Collected Works of Gaston Leroux

by Gaston Leroux

  Another thing that attracted Balaoo was that the pithecanthrope realized, at the first glance, all that could be made of an ape, properly dressed by a smart tailor. To begin with, there is a closer resemblance between your anthropoid ape, with his straight nose and his long, oval face, and a Western man than between a Chinese, for instance, and a gentleman from Tunis. But this particular ape is found only in the Far East, near the Forest of Bandong, and is a cousin of the pithecanthrope.

  Of course, the pithecanthrope is his superior, for he unites within himself the three greatest qualities in the world: the dexterity of the Java ape, the strength of the gorilla and the intelligence of man.

  “The pithecanthrope is as handy as the Java ape and as powerful as the African gorilla, but not as clever as man,” thought Balaoo, quite rightly. “But he is cleverer than the Java ape.”

  Gabriel believed everything that Balaoo told him and accepted his lead without question. This, moreover, was the only condition on which Balaoo consented, occasionally, to take Gabriel out, in the night of men, to amuse him. And Gabriel was not to growl when he got, back. Once, when Gabriel did growl on returning to his cage, Balaoo gave him a good shaking and swore that he should not see him again for two months.

  Balaoo did not want to have any bothers. He could not take Gabriel to Coriolis’, could he? And Gabriel, once outside his cage, was helpless without Balaoo. So no nonsense! Settled, once and for all. Tourôô! All right!

  Balaoo was still holding Gabriel by the hand. Together they stole to the dead-butterfly-house. The two of them had spent hours here chatting, sure of remaining undisturbed. It was here that Balaoo, before venturing to let Gabriel take his first steps in the night of men, gave him his final instructions and imparted his last lessons in behaviour before a pier-glass that dated back to Mme. de Pompadour. And it was in an old wall-cupboard, in which Cuvier,(*) as likely as not, had kept his things, that Balaoo hung up the very smart suit of clothes with which he had presented Gabriel and in which Gabriel proudly arrayed himself before their escapades.

  (*) Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), the famous French naturalist. — TRANSLATOR’S NOTE.

  They made their way in by methods of their own, methods connected with windows and gutter-pipes. And they came out again without soiling their clothes.

  Balaoo was no longer the scapegrace of the Big Beech at Pierrefeu, who used to return to the man’s house with the seat of his trousers torn. His trousers, whatever the exercise in which he indulged, never had any other crease than that which they were meant to have. And Balaoo was anxious that Gabriel should take the same care of his things that he did.

  They both wore the little soft, black-felt hats that were then the fashion. Lastly, Balaoo had made Gabriel a present of a magnificent pair of spectacles. The one with his eye-glass and the other with his spectacles could go where they pleased, without fear of molestation. But they must mind the dogs.

  Balaoo and Gabriel, dressed like smart man-youths, waited behind the entrance at the corner of the Rue de Jussieu, without hurrying, for there was no smell of keeper.

  Suddenly:

  “Now!” said Balaoo.

  One, two, three and over the railings! But they did not loiter in the Rue de Jussieu. Three bounds brought them to the Rue Lacépède, where they stopped to take breath. And, staidly and sedately, they turned up the well-lighted pavement of the Rue Monge.

  They walked along very nicely, still holding each other by the hand, and nothing particular happened until they reached the Rue des Écoles. Here Balaoo said:

  “Listen, Gabriel, I shall let go your hand now, because we are coming to a swagger part where people of our age don’t walk hand-in-hand. But be very careful. Don’t leave me. Do everything that I do; and none of your tricks, mind!”

  These injunctions were superfluous at the time when they first went out together. Gabriel, trembling all over with anxiety, was then content to imitate all Balaoo’s movements; in fact this caused them to be noticed one evening and taken for larking foreigners. But Gabriel was beginning to acquire a certain freedom from restraint; and Balaoo dreaded his impulses:

  “None of your tricks!” he repeated. “And mind the dogs!”

