One day he said, “Tell me about London.” I found myself speechless. Here was a subject about which I was more than conversant but had never been called upon to describe. That answer took the better part of a day, my pupil absorbing hundreds of new words and ideas. The encyclopedia provided drawings of Parliament and London Bridge and Buckingham Palace. I was not much inclined to theatrics, but I managed with the help of pantomime and mimicry to impersonate a variety of characters one might meet in the city—from a merchant to a beggar to a bobby. I attempted a barrister, a washerwoman, and a lorry driver. For a few moments I was Queen Victoria. My performance delighted Tarzan utterly, especially when I collapsed into giggles at my own silliness.
When I’d pointed out the Sahara Desert, he’d insisted I tell him about the desert, somewhere I had never been. I picked up a handful of fine-grained sand between us. “This is called ‘sand.’” He repeated the word and learned it instantly, as he always did. “Now imagine a world of nothing but sand”—I pointed to the western horizon—“to there and there”—I pointed north and south—“all the way back to your nest. Nothing but sand, some of it in huge piles called ‘dunes.’ There are hardly any trees and very little water.”
“I will see the desert?” he said, as much a pronouncement as a question.
“Well, yes, if you like,” I answered in as even a tone as possible, realizing the implications of that simple promise. Tarzan had taken me under his wing, nursed me, protected me, discovered the fate of my father, and led me on the strangest of odysseys, introducing me to
Pithecanthropus aporterensus erectus,
and here to this beach holding the mysteries of his past. I would certainly, at some point in the near future, be called upon to bring him out into the wider world. How far from his home should he be taken? Surely his help would be necessary to get me as far as Libreville, but was it my duty to bring him back to England, present him to society, assist him in retrieving his birthright and title? Was it my duty … or my desire?
I was forced to admit that when he’d uttered the words “I will see the desert?” I’d envisioned my new friend standing tall on a windswept dune … with me at his side. Visions of Jane Digby and her Bedouin husband assailed me.
Impossible!
Our chance meeting, this exceptional adventure, and Tarzan’s unbreakable bond with the Mangani might suggest some ties between us in the coming years. But what of the nature of those ties? What were my responsibilities to him? What were my feelings?
I had less question of what his feelings were toward me. I would find him staring openly at me in any and every circumstance. Listening with a cocked head if I hummed a tune. He was protective to a fault.
He would endlessly demand to hear about my
walla
in England, and my “nest.” I would describe as best I could the Edlington-Porter estate—the grounds and greenwood, the manor, the stables, my canopied bed. I told him of the long dining table made with wood from the mahogany trees of a forest like his, with their “legs”—so different from the Waziri banana leaf table. My explanation of glass windows left even me confused. I attempted to show him the way to drink from one of the Claytons’ teacups, but all he could do was laugh at the ridiculousness of the too-tiny, too-delicate “coconut shells” in his muscular fingers. He did a sight better with forks and knives and spoons but refused to employ them outside our lessons.
He liked especially to hear about the animals in England. The horses—“Like a
pacco,
zebra, but all of one color” and many times larger in size, upon whose backs I would ride at great speeds and jump over “hedges” and “stiles,” followed by a pack of yapping hounds. He urged me to make the sounds of all the animals I described and added them to his already prodigious repertoire. His eyes would grow wide as he imagined my descriptions and was shocked to hear that sometimes a tiny
sheeta
I called “Tabby” would sleep in my bed and wake me licking my neck with its tiny pink tongue. He thought it very odd that we should be forced to feed our animals to keep them alive. Why did they not feed themselves?
The day we sat under the palms, me describing the roses in my mother’s garden, I began with no warning to cry, surprising myself and alarming Tarzan.
“What hurts you?” he said.
It was so hard to explain that despite this magnificent adventure, I was homesick. “I want to see my mother,” I finally told him, sniffing back the tears, which did nothing but cause a flood of them to follow.
I felt an arm pulling at my shoulder and suddenly found my head in Tarzan’s lap, facing out to sea. The next thing I knew he was picking at my scalp with the gentlest fingers. He was “grooming” me, perhaps what his Mangani mother had done to soothe him when he was small. My heart broke, for his losses and my own, and there were no more lessons the rest of that somber afternoon.
