Quite another surprise awaited him there. Adelaide, turning over the cash to her husband and forbidding him to leave it, immediately dragged him off to the dining area, and there, wham! in a stuttering declamation, the words escaping as if from a release valve behind which they were boiling, she congratulated him again, but also congratulated herself and all of them, for he could, if he so wished, forever assure the family’s complete happiness...by marrying Saskia. Jan nearly fainted. She sprinkled him with cologne, and explained: Her daughter suspected nothing as she had been visiting a school friend since breakfast. He was to tell her himself, upon her imminent return, of his newfound wealth, and she, her mother, would devote herself within the next few days in preparing her daughter.
“Never!”
Jan came to something of a confused attention. He thought the girl did not love him. Her mother grumbled that she would very much like this to occur, but a single motion on his part quelled her angry outburst. He said that she loved him as a brother, not as one should love a fiancé... The mother said that as soon as she returned, without hiding anything from her, without prior coaching, she, her mother would ask her. Lord! as much as he adored her, and though this was the first and probably the last time that he would admit it, it was not for his own sake that he insisted on this procedure. No indeed, it is for her, the dear child, who thus surprised would allow her innermost feelings to be apparent. They would see, would they not? The very idea that he might have dreamed of her as his wife would bring her to tears; or rather, no, he swore to himself, she would burst out laughing.
Poorly concealing his uneasiness, Adelaide signaled him to be quiet: Saskia was coming in. Breathless she gave Jan a great big hug. What! Was he not happier than that? Well! She, as soon as she found out, could not stay away another minute, and ran over all aflutter. To think he wanted to give her all ten tickets, today she would have been the one winning the jackpot, 30,000 florins! Now she would go and take flowers from his lovely gardens. She had stopped doing this since she had heard, not from him but another source, that he reimbursed his employer for the bouquets she picked. Was she not a silly girl to ignore the fact that flowers were sold and were to be paid for like any other merchandise?
“Yes, everything is sold,” said her mother in an oddly grave tone, as much to interrupt this pointless prattling as to confer some honest counsel. From this tone Saskia concluded that there was some important news, and she quietly listened. Then, furious that Jan was forcing her to act so quickly, but, her voice, even more deliberate, trying to hide the fury which would have given away the fears which assailed her, Adelaide, trying to bore her eyes and her thought into those of her daughter, informed her that Jan, Mr. Jan, did her the honor of asking for her hand in marriage. She should answer truthfully and frankly.
“My hand? What for? Ah!”
And suddenly, with great candor—yes, truly! with great candor—she burst into unquenchable laughter. She, at her age, to be taken in by such a silly story! And her dear mother lending herself to such silly games. For she was truly taken in for a moment. “Fie upon you, naughty joker!” she went on, jumping up on Jan’s knees and patting his cheeks; and she, who no longer allowed herself to pull pranks on him...had she said yes! After all, he would certainly be a good husband, were they not almost brother and sister, and had they not loved one another.
Jan, interrupted her in turn, addressing himself first to Adelaide, then to her, while letting her dance on his knees as she had as a little child:
“Well then, has your gamble fallen sufficiently flat? Imagine this, Saskia, that believing you incredibly naive, she bet she could make you believe that I was asking for your hand in marriage. Thankfully, you didn’t fall into her trap, for then I would have lost. I, like you, could no longer keep a straight face, and was dying to burst out laughing.”
Holding it back too long, he, like Saskia, burst out laughing, even louder than her, laughing to tears.
Adelaide had run off.
“What’s she so furious about, losing?” Saskia asked.
“Well, no.”
“Well, yes. Didn’t you see how she slammed the door? So, what did you win?”
“Why, the jackpot, 30,000 florins.”
“I know, I know, I was talking about your bet with mom.”
‘I promised not to tell.”
“Oh, come on, tell me right now, for I’m dying to know.”
