In the forest where they rushed, loosened from the treetops by their passage, chunks of ice lapidated them; they found, rather than the eyes of carnivores, the cold purples of dusk pouring over the ground through the low branches, they heard only the echo of their own cries. Exhausted, failing, they leaned on the fir trees, and beneath the sweat which chilled their backs and the rest of their bodies, they felt a tightness around their hearts, their joints stiffening, as if they were being petrified alive.
However, the women, the children and the elderly, having remained behind, crouched down in a single group to share their remaining warmth. No longer having even their animal-hide or bark clothing to chew on and appease their hunger, they sucked on the gravel they had picked up at the base of the moraine and clasped their hands around their middles. A girl, Adah, leaving the shapeless group, sat away from the others, her legs stretched out on her bed of moss and dry leaves. Her love for the strongest of her brothers, now hunting with her father, drove her last hopes. Before dying, she dreamt of flaking him a flint axe sharper than all those found among the natural chips of rock split by the frost or broken off by avalanches. Holding the rock she had chosen upright between her knees, she struck at it with another, work which she had already begun outdoors, without noticing, as here in the shadow of the cave, the sparks which were ejected from the striking point and which she vainly attempted to catch. She believed them to be day-flies suddenly born around her, or the drops of a mysterious, previously unknown blood which escaped from the secret heart of rocks which one broke, leaving no more trace than the lightning- or meteor-like blood spatters. Now warmed up, she struck harder, only pausing to rearrange the pads of moss which helped her to better stabilize the stone whose edges she sharpened, between her shaky thighs.
Drawn up suddenly in a jerk of her back and hamstrings, she dropped her tool, shook the sprigs of moss warmed by their contact with her maiden’s lap, and which the sparks had lit. Bent over the dancing redness, which from the mattress spread to bundles of bark-based twine and scattered tree limbs, she wanted to catch them, put her finger in them, crying out more in surprise than pain at the slight burn. She quickly taught the elders, the women, the children, who were now awake, amazed, and fearful, to bring their benumbed limbs near the young god which manifested itself in bringing them warmth, light and joy, and all the life of the bright sun of their lost summers. Fire was discovered and men, having come home without killing anything, paralyzed with cold and thinking they had nothing left to do but die, lay down near it and were saved. In Adah’s honor the young women were consecrated to serving the hearth. The adults now pursued their prey until they reached it and to wherever it took them, and prolonged their lying in wait well into the night; they no longer feared getting lost; back there the coals glowed red to guide their return, and the smoke rose and flew in the breeze, as if to carry afar the amorous thoughts of the keepers, the proof of their vigilance, and of their tranquil state. During the rests which came with stormy weather, the elderly who no longer slept, along with all the rest, free of dull tedium in the warm and well lit shelter, inventors of future arts, fired pottery; strung shells to adorn themselves with bracelets, necklaces and hair decorations; carved, onto slabs of ivory and schist, fabulous beasts which then existed: elephants with manes, bears with bulging foreheads. Emptying the leg bones of the Dinornis, a bird before which the ostrich would look like a crow, made a quiver, boring holes into smaller ones made musical instruments, sculpting stag and reindeer antlers into staffs and whistles of command for the chiefs, into dagger handles and barbed harpoons.
Finally, at a second memorable date, fire gave man, now become the king of creation, the first and best servant to his sovereignty.
As the ice receded slowly toward the poles, restraining their empire to their immutably dismal regions, the seeds of flora and fauna which were spared rapidly multiplied in the liberated areas, and the fight for survival became so harsh that the family of man had its development more at risk, amidst the irresistible thrusts of life, than when it laid about its caves amidst the apparent death of creatures and things. Humble grasses like Sigillaria, which children’s steps now cut down in tufts, grew up as great columns, losing their green domes in the clouds, and which the anger of a herd of rhinoceros no more unsettled at their base than a swarm of ants. Fires set by man freed him from the encroachment of the forests, but his huts built, when he should be enjoying the sun and breathing a little easier, it was still only by surrounding himself with logs that he guaranteed his safety from the ceaseless animal attacks, that he purged the cinders of his clearing of the even more deadly reptiles and insects; and if the circle of fires burned low, he saw behind them another blaze approach, almost as bright, that of the wild beast’s eyes watching him.
