The Missing Link and Other Tales of Ape-Men

by Georges T. Dodds

  The ape remained motionless, examining the stranger.

  In the numbing air, his short breaths rose in little clouds of steam. He coughed. A sparrow’s chirping on the roof worried him and drew away his eyes.

  “Gulluliou,” enunciated Murlich in pongo, “t’r tirru Kneuh’r!” Turning, he translated under his breath: “Say hello to the lady!”

  A wave crossed the animal’s face, it was unclear whether his shivering arose from the cold or from his will being severely tested. His eyes seemed to grow, a ray of light moved fleetingly across them. A breath filled his lungs. His arms moved. His right hand gripped the bonnet which he removed from his head. In an extraordinary voice, both soft and rough at the same time, trembling with puerility, the ape spoke:

  “Tirru, Kneuh’r!”28 he answered.

  CHAPTER II

  In the cozy verandah extending from the small drawing room, Alix worked in the bright daylight of the bay window, filtered to a pale green by the plants. With a clear ring, the electric clock which controlled the time throughout the house, tolled 2 p.m.

  Miss Forest was sitting on a very low hassock, her long legs crossed under her dressing-gown. Nearby, in a bin, a pile of little yellow rectangles shone with a raw brightness in the winter garden’s tinted light. In a regular motion, the young woman’s hand dove into the bin, drew forth one of the pieces of crinkled silk, and with a needle tied it loosely in a delicate conch shape, tossing the mushroom thus generated into another bin. All that could be heard was Alix’s breath as she concentrated on this fairy’s work. Occasionally, too, the sound of a drop of water striking the bottom of a rocky basin in some dim corner could also be heard.

  Outside, the street noise from beyond the garden was smothered by the pallid softness of new fallen snow.

  Lucy, the chambermaid, half opened the door:

  “Mr. Maximin asks if Madam will see him?”

  “Why certainly, have him come in here, Lucy,” she answered without moving.

  With a familiar gait, Maximin came in, approached the young woman, and, having shaken her hand, sat down in front of her, tossing his hat, gloves and velour cape onto a piece of furniture.

  “Well, my dear poet, what’s new?” asked Miss Forest.

  Maximin shrugged his shoulders:

  “Ah! I came to see you because I was bored, I don’t know what to do with myself. I’ve been like this since this morning. It’s really bugging me!”

  “I bet you’ve been rehearsing?”

  “You said it. And Balsamore was horrible! I could have beaten her! When such women get it into their heads that they don’t want to perform, well, you know!”

  In a gesture which pulverized an empty space, he completed his sentence, adding:

  “It would take very little for me to take her out of the role!”

  Alix stopped sewing for a moment, and glanced over at Maximin:

  “Take her out of the role, are you mad? It wouldn’t have been worth the two months of work!”

  She tried to find some comforting words. Could he have come up with any better actress to play the role of the Nature- sprite? As if good actresses grew on trees! This one at least, notwithstanding her bad temper, was talented and experienced, she had performed a great deal abroad in the most favorable of countries. And one shouldn’t, in an act of desperation, excise a vital part of a theater troop recruited with great difficulty. “Have some patience until the première, afterwards, things will go along by themselves!”

  “I know, I know,” muttered Maximin, “and it is this thought which sustains me; without that!...” Blond with blue-grey eyes, and a scraggly beard dropping down from a face creased by worries, the musician-poet Maximin appeared far older than his 30 years. His thin hands told of his aristocratic origins. They were constantly in motion, white birds delineating in the air his many and impalpable dreams. He suffered and rejoiced in any number of mysterious things, but his refined intelligence drove him rather to suffer from it. He had published misunderstood books, and music that no one, except a few dilettantes, had heard. He would say, laughing with a melancholy air that he did not belong in his century, that he should have been born many years before, at some rather vague time when men could still form some attachment to images of the unreal. His temperament shifted back and forth like all nervous types; resigned one moment and wild at another, but his anger never went beyond a lovely gesture or a delightful bit of verse. While he wasn’t arrogant, he liked himself well enough to indulge in joys which only he could appreciate. He had few friends, of which Alix had long been one. They held each other in esteem. The young woman found in him a counterbalance to those contemporaries of his which she despised. She found in him a poet, a choice wit, a male presence, an attractive charm.

