The Missing Link and Other Tales of Ape-Men

by Georges T. Dodds

  Tartarin, for it was Tartarin, the immortal Tartarin of Tarascon, was hard pressed to escape the crowd’s enthusiasm, pulling out pell-mell his packages into the right of way, giving Jan an embrace, saying goodbye to him as if he were an old friend. Would they ever see each other again? Alas! Who knows? Back in his native lodgings only long enough to equip himself with new weapons, Tartarin would soon get back in the car, but this time to go poke his rifle at the terrible bear of the polar ice, the monstrous polar plantigrade, in Switzerland.18

  Paris, Brussels, and Jan finally breathed in the peaty smell of the polders. Even though it was December, the red cows, their long horns smoothly curving with their tips to the front were still in pasture, excited by the cold, and looking even more gluttonous than in the summer, as if the light sleet spangling the grass blades was dusting them with sugar. Against the background of the sky, which seldom changed in any season, the same brownish mists still drifted about, rounded smooth by such high altitude winds, that the windmill vanes deployed everywhere seemed only to capture their lost wisps and then turn backwards. In the canals the long, flat barges, the trekschuiten, harnessed to a horse, still made their slow way, barely rippling the dark and ever sleepy waters. On the level rails the same solid cars rolled smoothly on, filled with smokers, but where not a single traveler tapped the ash from his cigar anywhere but in the small wooden box, nailed for that very purpose to the lower portion of the window frame.

  “Haarlem! Haarlem!” In front of the station three cabs were lined up, their three drivers solemnly aligned in a row, offering themselves to the occasional tourist. Along the streets the children were playing, and Jan, who walked alone, having forgotten to warn them of the time of his arrival, shivered for the first time in a long while and hastened his sleepwalker’s steps, believing he recognized in certain of the childrens’ cries, an echo of Hemo’s rowdiness.

  He headed to the closest place, Saskia’s home.

  Martin Heltzius’ store was open and merchandise overflowed from all its shelves, but it was free of any customers or boss. He knocked, he rang. A five to six year old child, his fingers red from cold, ran up from the garden where the children made up two opposing sides and bombarded each other with snowballs.

  “Do you wish to buy something sir?”

  “Are you then the salesperson, son?”

  “Oh! No, sir, I just keep an eye on the store. If it’s to buy something I’ll go and get my dad or uncle Adrian at the Brinckleymann café. I say my uncle, but he isn’t really, he’s my grandmother’s husband, but not my grandfather either. I call him my uncle Adrian, because I love him very much.”

  “And your mother?”

  “Mommy is at the church, praying for another uncle whom I don’t know, who will be back one of these days from...from...I don’t know, from far, far away.”

  “Do you not know this other uncle’s name?”

  “Why yes! He is my uncle Jan. And mother wanted to name me after him. My name is Jan too.”

  Jan cried. Given his two large teardrops, his leanness, his arched back, his bundle, his leggings, his walking stick, his pathetic exterior, the child, moved by a certain thought, asked if he had come to beg for alms. Indeed, his mother was not in, but she always gave to the destitute, and he could give in her stead. And drawing a copper piece from his pocket, shiny from having been rubbed by the marbles he kept there, he extended it to him, timid for not having more.

  “Here my good man, don’t worry, my mother will give it back to me.”

  Jan hugged and thanked him. No, he was not begging for charity, or at least not for money. Let him tell his mother and father that a friend wished to speak with them, nothing more, a friend who has been far, far away.

  The child was already trotting off towards the café, when he changed his mind. One could read on his worried features his parents’ injunction to not go far from the store, and his hesitation at leaving the stranger there alone. Looking him over once again, with one of those childlike gazes which skim over the surface of things yet nonetheless unravel their thread, appearances and posturing for the gallery having no hold on their innocence, and trusting the tender meekness of his features, he ran off again, this time for good.

  Jan’s hand, resting on the counter, touched a newspaper. He picked it up. The Amsterdam Gazette, several days old, but still in its wrapper.