“Why...why, we bet that if I won, I would be the one to set the date for your wedding with Martin Heltzius. You’ll need to get cracking on putting your trousseau together.”
The young woman ran off to give her mom a great big hug.
Jan had put aside for her, at the great jeweler’s on Bartel Joris St., the watch she had long admired, and then made his way towards a nearby park. Night was falling and he still walked. The street lights, the great signal-lights in the railroad station in front of him, all shone out. Remembering, he lowered his brow and stepped back into the shadows. A light this red had lit up in his mind when Adelaide had so rudely proposed to have him for her son-in-law. Had they both hoped that Saskia, knowing him to be rich, would answer yes? The mother, perhaps, but he could witness to the fact that he had never had such a reprehensible thought, but had always judged Saskia to be what she was, adorable in her ignorance of vile connivings. No, flowers are not sold; yet they are sold. Thus his love had been more than disdained, but rather ignored or unsuspected. Hurt, his pain had a strange, sweet, almost suave quality in seeing that the object of his love had not, even for an instant, done anything to forfeit the esteem he held her in, in the humble and pure altar of his heart. Raising his head, he returned to the city.
CHAPTER III
The day he was handed, upon simply presenting his winning ticket at the lottery offices, 30,000 florins, more than 60,000 francs, Jan, accompanied and advised by his brother, deposited them with a banker in Amsterdam, where honor was as hereditary and solid as his huge fortune. Adrian, on their way back, asked him of his future plans. He said he had decided, most definitely, to be content to live off the interest, without making any attempt to build upon the capital. Fate brought it to him; well then, he would prove his gratitude to generous fate, by showing himself forever satisfied. This was the old family principle of a simple life. Adrian lauded his choice.
Saskia and Martin Heltzius married. The nuptials over, Jan, notwithstanding his good-hearted employer’s wish to leave him the gardens, the client-base and the firm’s excellent reputation for half the price offered by a young business competitor, untied his florist’s apron and dove into what ran the risk of becoming his only passion: books.
Having lived in Saskia’s old room that faced onto the square, right in front of the statue of Laurent Coster, he bought the small house of an old French painter who had washed up in Haarlem and had made a living making endless copies, for the small frames of the second-hand market, of Frans Hals’ masterpiece, where he grouped the portraits of 19 musketeers around their officer along with his own in the back, on the left, as if the light-hearted master, by placing himself in the background, had counted on posterity, which had not failed him, to bring him to the forefront.
Jan loved the French. As a child, in Rotterdam, he sought them out in particular among the visitors to the Great Church. Their prayers were a bit long; they were asked to pay the admission fee, they would argue about it, they would be brought before the fee written on the walls of the caretaker’s quarters, and no doubt remembering Belgium, they remarked that both catholic and protestant always ended having a hand in your pocket. However, they did end up smiling and paying up faster and more generously than other foreigners.
At the Brinckleymann café, he had been, from the day after his arrival, a friend to the old artist who ate there; he followed him to the museum, on his walks, and to his home. The old man would set up an easel, a canvas, leaving him to break open the pencils and pierce the paint tubes, answering his questions in Dutch, in the argot of Parisian studios,
and they understood one another perfectly.
He was a sketch-artist, sent over by one of Paris’ illustrated dailies when the great lake was being drained, with no family, already older, with no talent, but no longer deluding himself about it. Well over any fevered ambitions or desire to engage in pointless struggles to reach the top, this stranger had grown old alone, calmly, silently, a voluntary exile not only from his country, but from life, yet nonetheless of a gay disposition. No one remembered his name, not even himself it seemed; they called him the Frenchman, and he was held in esteem, loved, greeted wherever he went. While the will left to the city’s homeless shelter the little he owned, in particular the receipts from the sale of his home, a request, though not a condition, was attached. It was to hang, in some corner of the museum, a painting of his he had designated, which was found in the middle of a shambles of unfinished pieces. Haarlem accepted the bequest and fulfilled the request. The painting, signed with two initials, was the portrait of a woman—apparently a Parisian woman—before a lovely French landscape.
