The Missing Link and Other Tales of Ape-Men

by Georges T. Dodds

  The father comforted her with a kiss on her brow, and to celebrate the entire family being reunited, promised to buy a seed-cake, if Jan would consent to buying a few bottles of pale ale; the café on the corner sold some that was excellent. Jan accepted and emptied out his pocket, happy to be able to chat with Hemo’s last friend.

  Betty was only too glad, having been mistaken as to the interest she had aroused. Half laying on a mattress, her head held up by a plaid rolled up as a bolster, her legs stretched out and her feet leaning high up on the stove pipe, she confessed, between puffs on her cigarette, to things which she had heretofore kept secret.

  The clown’s murder did not surprise her, actually she had almost been expecting it; and if she only admitted it now, it was that the case having been closed she no longer feared that she would be harassed, or that her admission could be used against her, to accuse her of not having done anything to prevent the calamity which she suspected would occur. It was unbelievable, but a reporter—is that not the case?—was used to hearing all sorts of things. Well then, the truth: the ape was in love with her, and jealous of the clown.

  Like an actress or an orator who has uttered some powerful lines and listens for the crowd’s response, she paused. A shudder or a murmur of indignation would have pleasantly tickled her perverse fancy. But Jan, after the painful alternatives of his suppositions regarding Hemo’s origins, did not even give a start. Betty, disconcerted, wondered if she had a common man or a refined one with peculiar tastes on her hands, put her elbows on Jan’s knees, to better gauge his impassiveness, and in a pique of self-esteem, in an effort to compete professionally, continued, giving greater detail to her story, particularly upon hearing her younger sister needle her that she was wasting her breath.

  In her opinion, her father’s pride in Hemo’s education was not legitimate. Only she managed to win him over, for the poor beast was simply going to kick the bucket before she began to nurse him. Blows, caresses, even holding back his food left him indifferent; always shivering with cold, he would stay entire days motionless and silent on the bench which had been built for him over the stove, not even pulling up the covers which were placed on his back. His lips and around his eyes paled, his four little hands grown thin, he pulled his hair out like a mangy dog, panting feebly; a veterinarian whom they had consulted did not require a long exam to draw his diagnosis and predict his coming demise; Hemo, apparently was becoming consumptive, like most animals of his species transplanted to Europe. He was beginning, besides, to cough in little dry bursts, such as, you see, seldom leave Darlin’, our little daughter whom the doctors say is seized with a similar sickness.

  Thankfully she immediately took a liking to him. Curled up, his chin on his knees, sitting up in spite of the most blazing fire, or during his fits, his chest with sunken ribs bulging out, his mouth agape in an attempt to draw in the air he was missing. He drew close to her, came down from his shelf and held his arms out as he watched her. Tired of rolling on the carpet, in a gesture easily understood in thirsty children, he pointed at his nurse’s bosom. She picked him up under the arms and led him playfully around the room. Just like a wheedling child, he held on to her, crossing his hands on her shoulder, placing his cheek against hers, his eyes half-closed in contentment, and jumping on the bent arm with which she supported him at the least lagging in his walkabout. Such a great sadness would then overcome her, so that she reproached herself for being strict with him, and this would fade until sleep loosened him from her neck.

  He recovered.

  The father’s training scarcely went beyond the typical tricks which the circus riders taught the lowliest of carnies: being drawn apart between the top of two ladders, archery, cup and ball, dominoes, gun play, sword play with sabers and bayonet. It was she, more ambitious, who imagined trying to turn him into an actor. One of her lovers altered, according to her directions, the script of an old pantomime play. The other players required were recruited, the troop organized, her student, as early as the first rehearsal, knew his role better than anyone else, but then also showed himself to be more jealous than the stupidest of men. Everyone laughed about it, including William Ochter, the object of this jealousy. Only she worried about it, and then only to herself; she would also get angry if anyone brought it up in front of her. Did they take her to be a she-ape?

  This William, her lover in the play, had become so in private. Not that they loved each other, but it was difficult to live together as they did without such a thing happening. Besides, the men, the poor devils, made so little; they would be rather penny-pinching, would they not, to refuse them what they could not buy elsewhere? Will, a very good-looking boy, was a great favorite of the young ladies of the casinos and skating parties; quite intelligent, he kept himself for a better match, and would only stand still on stage for the opera-glasses of the wealthy bourgeois women. He reasoned correctly: these were the most generous, but they demanded that their favorite not run around. In sleeping with him, they simply acted as good friends; they allowed him to wait, without risking his health with the streetwalkers, so that what filled his tights could be appreciated by some honest women.

  Whatever the case, Hemo was jealous.

  And to do as much as confess, she admitted to be deserving of a few reprimands. Since everybody laughed about this jealousy, she, who didn’t laugh about it, should have been more careful. But see! Even the best take pleasure in having a man languish; who in her place would have resisted, especially when the man languishing was an ape. The joke was so funny! If she kissed William, Hemo closed his eyes as if not to see her, and, as if he could not control himself, growled, blew out hard, tugged on her skirt, and made faces that would put a smile on a coroner. If William kissed her it was much worse, he no longer growled, he threw himself against him, pushed him away, and ended up grinding his teeth, to the point of making him retreat. “Filthy creature!” stormed William, ending his caresses. Once when he left her open-mouthed, waiting in vain for his kiss, in jest she took an angry tone. “Let Harlequin go to the Devil, he doesn’t know how to protect Colombine.” It was stupid, but it nonetheless vexed the clown, who came up to her and took her in his arms. Pretending to be fighting him off, she called for help. Hemo then leapt on the poor man, knocked him over, and stomped on him so violently, that she was forced to order him to let go, and repeat the command several times and even strike him, he who would usually obey her least signal. Will then wished to take vengeance upon him, to kill his...indeed, yes, his rival; she calmed him down and made a solemn promise never to play that game again.

  All of this, already somewhat bizarre, became altogether so on a certain morning, or rather a certain afternoon. Some men had taken herself and her sister out the night before to dinner, and had kept them out until breakfast the next morning. Darlin’ having something to do in town, she had gone home alone. Will gone, with the whole household, for a walk, the house was empty except for Hemo. She stoked up the fire, and very tired, she went to bed. The night’s champagne and truffles, and especially her beau, a very nice beau, but older, had gotten her all excited. She tossed in her sleep, the sheets fell away, she felt herself kissed, snuffled, on her eyes, her lips, her breasts. She knew she was not dreaming of the older man, his kisses were too different. Wonderful in their awkwardness, she guessed in them a well-built cherubim fearful of pushing things too far, the poor innocent one, and so as not to trouble him or further intimidate him, she kept still, and even though she was awake she kept her eyes closed, almost. All of sudden, a storm broke, that stupid William tore Hemo from the bed like an idiot, and where, at first, she was disconcerted, she was then convulsed with laughter, until she had to jump down to separate them, for they were giving themselves up to a genuine duel, the brave ape opposing his fangs and nails to the brutal clown’s knife. From that day forward, Harlequin watched Pierrot as much as Pierrot watched Harlequin. To maintain the peace she had to avoid both of them. But the theater drew them together. The crowds would have had to be
awfully dumb not to notice that the ape and the clown, Pierrot and Harlequin, were not playing a part, but really despised each other, throwing each other around in earnest, and that the screams which escaped her were not all in feigned fear.

  The newspapers, seeing an easy story, only scrutinized the details of the murder, not of their background.

  Betty, her throat dry after such a long tale, nonetheless added an account of her memorable vaulting, in the gorilla’s arms, through the rafters of the Palace of Industry. She would remember it all her life. The newspapers say she had fainted. She had when he grabbed her and launched himself upward, but soon reawakened and immediately understood that she was running no risk. He held her so tightly, yet so tenderly on his vast hairy chest that during the wildest leaps she thought herself merely swinging from a richly appointed hammock, elastically woven in horsehair. He kissed her ears with such heated breath that she still wonders whether he was not then, in his language and with his ape’s tongue, whispering words of love to her. And when, cornered by 20 firemen, stagehands, soldiers, pursuing him with a forest of poles, stakes, ladders and scaffolding, he put her down safely in a recess in the wall. Taking a last look at her so full, so long, so drowned in regrets, shattered hopes, in youth betrayed, that at the moment he charged towards his aggressors and provoked them with a grinding of his teeth, signaling his readiness to fight, she could not keep quiet and cried out, her hands extended: “Hemo! Come to me! Come back! I love you.”

  The soldiers finally took hold of him, loaded him in chains, dragged him away, and the uproar muffled her voice. Had this not been the case, she would have been mercilessly jeered at.

  “Not me, my girl, not me!”

  It was Jan, who could not keep quiet either. Oh no, he would not laugh at her for speaking of Hemo as a human being. Bent over her, he grazed her brow with his lips, fevered by the thought she might not have confessed everything, that a false sense of propriety held her back, that she had guessed Hemo’s nature, that they had shared hours of intimacy, decisive, demonstrative of the equality of the two races, or at least of the similarity of their two races to the point of confusion. He brooded over her with great affection, amused himself by curling behind her ear the wild wisps of her fine hair. She thought she had conquered his cold facade and with a scornful pout she called her little sister an ignorant scamp, incapable of inspiring anything in a serious man. But she laughed in her face, Jan showing himself so serious indeed that he was heaving like a good man to whom one might propose an incestuous relationship.

  The father kept an eye on the goings-on between them, though apparently absorbed in his reading of Sir Stayel’s voyages. He burst out in curses, and both asked him simultaneously,

  “What is it?”

  “There is that it’s just bloody disgraceful,” he turned towards Jan, taking him to witness. Reopening the book which he had a suddenly slammed shut, he read the episode of a meeting between Stayel and a slave caravan, the Arab merchant placidly upon his donkey while his servants whipped long lines of wretched blacks in wood and iron shackles whose edges skinned them alive. And as if the misery of the blacks had recalled this white man’s misery to himself, he finished his beer and cakes, and cursed his daughter’s laziness. Let them beat it, since they were too stupid to please a distinguished guest. The theaters were letting out, the streets filling for the last time that night. Their buns would be history if they didn’t improve on the evening’s take!

  Jan blushed, searched through his pockets, found not a single guilder, and apologizing for his departure, followed the girls down. At the bottom of the stairs, as they were going back to the Dam Plaza and Kalver-Straat, their usual hunting grounds, he went his own way.

  CHAPTER XIII

  His rash desire to return to the site of the most recent events in Hemo’s life led Jan back to the Palace of Industry. The festivities were at their height, the bay windows, the glassed-in cupolas blazed with light, burst with music, and the rays, those echoes of happiness contrasted so painfully with the poor man’s state of mind, mournful, silent, sad unto death, that as soon as he arrived he ran away. But the same desire guided him again, going across the Amstel he headed for the Zoological Gardens. Over the wall, a tree limb appeared to him as an arm reaching out and lowered itself to grab him on his passage; upon the deep sighs of some great beasts in their nearby lodgings, he cried out oblivious to his own actions: “Hemo, Hemo, is that you?” and, surprised by the sound of his own voice, he ran off into the distance.

  He wandered about the sleeping city, by preference along the alleys and canals. The few who were still out late took him for a drunkard, because, his head on his chest, staggering with weakness, he did not see them and so jostled them with his elbow. The rich folk coming back from an evening’s entertainment went out of their way to avoid him; a homeless man, his nose to the wind, followed him, took a hard look at him under a street light, but given his pitiable state believed it useless to feel inside his pockets.

  He had not slept since his departure from Marseille and had not eaten since the day before. The fault was not in his not having money, even rich he would no more look for a bed or dinner, no longer feeling hunger or fatigue. His body to him was simply a worthless rag; only his brain worked, and with a life force that much more intense than fever, which general wear and tear had amplified, pushed ordinary sights into a realm of delirium. The least impression transmitted to him by his senses, a reflection, an odor, a whisper, led to sequences of mad analogies, bringing forth memories which condensed into hallucinations, and which he perceived as present, coexistent, no longer ordered in their proper place in the past. In the same minute he was 10, he was 40, he was 1000 years old, and he contemplated, modified, perfected, admired his old dreams, now fixed, solidified into visible and tangible realities.

  The places and the night melded together. Exhausted, he crumpled to the ground on the edge of the dock, among the loads of cargo.

  Around him was stacked merchandise from all over the world, wooden crates in pale pyramids, bales and bags in shapeless piles stuffed under coarse canvas covers, barrels one on top of another in uniformly stacked fortifications whose tops stood out in rounded waves, unlike a pile of coal whose crest showed a jagged profile. One might think it a dead city of collapsed buildings, some having remained partly standing, and one would situate it in the tropics or in the fjords, according to whether the draughts blowing through the maze of apparent ruins brought warm aromas of a shipment of spice or the harsh aroma of Norway spruce, and if the strong odors which always masked others blew in heavily, the empyreuma of tar and the stale mustiness of fish, it would still recall the sea.

  She was in basin facing him, her sides braced against the docks.

  Other ships were filling her; all the sails were taken down from the rigging and folded away. The masts were raised in a bare, polished forest. They seemed to form, their lines streaked pale across the night with the horizontal and oblique tangling of the yards and rigging, a gigantic web supporting with the thickness of its links the less dense tissue of the great patches of darkness piled up behind. Different colored fires opened here and there with huge eyes of red hot coals, sulfur, emerald, and were enveloped in the fog with purplish halos, of which more than one, lighting at intervals some carved and gilded nymph on the prow of a ship, revealing a livid and floating drowning victim, which the shadows that played about its recesses when the ship rocked seem to surround with greenish hair. A transatlantic liner, proud, concealed its massive cathedral. Nothing stirred. Not a sound. Suddenly, at the rising of a breeze, everything oscillated with the same rhythmic roll, some flames died out slowly at the swashing of the water, pulleys creaked, mooring cables strained briefly then slackened, chains rattled against one another, the canvas covers snapped, and the sides of the ships which came in contact with each other cracked like great spindles. Once again it stopped and one could only hear the harsh grinding of rats nibbling on garbage, the roar of a steamer starting up its en
gines for departure, a strident whistle-blast, and occasionally, on a big barge, the flat deck of which was barely dented by the roof of the cabin, a guard dog did his rounds and howled.

  The Moon was rising on the other side. Clouds continued to interpose themselves in its slow ascension, tiring it. At first wide, swollen and of a heavy crimson hue, by the time it reached its zenith, where it waited listlessly, it was no more than a collapsed, empty, pale mask against a ceiling of darkness. During a short lull, she lit up again, came back to life with new blood, giving back to the vast slumbering lands under her influence a bit of the redness of life. Her gaze cast into the shadowy abysses, changed them into black velvets upon which ancient scumble of phosphorus paste turned blue, and myriads of tiny waves on the surface of the water were crested with ephemeral glows.

  She continued her course, and the battle with the clouds was enjoined again. She went down towards the sea while they emerged from it. Livid, far over the waves, they emerged as granite islands bordered at the base by a narrow bar of horizon, while their compact masses, as if solidified, proceeded from the fathomless depths of the sea where nothing could intercept the breath which pushed them. The ridge atop them was crowned with shifting crenellations, arrows, gigantic towers which endlessly collapsed and recreated their nightmarish architecture. The silence of their collapse was not the least of the horrors, the silent storm suffocated one with fear, as if, presented with the lightning bolts of cosmic chaos, one waited endless minutes for the final peal. And the Moon, in the middle of these fuliginous blocks which endlessly rose and disaggregated, grew bloody in the parting of the cracks between them, waned, cadaverous and half eaten by their smoky fringes, was then completely eclipsed beneath their opaque curtain, drawing along in a spectral dance, with its many, rapid intermittences, everything of Heaven and Earth.