A woman crying out as if she had been gutted had the camp leaping to their feet one morning. A mother had entrusted the fire she was pledged to maintain to her daughter named Adah in remembrance of her great ancestress. When she came back to find her, she discovered her asleep, rolled over, and alongside, almost on top of her, an animal with frothy and bloody, shear-like canines. The whole tribe gathered round to see, but in place of the carnage they expected, the child was playfully pulling the fluffy tail and pointy ears of the beast, and the latter not only did not get angry, but licked the cute little hands and begged for their caresses. Then, turning her snout without otherwise moving towards the clubs already lifted over her, she showed in all her appearance and especially in her long imploring glances which begged for mercy, such a humble and submissive meekness, that rather than striking her, the clubs spared her, as perhaps she spared the little body she had at her disposal. A she-wolf or jackal, one of diverse genus, she was bitten all over, one of her hips was crushed, she had a wide tear on her flank, and the blood which flowed from her lips came from her own wounds which she continued to staunch. Besides, she was gravid, and this state as much as her weakness explained why she took refuge near the fires, the only way she could escape the attacks of the larger carnivores. Out of curiosity regarding what would come of her, they washed her and bandaged her; the little Adah, under her necklace of winkles which slapped her face, and laughing through it all, leaned on her as a companion, and refused to let her go, her arm around her neck, the mother took them both along. The litter having come to term, wolf cubs and children nestled together on the same litter and play-fought over the she-wolf’s breasts; and soon, both, grown up, having the same needs, sharing the same passionate interests, loping along in unison on the trail of some prey, guile, patience, speed, courage, strength, all the power of man multiplied ten-fold, a hundred-fold by the first faithful pack to help them out, by the dog forever become man’s liege-animal.
At this point in the story, Hemo was thoroughly excited. The roar of the lions in the heavily damaged greenhouse, as they were being shot, served as an appropriate accompaniment to the savagery with which he exalted the pride with which primitive man must have flared his nostrils when, upon the signal of a blast of horns, the first dogs lost their series of bites and rabid baying at the throat of elands, boars and aurochs, and delivered their still quivering flesh to the hunger-driven sharing of the flint and obsidian knives. And in singing he continued to swing, not being able to stop lest the flames envelop his legs.
The lions dead, the firemen who no longer feared encountering any further large carnivores, all by then cooked or asphyxiated, entered the hallway from the greenhouse, where they attacked the fire in the hottest of its foci. The nozzles of their fire hoses were spewing forth water in great streams, when the barrels of oil and thinners which the painters had put away in the monkey enclosure blew up in turn, feeding such sheaves of flame that Hemo, suffocated, dropped from the trapeze and was swallowed up by the heap of red hot coals, his final shriek answered only by Jan, who fainted in the crowd and was taken away.
“What, somebody injured?”
The good folk to whom everybody who met them asked this question, answered t
hat it was simply a stranger, a poor madman who claimed to be related to monkeys, and which the police commissioner ordered to be taken to the asylum.
The last of the curious gone, the night which had been interrupted now became thicker and more silent, though still somewhat disrupted in the eagle’s aviary by the frightened rustle of large wings spreading out in response to the unusual sounds, and, in the basin at the rear of the gardens, by the raucous barking of the sea-lions, still believing in an aurora borealis, and continuing to salute the smoky red which remained in the sky above the ruins.