* * *
It was time, I realized, to begin reading Tarzan his parents’ journal. There had been moments I’d been tempted to read on by myself, for my curiosity was intense. But there was fairness to be considered. This was young John Clayton’s life to be revealed. What gave me the right to gain knowledge of it before he did?
For the reading of the diary I chose the inside of the hut, in order to protect this precious and most irreplaceable document. Since the burial of the remains, Tarzan and I had tidied up the place as well as we were able, and after remaking the bed with the least frayed linens found in a wooden trunk, I had begun to sleep in it, very grateful for its comforts. He had chosen to sleep on the porch just outside the door, the closeness of the walls unbearable for him for more than an hour or two. Likewise, he was loath to sit on the bed, and this I put down to that tragic experience of his mother’s bones crumbling in his hands on this very spot.
And so I began reading, slowly and deliberately, stopping here and there to explain, simplify, or translate a word or passage Tarzan could not yet comprehend.
8 May 1885
While we thank God Almighty for our kindly treatment by the mutineers setting us down with all of our belongings, Alice and I yet find ourselves trapped in a nightmare from which there is no waking. We do our best, I with the building of the shelter, which I suppose could be called a tree house, and she furnishing it with the contents of her dower chest—the finest French linens, which we view with some irony laid across the crude bed that I have fashioned from the straightest of the found boards—and trying to eke out our stores of food by fishing, collecting small mollusks and seaweed, and partaking of the coconuts that have already fallen to the ground. Alice will not allow me to try my hand at climbing the long-necked trees, for if I should fall and injure myself or worse, all will be lost. She is right, of course, so I do not fight her on this, though I must admit to wanting more of the hairy-shelled fruit, its delicious white meat and delicate milk, the most refreshing of beverages.
In the last few days Alice has taken to helping me with my carpentry, something I at first protested, citing her delicate condition. She appraised me with a quirk of a smile and said, “I am not ill, my darling. I’m pregnant and perfectly capable of hammering a nail. The more help you have, the sooner we will have a shelter.” It surprised and delighted me more than I could have imagined that Alice is no wilting violet. That she is indeed a true helpmate and what Coleridge called a “soul mate.” I am blessed, so blessed.
Written with great hopes of rescue from a beach in Gabon,
John Clayton
23 June 1885
How odd it feels to take up the pen, for while I have since girlhood been an inveterate writer of letters to my friends, aunts, and cousins who lived a distance from Rutherford House, it had never occurred to me that my thoughts were worthy enough to warrant diary keeping. But here I am gazing over the sea from the window of the hut my hero of a husband built with his two hands, sitting at my mother’s antique writing table—a wedding gift—preparing to pour out the contents of my heart on these pages next to John’s own.
How it has come to this is all but inconceivable. How strange are the Fates that placed me first in the marriage bed of Lord Greystoke, who strayed far from the path set down for him by his father, instead following the commands of our Queen, then boarded us on a certain ship and, by the whimsy of a mutinous sailor called Great Henry, finally set us down on so deserted a shore as this.
I cannot say the Fates have been unkind, for we are not at the bottom of the sea. We’ve not died of malarial fevers, nor even suffer in the brittle cold of an English winter. The sun shines every day, breezes soothe our heated brows. We eat fish of a freshness indescribable and drink sweet rainwater collected in halves of coconut shells lining our porch. Our skins have grown golden tan (how horrified Mother would be!). But my belly bulges high and round, and by the sharp kicks and the tiny footprints that, to our delight and laughter, there appear, our child grows strong and healthy within.
John will read this, I know, but Diary, here is the truth of it: My husband, while always kind and attentive in our brief married life in England, held me as all men do their wives—as a sweet appendage and companion in the times set aside for family pleasures. Men work, attend to matters of business and estate. Women tend to social chores and children. Had we safely arrived at his post in Africa, our lives would yet have been separated by roles and rules, masculine and feminine.
