The Missing Link and Other Tales of Ape-Men

by Georges T. Dodds

  The next day he found some peace and quiet a little further out in the country. But upon his return the police were waiting for him. A little girl, having been victim one night in the woods of an indecent assault, public rumor had formally accused him, and he would have been arrested had they not discovered at the same moment, a stranger, an Englishman, who truthfully admitted to having acted with the consent, dearly paid, of the mother. Long after this day, poor Jan, whom the insulting suspicions had crushed, kept hearing the cries of the pack of gossips gathered during his interrogation, and threatening to break into his home to punish him immediately.

  Newspapers from Amsterdam calmed him down to some extent, plunging him back into his old obsessions, and teaching him that Hemo’s corpse, barely singed by the flames, had been dissected in the greatest detail. In spite of a century of research, one of them said, it was good nowadays to seize upon such opportunities, of which none will deny the extreme importance in these sorts of studies. One has again not found the existence of any significant differences in anatomy between man and this Gabonese ape; he has two feet, two hands, and the term quadrumana coined by the Frenchman Cuvier22 is clearly inappropriate; the circumvolutions of the brain, except for some insignificant differences are the same; in a word, the gorilla approaches the Hottentot bushman as closely as the bushman approaches civilized man, another Frenchman, Bory de Saint-Vincent,23 considered the bushman to be a transitional form between man and ape. There remained the question of articulated language, but would it be extending logic too far then to hesitate at categorizing those born deaf and dumb...

  Alas! Jan remembered having gone over these points and many others in every which way, when he was searching for proof of his paternity. Since the autopsy did not show the least unusual characteristic, he concluded in a flash of lucidity that D’ginna had been pregnant before their relations, that Hemo was in no way a part of him, and that only his fever had made him believe that this true ape spoke intelligible words the night of the fire. Finally he realized that the dangers he faced, the suffering, his lost youth, his dreams of glory, could be put out of his mind like water under the bridge. Well then, so be it, he would resign himself to this, but not without first satisfying a last fancy, which was to give a last goodbye to Hemo’s skeleton, displayed, according to the same newspapers, in the comparative anatomy galleries. And without mentioning it to anyone, he took the train to Amsterdam.

  At first he wandered from room to room, around the one he knew to be his goal, as if to increase his desire by a voluntary delay. One of these galleries brought on bitter disgust, there, labeled jars bearing fetuses preserved in alcohol were lined up on shelves, displaying the innumerable and multiple forms of hideousness of all the monstrosities, larvae more frightening in the reality of their repose than when they swarmed onto a nightmare-ladder, their greenness as if spread out and diffused in the cold light of the tall bay windows seemed to mottle the light, changing to the light of a vent-hole. In another, the arsenical smell of stuffed birds revolted him, but caught his eye with their bright colors. Then, on both sides of a narrow vestibule, glassed-in cases devoted to bats frightened him again. Examples of their numerous species, arranged in every pose, rotted there slowly. To distance himself from the great specter of a vampire bat, spread, a meter wide in wingspan, as if in flight, the fangs sticking out like halberds24 beneath its nose, he drew nearer a group that was uglier still, the kalongs of Timor, arrayed in their natural sleep position, their marten-like heads bent downward, their angular wings completely enveloping them, such that they resembled the monks long ago condemned to suffer hunger and thirst for having drunk at the black mass, who were then hung by one foot, with their robes accentuating the bony protrusions of their emaciated bodies, and whose gibbets one would have seen lined up in the background.

  The sequence of the mammals was begun with these bats. To the right and left of the entrance to the next suite of rooms, the bony frames strung on iron rods followed, one after the other, what a mere layman would see as an inextricable tangle. Completely in the back, in the middle of the walkway, widened into a round-about, Jan recognized Hemo, without consulting the notice. The skeleton was erected in a normal posture. His two feet nailed down to a waxed oak platform, he further supported himself by the curled up underside of his right hand’s phalanges, while the left hand, raised up, held onto a branch which came off horizontally from a tree trunk beside him. Prepared with great care, the matte whiteness of the bones was brought to life by the yellowed polish of the natural ligaments left on the joints. He was huge, his rounded rib cage capable of serving as the framework for a forge bellows, his mouth bearing a wonderful grin, the ridge of the eyebrows still shading the eye sockets. As from the bottomless urn of a great river, his coxal region, almost as big and harmoniously curved as a man’s, could have eventually issued forth generations until they formed a people. And Jan admired the solid base, and thought that action must be a pleasure for muscles endowed with such leverage, an action for which he himself bore only antipathy. At this hour, more than any other, the gallery had no other visitors to stop him from sinking back into his reveries.