  Dear sheet! thought Jan who unfolded it unconsciously. He no longer remembered how many years ago, but it was from it that he had learned of the drawing of the Orphan’s lottery, and of the fortune which suddenly fell to him. Had he not won the jackpot, what would his life have been? A digit greater or lesser in his ticket’s number and he would have stayed, cultivating tulips, his universe limited to his flower beds, D’ginna unknown to him, he would not be beset with that sadness, his memories of Hemo, which might kill him, kill him all the better by burdening him with a secret which he could never rid himself of by speaking of it.

  Hemo! Who had whispered the name? Through what strange coincidence had his lips pronounced it, while his eyes read it, no devoured it, on a back page of the Gazette? Written as plain as day, almost on every line, here indeed were the two triumphant syllables: Hemo! Hemo! Hemo! He spelt them out, his sight clouded, mumbled them in a choked voice, and suddenly rushed off like a madman from his cell, out of Martin Heltzius’ store, returning to the train station, just in time to catch the express to Amsterdam. For there was no doubt. Hemo, D’ginna’s son, Kaylinkah’s playmate, the native of the Pahouin country, his pupil, and perhaps much more than his mere pupil, was in this city, or at least was on the date on the newspaper, in which he reread over and over again an article entitled: Peter the Mattress-maker.

  CHAPTER XI

  NEWS REPORT FROM THE AMSTERDAM GAZETTE

  No more is it Peter the Mattress-maker that our headline should read, but Peter the Assassin. Last night we were no longer on the theater beat, but at the Assize Court. No longer tearing our white gloves applauding the actors, we have soiled them with blood handling a corpse. Indeed, last night, blood soiled our magnificent Palace of Industry Theater.

  Since we are not critiquing a play, but recounting a true crime, there is no need to obey the laws of stage propriety by holding back on the emotional scenes, or delaying the outcome until the end. So then, the outcome, here it is, right away, in all the simplicity of its horror: last night, in the middle of the show, before the eyes of the public, one actor murdered another. For we must not deceive ourselves, this was no accident, it was murder, and premeditated.

  I leave it for you to judge.

  One will remember that a troop of English pantomimes were making their debut at the Paleis voor Volksvlijt a fortnight ago; our dear readers can find the exact date in our newspaper’s back issues. We were the first to note this troop’s immense success, thanks to a singular act, one of those great attractions, well designed, we must admit, to draw a crowd. The main role was held by a young gorilla from Gabon. The leads had also given us a complete rundown on the strange animal, and we will remind you in this regard, that these details were reproduced by a number of our colleagues, without one having the decency to cite the Gazette, from whence they had taken them.

  Let us then repeat for those who might have forgotten, that this ape had been brought to Europe by one of the sailors who had escorted Sir Thomas Stayel, the illustrious English traveler sent to Africa by the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Jonathan Doyce—such was the sailor’s name—with a broken revolver which was no longer good for anything, had bought him near the sources of the Como, one of the upper affluents of the great Gabon River which flows into the Atlantic just above Senegal, from some Pahouin savages in whose village, if one can term a jumble of noisome huts a village, it lived a domesticated existence.

  Had these Pahouins been raising this young quadrumanous beast so they could devour it, rather than their own children, in leaner days? This would seem to be the case. Farther upstream, Sir Thomas Stayel had dis
covered hideous mounds of cooking wastes, which the pen refuses itself to describe, within which the bones of men and chimpanzees putrefied together. Alas, how slowly does barbarism retreat before civilization! How many more lives like that of Sir Stayel, entirely devoted to progress, will be needed to bring light to the very confines of the world where the deepest darkness reigns! That is the question, we shall, along with the illustrious explorer, repeat in the language of Shakespeare and Byron.

  We know that France exerts her protectorate over those regions of Gabon where the gorilla’s habitat is situated. Nonetheless, the Paris Natural History Museum only owns one specimen...stuffed. Hence did it try to acquire the one it knew to be in the possession of the English sailor. Jonathan Doyce would consent to part with it, but—who would blame him—in drawing the greatest profit possible. Unfortunately for the Paris Museum, the budget with which it operates did not allow it, in these circumstances, to compete with the circus owners, and the ape was finally awarded to some English clowns, who, his education completed, undertook a tour of all the great cities of the continent with him. Having disembarked in Antwerp, they had already drawn applause from Belgium, when they made their debut in Amsterdam.

