What Happened in the Rue Maule
On his arrival in Paris, Tarzan had gone directly to the apartments of
his old friend, D’Arnot, where the naval lieutenant had scored him
roundly for his decision to renounce the title and estates that were
rightly his from his father, John Clayton, the late Lord Greystoke.
“You must be mad, my friend,” said D’Arnot, “thus lightly to give up
not alone wealth and position, but an opportunity to prove beyond doubt
to all the world that in your veins flows the noble blood of two of
England’s most honored houses—instead of the blood of a savage she-ape.
It is incredible that they could have believed you—Miss Porter least of
all.
“Why, I never did believe it, even back in the wilds of your African
jungle, when you tore the raw meat of your kills with mighty jaws, like
some wild beast, and wiped your greasy hands upon your thighs. Even
then, before there was the slightest proof to the contrary, I knew that
you were mistaken in the belief that Kala was your mother.
“And now, with your father’s diary of the terrible life led by him and
your mother on that wild African shore; with the account of your birth,
and, final and most convincing proof of all, your own baby finger
prints upon the pages of it, it seems incredible to me that you are
willing to remain a nameless, penniless vagabond.”
“I do not need any better name than Tarzan,” replied the ape-man; “and
as for remaining a penniless vagabond, I have no intention of so doing.
In fact, the next, and let us hope the last, burden that I shall be
forced to put upon your unselfish friendship will be the finding of
employment for me.”
“Pooh, pooh!” scoffed D’Arnot. “You know that I did not mean that. Have
I not told you a dozen times that I have enough for twenty men, and
that half of what I have is yours? And if I gave it all to you, would
it represent even the tenth part of the value I place upon your
friendship, my Tarzan? Would it repay the services you did me in
Africa? I do not forget, my friend, that but for you and your wondrous
bravery I had died at the stake in the village of Mbonga’s cannibals.
Nor do I forget that to your self-sacrificing devotion I owe the fact
that I recovered from the terrible wounds I received at their hands—I
discovered later something of what it meant to you to remain with me in
the amphitheater of apes while your heart was urging you on to the
coast.
“When we finally came there, and found that Miss Porter and her party
had left, I commenced to realize something of what you had done for an
utter stranger. Nor am I trying to repay you with money, Tarzan. It is
that just at present you need money; were it sacrifice that I might
offer you it were the same—my friendship must always be yours, because
our tastes are similar, and I admire you. That I cannot command, but
the money I can and shall.”
“Well,” laughed Tarzan, “we shall not quarrel over the money. I must
live, and so I must have it; but I shall be more contented with
something to do. You cannot show me your friendship in a more
convincing manner than to find employment for me—I shall die of
inactivity in a short while. As for my birthright—it is in good hands.
Clayton is not guilty of robbing me of it. He truly believes that he is
the real Lord Greystoke, and the chances are that he will make a better
English lord than a man who was born and raised in an African jungle.
You know that I am but half civilized even now. Let me see red in anger
but for a moment, and all the instincts of the savage beast that I
really am, submerge what little I possess of the milder ways of culture
and refinement.
“And then again, had I declared myself I should have robbed the woman I
love of the wealth and position that her marriage to Clayton will now
insure to her. I could not have done that—could I, Paul?
“Nor is the matter of birth of great importance to me,” he went on,
without waiting for a reply. “Raised as I have been, I see no worth in
man or beast that is not theirs by virtue of their own mental or
physical prowess. And so I am as happy to think of Kala as my mother as
I would be to try to picture the poor, unhappy little English girl who
passed away a year after she bore me. Kala was always kind to me in her
fierce and savage way. I must have nursed at her hairy breast from the
time that my own mother died. She fought for me against the wild
denizens of the forest, and against the savage members of our tribe,
with the ferocity of real mother love.
