“I assure you, madam, that it is all right.”
“He has marked your poor face! Oh, George, what a brute you are! Nothing but scandals from one end of the week to the other. Everyone hating and making fun of you. You’ve finished my patience. This ends it.”
“Dirty linen,” he rumbled.
“It’s not a secret,” she cried. “Do you suppose that the whole street – the whole of London, for that matter – Get away, Austin, we don’t want you here. Do you suppose they don’t all talk about you? Where is your dignity? You, a man who should have been Regius Professor at a great University with a thousand students all revering you. Where is your dignity, George?”
“How about yours, my dear?”
“You try me too much. A ruffian – a common brawling ruffian – that’s what you have become.”
“Be good, Jessie.”
“A roaring, raging bully!”
“That’s done it! Stool of penance!” said he.
To my amazement he stooped, picked her up, and placed her sitting upon a high pedestal of black marble in the angle of the hall. It was at least seven feet high, and so thin that she could hardly balance upon it. A more absurd object than she presented cocked up there with her face convulsed with anger, her feet dangling, and her body rigid for fear of an upset, I could not imagine.
“Let me down!” she wailed.
“Say ‘please.’ ”
“You brute, George! Let me down this instant!”
“Come into the study, Mr Malone.”
“Really, sir —!” said I, looking at the lady.
“Here’s Mr Malone pleading for you, Jessie.
Say ‘please,’ and down you come.”
“Oh, you brute! Please! please!”
“You must behave yourself, dear. Mr Malone is a Pressman. He will have it all in his rag tomorrow, and sell an extra dozen among our neighbors. ‘Strange story of high life’ – you felt fairly high on that pedestal, did you not? Then a sub-title, ‘Glimpse of a singular menage.’ He’s a foul feeder, is Mr Malone, a carrion eater, like all of his kind – porcus ex grege diaboli – a swine from the devil’s herd. That’s it, Malone – what?”
“You are really intolerable!” said I, hotly.
He bellowed with laughter.
“We shall have a coalition presently,” he boomed, looking from his wife to me and puffing out his enormous chest. Then, suddenly altering his tone, “Excuse this frivolous family badinage, Mr Malone. I called you back for some more serious purpose than to mix you up with our little domestic pleasantries. Run away, little woman, and don’t fret.” He placed a huge hand upon each of her shoulders. “All that you say is perfectly true. I should be a better man if I did what you advise, but I shouldn’t be quite George Edward Challenger. There are plenty of better men, my dear, but only one G. E. C. So make the best of him.” He suddenly gave her a resounding kiss, which embarrassed me even more than his violence had done. “Now, Mr Malone,” he continued, with a great accession of dignity, “this way, if YOU please.”
We re-entered the room which we had left so tumultuously ten minutes before. The Professor closed the door carefully behind us, motioned me into an arm-chair, and pushed a cigar-box under my nose.
“Real San Juan Colorado,” he said. “Excitable people like you are the better for narcotics. Heavens! don’t bite it! Cut – and cut with reverence! Now lean back, and listen attentively to whatever I may care to say to you. If any remark should occur to you, you can reserve it for some more opportune time.
“First of all, as to your return to my house after your most justifiable expulsion” – he protruded his beard, and stared at me as one who challenges and invites contradiction – “after, as I say, your well-merited expulsion. The reason lay in your answer to that most officious policeman, in which I seemed to discern some glimmering of good feeling upon your part – more, at any rate, than I am accustomed to associate with your profession. In admitting that the fault of the incident lay with you, you gave some evidence of a certain mental detachment and breadth of view which attracted my favorable notice. The sub-species of the human race to which you unfortunately belong has always been below my mental horizon. Your words brought you suddenly above it. You swam up into my serious notice. For this reason I asked you to return with me, as I was minded to make your further acquaintance. You will kindly deposit your ash in the small Japanese tray on the bamboo table which stands at your left elbow.”
All this he boomed forth like a professor addressing his class. He had swung round his revolving chair so as to face me, and he sat all puffed out like an enormous bull-frog, his head laid back and his eyes half-covered by supercilious lids. Now he suddenly turned himself sideways, and all I could see of him was tangled hair with a red, protruding ear. He was scratching about among the litter of papers upon his desk. He faced me presently with what looked like a very tattered sketch-book in his hand.
“I am going to talk to you about South America,” said he. “No comments if you please. First of all, I wish you to understand that nothing I tell you now is to be repeated in any public way unless you have my express permission. That permission will, in all human probability, never be given. Is that clear?”
“It is very hard,” said I. “Surely a judicious account – ”
He replaced the notebook upon the table.
“That ends it,” said he. “I wish you a very good morning.”
“No, no!” I cried. “I submit to any conditions. So far as I can see, I have no choice.”
“None in the world,” said he.
“Well, then, I promise.”
“Word of honor?”
“Word of honor.”
He looked at me with doubt in his insolent eyes.
“After all, what do I know about your honor?” said he.
“Upon my word, sir,” I cried, angrily, “you take very great liberties! I have never been so insulted in my life.”
He seemed more interested than annoyed at my outbreak.
“Round-headed,” he muttered. “Brachycephalic, gray-eyed, black-haired, with suggestion of the negroid. Celtic, I presume?”
“I am an Irishman, sir.”
“Irish Irish?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That, of course, explains it. Let me see; you have given me your promise that my confidence will be respected? That confidence, I may say, will be far from complete. But I am prepared to give you a few indications which will be of interest. In the first place, you are probably aware that two years ago I made a journey to South America – one which will be classical in the scientific history of the world? The object of my journey was to verify some conclusions of Wallace and of Bates, which could only be done by observing their reported facts under the same conditions in which they had themselves noted them. If my expedition had no other results it would still have been noteworthy, but a curious incident occurred to me while there which opened up an entirely fresh line of inquiry.
“You are aware – or probably, in this half-educated age, you are not aware – that the country round some parts of the Amazon is still only partially explored, and that a great number of tributaries, some of them entirely uncharted, run into the main river. It was my business to visit this little-known back-country and to examine its fauna, which furnished me with the materials for several chapters for that great and monumental work upon zoology which will be my life’s justification. I was returning, my work accomplished, when I had occasion to spend a night at a small Indian village at a point where a certain tributary – the name and position of which I withhold – opens into the main river. The natives were Cucama Indians, an amiable but degraded race, with mental powers hardly superior to the average Londoner. I had effected some cures among them upon my way up the river, and had impressed them considerably with my personality, so that I was not surprised to find myself eagerly awaited upon my return. I gathered from their signs that someone had urgent need of my medical services, and I followed the chief to one of his huts. When I entered I found that the sufferer to whose aid I had been summoned had that instant expired. He was, to my surprise, no Indian, but a white man; indeed, I may say a very white man, for he was flaxen-haired and had some characteristics of an albino. He was clad in rags, was very emaciated, and bore every trace of prolonged hardship. So far as I could understand the account of the natives, he was a complete stranger to them, and had come upon their village through the woods alone and in the last stage of exhaustion.