The Missing Link and Other Tales of Ape-Men

by Georges T. Dodds

  The lurkers drew nearer to Jan.

  The different states of calmness and well-being which existed over the lowly haunts teeming with restless needs and vices, led to the welling up of, along with the rats from the vacant lots and sewers and bats, those human larvae which traversed back and forth through the sleeping city. Like those beasts of prey, vermin or jackals, whose voracity was deceived by the meaty smell of certain harmless flowers, they made their way towards Jan, who seemed to them, motionless and alone, a lost derelict, at the disposal of the first one to smell him out.

  First, a woman. Through the inky night and the dock’s thousand obstacles, she moved toward him, shook him, believed him to be drunk and searched him. Nothing, and the poor woman’s weak smile turned into a heart-broken grimace. Where to work at such an hour? They drove her out of basements, from the most abject of hovels, because of her far too pungent rags, of the cancer which ate away at the middle of her upper lip and exposed at the base of her nose the stump of three bluish teeth, teetering in their bleeding alveoli. Others preceding her, she believed, must already have stripped the good drunkard with the fine clothes. After having tried in vain to get his overcoat off, she resigned herself to her bad lot, slipped in against him to borrow some of his warmth, turned her face toward his so as to be ready for the kiss that luck might bring.

  A naked beggar sat down to his left, so thin as to make his joints crack, while on his neck and arms, the veins, dissected and hardened by alcohol, stood out in knotted bundles. Then, of all of them the most wretched, two children drew near. Brother and sister, they held each other’s hands, furtive, suspicious, on the look-out for the police of whom they have an hereditary fear, but nonetheless innocent and who would remain so, even when later they were thieves and murderers. For it was the city alone that was guilty, which abandoned them to every perverse contagion and to ravenous hunger, the seed of crimes for the so-called future justice of the courts and prisons. Instinct revealed to them their true fellows in this regimen of misery; they avoided Jan and crouched between the knees of the ragged fellow and the prostitute with the confidence of homeless dogs.

  A light rain, having threatened all day, now whipped, ice-cold, across them. Their backs to it, the group drew closer. The kids were racked with bouts of coughing which tore their chests apart, turned their faces purple, and whistled in their throats.

  Indifferent to the bad weather, the half-naked old man burned over every inch of his tanned skin, like a lamp wick without oil. For he had not had his full ration of alcohol, and his frame growing free of alcohol was curling up in horrible contractions, and, sucking the inside of his cheeks, he drew a thin stream of blood which he swallowed growling: “Gimme something to drink.” The woman scratched her itchy labial chancre, needled by the cold. She thus increased the unbearable burning, lamented, dug her nails into the palm of her hands to stop herself from tearing her face off.

  Jan, at the children’s coughing, the fetid breath of the drunkard, at the poor creature’s pain, remembered his older siblings who died of consumption, the epidemic among the suckling infants in the fishermen’s village, and his generous ambition to fight against and conquer the afflictions and destructive vices of the species. He had gone out, without hesitation, not even drawing back before the worst accusations of obscenity and lying, placing over all else the putting of his theory into practice, right up to his choice of wife, not some Gabonese or Hottentot savage, but poor D’ginna, whom he no longer thought of since his return to Europe, through scruples, which at this precise moment, seemed to him more like cowardice.

  Why had he not told Betty everything? Had he not vowed to sacrifice himself to the end, to deliver his good name to choruses of boos, to opprobrium? But Betty would not have understood. Besides, why harp over regrets? Had he not reached his goal? Was not Hemo nearby, and would he not see him in the morning? Who cared if the ignorant, the brutish had not seen in Hemo any traits which might have led them to suspect irregularities in his genealogy? Was that sufficient proof that these traits were absent, had they not instead already drawn naturalists to investigate them, scholarly authorities whose doubts would become convictions, as soon as Jan confessed to them the frightful love which they would be forced to absolve him of, forced as they would be to glorify the results?

