Coriolis assented; and Balaoo, after quickly bowing to the company, went up to his room without shaking hands with Madeleine.
Chapter XVIII
BALAOO FOUND GERTRUDE in his bedroom, putting out his evening-clothes and his dress-boots:
“Go away,” he said, roughly. “I’m not going out.”
“No one will know,” Gertrude answered, with a sigh, “and it will do you good to take a little air. Look, here’s twenty francs to enjoy yourself with. I’ll run down and serve the coffee and I’ll come back again. Get your things on.”
She went downstairs and returned in five minutes.
Balaoo was lying on the rug by the bedside. He had not changed his clothes and he was crying. Gertrude was terribly upset:
“What’s the matter with you? What’s the matter?”
“You know what’s the matter well enough!” replied Balaoo, pressing his clenched fists to his mouth to check his despair. “What did he come back for?”
“One can’t prevent his coming to Paris. He’s the master’s nephew. He’s here on business.”
“Oh, I know that, sooner or later, he’s bound to come and take Madeleine away. It is man’s law, but it will be my death.” Craftily he continued, “You may as well tell me if it’s for to-day or to-morrow. I swear I won’t hurt him. I promised Patti Palang Raing. Man is man; and I have shoe-hands instead of feet. I shall be quite good. I shall go straight to the Seine and drown myself without a word.”
“And what will become of me?” sobbed Gertrude.
“That’s not what I was asking. Is it for to-day or to-morrow?”
“But I assure you there’s no question of that!”
“Then tell me, you old vixen, why they wanted to send Zoé and me to the man’s house at Saint-Martin-des-Bois? It was the Bank of France to a handful of nuts that I agreed. They knew what they were doing and that I should love to see the Big Beech at Pierrefeu and the table-rock at Mahon and the orchard of my youth...But I suspected something...and, true enough, ‘he’ came!...Give me your word that you were not expecting him...You daren’t give me your word, eh?...Filth!”
At that moment, there was a tap-tap-tap at the door. Gertrude, flooding her handkerchief with her tears, went and opened it; and General Captain walked in:
“Hullo, Polly!” he said.
“Here’s this dirty rotter,” growled Balaoo. “What do you want, General Captain?” General Captain gave vent to a whole array of guttural and cackling sounds, that came from his throat as quickly as the words of any old woman in a rage.
“What’s he saying?” asked Gertrude.
“He says that he can’t understand why we haven’t started. I promised to take him to Pierrefeu.”
“Pierrefeu! Pierrefeu! Pierrefeu! Pierrefeu!” cried General Captain.
“He’s deafening me,” said Balaoo, turning over on his rug. “Go and fasten him to his perch, in the kitchen.”
“Let’s start! Let’s start! Let’s start!” yelled General Captain, flapping his wings.
“Oh, that’s enough of it!” said the pithecanthrope, catching him a tremendous box on the ear.
Gertrude, still weeping, put General Captain out of the room. They heard him, for a moment, on the landing, indulging in a torrent of bad language. Then he went downstairs very carefully, counting every step to the kitchen, where he climbed up on his perch near the door and pretended to go to sleep. As a matter of fact, he observed all that happened, for he was more inquisitive than any man-porter. It was not long before he saw Gertrude and Balaoo come down to the hall, taking endless precautions lest they should be heard.
Balaoo was dressed up to the nines. His light overcoat was open and gave a glimpse of his gleaming shirt-front and the silk lapels of his dinner-jacket. His patent leather boots shone like two black stars on the white flags of the hall.
“He’s off on the spree again,” thought General Captain. “And the old girl’ll kill herself sitting up for him!”
Balaoo allowed Gertrude to kiss him, before he started, and to slip some small change into his hand:
“Ah,” he said, with a sigh, “if I had not promised to fetch Gabriel, I should certainly have stayed at home!”
Gertrude pushed him gently out on the pavement and closed the heavy hall-door more gently still. Then she returned to the kitchen and settled down to spend the best part of the night dozing with her head on the table. She rejoiced at having persuaded Balaoo to go out:
“It’s a change for him,” she thought.
