As the trainer, with raised lash, hesitated an instant at the entrance to the
box where the boy and the ape confronted him, a tall broad-shouldered man
pushed past him and entered. As his eyes fell upon the newcomer a slight flush
mounted the boy’s cheeks.
“Father!” he exclaimed.
The ape gave one look at the English lord, and then leaped toward him, calling
out in excited jabbering. The man, his eyes going wide in astonishment, stopped
as though turned to stone.
“Akut!” he cried.
The boy looked, bewildered, from the ape to his father, and from his father to
the ape. The trainer’s jaw dropped as he listened to what followed, for
from the lips of the Englishman flowed the gutturals of an ape that were
answered in kind by the huge anthropoid that now clung to him.
And from the wings a hideously bent and disfigured old man watched the tableau
in the box, his pock-marked features working spasmodically in varying
expressions that might have marked every sensation in the gamut from pleasure
to terror.
“Long have I looked for you, Tarzan,” said Akut. “Now that I
have found you I shall come to your jungle and live there always.”
The man stroked the beast’s head. Through his mind there was running
rapidly a train of recollection that carried him far into the depths of the
primeval African forest where this huge, man-like beast had fought shoulder to
shoulder with him years before. He saw the black Mugambi wielding his deadly
knob-stick, and beside them, with bared fangs and bristling whiskers, Sheeta
the terrible; and pressing close behind the savage and the savage panther, the
hideous apes of Akut. The man sighed. Strong within him surged the jungle lust
that he had thought dead. Ah! if he could go back even for a brief month of it,
to feel again the brush of leafy branches against his naked hide; to smell the
musty rot of dead vegetation—frankincense and myrrh to the jungle born;
to sense the noiseless coming of the great carnivora upon his trail; to hunt
and to be hunted; to kill! The picture was alluring. And then came another
picture—a sweet-faced woman, still young and beautiful; friends; a home;
a son. He shrugged his giant shoulders.
“It cannot be, Akut,” he said; “but if you would return, I
shall see that it is done. You could not be happy here—I may not be happy
there.”
The trainer stepped forward. The ape bared his fangs, growling.
“Go with him, Akut,” said Tarzan of the Apes. “I will come
and see you tomorrow.”
The beast moved sullenly to the trainer’s side. The latter, at John
Clayton’s request, told where they might be found. Tarzan turned toward
his son.
“Come!” he said, and the two left the theater. Neither spoke for
several minutes after they had entered the limousine. It was the boy who broke
the silence.
“The ape knew you,” he said, “and you spoke together in the
ape’s tongue. How did the ape know you, and how did you learn his
language?”
And then, briefly and for the first time, Tarzan of the Apes told his son of
his early life—of the birth in the jungle, of the death of his parents,
and of how Kala, the great she ape had suckled and raised him from infancy
almost to manhood. He told him, too, of the dangers and the horrors of the
jungle; of the great beasts that stalked one by day and by night; of the
periods of drought, and of the cataclysmic rains; of hunger; of cold; of
intense heat; of nakedness and fear and suffering. He told him of all those
things that seem most horrible to the creature of civilization in the hope that
the knowledge of them might expunge from the lad’s mind any inherent
desire for the jungle. Yet they were the very things that made the memory of
the jungle what it was to Tarzan—that made up the composite jungle life
he loved. And in the telling he forgot one thing—the principal
thing—that the boy at his side, listening with eager ears, was the son of
Tarzan of the Apes.
After the boy had been tucked away in bed—and without the threatened
punishment—John Clayton told his wife of the events of the evening, and
that he had at last acquainted the boy with the facts of his jungle life. The
mother, who had long foreseen that her son must some time know of those
frightful years during which his father had roamed the jungle, a naked, savage
beast of prey, only shook her head, hoping against hope that the lure she knew
was still strong in the father’s breast had not been transmitted to his
son.
Tarzan visited Akut the following day, but though Jack begged to be allowed to
accompany him he was refused. This time Tarzan saw the pock-marked old owner of
the ape, whom he did not recognize as the wily Paulvitch of former days.
