Tarzan of the Apes
more quickly, but no more surely, than we shall forget him. He is only
a beast of the jungle, Miss Porter.”
The girl did not answer, but she felt her heart shrivel within her.
She knew that Clayton spoke merely what he thought, and for the first
time she began to analyze the structure which supported her newfound
love, and to subject its object to a critical examination.
Slowly she turned and walked back to the cabin. She tried to imagine
her wood-god by her side in the saloon of an ocean liner. She saw him
eating with his hands, tearing his food like a beast of prey, and
wiping his greasy fingers upon his thighs. She shuddered.
She saw him as she introduced him to her friends—uncouth, illiterate—a
boor; and the girl winced.
She had reached her room now, and as she sat upon the edge of her bed
of ferns and grasses, with one hand resting upon her rising and falling
bosom, she felt the hard outlines of the man’s locket.
She drew it out, holding it in the palm of her hand for a moment with
tear-blurred eyes bent upon it. Then she raised it to her lips, and
crushing it there buried her face in the soft ferns, sobbing.
“Beast?” she murmured. “Then God make me a beast; for, man or beast, I
am yours.”
She did not see Clayton again that day. Esmeralda brought her supper to
her, and she sent word to her father that she was suffering from the
reaction following her adventure.
The next morning Clayton left early with the relief expedition in
search of Lieutenant D’Arnot. There were two hundred armed men this
time, with ten officers and two surgeons, and provisions for a week.
They carried bedding and hammocks, the latter for transporting their
sick and wounded.
It was a determined and angry company—a punitive expedition as well as
one of relief. They reached the site of the skirmish of the previous
expedition shortly after noon, for they were now traveling a known
trail and no time was lost in exploring.
From there on the elephant-track led straight to Mbonga’s village. It
was but two o’clock when the head of the column halted upon the edge of
the clearing.
Lieutenant Charpentier, who was in command, immediately sent a portion
of his force through the jungle to the opposite side of the village.
Another detachment was dispatched to a point before the village gate,
while he remained with the balance upon the south side of the clearing.
It was arranged that the party which was to take its position to the
north, and which would be the last to gain its station should commence
the assault, and that their opening volley should be the signal for a
concerted rush from all sides in an attempt to carry the village by
storm at the first charge.
For half an hour the men with Lieutenant Charpentier crouched in the
dense foliage of the jungle, waiting the signal. To them it seemed like
hours. They could see natives in the fields, and others moving in and
out of the village gate.
At length the signal came—a sharp rattle of musketry, and like one man,
an answering volley tore from the jungle to the west and to the south.
The natives in the field dropped their implements and broke madly for
the palisade. The French bullets mowed them down, and the French
sailors bounded over their prostrate bodies straight for the village
gate.
So sudden and unexpected the assault had been that the whites reached
the gates before the frightened natives could bar them, and in another
minute the village street was filled with armed men fighting hand to
hand in an inextricable tangle.
For a few moments the blacks held their ground within the entrance to
the street, but the revolvers, rifles and cutlasses of the Frenchmen
crumpled the native spearmen and struck down the black archers with
their bows halfdrawn.
Soon the battle turned to a wild rout, and then to a grim massacre; for
the French sailors had seen bits of D’Arnot’s uniform upon several of
the black warriors who opposed them.
They spared the children and those of the women whom they were not
forced to kill in self-defense, but when at length they stopped,
parting, blood covered and sweating, it was because there lived to
oppose them no single warrior of all the savage village of Mbonga.
Carefully they ransacked every hut and corner of the village, but no
sign of D’Arnot could they find. They questioned the prisoners by
signs, and finally one of the sailors who had served in the French
Congo found that he could make them understand the bastard tongue that
passes for language between the whites and the more degraded tribes of
the coast, but even then they could learn nothing definite regarding
the fate of D’Arnot.
Only excited gestures and expressions of fear could they obtain in
response to their inquiries concerning their fellow; and at last they
became convinced that these were but evidences of the guilt of these
demons who had slaughtered and eaten their comrade two nights before.
At length all hope left them, and they prepared to camp for the night
within the village. The prisoners were herded into three huts where
they were heavily guarded. Sentries were posted at the barred gates,
and finally the village was wrapped in the silence of slumber, except
for the wailing of the native women for their dead.
The next morning they set out upon the return march. Their original
intention had been to burn the village, but this idea was abandoned and
the prisoners were left behind, weeping and moaning, but with roofs to
cover them and a palisade for refuge from the beasts of the jungle.
Slowly the expedition retraced its steps of the preceding day. Ten
loaded hammocks retarded its pace. In eight of them lay the more
seriously wounded, while two swung beneath the weight of the dead.
Clayton and Lieutenant Charpentier brought up the rear of the column;
the Englishman silent in respect for the other’s grief, for D’Arnot and
Charpentier had been inseparable friends since boyhood.