And she congratulated herself on having laid out his things on the bed: his dress-shirt, with the glittering front and the beautiful cuffs, as stiff as steel; his tall stand-up collar: things which no pithecanthrope can resist. (*)
(*) Negroes also are mad on well-starched white linen. — AUTHOR’S NOTE.
“Good night, ma’am,” said General Captain, in French.
“Good night, General Captain,” said Gertrude, politely.
This politeness was too good to last. General Captain felt a need also to treat old Gertrude as “filth!” But he learnt to his cost that what was permissible in a Balaoo was not always permitted in a General Captain. He got a beating with the tongs and raised such an outcry that Madeleine came running downstairs:
“What’s the matter?” she asked Gertrude, in an anxious voice. “Have you been crying again?”
“Yes.”
“Is it about Balaoo? Does he suspect anything?”
“Of course he suspects...It’ll be terrible!”
“Terrible!” repeated Madeleine, pensively.
Meanwhile, the melancholy Balaoo, with his hands dug into the pockets of his overcoat, his stick under his arm, his shoulders bent, his eyes fixed on the ground, was gliding like a shadow through the deserted streets, wrapped in his own thoughts.
He went down to the Seine by the back streets and turned up stream. On his right were the gloomy buildings of the Halle aux Vins.
What was his dinner-jacket doing in that evil-looking desert?
Well, Balaoo’s dinner-jacket was on its way to the Jardin des Plantes!(*)
(*) The Paris Botanical and Zoological Gardens on the south side of the Seine. — TRANSLATOR’S NOTE.
Coriolis had thought himself very clever in removing Balaoo from the bad influence of the forest and transferring the pithecanthrope’s abode to the heart of the capital; but he had committed a gross imprudence in taking a house only a few steps from the bears’ pit, the monkey-house and the lions’ and tigers’ cages. A man can’t think of everything!
And it was always in this direction, towards his brother-animals, that Balaoo’s, dreams led him, almost unconsciously, when his heart was heavy because of men.
On reaching the corner of the Pont d’ Austerlitz, Balaoo leant over the parapet and gazed at the rippling water and the shimmering reflections of the gas-jets.
He heaved a deep sigh and felt a touch on his shoulder: he turned round.
“Move on!”
It was an anxious policeman, suspecting a coming tragedy.
“Tchsschwopp!” said Balaoo.
“Eh? What did you say?”
Balaoo shrugged his shoulders and moved away in the darkness.
“A foreigner,” thought the policeman. “A Russian prince, perhaps...”
Tchsschwopp is east-monkey for something like, “Why can’t they leave one in peace?”
Balaoo had slanted towards the right and was now near the omnibus-office. He quickened his pace, following the railings, in search of solitude.
He found it. Then he pressed his forehead against the railings, the railings round the Jardin des Plantes, that huge cage in which men had shut up his brothers, the animals. Tired and shaking with sorrow as he was, the cold of the bars did him good; and he stood for a long time in that position, with his head against the rails, while his eyes, from which dropped two tears, round and heavy as marbles, glanced down his whole person to the black stars that were his patent-leather boots. That wa
s where the mystery lay, the mystery of his infinite unhappiness, which turned him into something worse than a pariah among men, something like a tamed animal, that is to say, the lowest thing on earth. For the lion is still somebody in his cage, in which timorous men have buried him alive; but Balaoo, what was he, in his patent-leather shoes? A man’s plaything, neither more nor less!...
Facing him, beyond the dark clumps of the trees, were the railed dens occupied by the great cats, whose heavy, alkaline scent reached him where he stood. He pictured them, calm, fateful and quiet, with their heads on their paws, sleeping peacefully in their houses. The crocodiles, stretched in their coffin-shaped compartments made no more noise than if they had been stuffed. Near them, under the blankets in which they wrapped their digestive dreams, were the reptiles: the noble families of snakes and Cleopatra’s asps, silly little animals, whose fame did not keep them from sleeping. For all these creatures were asleep. The very monkeys, who are never still during the day, were snoring, now that night had come, like brutes: like brutes, thought Balaoo, picturing to himself all that animal population slumbering while he sobbed out his pithecanthrope anguish against the railings.
