Driven by the keenest desire, for a being of a race superior not only to his own but also to that of Dilou, his first concubine, Ouha displayed in Rava’s regard a persuasive gentleness, all the more so because he wanted to possess her more ardently. In his animal sensuality, he retained the anxiety of a colossus playing with a fragile doll, fearful of breaking her. When he had finished, he laughed, expressing his joy with articulating whistles.
“J’soi! Sitsch!”
On the other hand, he genuinely sensed, by virtue of his instinct, refined by his contacts with humankind, his prestige over his subjects growing. Only Ouha dared to approach the fires that Rava lit, to warm himself there in the morning and the dusk. Carefully, he drove away the apes who were fearful of the flames but who, on seeing Ouha’s attitude and risking an audacity, wanted to draw nearer to them. He even affected an ease, a visible pleasure, by means of is mimes and gestures, in the act of warming himself—one of his royal prerogatives. He expressed the bliss of heat be means of the syllables: “Ffitch! Choo!”
With a repugnance she could not overcome, therefore, and a fear that time did not soothe, Rava submitted to Ouha, in accordance with the law of primitive and natural beings. She won Dilou’s attachment by meager womanly services, moderated her jealousy by continually giving way to her and throwing her into the arms of the monster, their common lover, in the hope of escaping, thanks to her, the horrible embrace. Dilou’s love for Ouha often saved Rava from monstrous caresses.
Then, the little Malay, some two years older than the Dilou, assumed for her black sister a measure of maternal care. When Dilou, who liked to run recklessly through thickets like an exuberant young beast, came back with her skin punctured by thorns, her and or feet bruised and bloody, Rava knew the leaves, pulps, flowers and salutary herbs that could heal her. One day, when Dilou had been bitten by a coral snake, the Malay woman had staunched the wound with her lips and cured the venom’s unhealthy fever. Thereafter, Dilou loved Rava with a blind devotion, in spite of the intractable fits of rage into which she sometimes flew when the Malay, woman, for reasons of preservation, took from her hands some object she had fabricated or forbade her some harmful action.
Gradually, they had come to understand one another. At first, gestures had been their only translator, then sounds—those that are onomatopoeic are almost the same in all languages—and signs, according to circumstances, had formed their limited dialect. Their instinct furnished them with mutually caressing and coaxing words before they had precisely defined the relevant meanings. Dilou spoke her native tongue, ape and Malay; Rava spoke the few words usually necessary in her native language, and had imposed them on Dilou by her superiority.
When Mabel had arrived, a cry of almost-animal rage, little different from the clamors of the apes while fighting, had escaped the thick red lips of Dilou; her eyes bulged out of their orbits and her clawed hands reached out toward the new captive. The apes’ admiration for that rival, manifested by the obscene gestures of their hands wandering over a projection of their hairy bodies, had brought the jealous anger of the little captive to a peak.
Coldly and phlegmatically, Ouha beat Dilou; Mabel, aided by Rava, protected her. Before the white queen, to whom he did not want to risk a refusal, within her sight, the magnificent orang caressed Dilou and Rava, and then, summoning a she-ape with a cry of “z-k-ch!” satisfied his lust again with cries and sighs of sensual joy. Stunned and frightened, Mabel stood in a corner, waiting, before allowing her eyes, weary of old fears, to close, to see the monster collapse on his bed of leaves and to hear his enormous jaws clicking.
Then, when she was too fearful of the male, silently, she went to take Rava by the hand, and then Dilou, making them lie down next to her, a little more tranquil because that living rampart of the two women separated her from Ouha.
Often, Mabel awoke with a start, having thought she had felt the Beast’s breath brush her face, or the ignoble purchase to his hair hands on her intimate parts. Many a time, on awakening, she found the giant crouched behind her head or at her feet, almost human, holding his chagrined face in his hands, with a real and profound sadness in his eyes, those of a disdained lover.