  For, once mere, Balaoo feared nothing on earth but dogs. The word fear is not strong enough: he was terrified of them. When he saw one, he would turn pale and fly, jump into a tram, or fling himself into a passing cab and tell the driver to go to the first address that came into his head: Bandong, for instance! He lost all his presence of mind. The moment a dog saw him, the first thing it did was to look at Balaoo’s feet. One would think that it knew, that it guessed what was inside Balaoo’s boots; and, however much that dog might respect the boots of anybody else, it knew no peace, unless Balaoo was clever enough to retreat in time, until it had tried its longing teeth on Balaoo’s shoe leather.

  “The fear of dogs,” Balaoo explained to Gabriel, in quick and comprehensive monkey-language, accompanied by a facial and manual pantomime which means as much to monkeys as to men, who themselves emphasize their words with gestures and grimaces, “the fear of dogs is the first stage of wisdom. Patti Palang Kaing classes men and dogs together. He says, in his book of the forest, ‘Do not trust their animal appearance, their hanging tongues, their arched tails, their whole air of being out for their own enjoyment, sniffing the good smell of the earth. They work for men without seeming to, like the traitors that they are, and they will dig their fangs into your throat, straight away, for a mere “Thank-you” from man.’”

  “Patti Palang Kaing speaks of the big sporting-dogs, not of the little dogs you meet in the cafes,” said Gabriel, scratching the tip of his nose.

  “Don’t do that!” said Balaoo, hitting him with his stick. “The little dogs in the cafés, on the ladies’ laps, are very troublesome too. They never stop barking while one’s in the room. I never sit down without first looking round to see if there’s a little dog about.”

  Just then, as they were passing the Brasserie Amédée, a little dog, on the lap of a lady sitting outside in the street, began to yelp like mad.

  “Come away!” said Balaoo.

  And he took Gabriel’s hand to drag him to the opposite pavement.

  But the little dog was too quick for them and, leaping from the lady’s lap, fastened its teeth in the calf of Gabriel’s leg. Gabriel, in his irritation, gave it a kick on the jaw and killed it.

  The thing happened so rapidly that Balaoo had no time to interfere:

  “And that’s not the end of it!” he thought, as he realized the damage done. “A pretty business, this is!”

  A crowd gathered round them in a moment, while the lady uttered heart-rending cries and stirred up the whole neighbourhood against them.

  The customers outside the café had risen as one man and were abusing them for wild beasts and savages. The girls on the students’ arms broke their sunshades and umbrellas over the two friends’ backs. A gentleman tried to hand Gabriel his card.

  Balaoo did not let go of Gabriel’s hand. Gabriel stood trembling and chattering his teeth. He was especially terrified at the eyes of the gentleman who was holding out his card.

  “The dirty aliens!” cried somebody.

  “Don’t answer,” said Balaoo, who seemed to have some experience of this sort of riot, having no doubt more than once, quite unintentionally, provoked the anger of the populace in the course of his nocturnal escapades. “Don’t answer. Fall back.” He fell back step by step, dragging Gabriel with him. “Fall back, without a word; and, whatever you do, don’t touch them.”

  But the crowd followed their retreat. And the gentleman with the card hung on to them and persisted in thrusting his pasteboard under Gabriel’s nose. Gabriel could not help breathing on the card, which tickled him — breathing through his nose — and then there was the devil to pay. The gentleman shouted that that villain, that murderer, that coward who refused to fight had spat in his face!

  The arrival of a number of students, marching down the R
ue Champollion in single file, added to the uproar and confusion. Balaoo, still retreating — for he knew where he was going — and still dragging Gabriel him, had the happy thought of taking the lunatic’s and telling him that he would hear from their seconds in the morning: he had seen this done at the theatre in a play by M. Georges Ohnet. Still yielding before the impact of the crowd, they soon found themselves with their backs against the Musée de Cluny. This was was what Balaoo was waiting for:

  “Hop!” he said. “Hop!”

  “Hop” means “jump” in monkey — as well as man-language. Gabriel understood. An ivy creeper hung from a gargoyle. Balaoo and the anthropoid ape were in the museum garden before the others knew what had become of them. When they understood, they redoubled their din. A window of the museum opened and a poet, M. Haracourt, put out his head to declare that they were making it impossible for him to work.