Even in their captivity, he envied those others behind their bars.
It hurt him dreadfully.
What bliss not to know!...To be ignorant of the “difference!”...Oh, the difference was not so great: it was contained within those patent-leather boots of his; and the passers-by who met that fine young man in dinner-dress would never have guessed what he carried about with him, inside his patent-leather boots!...But he, he, he thought of nothing but that, but the difference...and it spoilt all his evenings. Everywhere, at the café, at the Conférence Bottier, even when he went on to the theatre, his mind was obsessed by the horrible thought of the difference...And his despair led him constantly to the cages of the animal people...There were evenings when he felt so unhappy that he could have longed to have the hard hoofs of the cab-horses in the place of his shoe-hands!...Yes, he would rather have nothing inside his shoes, like a cab-horse, than hide that disgrace there...
One day also, when Coriolis had taken him to see the great pictures at the Louvre, he had come home quite upset. He escaped at the first opportunity and ran to “his” Jardin des Plantes and there spent hours looking at the horny little digits of the stags and hinds and gazelles. There were men with feet like that!...Yes, he had seen them in the pictures of men: men with little horny shoes and two horns on their heads, two pretty horns peeping through their hair; men who played music and made the ladies dance in the forest: beautiful, laughing ladies, in airy dresses...He asked Coriolis if he could not have little horny shoes like those put to his feet, instead of his shoe-fingers; and Coriolis explained that that had not been done since the remote days of antiquity. Coriolis had made fun of him again, of course. Yes, Balaoo was, really and truly, nothing but a plaything for men, for Coriolis, for...for Madeleine!
There was nothing human about Balaoo’s sighs that evening; and he had best take care: he had already attracted a policeman’s attention; and here came a keeper, on the other side of the railings, going his rounds. The man stopped, without seeing him, and listened to hear where those extraordinary gasps came from. Was it the hippopotamus moaning in his sleep? The elephant trumpeting? The panther bored to death?...No, keeper, resume your rounds: it is Balaoo weeping. And Balaoo has nothing to do with you!
The keeper moved away; and Balaoo, under his breath, murmured the following plaint, which was rather a complaint and which he always carried with him, deep down in his sad heart:
“Patti Palang Kaing! Patti Palang Kaing!
Could not the God of Christian man
Say that these fingers bound should be,
The toes on the shoe-hands of me?
“Patti Palang Kaing! Patti Palang Kaing!
Why did the God of Christian man
Alter the language of my song
From my native Forest of Bandong
And teach me to weep at right or wrong,
If He could not also bring His mind
The toes of my shoe-hands to bind?
“Patti Palang Raing! Patti Palang Kaing!
Appeal to the God of Christian man
To restore the language of my song
From my native Forest of Bandong!
And give me back my mangrove-trees,
With my hands that were not as these!” (*)
(*) For the translation of these and the other verses in the present volume I am indebted to the willing assistance of Miss D. Eardley Wilmot. — TRANSLATOR’S NOTE.
Poor Balaoo! Luckily, he had Gabriel left to console him, Gabriel, who was waiting for him now.
But it would not do to attempt anything before the time for the keeper to finish his round. The clock struck. Balaoo wiped his wet eyes with his handkerchief, spat in his hands — a thing he never used to do before he saw the acrobats at the music-halls — and, with a very careful movement of his loins, so as not to crease his shirt-front, jumped inside the gardens.
Balaoo feared nothing on earth but dogs. He no longer dreaded the man’s rounds, the hour of which had passed; but he was afraid lest the dogs, who could feel him coming even in their sleep, should wake. Fortunately, they were tied up in the little yard near the lion house. Nevertheless, there was the question of the scent to be grappled with. But Balaoo had a capital trick, which always succeeded when he went to visit his friends, at night. He used first to call on the polecats, in the rotunda by the entrance, and would come out simply reeking of pole-cat. Then he was able to walk about anywhere and to go as near as he pleased to the buildings watched by the dags. The smell of polecat does not make them bark: it is a natural smell in the Jardin des Plantes; whereas the smell of man and the smell of pithecanthrope— “The same thing,” thought Balaoo — always makes dogs bark.
