Jane (46 page)

So perplexed was I that I instead urged Tarzan to imagine the places on his father’s map where we would one day travel. Borneo, Stockholm, Mongolia, California. He told me he wished to know more of his mother’s and father’s life than had been written in their journal. That he hoped to ride on a train and in an automobile. To hear music and to see how
tar-zans
danced.

Yet I was plagued by doubts. I anguished compulsively over the question of whether I was in love with this man or simply consumed by lust. Whether our unique adventure and great passion were enough to move a couple through an entire lifetime. Did he love me, or see me simply as his “mate,” his “woman”? I had come to him in Eden almost magically, and I was, after all, the only non-Waziri female he had ever known, save his mother. Would he cleave so tightly to me when there were other young, pretty girls (and surely there would be) fawning and truckling at handsome Lord Greystoke’s feet?

I did some unselfish worrying as well. No amount of explanation, I argued with myself, could ever convey the claustrophobia of living the better part of life indoors—the loss of the freedoms Tarzan took for granted in a thousand different ways.

Oh, how I wished for some guidance in this endeavor! But there was none to be had. I could only hope for the best.

We nearly lost the journal in the mangrove swamp below Mbele territory, so treacherous was the rain-flooded tangle of roots. I hadn’t counted on being welcomed into the Mbele village after our tragic visit, but Chief Motobe had successfully sold the ivories that Father had given him and, at least for the moment, the people were prospering. I sat with the women stitching from the Waziri textile a simple garment for me, one that would cover me sufficiently for polite company.

Tarzan was taken into Motobe’s hut and emerged wearing the breeches and ragged linen shirt of the colonial officer whose jacket was the centerpiece of the chief’s holiday garb. Thus outfitted, we were taxied in a dugout canoe up the tributary to the main branch of the Ogowe.

I had done my best to prepare Tarzan for the first shock of modern technology, but sight of the stern-wheeler chugging downriver like a great white monster set him back on his heels. It was hard to read his expression, for there was some fright and horror admixed with admiration and excitement. And I knew that he wished above all, in the face of extreme circumstances, to appear brave and manly in my eyes.

We were taken aboard the
Dangereuse,
a craft less well captained and maintained than
La Belle Fille,
and the offer to pay our fare with a Waziri necklace was eagerly accepted. My appearance caused considerable commotion, as the “death of the white Englishwoman” had occasioned gossip all up and down the watercourse for many weeks after the Porter Expedition had come out of the jungle.

The captain plied me with countless questions, few of which I was willing to answer. He looked askance at the peculiarly clad “John Clayton” and tried to keep him up late at night drinking sherry and learn what he was sure were the sordid details of my rescue. Tarzan refused to drink, but he did use the French-accented captain to practice at English conversation, and insisted that the man show him every detail of the vessel, from the steam-run engine to the maps in the wheelhouse.

But the closer we came to civilization, the more apprehensive I became. Nothing I could ever describe would have prepared my lover for the shock of Libreville—the noise and the stench and frantic activity at every turn.

The moment we disembarked, I learned that a freighter would be sailing for England the next morning at dawn, and I quickly made arrangements for our passage home. As I negotiated for a tiny cabin with the captain—sadly, not my Captain Kelly—I saw a wide-eyed Tarzan standing alone on the dock, watching the rush and clatter of human commerce all around him. Again I observed his embrace of new experience, yet many times I saw him recoil at a harsh sound or the mindless jostling he received by the dockhands, blacks who must have looked unfathomable to him—Waziri tribesmen dressed in white men’s clothes, speaking the white man’s language.

With so little time till our departure, I became an army sergeant, ticking off all that we must accomplish before the morning. I hastily wrote a message to my mother telling her that I was alive and coming home, and sent it off as a telegram. Tarzan dutifully followed me everywhere, and I was forever extricating myself from his clutching embrace, as men unknown to him—black and white both, but all of them loud and aggressive—came unreasonably close to my person. How to explain that the crush of humanity was to be expected in city life, and that I was in no imminent danger? And how odd that he had trusted me to fight hand to hand with a grown man in the great chamber of Sumbula yet worried for my safety on the dock at Libreville.

Tarzan survived his first rickshaw ride with more equanimity than I could imagine—the sight of four native men propelling us in a box down crunching gravel avenues with strange
wallas
looming on both sides. His eyes grew wide as we trotted through the marketplace, where he gawked at the gaily dressed seesters and mammies, their piles of ripe fruit and vegetables. He grabbed my hand when we passed small wooden cages in which colorful
neetas
sat passively on perches, and grew visibly alarmed to see a row of monkeys likewise imprisoned. “I will explain later,” I told him, wondering how I would excuse this “civilized” practice of animal abduction and keeping. Only when we started out the coast road and passed beneath the scarlet bower of the flamboyant trees did he seem to soften and grow easy.

My disappointment was impossible to disguise when we arrived at Cecily’s house to find it altogether empty and boarded up with no one to tell me what had become of her.

Thus with nowhere to stay and no source of clothing to put on our backs, we made a forced return to the center of Libreville. I deposited Tarzan at the town’s only haberdasher, paying for a suit of clothes to be hastily assembled while I visited the dressmaker.

I felt my own clothes to be confining after the loose shift (and less) that I had become accustomed to. As Tarzan and I walked into the Libreville Hotel lobby, I could see he was chafing against his suit. It must have felt miserably tight around his limbs and neck … and the shoes had to have been unbearable.

He was staring openly at the trophy head of a lion mounted on the wall above the counter, and I cursed myself for failing to warn him of such monstrosities. As I traded gold for a room for “my husband and myself,” I was grateful for the moral leniency of the French in general and their downright laxity in this colonial backwater, for we had no luggage, I wore no wedding ring, and in a questionable and most unladylike manner I was negotiating for accommodations with a strange gold artifact.

I determined we should attempt eating a meal in a civilized setting and so we were seated in the nearly empty hotel dining room.

Tarzan sat rod straight in his chair and I whispered that he could lean against the back cushion if he liked. So much minutiae we took for granted in everyday life! Would I become nothing more than a full-time tutor?

He did quite well with his plates and glass and utensils, but we both found the food atrocious. Cecily had been right about that. I managed to get Tarzan to spit the poisonous stuff into his napkin and not onto the plate. I admit I did the same.

I was determined, though, to have him practice the manners he would be called upon to use in short order, so I began some quiet dinner conversation.

“You asked me once about Lord Greystoke. Do you remember?”

He nodded once.

“It might be better if you answered, ‘Yes, I remember.’”

“Yes, I remember,” he dutifully parroted.

“In England there are many, many people.”

“That live in
wallas,
” he added.

“Houses.”

“They live in
houses,
as many as there are trees in the forest.”

“That’s right. But some of the people live in small houses and others in very large ones. That’s because the ones who live in large houses have more money than the ones in small houses.”

“Money?”

“You know the Waziri necklaces I used to trade for our rooms on the ship and the room here?”

“Yes.”

“Those necklaces are made of gold, and gold is a kind of money. The men in England who have the most money…” I stopped then, because what I was about to say was absurd and profoundly upsetting to me.

“Tell me about the men in England who have the most money.”

“They get to be the headmen.”

“There is more than one headman?”

“Many more. One for every tribe. Tribes are called ‘families.’ Your father was from the Clayton family, and they had a great deal of money.”

“Do they live in a large house?”

“When they were alive they did. In a very large house.”

“But who is Lord Greystoke?”

“Lord Greystoke is a title, like ‘chief’—another name for a person. When your father’s father was alive, he was Lord Greystoke. When he died, his son, your father, became Lord Greystoke.”

Tarzan looked utterly perplexed.

“And now that your father is dead, his son,
you,
are Lord Greystoke. It means that you are an important man in England.”

“A chief?”

“In a way you’re a chief. You meet with other lords in an even bigger house in London—the House of Lords—and together you make the laws. Rules everyone else has to follow. You own a great deal of land, and horses and dogs, and you have many … oh, God…”

“I have many…? What do I have many of?”

