The Missing Link and Other Tales of Ape-Men

by Georges T. Dodds

  The committee members quickly gathered, but in insufficient numbers to form a quorum. It was proposed to reconvene in a week or so. The elected secretary complained that he was marrying off his daughter on that date, and that one should at least put it off for a fortnight. This time, however, the question entered the stage of a definite inquiry: three members were designated to lead the inquiry: a pharmacist, a veterinarian, and an engineer, second-class, for bridges and canals. In a touching spirit of accord, rather rare, the doctors had refused to take part in this investigatory commission, putting forward as a pretext that if they went there for free, as hygienists, to a village infected by an alleged epidemic, the inhabitants would bank on being able to call upon them in this manner all the time, so that in the end the administration would have encouraged the most foolish and blameworthy of peasant traits, namely, avarice. Was not the primary responsibility of the sick to heal themselves?

  The delegates put in a lot of work. Vegetable farmers and fishermen, men and women were questioned, and the names, addresses and professions of the infants’ parents, consigned to a statistical databank. Samples were taken from every well, every piece of salted meat and fish kept in the households. The cows, and as a secondary form of animal production the goats, were first examined themselves, then the grasses in which they were pastured, then their stables, which were measured and their cubic feet of volume determined. They were then each milked individually and 20 vials of milk, sealed and labeled, made up the rest of the samples. Plans were drawn up, the scope of surveys required was determined. A monument of science, of understanding and patience, a clear account shedding light on everything, of what had been done and what was left to do, of the results obtained and of those to obtain, the gentlemen’s report received in the General Assembly the congratulations of the president, and unanimous praise from their colleagues.

  Each one of them insisted, with noble modesty, on the items which remained to be elucidated. The pharmacist admitted that the chemical and microscopic analyses of already over a kilogram of lard and of fish which had been seized had not revealed anything. The veterinarian, a rather wordy speaker, but a scrupulous experimenter, was feeding the suspect milk samples to small rabbits, and formally promised to persevere, though the young animals in the laboratory which he had set up at his own expense in the two halves of a sawn-through barrel had not as yet presented anything abnormal except a quantity of fleas which he thought to be well above average, an observation he made in passing, reserving the right to later draw whatever conclusions from it which might suggest themselves. The engineer, second-class, of bridges and canals, presented estimates for the most urgent expenses, digs to be made to see whether drinking-water wells or fountains were receiving any infiltrations from septic systems.

  Without hesitation, the council agreed upon opening a line of credit. It offered to provide its time and energies, without discussion and without asking anything for itself. Was it not desirable for the State not to haggle over the necessary expenditures to continue the studies so well undertaken? But the honorable governor, who had taken on the responsibility of forwarding the request to whom it may concern, did not end up needing to do so. A wet-nurse, who might be excused for having maintained in this backwater town some of the common folk’s doubts regarding the administration’s vigilance, decided to bring in a doctor who would quickly rule out the wells, the animals and the latrines. There had been much exaggeration; all it was, was syphilis, indeed a contagious disease, but well known and which the honorable governor, thankful of one less worry, did not have to take care of. The sessions of the hygiene committee suspended, the pharmacist left off his analyses of the drinking water for the more remunerative task of making up hydrargyrum pills and salves, and the veterinarian, not without some regrets, drowned the dogs, and returned the young rabbits to their mother’s warren.

  At this point, eight children, two wives, one widow, and four men (the two husbands of the two wives, and the widow’s two lovers) were contaminated.

  The families of the uninfected infants were ordered to take them back. Alas! The little Heltzius had shown symptoms the day before. Jan, whose visit, after a night of insomnia, had occurred right after the doctor had left, had been the first to bring back the deplorable news. Saskia took to crying from morning ‘til night, frightened by all that was withheld from her, and especially by the prudent interdiction made to her against bringing her child home, or even going to cuddle him.

