Collected Works of Gaston Leroux

by Gaston Leroux

  Balaoo, on reaching the path, pointed to the direction in which the doctor was to go and himself turned back, solemnly, without even waiting to be thanked.

  Released! The doctor began to run like a madman, like a madman, like the madman that he was certainly in a fair way to become.

  For how long did he run? He could not be far from the high-road now. He was saved! Suddenly, he stopped short: some one had tapped him on the shoulder. He recognized the quadrumane’s touch. He turned round, greatly annoyed. Balaoo was standing behind him:

  “You never told me,” said Balaoo, quite as much out of breath as the doctor, “you never told me you were a postage!”

  A dismayed silence on the doctor’s part.

  “You must come back, as you’re a postage!” continued Balaoo.

  A despairing silence on the doctor’s part.

  “They can’t hurt my friends as long as you’re a postage. So come back at once.”

  A comatose silence on the doctor’s part.

  Silence gives consent. Balaoo tucked Dr. Honorat under his arm; and a quarter of an hour later found the doctor once more sitting at the foot of his tree, with the poacher’s knot round his foot and all the tribe of Vautrin gathered round him, trying to make him understand that Balaoo’ would never have let him loose if he had for one moment suspected the real value of a postage!

  But Dr. Honorat was never again to understand anything in this life...Dr. Honorat had dropped asleep with the peaceful sleep of childhood...Dr. Honorat was mad. “Phoh! Phoh!...Hack! Hack!”

  Friend Dhol came up, yellow-eyed, his tail between his legs, chattering his wolf’s teeth. Hubert snatched at his gun, but Balaoo struck down the barrel:

  “What’s the matter, Dhol? Can’t you stop those teeth of yours?”

  “Can we come here?” Dhol asked Balaoo, in three words of wolf. “The Race are on their way. Is there room for Mother Dhol and the little ones? We don’t know where to go in the forest.”

  Balaoo, who knew all the forest languages by heart, understood all that those three wolf-words implied. Behind the branches, a little beyond Dhol’s tail and levell with the moss, was a great pair of yellow eyes, as wide as goggles, belonging to the mother, and, close beside them, six little piercing stars and, around all that, a great sound of chattering teeth. It was the terrified Dhol family, following its head.

  “We have been to the Big Beech at Pierrefeu,” Dhol explained, “but it’s not safe. The people of the Race who are hastening from every part of the forest cannot be very far away. I spoke to General Captain, who told me that you were with the Three Brothers at the Moabit clearing, so I thought you might say a good word for us to the Three Brothers. The people of the Race will never come so far. We should be quite safe here, Balaoo, if you don’t mind.”

  All this was said in three or four or five wolf-words at the most, words in which people of the Race, who only know how to read books, would have heard nothing but “Hack! Hack!” and understood nothing at all, of course.

  Balaoo spoke to the Three Brothers and they had a serious discussion as to what to do. Dhol was the first scout to announce the enemy’s attack. They showed their appreciation by allowing him to tuck away his family in a little corner of Moabit, on the express understanding, however, that they were not to bite Zoé’s bare legs.

  Dhol had not finished settling down, when friend As showed his anxious mask. Balaoo learnt from him that all the animals were trembling with fright in their lairs and that they did not even dare remain there, at least not those who, like As, had seen men firing their holes.

  Never had so many men been known to go hunting, especially at night. No one knew what it meant, but it was most alarming. It was no good their hiding: they had reckoned without the moon and they could be seen gliding like snakes through the grass. And besides they could be scented from a distance, for the wind was blowing straight from Saint-Martin-des-Bois.

  All this was useful information for the Three Brothers; and Balaoo imparted it to them. As also received permission to curl himself up in a corner of Moabit; but he chose the opposite corner to that of the Dhol family, with whom he was on bad terms. As had no family; he had been a bachelor all his life.

  Élie, Siméon, Hubert, Zoé and Balaoo held a palaver in the centre of the clearing. They were all of one mind that the members of the Race who made use of speech to tell lies and break their promises were more contemptible than the cow in the fields, who knew no better than to let herself be milked by hired hands.

  At that moment, a family of roe-deer, the buck — a six-pointer — his doe and their little fawn, arrived from the opposite side to Saint-Martin. They stopped at the edge of the clearing with their legs all atremble, not knowing where to go, already showing the white of their scuts, turning tail because of the men. But where were they to flee? There were men everywhere!

  Balaoo whistled to them; and they shook with fright as he went up to them with soft words. He wanted to question them also, but had not time. A great noise approached from the distance. The whole forest seemed to rustle with thousands of wings and thousands of legs; and the branches on the ground crackled like burning wood. And, suddenly, Moabit was filled with an innumerable horde of panic-stricken animals. They darted blindly into the forest and ran round and round, like the horses in a circus under the ring-master’s whip. The rabbits arrived in battalions. They were thick underfoot. And all the boughs of the trees were full of birds. An old stag lifted desperate antlers to the moon. A pair of wild-boars with their young were so frightened that, neglecting all caution, they slid into the bottomless pit of an abandoned quarry.

  Balaoo in vain tried to calm them all by declaring that the members of the Race would never, never dare venture above the Moabit quarries. There was nothing but moaning and wailing all over the ampitheatre; and this partly because of the presence of the Three Brothers, which they could have well dispensed with. Yet the whole forest knew that the Three Brothers never killed animals when Balaoo was there. Hubert silenced Balaoo, when he was renewing his attempts to give confidence to the crowd, and whispered in his ear:

  “I can see you’ve never served in the army. ‘They,’ will go where they are told to go. That’s their orders; And you’ll see, they will come here.”

  “So much the worse for them,” said the pithecanthrope, simply.

  He asked for room in a tree and clambered to the top.

  He came down almost immediately.

  “Here they are,” he said. “Look out!”

  And, as he had resumed his trousers, he took them off again, so as to be more at his ease.

  Chapter XVI

  FOR TWO NIGHTS, Coriolis had not left his tower.

  He had built a sort of belvedere up there, where he loved to spend his time in contemplation. On level ground, in spite of his protecting walls, he did not feel far enough removed from the men whom he despised.

  Here, Coriolis had passed two horrible nights and a hideous day. No one will ever know what he suffered, though he was not inclined to exaggerate the importance of a Herment de Meyrentin’s disappearance from the face of the earth. When you are first cousin to a gentleman who has written all the nonsense, on the subject of Darwinism and the theory of evolution, with which that pretentious bookworm had filled the learned reviews for twenty years past, you need not expect to be mourned by an old eccentric who has studied nature at first hand, in every latitude, and who has taken her in at a glance, considering her one and indivisible and prepared to prove his views with his pithecanthrope.

  When all was said, what had Meyrentin the magistrate wanted with him? As likely as not, he had been sent by the cousin at the Institute, who might have got wind of the pithecanthrope!

  It was obvious that this pithecanthrope was going to annoy a lot of people. So much the worse for them! So much the worse for the idiots who do not believe in the doctrine of the evolution of species. Who ever heard of such stupidity! To think that the different species had never been developed o
n earth! Had the earth itself developed, yes or no, from the iron age to that of the old fossils of the Institute? So their contention was that the earth, which is constantly being transformed and constantly shifting, is covered with species which do not change, do not improve, do not decay with the worlds!...

  Oh, how angry Coriolis was, in his belvedere!...Luckily, he was there! Just so! And that prodigious chain of life, arrogantly broken by man, who refuses to know anything of his brothers the animals, he was going to weld for good and all to that rebel’s leg! With his pithecanthrope — now that he had turned the pithecanthrope into...a man! — he would say to man:

  “Animal yourself!”

  But, alas, what a catastrophe!

  At the very moment when, after all those years of patient work, he was proposing to make known his masterpiece and to introduce it, as a matter of right, into the great human family, the human child of his genius and his nocturnal studies had behaved like any old wild beast in the Forest of Bandong! For there was no denying it: his dear Balaoo’s murderous deed was as unconscious an act of impulse as the closing of any wild animal’s jaws upon its prey, in the jungle. What a catastrophe! What a catastrophe!

  Yes, Coriolis was having the bad time of his life. Buthe was incapable of vulgar despair. Possessed as he was by his fixed idea of making men out of monkeys and believing that he had succeeded, not an anxious thought as to the dangers involved had ever entered his brain; and his heart had no feeling of pity for the victim. He experienced neither remorse nor indignation. Not for a moment did he reflect:

  “What have I done? The murderer is myself!” In his heart of hearts — and who will ever know the heart of hearts of scientific men? — he was not wholly sorry, since there had to be a victim and since you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs, that this victim happened to be the near relation of a scientist who had never grasped the principles of evolution and who, for years, had horrified sensible men by maintaining his theory of the non-mutability of species!

  The thing was quite simple: all the man’s grief was due to the fact that he was afraid lest his crime should be discovered and his pithecanthrope taken from him. And I am in a position to add a few words that can only redound to his advantage and his credit: Coriolis suffered untold agonies not merely because it would mean the end of his work, if men learnt what had happened, but also and above all because he was less afraid of prison as a punishment for himself than he dreaded a cage for Balaoo, in which the poor orphan from the Forest of Bandong would have died of a broken heart. Coriolis loved Balaoo with the love of a father for his child.

  Besides, to know Balaoo was to love him: so gentle was he, so simple, charming and natural. It was certain that, if Balaoo had only given him time, M. Herment de Meyrentin would have been attracted by him like everybody else; but Balaoo had not given him time.

  After this, it will be understood why Coriolis sat weeping up in his tower; and why Madeleine, vainly trying to sew by the lamp in the dining-room, cried into the little basket in which she kept her needles and thread; and why old Gertrude, in her kitchen, wetted the knifeboard with her tears.

  The door between the dining-room and the kitchen was open. Gertrude did not know of the misfortune that had befallen her dear Noël’s distinguished visitor; but, as Balaoo had not been seen for five days, she had little doubt that he had been guilty of some villainy. As a rule, when Balaoo took a day off in the forest, the escapade did not last longer than twenty-four hours and Coriolis and Madeleine showed no particular anxiety. But, during the last three days, there was no talking to the master, who had locked himself up in his tower; and Madeleine went about mopping her eyes in every corner of the house. Another extraordinary thing was that, for three days, Gertrude had been forbidden to go into the village on any excuse whatever. Not only that, but all the doors of the house had been barred and bolted. And, on the top of this, they had heard the sound of fire-arms, one night, in the village; and a great light had shot up from behind the Place de la Mairie.

  All this mystery was quite enough to make a body tremble. Gertrude dreaded the worst for Balaoo. Nor did her anguish know any bounds when, on the afternoon of the next day, going up to her young mistress’ bedroom, she saw the roads black with people and the country filled with soldiers marching towards the forest. In her terror, she called Madeleine, who gave her but little comfort by telling her that she had asked her father what all that crowd and that movement of troops meant and that Coriolis had said that it had to do with the manoevres.

  All this was very far from, clear; but one fact was certain, which was that Balaoo did not return.

  Gertrude, while cleaning her knives, tried to obtain some little light from the few remarks vouchsafed by Madeleine. But Madeleine hardly answered her questions. And the old servant began to speak of Balaoo with a funereal sadness, as of one whom she was destined never to see again, enumerating his pretty ways, his oddities and all the tricks which he loved to play upon her in her kitchen, hiding the most useful articles and spilling all the salt into the soup when she was making a soup which Balaoo did not like. Gertrude had more than once seen Balaoo’s foothands and was acquainted with the great mystery. She loved Balaoo, therefore, not as a human being, but as a dear little pet of her own, that is to say, with all an old woman’s immeasurable fondness. Madeleine, on the other hand, cherished the pithecanthrope as she would a wayward and mischievous brother, whom an elder sister loves to correct and protect; and Balaoo returned every atom of her affection.