  The people explained that there were two ruffians in his garden. Thereupon he woke all the attendants, but no one was found hiding behind the stone relics of Julian the Apostate; and the crowd, emitting a variety of opinions on the event, went back to the Brasserie Amedée for more drinks.

  Meanwhile, Balaoo and Gabriel were far away, sitting outside a café at the corner of the Avenue Victoria and the Place du Châtelet, ensconced in a dark corner where you can drink at your ease, that is to say, with your fingers. And Balaoo said to Gabriel:

  “You see what dogs can bring you to. I had a system with them at Saint-Martin-des-Bois. To save bother, I hanged them all. The people believed in an epidemic of dogs; no one in the neighbourhood ever kept a dog again; and I was left in peace. But there are too many of them in Paris!”

  “Last time we went out, you promised to take me to Maxim’s. Are there any dogs there?”

  “No, but you won’t be, able to drink with your fingers.”

  Balaoo, at the beginning, had intended to take Gabriel’s education thoroughly in hand; but this was only a momentary good-natured impulse. And, whenever they were certain that they were alone, in the shade outside a cafe, with their hats over their eyes, they would straightway, both of them, drink their lager-beer with their fingers: you dip your fingers into the glass and suck.

  This relieved Balaoo of no little constraint. His excuse was that he thought that no one saw him. And, before throwing a stone at him, we should first make sure that we know a single member of the Race who never, in the seclusion of his bachelor dining-room, thinking himself unobserved, eats his fried potatoes with his fingers or rests his elbows on the table. And we have all read how M. de Vigny (*) used to take his meals in private, so as to eat more at his ease.

  All went well on the Place du Châtelet until the man with the pea-nuts arrived, when Balaoo had the mortification of seeing Gabriel leap at that worthy merchant and rob him of his wares in the twinkling of an eye.

  (*) Comte Alfred de Vigny (1797-1863), the author of Cinq-Mars. He spent the last twenty years of his life in retirement. — TRANSLATOR’S NOTE.

  The pea-nut vendor, mad with terror and thinking that his last hour had struck, contented himself with picking himself out of the gutter into which he had rolled and running away at full speed in search of a policeman. He found one and brought him stalking to the café where the tragedy had been enacted.

  The scared and peaceable customers told the man that his assailant had gone away with a gentleman who said that he would “make himself responsible.” They had tried to keep them back, so that they might offer some explanation, but in vain. The brutal lover of pea-nuts had left without a word, on the pretext that he did not speak French. Paris is full of foreigners who consider that they can safely take any liberty.

  Some members of the audience at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, who had come out during the interval for a drink and witnessed the attack, had ventured under the emotions aroused by Angelo Tyrant of Padua, to express the opinion that “it is not necessary to go to the theatre to see dishonest people.” Whereupon the gentleman who was with the lover of pea-nuts and who had “made himself responsible” declared that “it is not dishonest when you pay for things” and, before departing with his friend, laid a penny on the table.

  Then, as they had not settled for their bocks, the manager and the waiter had run after them; but the one carrying the basket of pea-nuts under his arm turned and showed two such formidable and threatening rows of white teeth, under his spectacles — you saw nothing but teeth and spectacles in his face — that the two men stopped, feeling sure that that indelicate customer had meant to bite them.

  While the policeman was taking notes in his little book and asking the people to “speak in turns” and while the plaintiff was mourning the goods which he would never see again, Balaoo and Gabriel had long been “moving on,” in the familiar phrase of the minions of the law. Seated on the top of the tram-car that runs from Montrouge to the Gare de l’Est, they enjoyed the mildness of the weather, the beauty of the young leaves on the trees along the boulevard, the charm of that spring evening and the excellence of the pea-nuts.

  Balaoo waited to “remonstrate” with Gabriel until the basket was empty, which was when they reached the Saint-Lazare prison. Gabriel was proposing to get down and walk along the cafés in search of more pea-nut vendors; and Balaoo felt that the time had come to enlarge upon the danger of his conduct. He put on his severe voice to tell Gabriel that, if he went on stealing pea-nuts, he would go to prison. And, pointing to the walls opposite, he explained to him what a man’s prison was.

