Ch. 1: A Guest at Evening

On a stretch of the western shore, where the sea came in green and went out silver, there stood a rose-apple tree so old that the fishermen said it had been planted by the wind before there were any fishermen at all. Its roots gripped the sand like the fingers of a sleeping giant. Its trunk leaned a little toward the water, as if it were listening to something the waves had to say. And all through the hot months its branches hung heavy with fruit, pale as moonlight on the side that faced the land and blushing rose on the side that faced the sun.

In this tree lived a monkey called Red-Face.

He had not always lived alone. Once he had been a member of a large and quarrelsome troop that roamed the mango groves inland, and he had been, by every account, the cleverest monkey in it. But cleverness is not the same as luck. The old king of the troop had grown older, and his teeth had grown fewer, and a younger monkey with a louder voice had pushed him from his seat. Red-Face, who had been the old king's favourite and his counsellor, found that the new court had no use for counsel. He was chased out with sticks and shrieks, and he went where he was not likely to be followed: down to the edge of the world, where the land gave up and the sea began.

There he found the rose-apple tree, and in the rose-apple tree he found a kind of peace.

He was not unhappy. A monkey who has a tree full of fruit, a cool wind at noon, and a view of the whole ocean has little reason to complain. He spent his mornings eating, his afternoons dozing in the fork of the third great branch, and his evenings watching the fishing boats come home with their lamps lit. He talked to himself a good deal, as solitary creatures do, and sometimes he talked to the tree, and once or twice, on very still evenings, he caught himself talking to the sea.

It was on one of those evenings that the sea talked back.

The sun had gone down in a great spill of orange, and the tide was running in. Red-Face was sitting on a low branch with a rose-apple in each hand, comparing them. “This one,” he said to nobody, “is sweeter. But that one is larger. And a wise monkey knows that a large disappointment is still a disappointment, whereas a small sweetness is always a sweetness.”

“A wise monkey,” said a voice from below, “would share the one he does not want.”

Red-Face nearly dropped both fruits. He looked down. Half in and half out of the water, lying among the roots of the tree like a log that had washed up and decided to stay, was a crocodile. He was long, and grey-green, and knobbed all over like the bark of a tamarind. His eyes, which sat on top of his head like two little lamps, were turned upward. His mouth, which was very wide, was not quite closed.

“Good evening,” said Red-Face carefully, drawing his tail up out of reach.

“Good evening,” said the crocodile. “I have been swimming since dawn, and I have caught nothing but a crab who argued the whole way down. I am tired, and I am a long way from home, and I smelled your fruit from out beyond the breakers. I do not suppose you would spare one to a stranger?”

Now Red-Face had heard all the stories about crocodiles. Every monkey has. The stories said that a crocodile's smile was a door that opened only one way. But he had also heard, from the old king who had been his friend, a saying that the wise men of the cities were fond of: that a guest who comes to your door at evening must be treated as a god, whoever he is, wherever he has come from, whatever his manners. And the crocodile, it must be said, had very good manners for a crocodile.

So Red-Face chose the sweeter fruit, not the larger one, and tossed it down.

The crocodile caught it neatly in his jaws and closed his eyes. For a long moment he did not say anything at all. Then he sighed, a deep, contented sigh that made little bubbles rise around his chin.

“That,” he said, “is the finest thing I have ever eaten. Is there more?”

There was a great deal more. Red-Face shook the branch, and the rose-apples came pattering down onto the wet sand, and the crocodile ate them one after another, and between mouthfuls he told the monkey about himself.

His name, he said, was Ugly-Mug. He did not seem to mind it. “My mother gave it to me,” he said, “and she was a practical woman. She said that a crocodile who expects to be called handsome will spend his whole life disappointed, whereas a crocodile named Ugly-Mug can only be pleasantly surprised.” He lived, he said, far across the bay, in a deep pool behind a sandbank where the river met the sea. He had a wife there, and a comfortable house in the mud, and a great many relations who came to visit more often than he liked.

“And you?” said Ugly-Mug. “Have you a wife? A family? A troop?”

“I have a tree,” said Red-Face. “It is a very good tree.”

The crocodile looked at him for a while with his lamp-like eyes. “That,” he said at last, “is a lonely answer.”

Red-Face did not reply, but he threw down another rose-apple, and this one was the sweetest of all.

Ugly-Mug came back the next evening, and the evening after that. Soon it became a custom, and then it became something more than a custom. The crocodile would swim in as the sun went down and lie among the roots, and the monkey would come down to the lowest branch, and they would eat rose-apples together and talk until the stars were thick overhead.

They talked about everything. Ugly-Mug knew the sea: the currents that ran cold under the warm ones, the sunken boat where the eels kept house, the turtles who came ashore once a year and wept as they laid their eggs. Red-Face knew the land: the habits of tigers, the stupidity of peacocks, the inner politics of monkey troops, which he described so wickedly that the crocodile laughed until he choked and had to sink under the water to recover.

And Red-Face, who had once been a counsellor to a king, had a store of tales from the wise men of the cities, which he told in the long hours after moonrise. He told of the heron who fooled the fish, and of the lion who was drowned by a hare, and of the tortoise who could not keep his mouth shut. Ugly-Mug listened to every one with his chin resting on a root and his eyes half closed.

“You know a great deal,” he said one night, “for a monkey.”

“I know a great deal for anyone,” said Red-Face, “but it has not made me rich, or safe, or welcome among my own people. I have begun to think that knowledge is like a rose-apple. It is sweet to have, but its real use is in the giving.”

“Then you are a generous creature,” said Ugly-Mug, “because you have given me a great deal of both.”

When the crocodile left that night, Red-Face filled the crook of his tail with the ripest fruit he could find. “Take these to your wife,” he said. “A husband who stays out every evening should not come home empty-handed.”

Ugly-Mug laughed his bubbling laugh. “You are wise in that too,” he said. And he swam away into the dark water with the rose-apples held gently in his great jaws, while the monkey watched from the branch until the ripples were gone.

Neither of them, that night, gave a single thought to what the crocodile's wife might make of such a gift.