By that time, I had summoned the two chauffeurs, who carried the unconscious Prince to the Blue Room, and put him to bed. We were all hoping that he would awaken soon, so he could tell us what had occurred, but we were disappointed. He remained in a strange stupor, and the chauffeurs took turns sitting up with him that night.
Niki had no explanation to offer except that he had gone into the adjoining room for a few minutes, closing the door behind him very softly so as not to arouse the sleeping guest. He had not heard the Prince enter the bedroom, and his first intimation that any one was there came with a piercing, blood-curdling cry, and then a heavy thud on the floor. He had rushed back into the bedroom to find just what I had found when first entering the bedroom.
Hearing this, I was entirely convinced that some horror had closed down on Prince Matani after he had entered the bedroom. I pictured him, taking in the whole scene at a glance, the monstrous creature in the bed, where he had expected to find a small chimpanzee, or baboon, and becoming, as it were, petrified with horror. And there must have been some reason for the sudden murderous fury of our Martian patient. Whatever it was, I felt the Prince was lucky to have saved his neck.
Taking it all in all, I was puzzled. The incident disturbed all of us. Pat looked anxious and tired at dinner, and went to her apartment very early in the evening.
Luckily, the presence of the police guard in the castle grounds had relieved my apprehensions; even at that, I was unable to sleep. Several times during the night, I got up and went to the Prince's room, to inquire about his condition. On my last call, about four in the morning, George, the chauffeur, informed me that the Prince appeared to be sleeping naturally, so I urged him to get a little sleep himself.
With some sense of relief, I finally went to sleep myself. Imagine my surprise, on awakening a few hours later, to find that the Prince had gone. Niki, an early riser, reported to me that he had seen the Prince steal quietly from his bedroom before any one else was up, and go downstairs. It appeared likely that he had telephoned from his room to the village for a taxi-cab, without arousing George, for he drove away a few minutes after coming downstairs. He acted like a crazy man, Niki said.
XVII
Never before had I realized what it meant to be in the public eye. Our family privacy, held virtually sacred, was no longer so. We really had less privacy at the castle during the days and weeks following the discovery of the rocket from Mars on the beach than the hippopotami at the Central Park Zoo. It was not unusual for me to find scientists, explorers, college professors, high school teachers and reporters, wandering in groups about the place, as though it were some museum, and staring at me as if I were a recently acquired Egyptian mummy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
And never before had I believed it possible to make a man out of a monkey, a gentleman out of a chimpanzee, no more than one can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. But that is precisely what had happened.