Footsteps creaked upon the dead leaves on the other side of the wall. Balaoo fell on his knees upon the stone threshold. The door opened and Balaoo at once felt a hand seize him by the ear.
“You rascal!” said an angry young female voice. “I’ll make you pay for this!...Two days and two nights out of doors...and in such a plight!...A nice thing!...I could cry, to look at you!...I have cried, Balaoo, I have cried!...Oh, don’t you go crying, you; don’t you begin! You’ll bring the whole village round you!...You young scamp, you!...All your clothes in rags!...Your new trousers!...Your Paris overcoat!...You’ve been climbing the trees, sir, you’ve been larking in the moonlight!...And you’ve upset papa most terribly!...”
Dragged by the ear, docile, repentant, snivelling and with his heart throbbing loudly with remorse, Balaoo let the girl lead him to his quarters. But, on reaching the end of the kitchen-garden, where he was supposed to work with M. Coriolis, in the greatest mystery, at the different transformations of the bread-plant, and opening the door of his room, he found himself in the presence of Coriolis himself. He at once made a movement as though to return to the friendly forest at a bound.
Coriolis’ face was colder, deader than marble.
Balaoo knew that expression. He dreaded nothing on earth so much as the sight of it. He would have preferred beatings and even the whippings with which he was tamed in his early youth to the silent reproach of those fixed eyes, of the haughty and contemptuous mask assumed by one of the Human Race who had obviously made a mistake in thinking that there was anything to be made out of a mere pithecanthrope.
And Coriolis’ lips — if they moved at all, for there were days when they remained closed as though human speech would be disgraced by conversing with a pithecanthrope — Coriolis’ lips were perhaps about to ask him, in front of Mlle. Madeleine — oh, the shame of it! — how his friends were, the great wild-boar of the Crau-mort and the wild-sow, his good lady, and the little wild boars, their children; and had he brought a message from the family of wolves that lived on the table-rock of Madon? Oh, horror! He who used to visit the brothers Vautrin, before they went to prison! And who was treated by them as an equal, as one of the same race! And even that he must not say, of course, because his master had remarked to him, one day, after meeting him on the road with his three chums, that he would rather have seen him in the company of hyenas, and jackals! So that he no longer knew where he was! After all, they belonged to the Human Race, they did!...’
Coriolis moved his lips:
“Turn round!”
Balaoo did not obey.
But Balaoo did as though he had not heard. He knew that his overcoat was nothing more than a rag and that the seat of his trousers was hanging down behind. He could never display such a sight before Mlle. Madeleine.
Coriolis took a step towards Balaoo, who began to tremble in every limb. Madeleine interposed with her gentle voice, with her gentle face of entreaty. She had understood Balaoo’s shame. She wanted to spare him the disgrace. His eyes filled with tears. Oh, he loved her, he loved her, he loved her! Goodness, how he loved her!...
But the doctor commanded:
“I want him to turn around!”
Then the soft voice said:
“Turn round, Balaoo dear!”
Ah! “Balaoo dear!” She could do what she pleased with him, when she dropped his man-name and called him by that which his father and mother had bestowed upon him in the Forest of Bandong: Balaoo!...
Balaoo dug his toe-nails into the soles of his boots and turned round.
Then a laugh which he had never heard before echoed through the room.
He spun round furiously. There stood a man whom he recognized at once from meeting him sometimes in the village street. He was the friend of the man who limped and whom he, Balaoo, could not stand at any price, the friend of that M. Bombarda whom he smacked in the face whenever the opportunity offered. He was the friend also of the gendarmes who had taken the Three Brothers to prison. Had he come to take Balaoo to prison too? What was he doing here?...
It was the first time that Balaoo had had the honour of having a stranger brought to see him! It was the first time that he was receiving a guest under his roof, that people condescended to introduce one of the Race to him in his own apartments!
By Patti Palang Kaing, his king, his god, the man had laughed at the condition of the pithecanthrope’s trousers! But Balaoo spun round so quickly and so furiously that the man’s laughter broke off in the middle and the man himself, terror-stricken, rushed to take refuge behind the table.
