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 50,000l., 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.’