I
Life is a
hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer
daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.
Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the
ultimate exterminator of our human species - if separate species we be - for
its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if
loosed upon the world. If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur
Jermyn did; and Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set fire to his
clothing one night. No one placed the charred fragments in an urn or set a
memorial to him who had been; for certain papers and a certain boxed object
were found which made men wish to forget. Some who knew him do not admit that
he ever existed.
Arthur
Jermyn went out on the moor and burned himself after seeing the boxed object
which had come from Africa. It was this object, and not his peculiar personal
appearance, which made him end his life. Many would have disliked to live if
possessed of the peculiar features of Arthur Jermyn, but he had been a poet and
scholar and had not minded. Learning was in his blood, for his
great-grandfather, Sir Robert Jermyn, Bt., had been an anthropologist of note,
whilst his great-great-great-grandfather, Sir Wade Jermyn, was one of the
earliest explorers of the Congo region, and had written eruditely of its tribes,
animals, and supposed antiquities. Indeed, old Sir Wade had possessed an
intellectual zeal amounting almost to a mania; his bizarre conjectures on a
prehistoric white Congolese civilisation earning him much ridicule when his
book, Observation on the Several Parts of Africa, was published. In 1765 this
fearless explorer had been placed in a madhouse at Huntingdon.
Madness
was in all the Jermyns, and people were glad there were not many of them. The
line put forth no branches, and Arthur was the last of it. If he had not been,
one can not say what he would have done when the object came. The Jermyns never
seemed to look quite right - something was amiss, though Arthur was the worst,
and the old family portraits in Jermyn House showed fine faces enough before Sir
Wade’s time. Certainly, the madness began with Sir Wade, whose wild stories of
Africa were at once the delight and terror of his few friends. It showed in his
collection of trophies and specimens, which were not such as a normal man would
accumulate and preserve, and appeared strikingly in the Oriental seclusion in
which he kept his wife. The latter, he had said, was the daughter of a
Portuguese trader whom he had met in Africa; and did not like English ways.
She, with an infant son born in Africa, had accompanied him back from the
second and longest of his trips, and had gone with him on the third and last,
never returning. No one had ever seen her closely, not even the servants; for
her disposition had been violent and singular. During her brief stay at Jermyn
House she occupied a remote wing, and was waited on by her husband alone. Sir
Wade was, indeed, most peculiar in his solicitude for his family; for when he
returned to Africa he would permit no one to care for his young son save a
loathsome black woman from Guinea. Upon coming back, after the death of Lady
Jermyn, he himself assumed complete care of the boy.
But
it was the talk of Sir Wade, especially when in his cups, which chiefly led his
friends to deem him mad. In a rational age like the eighteenth century it was
unwise for a man of learning to talk about wild sights and strange scenes under
a Congo moon; of the gigantic walls and pillars of a forgotten city, crumbling
and vine-grown, and of damp, silent, stone steps leading interminably down into
the darkness of abysmal treasure-vaults and inconceivable catacombs. Especially
was it unwise to rave of the living things that might haunt such a place; of
creatures half of the jungle and half of the impiously aged city - fabulous
creatures which even a Pliny might describe with scepticism; things that might
have sprung up after the great apes had overrun the dying city with the walls
and the pillars, the vaults and the weird carvings. Yet after he came home for
the last time Sir Wade would speak of such matters with a shudderingly uncanny
zest, mostly after his third glass at the Knight’s Head; boasting of what he
had found in the jungle and of how he had dwelt among terrible ruins known only
to him. And finally he had spoken of the living things in such a manner that he
was taken to the madhouse. He had shown little regret when shut into the barred
room at Huntingdon, for his mind moved curiously. Ever since his son had
commenced to grow out of infancy, he had liked his home less and less, till at
last he had seemed to dread it. The Knight’s Head had been his headquarters,
and when he was confined he expressed some vague gratitude as if for
protection. Three years later he died.
Wade
Jermyn’s son Philip was a highly peculiar person. Despite a strong physical
resemblance to his father, his appearance and conduct were in many particulars
so coarse that he was universally shunned. Though he did not inherit the
madness which was feared by some, he was densely stupid and given to brief
periods of uncontrollable violence. In frame he was small, but intensely
powerful, and was of incredible agility. Twelve years after succeeding to his
title he married the daughter of his gamekeeper, a person said to be of gypsy
extraction, but before his son was born joined the navy as a common sailor,
completing the general disgust which his habits and misalliance had begun.