  Betty’s adventures were the beginning of a proof, and the strange passion she admitted to having shared, she must have been driven to by an undeniable, secret instinct.

  He was discouraged, yet was on the verge of triumph. The theft of Hemo by an English sailor, his voyage, his sale, his arrival in Holland, his internment in the Zoological Gardens, in the country and location where he himself had aspired to submit for examination by the stunned academies, all of this done miraculously, should this not give him a certain faith in the future, showing him that he had been favored by the mysterious fate without which the best laid plans of men came to naught?

  These thoughts and thousands of others whirled around in his mind to the rapid rhythm of his carotids.

  Jan thought to himself that one sentence spoken by Hemo would have forced even the greatest dolts to pay attention and would have already caused a considerable stir everywhere, but that overwhelmed with his new life whose every detail must appear a prodigy, tied up, jostled, perhaps struck, the free child of the virgin solitudes must have isolated himself in a fierce silence. Besides, those words that Jan, mad with enthusiasm, used to hear him stammer out, who knows if, tired of repeating then without success, the first days of their separation, in the hands of the Pahouins’ or the white men speaking a different language, he had not forgotten them, but that tomorrow, recognizing the beloved and patient voice which taught him, he would not suddenly recover his ability to speak, to cry out in happiness and filial tenderness in defiance of the incredulous mob.

  And the mad dreamer, as always setting foot right in the middle of his dream, saw the crowd break open the disgraceful cage from whence Hemo harangued them, and knelt before this human being mistaken for an ape, as if before the victim of the most extraordinary, most cruel error. And he heard himself hailed as the scientific heir of his countrymen, the embryologist Swammerdam and Leeuwenhoek the microscopist who discovered zoosperms; he saw his name inscribed next to theirs, in the immortal list to which the Lamarcks, the Darwins and the Haeckels had risen. Back in his small house in Haarlem, he would complete at leisure Hemo’s education, supported this time by the goodwill and counsel of all the world’s scholars, now become his attentive correspondents and frequent visitors. As Hemo grew and adapted himself to his environment, any trace of motherly influence would diminish, while that of the father would increase. Hemo would lose most of his hair, by the same process of evolution which, before birth, rids the child of the woolly fleece it wears during its first months in utero, and which are the last vestiges of its ancestral simian hairiness. Hemo would marry, reproduce, marry off his sons, and perpetuate himself in numberless generations who would soon deny him, considering any allusion to their origins an insult, and would end up discovering a solar myth in the union of their forefather Jan with D’ginna.

  Jan smiled at this ingratitude of his offspring and forgave them in advance. He had done his duty; if he was successful in retarding the bastardization of the human race by infusing it with the pure scarlet of new blood, he demanded no recognition.

  After a short respite in the light, his thoughts turned more towards the darkness, thinking that heredity never abdicated its rights. Progress marched onward, which had the principal effect of undertaking selection in reverse, to bring the strong to debauchery, to the celibacy of army life, to war, to the overwork necessary for the continuous rise in demand which typified civilization. It also saved the weak, the sick, those with birth defects, by exempting them, giving them social assistance, opening its hospitals to a growing army of rickety children and as if throwing out the baby with the bathwater, abandoning the healthy street urchin. Through Christian charity it soiled its mittens trying to
rehabilitate fallen young women, leaving without a job that could support them those who had not yet fallen. Ah! civilization... Along with a French doctor who had told him of some of his visits to Pacific islands infected by European sailors, Jan intoned: “Civilization: syphilization.”

  Still prey to his obsession, he now saw his descendants, Hemo’s descendants, struck down in turn by physical and moral wretchedness. Science had conquered leprosy, the plagues which in medieval times cut down entire nations like a scythe, and would overcome scourges just as dreadful yet more insidious which still struck at the source of life: consumption, scrofula, cancer, neuroses, alcoholism. But, science, who would conquer her?