  The disease, now that it had been diagnosed and attacked with all the means that could be put into practice, and that specific recommendations limited its ravages to the 15 people already stricken, seemed to hurry to do the most damage possible to its victims. In some odd injustice, the actress’ kid who had brought it to the community seemed to have gotten over it. It also remained benign in the well-fed and well tended children of the farmers, as well as Saskia’s which had little more than an inflammation of the throat. It incubated slowly in the humans. But it progressed unchecked in the weak flesh of the fishermen’s rough brats; their eyelids and nostrils were stuck together, pale, ichorous; their joints knotted; their cracked lips receded, pursed like the opening of a tightly tied drawstring bag tearing when the pill was pushed between them; blisters grew on the palms of their hands and the soles of their feet, bursting, and discharging their fetid, sanious fluid, their irregular edges joining in a large, purplish sore.

  Jan did not wait for Saskia to plead with him before going for further news. Sometimes with Martin Heltzius, but more frequently alone, he arrived on foot, handing out alms and pity. The fishermen, who at first ran from him with the wariness of the poor, now invited him to relax for a moment. One afternoon he took shelter in a woman’s house during a violent summer storm. Black as ink, the low cloud cover seemed to have captured a strange light which did not emanate from any distinct sun, and which insinuated itself into the darkest recesses, attenuating and even erasing the distinction between objects and their shadows, bathing everything in an uncertain, static, and dead pallor. Most of the women, before going down to the beach, where they walked about anxiously, listening, watching the waves, trying to discover behind the great swell which the North Sea sent to crash at their feet, their men and elders’ vessels, had collected the sick little ones in the same hovel as Jan had taken shelter in. The convalescents slept; one, almost a corpse, showed no movement of the chest; the face of another whom the virus had bloated with confluent tumors looked as though the pustules of a toad were crawling over his face; all were breathing and droning with such monotony as to render Jan sleepy, making him dream, on this doleful day, of the cruel limbo into which innocent newborns expiated some heinous sin of their father’s.

  The sky cleared up and he thanked the fisherman’s wife who accompanied him as he walked along the switch-backed trail over the dunes to take a breath of fresh air and view from a greater height the horizon over the sea. Comparing farmers’ homes on the fertile lands to her hovel in a bare sand pit, she spat out spitefully:

  “Oh! Those monsters, to think they are the ones that poisoned us all. They accused the infants of having brought the rot of the cities to the beach. Who knows? These soils which only they dare cultivate are indeed rich, but rich with corpses, those having formerly belonged in the leper colony. Traitors, they allowed the old boats which had fed their ancestors to fall into disrepair, for their cowardly mole’s life sheltered from the storms. By stirring up the burial grounds and sowing their filthy wheat, have they not brought forth into the air the germs of pestilence which were buried there? Horrors! They taunted us with the white bread of their harvests, which they showed us from afar, but they have eaten leprosy and the pox with it.”

  Jan calmed her down with a little money and sent her on her way.

  He found Saskia’s son to have already regained, thanks to the efficacy of the treatment, his initial vivacity and good humor. The doctor allowed the wet-nurse to bring him back permanently to Haarlem, and for the mother to smother h
im in kisses. But Jan always feared a relapse. He read medical texts, and as the ignorant do not realize that the authors are forced to describe all cases, emphasizing the worst and enumerating them one after another, so too did he not understand that any given individual may only show the least dangerous symptoms at any given phase of the disease. All their lives, long or short, he saw those children which were thought to be cured, but tainted by the foul virus, transmitting in turn this eternal menace to their children’s bone marrow. Then he remembered his big brothers and sisters, inheriting their father’s consumption, this even worse disease which had killed off 10 of the 12, in their youth, in the midst of happy, healthy times.

  Stung with disgust by man’s fate, a peculiar pity for the sadness and rancor’s of life brought him to blame life itself. What insanity is it that wishes to bring to life creatures doomed to misery, he would say, while he preserved that of a pregnant beggar-woman extending her hand to him. The listeners at the Brinckleymann café would sit and listen wide-eyed at his thoughts on the subject, taking up their conversations again with a wink of the eye and a tapping of a finger on their brow.