  Hemo, such is the name of this unique actor, the same name he bore among the savages, however that may be, the name, given first billing on the posters displayed at the Paleis voor Volkslijt, sold out the hall every night. We have analyzed, in this very column, the pantomime he played. We stated that it was what one might suppose such a thing should be: an excuse for extraordinary gambols.

  Pierrot the Mattress-maker, such was the title.

  Hemo, that is the ape, included in his role as Pierrot the functions of mattress-maker and of Colombine’s husband. Colombine was played by the ravishing Miss Betty. The Harlequin with whom, as always, she always hoodwinked Pierrot, was William Ochter, the most stunning clown, bar none, to ever have donned the traditional and elegant red and black diamond-patterned costume. As soon as Pierrot’s back was turned, he came to laugh and frolic with his mistress, drink and eat with her Pierrot’s wine and paté. The latter quickly guessed what was going on between them. He watched them, caught them, and threatened Harlequin, who answered him with a hail of blows using a washerwoman’s beater.

  Pierrot locked up his wife. While he worked on one side of the stage, one could see her pining in the lonely house which filled the other side. He combed out his mattresses; when they were finished, he rolled them up, tied them up and brought them inside; Harlequin slipped into one of them, after having distracted him with a call from offstage; completely unawares he brought him into his shop, such that the two lovers, Harlequin having quickly left his hiding spot, caressed each other on the mattress prepared and brought in by the poor husband.

  Upon hearing their kisses, Pierrot caught them again. This time there was a mad chase, such an emulation of grimaces, of contortions, of tumbling between Harlequin and Pierrot, that one could no longer tell, between the two, who was the ape and who was the man. They scuffled about on the second floor of the house, in the trees in the yard, on the roof; they tumbled down from prodigious heights, turning several times upon themselves, and bounding off faster than ever.

  Harlequin finally escaped, and Pierrot, aching all over, limping, pondered, trying to figure out how he had gotten into his store, sounding the walls, checking the shutters, the door, with the bewilderment of a screamingly funny grotesque. Upon seeing the untied mattress amongst the others, he blinked and tapped his brow with his finger to indicate that he had understood. In the following act, when Harlequin was sneaking his way in again, he pretended not to notice anything, but, once the mattress was rolled up and tied, rather than dragging it into his home with the others, he drew it up to the bottom of a tree, and ran him through with several thrusts of a sword. The trick was simple, but very cleverly executed; Harlequin as one will have guessed, had disappeared through a trap door in the flooring; bladders of dark red wine designed to be burst open by the sword bubbled forth a stream of blood, and Pierrot would smear his whiteface with it in one of those exaggerations typical of the English stage, which, as we know, never holds back from presenting the public with the most trivial and repugnant reality. Harlequin, offstage, imitated the cries of a pig being slaughtered; as in the best developed of melodramas, the women were all atremble. Not yet appeased, Pierrot took up the bloody mattress and like a reaper might his wheat, he beat it mercilessly, sat on it, trampled on it, and finally unrolled it to admire his work, to wallow in his vengeance.

  From the basement, Harlequin had slipped in his place in the mattress a flattened, life size portrait of himself painted on an inflatable gold-beater’s skin. The crowd was in stitches. Colombine, drawn by the joyful cries of her fierce husband, was almost unconscious as she tenderly ran her fingers over her lover, reduced to a pancake. So when policemen passed through at the rear of the stage, she ran after them to denounce the crime.

