The Missing Link and Other Tales of Ape-Men

by Georges T. Dodds

  March arrived with its downpours, great gusts of wind shook the trees in the garden, the privet and laurel bushes, and notwithstanding the double doors ran through the house and pavilion. One day, Alix received a visit from Maximin. They had not seen each other since the showing of The Triumph of Man. The poet was now famous, but Alix had long shown herself intractable with respect to forgiving her old friend his indiscretion. However, after a heartbroken plea for forgiveness, she consented to see him again. Truly, he was missing from her sensible and methodical virginal existence.

  He sat on the verandah near the young woman as had been his habit before. They spoke together of literature, of follow-ups to the play, of the poet’s other projects: Gulluliou never came up. It seemed to both Maximin and Alix that the other was fearful of this event being evoked. Such a feeling seemed ridiculous to both of them, as they carefully hid this from each other. Yet it was on this very day that Gulluliou was to show himself to be a true man, in such a miserable manner, that Alix would remain touched forever.

  As Maximin was leaving, on the threshold of the outer hall, in the half-light of a bulb enclosed in a violet-streaked ceiling fixture, beneath a raised piece of tapestry she suddenly caught sight of the ape. He was still and silent. He was allowed to wander through the different rooms, and having heard a noise, he had simply come to have a look. Once the visitor had left, Alix considered scolding Gulluliou for his indiscretion, and searched for the right words, when he, with a sad look, pointed at the door. Using two of the words of his meager French vocabulary, he said:

  “Come…he come!”

  The reproach was almost human in its intonation. An idea flashed through the young girl’s mind, confirming what she suspected. Gulluliou, this 13-year-old creature, formidable and immature…this Gulluliou was in love with her…Contempt, anger, and a sort of mad gaiety came over her all at once. To be loved by an ape as she was already by the poet, was it not the most terrifying of fantasies? Loved by Gulluliou! How ridiculous, Gulluliou jealous! This was too unexpected, too extraordinary, too unnatural!

  But, after a period of silence, the animal’s voice rose again. He was closer to her, gazing at her with an imploring look, hands together, stating:

  “You good…you beautiful!”

  He drew closer still:

  “You good…you beautiful!”

  Alix backed away, touched by fear.

  Was he going to touch her? Such a fear overtook her. A certain sudden lucidity showed her the danger. She was in a corner; to reach the door she must cross Gulluliou. She did not dare. She would have called out for help, but her throat tightened in silent anticipation, for she saw the beast rising in the ape’s eyes, saw the flame of the brute’s wild instincts rise little by little in its eyes.

  So this was what he had been planning for so long, what had sucked the life from his body, what made his eyes glow in an unquenchable fever. This was indeed love! How monstrous, to be loved by an ape!

  The house was empty, the workroom deserted, Murlich busy in the garden pavilion.

  “You beautiful, you good, you beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!”

  Gulluliou repeated these few words mixed with words in pongo in a low, muffled voice. The huskiness of his voice betrayed the call of ancestral voices at the very source of his race wishing to be reborn. He approached her, but she backed up. In her terror she could no longer find the buzzer on the wall which would have summoned someone. She ended up being backed into a corner.

  The ape came to her, proffering awkwardly delivered, incomprehensible words. Their tone became fiercer, his teeth at times grinding between jaws now more preeminent than was usual. Beneath his loose clothing, arms and legs were tensing as if to leap.

  Alix felt the animals short strong breaths on her face. There rose from him an odor of musk.

  Gulluliou put his arm around Alix’s waist and drew her to him, unable to escape this belt of nerves and sinews. The hideous mouth, the wet-lipped snout, pressed upon the woman’s lips. Slowly he pushed her to the floor, petrified, incapable of the least defensive gesture. When she was stretched out, he bent over her, a moving shadow, mingling in the half-light with the soft, thick carpet.

  At that point she seemed to pull herself together and with a sudden burst of energy found the strength to grab his wrists. She was so weak before this unbridled beast. Still, she fought.

  The filthy kiss nauseated her, and the more she fought, the more she realized she was lost, that she could no longer prevent anything. The ape growled and had again overpowered her. She closed her eyes, her hand before her, her legs bent under her. A last ditch effort before the rape…

  She waited…

  Suddenly the great black, hairy, snaking arms which embraced her, unknotted themselves. She felt herself free, was standing up in an instant, looking around. Gulluliou was in front of her, his head lowered, his limbs shaking. Something mysterious was going on inside him. He seemed bewildered, his eyes vacillating like candles under an invisible draught.

  Then, abruptly, he moaned softly and fell at the girl’s feet like a broken puppet which collapses to the floor. His chest was torn with deep coughing, sobs gurgled in his throat. He cried, his body shaking.

  “Alix, Alix, you good, you beautiful!” He was no longer anything but a pathetic rag of a thing, miserable, ridiculous, a heap of collapsed flesh from which arose the anguish of love.

  The man was victorious over the ape.

  CHAPTER VII

  Gulluliou was constantly feverish now. The doctor came to visit him frequently, allowing his rising concerns to show.