After the close of the American war he was heard of as sailor on a merchantman
in the African trade, having a kind of reputation for feats of strength and climbing,
but finally disappearing one night as his ship lay off the Congo coast.
In
the son of Sir Philip Jermyn the now accepted family peculiarity took a strange
and fatal turn. Tall and fairly handsome, with a sort of weird Eastern grace
despite certain slight oddities of proportion, Robert Jermyn began life as a
scholar and investigator. It was he who first studied scientifically the vast
collection of relics which his mad grandfather had brought from Africa, and who
made the family name as celebrated in ethnology as in exploration. In 1815 Sir
Robert married a daughter of the seventh Viscount Brightholme and was
subsequently blessed with three children, the eldest and youngest of whom were
never publicly seen on account of deformities in mind and body. Saddened by
these family misfortunes, the scientist sought relief in work, and made two
long expeditions in the interior of Africa. In 1849 his second son, Nevil, a
singularly repellent person who seemed to combine the surliness of Philip
Jermyn with the hauteur of the Brightholmes, ran away with a vulgar dancer, but
was pardoned upon his return in the following year. He came back to Jermyn
House a widower with an infant son, Alfred, who was one day to be the father of
Arthur Jermyn.
Friends
said that it was this series of griefs which unhinged the mind of Sir Robert
Jermyn, yet it was probably merely a bit of African folklore which caused the
disaster. The elderly scholar had been collecting legends of the Onga tribes
near the field of his grandfather’s and his own explorations, hoping in some
way to account for Sir Wade’s wild tales of a lost city peopled by strange
hybrid creatures. A certain consistency in the strange papers of his ancestor
suggested that the madman’s imagination might have been stimulated by native
myths. On October 19, 1852, the explorer Samuel Seaton called at Jermyn House
with a manuscript of notes collected among the Ongas, believing that certain
legends of a gray city of white apes ruled by a white god might prove valuable
to the ethnologist. In his conversation he probably supplied many additional
details; the nature of which will never be known, since a hideous series of
tragedies suddenly burst into being. When Sir Robert Jermyn emerged from his
library he left behind the strangled corpse of the explorer, and before he
could be restrained, had put an end to all three of his children; the two who
were never seen, and the son who had run away. Nevil Jermyn died in the
successful defence of his own two-year-old son, who had apparently been
included in the old man’s madly murderous scheme. Sir Robert himself, after
repeated attempts at suicide and a stubborn refusal to utter an articulate
sound, died of apoplexy in the second year of his confinement.
Sir
Alfred Jermyn was a baronet before his fourth birthday, but his tastes never
matched his title. At twenty he had joined a band of music-hall performers, and
at thirty-six had deserted his wife and child to travel with an itinerant
American circus. His end was very revolting. Among the animals in the
exhibition with which he travelled was a huge bull gorilla of lighter colour
than the average; a surprisingly tractable beast of much popularity with the
performers. With this gorilla Alfred Jermyn was singularly fascinated, and on
many occasions the two would eye each other for long periods through the
intervening bars. Eventually Jermyn asked and obtained permission to train the
animal, astonishing audiences and fellow performers alike with his success. One
morning in Chicago, as the gorilla and Alfred Jermyn were rehearsing an
exceedingly clever boxing match, the former delivered a blow of more than the
usual force, hurting both the body and the dignity of the amateur trainer. Of
what followed, members of “The Greatest Show On Earth” do not like to speak.
They did not expect to hear Sir Alfred Jermyn emit a shrill, inhuman scream, or
to see him seize his clumsy antagonist with both hands, dash it to the floor of
the cage, and bite fiendishly at its hairy throat. The gorilla was off its guard,
but not for long, and before anything could be done by the regular trainer, the
body which had belonged to a baronet was past recognition.
II
Arthur Jermyn
was the son of Sir Alfred Jermyn and a music-hall singer of unknown origin.
When the husband and father deserted his family, the mother took the child to
Jermyn House; where there was none left to object to her presence. She was not
without notions of what a nobleman’s dignity should be, and saw to it that her
son received the best education which limited money could provide. The family
resources were now sadly slender, and Jermyn House had fallen into woeful
disrepair, but young Arthur loved the old edifice and all its contents. He was
not like any other Jermyn who had ever lived, for he was a poet and a dreamer.
Some of the neighbouring families who had heard tales of old Sir Wade Jermyn’s
unseen Portuguese wife declared that her Latin blood must be showing itself;
but most persons merely sneered at his sensitiveness to beauty, attributing it
to his music-hall mother, who was socially unrecognised. The poetic delicacy of
Arthur Jermyn was the more remarkable because of his uncouth personal appearance.
