And by the end of the half hour the
excitement and the heat seem to have got the better of the Professor's
temper, and he waved the disgusting brute angrily away with a gesture
that probably was not much less impatient than the gorilla's own. And
at that the animal suddenly became voluble. He beat more furiously
than ever upon the cage and slipped his great fingers through the
bars, trying to reach the Professor, and poured out volumes of
ape-chatter.
Why, why did men shoot at him, he asked. He made himself terrible,
therefore men ought to love him. That was the whole burden of what the
Professor calls its argument. ``Me, me terrible,'' two slaps on the
chest and then a growl. ``Man love me.'' And then the emphatic
negative word, and the sound that meant guns, and sudden furious
rushes at the cage to try to get at the Professor.
The gorilla, Professor Beek explains, evidently admired only strength;
whenever he said ``I make myself terrible to Man,'' a sentence he
often repeated, he drew himself up and thrust out his huge chest and
bared his frightful teeth; and certainly, the Professor says, there
was something terribly grand about the menacing brute.
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