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Volume 8084

The Locket

by Alan Hanson

When the mutineers on the Fuwalda marooned Lord and Lady Greystoke on a West African shore in June 1888, they left the castaways “numerous chests and boxes” that the Greystokes had brought with them on their journey to John Clayton’s new post in British West Africa. Somewhere amidst the “great quantity of stuff” in those containers was a “small black box” housing a number of personal items belonging to John Clayton. A month later, as the couple moved into the cabin that John had built for them, he placed the little black box in the back of one of the cupboards he had built in the cabin. The box was secured, but Clayton left the key in the lock. It’s unknown whether or not Lord Greystoke or his wife ever again opened the box to look at its contents. They had no use for it in the struggle for survival that the couple fought over the 15 months they lived in the cabin. It’s only known that the small black box was still in the back of the cupboard when Lady Alice died in her sleep and the great ape Kerchak killed Lord Greystoke in mid-October 1889.

Adopted into the ape tribe at one year of age, the Greystokes’ son would not reenter the cabin until the age of 10 in February 1899. Although the young Tarzan spent much time in the cabin from then on, more than eight long years passed before he found his father’s locket. One day in the early summer of 1907, Tarzan noticed the small metal box his father had hidden in the back of the cupboard. It only took Tarzan a few moments to discover how the lock worked, and soon he was inspecting its contents — a photograph of a man, a few letters, a small book, and a “golden locket studded with diamonds, linked to a small gold chain.”

Tarzan was still wearing the locket 20 months later when the Porter party was marooned on the beach near his cabin. In February 1909, Tarzan saved William Clayton from a leopard and a lion. That day Clayton became the first European to see Tarzan wearing the locket.

“Before him he saw the figure of a young man, naked except for a loin cloth and a few barbaric ornaments about his arms and legs; on the breast a priceless diamond locket gleaming against a smooth brown skin.”

Later that same day, nearly two years after Tarzan first found the locket, Jane Clayton became the second person to wear the locket around the neck. After Tarzan killed an ape to rescue Jane, he carried her to the amphitheater where his ape tribe celebrated their primitive rites. As Tarzan and Jane sat on the edge of a drum, Jane noticed the “magnificent diamond locket” that hung around Tarzan’s neck. At that point, Burroughs provided his most detailed description of the locket.

“She pointed to it now, and Tarzan removed it and handed the pretty bauble to her. She saw that it was the work of a skilled artisan and that the diamonds were of great brilliancy and superbly set, but the cutting of them denoted that they were of a former day. She noticed too that the locket opened, and pressing the hidden clasp, she saw the two halves spring apart to reveal in either section an ivory miniature. One was of a beautiful woman and the other might have been a likeness of the man who sat beside her, except for a subtle difference of expression that was scarcely definable.”

Noting for the first time that the locket opened, Tarzan took it back from Jane and examined it. She sat wondering how this “beautiful ornament” had come into Tarzan’s possession. The ape-man then removed a photograph from the bottom of his quiver, and the two compared it to the man’s picture in the locket. Although Jane recognized that the images in the picture and in locket were of the same man, it didn’t occur to her at the time that the man might be Tarzan’s father.

“For a few moments he sat in silence, his eyes bent upon the ground, while Jane Porter held the little locket in her hand, turning it over and over in an endeavor to find some further clew that might lead to the identity of its original owner. At length a simple explanation occurred to her. The locket had belonged to Lord Greystoke, and the likenesses were of himself and Lady Alice. This wild creature had simply found it in the cabin by the beach. How stupid of her not to have thought of that solution before. But to account for the strange likeness between Lord Greystoke and this forest god — that was quite beyond her, and it is not strange that she did not imagine that this naked savage was indeed an English nobleman.”

When Jane returned the locket to Tarzan, he took it in his hands and placed it around her neck. Surprised, she would have given it back, but Tarzan would not let her do so. When she raised the locket to her lips in acknowledgment of the gift, Tarzan responded by taking the locket in his hand and kissing it in return.

After returning Jane to his cabin to rejoin her fellow castaways, Tarzan hurried off into the jungle to save Lieutenant D’Arnot from death at the stake in the native village. Meanwhile, back at the cabin, Jane struggled with her feelings toward the jungle man who had rescued her.

