A growl that lifted the hairs on the back of my neck came from above. It was followed by the descent of the duke’s heavy body upon our branch, which bent alarmingly. But Greystoke squatted upon it, his hands free, with all the ease of the baboon he had been accused of being.
“What does that last remark mean?” he said.
At that moment the moon broke through the clouds. A ray fell upon Holmes’ face, which was as pale as when he had been playing the dying detective. He said, “This is neither the time nor the place for an investigation of your credentials. We are in a desperate plight, and...”
“You don’t realise how desperate,” Greystoke said. “I usually abide by human laws when I am in civilisation or among the black blood-brothers of my ranch in East Africa. But when I am in my larger estate, that of Central Africa, when I am in the jungle, where I have a higher rank even than duke, where, to put it simply, I am the king, where I revert to my primal and happiest state, that of a great ape...”
Good Lord! I thought. And this is the man Holmes referred to as inarticulate!
“...then I obey only my own laws, not those of humanity, for which I have the greatest contempt, barring a few specimens of such...”
There was much more in this single statement, the length of which would have made any German philosopher proud. The gist of it was that if Holmes did not explain his remark now, he would have no chance to do so later. Nor was the duke backward in stating that I would not be taking any news of Holmes’ fate to the outside world.
“He means it, Holmes!” I said.
“I am well aware of that, Watson,” he answered. “His Grace is covered only with a thin veneer of civilisation.”
This phrase, I remembered, was one used often by the American novelist to describe his protagonist’s assumption of human culture.
“Very well, Your Highness,” Holmes said. “It is not my custom to set forth a theory until I have enough evidence to make it a fact. But under the circumstances...”
I looked for Greystoke to show some resentment at Holmes’ sarcastic use of a title appropriate only to a monarch. He, however, only smiled. This, I believe, was a reaction of pleasure, of ignorance of Holmes’ intent to cut him. He was sure that he deserved the title, and now that I have had time to reflect on it, I agree with him. Though a duke in England, in Africa he ruled a kingdom many times larger than our tight little isle. And he paid no taxes in it.
“Watson and I were acquainted with the ten-year-old son of the sixth duke, your reputed father,” Holmes said. “That boy, the then Lord Saltire, is not you. Yet you have the title that should be his. You notice that I do not say the title should rightly be his. You are the legitimate inheritor of the late duke’s titles and estates. Titles and estates, by the way, that should never have been his or his son’s.”
“Good Lord, Holmes!” I said. “What are you saying?”
“If you will refrain from interrupting, you will hear what I’m saying,” he responded sharply. “Your Grace, that American novelist who has written a highly fictionalised novel based on your rather... ahem... nonconventional behaviour in Africa, came closer to the truth than anybody but yourself, and a few of your friends, I presume, realise. Watson tells me that in the novel your father, who should have been the seventh duke, was marooned on the shores of western Africa with his wife. There you were born, and when your parents died, you were adopted by a tribe of large intelligent apes hitherto unknown to science. They were strictly a product of a romantic imagination, of course, and the apes must have been either chimpanzees or gorillas, both of which du Chaillu has reported seeing in West Africa. Neither, however, exists at ten degrees south latitude, which is where the novelist said you were born and raised. I would place your birth further north, say somewhere near or in the very country, Gabon, which du Chaillu visited.”
“Elementary, my dear Holmes,” Greystoke said, smiling slightly again. I warmed to him somewhat, since it was evident by his remark that he was acquainted with my narratives of the adventures of Holmes and myself. A man who read these, and with evident pleasure, couldn’t be all bad.
“If it is elementary,” Holmes said with some asperity, “I am still the only man complex enough to have grasped the truth.”
“Not all of it,” Greystoke replied. “That Yank writer was quite correct in his guess that the tribe that raised me was unknown to science. However, they were not great apes but a sort of apemen, beings halfway on the evolutionary ladder between Homo sapiens and the ape. They had speech, which, though simple, was still speech. And that is why I did not become incapable of using language, as all other feral humans so far discovered have been incapable. Once a child passes a certain age without encountering human speech, he is mentally retarded.”
“Really?” Holmes said.
“It does not matter whether or not you believe that,” the duke said.
“But the Yank had your uncle inheriting the title after his brother died and your parents were declared dead. Then your uncle, the sixth duke, died, and your cousin, the lad Watson and I knew as Lord Saltire, became the seventh duke. So far, the Yank’s account was in agreement with the reality. It is the next event which, in his romance, departed completely from reality.”
“And that was?” Greystoke said softly.
“Consider first what the Yank said happened. In his novel the jungle man found out that he was the rightful heir to the title. But he kept silent about it because he loved the heroine and she had promised to marry his cousin and considered herself bound by her promise. If he revealed the truth, he would strip her of her title of duchess and, worse, of the fortune which the cousin possessed. She would be penniless again. So he nobly said nothing.
“But according to Watson, a great reader of fiction, the Yank wrote a sequel to the first romance. In this the cousin gets sick and before dying confesses that he saw the telegram about the fingerprints, destroyed it, and ignobly kept silent. Fortunately, the girl had put off the marriage, so there is no question of her being a virgin, which is an important issue to the housemaids and some doctors who read this type of literature. Our hero becomes Lord Greystoke and everybody lives happily forever after — until the next adventure.
“I believe that in reality you did marry the girl on whom the novelist based his character. But that is pure nonsense about the jungle man’s assumption of the title. If that had happened in reality, do you think for a moment that the resultant publicity would not have been world-wide? What a story — the heir to an English title appearing out of the African forest, an heir not even known to exist, an heir who has been raised by a band of missing links. Can you imagine the commotion, the curiosity, inflaming the world? Can you imagine what a hell the heir’s life would be, no privacy, reporters trailing him at every step, an utter lack of privacy for not only him but his wife and his family?
“But we know that no such thing happened. We do know that an English peer who had led an uneventful life, except for being kidnapped when ten, at maturity goes to Africa and settles down upon a ranch. And after a while strange tales seep back to London, tales of this peer reverting to a jungle life, wandering through central Africa clad only in a loincloth, eating raw meat, killing lions with only a knife, breaking the necks of gorillas with full-nelsons, and consorting with apes and elephants. The man has suddenly become a combination of Hercules, Ulysses, and Mowgli. And Croesus, I might add, since he seems to have a source of great wealth hidden some place in deepest Africa. It is distributed through illegal channels, but word of it reaches Threadneedle Street and New Scotland Yard, of course.