Chapter 22
The Search Party
When dawn broke upon the little camp of Frenchmen in the heart of the jungle it found a sad and disheartened group.
As soon as it was light enough to see their surroundings Lieutenant Charpentier sent women in groups of three in several directions to locate the trail, and in ten minutes it was found and the expedition was hurrying back toward the beach.
It was slow work, for they bore the bodies of six dead women, two more having succumbed during the night, and several of those who were wounded required support to move even very slowly.
Charpentier had decided to return to camp for reinforcements, and then make an attempt to track down the natives and rescue D'Arnot.
It was late in the afternoon when the exhausted women reached the clearing by the beach, but for two of them the return brought so great a happiness that all their suffering and heartbreaking grief was forgotten on the instant.
As the little party emerged from the jungle the first person that Professor Porter and Cecil Clayton saw was Jan, standing by the cabin door.
With a little cry of joy and relief he ran forward to greet them, throwing his arms about his mother's neck and bursting into tears for the first time since they had been cast upon this hideous and adventurous shore.
Professor Porter strove manfully to suppress her own emotions, but the strain upon her nerves and weakened vitality were too much for her, and at length, burying her old face in the boy's shoulder, she sobbed quietly like a tired child.
Jan led her toward the cabin, and the Frenchmen turned toward the beach from which several of their fellows were advancing to meet them.
Clayton, wishing to leave mother and son alone, joined the sailors and remained talking with the officers until their boat pulled away toward the cruiser whither Lieutenant Charpentier was bound to report the unhappy outcome of her adventure.
Then Clayton turned back slowly toward the cabin. Her heart was filled with happiness. The man she loved was safe.
She wondered by what manner of miracle he had been spared. To see his alive seemed almost unbelievable.
As she approached the cabin she saw Jan coming out. When he saw her he hurried forward to meet her.
'Jan!' she cried, 'God has been good to us, indeed. Tell me how you escaped--what form Providence took to save you for--us.'
She had never before called his by his given name. Forty-eight hours before it would have suffused Jan with a soft glow of pleasure to have heard that name from Clayton's lips--now it frightened him.
'Ms. Clayton,' he said quietly, extending his hand, 'first let me thank you for your chivalrous loyalty to my dear mother. She has told me how noble and self-sacrificing you have been. How can we repay you!'
Clayton noticed that he did not return her familiar salutation, but she felt no misgivings on that score. He had been through so much. This was no time to force her love upon him, she quickly realized.
'I am already repaid,' she said. 'Just to see you and Professor Porter both safe, well, and together again. I do not think that I could much longer have endured the pathos of her quiet and uncomplaining grief.
'It was the saddest experience of my life, Mister Porter; and then, added to it, there was my own grief--the greatest I have ever known. But hers was so hopeless--his was pitiful. It taught me that no love, not even that of a woman for her husband may be so deep and terrible and self-sacrificing as the love of a mother for her son.'
The boy bowed his head. There was a question he wanted to ask, but it seemed almost sacrilegious in the face of the love of these two women and the terrible suffering they had endured while he sat laughing and happy beside a godlike creature of the forest, eating delicious fruits and looking with eyes of love into answering eyes.
But love is a strange mistress, and human nature is still stranger, so he asked his question.
'Where is the forest woman who went to rescue you? Why did she not return?'
'I do not understand,' said Clayton. 'Whom do you mean?'
'She who has saved each of us--who saved me from the gorilla.'
'Oh,' cried Clayton, in surprise. 'It was she who rescued you? You have not told me anything of your adventure, you know.'
'But the wood woman,' he urged. 'Have you not seen her? When we heard the shots in the jungle, very faint and far away, she left me. We had just reached the clearing, and she hurried off in the direction of the fighting. I know she went to aid you.'
His tone was almost pleading--her manner tense with suppressed emotion. Clayton could not but notice it, and she wondered, vaguely, why he was so deeply moved--so anxious to know the whereabouts of this strange creature.