  Gabriel could not help shuddering at the sight of that horrible building. He thought of his bright and airy cage in the Jardin des Plantes, among the trees and the flowers, where he was visited daily by man-children’s nurses and by scarlet-legged warriors. He promised Balaoo anything and everything, if Balaoo would only take him to Maxim’s. Balaoo had told him that it was the best cafe in Paris for pine-apples and bananas, only you must behave properly there and keep quiet, because it is visited by the best people. Balaoo himself had been there two or three times, having heard it well spoken of, between the positive and the negative, at the Conférence Bottier.

  “I don’t mind taking you to Maxim’s,” said Balaoo, “but you understand that, if you go for the bananas and pine-apples as you went for the pea-nuts, we shall be in for trouble. You must wait to be served and not imagine that every dish that passes before your eyes is meant for you.”

  Gabriel swore by Patti Palang Kaing that he would keep his hands in his pockets.

  Half an hour later, they drove up in a taxi-cab and walked into Maxim’s. As the driver of the taxi had not been paid, he waited for them, as in duty bound, outside the door.

  Balaoo and Gabriel felt a little shy and had not the courage to disturb all the fine people who blocked up the middle passage between the tables. Moreover, Balaoo had his own little favourite corner, on the left, as you go in, behind the door. You attract less notice there and can eat your pine-apples and bananas in peace and comfort.

  “Oh, here’s the Hindu professor!” said Henry, the manager, as Balaoo and his friend entered the restaurant. “Baptiste, take a pine-apple to the Hindu professor. And some bananas.”

  In first-class establishments, a customer has but to visit the place twice for the waiters to remember all his tastes and little ways. Baptiste went to execute the order and returned almost at once:

  “The Hindu professor wants to speak to you,” he said. “I can’t make out what he’s saying.”

  “But he speaks French.”

  “Yes, only he’s asking for raw rice. I can’t serve him with raw rice!”

  “Raw rice?”

  The manager walked to the table at which Balaoo and Gabriel were seated and bowed:

  “Have you given your order, gentlemen?”

  “It’s like this,” said Balaoo, cutting up a pine-apple for Gabriel. “I’ve brought a friend with me. My friend would like a little rice. Can you give us some rice?”

  “Certainly, sir,” said Henry, with his us
ual perfect manner, which never betrayed the least astonishment.

  “How would you like it served? With milk? Or in a soup? Or rice-croquettes or cakes? Would you care for gravy-rice?”

  “We should like it raw,” said Balaoo, giving one half of the pine-apple to Gabriel, whose head was hidden under his soft felt hat.

  “Quite raw?”

  “Yes, quite raw, in a salad-bowl. It’s very easy: you take a large salad-bowl and, fill it with rice. You bring it to us; and we pour in some champagne.”

  “Ah, I see,” said Henry, “an Indian dish! It ought to be delicious.”

  And he hurried off to give the order.

  “Try and eat decently,” said Balaoo to Gabriel, “They’re staring at us. It’s not difficult to eat a pine-apple decently.”

  “There are no dogs here,” said Gabriel, speaking with his mouth full, “but lots of ladies.”

  “Be careful with the ladies,” said Balaoo. “They’re almost as big a nuisance as the dogs. If they speak to you, don’t kick them; leave it to me to answer them.”

  Gabriel, who had finished his pine-apple, started eating the tooth-picks, unseen by Balaoo:

  “Tourôô!” he said. “Rely on me!”

  At that moment, a “lady” passed and said: “Hullo, there’s the Hindu professor! He’s brought his monkey with him!”

  Balaoo turned white with rage:

  “Goek!” he said, following her with his eyes. “She smells of buffalo-hump.”

  But the sight of that brazen woman who smelt so strong carried his thoughts back, by a fatal contrast, to a young man-woman who smelt like the spring when the violets sprouted among the mossy roots of the Big Beech at Pierrefeu. In vain he tried to divert his mind with the incident of the pea-nuts, the dead dog and all the comical situations caused by Gabriel’s inexperience and charming innocence: the sad and anxious thought of Madeleine seared his inmost heart, even as his inside was scorched when he ate a whole jar of pickles by himself.

  Meanwhile, Gabriel had finished not only the pine-apple, but all the bananas and all the tooth-picks: