Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs (book club reads .TXT) đź“•
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- Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs
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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 Englishman 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 his grief the more keenly because D’Arnot’s sacrifice had been so futile, since Jane had been rescued before D’Arnot had fallen into the hands of the savages, and again because the service in which he had lost his life had been outside his duty and for strangers and aliens; but when he spoke of it to Lieutenant Charpentier, the latter shook his head.
“No, Monsieur,” he said, “D’Arnot would have chosen to die thus. I only grieve that I could not have died for him, or at least with him. I wish that you could have known him better, Monsieur. He was indeed an officer and a gentleman—a title conferred on many, but deserved by so few.
“He did not die futilely, for his death in the cause of a strange American girl will make us, his comrades, face our ends the more bravely, however they may come to us.”
Clayton did not reply, but within him 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 his black captors.
So it was a solemn party that awaited their coming, and few words were spoken as the dead and wounded men were tenderly placed in boats and rowed silently toward the cruiser.
Clayton, exhausted from his five days of laborious marching through the jungle and from the effects of his two battles with the blacks, turned toward the cabin to seek a mouthful of food and then the comparative ease of his bed of grasses after two nights in the jungle.
By the cabin door stood Jane.
“The poor lieutenant?” she asked. “Did you find no trace of him?”
“We were too late, Miss Porter,” he replied sadly.
“Tell me. What had happened?” she asked.
“I cannot, Miss Porter, it is too horrible.”
“You do not mean that they had tortured him?” she whispered.
“We do not know what they did to him before they killed him,” he answered, his face drawn with fatigue and the sorrow he felt for poor D’Arnot and he emphasized the word before.
“Before they killed him! What do you mean? They are not—? They are not—?”
She was thinking of what Clayton had said of the forest man’s probable relationship to this tribe and she could not frame the awful word.
“Yes, Miss Porter, they were—cannibals,” he said, almost bitterly, for to him too had suddenly come the thought of the forest man, and the strange, unaccountable jealousy he had felt two days before swept over him once more.
And then in sudden brutality that was as unlike Clayton as courteous consideration is unlike an ape, he blurted out:
“When your forest god left you he was doubtless hurrying to the feast.”
He was sorry ere the words were spoken though he did not know how cruelly they had cut the girl. His regret was for his baseless disloyalty to one who had saved the lives of every member of his party, and offered harm to none.
The girl’s head went high.
“There could be but one suitable reply to your assertion, Mr. Clayton,” she said icily, “and I regret that I am not a man, that I might make it.” She turned quickly and entered the cabin.
Clayton was an Englishman, so the girl had passed quite out of sight before he deduced what reply a man would have made.
“Upon my word,” he said ruefully, “she called me a liar. And I fancy I jolly well deserved it,” he added thoughtfully. “Clayton, my boy, 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.”
But before he did so he called gently to Jane upon the opposite side of the sailcloth partition, for he wished to apologize, but he might as well have addressed the Sphinx. Then he wrote upon a piece of paper and shoved it beneath the partition.
Jane saw the little note and ignored it, for she was very angry and hurt and mortified, but—she was a woman, and so eventually she 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.
“He did think it or he never would have said it,” reasoned the girl, “but it cannot be true—oh, I know it is not true!”
One sentence in the letter frightened her: “I would not have hurt you above all others in the world.”
A week ago that sentence would have filled her with delight, now it depressed her.
She wished she had never met Clayton. She was sorry that she had ever seen the forest god. No, she was glad. And there was that other note she had found in the grass before the cabin the day after her return from the jungle, the love note signed by Tarzan of the Apes.
Who could be this new suitor? If he were another of the wild denizens of this terrible forest what might he not do to claim her?
“Esmeralda! Wake up,” she cried.
“You make me so irritable, sleeping there peacefully when you know perfectly well that the world is filled with sorrow.”
“Gaberelle!” screamed Esmeralda, sitting up. “What is it now? A hipponocerous? Where is he, Miss Jane?”
“Nonsense, Esmeralda, 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, Esmeralda, I’m just plain ugly to-night,” said the girl. “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 man eating geniuses that Mister Philander been telling about—Lord, it ain’t no wonder we all get nervous prosecution.”
Jane crossed the little room, laughing, and kissing the faithful woman, bid Esmeralda good night.
Brother Men.
When D’Arnot regained consciousness, he found himself lying upon a bed of soft ferns and grasses beneath a little “A” shaped shelter of boughs.
At his feet an opening looked out upon a green sward, and at a little distance beyond was the dense wall of jungle and forest.
He was very lame and sore and weak, and as full consciousness returned he felt the sharp torture of many cruel wounds and the dull aching of every bone and muscle in his body as a result of the hideous beating he had received.
Even the turning of his head caused him such excruciating agony that he lay still with closed eyes for a long time.
He tried to piece out the details of his adventure prior to the time he lost consciousness to see if they would explain his present whereabouts—he wondered if he were among friends or foes.
At length he recollected the whole hideous scene at the stake, and finally recalled the strange white figure in whose arms he had sunk into oblivion.
D’Arnot wondered what fate lay in store for him now. He could neither see nor hear any signs of life about him.
The incessant hum of the jungle—the rustling of millions of leaves—the buzz of insects—the voices of the birds and monkeys seemed blended into a strangely soothing purr, as though he lay apart, far from the myriad life whose sounds came to him only as a blurred echo.
At length he fell into a quiet slumber, nor did he awake again until afternoon.
Once more he experienced the strange sense of utter bewilderment that had marked his earlier awakening, but soon he recalled the recent past, and looking through the opening at his feet he saw the figure of a man squatting on his haunches.
The broad, muscular back was turned toward him, but, tanned though it was, D’Arnot saw that it was the back of a white man, and he thanked God.
The Frenchman called faintly. The man turned, and rising, came toward the shelter. His face was very handsome—the handsomest, thought D’Arnot, that he had ever seen.
Stooping, he crawled into the shelter beside the wounded officer, and placed a cool hand upon his forehead.
D’Arnot spoke to him in French, but the man only shook his head—sadly, it seemed to the Frenchman.
Then D’Arnot tried English, but still the man shook his head. Italian, Spanish and German brought similar discouragement.
D’Arnot knew a few words of Norwegian, Russian, Greek, and also had a smattering of the language of one of the West Coast negro tribes—the man denied them all.
After examining D’Arnot’s wounds the man left the shelter and disappeared. In half an hour he was back with fruit and a hollow gourd-like vegetable filled with water.
D’Arnot drank and ate a little. He was surprised that he had no fever. Again he tried to converse with his strange nurse, but the attempt was useless.
Suddenly the man hastened from the shelter only to return a few minutes later with several pieces of bark and—wonder of wonders—a lead pencil.
Squatting beside D’Arnot he wrote for a minute on the smooth inner surface of the bark; then he handed it to the Frenchman.
D’Arnot was astonished to see, in plain print-like characters, a message in English:
I am Tarzan of the Apes. Who are you? Can you read this language?
D’Arnot seized the pencil—then he stopped. This strange man wrote English—evidently he was an Englishman.
“Yes,” said D’Arnot, “I read English. I speak it also. Now we may talk. First let me thank you for all that you have done for me.”
The man only shook his head and pointed to the pencil and the bark.
“Mon Dieu!” cried D’Arnot. “If you are English why is it then that you cannot speak English?”
And then in a flash it came to him—the man was a mute, possibly a deaf mute.
So D’Arnot wrote a message on the bark, in English.
I am Paul d’Arnot, Lieutenant in the navy of France. I thank you for what you have done for me. You have saved my life, and all that I have is yours. May I ask how it is that one who writes English does not speak it?
Tarzan’s reply filled D’Arnot with still greater wonder:
I speak only the language of my tribe—the great apes who were Kerchak’s; and a little of the languages of Tantor, the elephant, and Numa, the lion, and of the other folks of the jungle I understand. With a human being I have never spoken, except once with Jane Porter, by signs. This is the first time I have spoken with another of my kind through written words.
D’Arnot was mystified. It seemed incredible that there lived upon earth a full-grown man who had never spoken with a fellow man, and still more preposterous that such a one could read and write.
He looked again at Tarzan’s message—“except once, with Jane Porter.” That was the American girl who had been carried into the jungle by a gorilla.
A sudden light commenced to dawn on D’Arnot—this then was the “gorilla.” He seized the pencil and wrote:
Where is Jane Porter?
And Tarzan replied, below:
Back with her people in the cabin of Tarzan of the Apes.
She is not dead then? Where was she? What happened to her?
She is not dead. She was taken by Terkoz
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