“And I, on my part, loved her, Paul. I did not realize how much until
after the cruel spear and the poisoned arrow of Mbonga’s black warrior
had stolen her away from me. I was still a child when that occurred,
and I threw myself upon her dead body and wept out my anguish as a
child might for his own mother. To you, my friend, she would have
appeared a hideous and ugly creature, but to me she was beautiful—so
gloriously does love transfigure its object. And so I am perfectly
content to remain forever the son of Kala, the she-ape.”
“I do not admire you the less for your loyalty,” said D’Arnot, “but the
time will come when you will be glad to claim your own. Remember what I
say, and let us hope that it will be as easy then as it is now. You
must bear in mind that Professor Porter and Mr. Philander are the only
people in the world who can swear that the little skeleton found in the
cabin with those of your father and mother was that of an infant
anthropoid ape, and not the offspring of Lord and Lady Greystoke. That
evidence is most important. They are both old men. They may not live
many years longer. And then, did it not occur to you that once Miss
Porter knew the truth she would break her engagement with Clayton? You
might easily have your title, your estates, and the woman you love,
Tarzan. Had you not thought of that?”
Tarzan shook his head. “You do not know her,” he said. “Nothing could
bind her closer to her bargain than some misfortune to Clayton. She is
from an old southern family in America, and southerners pride
themselves upon their loyalty.”
Tarzan spent the two following weeks renewing his former brief
acquaintance with Paris. In the daytime he haunted the libraries and
picture galleries. He had become an omnivorous reader, and the world of
possibilities that were opened to him in this seat of culture and
learning fairly appalled him when he contemplated the very
infinitesimal crumb of the sum total of human knowledge that a single
individual might hope to acquire even after a lifetime of study and
research; but he learned what he could by day, and threw himself into a
search for relaxation and amusement at night. Nor did he find Paris a
whit less fertile field for his nocturnal avocation.
If he smoked too many cigarettes and drank too much absinth it was
because he took civilization as he found it, and did the things that he
found his civilized brothers doing. The life was a new and alluring
one, and in addition he had a sorrow in his breast and a great longing
which he knew could never be fulfilled, and so he sought in study and
in dissipation—the two extremes—to forget the past and inhibit
contemplation of the future.
He was sitting in a music hall one evening, sipping his absinth and
admiring the art of a certain famous Russian dancer, when he caught a
passing glimpse of a pair of evil black eyes upon him. The man turned
and was lost in the crowd at the exit before Tarzan could catch a good
look at him, but he was confident that he had seen those eyes before
and that they had been fastened on him this evening through no passing
accident. He had had the uncanny feeling for some time that he was
being watched, and it was in response to this animal instinct that was
strong within him that he had turned suddenly and surprised the eyes in
the very act of watching him.
Before he left the music hall the matter had been forgotten, nor did he
notice the swarthy individual who stepped deeper into the shadows of an
opposite doorway as Tarzan emerged from the brilliantly lighted
amusement hall.
Had Tarzan but known it, he had been followed many times from this and
other places of amusement, but seldom if ever had he been alone.
Tonight D’Arnot had had another engagement, and Tarzan had come by
himself.
As he turned in the direction he was accustomed to taking from this
part of Paris to his apartments, the watcher across the street ran from
his hiding-place and hurried on ahead at a rapid pace.
Tarzan had been wont to traverse the Rue Maule on his way home at
night. Because it was very quiet and very dark it reminded him more of
his beloved African jungle than did the noisy and garish streets
surrounding it. If you are familiar with your Paris you will recall the
narrow, forbidding precincts of the Rue Maule. If you are not, you need
but ask the police about it to learn that in all Paris there is no
street to which you should give a wider berth after dark.
On this night Tarzan had proceeded some two squares through the dense
shadows of the squalid old tenements which line this dismal way when he
was attracted by screams and cries for help from the third floor of an
opposite building. The voice was a woman’s. Before the echoes of her
first cries had died Tarzan was bounding up the stairs and through the
dark corridors to her rescue.