Most of the Jermyns had possessed a subtly odd and repellent cast, but Arthur’s
case was very striking. It is hard to say just what he resembled, but his
expression, his facial angle, and the length of his arms gave a thrill of
repulsion to those who met him for the first time.
It
was the mind and character of Arthur Jermyn which atoned for his aspect. Gifted
and learned, he took highest honours at Oxford and seemed likely to redeem the
intellectual fame of his family. Though of poetic rather than scientific
temperament, he planned to continue the work of his forefathers in African
ethnology and antiquities, utilising the truly wonderful though strange
collection of Sir Wade. With his fanciful mind he thought often of the
prehistoric civilisation in which the mad explorer had so implicitly believed,
and would weave tale after tale about the silent jungle city mentioned in the
latter’s wilder notes and paragraphs. For the nebulous utterances concerning a
nameless, unsuspected race of jungle hybrids he had a peculiar feeling of
mingled terror and attraction, speculating on the possible basis of such a
fancy, and seeking to obtain light among the more recent data gleaned by his
great-grandfather and Samuel Seaton amongst the Ongas.
In
1911, after the death of his mother, Sir Arthur Jermyn determined to pursue his
investigations to the utmost extent. Selling a portion of his estate to obtain
the requisite money, he outfitted an expedition and sailed for the Congo.
Arranging with the Belgian authorities for a party of guides, he spent a year
in the Onga and Kahn country, finding data beyond the highest of his
expectations. Among the Kaliris was an aged chief called Mwanu, who possessed
not only a highly retentive memory, but a singular degree of intelligence and
interest in old legends. This ancient confirmed every tale which Jermyn had
heard, adding his own account of the stone city and the white apes as it had
been told to him.
According
to Mwanu, the gray city and the hybrid creatures were no more, having been
annihilated by the warlike N’bangus many years ago. This tribe, after
destroying most of the edifices and killing the live beings, had carried off
the stuffed goddess which had been the object of their quest; the white
ape-goddess which the strange beings worshipped, and which was held by Congo
tradition to be the form of one who had reigned as a princess among these
beings. Just what the white apelike creatures could have been, Mwanu had no
idea, but he thought they were the builders of the ruined city. Jermyn could
form no conjecture, but by close questioning obtained a very picturesque legend
of the stuffed goddess.
The
ape-princess, it was said, became the consort of a great white god who had come
out of the West. For a long time they had reigned over the city together, but
when they had a son, all three went away. Later the god and princess had
returned, and upon the death of the princess her divine husband had mummified
the body and enshrined it in a vast house of stone, where it was worshipped.
Then he departed alone. The legend here seemed to present three variants.
According to one story, nothing further happened save that the stuffed goddess
became a symbol of supremacy for whatever tribe might possess it. It was for
this reason that the N’bangus carried it off. A second story told of a god’s
return and death at the feet of his enshrined wife. A third told of the return
of the son, grown to manhood - or apehood or godhood, as the case might be - yet
unconscious of his identity. Surely the imaginative blacks had made the most of
whatever events might lie behind the extravagant legendry.
Of
the reality of the jungle city described by old Sir Wade, Arthur Jermyn had no
further doubt; and was hardly astonished when early in 1912 he came upon what
was left of it. Its size must have been exaggerated, yet the stones lying about
proved that it was no mere Negro village. Unfortunately no carvings could be
found, and the small size of the expedition prevented operations toward
clearing the one visible passageway that seemed to lead down into the system of
vaults which Sir Wade had mentioned. The white apes and the stuffed goddess
were discussed with all the native chiefs of the region, but it remained for a
European to improve on the data offered by old Mwanu. M. Verhaeren, Belgian
agent at a trading-post on the Congo, believed that he could not only locate
but obtain the stuffed goddess, of which he had vaguely heard; since the once
mighty N’bangus were now the submissive servants of King Albert’s government,
and with but little persuasion could be induced to part with the gruesome deity
they had carried off. When Jermyn sailed for England, therefore, it was with
the exultant probability that he would within a few months receive a priceless
ethnological relic confirming the wildest of his
great-great-great-grandfather’s narratives - that is, the wildest which he had
ever heard. Countrymen near Jermyn House had perhaps heard wilder tales handed
down from ancestors who had listened to Sir Wade around the tables of the
Knight’s Head.
Arthur
Jermyn waited very patiently for the expected box from M. Verhaeren, meanwhile
studying with increased diligence the manuscripts left by his mad ancestor. He
began to feel closely akin to Sir Wade, and to seek relics of the latter’s
personal life in England as well as of his African exploits. Oral accounts of
the mysterious and secluded wife had been numerous, but no tangible relic of
her stay at Jermyn House remained. Jermyn wondered what circumstance had
prompted or permitted such an effacement, and decided that the husband’s
insanity was the prime cause. His great-great-great-grandmother, he recalled,
was said to have been the daughter of a Portuguese trader in Africa. No doubt
her practical heritage and superficial knowledge of the Dark Continent had
caused her to flout Sir Wade’s tales of the interior, a thing which such a man
would not be likely to forgive. She had died in Africa, perhaps dragged thither
by a husband determined to prove what he had told. But as Jermyn indulged in
these reflections he could not but smile at their futility, a century and a
half after the death of both his strange progenitors.
In
June, 1913, a letter arrived from M. Verhaeren, telling of the finding of the
stuffed goddess. It was, the Belgian averred, a most extraordinary object; an
object quite beyond the power of a layman to classify. Whether it was human or
simian only a scientist could determine, and the process of determination would
be greatly hampered by its imperfect condition. Time and the Congo climate are
not kind to mummies; especially when their preparation is as amateurish as
seemed to be the case here. Around the creature’s neck had been found a golden
chain bearing an empty locket on which were armorial designs; no doubt some hapless
traveller’s keepsake, taken by the N’bangus and hung upon the goddess as a
charm. In commenting on the contour of the mummy’s face, M. Verhaeren suggested
a whimsical comparison; or rather, expressed a humorous wonder just how it
would strike his corespondent, but was too much interested scientifically to
waste many words in levity. The stuffed goddess, he wrote, would arrive duly
packed about a month after receipt of the letter.
The
boxed object was delivered at Jermyn House on the afternoon of August 3, 1913,
being conveyed immediately to the large chamber which housed the collection of
African specimens as arranged by Sir Robert and Arthur. What ensued can best be
gathered from the tales of servants and from things and papers later examined.
Of the various tales, that of aged Soames, the family butler, is most ample and
coherent. According to this trustworthy man, Sir Arthur Jermyn dismissed
everyone from the room before opening the box, though the instant sound of
hammer and chisel showed that he did not delay the operation. Nothing was heard
for some time; just how long Soames cannot exactly estimate, but it was
certainly less than a quarter of an hour later that the horrible scream,
undoubtedly in Jermyn’s voice, was heard. Immediately afterward Jermyn emerged
from the room, rushing frantically toward the front of the house as if pursued
by some hideous enemy. The expression on his face, a face ghastly enough in
repose, was beyond description. When near the front door he seemed to think of
something, and turned back in his flight, finally disappearing down the stairs
to the cellar. The servants were utterly dumbfounded, and watched at the head
of the stairs, but their master did not return. A smell of oil was all that
came up from the regions below. After dark a rattling was heard at the door
leading from the cellar into the courtyard; and a stable-boy saw Arthur Jermyn,
glistening from head to foot with oil and redolent of that fluid, steal
furtively out and vanish on the black moor surrounding the house. Then, in an
exaltation of supreme horror, everyone saw the end. A spark appeared on the
moor, a flame arose, and a pillar of human fire reached to the heavens. The
house of Jermyn no longer existed.
The
reason why Arthur Jermyn’s charred fragments were not collected and buried lies
in what was found afterward, principally the thing in the box. The stuffed
goddess was a nauseous sight, withered and eaten away, but it was clearly a
mummified white ape of some unknown species, less hairy than any recorded
variety, and infinitely nearer mankind - quite shockingly so. Detailed
description would be rather unpleasant, but two salient particulars must be
told, for they fit in revoltingly with certain notes of Sir Wade Jermyn’s
African expeditions and with the Congolese legends of the white god and the
ape-princess. The two particulars in question are these: the arms on the golden
locket about the creature’s neck were the Jermyn arms, and the jocose
suggestion of M. Verhaeren about certain resemblance as connected with the
shrivelled face applied with vivid, ghastly, and unnatural horror to none other
than the sensitive Arthur Jermyn, great-great-great-grandson of Sir Wade Jermyn
and an unknown wife. Members of the Royal Anthropological Institute burned the
thing and threw the locket into a well, and some of them do not admit that
Arthur Jermyn ever existed.