  Having remained alone, poor Pierrot began to shake, seeing himself judged, convicted and hung, and previewing the noose about his neck, he kicked about, croaked, his tongue drawn out by the sudden jerk of an irremediable snap. But suddenly his face changed, a glimmer of malice came over it; he loosened the slipknot which he imagined was already about his neck, sighed deeply like one asphyxiated now reborn to life, ran home, came back out with something hidden under his smock, and having made sure he was alone, he raised it in triumph. A bellows! It was a bellows of which he fitted the nozzle in the nose, the mouth, the ears, even in the lower back of the inflatable man, with such a drollness of motions that it covered for what was the rather risqué nature of the last joke. There were indeed a few shocked “oh! oh!,” but these were quickly drowned out by the laughter upon seeing the inflatable figure growing round, its arms and legs spreading apart, and Pierrot putting it back into the mattress with endless precautions so as not to deflate it. When the police officers, led by a Colombine in tears, proceeded to investigate, it was, of course, the real Harlequin who, back in place, rose up better than ever, between the two spouses whose amazements during the proceedings, were equal but pleasantly contradictory: the wife, thrilled, the husband dumbfounded. Harlequin showed the police officers his close-fitting vest pierced by the sword; and Pierrot, handcuffed, was taken away, but not fast enough for him not to see his supposed victim and his unfaithful Colombine pay out to one another their arrears in kisses.

  From this pantomime like unto so many others, the gorilla created a strange work of art through the intense expression of his features, and his frantic capers. Let us cut to the quick. As much as our readers have had a hunch, so we are certain: it was in the act where Pierrot runs through the mattress with the sword that the murder occurred.

  The crowd, gayer, and more tumultuous, was packed into the hall even more densely than on the previous nights. Let the reader forgive us a word of backstage slang: it gave itself wholeheartedly to the actor.

  Pierrot, the Ape, Hemo to give him his true name, had never shown such verve. A single one of his leaps took him right across the scenery; he shouted like Othello, the first time he discovered Harlequin, and looked at him as if he wished to devour him: one could hear his fangs grating. The waves of applause followed one upon the other without end. Given the meager week in the theaters, nothing drawing us elsewhere, we had come to occupy our seat for a second time. We can say: “I was there.” Thus, we were approaching the scene with Harlequin in the mattress.

  “The business scene,” such as the illustrious Parisian speaker who deigned to honor us with his remarks, if we daren’t say his friendship, during his recent trip to our beloved Amsterdam on the occasion of the Exposition—M. Francis Quarcey—does indeed thus qualify as the most important scene, the scene where the intrigue is knit. We know that his theories on the theater have contributed to him being categorized among the master writers of his country, at least as much as his Le Roi des Dunes, that marvelous novel which ignorant and jealous reviewers (these alas can only be fo
und in Paris!) said was plagiarized from Rolla, a ridiculous Italian poem. And this reparation is only right, so have we assured ourselves in the numerous, yet all too infrequent conversations which he has allowed us to profit by—we mere pupils—conversations whose recollection remain among the highlights of our already long literary career. For M. Francis Quarcey, whose modesty will be vexed if perchance his eyes come to peruse these few words, joins the tactfulness of a Pascal, to the profundity of a Béranger,19 and we understand why his countrymen have awarded him the flattering yet deserved name of La Bruyère’s20 grandson.

  Those whom, like us, had attended the first show, noticed a few changes in the details, but without attaching any importance to them.

  Until now Pierrot had only tied the mattress containing Harlequin in the middle, with a loose piece of twine. Last night, on the contrary, he tied it at both ends, tying it tight, thus creating a huge bolster, solidly sealed at both ends. He believed it to be a complication designed to better conceal the disappearance of the clown and his replacement with the life size inflatable simile. Then, rather than leaning it against a tree, he propped it up at the other end of the stage, near the wall of the house; we supposed that the trap door had been moved. Finally, when he brandished the sword and lanced the mattress with even fiercer blows, and the mattress gave a start as if shaken through the frothing of red blood, we applauded with greater warmth what appeared to us to be an improvement on the old trick. O! fatal error!

  Poor William Ochter, the clown, was indeed wrapped up like a dumpling, imprisoned in a sack. It was indeed him, in the flesh, which the sword was relentlessly running through. It was indeed his blood that was flowing. And when, after an uproar, at first indistinct, was heard backstage, came the cries of the entire cast of actors, walk-ons, stage-hands, and firemen, frightened and frantic, completely forgetting to lower the curtain when they unraveled the horrible bedding, it was no longer a mock-corpse, a dead-man-for-laughs which appeared before the speechless and as yet uncomprehending audience, but...