  Unaware in this situation that he perhaps was experiencing the remaining fragments of his parental pride, in his prolonged contemplation he hypnotized himself, until his wobbly legs forced him to sit down. The harsh daylight spread out in the middle of the polished floor, sprinkling with gold dust a steel bar, a screw head, the edge of a varnished table, but was chased from along the walls by great swaths of shadow rolling out their transparent airiness, crepe curtains beneath, where, as the paleness of the bones was projected upon them, Jan saw the skeletons grow and move about.

  Having long practiced the teachings of the Bible, Jan recalled from afar the readings of his childhood, the Valley of Josaphat, that valley of carnage where Joel summoned the reborn nations to listen to the lion-like roars of the Lord. Jan believed himself to be witnessing a sordid parody of the Last Judgment. Indeed it was not the dead rising from the universal putrefaction, trying to hide their wounds and their vices from God on his throne of clouds, trying in a supreme and derisive hypocrisy to thicken about their rediscovered flesh and soul, the folds of the shroud and of repentance; it was the skeletons which he had examined, of beasts existing or extinct, detaching their feet from the pedestals, slipping down from the half-open cabinets, ridding themselves of their supporting structures, jostling each other in confusion, rushing forward, prancing, climbing onto one another. An elephant with an ostrich on its back, frogs standing on his tusks, walking on their hind legs, those in the front carried on the shell of a fossil glyptodon,25 with which early men sheltered themselves; about the seven cervical vertebrae of a giraffe, all those of a boa were wrapping themselves; mice, cats, dogs and bears chased after one another, while off on the side, an assemblage of heavy bones which had been a lion, its head buried inside the rib cage of a sheep, but unable to bite because its lower maxillary, which, its copper staples rusted, had unhooked itself, hung chattering in anger. These skeletons expressed the same fears and hungers that they expressed, struggling in a ridiculous continuance of interspecies competition as it had been, but supplying not the last of the episodes of the parade which Jan saw march by beneath his eyelids and in front of Hemo. For all of them, the hunters and the hunted, the executioners and the victims, the cruel and the meek, the giants and the vermin ended up coming to bow before the great ape, who, with the phalanges of his left hand, anointed each of them with a quick and disdainful benediction.

  Since they then disappeared, the comedy seemed to be coming to an end, when the door at the back of the room opened. The two leaves of the folding door opened themselves without a creak against the doorframe. Beyond, instead of the vestibule through which Jan had entered, an arched canal, a half-full sewer stretched out, stretched out to the point of narrowing down to a point imperceptible from the other end, and the only lighting allowed one to plumb the smooth spread of its walls arising from the pale life
of its waters. Indeed, these waters, while they at first glance seemed to stagnate and give off a fetid stench, like a motionless and deserted cesspool, supported creatures which in leaping from the surface spread a lunar-like reflection upon it. Jan, noxious, suddenly felt his heart clench and fail him, as he recognized these creatures which he had been unable to distinguish at first, as the fetuses of monsters escaped from their jars.

  There were those that flopped about like fish, some that looked like geckoes, which climbed with the stumps of their rudimentary limbs, or with limbs emerging worm-like from their bellies, and dropped from the curved arch where they had left a glistening mucous-laden trail. However, they did not produce in their fall any more than a soft gelatin-like rippling of the surface. Glimmers, bleached and dull, but variable, greenish, sulfurous, of the pale lilac hue of cyanogen26 flames to the pale blue of steel, left Jan no need to compare them to the phosphorescent infections which certain storm-driven tides washed up on tropical strands. The light seemed to spread with the pestilence, as if these embryos were anxious to spotlight their putrefaction. And perhaps the most hideous was that they did not exhibit that vague allure of life where the squirming of larvae animates corpses but, instead, their own joyous activity.