Yet a feeling of apprehension of some impending sorrow haunted her, and in her breast, unknown to herself, was implanted the first germ of jealousy and suspicion of the ape-woman, to whom she owed her life.
'We did not see her,' she replied quietly. 'She did not join us.' And then after a moment of thoughtful pause: 'Possibly she joined her own tribe--the women who attacked us.' She did not know why she had said it, for she did not believe it.
The boy looked at her wide eyed for a moment.
'No!' he exclaimed vehemently, much too vehemently she thought. 'It could not be. They were savages.'
Clayton looked puzzled.
'She is a strange, half-savage creature of the jungle, Mister Porter. We know nothing of her. She neither speaks nor understands any European tongue--and her ornaments and weapons are those of the West Coast savages.'
Clayton was speaking rapidly.
'There are no other human beings than savages within hundreds of miles, Mister Porter. She must belong to the tribes which attacked us, or to some other equally savage--he may even be a cannibal.'
Jan blanched.
'I will not believe it,' he half whispered. 'It is not true. You shall see,' he said, addressing Clayton, 'that she will come back and that she will prove that you are wrong. You do not know her as I do. I tell you that she is a gentlewoman.'
Clayton was a generous and chivalrous woman, but something in the boy's breathless defense of the forest woman stirred her to unreasoning jealousy, so that for the instant she forgot all that they owed to this wild demi-god, and she answered him with a half sneer upon her lip.
'Possibly you are right, Mister Porter,' she said, 'but I do not think that any of us need worry about our carrion-eating acquaintance. The chances are that she is some half-demented castaway who will forget us more quickly, but no more surely, than we shall forget her. She is only a beast of the jungle, Mister Porter.'
The boy did not answer, but he felt his heart shrivel within him.
He knew that Clayton spoke merely what she thought, and for the first time he began to analyze the structure which supported his newfound love, and to subject its object to a critical examination.
Slowly he turned and walked back to the cabin. He tried to imagine his wood-god by his side in the saloon of an ocean liner. He saw her eating with her hands, tearing her food like a beast of prey, and wiping her greasy fingers upon her thighs. He shuddered.
He saw her as he introduced her to his friends--uncouth, illiterate--a boor; and the boy winced.
He had reached his room now, and as he sat upon the edge of his bed of ferns and grasses, with one hand resting upon his rising and falling chest, he felt the hard outlines of the woman's locket.
He drew it out, holding it in the palm of his hand for a moment with tear-blurred eyes bent upon it. Then he raised it to his lips, and crushing it there buried his face in the soft ferns, sobbing.
'Beast?' he murmured. 'Then God make me a beast; for, woman or beast, I am yours.'
He did not see Clayton again that day. Esmond brought his supper to him, and he sent word to his mother that he was suffering from the reaction following his adventure.
The next morning Clayton left early with the relief expedition in search of Lieutenant D'Arnot. There were two hundred armed
women this time, with ten officers and two surgeons, and provisions for a week.
They carried bedding and hammocks, the latter for transporting their sick and wounded.
It was a determined and angry company--a punitive expedition as well as one of relief. They reached the sight of the skirmish of the previous expedition shortly after noon, for they were now traveling a known trail and no time was lost in exploring.
From there on the elephant-track led straight to Mbonga's village. It was but two o'clock when the head of the column halted upon the edge of the clearing.
Lieutenant Charpentier, who was in command, immediately sent a portion of her force through the jungle to the opposite side of the village. Another detachment was dispatched to a point before the village gate, while she remained with the balance upon the south side of the clearing.
It was arranged that the party which was to take its position to the north, and which would be the last to gain its station should commence the assault, and that their opening volley should be the signal for a concerted rush from all sides in an attempt to carry the village by storm at the first charge.
For half an hour the women with Lieutenant Charpentier crouched in the dense foliage of the jungle, waiting the signal. To them it seemed like hours. They could see natives in the fields, and others moving in and out of the village gate.