  In a minute of silence, Maximin watched the seamstress’ nimble fingers. One by one, the little orange funnels continued to rain down in a carpet of watered silk.

  Alix smiled, waiting for him to speak:

  “Stupid me,” he said, “isn’t that Balsamore’s costume you’re making there? The one you were telling me about?”

  “This is it. Do you think it will be nice?”

  “Such marvelous style. And so natural. Let’s hope she’ll want to wear it!”

  “She’ll want to. She can’t refuse such a costume. Here, look at the sketch!”

  On a table with wrought-iron morning-glory-inspired legs, she looked for the sketch amongst a pile of others.

  “Can you see her on stage, your Nature-sprite? In the third act, appearing before the man in this smashing tunic, made from the forest’s most humble plants? Why now, I’ve thought of something, why couldn’t she be holding, like a parasol, a huge mushroom?”

  “Ah! No, no, not a Mushroom-sprite!” muttered the poet, without further commenting on Alix’s strange mania.

  He added, dreamily:

  “The third act, I’ve reworked a lot of it since I last saw you. You’d have to attend one of the rehearsals. It’s that damned Bertha who made me change half of her lines. But now I think I’ve gotten a good grasp on it, that act of mine! I’ve got it pinned down.”

  Maximin, as was his habit, was getting fired up.

  “Ah! You’ll see. On stage perhaps you’ll like it! You understand, I mostly wanted to make a statement with this play drama or fantasy, whatever one wishes to see in it, a work which carries a punch. And if I composed the music for the Third Act, it was so as to attain the full emotional range I am capable of. Because, this time, someone is going to have to back down, the public, or me. With all these essays and books, I have not been focused enough. True art is expressed in the theater. We no longer have theater, literature, poetry; our era is one of speculation on scientific matters, not matters of ideals. Do you believe in a humanity with no ideals? They make me laugh!”

  Alix had stopped sewing, and listened. The artist was now getting carried away, caught in a whirlwind of his thoughts, thinking loud, his hands aflutter:

  “People today know the value of money, but not that of a dream. They have forgotten their origins, lost in the origins of Greek and Roman art. The United States of Europe don’t want to hear that amongst their distant forefathers was the man who carved the Victory of Samothrace, or wrote El Cid. A starry- eyed rhymer is ill-suited to today’s world, one can agree to this, but…”

  His voice which had lashed out, softened in hopeful pity:

  “But I’m confident, the scientific era has been going on for a while, why should they not make room at their table for poets, scholars of another world? You well know, darling, you well know, I have been working on this production of my Triumph of Man for years. Alas! I don’t know if I will be able to waken among us what may remain of a taste for fantasy, for art, for what extends beyond mere existence. I’m not entirely self-confident, I’m not sure if I’ve managed to create my work as I conceived it, but it will finally be produced! Produced, produced on stage, with scenery, as poets were 200 years ago! And the orchestra I have gathered w
ith great difficulty will play my music, and perhaps then will they listen to me!”

  Joy radiated so intensely from him that the young woman, as widely open to emotions as her independent sense of taste allowed, didn’t dare express her thoughts, or speak of her fears. Was not this play, specially designed to represent the Triumph of Man, a risky business for the poet, as well as the producer who covered the initial costs? How would it be received, what fate would be reserved to the bold whose attempts she applauded? People were no longer accustomed to theater, art was dead, entirely forgotten, something reserved for a few aficionados and the archeologists.

  But with her flighty thought, Alix gave herself up once more to her admiration of Maximin, to wishing him success.

  “Your play,” she said, “is unified in its three acts, it will have an impact!”