“Don’t be afraid, monsieur,” said Coriolis. “He’s not dangerous. He wouldn’t hurt a fly!”
“A fly!” growled Balaoo, within himself. “A fly indeed! Better ask Camus, the tailor in the Cours National, who was always making fun of me, better ask him if I wouldn’t hurt a fly!”
“Come here, Noël,” said Coriolis.
And, as Balaoo came forward, quivering with anger, Coriolis, with his grand white beard, resuming his kinder manner, gave the pithecanthrope a friendly little tap on his raging cheek. Balaoo drew in his dog-teeth and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. It was high time. Another minute and the stranger would have taken him for a brute.
The visitor said:
“It’s extraordinary! I have seen monkeys at the music-hall, but anything to equal this...never!”
Balaoo clenched his fists to his mouth to prevent the thunder that swelled his chest from bursting.
Coriolis said:
“Never use that word in his presence.”
“What word?”
“Monkey.”
“Oh, does he understand as much as that?”
“You need not ask if he understands: look at the face he’s pulling!”
“Yes, he frightens me,” declared the visitor, stepping back in alarm.
“Once again, you have nothing to be afraid of. You have vexed him by using that word, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly...”
“Oh, he understands anything!” continued Coriolis.
“And you say that he speaks?”
“He speaks better French than our peasants. Speak, Balaoo, say something.” Balaoo, seeing himself treated, in front of one of the Race, like an interesting animal at a fair, turned his poor face, wrung with shame and despair, to her who always, at his worst trials, had been his supreme consolation and who sometimes, when his brain relapsed into animal darkness, had proved herself his saving star.
Madeleine, seeing his anguish, gave him a smile and uttered these words:
“Book of etiquette, paragraph ten.”
The pithecanthrope at once turned to the visitor:
“I have not had the honour of being introduced to you, monsieur,” he said, in a roar that made the house shake again.
“Oh!” exclaimed the visitor. “Oh! Ah! Ah!...”
And he opened, the wide eyes of one who is ready to rush away in fright.
But Coriolis was not satisfied:
“Politely,” he said. “Politely. In your gentlest voice.”
“Come, Balaoo, in your gentlest voice,” insisted Madeleine, in her own gentle voice.
And Balaoo repeated the sentence— “I have not had the honour of being introduced to you, monsieur” — in the piping voice that made all the young ladies laugh, excepting Madeleine.
“But it’s marvellous,” shouted the other member of the Race. “It’s marvellous, marvellous!...I can’t believe it!...He can’t be a pithecanthrope!...”
“He’s not one any longer,” Coriolis assented. “He’s a man.”
At these words, Balaoo raised a proud and triumphant forehead.
Coriolis proceeded to make the introductions in the terms prescribed in the book of etiquette:
“I have the honour to introduce to you M. Noël, my valued assistant in my work on the bread-plant.” And, turning to Balaoo, “This, my dear friend, is M. Herment de Meyrentin, the examining-magistrate, who is very anxious to make your acquaintance. Pray
sit down, gentlemen.”
The “gentlemen” sat down.
“You know what a magistrate is, my dear Noël?” asked Coriolis, with an important air.
“A magistrate,” replied Balaoo, with an air of equal importance, “is a man who sends thieves to prison.”
“And what is a thief?” M. de Meyrentin ventured to ask.
“A thief,” said Balaoo, imperturbably, “is a man who takes things without paying for them.”
And he closed his eyes to escape the visitor’s curious scrutiny:
“That magistrate’s a great bore,” he thought. “Is he never going?”
“May I give you some tea?” said Madeleine, in her musical voice.
Tea! Balaoo, utterly dazed, opened his eyes again. Madeleine handed him a cup and he stirred the sugar in the fragrant brew with the tip of his silver-gilt spoon.
