It was quite a small party at Lady Wyse’s. Disturnal was there, the
rising young High Church M.P.; Sir Peter Parchmin; his wife, and a
few miscellaneous ladies; General Wapshot; a Man with a Clever Face;
an Eminent Scientist; and a Philosopher. This last was not a speaking
character; a little wizened man with a bald head; he had made a
reputation in his youth by retiring into solitude for three years and
coming back with the apophthegm, ‘Give me a pebble and a protoplasm
and I will make you a universe.’ Nobody having given him either, his
plans had rested there. They put him in a Chair at Cambridge, and he
had never opened his mouth since. He and the Eminent Scientist were
men with that peculiar knack the learned have of looking out of place
in any clothes they wear, but convincing you somehow that they would
look more out of place without them. Lady Wyse had invited them quite
at random, because she thought they would be interested in a scientific
scheme which Sir Peter was to propound that night; she could not surely
be expected to distinguish different sorts of savants?
Lady Parchmin was a tired but talkative blonde, who made one feel sorry
for Sir Peter in a kind of abstract way; yet she was a saint, and he
was an immoral man. He pretended to pursue Lady Wyse from mean and
interested motives; but there he lied. His love for Lady Wyse was the
only genuine sentiment he had ever felt--that was why she tolerated
him; she was a strong ennobling thought, like Wagner music remembered
or imagined in a railway train; his wife, the eternal passenger who sat
before him, dim and dowdy, on the other seat, was only a monument of
dull duty and a long-forgotten fancy.
Dinner was drawing to a close. Wine and fruit were going round; the
butler had marched his squad away.
The Man with the Clever Face suddenly distinguished himself--Lady
Wyse had introduced him as ‘the well-known Mr. Holmes,’ but neither
Disturnal nor the General nor the Eminent Scientist remembered to have
heard of him before. Lady Parchmin had been recounting her emotions on
seeing a newspaper placard as she drove to dinner.
‘“There,” said I when I saw it, “I’m sure it’s the man I saw them
arresting this morning.”’
Mr. Holmes broke silence for the first time. He fixed his penetrating
gaze on Lady Parchmin’s hair, and said:
‘You must have said that to yourself then, for you drove here alone.’
She put her hands up quickly to her head, saying:
‘Good Heavens! How do you know that? I did. Peter walked.’
‘How extraordinary!’ murmured the guests.
‘Do tell me how you told?’ said Lady Parchmin.
Mr. Holmes looked round the table with a dry, triumphant smile; then
leaned confidentially towards Lady Parchmin, and explained:
‘I saw your husband’s goloshes in the hall.’
‘You must be a detective!’ said Lady Parchmin.
‘I am,’ he said.
‘How funny!’
‘Odd thing to meet at dinner, isn’t it?’ said their hostess languidly.
‘Now then, Sir Peter, out with your little scheme.’
Sir Peter cleared his throat and rearranged his wine-glasses. He looked
at Dwala.
‘I think you were present, Prince, at an evening at Lady Lillico’s,
where I was made to deliver a little lecture on the Missing Link?’
Dwala looked steadily into the Biologist’s eyes: he saw nothing there
but an enterprise and the desire to please; but he was conscious of a
secret triumph of amusement emanating from Lady Wyse.
‘Yes, I was there.’
‘I mentioned, if you remember, a scheme for an expedition?’
‘Yes, to find the Missing Link.’
‘Quite so. Well, our plan is this--I’m empowered to speak for the
University--the new writ is issued, and we can proceed to nomination at
any moment. Now, of course, we don’t _sell_ our nomination; you quite
understand that?’
Mr. Disturnal caught his roving eye, and nodded brightly.
‘But we’re determined to have a scientific man, or a man interested in
science. The University is delighted to accept you; but you must prove
your interest in science in the way that they select. Well, they’ve
selected a way, and if you accept their conditions, you’ll be nominated
on Saturday, which is the same thing with us as being elected.’
‘What’s the condition?’ asked Dwala.
‘That you guarantee the Missing Link Search Fund by handing in a cheque
for 50,000_l._, the balance, if any, to be returned when the search
is over. Mr. Holmes here is going out to Borneo in charge of the
expedition; and a scientist or two will go with him. Do you accept?’
Dwala glanced at Lady Wyse.
‘Certainly. I’ll send you the cheque to-night.’
‘And what do you propose to do with the Missing Link when you’ve got
him?’ asked Mr. Disturnal.