Clayton could not but realize that the Frenchman felt his grief the
more keenly because D’Arnot’s sacrifice had been so futile, since Jane
had been rescued before D’Arnot had fallen into the hands of the
savages, and again because the service in which he had lost his life
had been outside his duty and for strangers and aliens; but when he
spoke of it to Lieutenant Charpentier, the latter shook his head.
“No, Monsieur,” he said, “D’Arnot would have chosen to die thus. I only
grieve that I could not have died for him, or at least with him. I wish
that you could have known him better, Monsieur. He was indeed an
officer and a gentleman—a title conferred on many, but deserved by so
few.
“He did not die futilely, for his death in the cause of a strange
American girl will make us, his comrades, face our ends the more
bravely, however they may come to us.”
Clayton did not reply, but within him rose a new respect for Frenchmen
which remained undimmed ever after.
It was quite late when they reached the cabin by the beach. A single
shot before they emerged from the jungle had announced to those in camp
as well as on the ship that the expedition had been too late—for it had
been prearranged that when they came within a mile or two of camp one
shot was to be fired to denote failure, or three for success, while two
would have indicated that they had found no sign of either D’Arnot or
his black captors.
So it was a solemn party that awaited their coming, and few words were
spoken as the dead and wounded men were tenderly placed in boats and
rowed silently toward the cruiser.
Clayton, exhausted from his five days of laborious marching through the
jungle and from the effects of his two battles with the blacks, turned
toward the cabin to seek a mouthful of food and then the comparative
ease of his bed of grasses after two nights in the jungle.
By the cabin door stood Jane.
“The poor lieutenant?” she asked. “Did you find no trace of him?”
“We were too late, Miss Porter,” he replied sadly.
“Tell me. What had happened?” she asked.
“I cannot, Miss Porter, it is too horrible.”
“You do not mean that they had tortured him?” she whispered.
“We do not know what they did to him _before_ they killed him,” he
answered, his face drawn with fatigue and the sorrow he felt for poor
D’Arnot and he emphasized the word before.
“_Before_ they killed him! What do you mean? They are not—? They are
not—?”
She was thinking of what Clayton had said of the forest man’s probable
relationship to this tribe and she could not frame the awful word.
“Yes, Miss Porter, they were—cannibals,” he said, almost bitterly, for
to him too had suddenly come the thought of the forest man, and the
strange, unaccountable jealousy he had felt two days before swept over
him once more.
And then in sudden brutality that was as unlike Clayton as courteous
consideration is unlike an ape, he blurted out:
“When your forest god left you he was doubtless hurrying to the feast.”
He was sorry ere the words were spoken though he did not know how
cruelly they had cut the girl. His regret was for his baseless
disloyalty to one who had saved the lives of every member of his party,
and offered harm to none.
The girl’s head went high.
“There could be but one suitable reply to your assertion, Mr. Clayton,”
she said icily, “and I regret that I am not a man, that I might make
it.” She turned quickly and entered the cabin.
Clayton was an Englishman, so the girl had passed quite out of sight
before he deduced what reply a man would have made.
“Upon my word,” he said ruefully, “she called me a liar. And I fancy I
jolly well deserved it,” he added thoughtfully. “Clayton, my boy, I
know you are tired out and unstrung, but that’s no reason why you
should make an ass of yourself. You’d better go to bed.”
But before he did so he called gently to Jane upon the opposite side of
the sailcloth partition, for he wished to apologize, but he might as
well have addressed the Sphinx. Then he wrote upon a piece of paper and
shoved it beneath the partition.
Jane saw the little note and ignored it, for she was very angry and
hurt and mortified, but—she was a woman, and so eventually she picked
it up and read it.
MY DEAR MISS PORTER:
I had no reason to insinuate what I did. My only excuse is that my
nerves must be unstrung—which is no excuse at all.
Please try and think that I did not say it. I am very sorry. I would
not have hurt _you_, above all others in the world. Say that you
forgive me.
WM. CECIL CLAYTON.
“He did think it or he never would have said it,” reasoned the girl,
“but it cannot be true—oh, I know it is not true!”
One sentence in the letter frightened her: “I would not have hurt _you_
above all others in the world.”
A week ago that sentence would have filled her with delight, now it
depressed her.
She wished she had never met Clayton. She was sorry that she had ever
seen the forest god. No, she was glad. And there was that other note
she had found in the grass before the cabin the day after her return
from the jungle, the love note signed by Tarzan of the Apes.
Who could be this new suitor? If he were another of the wild denizens
of this terrible forest what might he not do to claim her?
“Esmeralda! Wake up,” she cried. “You make me so irritable, sleeping
there peacefully when you know perfectly well that the world is filled
with sorrow.”
“Gaberelle!” screamed Esmeralda, sitting up. “What is it now? A
hipponocerous? Where is he, Miss Jane?”
“Nonsense, Esmeralda, there is nothing. Go back to sleep. You are bad
enough asleep, but you are infinitely worse awake.”
“Yes honey, but what’s the matter with you, precious? You acts sort of
disgranulated this evening.”
“Oh, Esmeralda, I’m just plain ugly to-night,” said the girl. “Don’t