Tarzan, influenced by Akut’s pleadings, broached the question of the
ape’s purchase; but Paulvitch would not name any price, saying that he
would consider the matter.
When Tarzan returned home Jack was all excitement to hear the details of his
visit, and finally suggested that his father buy the ape and bring it home.
Lady Greystoke was horrified at the suggestion. The boy was insistent. Tarzan
explained that he had wished to purchase Akut and return him to his jungle
home, and to this the mother assented. Jack asked to be allowed to visit the
ape, but again he was met with flat refusal. He had the address, however, which
the trainer had given his father, and two days later he found the opportunity
to elude his new tutor—who had replaced the terrified Mr. Moore—and
after a considerable search through a section of London which he had never
before visited, he found the smelly little quarters of the pock-marked old man.
The old fellow himself replied to his knocking, and when he stated that he had
come to see Ajax, opened the door and admitted him to the little room which he
and the great ape occupied. In former years Paulvitch had been a fastidious
scoundrel; but ten years of hideous life among the cannibals of Africa had
eradicated the last vestige of niceness from his habits. His apparel was
wrinkled and soiled. His hands were unwashed, his few straggling locks
uncombed. His room was a jumble of filthy disorder. As the boy entered he saw
the great ape squatting upon the bed, the coverlets of which were a tangled wad
of filthy blankets and ill-smelling quilts. At sight of the youth the ape
leaped to the floor and shuffled forward. The man, not recognizing his visitor
and fearing that the ape meant mischief, stepped between them, ordering the ape
back to the bed.
“He will not hurt me,” cried the boy. “We are friends, and
before, he was my father’s friend. They knew one another in the jungle.
My father is Lord Greystoke. He does not know that I have come here. My mother
forbid my coming; but I wished to see Ajax, and I will pay you if you will let
me come here often and see him.”
At the mention of the boy’s identity Paulvitch’s eyes narrowed.
Since he had first seen Tarzan again from the wings of the theater there had
been forming in his deadened brain the beginnings of a desire for revenge. It
is a characteristic of the weak and criminal to attribute to others the
misfortunes that are the result of their own wickedness, and so now it was that
Alexis Paulvitch was slowly recalling the events of his past life and as he did
so laying at the door of the man whom he and Rokoff had so assiduously
attempted to ruin and murder all the misfortunes that had befallen him in the
failure of their various schemes against their intended victim.
He saw at first no way in which he could, with safety to himself, wreak
vengeance upon Tarzan through the medium of Tarzan’s son; but that great
possibilities for revenge lay in the boy was apparent to him, and so he
determined to cultivate the lad in the hope that fate would play into his hands
in some way in the future. He told the boy all that he knew of his
father’s past life in the jungle and when he found that the boy had been
kept in ignorance of all these things for so many years, and that he had been
forbidden visiting the zoological gardens; that he had had to bind and gag his
tutor to find an opportunity to come to the music hall and see Ajax, he guessed
immediately the nature of the great fear that lay in the hearts of the
boy’s parents—that he might crave the jungle as his father had
craved it.
And so Paulvitch encouraged the boy to come and see him often, and always he
played upon the lad’s craving for tales of the savage world with which
Paulvitch was all too familiar. He left him alone with Akut much, and it was
not long until he was surprised to learn that the boy could make the great
beast understand him—that he had actually learned many of the words of
the primitive language of the anthropoids.
During this period Tarzan came several times to visit Paulvitch. He seemed
anxious to purchase Ajax, and at last he told the man frankly that he was
prompted not only by a desire upon his part to return the beast to the liberty
of his native jungle; but also because his wife feared that in some way her son
might learn the whereabouts of the ape and through his attachment for the beast
become imbued with the roving instinct which, as Tarzan explained to Paulvitch,
had so influenced his own life.
The Russian could scarce repress a smile as he listened to Lord
Greystoke’s words, since scarce a half hour had passed since the time the
future Lord Greystoke had been sitting upon the disordered bed jabbering away
to Ajax with all the fluency of a born ape.
