Volume 1831
Georges Dodds'
The Ape-Man: his Kith and Kin
A collection of texts which prepared the advent of Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Presents
http://www.erbzine.com/mag18/hemo.htm
| Chapter I. | . |
| Chapter II. | |
| Chapter III. | |
| Chapter IV. | |
| Chapter V. | |
| Chapter VI. | |
| Chapter VII. | |
| Chapter VIII. | |
| Chapter IX. | |
| Chapter X. | |
| Chapter XI. | |
| Chapter XII. | |
| Chapter XIII. | |
| Chapter XIV. | |
| Chapter XV. |
Hemo
Jan was the last born of Philip Maas, and Philip Maas was the custodian of the main temple in Rotterdam. Formerly dedicated to Saint Lawrence, the huge building has maintained its Catholic name. It remains the Great Church, with an amphitheatric interior for professing grave things such as are common in Protestant churches, walls cold and unadorned under their whitewash, pews arranged in tiers. In the Groote-Kerk, guides, printed or living, wishing to show the "curiosities," describe a half-dozen marble mausoleums and the copper grille separating the nave from the choir. Forced to mention the 1,25 F entrance fee, these guides would likely fare better were they to omit mentioning ahead of time that there is nothing to see. However, this emptiness is a good reform, as, unlike in Italy or as in former times in Belgium, one avoid the triple tedium of being forced to run between several chapels, to admire one masterpiece and a couple of crusts. When the Joanne and Bædeker travel guides mistakenly fail to incite travellers to the daily use of their gullibility in favour of recommending the packing of flannels, the only result can be a daily decline in the gullibility of tourists. As the visitors, aside the lure of the tombs, the organ and the metal work, are never abundant in the Great Church, Philip Maas, the caretaker, seldom added tips to his meagre fixed income. Chapter I
Now his family was large: first, his wife, then, between Adrian his eldest and Jan his last, ten other children. A thin partition divided his caretaker's quarters, in a corner recess of the aisle, into two rooms. With one alcove and a closet that could fill each of the two rooms, they could already barely fit the first child's crib; for the others, Philip had to look in the city for supplemental housing, or give up his position. He rented one of those basements that impart such a distinctive look to the cities of his country, a kind of cave from which one reached the street by way of steep steps between the foot of the house and the top of the sidewalk, and into which the daydreaming loiterer is at risk of tumbling while browsing along the shops. It was in an alley between the square and the street that housed the city's richest stores. From there, by climbing the stairs and extending their neck a bit to the left, one of the children kept watch on the caretaker's quarters, as well as he would have beside the church, near the door.
The father, as an old man, was returning to his old trade of a tailor. Nevertheless, in a basement, particularly a basement in Holland, it is altogether too dark for sewing. Not to mention that this brave little caretaker-man, always with a slight cough, was so vibrant, so nervous, so perpetually in motion, that he could not stay put a quarter of an hour without jumping up suddenly from his rest, like the little devil in a jack-in-the-box. He found employment more gainful and more to his tastes: the raising of song birds.
Compared with the many stores where birds from the islands press the ruffles of their fine multicolored striations against the support rods of their aviaries, motionless as the skylarks skewered and barded by the dozen by food purveyors'; where innumerable species of parrots chirp and perform gymnastics on the end of the fine chain that holds them, like a galley-slave, to their perch; next to the famous market in Anvers, where showmen and circuses from all over Europe supply themselves in animals of all sorts, Philip, Philip Maas of the narrow roadway to the Church, in Rotterdam, patiently developed a most deserved reputation. There were only a dozen cages, hung, on pleasant days on the bar of the rail surrounding the top step of the sunken entrance-way that led to his home, and brought in, at night or in winter, to the room downstairs. And each held but one bird of drab plumage, but which he knew how to make into an incomparable artist.
