The Disentanglers

by Andrew Lang

I. The Prize of a Lady’s Hand

‘Yes, I guess that Pappa was reckoned considerable of a crank. A great educational reformer, and a progressive Democratic stalwart, that is the kind of hair-pin Pappa was! But it is awkward for me, some.’

These remarks, though of an obsolete and exaggerated transatlantic idiom, were murmured in the softest of tones, in the most English of silken accents, by the most beautiful of young ladies. She occupied the client’s chair in Merton’s office, and, as she sat there and smiled, Merton acknowledged to himself that he had never met a client so charming and so perplexing.

Miss McCabe had been educated, as Merton knew, at an aristocratic Irish convent in Paris, a sanctuary of old names and old creeds. This was the plan of her late father (spoken of by her as Pappa), an educational reformer of eccentric ideas, who, though of ancient (indeed royal) Irish descent, was of American birth. The young lady had thus acquired abroad, much against her will, that kind of English accent which some of her countrywomen reckon ‘affected.’

But her intense patriotism had induced her to study, in the works of American humourists, and to reproduce in her discourse, the flowers of speech of which a specimen has been presented. The national accent was beyond her, but at least she could be true to what she (erroneously) believed to be the national idiom.

‘Your case is peculiar,’ said Merton thoughtfully, ‘and scarcely within our province. As a rule our clients are the parents, guardians, or children of persons entangled in undesirable engagements. But you, I understand, are dissatisfied with the matrimonial conditions imposed by the will of the late Mr. McCabe?’

‘I want to take my own pick out of the crowd—’ said Miss McCabe.

‘I can readily understand,’ said Merton, bowing, ‘that the throng of wooers is enormous,’ and he vaguely thought of Penelope.

‘The scheme will be popular. It will hit our people right where they live,’ said Miss McCabe, not appropriating the compliment. ‘You see Pappa struck ile early, and struck it often. He was what our Howells calls a “multimillionaire,” and I’m his only daughter. Pappa loved me, but he loved the people better. Guess Pappa was not mean, not worth a cent. He was a white man!’

Miss McCabe, with a glow of lovely enthusiasm, contemplated the unprecedented whiteness of the paternal character.

‘“What the people want,” Pappa used to say, “is education. They want it short, and they want it

striking.” That was why he laid out five millions on his celebrated Museum of Freaks, with a staff of competent professors and lecturers. “The McCabe Museum of Natural Varieties, lectures and all, is open gratuitously to the citizens of our Republic, and to intelligent foreigners.” That was how Pappa put it. I say that he dead-headed creation!’

‘Truly Republican munificence,’ said Merton, ‘worthy of your great country.’

‘Well, I should smile,’ said Miss McCabe.

‘But—excuse my insular ignorance—I do not exactly understand how a museum of freaks, admirably organised as no doubt it is, contributes to the cause of popular education.’

‘You have museums even in London?’ asked Miss McCabe.

Merton assented.

‘Are they not educational?’

‘The British Museum is mainly used by the children of the poor, as a place where they play a kind of subdued hide-and-seek,’ said Merton.

‘That’s because they are not interested in tinned Egyptian corpses and broken Greek statuary ware,’ answered the fair Republican. ‘Now, Mr. Merton, did you ever see or hear of a popular museum, a museum that the People would give its cents to see?’

‘I have heard of Mr. Barnum’s museum,’ said Merton.

‘That’s the idea: it is right there,’ said Miss McCabe. ‘But old man Barnum was not scientific. He saw what our people wanted, but he did not see,

Pappa said, how to educate them through their natural instincts. Barnum’s mermaid was not genuine business. It confused the popular mind, and fostered superstition—and got found out. The result was scepticism, both religious and scientific. Now, Pappa used to argue, the lives of our citizens are monotonous. They see yellow dogs, say, but each yellow dog has only one tail. They see men and women, but almost all of them have only one head: and even a hand with six fingers is not common. This is why the popular mind runs into grooves. This causes what they call “the dead level of democracy.” Even our men of genius, Pappa allowed (for he was a very fair-minded man), do not go ahead of the European ticket, but rather the reverse. Your Tennyson has the inner tracks of our Longfellow: your Thackeray gives our Bertha Runkle his dust. The papers called Pappa unpatriotic, and a bad American. But he was not: he was a white man. When he saw his country’s faults he put his finger on them, right there, and tried to cure them.’