  Jan wished to escape, but it was too late. The water was seeping into the gallery; in order not to get his feet wet he had to draw them up with two hands crossed over his knees, and even then the fetuses stuck to his legs, unclean leeches which he detached in epileptic spasms. They all then headed for Hemo, but instead of saluting him and disappearing, they wrapped themselves around his tibias, his femurs, in two uninterrupted columns which filled up his pelvic region. More were coming up; to fit them in, the skeleton grew in every dimension; his pelvis became a vat and this vat a charnel-house spreading like a nebulous soft roe, which drew from the abysmal depths of the darkness new things which Jan recognized in turn as the bats from the first glassed-in displays. They hovered and perched on Hemo’s head, now as wide as his pelvis, and there watched, through the disjointed sutures, the inside of the skull where the foetuses, continuing their ascension along the vertebrae, penetrated through the occipital. The bats then seized upon them at their arrival, and swallowed them without bothering to tear them to pieces, almost pumping their unnameably denatured meat into a sticky, juicy, macerating porridge.

  The last glow thus extinguished, Jan felt on his brow the glancing touch of sticky wings and the sharp bite of tiny teeth on the fat of his arm. Satiated, would the vampires suck his blood to wash down their disgusting treat? As he drove them away, a tender voice reached him. It was still broad daylight. His brother Adrian begged him to calm down, sponged off his bristly face which was clammy with sweat, and pinched his arm to draw him from his lethargy. Martin Heltzius accompanied him, and a third individual which Jan did not remember ever having met, though Martin presented him as a friend. All four left the gallery, passing back through the hallway with the bats, where Jan could not hold back a shiver of fear, and which his brother, who assisted him in his still torpid gait, noticed and asked him about. He answered that it was a silly dream he had just had, already forgotten, but in which these vile beasts played the main role.

  “Ah! You hear, sir,” Adrian then said to the stranger, “he was dreaming, merely dreaming, and that happens to the healthiest among us. It’s that, you see, my poor friend, that you certainly surprised us when we came upon you. Your back was hunched, your legs pulled up, and you were swinging your arms over your head like a windmill.”

  The stranger remained silent and impassive, but Martin lightly shrugged his shoulders.

  Outdoors, Jan, struck by the reddened eyes of his elder brother, questioned him in turn. It was clear he had been crying. Over what? Was someone sick at home? It was Martin who, when they all got into a carriage and left the museum, reassured him; no, everything was fine in Haarlem, they were only a bit worried that morning upon discovering his sudden disappearance; but the scattered newspapers in his room, in telling of the public exposition of Hemo’s skeleton, allowed them to easily guess where to find him, especially since at the train station they questioned the very employee who had sold him his ticket to Amsterdam. And with his usual cordial demeanor, pretending to interest himself in what he knew interested Jan, he insisted on discussing the skeleton.

  “So, how did you feel seeing that big devil of a skeleton? I bet you gave each other a hug, that you talked of your adventures in the land of the savages and that you were both homesick for those lands and savages, especially for those native women, now weren’t you, you little prankster.”

  But already surprised by his brother’s behavior, who with a finger on his lips and big tears in his eyes was indicating to him he should keep quiet, Jan was even more surprised when the carriage stopped far from the train station. The stranger got out first and invited him to follow, while his brother, to whom he appealed for an explanation, drew him to himself by his neck and repeated through his kisses:

  “Forgive me my poor Jan, my poor beloved, forgive me. I didn’t want to do it, it was the others...”

  “Let’s get it over with, gentlemen, let’s get it done.”

  And the stranger, untangling the two brothers’ arms, took hold of Jan, and closing the carriage door, shouted to Adrian and Martin who had remained in the carriage, “Goodbye, gentlemen,” and “Go on!” to the driver, who turned around and went off at a trot.

  Jan was put back in the asylum.

  He did not move for two days, laying on his stomach, his head up on his elbow, in the middle of a room padded from top to bottom, refusing to answer. He did not sleep, even though his meditations had the intensity of a hibernating sleep. He was left alone. The morning of the third day, he opened his eyes to the incomprehensible maneuvers of people his keepers claimed were nurses, and who, when they forced a long, hard rubber stick between his teeth, seemed more like awkward contortionists trying to impale him backwards.

  As he struggled, the men asked: “Why will you not eat with good will?”