  Upon a gesture which suggested his fevered enthusiasm had already dropped, he nonetheless still enjoyed reviewing his favorite thoughts. Maximin replied:

  “Yes, perhaps, I do feel that. Man appears in the first act burdened by the weight of his errors and atavistic superstitions that is the past. In a second act, having freed himself, he falls under another yoke, that of icy, methodical reason which is the present. Finally, its third act, the future which I have dreamed of as the complete artistic expression through music, poetry and staging, where Man, guided by the Nature-sprite and the Prince of Dreams, rediscovers his true voice and joins with the Woman to redeem the world through love. Yes, I do believe that within this narrow frame I have packed in sufficient good things, along with some things of beauty. Ah! I can’t wait for it to all be over! If on opening night, with free admissions of course, we succeed, our cause is won.”

  Alix, struck her knee nervously with her fist:

  “And we will succeed! First of all, Balsamore will be stunning in her role. All the others as well. You have quite a cast! And the décors! The old-growth forest in the last act gives such an illusion of depth and breadth. It’s marvelous!”

  Maximin approved with a gesture.

  The young woman had returned to her work; watered silk mushrooms dropped anew into the bin. Upon the warm pallid silence of the winter garden, all that could be heard were the soft sounds of Alix’s hand pulling through the needle, and quickly wrapping the mushroom stems in silk thread, and, on occasion, the delayed drop of the water striking a stone in the basin.

  Lucy came in, bringing a tray of tea which she placed on a corner of the table.

  Alix served the poet:

  “Would you like some cactus liquor with it?”

  “Why, certainly. It brings on lovely dreams. I like it.”

  “Oh! me too!” reinforced the young woman.

  They enjoyed the warm drink to which a few drops of the liquor had been added. Two clouds billowed forth from the blue stoneware cups humidifying the air.

  “An opium cigarette?” Alix suggested.

  Maximin shook his head:

  “No thanks, not today, I’m too nervous. Balsamore’s to blame for it all.”

  They stopped talking. The blond man watched his friend, who, bending over, picked up the pile of orange corollas, letting them drop in a silky rain. For a moment Alix’s eyes met the poet’s, and both felt an unexpressed awkwardness: Alix sensed that Maximin would again broach the subject she had forbidden him to raise with her. He loved her, he had told her one day; she had no doubt. She too, a mere woman, would not have been loath to love him too. If such a thing had been possible in her case, it certainly would have been the artist she would have chosen. But she could not, steeped, no, conquered by too great a sense of independence, to even accept the concept of love, of a mutual fettering. She wished to be contented to enjoy all the pleasures of life, without for a single moment infringing upon her liberties in any manner. In a fear of committing an assault upon her solitary soul’s fate, she refused to give herself to anyone. They no longer spoke of such things between them.

  To say something and break the awkwardness which weighed upon them, Maximin expressed a sudden thought:

  “But your cousin, professor Murlich, has arrived, has he not?”

  “Yes, the day before yesterday.”

  “I saw that in my newspaper.”

  “What, is it already known?”

  “All Paris must know.”

  “If you wish, I shall present you to the professor.”

  “Why, sure. Will he stay here long with his famous student?”

  “Two or three months. Classes at Basel University take up again in April, I believe. Will you attend the seminar at the Museum? It should be quite curious.”

  “Perhaps, but when all is said and done, is this ape all that interesting?”

  Shaking her head, Alix replied:

  “Oh! far more than any man! I’m sure you’ll be terribly interested in him. Today my cousin is presenting him to some of his colleagues.”

  “I’ll attend his presentation,” declared Maximin.

  They were silent, Maximin, in front of Alix, savoring the charms of the resulting silence.

  In the greenish transparency of the air in which the stems of the hothouse plants stood, the tea continued to steam from the cups. They entirely gave themselves up to the sleepy hold of the cactus liquor. The bell for the entrance gate which opened into the garden barely disturbed them. Through the double-paned windows they saw Murlich, followed by Gulluliou in similar attire, passing obliquely across the crackling gravel of the path, through the cold fog.