‘A noble policy,’ murmured Merton.

Miss McCabe was really so pretty and unusual, that he did not care how long she was in coming to the point.

‘Well, Pappa argued that there was more genius, or had been since the Declaration of Independence, even in England, than in the States. “And why?” he asked. “Why, because they have more variety in England. Things are not all on one level there—”’

‘Our dogs have only one tail apiece,’ said Merton, ‘in spite of the proverb “as proud as a dog with two

tails,” and a plurality of heads is unusual even among British subjects.’

‘Yes,’ answered Miss McCabe, ‘but you have varieties among yourselves. You have a King and a Queen; and your peerage is rich in differentiated species. A Baronet is not a Marquis, nor is a Duke an Earl.’

‘He may be both,’ said Merton, but Miss McCabe continued to expose the parental philosophy.

‘Now Pappa would not hear of aristocratic distinctions in our country. He was a Hail Columbia man, on the Democratic ticket. But something is wanted, he said, to get us out of grooves, and break the monotony. That something, said Pappa, Nature has mercifully provided in Freaks. The citizens feel this, unconsciously: that’s why they spend their money at Barnum’s. But Barnum was not scientific, and Barnum was not straight about his mermaid. So Pappa founded his Museum of Natural Varieties, all of them honest Injun. Here the lecturers show off the freaks, and explain how Nature works them, and how she can always see them and go one better. We have the biggest gold nugget and the weeniest cunning least gold nugget; the biggest diamond and the smallest diamond; the tallest man and the smallest man; the whitest negro and the yellowest red man in the world. We have the most eccentric beasts, and the queerest fishes, and everything is explained by lecturers of world-wide reputation, on the principles of evolution, as copyrighted by our Asa Gray and our Agassiz. That is what Pappa called popular education, and it hits our citizens right where they live.’

Miss McCabe paused, in a flush of filial and patriotic enthusiasm. Merton inwardly thought that among the queerest fishes the late Mr. McCabe must have been pre-eminent. But what he said was, ‘The scheme is most original. Our educationists (to employ a term which they do not disdain), such as Mr. Herbert Spencer, Sir Joshua Fitch, and others, have I thought out nothing like this. Our capitalists never endow education on this more than imperial scale.’

‘Guess they are scaly varmints!’ interposed Miss McCabe.

Merton bowed his acquiescence in the sentiment.

‘But,’ he went on, ‘I still do not quite understand how your own prospects in life are affected by Mr. McCabe’s most original and, I hope, promising experiment?’

‘Pappa loved me, but he loved his country better, and taught me to adore her, and be ready for any sacrifice.’ Miss McCabe looked straight at Merton, like an Iphigenia blended with a Joan of Arc.

‘I do sincerely trust that no sacrifice is necessary,’ said Merton. ‘The circumstances do not call for so—unexampled a victim.’

‘I am to be Lady Principal of the museum when I come to the age of twenty-five: that is, in six years,’ said Miss McCabe proudly. ‘You don’t call that a sacrifice?’

Merton wanted to say that the most magnificent of natural varieties would only be in its proper place. But the man of business and the manager of a great and beneficent association overcame the mere amateur of beauty, and he only said that the position of

Lady Principal was worthy of the ambition of a patriot, and a friend of the species.

‘Well, I reckon! But a clause in Pappa’s will is awkward for me, some. It is about my marriage,’ said Miss McCabe bravely.

Merton assumed an air of grave interest.

‘Pappa left it in his will that I was to marry the man (under the age of five-and-thirty, and of unimpeachable character and education) who should discover, and add to the museum, the most original and unheard-of natural variety, whether found in the Old or the New World.’

Merton could scarcely credit the report of his ears.

‘Would you oblige me by repeating that statement?’ he said, and Miss McCabe repeated it in identical terms, obviously quoting textually from the will.

‘Now I understand your unhappy position,’ said Merton, thoroughly agreeing with the transatlantic critics who had pronounced the late Mr. McCabe ‘considerable of a crank.’ ‘But this is far too serious a matter for me—for our Association. I am no legist, but I am convinced that, at least British, and I doubt not American, law would promptly annul a testatory clause so utterly unreasonable and unprecedented.’

‘Unreasonable!’ exclaimed Miss McCabe, rising to her feet with eyes of flame, ‘I am my father’s daughter, and his wish is my law, whatever the laws that men make may say.’

Her affectation of slang had fallen off; she was absolutely natural now, and entirely in earnest.

Merton rose also.

‘One moment,’ he said. ‘It would be impertinence in me to express my admiration of you—of what you say. As the question is not a legal one (in such I am no fit adviser) I shall think myself honoured if you will permit me to be of any service in the circumstances. They are less unprecedented than I hastily supposed. History records many examples of fathers, even of royal rank, who have attached similar conditions to the disposal of their daughters’ hands.’

Merton was thinking of the kings in the treatises of Monsieur Charles Perrault, Madame d’Aulnoy, and other historians of Fairyland; of monarchs who give their daughters to the bold adventurers that bring the smallest dog, or the singing rose, or the horse magical.

‘What you really want, I think,’ he went on, as Miss McCabe resumed her seat, ‘is to have your choice, as you said, among the competitors?’

‘Yes,’ replied the fair American, ‘that is only natural.’

‘But then,’ said Merton, ‘much depends on who decides as to the merits of the competitors. With whom does the decision rest?’

‘With the people.’

‘With the people?’

‘Yes, with the popular vote, as expressed through the newspaper that my father founded—The Yellow Flag. The public is to see the exhibits, the new varieties of nature, and the majority of votes is to carry the day. “Trust the people!” that was Pappa’s word.’

‘Then anyone who chooses, of the age, character, and education stipulated under the clause in the will,

may go and bring in whatever variety of nature he pleases and take his chance?’

‘That is it all the time,’ said the client. ‘There is a trust, and the trustees, friends of Pappa’s, decide on the qualifications of the young men who enter for the competition. If the trustees are satisfied they allot money for expenses out of the exploration fund, so that nobody may be stopped because he is poor.’

‘There will be an enormous throng of competitors in these conditions—and with such a prize,’ Merton could not help adding.

‘I reckon the trustees are middling particular. They’ll weed them out.’

‘Is there any restriction on the nationality of the competitors?’ asked Merton, on whom an idea was dawning.

‘Only members of the English speaking races need apply,’ said Miss McCabe. ‘Pappa took no stock in Spaniards or Turks.’

‘The voters will be prejudiced in favour of their own fellow citizens?’ asked Merton. ‘That is only natural.’

‘Trust the people,’ said Miss McCabe. ‘The whole thing is to be kept as dark as a blind coloured person hunting in a dark cellar for a black cat that is not there.’

‘A truly Miltonic illustration,’ said Merton.

‘The advertisement for competitors will be carefully worded, so as to attract only young men of science. The young men are not to be told about me: the prize is in dollars, “with other advantages to be later specified.” The varieties found are to be

conveyed to a port abroad, not yet named, and shipped for New York in a steamer belonging to the McCabe Trust.’

‘Then am I to understand that the conditions affecting your marriage are still an entire secret?’

‘That is so,’ said Miss McCabe, ‘and I guess from what the marchioness told me, your reference, that you can keep a secret.’

‘To keep secrets is the very essential of my vocation,’ said Merton.

But this secret, as will be seen, he did not absolutely keep.

‘The arrangements,’ he added, ‘are most judicious.’

‘Guess Pappa was ’cute,’ said Miss McCabe, relapsing into her adopted mannerisms.

‘I think I now understand the case in all its bearings,’ Merton went on. ‘I shall give it my serious consideration. Perhaps I had better say no more at present, but think over the matter. You remain in town for the season?’

‘Guess we’ve staked out a claim in Berkeley Square,’ said Miss McCabe, ‘an agreeable location.’ She mentioned the number of the house.

‘Then we are likely to meet now and then,’ said Merton, ‘and I trust that I may be permitted to wait on you occasionally.’

Miss McCabe graciously assented; her chaperon, Lady Rathcoffey, was summoned by her from the inner chamber and the society of Miss Blossom, the typewriter; the pair drove away, and Merton was left to his own reflections.

‘I do not know what can be done for her,’ he

thought, ‘except to see that there is at least one eligible man, a gentleman, among the crowd of competitors, and that he is a likely man to win the beautiful prize. And that man is Bude, by Jove, if he wants to win it.’

The Earl of Bude, whose name at once occurred to Merton, was a remarkable personage. The world knew him as rich, handsome, happy, and a mighty hunter of big game. They knew not the mysterious grief that for years had gnawed at his heart. Why did not Bude marry? No woman could say. The world, moreover, knew not, but Merton did, that Lord Bude was the mysterious Mr. Jones Harvey, who contributed the most original papers to the Proceedings of the Geographical and Zoological Societies, and who had conferred many strange beasts on the Gardens of the latter learned institution. The erudite papers were read, the eccentric animals were conferred, in the name of Mr. Jones Harvey. They came from outlandish addresses in the ends of the earth, but, in the flesh, Jones Harvey had been seen by no man, and his secret had been confided to Merton only, to Logan, and two other school friends. He did good to science by stealth, and blushed at the idea of being a F.R.S. There was no show of science about Bude, and nothing exotic, except the singular circumstance that, however he happened to be dressed, he always wore a ring, or pin, or sleeve links set with very ugly and muddy looking pearls. From these ornaments Lord Bude was inseparable; to chaff about presents from dusky princesses on undiscovered shores he was impervious. Even Merton

did not know the cause of his attachment to these ungainly jewels, or the dark memory of mysterious loss with which they were associated.

Merton’s first care was to visit the divine Althæa, Mrs. Brown-Smith, and other ladies of his acquaintance. Their cards were deposited at the claim staked out by Miss McCabe in Berkeley Square, and that young lady soon ‘went everywhere,’ and publicly confessed that she ‘was having a real lovely time.’ By a little diplomacy Lord Bude was brought acquainted with Miss McCabe. She consented to overlook his possession of a coronet; titles were, to this heroine, not marvels (as to some of her countrywomen and ours), but rather matters of indifference, scarcely even suggesting hostile prejudice. The observers in society, mothers and maids, and the chroniclers of fashion, soon perceived that there was at least a marked camaraderie between the elegant aristocrat, hitherto indifferent to woman, untouched, as was deemed, by love, and the lovely Child of Freedom. Miss McCabe sat by him while he drove his coach; on the roof of his drag at Lord’s; and of his houseboat at Henley, where she fainted when the crew of Johns Hopkins University, U. S., was defeated by a length by Balliol (where Lord Bude had been the favourite pupil of the great Master). Merton remarked these tokens of friendship with approval. If Bude could be induced to enter for the great competition, and if he proved successful, there seemed no reason to suppose that Miss McCabe would be dissatisfied with the People’s choice.

Towards the end of the season, and in Bude’s

smoking-room, about five in the July morning after a ball at Eglintoun House, Merton opened his approaches. He began, cautiously, from talk of moors and forests; he touched on lochs, he mentioned the Highland traditions of water bulls (which haunt these meres); he spoke of the Beathach mòr Loch Odha, a legendary animal of immeasurable length. The Beathach has twelve feet; he has often been heard crashing through the ice in the nights of winter. These tales the narrator has gleaned from the lips of the Celtic peasantry of Letter Awe.

‘I daresay he does break the ice,’ said Bude. ‘In the matter of cryptic survivals of extinct species I can believe a good deal.’

‘The sea serpent?’ asked Merton.

‘Seen him thrice,’ said Bude.

‘Then why did not Jones Harvey weigh in with a letter to Nature?’

‘Jones Harvey has a scientific reputation to look after, and knows he would be laughed at. That’s the kind of hair-pin he is,’ said Bude, quoting Miss McCabe. ‘By Jove, Merton, that girl—’ and he paused.

‘Yes, she is pretty,’ said Merton.

‘Pretty! I have seen the women of the round world—before I went to—well, never mind where, I used to think the Poles the most magnificent, but she—’

‘Whips creation,’ said Merton. ‘But I,’ he went on, ‘am rather more interested in these other extraordinary animals. Do you seriously believe, with your experience, that some extinct species are—not extinct?’

‘To be sure I do. The world is wide. But they are very shy. I once stalked a Bunyip, in Central Australia, in a lagoon. The natives said he was there: I watched for a week, squatting in the reeds, and in the grey of the seventh dawn I saw him.’

‘Did you shoot?’

‘No, I observed him through a field glass first.’

‘What is the beggar like?’

‘Much like some of the Highland water cattle, as described, but it is his ears they take for horns. Australia has no indigenous horned animal. He is, I should say, about nine feet long, marsupial (he rose breast high), and web-footed. I saw that when he dived. Other white men have seen him—Buckley, the convict, for one, when he lived among the blacks.’

‘Buckley was not an accurate observer.’

‘Jones Harvey is.’

‘Any other queer beasts?’

‘Of course, plenty. You have heard of the Mylodon, the gigantic Sloth? His bones, skin, and hair were lately found in a cave in Patagonia, with a lot of his fodder. You can see them at the British Museum in South Kensington. Primitive Patagonian man used the female of the species as a milch-cow. He was a genial friendly kind of brute, accessible to charm of manner and chopped hay. They fed him on that, in a domesticated state.’

‘But he is extinct. Hesketh Pritchard went to look for a live Mylodon, and did not find him.’

‘Did not know where to look,’ said Bude.

‘But you do?’ asked Merton.

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Then why don’t you bring one over to the Zoo?’

‘I may some day.’

‘Are there any more survivors of extinct species?’

‘Merton, is this an interview? Are you doing Mr. Jones Harvey at home for a picture paper?’

‘No, I’ve dropped the Press,’ said Merton, ‘I ask in a spirit of scientific curiosity.’

‘Well, there is the Dinornis, the Moa of New Zealand. A bird as big as the Roc in the “Arabian Nights.”’

‘Have you seen him?’

‘No, but I have seen her, the hen bird. She was sitting on eggs. No man knows her nest but myself, and old Te-iki-pa, the chief medicine-man, or Tohunga, of the Maori King. The Moa’s eyrie is in the King’s country. It is a difficult country, and a dangerous business, if the cock Moa chances to come home.’

‘Bude, is this worthy of an old friend, this blague?’

‘Do you doubt my word?’

‘If you give me your word I must believe—that you dreamed it.’

Then a strange thing happened.

Bude walked to a small case of instruments that stood on a table in the smoking-room. He unlocked it, took out a lancet, brought a Rhodian bowl from a shelf, and bared his arm.

‘Do you want proof?’

‘Proof that you saw a hen Moa sitting?’ asked Merton in amazement.

‘Not exactly, but proof that Te-iki-pa knew a thing or two, quite as out of the way as the habitat of the Moa.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Bare your arm, and hold it over the bowl.’

The room was full of the yellow dusky light of an early summer morning in London. Outside the heavy carts were rolling by: in full civilisation the scene was strange.

‘The Blood Covenant?’ asked Merton.

Bude nodded.

Merton turned up his cuff, Bude let a little blood drop into the bowl, then performed the same operation on his own arm.

‘This is all rot,’ he said, ‘but without this I cannot show you, by virtue of my oath to Te-iki-pa, what I mean to show you. Now repeat after me what I am going to say.’

He spoke a string of words, among which Merton, as he repeated them, could only recognise mana and atua. The vowel sounds were as in Italian.

‘Now these words you must never report to any one, without my permission.’

‘Not likely,’ said Merton, ‘I only remember two of them, and these I knew before.’

‘All right,’ said Bude.

He then veiled his face in a piece of silk that lay on a sofa, and rapidly, in a low voice, chanted a kind of hymn in a tongue unknown to Merton. All this he did with a bored air, as if he thought the performance a superfluous mummery.

‘Now what shall I show you? Something simple.

Look at the bookcase, and think of any book you may want to consult.’

Merton thought of the volume in M. of the Encyclopædia Britannica. The volume slowly slid from the shelf, glided through the air to Merton, and gently subsided on the table near him, open at the word Moa.

Merton walked across to the bookcase, took all the volumes from the shelf, and carefully examined the backs and sides for springs and mechanical advantages. There were none.

‘Not half bad!’ he said, when he had completed his investigation.

‘You are satisfied that Te-iki-pa knew something? If you had seen what I have seen, if you had seen the three days dead—’ and Bude shivered slightly.

‘I have seen enough. Do you know how it is done?’

‘No.’

‘Well, a miracle is not what you call logical proof, but I believe that you did see the Moa, and a still more extraordinary bird, Te-iki-pa.’

‘Yes, they talk of strange beasts, but “nothing is stranger than man.” Did you ever hear of the Berbalangs of Cagayan Sulu?’

‘Never in my life,’ said Merton.

‘Heaven preserve me from them,’ said Bude, and he gently stroked the strange muddy pearls in the sleeve-links on his loose shirt-cuff. ‘Angels and ministers of grace defend us,’ he exclaimed, crossing himself (he was of the old faith), and he fell silent.

It was a moment of emotion. Six silvery strokes were sounded from a little clock on the chimney-piece. The hour of confidences had struck.

‘Bude, you are serious about Miss McCabe?’ asked Merton.

‘I mean to put it to the touch at Goodwood.’

‘No use!’ said Merton.

Bude changed colour.

‘Are you?’

‘No,’ interrupted Merton. ‘But she is not free.’

‘There is somebody in America? Nobody here, I think.’

‘It is hardly that,’ said Merton. ‘Can you listen to rather a long story? I’ll cut it as much as possible. You must remember that I am practically breaking my word of honour in telling you this. My honour is in your hands.’

‘Fire away,’ said Bude, pouring a bottle of Apollinaris water into a long tumbler, and drinking deep.

Merton told the tale of Miss McCabe’s extraordinary involvement, and of the wild conditions on which her hand was to be won. ‘And as to her heart, I think,’ he added, ‘if you pull off the prize—

If my heart by signs can tell,
Lordling, I have marked her daily,
And I think she loves thee well.’

‘Thank you for that, old cock,’ replied the peer, shaking Merton’s hand. He had recovered from his emotion.

‘I’m on,’ he added, after a moment’s silence, ‘but I shall enter as Jones Harvey.’

‘His name and his celebrated papers will impress the trustees,’ said Merton. ‘Now what variety of nature shall you go for? Wild men count. Shall you fetch a Berbalang of what do you call it?’

Bude shuddered. ‘Not much,’ he said. ‘I think I shall fetch a Moa.’

‘But no steamer could hold that gigantic denizen of the forests.’

‘You leave that to Jones Harvey. Jones is ’cute, some,’ he said, reminiscent of the adored one, and he fell into a lover’s reverie.

He was aroused by Merton’s departure: he finished the Apollinaris water, took a bath, and went to bed.