‘Ah!’ said the Biologist, consulting the eye of the Eminent Scientist:
‘that’s a big question.’
‘Can’t you imagine,’ said Lady Wyse, ‘what a scientist would do with a
strange animal?’
‘I’d put him in a bag and drown him, by Gad!’ said the General genially.
‘Ah, you’re not a scientist, General,’ said Lady Wyse. ‘Sir Peter would
thank Providence humbly for his opportunities, and set about studying
the creature’s soul. Can’t you imagine him walking politely round it
asking questions?’
‘Lady Wyse is joking, of course,’ said the Biologist. ‘If I got hold of
the animal, I know perfectly well what I should do.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Mr. Disturnal, in his bright, intellectual way.
‘I should examine his hippocampus minor.’
‘Well, really!’ said Lady Wyse, pushing back her chair: ‘we women had
better be going.’
‘It’s a curve in the brain,’ almost shouted Sir Peter, hurrying to the
door handle: ‘the thing Owen and Huxley fell out about.’
‘Bring the men up quick,’ said Lady Wyse. ‘I and your wife’ll have
nothing to talk about upstairs but you, and we’ll both be bored to
death.’
* * * * *
Mr. Holmes, who went early, had a great send-off; he was going
straight to Plymouth that night to superintend the preparation for the
expedition, which had only awaited Dwala’s promise. Sir Peter Parchmin
made a speech, and Mr. Holmes made a speech, and everybody waved
handkerchiefs on the balcony as he drove away.
‘Well,’ said Lady Wyse, as Dwala sat down beside her at last: ‘what do
you think of my little joke?’
‘It’s too human.’
‘I thought you’d be amused.’
‘It takes a great deal to make me laugh.’
‘Are you afraid people will discover your secret?’
‘I think you’re rash.’
‘I’m not. I’m calculating. Arrived where you are, you could sit all day
on a churchyard wall yelling your secret in people’s ears, and they
would pay no attention to it.’
‘Unless an honest man came by, or a clever one.’
‘An honest man wouldn’t be clever enough to hear it, and a clever one
wouldn’t be honest enough to repeat it.’
‘Don’t endanger a joke for the sake of a ... an epigram.’
‘Do you know, Prince, I have a sort of presentiment our joke will never
come off.’
‘Shall I never have a good laugh before I die?’
‘Who knows? Something may turn up.... But why do you cough like that?
Are you ill?’
‘No. I often cough like that.’
‘It would spoil everything if you were ill.’
With a little gesture Lady Wyse summoned the watchful Parchmin, and
bade him bring his fellow-savants.
‘What’s the matter with Prince Dwala?’ she asked. ‘He coughs in a funny
way. Examine him.’
The command covered the whole trio. The Philosopher assumed a frivolous
look. The Eminent Scientist disclaimed competence: he was Chemistry or
something.
‘Nonsense!’ said Lady Wyse. ‘What’s the good of being a scientist?’
Dwala towered serenely while the Biologist and the Eminent
Scientist--having exchanged grimaces of apology--walked round and
round him, with their ears to his sides, one behind the other, as if
it were a game, with an occasional murmur from the Biologist of ‘Cough
again’--‘Say ninety-nine.’
The little bald Philosopher stood opposite, with his eyebrows raised
and his hands behind his back, tipping himself patiently up and down on
his toes, like a half-witted child. The Biologist, meeting the Eminent
Scientist accidentally at a corner, made a parenthesis of his mouth and
shook his head. Coming to the perpendicular soon, he recommended care
and a healthy life.
‘Do you think there’s anything the matter with the Prince?’ Lady Wyse
asked Parchmin, aside.
‘I couldn’t say,’ said the Biologist. ‘I should like to examine him
properly first.’
‘How properly?’
‘One can’t tell anything through a shirt-front.’
‘Take him in there,’ she commanded, pointing to the door of the next
room, ‘and examine him _thoroughly_.’
Dwala hesitated. ‘Isn’t he ... clever?’ he murmured.
‘It’s all right,’ she smiled back; ‘he isn’t honest.’
A few minutes later, when the guests were gathering about Lady Wyse
to say good-bye, the door of the side-room burst open, and Sir Peter
Parchmin came tumbling out, white with horror. He seized the General,
who was nearest to him, in a wild embrace--half as a leaning-post, half
as a protection--crying:
‘Good Lord! He’s got a ta ... ta ... ta....’
‘Confound you, sir!’ said the General; ‘do you take me for Lady
Parchmin?’