  Outside of measurable time, the last men appeared to Jan. They had completely subdued Nature, its every law had been enunciated. Convinced of the truth that only life was real, and that life was only a short passage in a certain state of aggregation, each one of them practiced the ultimate wisdom which could be summarized, in the last analysis, as one of enduring as long as possible in the momentary state of time and matter which it represented. Joy, sadness, vice, virtue, desire, lust had been so many causes of wear over the past centuries. All the mysteries dissected, weighed, even the scientist’s curiosity was dead. Upon being born, even the cretins knew everything. Why would they budge? The Earth, modified to their use from Pole to Equator, was everywhere identical, and it sufficed, to know it as it was anywhere, to give a quick circular glance around the point where one had remained fixed.

  The vertebrate man no longer existed except as skeletons which hung beneath museum tags. His body was atrophied little by little at the ever growing profit of his mental capacity. It was the reign of the Pure Cerebrals, crab-like creatures made up only of a brain and a few organs, the excessive division of physiological labor having continued to perfect, in each individual, such and such special adaptation at the detriment of others, so as to give this specialized organ, under a reduced volume, all the possible power and ability to discriminate. Straight away, without the help of ancient instruments, the astronomer resolved all the questions regarding nebulas; the physicist read telegraphic missives by the vibrations in the wires; the musician needed only to listen to hear the roar of comets through the ether; Don Juan, with a single kiss shot from the tip of his fingers, fertilized his 1003 lovers.

  It was the penultimate era, that of the blossoming of the mind after an irremediable collapse. The lack of balance between the thought and the action grew still; in the same way that man condensed himself into a brain, so the brain condensed itself into a single cell, a recreation of Haeckel’s amoeba from which every organized creature was born amidst the Laurentian seas. But life is a cycle, the cycle is closed, and as the primordial cells evolved through every animal form to reach man, the last disintegrated into the simple elements, returned to mineral dust, and finally, it was thus, with regard to the human race, the end.

  What good would attempts at regeneration be, he asked himself, if it was not to put off the final degeneration for a few million centuries, a mere split-second in the infinity of time? Just so, the wretched who had come to sit near him had slipped off the bench, had snuggled up to each other in a shapeless group, and he took their faces, their only feature visible in the opacity of night, for those human larvae he had earlier visualized. They would have fallen in his dream, into the mud, and under the play of the Moon which hid and unhid them, they hopped as pallid toads at his feet. He got up, stepped over them, and took his sudden disgust for his former hopes out onto the dock.

  Suicide was something which best distinguished humans from other animals. How did those who maintained any hint of faith in any individual immortality, resist the temptation to experience it right away? What would they risk? Beyond the grave cannot be any worse than what preceded the grave.

  And he was probably going to decide to throw himself in the water to elucidate this question from some other place, when some distant rumors made him draw himself up. People were running through the streets, and their cries where getting louder as they approached.

  “Fire! Fire!”

  “Where?”

  “In the Zoological Gardens.”

  “The Zoological Gardens?”

  “Yes, in the monkey enclosure.”

  CHAPTER XIV

  The enclosures for the wild beasts were laid out in two rectangular areas on the right and on the left of the huge half-moon shaped cast iron and steel cage. They were paved with bitumen, had a water basin in the middle, and a gigantic perch in the form of a fake tree whose thick limbs were debarked oak trunks. A trapeze and some rings hung from the domed roof. The floor, in freestone, was divided regularly into shelters to protect the monkeys during the night and the bad season. This cage, as yet unfinished, served, as it waited for its future inhabitants to frolic about it in almost complete freedom, as the contractor’s storage area. A long service hallway stretched out behind, allowing cleaning, ventilation, heating, feeding, and also access for visitors with special passes to visit in the winter, when the front grillwork was closed up.