To the starlings he gave hemp seed and biscuits; to the robins, a mixture of poppy flour and chopped calves' heart. The calf's heart cost him less than a quarter florin, roughly 0,50 F per week; the poppy flour, six sous a pound, and he did not even use a pound a month. As the robins, at the time of their migration, tore out their feathers, flayed themselves, tore themselves apart trying to take flight, Philip padded the wires of their cage roofs in cotton batting, and was often forced to blind them. Good and gentle, he hesitated, disturbed at no longer seeing them shake themselves, shift their eyes and puff up their crop in anticipation when he shouted to them "Attention" when showing them their treat, a cockroach --- an insect that thrives in moist places. He was only comforted from this horrible operation by hearing them sing better later, and in selling them at a higher price.
His triumph was the common lark, the grey lark, with the dark speckling of the throat and chest, with the forked tongue, sober, retaining any music one whistled to it, quiet at night. He had some that knew the national anthems of all the countries; an Englishman, brought by the child who was on lookout at the Great Church that day, had bought one which repeated God Save the Queen like a flageolet of the queen's Scottish guard, seventy-five florins, more than 150 F. The robins learned these melodies, but with greater difficulty because of their habit of always returning to the banality of their usual serenades.
With only one child more per year, their living quarters took on the appearance of a rabbit-hutch to such an extent that Philip took advantage of the fortune he had made with the Englishman, to annex the ground floor. Thus emerging from a cave, the light of the new rooms was an endless joy to all. The birds themselves sang louder. A number of windows opened on the alley. When the fog broke up, there were summer days during which, unless one had to work, one need not light the lamps before three o'clock in the afternoon. The house was finally ready for honest and peaceful happiness. Death entered the premises.
Adrian, the eldest child, was married and living in Haarlem. The others, except the last few, were still in school, worked here and there in the city, only returning to the family domicile to eat and sleep. Nearing twenty, the youngest son fell sick, lingered awhile, then died of consumption. A daughter, the third eldest, began coughing at the same age, and followed her brother from the heavy Utrecht-velvet armchair where he himself had sat for hours under a pile of covers, to the cemetery. Then it was another daughter; she did not live much past the fatal age. Then a son. One daughter returned to the status of eldest; when the disease began, terrified, she, one dark December night, went and drowned herself in the Meuse. Her corpse was found the next day, crushed between the sides of two of the many barges tied up at the Boompjes docks. Three younger ones, taken on as ship's boys as soon as they could climb the rigging, sought in vain to escape. The sickness boarded with them, allowed them to grow, develop, to think themselves safe, to laugh and cry, even to forget, and, at the fated time took them and laid them to rest forever. Two had died in the East-Indies, at Batavia, the third on the open seas. The poor mother, the least touched went mad and was committed to an asylum. When the old custodian, long on the brink of death, finally died, there only remained the eldest and youngest sons, Adrian, thirty-seven and Jan less than a third his age, to serve as pallbearers.
The funeral over, the elder took the young by the hand and brought him home to Haarlem with him. Neither one dare look behind them.
On their way, wishing to break with their past, they opened the cage of the last skylark their father had trained. Disoriented, it perched momentarily on little Jan's finger, tottered as if inebriated with its sudden liberty, flapped its wings, rose, turned, and, tore off towards sunnier climes, beyond the horizon where the big windmills seem to grind up the fog continually --- without even a word of goodbye
Adrian's wife was older than he. Widowed, already a mother, she had made him understand the very day of their nuptials, that her late husband having been rich, and he not being so, she did not wish to have any new children who would be beneath, as she put it, their uterine sister, and consequently that they would have no children together. Dumbfounded, the young man could only mutter: Chapter II
"If only you had told me earlier!"
"What for? It was time enough tonight."
"But I'll make money, I'll work..."
"I certainly hope so, I chose you for that very reason,"
Adrian had lowered his head, and never since raised it.
On the whole, Adelaide Brinckleymann was a good woman. A barmaid whom Brinckleymann had married after a country fair, and whom he had put in charge of the Brinckleymann caf‚, she had almost been forced to a quasi-avaricious stinginess. An easy-going drinker, gambler, eater and drinker, and not, like most of his race, of a cold and near-melancholic disposition, his bursts of laughter were enough to split a beer stein. As long as the party went on all night, he was always ready to put the tab he had encouraged his friends to build over the day onto his own tab, the ledger of profits and losses. With his potbelly, his widely-set jaws so well adapted to chowing-down that his cheeks seemed horizontal, and especially the crimson blush of his bloated face, Brinckleymann should have lived in the days of Franz Hals, whose wide-ranging and bold genius would have immortalised him, among the marvels of a nearby museum, in the forefront of his banquet of freebooters. The cellar was emptying without the till filling. A few more years would have brought ruin. Adelaide having brought nothing more into the marriage than her corsage and her work ethic, was constantly careworn. Nevertheless, that husband dead, dead of natural-causes, of no other sickness than a week of partying, she had set promised herself a husband who would take on all the worries, and would keep quiet as she had.