  “Simply because I was thinking of other things,” he confessed in good faith, sitting down to savor with as sincere an appetite as was his confession, the fine stew which was offered him. While not convinced by his good humor, the nurses were no less happy to see their work ending in a friendly manner; they were convinced that the doctors were wrong not to immediately allow more violent measures. “Until proof of the contrary!” they muttered, taking along the esophageal probe.

  It turned out to be the only unpleasant incident in his new life. His two days of thought had not been lost. This peaceful serenity which the most fortunate rarely ever have complete, were it only to have the almost indestructible germ of doubt as to its duration, he had it, along with the certitude that it would be forever. From a material perspective, he felt a great relief at no longer having to worry about a place to live, food, clothing, relationships or money; to be able to isolate himself from landscapes, his surroundings, his neighbors, to do or not do like everyone else, to warm himself in the summer, to wander about at night and sleep during the day, to talk aloud to himself; to no longer be interrogated, the butt of criticism, or what is worse, to those marks of respect or sympathy to which one must at least smile politely; to close oneself off and ignore the face or the backside of a passer-by. It might indeed be absurd to suffer no more than the pricking of needles, rather the myriad little nothings that make up daily life he had nonetheless suffered. He considered his incarceration as his emancipation, as complete as it was unexpected, and the fat Heltzius could have, to bring him there, saved on his malice; he would have come on his own had he known the calm and solitude he would find there.

  “Everything works out in life, as long as one waits,” he would say.

  Thanks to his brother’s generosity, which he warmly thanked him for with all his heart, he enjoyed a small suite and a portion of park all to himself, in the paying customers’ section. His keeper, once he had assured himself that it was pointless
to watch him, only came by to bring his meals. He was also allowed to walk around in the huge common courtyard where all the lunatics classified as posing no danger to others were. He noticed with pleasure that these good folk, if they harbored their madness like the well-behaved outside the institution, at least had the advantage over them of leaving their neighbors each to their own; but any human figure having become insufferable to him, he remained in his corner of the garden, where he sometimes accused himself of being self-centered and lacking in charity, but to then absolve himself in considering that his presence, here or there, would be of no help to anyone.

  So why get into trouble?

  Always finding a practical reason, he judged that one did not require such a great deal of space to stretch out one’s limbs, and so he shut himself up in his room so as to continue more comfortably to ponder the questions which were familiar to him. Why bother going anywhere? It would only be to see; assuming one could go anywhere, and one could not go everywhere at once, and especially, especially! one could not go at all times. The same eyes could only view but a ridiculously minute portion, compared to the eternal and capricious metamorphoses of Nature, rays, reflections, colors, topographies, plants, forests, oceans, clouds, skies; and he who could not see all of this in himself saw nothing. In the same way we do not touch, taste, smell, or hear more than a fraction of the available immensity of shapes, tastes, odors and sounds. One might as well then close all these windows of our senses, which only allow us to communicate with such a miserably small part of our environment; and, reducing the beast in oneself as much as possible, concentrate entirely on one’s soul, which alone could imagine, reproduce and compass all the phenomena of the universe in their doubly infinite dimensions of space and time.

  Drowning so pleasantly in illusion, he would blush in modesty, embarrassed to remember his crazy old ideas. What stupidities had he dared publish after his early readings, the good boy-gardener of yesterday, who, before having assimilated the elements of science upon which he had gorged, had belched them forth barely digested into a filthy magma? And his attempt to regenerate the human race, that blossoming of vibrios27 which stir themselves for the duration of a lightning bolt! And his wish to leave behind a famous name! Fame... leaving his name...to whom? To what? When the scoria which already stain the surface of the Sun meld into one opaque layer, the Earth, immediately reduced to a block of ice, will have no more rivers, no more seas, no more winds, no more exchange between air and water; it will come back to life with short and rare intermittence, by the heat which the center of the Sun, still in fusion, would send it, dislocating from time to time its crust to shine again briefly; oh! how little then would those dominant names, Jesus, Cesar, Shakespeare weigh upon the pale and trembling lips of the last man, holding his benumbed hands out towards the abolished aurora, from this dead Earth still spinning around a black sun, in a night which would get darker, all the stars being suns that would also die, and the pale smoke of the nebulas being the last to bring light to the few points remaining in the complete darkness.