Only, just before drinking, believing that no one was looking at him, he swiftly dipped his hand into the liquid and sucked his fingers, pithecanthrope-fashion. That was a thing he could not resist.
Coriolis and M. de Meyrentin, who were carrying on an eager conversation between themselves, did not notice the ill-bred action; but Madeleine saw it all and silently scolded Balaoo with a threatening forefinger. Balaoo glanced at her out of the corner of his eye and gave a sly grin. Then, when Coriolis looked at him again, he drank like a man and put his cup down prettily on the tray.
Next, Balaoo crossed his legs, swung one foot with a careless grace, threw himself back in his chair with a smirk and sat smiling fatously. Suddenly, M. Herment de Meyrentin stooped, took Balaoo’s right hand and examined it attentively:
“But these are not the hands of a...”
Coriolis cut him short: “Hush,” he said. “I warned you not to use that word...and I have already told you of the work to which I have devoted myself for the last ten years. You can do anything with electrolytic, depilatory creams and a little patience. Look at his face: wouldn’t you say he was a Chinese or a Japanese, just a trifle sunburnt? Who would ever take him for a quadrumane? You can use that word: he does not understand it.”
“A quadrumane? A quadrumane?” repeated Herment de Meyrentin, rather irritably. “I’ve seen only two hands so far...”
“Balaoo, take off your boots.” Balaoo thought that his ears must have deceived him. But no, Coriolis repeated the hideous command. Take off his boots! He, who has always been forbidden to show his shoe-hands! And who had been brought up to loathe and abominate his lower extremities! And who had never revealed this mystery except before the brothers Vautrin, in the depths of the forest, on days when he had gone hunting without leave and taught them to build invisible little huts in the trees!...
No, then, no, he would not take off his boots! The disgrace was too great, when all was said! And he stood up, with his hands in his pockets, whistling a tune, as though he had forgotten all about it. To his surprise, the others said nothing. They watched him as he walked, for Balaoo was walking up and down, with a thoughtful brow, as we sometimes do when we have something that preoccupies our mind. He forgot that he had no seat to his trousers. A scrap of conversation between his two visitors reminded him of it:
“You see, he has no appendage like that which we see in the lower quadrumana: no tail and no callosities. Note also that the bones of the ischium, which forms the solid framework of the surface on which the body rests when sitting, are less developed than in the quadrumana endowed with ischial callosities and are shaped more like those of a man. Lastly, he walks, as a rule, slowly and circumspectly; and I have taught him to give up his habit of waddling...”
Just then, in his annoyance, Balaoo began to waddle from side to side.
“You’d better waddle!” cried Coriolis, angrily. “I’ll send you waddling in the streets of the village; and the school-children will laugh at you, Balaoo!”
Balaoo thought to himself:
“Ask Camus and Lombard, who were found hanged, why I put them to waddle at the end of a rope!” (*) But Balaoo’s trials were not over. After taking off Balaoo’s boots himself, Coriolis took his shoe-hands in his own, human hands. Balaoo turned away his head so as not to witness a sight that, disgusted him. But he could not help hearing.
(*7) This was a terrible thing for Balaoo, who did not know that Camus and Lombard were lame and who believed that they made fun of him by imitating his waddle as they walked along the street, which was his reason for hanging them! — AUTHOR’S NOTE.
“You see,” said Coriolis, “that the great toe of the foot, which is smaller than in a man, makes up for this by being much more flexible.”
“I hope he’s not going to tickle me!” thought Balaoo.
M. Herment de Meyrentin nearly swooned with delight, when he saw, at last, the feet of the man who walked upside down.
“I see! I see!” he cried. “It’s incredible: a quadrumane, a quadrumane that talks!...Oh, it’s simply incredible!”
“All animals talk,” said Coriolis, “but the quadrumane, which is one of the higher animals, possesses a greater variety of distinct sounds than the other beasts to express desire, pleasure, hunger, thirst, terror and so on: very distinct sounds and invariably the same. These utterances, therefore, from a language. In my pithecanthrope, which is the chief of the quadrumana, the one most nearly related to man, I have discovered as many as forty distinct sounds.”
“And you went on the principle that, if an animal can pronounce forty sounds, it can pronounce every sound?”
“Open your mouth, Balaoo,” said Coriolis.
Balaoo, who was ready to die of shame, had no time to protest. Coriolis, after holding his shoe-hands, was now holding his two jaws, without any antiseptic preliminaries, and working them on their coronoid processes as though he were setting a wolf trap. Balaoo foamed at the mouth; and his large, round, gentle eyes shed tears as they contemplated Madeleine, who was sadly watching the operation. Even so the sufferer who is having a tooth extracted gazes mournfully and gloomily at the staunch friend who had accompanied him to the dentist’s.
“He has magnificent teeth,” said M. de Meyrentin.
“Never mind the teeth, my dear sir,” said Coriolis, impatiently “Just look at that pharynx! I have always said and I have always written, ‘Every faculty, functional and anatomical, moral, intellectual and instinctive,’ depends upon the strueture; and, as the structure tends to vary, it is capable of improvement.’”
“He doesn’t see that he’s spitting in my mouth!” thought Balaoo.
“You have perfected the pharynx,” said M. de Meyrentin, “altered the back of the throat, worked at the vocal cords; and that was enough, you say, to enable you to turn a monk...a quadrumane, I mean, into a man?”
“Why not?” said Coriolis, letting go the jaw for a moment. “It is not difficult to show that no absolute structural line of demarcation, wider than that between the animals which immediately succeed us in the scale, can be drawn between the animal world and ourselves.”
“All the same, my dear sir, there is an immense gulf between the monk...the animal, I mean, and man.”
“No one is more strongly convinced than I am,” answered Coriolis, continuing to quote the late Professor Huxley, “of the vastness of the gulf between civilized man and the brutes. No one is less disposed to think lightly of the present dignity or despairingly of the future hopes of the only consciously intelligent denizens of this world; but, even from this intellectual and moral point of view, I contend that, by modifying the structure, it is possible to fill up the gulf.”
“What you say fills me with admiration and, at the same time, with terror.”
Within himself, the magistrate thought:
“It’s you who will be filled with terror, presently, when I tell you what your advanced theories have brought you to!”
For M. de Meyrentin, the cousin of the great Meyrentin of the Institute, had remained an idealist and an anti-Darwinian, like the pride of the family.
“Nonsense!” sa
id Coriolis, aloud. “What is it that makes man what he is? Is it not the faculty of speech? Language enables him to note his experiences; language increases the scientific assets of the generations that follow one upon the other. It is thanks to language that man is able to link together more closely his fellow-creatures distributed over the face of the globe. It is language that distinguishes man from the rest of the animal world. This functional difference is immense and the consequences are extraordinary. And yet all this can depend on the very slightest alteration in the conditions of the back of the throat. For, what is this gift of speech? I am speaking at this moment; but, if you change in the least degree the proportion of the combined forces at present in action in the two nerves that control the muscles of my glottis, I become dumb at once. The voice is produced only so long as the vocal cords are parallel; they are parallel only so long as certain muscles contract in a similar fashion; and this, in its turn, depends upon the equal action of the two nerves of which I have just spoken. The least change in the structure of these nerves and even in the part from which they spring, the least alteration even in the blood-vessels involved, or, again, in the muscles which the blood reaches, might make us dumb. A race of dumb men, deprived of all power of communicating with those who can speak, would be a race of brutes.”
“Just so, just so,” said the magistrate.
“It goes without saying,” continued Coriolis. “Don’t scratch yourself, Balaoo!”
Balaoo, who hought himself unobserved, was covered with shame.
“Well, what I have done is the opposite of one aiming at producing dumbness: I have aimed at increasing the scope of an organ which was already capable of emitting certain sounds of speech. I have held all those nerves, all those muscles, all those arteries in my forceps, for the greater glory of my demonstration.”
Collected Works of Gaston Leroux Page 295