CHAPTER XV
Jan Maas’ identity easily established, the asylum notified his family. His brother Adrian, the old widow Brinckleymann, Saskia his step-sister, and Martin Heltzius, all came in from Haarlem the same day, recognized him and took him with them against the better judgment of the director, who wished to see him submitted to a medical examination before releasing him. Hearing Jan name them all, inquire about the health of each of them, of their occupations, their financial situation, remembering obscure details of their common past, which they themselves had forgotten but which the precision of his words and memories helped them recover, they thought it the director who must be crazy.
However, Saskia and her husband were both very much surprised, when, having asked him what had made him rush off when he had barely arrived home, he initially hesitated and then answered that a newspaper, which he happened to find at hand, had proved to him the presence in Amsterdam of the best, of the most faithful companion of his years in Africa, and, his anger concentrated, his sobs poorly concealed he explained that this companion was a young ape, which he had the right, even the obligation to immediately reclaim from the ever-cursed people who had taken him.
The director then said to him, in a very natural manner, that his friendship for this lovely animal, this gorilla which the English clowns had been forced to give up to the Zoological Gardens, where he died in so singular a manner that night, could easily be understood. Was Hemo not his relative? His...?
“Alas! Sir, he was my son,” sobbed Jan.
“So then you had knowledge of, you understand me well, I say...knowledge of...his mother?”
“D’ginna! Yes I knew D’ginna”
And this time Jan allowed his tears to flow. Adrian’s wife and daughter no longer knew what sort of face to put on, Martin chuckled heartily, and Adrian, drawing the sick man to him in his big arms, hugged him, and cried out: “My brother! My poor brother!”
The director was no fool. He authorized his departure; but before, thrilled to be able to lay out a bit of science with no medical intern there to shrug his shoulders, he drew the two women and Heltzius off to the side and explained to them, gravely nodding his head, that the brain was a kind of piano, with a keyboard made up of thousands of keys, and that madness often consists in only one of these being out of tune, and thus people seemingly quite rational to the layman are indeed found mad by the psychiatrist, whose experienced finger presses the sensitive spot, knowing how to detect the broken note. Let them surround the poor boy with every precaution and always somewhat suspicious of him, given that his monomania of believing himself the father of an ape and thus the former—how can he express this—husband of a she-ape, indicated most likely some strange aberration to his reproductive instinct.
These recommendations offered in wisdom were met in a similar manner, and the family thanked the director.
During their return, Jan could not so much as look out the door of their train carriage to see some forgotten landscape without his brother gently restraining him from behind, like a father his dizzy child. Intimidated, but as always not wishing to complain, he sat down again. The big Heltzius would then drum on his ribs with his elbow and say: “You joker, you damn joker!” and whisper in his ear: “When we’re talking man to man, you’ll tell me all your jokes, won’t you?” with concealed winks that Jan no more understood than the actions of his brother who was being excessively careful with him, thus annoying him a great deal more. As for the old widow Brinckleymann, their gazes barely came to cross each other before she would pout in profound aversion. To change the mood, perhaps to rekindle an ancient fondness, he wished to hold the hands of Saskia sitting across from him; the gesture and the shriek with which she drove him off betrayed such fright, that the other travelers in the coach, suspecting him of some inappropriate behavior, all turned their angry faces towards him. Even a respectable matron of some 50 years, with mucus hanging from her truffle-nose, judiciously reflected aloud that it was horrible that those of her sex must be exposed to certain lewd individuals; and, a few minutes later, seeing Saskia, who, somewhat embarrassed at her outburst was smiling at Jan, she added that besides, such dissolute people were well acquainted with those to whom they chose to address themselves; she, had never been attacked. But Jan, remaining still, pretended to sleep.
Once off the train, Adrian, blinded by brotherly love, and reminding them that they were one family, begged them all to reveal nothing of Jan’s bizarre ideas, to say nothing of what asylum they had found him in. A family would be rather stupid not to keep to itself, as one family, as much as possible, the stain of one of its members.