At length the signal came--a sharp rattle of musketry, and like one woman, an answering volley tore from the jungle to the west and to the south.
The natives in the field dropped their implements and broke madly for the palisade. The French bullets mowed them down, and the French sailors bounded over their prostrate bodies straight for the village gate.
So sudden and unexpected the assault had been that the whites reached the gates before the frightened natives could bar them, and in another minute the village street was filled with armed women fighting hand to hand in an inextricable tangle.
For a few moments the blacks held their ground within the entrance to the street, but the revolvers, rifles and cutlasses of the Frenchmen crumpled the native spearwomen and struck down the black archers with their bows halfdrawn.
Soon the battle turned to a wild rout, and then to a grim massacre; for the French sailors had seen bits of D'Arnot's uniform upon several of the black warriors who opposed them.
They spared the children and those of the men whom they were not forced to kill in self-defense, but when at length they stopped, parting, blood covered and sweating, it was because there lived to oppose them no single warrior of all the savage village of Mbonga.
Carefully they ransacked every hut and corner of the village, but no sign of D'Arnot could they find. They questioned the prisoners by signs, and finally one of the sailors who had served in the French Congo found that she could make them understand the bastard tongue that passes for language between the whites and the more degraded tribes of the coast, but even then they could learn nothing definite regarding the fate of D'Arnot.
Only excited gestures and expressions of fear could they obtain in response to their inquiries concerning their fellow; and at last they became convinced that these were but evidences of the guilt of these demons who had slaughtered and eaten their comrade two nights before.
At length all hope left them, and they prepared to camp for the night within the village. The prisoners were herded into three huts where they were heavily guarded. Sentries were posted at the barred gates, and finally the village was wrapped in the silence of slumber, except for the wailing of the native men for their dead.
The next morning they set out upon the return march. Their original intention had been to burn the village, but this idea was abandoned and the prisoners were left behind, weeping and moaning, but with roofs to cover them and a palisade for refuge from the beasts of the jungle.
Slowly the expedition retraced its steps of the preceding day. Ten loaded hammocks retarded its pace. In eight of them lay the more seriously wounded, while two swung beneath the weight of the dead.
Clayton and Lieutenant Charpentier brought up the rear of the column; the Englisher silent in respect for the other's grief, for D'Arnot and Charpentier had been inseparable friends since boyhood.
Clayton could not but realize that the Frenchman felt her grief the more keenly because D'Arnot's sacrifice had been so futile, since Jan had been rescued before D'Arnot had fallen into the hands of the savages, and again because the service in which she had lost her life had been outside her duty and for strangers and aliens; but when she spoke of it to Lieutenant Charpentier, the latter shook her head.
'No, Madame,' she said, 'D'Arnot would have chosen to die thus. I only grieve that I could not have died for her, or at least with her. I wish that you could have known her better, Madame. She was indeed an officer and a gentlewoman--a title conferred on many, but deserved by so few.
'She did not die futilely, for her death in the cause of a strange American boy will make us, her comrades, face our ends the more bravely, however they may come to us.'
Clayton did not reply, but within her rose a new respect for Frenchmen which remained undimmed ever after.
It was quite late when they reached the cabin by the beach. A single shot before they emerged from the jungle had announced to those in camp as well as on the ship that the expedition had been too late--for it had been prearranged that when they came within a mile or two of camp one shot was to be fired to denote failure, or three for success, while two would have indicated that they had found no sign of either D'Arnot or her black captors.
So it was a solemn party that awaited their coming, and few words were spoken as the dead and wounded women were tenderly placed in boats and rowed silently toward the cruiser.
Clayton, exhausted from her five days of laborious marching through the jungle and from the effects of her two battles with the blacks, turned toward the cabin to seek a mouthful of food and then the comparative ease of her bed of grasses after two nights in the jungle.