It was during this interview that a plan occurred to Paulvitch, and as a result
of it he agreed to accept a certain fabulous sum for the ape, and upon receipt
of the money to deliver the beast to a vessel that was sailing south from Dover
for Africa two days later. He had a double purpose in accepting Clayton’s
offer. Primarily, the money consideration influenced him strongly, as the ape
was no longer a source of revenue to him, having consistently refused to
perform upon the stage after having discovered Tarzan. It was as though the
beast had suffered himself to be brought from his jungle home and exhibited
before thousands of curious spectators for the sole purpose of searching out
his long lost friend and master, and, having found him, considered further
mingling with the common herd of humans unnecessary. However that may be, the
fact remained that no amount of persuasion could influence him even to show
himself upon the music hall stage, and upon the single occasion that the
trainer attempted force the results were such that the unfortunate man
considered himself lucky to have escaped with his life. All that saved him was
the accidental presence of Jack Clayton, who had been permitted to visit the
animal in the dressing room reserved for him at the music hall, and had
immediately interfered when he saw that the savage beast meant serious
mischief.
And after the money consideration, strong in the heart of the Russian was the
desire for revenge, which had been growing with constant brooding over the
failures and miseries of his life, which he attributed to Tarzan; the latest,
and by no means the least, of which was Ajax’s refusal to longer earn
money for him. The ape’s refusal he traced directly to Tarzan, finally
convincing himself that the ape man had instructed the great anthropoid to
refuse to go upon the stage.
Paulvitch’s naturally malign disposition was aggravated by the weakening
and warping of his mental and physical faculties through torture and privation.
From cold, calculating, highly intelligent perversity it had deteriorated into
the indiscriminating, dangerous menace of the mentally defective. His plan,
however, was sufficiently cunning to at least cast a doubt upon the assertion
that his mentality was wandering. It assured him first of the competence which
Lord Greystoke had promised to pay him for the deportation of the ape, and then
of revenge upon his benefactor through the son he idolized. That part of his
scheme was crude and brutal—it lacked the refinement of torture that had
marked the master strokes of the Paulvitch of old, when he had worked with that
virtuoso of villainy, Nikolas Rokoff—but it at least assured Paulvitch of
immunity from responsibility, placing that upon the ape, who would thus also be
punished for his refusal longer to support the Russian.
Everything played with fiendish unanimity into Paulvitch’s hands. As
chance would have it, Tarzan’s son overheard his father relating to the
boy’s mother the steps he was taking to return Akut safely to his jungle
home, and having overheard he begged them to bring the ape home that he might
have him for a play-fellow. Tarzan would not have been averse to this plan; but
Lady Greystoke was horrified at the very thought of it. Jack pleaded with his
mother; but all unavailingly. She was obdurate, and at last the lad appeared to
acquiesce in his mother’s decision that the ape must be returned to
Africa and the boy to school, from which he had been absent on vacation.
He did not attempt to visit Paulvitch’s room again that day, but instead
busied himself in other ways. He had always been well supplied with money, so
that when necessity demanded he had no difficulty in collecting several hundred
pounds. Some of this money he invested in various strange purchases which he
managed to smuggle into the house, undetected, when he returned late in the
afternoon.
The next morning, after giving his father time to precede him and conclude his
business with Paulvitch, the lad hastened to the Russian’s room. Knowing
nothing of the man’s true character the boy dared not take him fully into
his confidence for fear that the old fellow would not only refuse to aid him,
but would report the whole affair to his father. Instead, he simply asked
permission to take Ajax to Dover. He explained that it would relieve the old
man of a tiresome journey, as well as placing a number of pounds in his pocket,
for the lad purposed paying the Russian well.
“You see,” he went on, “there will be no danger of detection
since I am supposed to be leaving on an afternoon train for school. Instead I
will come here after they have left me on board the train. Then I can take Ajax
to Dover, you see, and arrive at school only a day late. No one will be the
wiser, no harm will be done, and I shall have had an extra day with Ajax before
I lose him forever.”
The plan fitted perfectly with that which Paulvitch had in mind. Had he known
what further the boy contemplated he would doubtless have entirely abandoned
his own scheme of revenge and aided the boy whole heartedly in the consummation
of the lad’s, which would have been better for Paulvitch, could he have
but read the future but a few short hours ahead.