  “Not only has the serum not worked,” he said, “but the condition I had told you to expect has declared itself. It’s that bad cold he’s had for two months that has caused all of this. I had nonetheless thought him out of its grip.”

  The Son-of-Doves was again taken with a stubborn dry cough, which shook his long bouts of dozing in the recesses of his chair. He was placed before the window of his room, the windows closed but the curtains raised, and from there he watched the progressive development of spring on the budding trees.

  One day, towards the end of March, in order to offer a little distraction to Gulluliou and to get him out of the house where he was fretting with boredom, Alix suggested that they attend a sitting of the House which was due to discuss the famous Sahara Railroad scandal. Murlich nearly jumped out of his skin at the mere thought of it. “Why even perfectly healthy people catch the flu there! And how would Gulluliou survive that, the poor wretch? It is crazy to think of such a thing!”

  “But,” replied the young woman, “what tells you, dear cousin, that dear Dr. Darembert, as famous as he might be, is not wrong about him at present…And besides, whether or not Gulluliou is consumptive, don’t you think it better anyway that he have a gay and varied life, rather than be locked up here? Gulluliou is still solid on his feet, he eats very well; it’s not because he coughs a bit that you’re going to keep him imprisoned. On the contrary, it is because he is sad that I ask you to entertain him. Yes, he’s bored, this animal is dying of boredom and nothing else…that’s what’s giving him a fever!”

  She added, to convince the hesitant Murlich, that Gulluliou, carefully bundled up, would risk nothing in seeking such entertainment. He could be driven there in a car and be brought back in the same manner. The galleries at the Legislative Palace were spacious and easy to access, the room heated, the air purified by an excellent ventilation system. And such a sitting of the Legislative Palace was something he had never experienced. Had Murlich even been there before?

  The scientist had to admit that he hadn’t.

  “So you see,” Alix concluded, there are a number of good reasons! We’ll have good seats. Vandrax who is speaker of the House promised me so.”

  Murlich finally agreed to try it. Besides, the doctor, whom they consulted the next day, while recommending the greatest precautions be taken, had no formal objection to such an outing.

  “However, at the
slightest sign of him getting overly excited,” Darembert lightly struck the top of his left hand with his right, “to bed!” And he said to Alix, “It is a hazardous treatment you are starting here, I would not allow it were he a man!”

  It was the young woman’s opinion that what Gulluliou suffered from the most was solitude and silence. Her anger at the events during which the pongo had so brutally confessed his passion, but which she had kept to herself, had turned to pity. Only the physical disgust of the kiss received from those black lips now remained. Her heart forgave him. Since then, Gulluliou had been nothing but docile, and most even-tempered. If truly he loved, if this love implanted in the creature’s troubled consciousness was indeed akin to human love, how acutely then must the near-man be suffering.

  And Alix dreamed of bringing him back to health by exposing him to a variety of sights and sounds, whereby his youth would allow him to recover.

  On April 8 at 4 p.m., the great debate over the Sahara Railroad scandal was in full swing.

  Erected on the same site as the former building destroyed in the revolution of 2074, the Legislative Palace was just as large. The council-chamber could hold, besides the 1200 members, some 2000 spectators. The members’ seats were stacked in tiers and arranged in a semicircle at the back, along with the speaker’s platform surrounded by a visitors’ gallery. The chamber’s layout and dimensions reminded one of the amphitheaters of antiquity.

  When Murlich, Gulluliou, Alix and Vandrax’s secretary, who served as chaperone arrived, the speaker, in vibrant tones and with gestures typical of a short sanguine southerner, held the floor. His beard shaking, index finger extended, threatening in turn the ceiling, the right, the middle, the left, he straightened up his stocky frame, rolled his r’s, and gave himself entirely to the fight.

  “Citizens, the time for procrastinating is over…this country demands you step forward and act. The House must prove that a commonality of perspective exists between it and democracy, that they can count on one another. I would ask the minister what guarantees of security he would now make to European businesses operating in our African provinces, given how illusory his former guarantees were…I ask him if a bunch of swindlers and cheats will, with complete impunity, be allowed to line their coffers with the European Union’s capital.”

  Cheers and applause drowned out the orator’s voice. The centrists and the right were the ones applauding him. But a rumble of barking cries, curses and whistles arose. At the back of the great narrowing of the chamber the 600 leftist members were on their feet, and with their outcries, the pounding of their fists on the desks, they tried to stop Vandrax from proceeding.

  The interruptions crisscrossed: “Cheats yourself! Talk about swindlers! Enough! Those are fighting words! Liar!” screamed the Leftists while the 500 members of the opposing party continued their applause. Finally, Vandrax, his arm extended, turning to face his adversaries, reopened his mouth and bellowed on slowly:

  “Your anger, citizens, shall not overcome my stamina! You will hear me out anyway, whether you wish to or not. This debate, which in vain you have, by means fair and foul, tried to delay is of too immediate an importance for us to drop it again before getting to the bottom of it…I said that the swindlers and cheats…”

  The thunderous rumbling, which had only let up slightly, rose as loud as ever, accompanied by the other party’s opposing vociferations. The already stormy session promised to get worse. In the gallery, Murlich whispered to Miss Forest:

  “This is outrageous. And they call this debate!”