Jan converted a vacant lot into a garden, extended the ground floor with a greenhouse, containing, as at his former employer’s, a circulating hot water heater. A spiral staircase led to the floor above, where two rooms, one long and narrow, where he slept, and another, the artist’s studio which he converted into an office, constituted his true residence. He continued to take his meals at his brother’s. His home being behind the railroad, in a wedge of land between the river and the canal beltway, he would, at the same time every day, with the short steps of a small landowner, saunter down the shores of the Spaarne to the street facing the square, and then return the same way.
The regularity of his passage cheered up the river folk. Besides these self-imposed outings, he rarely wandered outside his neighborhood, but remained in the lovely park set above the early fortifications, hand behind his back or holding a book, daydreaming, muttering to himself. If one tried to accost him, he would evade one, if one insisted, he would rudely break away and take refuge at home. Given his new state one might have accused him of being prideful, but this did not occur to anyone, as he was too well known.
He would receive books from everywhere: Germany, France…he neglected his garden and greenhouse; his light remained lit until dawn, the glow from the bay-window in his office remaining almost all night, shaded from time to time when he moved about by the great shadow of his silhouette. In former times one might have thought him a sorcerer or an alchemist, but today the good folk whose greetings he barely and only absentmindedly acknowledged, would, behind his back, tap their foreheads with a finger, in the universal sign of a mind gone astray.
His visits to Saskia upon her giving birth tore him somewhat from his stay-at-home ways. Mrs. Martin Heltzius, tied to her business, was forced to place her child with a wet-nurse. The store returned to its former routine, and Jan’s visits returned to their former infrequency. At the dinner table he answered so queerly that his brother- and sister-in-law stopped speaking to him. Finally, when an Amsterdam newspaper commented upon the baroque lucubration he had just published, there were no doubts left: clearly, he was mad.
He was devoting himself to natural history.
Had he limited himself to those descriptive domains, such as existed in botany, requiring little more than memorization, underpinned by themselves alone, being immediately accessible to all, he could have acquired some hard and fast knowledge, something whereby his long nights would have contributed important new information to the field of taxonomy. Unfortunately, he had quickly been captured by those generalizations whose careful laying out was the purview of great minds, but of which vague projects penciled in the margins of science were more closely associated with an entire class of harmless, powerless cranks. Jan was certainly among these, thrusting blindly between two well-established pillars of knowledge to emerge somewhere in a morass, off the beaten path, a path which he had at one time trod. Losing themselves all the more, that, their backs were to the goal, they pressed forward, simple-minded folk, crushed by doubt, incapable of being content with mere theoretical estimates arrived at through pure reason. Such an agenda for duly witnessed certainty, for something henceforth undeniable, did not bother them, for discovery exalted the seeker and provided him with the ecstasy of certainty, which once tasted, rendered him insensible to all other pleasures. Their imagination, neither powerful nor expansive was instead smoky, scattered, foggy. Capable only of dreaming, yet not poets, they could not supply their own materials, but found them in arithmetic text, never seeing in science, but what was not there. Naysayers or believers, the seekers of the absolute were recruited among them. They required vast quantities of money and conceit for them to be dangerous, and their attributes being generally contrary to their temperament, the majority, like Jan, remained harmless creatures, innocuous reformers of humanity and healers of its woes: poverty, war, prostitution, vivisection. Their books dealt with everything, and besides ran the gamut from the Sun to the Moon, supporting scripture upon Mesmer’s teachings, and true geniuses upon such innocents as themselves. While in medieval times they had their chance to write, on occasion some modern scholar would dig up one of these “Summas,” and not wishing to admit to the pointlessness of having exhumed it, they would demonstrate, with footnotes, commentary, prefaces and afterwords, that the author was one of those great forgotten geniuses, who in an age of darkness illuminated the glittering achievements of the future. All this was child’s play, as everything could be predicted, mothers and doctors assert, from the babbles of a child or from hallucinatory ramblings.
Jan had named his book: Hemo, drawn from the Greek word “blood.” Hemo was the name with which he baptized the new-blooded man, the renewed-man generated by his method. The Adam of old was subject to Nature, to the world, but the world would be subject to Hemo. An explanation of the world was then indispensable, for man must know what he must tame, so Jan established immediately and completely his cosmogony.
God, the Divine Spirit exists throughout eternity. No one, not even Moses in the Hebrew Genesis, had ever stated—as Voltaire had correctly pointed out—that anything was made from nothing, or that the Divine Spirit was literally the Wind stirring the Waters. In criss-crossing it, these wind-driven currents filled the universe. At every crossing point, a gas burst forth—oxygen—forever bearing the creative spark, inseparable from God, and whose different manners of condensing led to all the celestial bodies in the universe. The universe was thus God incarnate in all things through his breath; the universe was the Spirit and the Spirit was God; whence arose that mystery which greater number of religions admit to, from the Hindu Trimurti to the Christian Trinity: God the father, creator; his breath, the Holy Spirit; and the universe, starting with man, his creation, his creature, his son. The divine breath which was in everything, which was everything, the overall single causative agent, of which matter and its multiple phenomena—life, sound, light, heat, magnetism—are but its objective manifestations, which current science has proven that these supposedly different processes are different forms of motion. This principle which was cause and effect, matter and energy, body and action, creation and creator, universe and God, was electricity. Jan then broached the subjects of transcendental anatomy and physiology, comparing the small blueish veins on a young woman’s brow to the Milky Way, tiny veins on the brow of God, tumbling along suns like blood cells. The human brain was a gathering of stars, a nebula link to a central sun: the soul. The soul, as everything else in the universe, was an electrically charged fluid. Adam and Eve’s sin was to have usurped God’s role in mixing their fluids; they created, but by lessening themselves. Every man was the result of such a reduction in two prior beings, those which had created him, and this loss constituted original sin. Man and woman, brought together, burnt in a supreme collision, sparking love at the sacred moment when the melted portion of their two fluids broke away as a soul of its own. This man and this woman, if they loved each other without reproducing t
hemselves, thus lost part of their electricity, diminishing God by the entire quantity of divinity that they had not passed on to a child. It was the crime perpetrated by Onan and recommended by Malthus, the crime of nations that would perish. And Jan, rising to heady moral speculations, invoked the God within him to purify his lips from vulgar words and maintain chaste his overheated thoughts. Perhaps here, the image of Saskia had arisen in his memories. Anyway, this invocation completed his work. Admitting with a scrupulous honesty his need to undertake further studies, the author begged his philosopher colleagues to wait for the complete exposition of his conclusions, in order to judge the system at once, as a whole. The cornerstones were set, the world explained, man as he was, understood. The true Homo, man as he must be, would be the topic of the second volume.
The philosophers waited.
His humble horticultural work abandoned, Jan tossed out the rarest flowers from his beds to bury maceration vats. Cow and horse heads, entire carcasses of dogs, rabbits, and birds, picked up here and there, were thrown in. The vats exhaled a charnel stench over the ramparts. The neighbors complained. He apologized, and emptied the vats, too early, into the greenhouse. Needing to tear off the greening flesh, to scrape the tendons and ligaments from the still fatty bones, his hands in the rotting matter, his nose hovering over plates in anatomy texts, he was prone to continuous bouts of nausea whose retching clouded over his eyes. Threatened finally, because of the reek pervading his clothing and entire body, of being refused a place at Adelaide’s table, he buried the bones and with them his project to mount himself a collection of them. Upon the counsel of his doctor, he went to see a naturalist in Antwerp very skilful in preparing skeletons.
The Missing Link and Other Tales of Ape-Men Page 3