“… with one hand resting upon her rising and falling bosom, she felt the hard outlines of the man’s locket beneath her waist. She drew it out, holding it in the palm of her hand for a moment with tear-blurred eyes bent upon it. Then she raised it to her lips, and crushing it there buried her face in the soft ferns, sobbing. ‘Beast?’ Then God make me a beast; for, man or beast, I am yours.”

On the final night before she was to leave on a French cruiser, she “crushed the locket to her lips,” and declared, “I love you and because I love you, I believe in you.” That was the last time the golden locket was seen in the Tarzan of the Apes. There was no mention of it when Tarzan and Jane met again in the Wisconsin woods at the end of the story.

“Ships that Pass”

From that night in Tarzan’s cabin, when Jane Porter crushed the locket to her lips and declared her love for her missing ape-man, nearly a year passed before the locket was again seen. It is the only reference to it in the adventures both Tarzan and Jane experienced in The Return of Tarzan. In late February 1910, both of them were traveling at sea, Tarzan on a ship bound for Cape Town and Jane on Lord Tennington’s yacht headed for London. Burroughs revealed that Jane Porter still treasured the locket Tarzan gave her.

“And so it happened that on a certain day two vessels passed in the Strait of Gibraltar. The smaller, a trim white yacht, was speeding toward the east, and on her deck sat a young woman who gazed with sad eyes upon a diamond-studded locket which she idly fingered. Her thoughts were far away, in the dim, leafy fastness of a tropical jungle—and her heart was with her thoughts. She wondered if the man who had given her the beautiful bauble, that had meant so much more to him than the intrinsic value which he had not even known could ever have meant to him, was back in his savage forest.”

Tarzan the Untamed

Another four-and-a-half years passed before the golden locket is mentioned again, this time in the opening chapter of Tarzan the Untamed. After passing through many harrowing adventures leading up to their marriage in October 1910, Tarzan and Jane had settled on an estate in West Africa. Hurrying home from the coast in September 1914, Tarzan found what he believed to be Jane’s burned body in their bungalow’s bedroom.

“The diamond-studded locket with the pictures of his mother and father that he had worn always until he had given it as a token of his highest devotion to Jane Clayton before their marriage was missing. She always had worn it since; but it had not been upon her body when he found her slain in her boudoir so that now his quest for vengeance included also a quest for the stolen locket.”

Tarzan learned from a captured German soldier that Hauptmann (Captain) Fritz Schneider, who led the German raid on his home, had ordered his wife’s killing. Assuming the Schneider took the locket from around Jane’s neck, Tarzan set out in search of the German officer. During his quest, Tarzan came upon Bertha Kirchner, a German spy (he believed) lost in the jungle. A lion had ripped open the woman’s shirt, and there Tarzan saw something that enraged him.

“He saw her naked breasts where Numa had torn her clothing from her and dangling there against the soft, white flesh he saw that which brought a sudden scowl of surprise and anger to his face — the diamond-studded, golden locket of his youth — the love token that had been stolen from the breast of his mate by Schneider, the Hun. ‘Where did you get this?’ he demanded, as he tore the bauble from her … ‘It is mine. Tell me who gave it to you or I will throw you back to Numa.’”

Bertha responded that Hauptmann Fritz Schneider had given it to her. (The scene suggests

that it was Hauptmann Schneider who took the locket from Jane after the German raid on the Greystoke farm.) After taking the locket from Bertha, Tarzan put it around his own neck. It didn’t stay there for long, though. When Tarzan turned his back, Bertha knocked him cold with the butt of a pistol and took the locket back.

When Tarzan recovered, he followed Bertha’s trail to Wilhelmstal, where he hoped to find the girl, the locket, and Hauptmann Schneider. He found all three (he thought) in a room in German headquarters in the town. He listened at the door as Bertha spoke.

“I have brought the locket, as was agreed upon between you (Hauptmann Schneider) and General Kraut, as my identification. I carry no other credentials. This was to be enough. You have nothing to do but give me the papers and let me go.”

Tarzan entered the room in Wilhelmstal, killed Schneider, and found the locket in his clothing. Nothing more is mentioned of the bauble in Tarzan the Untamed, nor in any of the ape-man’s adventures in his subsequent escapades described by Burroughs in Tarzan the Terrible and Tarzan and the Golden Lion.