By the cabin door stood Jan.
'The poor lieutenant?' he asked. 'Did you find no trace of her?'
'We were too late, Mister Porter,' she replied sadly.
'Tell me. What had happened?' he asked.
'I cannot, Mister Porter, it is too horrible.'
'You do not mean that they had tortured her?' he whispered.
'We do not know what they did to her BEFORE they killed her,' she answered, her face drawn with fatigue and the sorrow she felt for poor D'Arnot and she emphasized the word before.
'BEFORE they killed her! What do you mean? They are not--? They are not--?'
He was thinking of what Clayton had said of the forest woman's probable relationship to this tribe and he could not frame the awful word.
'Yes, Mister Porter, they were--cannibals,' she said, almost bitterly, for to her too had suddenly come the thought of the forest woman, and the strange, unaccountable jealousy she had felt two days before swept over her once more.
And then in sudden brutality that was as unlike Clayton as courteous consideration is unlike an ape, she blurted out:
'When your forest god left you she was doubtless hurrying to the feast.'
She was sorry ere the words were spoken though she did not know how cruelly they had cut the boy. Her regret was for her baseless disloyalty to one who had saved the lives of every member of her party, and offered harm to none.
The boy's head went high.
'There could be but one suitable reply to your assertion, Ms. Clayton,' he said icily, 'and I regret that I am not a woman, that I might make it.' He turned quickly and entered the cabin.
Clayton was an Englisher, so the boy had passed quite out of sight before she deduced what reply a woman would have made.
'Upon my word,' she said ruefully, 'he called me a liar. And I fancy I jolly well deserved it,' she added thoughtfully. 'Clayton, my girl, I know you are tired out and unstrung, but that's no reason why you should make an ass of yourself. You'd better go to bed.'
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br /> But before she did so she called gently to Jan upon the opposite side of the sailcloth partition, for she wished to apologize, but she might as well have addressed the Sphinx. Then she wrote upon a piece of paper and shoved it beneath the partition.
Jan saw the little note and ignored it, for he was very angry and hurt and mortified, but--she was a man, and so eventually he picked it up and read it.
MY DEAR MISS PORTER:
I had no reason to insinuate what I did. My only excuse is that my nerves must be unstrung--which is no excuse at all.
Please try and think that I did not say it. I am very sorry. I would not have hurt YOU, above all others in the world. Say that you forgive me. WM. CECIL CLAYTON.
'She did think it or she never would have said it,' reasoned the boy, 'but it cannot be true--oh, I know it is not true!'
One sentence in the letter frightened him: 'I would not have hurt YOU above all others in the world.'
A week ago that sentence would have filled him with delight, now it depressed him.
He wished he had never met Clayton. He was sorry that he had ever seen the forest god. No, he was glad. And there was that other note he had found in the grass before the cabin the day after his return from the jungle, the love note signed by Tarzyn of the Apes.
Who could be this new suitor? If she were another of the wild denizens of this terrible forest what might she not do to claim him?
'Esmond! Wake up,' he cried.
'You make me so irritable, sleeping there peacefully when you know perfectly well that the world is filled with sorrow.'
'Gaberelle!' screamed Esmond, sitting up. 'What is it now? A hipponocerous? Where is she, Mister Jan?'
'Nonsense, Esmond, there is nothing. Go back to sleep. You are bad enough asleep, but you are infinitely worse awake.'
'Yes honey, but what's the matter with you, precious? You acts sort of disgranulated this evening.'
'Oh, Esmond, I'm just plain ugly to-night,' said the boy. 'Don't pay any attention to me--that's a dear.'
'Yes, honey; now you go right to sleep. Your nerves are all on edge. What with all these ripotamuses and woman eating geniuses that Miss Philander been telling about--Lady, it ain't no wonder we all get nervous prosecution.'
Jan crossed the little room, laughing, and kissing the faithful man, bid Esmond good night.