  “Poor Mr. Jan! His walks along the seaside this summer chased away his bizarre thoughts but since he’s been keeping himself cloistered recently, here they are again, worse than ever.”

  He went back to keeping strictly to himself as he had in the past, of muttering to himself as he walked along with great strides. Even his best friends, Saskia and his brother Adrian, had no conviction in their whispered voices when they defended him from accusations of being mad. Then one morning at dawn, after another one of his many sleepless nights, he got up, leaned on his elbows at his open window, and gave in to his vague desires.

  The old French painter, who had smoked so many pipes under the same roof, came to mind without him knowing why. The exile had seen the seas outside Haarlem upon the horizon under the lingering fog which little by little was drawn away by the Sun; and he saw the spongy soil of the polders spread out in vast pastures. Well, everything changes, everything passes, thought Jan, except those great men whose name, on occasion, survives even their works.

  That morning, the neighbors and passersby found him finally settled down. He walked calmly, singing to himself, hands in his pockets, no longer waving about madly like a free-whirling windmill. Truth was that after months of experiments by trial and error and further studies, his small obsession had led his visionary’s mind, bubbling with ideas, to set a goal for himself: he was going to work at regenerating the human race.

  He distributed among his parents and friends his parrot and his monkeys, thus convincing many he had regained his sanity. His books, atlases, and tools of all sorts, packed in crates, were secretly taken to the railroad station. He told his brother he was taking a trip to Belgium, but quickly left Brussels for Paris, and Paris for Marseilles, from where he wrote to Adrian and Saskia not to wait for him for another year, for, given that he was already so close to Algeria, he had decided to visit it. His collection of books, atlases and equipment complete, under the cover of a humble protestant missionary he took ship for the Pillars of Hercules, Guinea, Gabon and the unknown.

  CHAPTER V

  The cabin, very large and round, had a wall built of woven bamboo and bark, whose fissures are filled with a coating of clay, and for a roof a solid conical structure of narrow, thick planks five to six meters long, which supported palm leaves sown together with straps made from lianas. The hinges and lock on the woven-reed-door were made with knots of similar lianas, and the whole place was painted with white-wash. Matting covered a portion of the floor; the fireplace was in the middle on some stones, and its smoke rose freely through an opening at the top of the roof. The table was made from slabs of slate nailed to three posts driven into the soil, and bore some coarse pottery and some books. Chests, stools, pitchers, mats, pineapple fiber nets, kindling and logs for the fire were strewn on the ground; animal pelts, fish, clusters of fruit, bananas, grapes, cobs of corn, and yaw tubers were drying on the wall, amongst a number of weapons hanging from water-buffalo horns; hung so as to dangle in the smoke were legs and shoulders of antelope and boar, turning under the radiating heat.

  The fire no longer flamed, but the heated atmosphere and red-hot coals indicated that it had been burning for a long time. There was no light, other than the reflection of the red coals on the gun barrels, tool blades, and the curved surfaces of a glazed jar.

  A man in tattered clothing, chest, legs and arms bare, crouched near the fire, elbows on his knees, face held in his hands. From time to time he rose and on his tip-toes crossed over to a place where darkness accumulated, bent over a low, wide cot built of rushes, leaves, grass and pelts. At his approach, a moan came from the darkness; he arranged and carefully spread the covers as if for someone sick, whispered a few soft, calming words and returned to his place, no longer hearing—the moans having ended—anything but the irregular, halting, rough and sometimes wheezy breathing of the poor creature, his mate, whom even in sleep seemed a martyr.

  He lit upon the revived fire a hemp wick soaked in a bowl of oil, drew a stool close to him and leaned a large octavo volume on it. The light flickered in the column of air drawn up by the chimney’s opening, but provided sufficient light. It was indeed Jan Maas, little changed; still Jan Maas the meek baby-faced dreamer from the land of tulips, except that he was clothed in rags, that his nose was more prominent between his thin tanned cheeks, and that his eyes, deep and sparkling, indicated a fever. And always, as was the case when he attended lectures, his mind wandered in spite of himself, while his finger flipped through the pages.