Tarzan and the Ant Men

Tarzan reclaimed his locket from Schneider’s body in late May 1916. Sometime after Tarzan and Jane were reunited in Pal-ul-don, it seems that Tarzan would have given the locket back to his wife. After all, Jane had apparently worn it around her neck from the time Tarzan gave it to her in June 1909 until Hauptmann Schneider took it from her during the German raid on the Greystoke farm in September 1914. However, when the locket next appears in Tarzan and the Ant Men, it’s still around Tarzan’s neck.

While Jane was in London in early February 1920, Tarzan took off on his first solo airplane flight from a field near the Greystoke home in Africa. When his plane later crashed into trees inside The Great Thorn Forest, he was ejected and landed unconscious on a forest trail. When a passing warrior woman found and searched him, Burroughs reported, “Only the diamond studded, golden locket that had been his mother’s she left untouched upon its golden chain about his neck.” Later, before Tarzan regained consciousness, a young male of his captor’s tribe, “attracted by the golden locket removed it from the ape-man’s neck and placed it upon his own.”

It didn’t stay there for long, though. He soon died when he was struck upon the head by a stone cast by a young female. His body, left in the sand where he fell, soon drew the attention of vultures, who swarmed over it, quickly picking the boy’s bones clean.  When the feast was over, the birds flew away. One of them, though, carried away a souvenir.

“… entangled about the neck of one of the birds was a golden chain from which depended a diamond encrusted locket. Ska fought the bauble that swung annoyingly beneath him when he flew and impeded his progress when he walked upon the ground, but it was looped twice about his neck and he was unable to dislodge it, and so he winged away across The Great Thorn Forest, the bright gems gleaming and scintillating in the sun.”

The vulture learned to cope with the discomfort caused by the chain that encircled him.

“The pendant locket, sparkling in the sun light, had ceased to annoy him while on the wing, only when he alighted and walked upon the ground did it become an incumbrance; then he stepped upon it and tripped, but long since had he ceased to fight it, accepting it now as an inescapable evil.”

Eventually, though, the locket with its chain proved a fatal impediment for Ska. When he landed to feast on the remains of a buffalo, the chain caught around the horn of the dead beast. Burroughs briefly summarized the bird’s fate: “Never again would Ska, the vulture, pursue aught.”

One day in early July 1920, Usula, one of Tarzan’s faithful Waziri warriors, was cautiously moving down a trail when he came upon an awful sight. A white man was lying beside the carcass of a dead buffalo feasting on the animal’s hide. When the man looked up, Usula recognized him as the “The Big Bwana.” When he raised him to his knees, Usula saw something that confirmed for him the man’s identity.

“At his side, caught over one of the horns of the buffalo, was The Big Bwana’s golden locket with the great diamonds set in it. Usula replaced it about the man’s neck. He built a strong shelter for him nearby and hunted food, and for many days he remained until the man’s strength came back; but his mind did not come back. And thus, in this condition, the faithful Usula led home his master.”

At the Greystoke bungalow, the presence of the locket around the man’s neck convinced everyone present, including Jane, that the mindless man was Lord Greystoke. However, six months after he flew away from the Greystoke farm on his solo flight, Tarzan finally arrived back home just in time to expose the imposter as Esteban Miranda, who had been impersonating Tarzan since the opening events of Tarzan and the Golden Lion nearly four years before.

Although not mentioned, the golden locket was no doubt immediately removed from the neck of Miranda and returned to the Greystokes. It’s unknown what Tarzan and Jane did with it then, since the locket was never again mentioned in any of ERB’s subsequent Tarzan stories.

Summary

The basic facts about the Greystokes’ golden locket are these. It appears on and off in ERB’s Tarzan saga over a period of 13 years, from when Tarzan found it in the cabin in June 1907 until July 1920, when Usula placed it around the neck of Esteban Miranda.

At various times, five people wore the locket around their necks. Tarzan was the first, followed by Jane in Tarzan of the Apes. Next was Bertha Kircher in Tarzan the Untamed, followed by Tarzan again in same book. The Alali boy wore the locket in Tarzan and the Ant Men before Usula finally placed it around the neck of Esteban Miranda.

Those are the basic particulars of the appearances of the “magnificent diamond locket” in four of ERB’s Tarzan stories. Burroughs offered it as a symbol of the enduring love shared by two generations of Greystoke men and their mates.

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