At the end of the corridor on the third landing a door stood slightly
ajar, and from within Tarzan heard again the same appeal that had lured
him from the street. Another instant found him in the center of a
dimly-lighted room. An oil lamp burned upon a high, old-fashioned
mantel, casting its dim rays over a dozen repulsive figures. All but
one were men. The other was a woman of about thirty. Her face, marked
by low passions and dissipation, might once have been lovely. She stood
with one hand at her throat, crouching against the farther wall.
“Help, monsieur,” she cried in a low voice as Tarzan entered the room;
“they were killing me.”
As Tarzan turned toward the men about him he saw the crafty, evil faces
of habitual criminals. He wondered that they had made no effort to
escape. A movement behind him caused him to turn. Two things his eyes
saw, and one of them caused him considerable wonderment. A man was
sneaking stealthily from the room, and in the brief glance that Tarzan
had of him he saw that it was Rokoff. But the other thing that he saw
was of more immediate interest. It was a great brute of a fellow
tiptoeing upon him from behind with a huge bludgeon in his hand, and
then, as the man and his confederates saw that he was discovered, there
was a concerted rush upon Tarzan from all sides. Some of the men drew
knives. Others picked up chairs, while the fellow with the bludgeon
raised it high above his head in a mighty swing that would have crushed
Tarzan’s head had it ever descended upon it.
But the brain, and the agility, and the muscles that had coped with the
mighty strength and cruel craftiness of Terkoz and Numa in the fastness
of their savage jungle were not to be so easily subdued as these
apaches of Paris had believed.
Selecting his most formidable antagonist, the fellow with the bludgeon,
Tarzan charged full upon him, dodging the falling weapon, and catching
the man a terrific blow on the point of the chin that felled him in his
tracks.
Then he turned upon the others. This was sport. He was reveling in the
joy of battle and the lust of blood. As though it had been but a
brittle shell, to break at the least rough usage, the thin veneer of
his civilization fell from him, and the ten burly villains found
themselves penned in a small room with a wild and savage beast, against
whose steel muscles their puny strength was less than futile.
At the end of the corridor without stood Rokoff, waiting the outcome of
the affair. He wished to be sure that Tarzan was dead before he left,
but it was not a part of his plan to be one of those within the room
when the murder occurred.
The woman still stood where she had when Tarzan entered, but her face
had undergone a number of changes with the few minutes which had
elapsed. From the semblance of distress which it had worn when Tarzan
first saw it, it had changed to one of craftiness as he had wheeled to
meet the attack from behind; but the change Tarzan had not seen.
Later an expression of surprise and then one of horror superseded the
others. And who may wonder. For the immaculate gentleman her cries had
lured to what was to have been his death had been suddenly
metamorphosed into a demon of revenge. Instead of soft muscles and a
weak resistance, she was looking upon a veritable Hercules gone mad.
“_Mon Dieu!_” she cried; “he is a beast!” For the strong, white teeth
of the ape-man had found the throat of one of his assailants, and
Tarzan fought as he had learned to fight with the great bull apes of
the tribe of Kerchak.
He was in a dozen places at once, leaping hither and thither about the
room in sinuous bounds that reminded the woman of a panther she had
seen at the zoo. Now a wrist-bone snapped in his iron grip, now a
shoulder was wrenched from its socket as he forced a victim’s arm
backward and upward.
With shrieks of pain the men escaped into the hallway as quickly as
they could; but even before the first one staggered, bleeding and
broken, from the room, Rokoff had seen enough to convince him that
Tarzan would not be the one to lie dead in that house this night, and
so the Russian had hastened to a nearby den and telephoned the police
that a man was committing murder on the third floor of Rue Maule, 27.
When the officers arrived they found three men groaning on the floor, a
frightened woman lying upon a filthy bed, her face buried in her arms,
and what appeared to be a well-dressed young gentleman standing in the
center of the room awaiting the reenforcements which he had thought the
footsteps of the officers hurrying up the stairway had announced—but
they were mistaken in the last; it was a wild beast that looked upon
them through those narrowed lids and steel-gray eyes. With the smell of
blood the last vestige of civilization had deserted Tarzan, and now he
stood at bay, like a lion surrounded by hunters, awaiting the next
overt act, and crouching to charge its author.