  It was in these new constructions that Hemo had been imprisoned after the tragedy at the Palace of Industry. The honor of the hangman’s noose and guillotine demanding that they be reserved for human criminals, the authorities were content to keep it quiet; the public furor appeased, perhaps he would be allowed to live and once more be exhibited. Well, in 24 hours they had not only forgiven him, but he became the top attraction at the Zoological Gardens, even all of Amsterdam. Hotel pageboys, guides and carriage drivers would mention him to tourists even before the Art Museum. The La Ronde de Nuit was no longer the only object to hear, from 30 feet away and before anything had been seen of it, the oohs and ahs of admiration on command. They lined up. Treats rained down on his litter. He did not touch any of it, not even the hazelnuts he usually adored; not even at mealtime. The administration, whose fortunes he doubled in doubling the attendance were worried, consulting his former masters the English pantomimes, who, well paid, diagnosed correctly that he was languishing with boredom, not being used to such isolation.

  An orangutan couple lived in the next cell over. Three months off a ship from the Malaysian colonies, they were still ashamed to have fallen in the Dayak hunters’ treacherous traps, but understood the pointlessness of delayed anger, enviable in the dignity of their defeat, they kept quiet, and motionless among the woolen blankets with which they formed a veritable cocoon, only their faces sticking out, like Peruvian mummies wrapped up with their knees against their chests. On visiting day, when the umbrellas and canes of the rubber-neckers forced them to move, the male would turn his back, draw his mate over to him, protect her in the soft fur of his reddish chest, wrap her up in his overlong arms, shield her from their vile taunts and almost from their view. She would begin to cough from the consumption which kills them all, in spite of all the care given them, under the healthier climates of Europe, a remarkable fact given that they were native to old growth forests pumping for all eternity over the stagnant waters of a spongy soil, venomous mists sweating forth beneath an implacable sun. Resigned to her fate, she circled with her arm, like a child its mother, the neck of the veterinarian who slowly picked her up to look her over, and only weakly resisted the brutal keeper who would roughly rub her ribs with tincture of iodine, filled her carelessly with prescription drugs, applied vesication ointment, and even, if no one was watching, spat on her and struck her, furious at his low wages for such an irksome task. And from the point when, the male seeing her beaten for no reason, had launched himself to her rescue and had received a heavy kick in the stomach, which had left him laid out and howling in pain, she stifled her least discomfort and offered herself at the boor’s feet, letting him tear the skin off her or strangle her on the pretext of bandaging her or having her yawn so he could toss some pills down her throat.

  To cure him of his boredom, Hemo was placed beside them, at the risk of having him contract the tuberculosis whose contagiousness was yet only admit
ted by the theoreticians, those whom people with common sense call empty-headed, until they themselves, constrained to accept a new idea, affirm disdainfully always having known it to be so. Hemo first pulled a good prank on their keeper. Having noticed that in the presence of the overseers he always pretended to be as patient as he was mild, he pinched him in the calf one morning once the veterinarian, his consultation ended, had walked away. The individual slapped at him; he dodged it and began to execute a thousand contortions of despair, to scream like a burn victim, to hold his jaw as if it were broken, all with gestures and looks of fear so clear, so precisely targeted, that the doctor, having run back, understood that the keeper was abusing them, called him a dirty coward, an idiot, and had him fired. Hemo lavished his hand with expressive caresses as he used to with Colombine, clearly indicating that he understood his charitable intervention, his actions brought on by pity. Then, Hemo got rid of the curious, especially the nasty little urchins whose compact hordes succeeded one another before the bars on general admission days, by surrendering himself to a series of manipulations so obscene that the administration’s sense of decency led them to close up the shutters. Finally, he taught the patient how not to swallow the pills given her; she seemed to accept them, but concealed them in the recess of her cheek, spitting them out when the keeper had left. Naturally, she was no better or worse; if anything she gained by it. Believing the first treatment to be ineffective, they began a second; instead of grains of arsenic to upset her stomach, she received rations of good quality liquor; and the ruse which had hastened this pleasant change did not cause any problems, since her sickness was incurable.