  It was a brief view. Silence once again fell upon the verandah, interrupted only by the intermittent lip-like sound of the drops of water falling to the bottom of the rock-lined basin.

  CHAPTER III

  A fortnight later, the huge amphitheater of the Museum was packed with a disparate crowd: scholars, the bourgeois and the workman, men and women, all illuminated in great globs of light and shadow by the huge electric fixture suspended from the center of the dome. Arranged in tiers, this whispering crowd buzzed in expectant silence. Here and there the anonymous landscape of people, shifting like a calm sea, had their interest piqued by a red scarf, a bald head, the glare from a pair of glasses. For almost two hours the crowd satisfied the same intense curiosity which brought it to the conference in Munich, to the showing of Gulluliou. Preexisting opinion had been fed fresh impressions. This talking ape had shaken from its routine a society for whom science could no longer supply any surprises; everyone’s reason was found wanting. In a century in which the human brain thought it had supplied its last efforts, where gears had replaced muscles and sinews, where the artisan himself was reduced to using his thought processes to guide a piece of machinery, one had judged unusual a professor from Basel’s offer to prove the appearance of intellectual parentage between man and ape. One had come to witness this with a skeptical curiosity.

  It was 10 p.m. With few interruptions the crowd’s interest had been maintained. There were even some signs of approbation, some applause, when, to begin his presentation, Murlich went over the story of his many travels, his attempts among many different species of ape, and how, having arrived in Borneo, he came to spend time among the pongos, as well as how he managed to study these dangerous animals.

  The orator described to the stirring crowd the large iron cage, a sort of forest home, linked to nearby buildings by telephone, fax, and wireless, equipped with recorders that preserved the most delicate nuances of intonation in the pongos’ voices. Thus had he managed, after some trial and error, and using tame animals, to surreptitiously observe the behavior and language of the tribe amongst which he had forced himself to live. After a few months, the apes were sufficiently familiar with him that he could go out, wander freely, and speak with them!

  After these preliminaries, Murlich had finally had Gulluliou brought before the crowd, dressed in an impeccable dress-coat from which the shirt front burst forth in an icy white. The ape, light beam pointer in hand, covering and baring himself in turn, saluted the audience. He stood very firmly on hi
s legs, his body comfortable, but with the same worried batting of the eyelids, the same sorrow locking his lips in a look of resignation. He then sat down near the chair, where he was seen to serve himself a drink, to pour out some tea and sugar, and savor it in a seemingly distracted and aristocratic gesture, as some long ago prince might have. Especially, he managed to answer with some flexibility, precision and intelligence all the questions which Murlich and his many assistants asked him. These experiments which irrefutably demonstrated the reality of an ape language caused a great sensation, even a certain commotion: the proof of an intelligence superior to that previously assumed to exist among the apes did not go without disconcerting some people. Nonetheless, the facts were clear. And the crowd, amongst whom a few had translated their disapproval by repeated exclamations of hush!, had applauded each of Gulluliou’s responses.

  It was now under a growing nervous tension that Murlich, in his calm voice which firmly accentuated each word, continued his presentation.

  “You yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, have seen that Wurmb’s pongos, which indeed seem to be the apes most closely related to us, have the capacity to express their feelings in a series of articulate sounds, a true language. This simple fact, now established, is monumental given all the sorts of information that can be derived from it.

  “First of all, a question poses itself, that of the animal’s physical conformation. We indeed know, as I mentioned earlier, that at some point in time not far removed from our own, science believed apes to be incapable of speech, in the exact sense of the word. And, given the particular layout of their vocal organs, particularly the small area afforded to the tongue, science had been correct, at least at that time. Certain anatomical specimens in our collections, some 80 to 100 years old, attest that these animals which interest us were indeed not so constituted, or were poorly constituted to make use of speech. However, we have just seen them today capable of speech!