His wife loudly demanded to be heard. “There is this. How can Mr. Maas repeat ‘one family, one family?’ Jan is of the Maas family, yes, but not of the family of the two, widow and daughter of Brinckeylmann, and not any more of the Heltziuses, don’t you agree my son-in-law?” She put the emphasis on “my son-in-law,” to clearly recall to her second husband, who had not said another word, that Martin was her son-in-law, but not his. And to disengage herself from any responsibility in events that were to follow, she confided her fears to her friends as early as the first night; if it was entirely on my shoulders, she said, I would have taken him on, as I often repeated to my husband, insisting that he bring back the poor devil, despite the burden he represents; but, you see, according to the asylum’s director, the most inoffensive looking madman is necessarily a constant menace, his psychoses can erupt at any moment, under the most diverse and unpredictable of circumstances. In making such a solemn admission regarding persons of this nature, she had overcome her pride and felt it her duty to at least inform her most intimate friends. These good folk comforted her, and so that their relations not be strained, and so that her unfortunate brother-in-law not become the object of idle curiosity, they promised her to keep the secret.
The next day all the city knew about it.
Jan lived a tortured life. In the street, the children gathered around his footsteps, calling out to one another to follow him like a mask, or, if he sent them away with some anodyne scolding, they would ambush him at every milestone to shout: “Beware the madman! Beware the madman!” They would then run off laughing, jostling passersby and rubber-neckers drawn out on the threshold. Women pointed him out to one another, young women looked at him sideways, pushing each other, stifling their laughter. At the museum, the guard never took his eyes off him, and drawing near every time he stopped in front of a piece, repeated an injunction to not touch anything, telling him to move on, as if he always expected him to deface the canvas.
Through the double windows of the shop-front and of the inner verandah of the Brinckleymann café‚ he could see his step-sister at the counter, her large bosom overflowing onto the marble having to hold her and her crocheting up, her rump filling the width of the chesterfield, her ample figure dozing open-eyed. With a stereotypical smile for the clients on her face, she offered, unwittingly pink in the cloud of pipe smoke, the image of a majestic idol of congealed fat, calmly and without disdain accepting the usual offerings of incense. His hand on the door handle, this fat trembled, her mouth was pinched, the gaiety of her complexion faded. He nonetheless entered, building up all his courage: her eyebrows became furrowed, and her features dropped as if the tobacco smoke had settled on her like jaundice. The customers, disturbed in the normal silence of their digestion, whispered. He sat down. His step-sister sighed, turned
her eyes up to the ceiling, and finally left, having closed her accounts ledger with a sharp smack, an invariable sequence of events after which her brother brayed, in a whimpering voice, that it would be best if he went back to look after himself in his room.
This room was in the Heltzius’ house, on the first floor, facing the garden. If he closed himself up to read, the maid would interrupt him until Saskia herself would have to go up and berate him for trying to make himself sicker. Saskia also forbade him to go and pick up the children at the baby-sitters, a pointless interdiction since the little girls, terrified, would burst into tears as soon as he touched their hands, and the eldest, the boy, refused categorically to be seen with him, because his friends would then laugh at him. In the store downstairs, he would not have penetrated into the place for more than a few minutes when he was shoved out, a buyer having arrived, while in the kitchen, the kitchen-maid would badger him, complaining that he was always in her way. If he took refuge on a bench in the garden, Saskia would again bother him, asking him how he expected to get better if he was always day-dreaming. He should instead get about and do something. To obey her he tried to take walks outside the city, but fared little better. Sitting one day, for example, very calmly on the edge of the smooth waters of a sleepy canal, he suddenly felt himself picked up from behind around the waist. A farmer thus dragged him off to his house, locked him up without even answering his bewildered questions, and ran off to get Heltzius, who brought him home like a truant child, having him run ahead, berating him for wishing to drown himself and bring down all sort of trouble on the family. Given time, he’d do something that would have them regret they allowed him his liberty. And from the outskirts to the house, everyone on their way told each other how he was already under the water when they dragged him out.
The Missing Link and Other Tales of Ape-Men Page 17