The Biologist only clung the closer, babbling feebly in his ear:
‘He’s got a ta ... ta ... tail!’
* * * * *
It was true. Dwala had a tail. Now I am aware that in these days of
learning, when many an ordinary College Don knows as much science as
the elder Pliny, this will seem almost incredible; and in the eyes
of some it will throw doubt on the truth of my story, for it is well
known that the anthropoid apes have no tails. But then Dwala was not an
anthropoid ape, but a Missing Link. The fact is that in the old times
there were as many varieties of _Pithecanthropus erectus_ as there are
nowadays of _Homo sapiens britannicus_; but the physical differences
between them were far more clearly marked than ours. The aristocracy of
the race, to which Dwala’s family belonged, were distinguished from the
plebeians, not merely by the greater stoutness of their bony structure
and the superior coarseness of their fur--distinctions which a
demagogue might have argued down to nothing--but also by the possession
of tails, a thing about which there could be no mistake. Among the
lower classes even the merest stump, the flattering evidence of an old
scandal, entitled the owner to a certain measure of respect.
* * * * *
‘Confound his tail!’ exclaimed the peppery General, pushing him away.
‘Who’s got a tail? the dog?’
‘Dog?’ murmured the Biologist, in the dazed, indignant tones of a man
under the influence of a drug. ‘No! Prince Dwala!’
The General dropped rigid into an armchair, and bobbed up and down on
the springs of it. A shocked silence fell on the room, as if something
grossly indelicate had been shouted out. Men blinked and lowered their
heads; women stared and raised them. There was a movement as of looking
for things lost, an untranslated impulse towards the stairs.
Lady Wyse, the one thing alive in this wax-work show, went quickly to
the door and put her back against it, hand on handle, to prevent the
figures from escaping.
‘Sir Peter is talking like an idiot,’ she said, in low, clear tones;
‘he knows perfectly well that Prince Dwala no more has a tail than any
one of _us_ has.’
The horror of the fact suggested passed directly into indignation
at the suggestion of it. They turned on the Biologist, demanding an
explanation. The little General voiced the public feeling. He shot up
out of his chair, and shook the tall savant violently by the lappels of
his coat.
‘Have you been drinking, sir? Do you know that there are ladies
present?’
A chorus of inarticulate wrath went up. They crowded scowling round
the frightened Parchmin, women with folded arms, men with their hands
thrust deep down into their trouser pockets.
‘Now then sir, explain yourself!’ said the General; ‘what do you mean
by a tail?’
‘Da ... da ... did I say a tail?’
The General shook him again. ‘You know you did!’
‘I ... I ... I ... I didn’t mean a tail,’ stammered the Biologist; ‘not
in the ordinary sense....’
‘You said _tail_, sir!’
‘I didn’t mean an ... an ... an actual prolongation of the caudal
vertebrae.’
‘Well, what did you mean, then?’
‘I only meant he had....’
‘Go on.’
‘I thought I detected....’
‘Go on--go on.’
‘That if the Prince wasn’t careful ... there was a sort of incipient
hardening of the skin which might lead to what German doctors call a
“tail.” It’s a purely technical term. I ... I ... apologise, I’m sure,
for having spoken inadvertently.’
‘He ought to be ashamed of himself!’ was the general verdict.
‘What a dreadful thing to happen at a dinner-party!’
‘At Lady Wyse’s too, of all places!’
They all turned their backs on him, and crowded round Dwala, who
emerged serenely at this moment from the next room; shaking hands
warmly with him, as if he had just achieved a triumph. Mr. Disturnal
smiled him a meaning smile as he said good-bye.
Dwala and the Biologist were the last to go.
‘Good-bye,’ said Lady Wyse to Sir Peter. ‘I suppose you’ll stop the
Expedition now?’
‘Stop the Expedition? Why?’
‘Great heavens! Then you haven’t guessed the secret after all?’
The Biologist stared at her with wild eyes for several seconds, then
suddenly twirled and fell like a sack on the floor. When they had
bathed him back to his senses at last, he sat up on his hands and said:
‘Prince Dwala must blow his brains out!’
Lady Wyse rang laughter like a bell.
‘Why?’ asked Dwala, greatly interested.
‘Any English gentleman would.’
‘I forbid it!’ said Lady Wyse.
‘Why?’
‘He’d spoil his hippocampus minor.’
‘Pah!’ exploded Sir Peter bitterly: ‘you always take his side.’