“What has happened here?” asked one of the policemen.
Tarzan explained briefly, but when he turned to the woman for
confirmation of his statement he was appalled by her reply.
“He lies!” she screamed shrilly, addressing the policeman. “He came to
my room while I was alone, and for no good purpose. When I repulsed him
he would have killed me had not my screams attracted these gentlemen,
who were passing the house at the time. He is a devil, monsieurs; alone
he has all but killed ten men with his bare hands and his teeth.”
So shocked was Tarzan by her ingratitude that for a moment he was
struck dumb. The police were inclined to be a little skeptical, for
they had had other dealings with this same lady and her lovely coterie
of gentlemen friends. However, they were policemen, not judges, so they
decided to place all the inmates of the room under arrest, and let
another, whose business it was, separate the innocent from the guilty.
But they found that it was one thing to tell this well-dressed young
man that he was under arrest, but quite another to enforce it.
“I am guilty of no offense,” he said quietly. “I have but sought to
defend myself. I do not know why the woman has told you what she has.
She can have no enmity against me, for never until I came to this room
in response to her cries for help had I seen her.”
“Come, come,” said one of the officers; “there are judges to listen to
all that,” and he advanced to lay his hand upon Tarzan’s shoulder. An
instant later he lay crumpled in a corner of the room, and then, as his
comrades rushed in upon the ape-man, they experienced a taste of what
the apaches had but recently gone through. So quickly and so roughly
did he handle them that they had not even an opportunity to draw their
revolvers.
During the brief fight Tarzan had noted the open window and, beyond,
the stem of a tree, or a telegraph pole—he could not tell which. As the
last officer went down, one of his fellows succeeded in drawing his
revolver and, from where he lay on the floor, fired at Tarzan. The shot
missed, and before the man could fire again Tarzan had swept the lamp
from the mantel and plunged the room into darkness.
The next they saw was a lithe form spring to the sill of the open
window and leap, panther-like, onto the pole across the walk. When the
police gathered themselves together and reached the street their
prisoner was nowhere to be seen.
They did not handle the woman and the men who had not escaped any too
gently when they took them to the station; they were a very sore and
humiliated detail of police. It galled them to think that it would be
necessary to report that a single unarmed man had wiped the floor with
the whole lot of them, and then escaped them as easily as though they
had not existed.
The officer who had remained in the street swore that no one had leaped
from the window or left the building from the time they entered until
they had come out. His comrades thought that he lied, but they could
not prove it.
When Tarzan found himself clinging to the pole outside the window, he
followed his jungle instinct and looked below for enemies before he
ventured down. It was well he did, for just beneath stood a policeman.
Above, Tarzan saw no one, so he went up instead of down.
The top of the pole was opposite the roof of the building, so it was
but the work of an instant for the muscles that had for years sent him
hurtling through the treetops of his primeval forest to carry him
across the little space between the pole and the roof. From one
building he went to another, and so on, with much climbing, until at a
cross street he discovered another pole, down which he ran to the
ground.
For a square or two he ran swiftly; then he turned into a little
all-night café and in the lavatory removed the evidences of his
over-roof promenade from hands and clothes. When he emerged a few
moments later it was to saunter slowly on toward his apartments.
Not far from them he came to a well-lighted boulevard which it was
necessary to cross. As he stood directly beneath a brilliant arc light,
waiting for a limousine that was approaching to pass him, he heard his
name called in a sweet feminine voice. Looking up, he met the smiling
eyes of Olga de Coude as she leaned forward upon the back seat of the
machine. He bowed very low in response to her friendly greeting. When
he straightened up the machine had borne her away.
“Rokoff and the Countess de Coude both in the same evening,” he
soliloquized; “Paris is not so large, after all.”