  The two women could easily have communicated their common sorrow through the open door; and yet they hesitated to do so, especially as they could only expect to intensify their grief. Gertrude was the first to break silence, by speaking of the wedding:

  “Have you heard from M. Patrice?” she asked.

  Madeleine replied by merely shaking her head. She did not care a straw for M. Patrice at that moment, nor for any sweetheart in the wide world.

  “When shall we see him again?” the old woman continued, more or less indifferently.

  No reply.

  “Will the wedding be here or in Paris?”

  A dead silence.

  “Balaoo doesn’t like it when M. Patrice comes,” Gertrude said, more timidly.

  This time, she got an answer with a vengeance:

  “How do you know, you silly old fool? Has Balaoo spoken to you of Patrice?”

  “No, but he becomes unbearable when M. Patrice is here...Oh, where can he be now?...When I think,” she moaned, “that, only last Saturday, he was sitting there, on that chair, peeling my leeks for me and telling me his stories of the Forest of Bandong, I feel as if I could die of misery! I am sure that something has happened to him!”

  She could not understand why Madeleine did not go out to call him, as she always did when he stayed out too late.

  “He must please himself,” sighed Madeleine. “If he keeps away for so long, it’s because he’s lost his affection for us. Papa is right: he is big enough to be a man. He must know his own mind. If he prefers the society of the forest to ours, that’s his affair: he will never be anything but a Balaoo of the forest and we must give up the hope, at his age, of making a proper man of him.”

  “You take it very easily, miss,” Gertrude retorted, “and I don’t think that’s natural. You’re keeping something from me, here. You’ve lost confidence in me. If I’m in the way, you had better say so.”

  “You’re talking like the dear old stupid that you are. No one’s keeping anything from you. Balaoo doesn’t care about us any more; and I don’t see why I should upset myself: he’s only a monkey, after all!”

  “You break my heart when you talk like that,” said Gertrude, who had a sensitive heart and who once nearly died of grief at the death of a little crook-backed cat which she had shut up in a drawer by accident. “You didn’t always say so. You used to say, ‘That fellow is extraordinarily clever. He understands all we say and he guesses the rest. He knows more than the mayor and the
priest rolled into one.’ Did you say that or did you not?”

  “Evil instincts always regain the upper hand in the children of wicked parents,” replied Madeleine, her little nose all red with weeping and despair.

  “He didn’t know them long enough to learn their wicked ways,” rejoined Gertrude, defending Balaoo inch by inch.

  “Oh, he was twelve months old when he left them: that’s a lot for a little monkey, my dear Gertrude, a great deal more than you think!”

  “I know, of course, that he couldn’t talk. He learnt that here; and all his ways are just like yours and the master’s. He walks like the master, with a little stoop in his back and his feet turned out. And, when he laughs, he mimics you so exactly, miss, that, if one weren’t to see him, one would think it was you!”

  “Thank you, Gertrude.”

  “I’m not saying it to annoy you: there was a time when you would have been pleased to hear it. But you don’t care for Balaoo any more; and I can’t think what’s happened!”

  Suddenly, old Gertrude stopped cleaning her knives and ran into the dining-room, for Madeleine had burst into a fit of crying. She sat sobbing, with her elbows on the table and her fair-haired little head between her hands, while her shoulders shook spasmodically.

  “Oh, what is it, miss, what is it? Lord above, is it I who’ve upset you?...Do say something!...You frighten me!...”

  “Let me be, Gertrude, let me be!...”

  “I see myself letting you be, in such a state! I’ll go and call the master.”

  “No, no, Gertrude, don’t do anything of the sort...There...I’m all right now...”

  “I feel certain that something has happened!”

  “I wish you would stop talking your nonsense! What do you think can have happened? Nothing’s happened at all, do you hear, you old fool?”

  “I’m sure I beg your pardon, miss,” said Gertrude, wounded in her pride and returning to her kitchen.