  The book was a treatise on child birth. Among the medical illustrations which followed one another under his absent- minded thumb, one held his attention. Representing the methodology for undertaking one of the most difficult manipulations with the forceps, it appeared abominable, and his gaze, troubled by a brighter flicker of the fire, believed it to be spotted with blood. He blew out his light as if he hoped it would also put out his fear, pushed away the book, and slipped back into the shadows. “My God, let’s hope this case is not the same. Let’s wait...I’ve seen so many already!” he sighed, drawn by these words to review his past.

  The long crossing, his arrival at the French mission in the Bay of Gabon, going up the river, the joys and fears, the wild beasts, savages worse than the beasts, fevers worse than the savages, numerous dangers besides that of being eaten by a tribe of Pahouins who had kept him fattened—all these things, though they had lasted months and months, were of so little importance to Jan, that they floated about his mind in an indistinct fog. Adventures whose true yet brief description would have been enough to cover ten explorers with glory were forgotten before the motives he had to undertake them. A walking, talking mummy, he had walked amongst the most fearsome and spectacular of what central Africa had to offer, his eyes turned inward, hypnotized by the intensity of his internal contemplation. Nothing having taken hold of his mind outside those facts or thoughts directly linked to his goal, his memories began with the first encounter with the great apes in their free state.

  Having become now the pampered guest of the Pahouins after he had administered large doses of quinine to their sick chief thus saving him from a malignant fever and himself, by a singular cause and effect, from being impaled and roasted, he joined a few of their warriors in beating out antelopes. A very young girl, an intrepid huntress, followed them. Having remained behind to admire her already chubby nakedness in a pond—attention to style, following findings which Jan thought to be new, existing in all latitudes—they suddenly heard her cry out for help. A gorilla was attempting to kidnap her, a huge male, he held her by the waist in one of his arms, compensating for the extra breadth of her hips by using his second hand; with the top of his bent-over phalanges he supported himself against the soil. The young Pahouin’s fiancé, boldly running after the kidnapper, struck him from a distance with a poisoned arrow. Sensing himself injured, the d’ginna, su
ch was the name the other hunters were shouting, stopped, softly put her down in the grass and began to rape her, disdainful of the menacing screamers which leapt after him, driven mad by an overbearing desire to satisfy his lust before he died. To drag him from the body of his victim, they had had to finish him off with spears and clubs. Thrown onto his back, the herculean grasp of his arms had relaxed. His lips, in spite of having receded over his canines, seemed rather to flutter for a kiss than to tense for a bite, and his look, rather than the cruel expression which ought to have been imparted upon them by his bloody death, maintained a fluid languor of ecstasy. The young Pahouin girl, with the annoyed gesture with which a European woman flounces her dress, slapped around her kidneys to erase the grass marks, and smiled. On the way back, under her breath, she told Jan that she had not been very afraid, the hairy men of the woods never hurt women; and Jan, still studying their manners, asked why then had she cried out for help. She answered that had she not, she would have been considered tainted for seven weeks, and her marriage into the tribe would then have been delayed.

  He thanked God, for thus had he unraveled the tangled mess which his numerous predecessors had accumulated: where they differing observations, simple exaggerations or legends collected among the natives? He guessed that in the attending chaos the office-bound naturalists admitted or rejected certain facts, according to whether they found that they supported current theories or not. He was struck by the weakness of other peoples’ frequent accusations of the French being weak-minded; was it not instead among them, that so many scientists, when they presented the results of their most conscientious studies, always feared offending religious sensibilities? Was it not among them that many, to avoid taking a position, joined that school of dishonest cheats in which the positivists boasted of their disdain for the big questions, and of ever coming to any hard and fast conclusions? Weak minds, he told himself in an echo of sermons heard in the temple in his youth, could not grasp that Creation, as one studied it in greater and greater detail, would manifestly reveal the Creator in his inherent justice and eternal beauty. He vowed to himself not to retreat before any new truths, certain that they could not but support his faith. It was for allowing him to so quickly elucidate the question of contact between native women and apes, that he thanked God.