That afternoon Lord and Lady Greystoke bid their son good-bye and saw him
safely settled in a first-class compartment of the railway carriage that would
set him down at school in a few hours. No sooner had they left him, however,
than he gathered his bags together, descended from the compartment and sought a
cab stand outside the station. Here he engaged a cabby to take him to the
Russian’s address. It was dusk when he arrived. He found Paulvitch
awaiting him. The man was pacing the floor nervously. The ape was tied with a
stout cord to the bed. It was the first time that Jack had ever seen Ajax thus
secured. He looked questioningly at Paulvitch. The man, mumbling, explained
that he believed the animal had guessed that he was to be sent away and he
feared he would attempt to escape.
Paulvitch carried another piece of cord in his hand. There was a noose in one
end of it which he was continually playing with. He walked back and forth, up
and down the room. His pock-marked features were working horribly as he talked
silent to himself. The boy had never seen him thus—it made him uneasy. At
last Paulvitch stopped on the opposite side of the room, far from the ape.
“Come here,” he said to the lad. “I will show you how to
secure the ape should he show signs of rebellion during the trip.”
The lad laughed. “It will not be necessary,” he replied.
“Ajax will do whatever I tell him to do.”
The old man stamped his foot angrily. “Come here, as I tell you,”
he repeated. “If you do not do as I say you shall not accompany the ape
to Dover—I will take no chances upon his escaping.”
Still smiling, the lad crossed the room and stood before the Russ.
“Turn around, with your back toward me,” directed the latter,
“that I may show you how to bind him quickly.”
The boy did as he was bid, placing his hands behind him when Paulvitch told him
to do so. Instantly the old man slipped the running noose over one of the
lad’s wrists, took a couple of half hitches about his other wrist, and
knotted the cord.
The moment that the boy was secured the attitude of the man changed. With an
angry oath he wheeled his prisoner about, tripped him and hurled him violently
to the floor, leaping upon his breast as he fell. From the bed the ape growled
and struggled with his bonds. The boy did not cry out—a trait inherited
from his savage sire whom long years in the jungle following the death of his
foster mother, Kala the great ape, had taught that there was none to come to
the succor of the fallen.
Paulvitch’s fingers sought the lad’s throat. He grinned down
horribly into the face of his victim.
“Your father ruined me,” he mumbled. “This will pay him. He
will think that the ape did it. I will tell him that the ape did it. That I
left him alone for a few minutes, and that you sneaked in and the ape killed
you. I will throw your body upon the bed after I have choked the life from you,
and when I bring your father he will see the ape squatting over it,” and
the twisted fiend cackled in gloating laughter. His fingers closed upon the
boy’s throat.
Behind them the growling of the maddened beast reverberated against the walls
of the little room. The boy paled, but no other sign of fear or panic showed
upon his countenance. He was the son of Tarzan. The fingers tightened their
grip upon his throat. It was with difficulty that he breathed, gaspingly. The
ape lunged against the stout cord that held him. Turning, he wrapped the cord
about his hands, as a man might have done, and surged heavily backward. The
great muscles stood out beneath his shaggy hide. There was a rending as of
splintered wood—the cord held, but a portion of the footboard of the bed
came away.
At the sound Paulvitch looked up. His hideous face went white with
terror—the ape was free.
With a single bound the creature was upon him. The man shrieked. The brute
wrenched him from the body of the boy. Great fingers sunk into the man’s
flesh. Yellow fangs gaped close to his throat—he struggled,
futilely—and when they closed, the soul of Alexis Paulvitch passed into
the keeping of the demons who had long been awaiting it.
The boy struggled to his feet, assisted by Akut. For two hours under the
instructions of the former the ape worked upon the knots that secured his
friend’s wrists. Finally they gave up their secret, and the boy was free.
Then he opened one of his bags and drew forth some garments. His plans had been
well made. He did not consult the beast, which did all that he directed.
Together they slunk from the house, but no casual observer might have noted
that one of them was an ape.