“Servants. Yes, I know. ‘What are servants?’” I was finding it difficult to hide my agitation. “Servants are men and women who have very little money. So they work in the houses of men with lots of money and do the things that the rich men don’t want to do for themselves.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I!”

He looked at me quizzically. “Have I made you angry?”

“No. And I’ve done a pathetic job explaining the English aristocracy to you.” I sighed. “You are John Clayton
and
Lord Greystoke. You are a wealthy and important man. And when you get to England and have a houseful of servants waiting on you hand and foot and everyone trying to push you this way and that and fit you into their stinking little boxes, you’re going to be a very unhappy man indeed!”

With that I stood from the table, wiping hot tears from my face. “Can we go to our room, please?”

Tarzan leaped from his chair so quickly it toppled over behind him. I took his arm, and leaving a Waziri coin behind, we hurried out of the dining room.

Once in our room I tried to settle myself down, but Tarzan, obviously suffering from claustrophobia in the small hot space, said almost immediately, “There is something dead nearby.”

It was the
air
that was dead, I thought, though I had no way to express such a thing. When I showed him the toilet and the bathtub rooms down the hall and explained their functions, he grew visibly confused. I thought then that if the word “ridiculous” had been part of his vocabulary, he would have employed it.

All of this worried me, for if today’s sights and sounds and smells grated on Tarzan’s being, what a horror he would find Liverpool or London. It might be necessary to keep him in the countryside for a good long while. He might never acclimate, I thought miserably. But I was too exhausted to make small talk or any more convoluted explanations of this strange world into which I was taking him.

I suggested we get some sleep, and we undressed. But when I went to turn down the gaslights, I found that Tarzan had climbed out of bed and was curling up on the floor under the open window.

From the dark I heard him say, “This is how people live in England?”

I wished desperately to reassure him that it wasn’t, but that would have been a lie. “I’m afraid so,” I said, and with a heavy heart, I lay myself down. I was gone as soon as my head touched the pillow.

My dreams were scattered and disturbing, the worst of them the sight of Tarzan strapped into an easy chair, struggling against the bindings in a drawing room barely as wide as his shoulders and as high as his head.

I awoke as I always did, long before sunup. When I reached for Tarzan he was not beside me, and I remembered he had chosen to sleep on the floor. It was then I felt something different about my hand. With my thumb I felt the top of my third finger and discovered I was wearing a ring.

Alice Clayton’s wedding band.

Its meaning struck me with as much worry as it did joy, but the sentiment was so dear, so loving, that I leaped from bed and went in the dark to the window, dropping to my knees.

Tarzan wasn’t there.

I felt my way to the gaslamp and lit it. I could see his new suit of clothes draped neatly over the back of the chair where he had put them the night before. The cases of Kerchak’s bones and the journal were where I had left them. Out in the hall he was nowhere to be seen. I looked in the bath and toilet rooms.

I began frantic reasoning and rationalization. Perhaps he had wished to spend his last hours on the African continent out-of-doors rather than enclosed in a malodorous hotel room. Maybe he had found his way back to the scarlet bower of the flamboyant trees and was even now waiting to greet
kudu.

But now the sun’s first rays were lighting the hotel room. Panic rising in my head and heart, I hurriedly dressed. I tucked the journal under my arm and gripped a bone case in either hand. I descended to the deserted lobby and was relived to see a rickshaw with its four-man crew waiting at the door. I had them take me through the whole of Libreville, down the still-deserted avenues and out the coast road where the vermillion trees showed no inhabitants other than the still-slumbering birds.

When we reached the marketplace, it was strangely chaotic in the thin predawn light. Vendors were shouting angrily, and as we passed the wooden cages where the day before we had seen imprisoned animals, I could see now that they were empty. All of them. My heart pounded and my stomach turned, certain that I knew their liberator. What I did not know was the meaning of the gesture. Had it been Tarzan’s final act—a universal declaration of independence—before vanishing into the green world he’d realized he did not wish to leave?