The Missing Link, Edward Dyson [new reading .TXT] 📗

young ladies in all, daughters of the superior families of Bunkers and the surrounding district. Miss Arnott, their teacher, was a tall, bony spinster, with austere glasses and sharp elbows that looked like weapons of defence.

The Professor had several manners adapted for various audiences, and possessed costumes to Suit. He met Miss Arnott and her pupils in his splendid impersonation of the studious naturalist and reverent authority on the wonders of creation. A long black coat, a somewhat dingy belltopper, and a pair of smoked spectacles went with the part. So equipped, the boss conducted the seminary through his Museum of Marvels, educating and edifying the pupils, first with the astonishing mathematical calculations of Ephraim, the educated pig, then with Madame Marve's amazing acts of mysticism and legerdemain.

The Living Skeleton was described as a unique freak of nature--"Teaching us all how wise and wonderlul are the workings of Providence," said the Professor, piously. "He is thin, ladies, but very--happy," he added.

This was Bonypart's cue to work off a long, wan smile, and he smiled accordingly. The effort so worked on the feelings of one of the younger pupils that she burst into tears, and offered the bone man her piece of cake.

Matty Cann looked eager, but the Professor smartly intervened.

"Excuse me, young lady," he said suavely, "but visitors are requested not to feed the Living Skeleton. Living Skeletons are very delicately organised, madame," he continued, addressing the teacher. "A dry biscuit has been known to throw them into violent dyspepsia and they have died of a rump steak."

Bonypart groaned audibly and recovering himself, made another effort to smile, but failed, and sighed hungrily, whereat the younger pupil broke into a dismal wail, and had to be taken out and soothed with lemonade.

The fine collection of natural curiosities, illustrating the descent of man, was reserved for the last, and Professor Thunder proudly arrayed his company before the cages containing the tiny apes, the middling-sized gibbons, the baboon, Ammonia, the gorilla, and Mahdi, the man-monkey, or Missing Link.

The young ladies were quite enthusiastic in their admiration. They fed the Missing Link with spongecake and nuts, which he took from their hands and ate with a certain genteel decorum. His manner of cracking the nuts was much appreciated. Nickie was a specialist at nut-cracking, having made a special study of the subject at the Zoo.

Some of the girls said he was a "regular dear," and threw him flowers, and frosty Miss Arnott relaxed her elbows a trifle, and admitted that this quaint creature was indeed entertaining and instructive--most instructive. She had never met a more instructive creature. And meanwhile Ammonia the gorilla shook the dividing bars, and reached fierce claws towards Mahdi, convulsed with jealousy, and inspired with a primitive yearning for nuts.

Professor Thunder spread himself in the delivery of his learned oration on the origin of the human race, beginning with Spider, and ranging up to the wondrous Missing Link. "Captured by my own hand in the jungles of Central Africa, ladies," said he, with fine dramatic elocution and the attitudes of a leading man.

"You will observe that the creature is kept in semi-darkness, that is because he is accustomed to the thick shades of his native forests. He is very docile, excepting when attacked or irritated"--(descriptive growls from the Missing Link)--"when he displays extraordinary activity in pursuit of his foes"--(display of extraordinary activity by Madhi, swinging on the bar, racing round the cage, roaring, &c.). "He is very human in his appearance, as you will observe, and is much more upright in his carriage than the gorilla, while his mild and benevolent expression in repose"--(mild and benevolent expression artfully simulated by the Missing Link)--"gives his countenance a certain manly beauty and dignity. Looking at him thus, ladies, no one will deny that he stands for the missing link in the chain leading from the small ape up through the gorilla to the noblest work of God." The Professor finished chin up, heels together, eyes lifted, and the left hand thrust in the vest, a la Napoleon--to signify the highest effort of a benign Providence.

Here Ammonia created a diversion by squealing angrily, spitting at the Missing Link, and clawing for him in a paroxysm of professional envy.

"I think, ladies," continued Professor Thunder in his best manner, "that even those who discard the Darwinian hypothesis because of their objection to acknowledging relationship with the monkeys should have no reluctance to admit some distant connection with this noble and intelligent being, so like man in bearing and intellect, and yet so closely allied to the gorilla that we cannot deny--Blazes and fury!"

The Professor's indecorous ejaculation was in spired by the mean, vicious, and unsportsmanlike conduct of Ammonia the gorilla, who had succeeded in gripping Mahdi by one leg, and was hanging on, squealing frightfully.

"Pull him off! Pull him off!" yelled the Missing Link, forgetting everything in the moment of pain and, peril.

Instantly the whole show was thrown into commotion. Miss Arnott screamed, her pupils screamed, the monkeys all rattled at their cages and jabbered excitedly; the Professor, the Living Skeleton, and Madame Marve added to the uproar.

Ammonia, having his hated rival in his power at last, was determined to glut his hate. He secured a grip with the other iron talon, dragged Nickie down, and pulling him close to the bars, and pushing his short nose between the rods, bit at him with gleaming teeth, and all the time he clawed furiously, his nails tearing through the hide of the Missing Link, and lacerating the man beneath pitilessly.

Nickie fought and yelled and swore, in good strong Australian. Miss Arnott's pupils, huddled together, staring with round, horrified eyes, and as they stared a truly horrible thing happened. The skin was torn clean from the upper part of the Missing Link, and the bare, blood-stained head and shoulders of a man emerged.

That was too much for a well-conducted ladies seminary. With a final ear-piercing scream in chorus the school turned and fled; it broke pell-mell from the tent, headed by Miss Arnott, who executed a remarkable sprint, taking her age, her dignity and her lack of training into consideration.

It was Madame Marve who rescued Nickie from the clutches of the gorilla, having subdued the brute with a discharge from a squirt charged with ammonia; but Professor Thunder was not thankful, he hadn't time, his magnificent mind was already busy on ways and means of repairing the mischief done to his Missing Link and to his reputation as an honourable showman.

Of course, the revelation resulting from Ammonia's misconduct would go round the place like wildfire. There might be a raid of indignant residents, a prosecution for fraud, and there wasn't time to run.

The raid came in due time. Ten heads of families accompanied by Quinn, the local constable, bore down upon the Museum of Marvels within an hour. Professor Thunder met them at the entrance, with his studious manner and his solemn black hat. The raid was going to express itself forcibly; it did refer to "iniquitous frauds," "shameful imposition," "scoundrels," &c., but the Professor's big, penetrating voice, his heavy-as-lead manner, triumphed.

"Most unfortunate, gentlemen, a most lamentable disaster," he said. "My valuable Missing Link is more seriously injured than I imagined, and I may lose him, which would be a heavy blow, indeed, as the College of Naturalists of London, values the beast at four thousand and seventy pounds."

"It's a fraud--a blanky imposition!" cried a fierce little man.

"Gentlemen will you favour me by stepping into the museum, and judging for yourself," said Thunder gravely. "You will find the Missing Link in a low state, but Madame Marve has done all that surgical skill could do. The murderous attacks of the gorilla scalped the poor creature, and tore the skin from his body, but the wounds have been stitched up--there is still hope. This way, gentle men, and quietly, if you please."

The surprised and subdued deputation found Mahdi, the Missing Link, lying moaning on his straw, his wounds--artfully bloodstained--all stitched up. There were white bandages about his head and his injured arms.

"But the girls say it was a man gasped the fierce deputationist.

"A not unnatural mistake, my dear sir," said the Professor, "Strip the poor creature of its hairy hide and its resemblance to a human creature would deceive the most expert naturalist."

"Wonderful!" said the local publican.

"But all the same, me mahn," said Quinn, regretfully, "I have half a moind t' prosecute yeh fer croolty t' animals."

The trick worked, however, the situation was saved, and that night all Bunkers flocked to see the Missing Link that had been flayed in its life-and-death struggle with an infuriated gorilla.


CHAPTER X.

THE STOLEN BABE.

IN the larger townships and the small towns visit by the museum of Marvels on its provincial tour, Professor Thunder, gifted manager of this "colossal amusement enterprise," as the streamers eloquently phrased it, preferred to secure a shop in the main street to pitching his tent in some out-of-the-way place, where his persuasive powers might be wasted on the desert air.

The Professor flattered himself there was not a more seductive "spruicher" in the business, and, mounted on a gin case at a shop front plentifully papered with screaming posters depicting the more popular attractions, he reckoned that he could always lure a given number of people into the show by the sheer force of his eloquence, and so make up the rent, provided there were men and women in the street willing to listen.

Professor Thunder had found a vacant shop to suit him near the end of Main-street, Wangaroo. He would have preferred a central site at the same price, or even less, but none was available. However, business was so good on the first afternoon and evening that he resolved to extend his Wangaroo season into the following week. This involved a day of idleness, an unemployed Sunday, a boon that rarely came to the partakers in Professor Thunder's godless enterprises, the day of rest usually being given over to travel and arduous preparations for a Monday matinee.

Nicholas Crips was well content with the change of dates. He certainly took a good deal of natural pride in his marked success as the most artistic and realistic representative of the missing link, and toyed in the reputation he was rapidly making for himself in the show business; but for all that, it was a great relief to throw off the hide of the celebrated man-monkey, drop the exactions of art, and be himself for a whole day.

Nickie did not find, as many celebrated actors have done, that the work of sustaining a grand role day after day, night after night, week after week, and month after month, was too exacting; he bore the strain with consummate ease; moreover, the most conscientious artist wishes to be himself once now and again, if merely for a change.

The shop in Wangaroo occupied by the Museum of Marvels was rented from a Chinese greengrocer, who carried on a business next door. The place had originally been one shop, but Kit See, with the frugality of his race, had partitioned it roughly, and with Oriental astuteness let the half for nearly as much as he paid for the whole.

Kit See was a stout, cream Confucian with an oleaginous smile, and the gentle, propitiatory man of an inferior people, cunning enough to realise that if you cannot dominate it is wisest to be docile. He had a good stock, a good business, a half-caste wife, and a noiseless, placid, slit-eyed baby about the size