The Biologist only clung the closer, babbling feebly in his ear:
‘He’s got a ta ... ta ... tail!’
It was true. Dwala had a tail. Now I am aware that in these days of learning, when many an ordinary College Don knows as much science as the elder Pliny, this will seem almost incredible; and in the eyes of some it will throw doubt on the truth of my story, for it is well known that the anthropoid apes have no tails. But then Dwala was not an anthropoid ape, but a Missing Link. The fact is that in the old times there were as many varieties of Pithecanthropus erectus as there are nowadays of Homo sapiens britannicus; but the physical differences between them were far more clearly marked than ours. The aristocracy of the race, to which Dwala’s family belonged, were distinguished from the plebeians, not merely by the greater stoutness of their bony structure and the superior coarseness of their fur—distinctions which a demagogue might have argued down to nothing—but also by the possession of tails, a thing about which there could be no mistake. Among the lower classes even the merest stump, the flattering evidence of an old scandal, entitled the owner to a certain measure of respect.
‘Confound his tail!’ exclaimed the peppery General, pushing him away. ‘Who’s got a tail? the dog?’
‘Dog?’ murmured the Biologist, in the dazed, indignant tones of a man under the influence of a drug. ‘No! Prince Dwala!’
The General dropped rigid into an armchair, and bobbed up and down on the springs of it. A shocked silence fell on the room, as if something grossly indelicate had been shouted out. Men blinked and lowered their heads; women stared and raised them. There was a movement as of looking for things lost, an untranslated impulse towards the stairs.
Lady Wyse, the one thing alive in this wax-work show, went quickly to the door and put her back against it, hand on handle, to prevent the figures from escaping.
‘Sir Peter is talking like an idiot,’ she said, in low, clear tones; ‘he knows perfectly well that Prince Dwala no more has a tail than any one of us has.’