  “Oh!” smiled the young woman, “this is nothing, they’re only getting started. You’ll see later!”

  And she added, in response to the scientist’s surprised look:

  “They come to blows in almost every session. What can you do, that’s politics! You know, politics is the backbone of the European nations, but France is the country within the Union where it is best loved. Three quarters of the population seem to live for nothing else; every year an entire month is devoted to legislative elections. A month of genuine civil war, where all the passions are reborn with redoubled strength…especially since the women have the vote. Supposedly there was a time when they didn’t vote, when they were not allowed to involve themselves in such things.”

  “Certainly,” replied Murlich with approval, “it’s not that long since they enjoyed the same civil rights as men. It’s only been for 20-odd years in Switzerland.”

  Alix answered:

  “Anyway, I never vote myself. It’s like those women who run for office, do you think it’s natural for them to do so? That’s ridiculous! If only you saw them these poor female members when they are all gathered in one room. One might take them for parrots at the Museum of Natural History: what a cacophony!”

  “Indeed,” worried Murlich, “how come none of them seem to be here? I see only men.”

  “They must be in some Committee session,” continued the young woman, “they’ll arrive soon. There are 100 or so, a small proportion of all the members, but they stick together!...Yes, don’t you think all those people would be better off staying comfortably at home, placing their interests into the hands of only a few? We are a strange people, we believe ourselves to be happy because we read daily, in 500 different political gazettes, that there’s been more fisticuffs in the House.”

  “You are,” said Murlich, “a people with a taste for ferment and independence; and sometimes good things come of it. One mustn’t forget, child, that your country was the one to spread the social net which exists today. It was one of the earliest republics, it helped in the formation of all the others, advocated their unification, and finally, has always set the example in terms of progress and emancipation. It’s natural that you be enthralled by politics, for it runs in your veins, it courses with your blood. You have been the vanguard of modern civilization, and have remained in that role. It is almost in spite of yourselves that you have gathered the ideas, spread them, knocked them about!”

  “Especially that we knock them about. You, cousin, look upon our race as an external observer who sees an overall picture, but from close up it’s another story.”

  Murlich, pointing to the hemicycle, addressed Vandrax’s secretary, who was following the debate raised by his employer with obvious interest, and asked him:

  “So there are still three great schools of thought, as there were in former times? And what are their respective points of view?”

  “Why, sir,” the young man answered, “it’s difficult to figure out!”

  “However,” Murlich insisted, “under former regimes, one could easily distinguish their platforms, based on their party affiliation. Thus, under the 3rd French Republic, so rich in parliamentary highlights, history tells us that the Commons was divided into three parties, whose political platforms were well defined.”

  “Oh!” the other answered, “we have none like that. A party’s platform changes every day, according to the question being debated. Today, for this Sahara business there are those who support the Minister and those who support Vandrax. Tomorrow it will be something different. You do understand that there are no longer republicans and monarchists, nor…”

  Murlich, smiling, interrupted:

  “Obviously such labels would no longer be meaningful, given the agreement which exists on the form of government.”

  “Consequently,” Alix said, “you see that it is when the least reason exists for politicking, that the greatest politicking goes on. Our members’ ancestors had very different issues to deal with, issues which no longer exist: cults, war, the navy. They were only 500 to do this. Ours only busy themselves with internal matters, 1200 of them are at it, and they still find a way of fighting amongst themselves.”

  “The Frenchman’s belligerent intensity,” the naturalist concluded, “finds its natural outlet in parliamentary sessions. It’s logical.”

  His attention was diverted by Gulluliou, shaken by violent coughing. He immediately gave him a cough drop,
anxiously patting him on the back. The ape panted, somewhat dazzled by the daylight that came through the windows, and by the restless multitude before him.

  They returned their attention to what was happening at the front of the amphitheater. Vandrax was still at the podium, he stood courageously, his voice fighting to overcome the crowd’s powerful rumble, and the rhythmic sound of the desks. A thick haze, was hanging over the assembly, inciting the hot heads, of which one was searching the nooks and crannies of the room. The orator shouted out:

  “I ask the honest parties in the Commons to sanction this nation’s judgment by their verdict. Will the Minister of Labor then dare to come to this podium to once again attempt to deflect public opinion? He’ll not be able to do it! Light will be shed on everything. My supporters and I are ready to sustain the debate. The government’s servile accomplices cannot quash our cry of alarm.”

  Again, the whistles and insults rained down on Vandrax. For an hour now, he had been fighting the storms which rumbled on either side, and had only been able to develop a tiny portion of his question. Suddenly he flew into a rage, shook his fist at the left, screaming:

  “Ah! You crooks, you will not let me speak, but I will speak nonetheless!”

  This was the signal, from every side the ink-bottles arced across the room. The entire assembly was on their feet in a tumultuous and chaotic state. The tiers of seats, from top to bottom, were awash in invective, and the members threw at each other anything which came to hand. Meanwhile, at the podium, twisting in every direction, alternately straightening up or leaning over, he bellowed: