Even though the veterinarian had long known that a taste for alcohol was amongst those which the great apes, like savages, most readily borrow from man, the poor creature relished the liquid in such perfect beatitude that he took upon himself the pleasant task of serving her, to see her half close her eyes, smack her lips and curl up her tongue in anticipation, crestfallen when upon entering he hid in fun the bottle in his coat. As gluttonous as her, the other orang and Hemo would end up each getting a spoonful themselves. It was then that the keeper looked upon the flask with such strangely covetous eyes that the veterinarian, in handing it back to him to put away, made sure to take note of the content level in the bottle, and to smell its strength.
She soon no longer had the strength to rise. Besides her glass of liquor she would take in nothing else, lying on her side for days on end, her arms crossed or, when her mate tried to perk her up by playing, extended them, one under her head as a pillow, the other below on her charms, like the Medici Venus. Her nails were curling more and more into claws. The arch of her ribs seemed to flatten, and along her protruding spine, spots long in contact with the floor lost their hair and excoriated, began to bleed. They brought her a mattress of kelp, a second blanket, larger, warmer, and the gesture was lamentably human when she tucked this blanket beneath her, shivering at the least breath of air, shaken after the least effort by bouts of coughing which left her breathing raspy. She died. A boy loaded her into a wheelbarrow, to take her to the amphitheater where the naturalists’ aides waited. It was indeed a body, not some sort of carrion. To bend the stiffened body, the boy had to push with his foot on her lower belly. The head, thrown back, rubbed on the wheel, and upon the chest thus bent back, the breasts showed two little cups of bare flesh, streaky, with purplish nipples, while the larynx’s resonating chambers lay flattened on her neck, like the flaccid pouch of a goiter.
Hemo, who always carefully studied the comings and goings of the staff, grabbed the key which the amphitheater boy had left in the lock, with the ring attached to it, hid it in the straw and sat on it. The boy, his wheelbarrow delivered, came back to look on the ground, to search through his overalls, hesitating for a moment, and decided to only lock up with the bolt, supposing that the keeper had picked up his keys. The latter came to the same conclusion when coming to stoke the heater for the night, and Hemo, hearing him going off, remembering the English clowns, danced a jig in front of the orangutan which had remained motionless and stunned since the body had been taken away. But having lost the habit of such exercise, he quickly tired of it; sitting then near his fellow ape, he stared at the thin streaks of the pale dusk which filtered in through the shutters, saw them slowly disappear, and, as soon as he judged that night had fallen, headed for the door, slid his hand between two bars, pulled the bolt, and slipped into the hallway.
A few night-lights hung from the ceiling, their flat wicks giving just enough light to allow him to stay in the middle of the path. The wild beasts which were already sleeping, not recognizing their keeper, stirred; at the bars, claws ready to grab him were stretching out, great bulks were rising to their feet, strongly sniffing the air, like the puff of a working steam engine, growling; finally the disturbed creatures went back to some forgotten bone from their last meal. Hemo thus seemed to wake, from cage to cage, the sounds of great maws, and to light pairs of dull eyes into living carbuncles.
His little walk assured him he was sole master of the place. At the end, from the door through which the last lamp in the hallway sent a light which, too feeble to outline itself on the black of the growing medium, melted into an indistinct reddish glow, there came the heavy atmosphere of a greenhouse saturated with the humid warmth and smells of vegetation reminding him of his native country; he drew it in, thrilled. The only things lighted were the tree ferns from Brazil and New Zealand, some with an upright stem, covered in what resembled scales, left behind by the ancient attachment point of leaves, the others with their middle fronds curled up in a fiddlehead and hairy like an animal’s tail, along with a giant screw-pine, immediately climbing and lost in the heights, allowing its long striped leaves to hang down into the uncertain light which washed out their color and left them like so many motionless tapeworms. At the edge of the shadows, a shelf of cacti bristled with needles, twisting prone stems into a tangled nest of snakes. And beyond that many other shapes waited in ambush for Hemo who guessed at their presence in the darker clumps distinguishable in the greater darkness, his fears restraining him from going any farther.
In front of his shelter was a sort of store-room, a large cupboard containing the maid’s equipment. All he needed to do to gain access to the flask of alcohol, when he came back, was to lift the catch. He took three-quarters for himself and poured the remainder into the orang’s dish, who, not educated by Miss Betty, did not know how to pour drink straight down his throat, scooping it in his hand instead. Tipsy, but not satisfied, he searched some more, finding in the messy pile of objects a carboy of oil, which he tilted towards his lips, and dropped so abruptly in suddenly drawing away from it in disgust that it broke into pieces. The nauseating liquid spread through the small drains used in washing out the cages and the hallway, soaked into the pine flooring and litter. When Hemo bumped against the long fire-iron which he had seen the keeper use to rake up the coals, he grabbed the tool and in his imitative rage rummaged around in the heater with it. When the first bits of hot coal fell outside the heater, trails of fire immediately sprung up everywhere.
Between the two furrows on either side of the hallway, he dragged the orang, stopping only to turn in glee towards his work. The burning oil, which the slope of the drains directed towards them, was catching up to them; a large vestibule offered a closer shelter to them than did the greenhouse. They pushed at a pair of swinging doors, and thought themselves free. But they were only in their previous palace, huge, and with no way out. Furious at this failed escape, Hemo took vengeance in a cruel inspiration. He went back into the hallway, pulled, across the line of fire, the bolts of four of the cages that had been closed no better than his, and running back to his companion, at the top of their huge perch, waited to cheer on the ferocious battles and all of the spectacle which, with the help of chance, he had so ably prepared.
The first victim of his malice was a poor little chevrotain21 which had been isolated from a family of eight to ten individuals for his own protection, one of his legs was already broken, from the unappeased rancor of an old buck whose lovemaking he interfered with. The new layout did not allow him to be put anywhere else, leaving him neighbored with a panther who, in spite of several dividers being interposed between their cages, scented him, and whose mewing kept him pinned to his litter, trembling, taking up as little space as possible, his limb wrapped up in a splint as well as his others bent under his stomach. Forgetting his fear, he came along, limping before the bars of the monkey palace; his doe was already answering him from far away in the park when he expired, his flanks and neck torn open by the panther.
Two lions next door did not bother moving except to turn their backs to the fire and resume their sphinx-like poses. A calming of nerves flattened their hindquarters; they rejoiced at their ease, calm except for a few twitches of pleasure at the base of the tail, and did not extend their nails, to face the danger and leap, in bounds of several meters, right into the greenhouse, until the heat became unbearable. Upon their roaring out, as if at a signal, all at once the hallway rang out with the cries of all its denizens, with all the howls of a sinking ark. The fire, as if fanned by these cries of terror, burst out more violently. The large cage in turn was on fire, where everything seemed to have been set out to facilitate the fire: the contractor’s equipment thrown in haphazardly, sheets of flooring piled up in a corner, wood chips left over from carpentry covering the ground, scaffolding poles and platforms leaning on the perch, pots of colored paint and barrels of thinner and oil for the painters. And if, in the hallways, the fire smoldered without one being able to see much from outsi
de, here it formed an open-air pyre that lit up the surroundings, scattering its sparks over the sleeping creatures scattered about the gardens. Aviaries became animated like a chicken coop at the approach of a fox. From the edge of their deep pool the sea-lions, believing themselves back in the land of the aurora borealis, dove happily to rise back up every minute and, just above the surface, saluted the sudden wavering glow with short barks. Blinded by the smoke, the panther left its meal, followed the inside of the bars, sometimes drawing up against them, the black velvet of his coat gaining the luster of magnificent moiré patterns, as crimson as the blood which still dripped from his chops. And in all the walkways, help was arriving, at the sound—sinister in the night—of the trumpet and drums.
Upon seeing the panther, the museum’s employees cried out that the big cats had escaped, and were panicked into headlong flight which had at least one tangible benefit: it left the way open for the firemen. One of the latter, immediately close enough to the beast that it could hope to strike him with its claws, threw an axe at it through the bars, missing it, but, getting closer, the fire and its fury bringing it back towards him, this time he split its head open to the neck. Another, resolved to get into the hallway, which he thought to be the seat of the fire, by way of the yet intact greenhouses, cut, his safety light in one hand, his pickaxe in the other, an easy breach in the windowed structure, only to be confronted by a lion’s mouth, before which he drew back. The cowards had not overstated the danger, the big cats had indeed been released.
The officers pushed back the curious and met briefly. They just had to keep the fire from spreading, and to stop the beasts from taking their carnage or at least their disorder into the city. Cordoning off the area, men with rifles cocked, fingers on the triggers, were ready to bring down the surviving beasts should the walls collapse. At the same moment terrible cries drew everyone’s eyes to the top of the monkey enclosure. It was Hemo and the orang who had been forgotten there. Asphyxiated no doubt, the latter tumbled down, bouncing off the bars, and in spite of the fact that they were heated to a brownish red, clenched them and bit them in pain, leaving behind torn shreds of his hands and lips, howling lamentably until the very moment he entered, finally dead, the blazing mass where his flesh sizzled, his skull exploded, and where his large, fierce body was soon no more than a mass of blackened axle grease stinking of melted fat.
But Hemo, whom the orang had held onto, had had to knock him out with a punch to the face in order not to follow him, still had not given up. The perch, half burnt away at the base, was weakening so he took to the arches and cross-braces supporting the top of the building. Swinging down the trapeze which the masons, whom he had disturbed in their handling of their ladders, had attached by means of a lozenge of wire to the structure supporting the glassed over ceiling, and sliding straight along the horizontal bar, sent it careening like a swing. The flames were almost touching him, but the wind from his rocking to and fro blew them back, to the front, to the back, farther away at each successive and faster pass. He appeared above them and amidst them like the demon which emerged invulnerable from the bubbling cauldron in which witches reduced aspic and toads, the roots of euphorbia and mandrake to an unguent which they applied upon the Sabbath. The crowd, recognizing him, called out his name, when a bizarre scene suddenly quieted a thousand voices at once, the scene of Jan Maas arriving from the docks, pushing aside the guards, falling to his knees before the monkey enclosure, his arms extended towards Hemo, crying and calling him his son. And the sympathy of a sincere pity soon replaced the laughter and mockery which had at first risen at every hand. As soon as they saw how thin he was, how haggard he looked, how downtrodden and fevered the stranger was, and how he tried to force his way through the ranks of the firemen, who held him back, they knew him to be insane. For what party had the devil that night let the animals out of their pens and the insane out of their asylums? Two men dragged him off. A poor angry sheep, in tears, he pleaded with them, begged that he be allowed to save his child, since the firemen themselves refused to do so. And as if feeling him to be so weak, posing so little danger, the hands around him would loosen, allowing him to throw himself back on his knees and cry out anew: “Hemo! Hemo! My son!”
At this distinctive voice, Hemo stopped short on the trapeze, jumped to the bottom of the cage, and in spite of the smoke which choked him, in spite of the sparks which lit up his fur in little bouquets of oakum, in spite of the coals he crushed beneath his feet, he too knelt, his arms outstretched towards Jan, and sobbed in genuine sobs, crying real tears, until, out of breath, he was forced, in order to breathe and to regain his trapeze and get it swinging again quickly. But now no one was in doubt that these two wretches, the madman and the gorilla, knew each other, and the question of knowing where and how their friendship was born was the topic of every conversation. One could not suppose Jan to be an old employee of the circus which had brought the creature to Amsterdam; he was not English, and from the language he spoke, without an accent, they could not deny him the attribute of being one of their countrymen, even if he had not out and out said it. For now, here he was telling the whole story, his family in Rotterdam and Haarlem, his trip, his dreams of regenerating the human race, the Pahouins, and finally, ashamedly, he told of his tropical lovemaking, of D’ginna and the birth of Hemo. The apparent bestiality of this type of monomania surprising the men somewhat, they drew back in exaggerated disgust, while the greasy throated gossips lowered their eyes and demanded all the gruesome details.
It was then that Hemo, whom none had heard proffer the least sound since his departure from Africa, not even the Englishmen who had long educated him, not even the spectators who had seen him murder the clown and escape with Colombine into the theater’s rafters, intoning a strange concert, brief and strident cries from a coppery throat, guttural muffled croaks, prolonging the same note as the wind through the deep recesses of a marine conch, the tremolos of a tongue rolled up against the pallet. Jan, in ecstasy, heard in it a speech expressed almost entirely in onomatopoeia, but which he understood, and consequently which all could understand, and which finally supplied that proof so long hoped for, the indisputable proof of the success of his experiment: Hemo sang, Hemo spoke, Hemo was thus born of man, was thus indeed his son.
Hemo, for Jan, improvised a hymn to the glory of fire, a superb recapitulation of a number of lectures and teachings which Jan had lavished upon him in their hours of common solitude.
Having little faith in chance, Hemo did not believe that the discovery of fire was the result of lightning in the forest primeval setting, a fire in giant ferns having dried up under a sun larger than the one which appeared today, or by the striking together of dead branches in a hurricane. It rather probably occurred during some terrible winter of the Ice Age. An alpha male among the males, among the males of an era lost many thousands of centuries in the past, extended his arm bearing a club cut from a tree trunk, over the women he preferred, over the children he had had by them, over the elders which bore him and whom before him, when they no longer could follow the shifting camps of the tribe, he killed, over the orphans whose fathers had been smothered to death by the great cave bears, or gutted by the four incredibly rigid and sharp tusks of the mastodon, and stated: “This share is my share. Beware all who try to lay a hand on it!” And the human family, thus barely constituted under primordial justice and consecrated by force, defeated by the eternal cold, was in its final agonies, and would die.
The cave which it inhabited, chosen for its depth, opened halfway up a hill by a narrow entrance which overhanging rock made even smaller. Racing brooks; rivers so slow that ripples from cross-current winds led one to misidentify the direction of flow; great lakes whose limpid surface the great stag took for a stretch of sky fallen to earth, and where, thirsty, he would, in admiring his four meter wide antlers, forget to drink; torrents the steps of whose cascades seemed an atomizer of light; all these now but a chaos of ice, piles of jagged blocks, their tumult congealed
in place and hardened into silence. Around them, neither the mountain nor the plains had, under the universal shroud of snow, any defined shadows, distance and elevation being confounded. The whole Earth was leveled by a sepulchral whiteness, barely tinged, deep in the abyss of night, with a blue metallic sheen.
Their skin slashed on the edges of the ice; the callosities on their feet crushing the rounded pebbles of granular glacier snow; their nails, like genuine claws, scratching even the smoothest of the slippery surfaces; sinking to their navels and sometimes even completely disappearing into hidden crevasses, the men were headed to the forest in a tight file. The father was in front, erect and spreading wide his hairy chest to protect his elders behind him from the squall which had taken them unprepared. The hollowness of their eyes, their cheeks, their hypochondriums, indicated months of famine, and the frightful emaciation that stripped the very meat from their bones, brought out the husky nature of their skeletons. Their veins and tendons stood out like taut ropes, their joints were knotty masses, and their spines resembled the angular backbones of the hyena. Naked, a stone axe in their fist, a spear on their shoulder, their hair full of pellets of ice, two steady streams of steam as their breath exited through their nostrils, between which gleamed their sharp chattering teeth. The last hope which led them out to the hunt rose as they approached the forest; the red sun set in a pale sky seeded the understory with shifting gleams, which they took to be the eyes of wild creatures watching them. And they sped up, straining their pace and voices, throwing their weapons by the wayside to lighten themselves, drunk with lust, believing already that after the fierce embrace of starvation they would eat and drink their belly-full of fresh meat and warm blood at the very breast and neck of the monsters whose glowing ambushes they could make out. The men’s hunger defied that of the monsters.
The Missing Link and Other Tales of Ape-Men Page 16