By virtue of all these tender demonstrations of Ouha’s toward Mabel, a dull resentment brooded, in spite of everything, in Dilou’s simple heart. She dared not make her hated manifest for fear of being punished, but in a sly feline fashion, like the she-ape she had almost become, the black girl attempt to hurt Mabel without being seen. She took objects of which Miss Smith scarcely ever let go as soon as they were put down, while the American woman’s back was turned. Many a time, during the young white woman’s siestas, Dilou threw thorny branches at her. Rava was always there to protect Mabel; the Malay woman had blossomed since the arrival of her new companion, and sometimes even abandoned her native phlegm to laugh and play with her childishly, like a happy little girl.
One day, without paying any heed to Dilou crouched near the threshold of the grotto, Mabel was standing at the top of a path that went along a precipice where vague rocks undulated all the way down to a foaming torrent. Dilou, throwing herself between her legs, would have caused her to fall with an abrupt shock if Rava had not shouted, grabbed hold of her and held her back.
During the long days, the women took long siestas almost every afternoon in the strong diurnal heat. But twenty days had passed since the abduction of the American woman without Dilou having given up her malicious attacks on Mabel, in spite of the severe punishments inflicted by Ouha several times over. That day, the heat was torrid; its leaden fluid enveloped the silent forest, where nothing could be heard out the slithering of reptiles, and the hum of summer insects between the leaves; even the soul of the forest, the beasts, suspended their breath.
Mabel, glad of Ouha’s absence, was asleep on her bed of leaves and moss, renewed every day by the king—for Ouha, noticing the care that the white woman took of her lodgings, made things easier for her.
At the noise of small stones shifting, Rava opened her eyes. Dilou was climbing up the rocky walls of the cavern by means of its projections. Grimacing, Dilou crouched down on a stone outcrop, almost directly above the sleeping Mabel’s head. With fiery eyes, Dilou stared at the white virgin. Perhaps, in the obscure soul of Rava, a dull mistrust of Mabel still remained, as toward Dilou, both of them being so different from herself, so she made no move to prevent anything Dilou might do.
Rava watched Dilou and, curiously, spied on her every gesture, Having spotted a block of granite, the black woman rolled the heavy stone along a ledge. Finally, Rava stood up and, when she saw Dilou brandishing the stone, with great effort, above Mabel’s head, bounded forward to snatch the block from the menacing hands and send it rolling far away from the sleeping beauty. The noise woke Mabel up; she understood, and her eyes thanked Rava.
XXXIV. Love Progresses
By dint of observing their gestures and the syllables of their primitive language, Mabel had come to understand the thoughts that the anthropoids translated into marvelous and precisely eloquent mimes of cupidity, desire, sadness, joy or anger, at the instant they felt those impressions, common to all beings.
Once the initial stupors and terrors of the early days had passed, she had also understood accurately what power she had, what ascendancy her delicate beauty could exercise over brutal strength.
By the murder of the audacious orangutan who had dared to advance his gesture toward the flower of her body, and whom she had shot, a salutary dread was established. Even Ouha, sovereign and suitor, despot and lover, dared not risk anything irremediable in her regard, convinced that she disposed of a force unknown to him, like thunder, in which there was fire, noise, and something that struck, which one could not see—a weapon whose secret he did not know.
Because of this mystery, the young woman remained, in the eyes of Ouha and his subjects, a redoubtable and benevolent enchantress, according to whether or not she was satisfied. Ouha was glad to have seen the admired white woman
fight beside him, gaitered in her light brown boots, in lacy culottes, with a leather belt over the rigid armor of the corset or the crumpled slip falling in two symmetrical globes, leaving uncovered the alabaster upper body, scarcely flesh-tinted. During an invasion of neighboring orangutans, Mabel had wielded a hatchet, which she had discovered in a pile of booty amassed by the hairy king.
By virtue of that noble deed, Mabel had become a heroine to the apes, a living palladium, much like Jeanne d’Arc, the Maid, to the soldiers of King Charles VII before the walls of Orléans: a fetish surrounded henceforth by superstitious veneration. The entire tribe was convinced of the efficacy of her mere presence against anything. Twice, at their head, by Ouha’s side, she had battled an enemy tribe victoriously.
Dilou, the black girl who had almost reverted to animality, had fought in both battles by Ouha’s side, striking heavy blows with a knotted branch, or, according to her bestial instincts, enveloped by long contact with the apes, bounding with her claws extended, with ferocious cries, to bite an adversary’s limbs, grappling in hand-to-hand combats in which her sinewy muscularity and the feline suddenness of her leaps often gave her an advantage over opponents that were much stronger and heavier, who were disconcerted by the attack and fled.
Rava, disdainful of such skirmishes, unworthy, in her view, of her human pride remained with the she-apes charged with guarding the royal cavern. During the whole affair, the Malay remained aloof from the combat, hieratically immobile at the foot of a tree, her face painted red and yellow, her eyelids dotted with red, elongated to join up with the arch of her eyelids
Suddenly, as if remembrance lying dormant in the ashes of her memory had been reunited in the little Malay, she had burst into song, in the bloody dusk, in the face of the setting sun. Her shrill voice, child-like and yet potent, intoned a chant to a staccato rhythm, punctuated by cries: doubtless a war-song of her race, springing from nostalgia for the human battles of which the apes’ combat reminded her.
Ouha was wounded during that skirmish with the enemy tribe. Touched by is attitude, by the gentleness that the Orang King manifested in her regard, Mabel Smith had bandaged his wounds. The Beast had conceived a profound gratitude for the white woman, testified by a redoubling of attentions that was almost servile. When Mabel attached the benevolent leaves to his hairy torso with vegetable fibers she had collected, and when she applied damp cloths to the gaping lips of the wound, Ouha, without moaning, restrained the cries of pain that were on the brink of escaping him, gazed at her with wide-eyed submission, seemingly forgetting his tyrannical power at such moments, his superhuman strength abdicated to the hands of his beloved, that benevolent and desired divinity.
The American woman had now suppressed her indescribable disgust at Ouha’s approach when a vertical gesture gave evidence of his sensual disturbance. The king, in spite of his long ardor, was afraid of the petty lightning that his prisoner could unleash.
One night, when she was asleep, she awoke oppressed by a heavy weight, as in a nightmare—but a form blacker than the shadows was, in reality, weighing upon her: Ouha, terrible and panting, whose muzzle was brushing her face; the entire brown mass of that gigantic body suspended above her svelte nudity; that erotic brute hideously braced on the four pillars of his hairy limbs.
Already, the long and muscular hands were gripping her, tremulous and seeking. How could she extract herself from such a vice-like embrace as the one in which the Beast was holding her? Paralyzed, she had no means of reaching the hiding-place in which her revolver was lying, carefully hidden. Rigid, her limbs atrociously twisted, she was like an inert cadaver, a solid blocks, taut and petrified.
Then, at the moment when the disappointed monster raised himself up slightly, the young woman struck the giant animal’s long hard virility violently with her clenched fist.
Ouha bounded out of the bed of leaves, over the sleeping Dilou and Rava, and a loud cry of simultaneous pain and rage made the walls of rock tremble, resonating with repeated echoes. The two women, woken up, consoled him, Dilou, especially, in a childish negro-ape jargon, in which there were promises and questions, phrases of solicitude detectable in a tone ameliorated by coaxing words;
“Ber!...Hiens!...Ouha, pig!....Warr!...Zef!...Zefbel!...Me, pig!...Pig!...suck Ouha…”
All of that was almost lisped, with an infinite softness intended to console, questing at the same time, promising caresses and joys.
Another day, Ouha, thinking that Mabel as far away from the common dwelling, searched the cracks in the walls, trying to discover where the captive might have hidden the little magical and destructive jewel. The American woman caught him, mocking and enigmatic at the very moment when he seized the loaded revolver from among her folded clothes.
Ouha turned it over and over in his hands, unable to find the correct way to grasp the weapon in order to make use of it, brandishing it as if it were his rusty carbine, a mere club in his ignorant hands. Miss Smith took hold of the butt without him resigning himself to let go of the steel barrel—but she pulled the trigger with a finger that she immediately withdrew.
Terrified by the noise, Ouha hid, cowering in a corner, but then came to put his finger in the hole that the bullet had made in the ground. He made no further attempt to steal the lightning from the white captive—who was, in any case, his talisman, the symbol of his omnipotence. In spite of his disappointment as a lover with regard to the white queen, he was further convinced by that thunderbolt that he was, because of his three wives—the fire that they knew how to make, and the lightning that the ungraspable released—as much as by virtue of his own strength, the King of the Forest.
Then, during the long dog-days and the sleepless nights, Ouha stayed crouched not far from Mabel, following her slightest gestures with his eyes, or staring from the depths of his jet pupils set in circles of gold at the languid slenderness of the Adored, the woman he so desired to possess, but whose fragility defied him.
Thus, coquettishly, Mabel Smith, divining that Ouha was similar to human males in terms of his senses and admiration in the presence of a woman, used her beauty to ensure his conquest. Beauty would be saved from the monstrous desire of the Beast, whom, sometimes, inadmissibly, and with disgust, she desired.
Yes, Mabel was certain, in her precise perspicacity, of her power over the Orangutan that was as superior to other apes as Napoléon was to his contemporaries, Ouha, who hid beneath his primitive envelope the embryo of a soul of noble execution: Ouha, the formidable lover of women, a hairier, coarser and more rough-hewn man, a savage of genius, above his own kind by virtue of the conscious domination by which he elevated himself, by virtue of his pride, his strength and his extraordinary intelligence, to which, in sum, the primitive instinct of his raced has led him.
Was it contact with human beings had given rise to concepts and imaginations in that astonishing ape whose brain surpassed that of many humans? Or do certain animals carry within hem the seeds of ideas, the fetus of a soul? But Ouha, in the very tyranny of his will, seemed human, even more jealous of his prestige than his abductions. He was just, even toward his subjects, as soon as he had no quarrel with them. Politically, he divided in order to rule, creating rivalries by means of unequal favors, equilibrating the powers beneath him.
As the ascendancy of her weakness over the tamed Napoléonic brute became clearer, Mabel became the arbiter of his angers, the only being capable of igniting them or extinguishing them. Now, sure of Ouha’s respect, mingled with dread, Mabel Smith occasionally favored him with a brief flattery of the hand. Mimed conversations or exclamations, onomatopoeias, and shrill cries completing gestures, became frequent between the orangutan and the American woman. One might have thought that, that by means of the attentions he paid her every day, every hour, the Beast wanted to beg pardon for retaining his beautiful captive. Fruits, flowers, all the riches of the forest—even animals similar to those that Dilou and Rava hunted so ingeniously—incessantly renewed, maintained in a superfluity of natura
l wealth the guest who would have been omnipotent had she not been a prisoner of the anthropoid tribe.
Meanwhile, taciturn, as soon as his vain desires began to torment him, Ouha remained immobile and silent for hours, staring through some gap in the foliage or, perched on one of the rocky outcrops of the mountain, filling his eyes and brain, where vague thoughts and great dreams were perhaps agitating, with distant horizons and celestial reflections regarding that which, being beyond is domain, was unknown to him.
Who knows, Mabel thought, whether he might be imagining possessing me, in a distant world, in the midst of an imaginary décor, mutated into a human? How many humans, anyway, are less wise, less correct, is one might put it thus, capable of a cruelty of which that phenomenal orangutan has no notion outside of moments of battle?
Tales of atrocities, between individuals or nations, of injustices and reprisals, sprang to her mind, where, by way of contrast, a number of instances of Ouha’s clemency rose up. Ouha was doubtless energetic, but devoid of any tyranny that did not serve his power, and so gentle toward her, even in the presence of his subjects, as soon as the interests of his reign were no longer at stake.
Seeing him thus, so brave, and not without generosity toward the vanquished, seeing that he was even trying, thanks to her, to comprehend real beauty and grandeur, the extension of his instinct, raised to the level of intelligence, incessantly increasing beyond the limits of his species, a genuine esteem was born in Mabel’s soul for the king of the apes.
Miss Smith, strong in the power of her limited, tender and chaste caresses over Ouha, the suzerain of the forest, had easily become his tutor. By virtue of incessant contact with Mabel, guided by that which she prevented him from doing and the actions to which the young woman urged him, Ouha increased his comprehension, harmonizing himself, in truth, under the increasing influence of the virtuoso who, by a sign, a caress or a promissory gesture, by her coquettish grace, caused his senses to vibrate and knew how to restrain them, also showing him his own interest, directing the apes through him.
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