suburbia, lush laburnum time enough to satisfy a cockney Keats. But the morning's grace was too complete to be banished by self-mockery, I remained