Balaoo knew where the keys of his friends’ houses hung, in the man’s house, near a little fanlight which you had only to push open. Then you just put in your hand. There was no danger.
He made no noise walking. He had learnt to walk silently even in his patent-leather boots. Besides, no feathered animal on his road, sleeping on one leg, would have been silly enough, even if wakened with a start, to cry murder. It would have known at once that friend Balaoo was passing. No animal wauld give the alarm: he could be easy, quite easy, as long as the dogs smelt the scent of pole-cat.
The Abyssinian goats, in their sheds, bade him good evening with a little beat of understanding which he alone took in and which he answered by just breathing through his nostrils, without stopping in his walk. The great waders, the tall herons played him a stealthy little tune on the castanets of their long beaks.
But he would not go near the horrible tribe of low-class monkeys, otherwise known as the monkeys with prehensile tails, who were the scum and the disgrace of the animal world. Every race has its scandals. Among the members of the Human Race are disreputable troglodytes, who live in stone caves, squatting on their hams, with hair coming down to their heels, even as there are astounding Esquimaux, with sealskin legs and thighs, and niggers, niggers who absolutely dare to wear white shirt-collars. If Balaoo ever rose to any sort of position among the members of the Race, if he woke up one morning with proper shoe-feet, he would give lectures all over the world in favour of forbidding niggers to wear other than black collars.
But the low-class monkeys with the prehensile tails were the greatest disgrace of all! A pithecanthrape can mix with all creation, from the highest to the lowest, without losing caste; but not with those!...If he, a pithecanthrope from the Forest of Bandang, were to do such a thing as that, no oriental anthropoid would ever forgive him; and Gabriel, if he came to hear of would spit in his face...flatly!
Balaoo, after calling on the pole-cats, exploring the surroundings and parading his pole-cat scent, returned to the lion-house. The inmates knew that it was he, by the way in which he turned the key in the lock. And there was a general commotion in the cages e
ven before he set foot in the corridor. However, if they expected, that evening, to have a good old palaver with Balaoo, who always told them such extraordinary man-stories, they were mistaken. His visit was brief. They had hardly time to say how-do-you-do and good-bye. Balaoo walked out again, leading by the hand a companion of almost his own size.
It was Gabriel, the great Asiatic ape.
At first there was not a word exchanged between them. Gabriel could judge by Balaoo’s attitude and silence that his friend was full of sorrow. He squeezed Balaoo’s hand gently, to convey to him that, without knowing the cause, he felt for him in his grief. As they turned by the sea-lions’ pond, Gabriel tried to ask a question; but Balaoo closed his mouth with a curt and impatient “Woop!” which means, “Please, I beg of you!” And Gabriel, seeing his friend so upset, squeezed his hand once more, harder this time.
“Tourôô! ’Tis good to feel the grasp of a friend’s hand,” thought Balaoo.
Balaoo had no friends, no chums, among men. He dreaded familiarity as the greatest danger that threatened him. He hid his shame under an uncompromising pride.
Latterly, especially during the last two months, it had seemed to him as though the time which he spent with Madeleine was being measured out to him grudgingly.
When he was not with Coriolis, who was his master, with Gertrude, who was his servant, or with Zoé, who was his little slave, he was all alone...all alone with the thought of Madeleine and his own shame.
The nights were terribly hard. Once, when he had been finding consolation in the company of the great cats in the lion-house, Gabriel, a new-comer behind the bars of civilization, had lent a flattering ear to all that Balaoo said; and the thought occurred to Balaoo to make a friend and comrade of the ape. He got on well with him, had much less difficulty than with the others in translating what he called his man-thoughts into animal language. They had common turns of speech, common idioms that delighted them and brought them within a mile of their Forest of Bandong. Java, their wild and mysterious mother, had sent the same blood flowing through their veins.
Collected Works of Gaston Leroux Page 308