But here on this beach no such lines of distinction apply. Some days I fish for our supper. He washes our clothes. I will collect wood for the fire. He will cook a crab and coconut stew. Still, I’ll sew on a button. He will lift a heavy load. But that such sweet equality should exist I never imagined in the world.
I would be lying if I said I do not long for a feather bed, Bessie’s apricot scones slathered in sweet cream, a stroll in Hampstead Heath on a crisp autumn morning, and most of all my mother’s hand to hold when this babe is born.
But I do not curse the Fates or God for this strange adventure, one that I believe in my heart will end with eventual rescue. But it will leave its indelible mark on my life with John. Of this I’m sure. Once so tightly cleaved together, we shall never be torn asunder. We are one creature now, and for that I can only give thanks to God and the Fates and to Great Henry himself, who, by the look of the wreck of the
Fuwalda,
is already in the arms of Jesus.
Written in gratitude from a beach in Gabon,
Alice Clayton
18 September 1885
I have in the many months of this sojourn thought myself a brave man. But I have in the last day been rudely disabused of that notion. For without benefit of physician or midwife I was called upon to bring my child into the world. Before Alice’s true labor began, I had time to muse on the sheer unorthodoxy of a husband presiding over this most primal of occasions. I would in the society we once knew have paced impatiently, whiskey and cigar in hand, in the downstairs salon, far enough away from the birthing chamber to be spared the womanly shrieks of pain, and I, like all men, would wait for news of a joyous birth (or the tragic death of mother or child, or both).
Modesty prevents me from imparting the sometimes gruesome particulars, but finally the moment came and there I stood between Alice’s thighs, she the picture of courage to my knee-clacking terror, pulling the slippery head and shoulders of our son from her heaving body, waiting breathless to hear the first squalling cry that would signal he lived.
But it did not come. An eternity passed in terrible silence broken only by Alice’s exhausted panting and my own feeble gasps of defeat. My eyes met hers, her face wet with sweat and tears of pain, lips twitching, but no words came forth. She should have been shouting out to God her fury at this betrayal, but she was silent. “Alice,” I thought but could not say aloud, “I love you more than words have meaning to express. I love you to distraction, whether this child lives or dies.”
And then it came. From the bloody bundle I held in my two hands a sound more welcome than a chorus of angels. Not a whimper or choked spluttering but a demanding bawl, a raucous cry, a clamorous announcement of new life!
Alice collapsed into sobs of relief as I laid our son on her breast and cut the cord, tying it twice. Little John Clayton, having taken his place in the world, lost no time seeking his first meal. I helped Alice to sitting, and the boy sucked noisily. I left them, she staring down at the miracle in her arms, and sought the narrow porch outside the door, gulping in fresh air and trying to still my knocking knees.
The sun had commenced its setting behind a great wall of grey and gold and orange clouds, a storm far out to sea. Here the waves still lapped lazily on the shore as though unaware of what forces behind would whip them soon into frenzied foam, and before them a rude hut in which a storm of a different kind had already been weathered.
I laid my head on the rail and began to weep, relieved of unutterable terror and racked with unspeakable joy. We have borne a child, Alice and I. Little Lord Greystoke. John Clayton. Johnnie. Our son. Beloved. Beloved. Beloved.
Written with all the beauty and blessings of Heaven and Earth about me,
John Clayton
* * *
I looked up from the page blinded by tears to find Tarzan standing behind me.
“I was born here?” he said, as much a statement as a question.
I looked across the room. “You were. In that bed.”
“My father was John Clayton?” Tarzan was thinking very hard. “
I
am John Clayton? I am … Johnnie?”
I nodded a vigorous affirmation.
“Who is Lord Greystoke?”
Ha! What a question.
How on earth could I possibly explain the idiocy and ridiculous complexity of titles and noble lineage? That Tarzan, a naked jungle dweller, was a peer of England, heir to a vast fortune, owner of farms and greenwoods, houses in country and town, master of servants, tenants, gardeners, gamekeepers, client to groveling lawyers and accountants, each at his beck and call? A seat in Parliament awaited him! It was ludicrous and altogether indescribable.