She could have found no better.
The clientele changed: the old, now fewer since they could not pay up their tabs on a regular basis, were complemented by a more profitable one of merchants and landlords. The establishment kept the name of its founder: Caf‚ Brinkleymann, but the new manager, Adrian Maas, appeared more like a servant in his own home.
The good folk, sitting side by side on the moleskin- covered benches lining the walls, enveloped in the smoke of large cigars and long clay pipes, rarely moving but to unfold a newspaper or pick up a glass, their lips speechless, their motions noiseless, resembled a row of well-oiled, silent automatons arrayed behind smoky windows. Adrian served them, often leaning against the door with his towel under his arm, glancing around but oblivious, given that he lived there, to the originality of this Haarlem landmark. The bells and the famous organ pealed out their songs in the church over to the left, but Adrian heard none of it. However, a single sharp clang struck by his wife had him scurrying to see who needed him. One of the automatons wished to pay, or was in need of oil; there was change to make, a stein to fill. Then he would return his post.
When the museum opened, a few strangers wandered past, some countrymen from adjoining provinces, Friesian whom a stray beam of sunlight would on occasion light up the forehead- strap and pendant-decorated blinders in a glitter of gold. Dogs, their tongues hanging out, followed the bakers' and herb-sellers' carts. Adelaide rang again. Adrian leaned his elbow on the marble top of the waxed oak counter behind which she sat in state. The great array of windows behind her allowed a view of a narrow courtyard with tiers of red geraniums that conferred a pinkish hue to the nape of her neck and the rims of her ears. He admired her at length: pink-complexioned, fresh, blond, chubby, bearing a vague smile, as if dozing from the rocking of her ample bosom and its endless drone. When she drew him from his reverie, her finger stretched out, her rings glistening less than her skin, pointing out a drop of spirits or the ring left by a saucer on the last table vacated by a customer, he would sigh, and wipe it down.
This love, which the wife's crabby dominance only allowed to blossom on rare occasions, Adrian's simple heart ended up reallocating in friendship upon Saskia, his predecessor's daughter. She believed him to be her father, and every time she, in chatting with her dolls, called him "dad" he would hug her and feel his life was not so bad after all. He missed her more than she he when they sent her off to school as a day- boarder. Every morning he would prepare her little lunch-basket, hiding all sorts of treats, which her mother pretended not to see, under her primers. He would see her there and pick her up again at the end of the day.
On his way back from Rotterdam, he was not without some apprehension as to how the imposing Adelaide, decidedly stingy, would welcome little Jan, now their dependant. A last hesitation was slowing his steps across the square, when Saskia, serving a doll's dinner-party on an outdoor table on the terrace, spying them out, left her games, jumped up to hang on Jan's neck, whom she then breathlessly pushed towards the counter, her hands clapping, crying out loudly: "Oh! mommy, daddy's brought a little brother."
The mother did not contradict her, smiled at the lad, and Adrian always reckoned that it was thanks to Saskia's intervention that his wife had not pouted for more than a minute.
The two children grew up together.
The part of the bench along the great array of windows was their little nook, usually empty, for the customers generally lined up near the entrance. They play acted a wedding, being husband and wife. They imitated their mother and father: Jan set the table, did the cooking, the groceries, the big jobs; Saskia sat and made tick marks on a chalkboard with the gravity of her mother tabulating accounts on the counter, losing patience with his slow progress, accusing him of being good-for-nothing, then, seeing him heavy-hearted and on the brink of tears, she would quickly give up her shrewish role, call him silly for crying over nothing, sit him in her place, fix the awkwardness brought on by her scolding, and climbed up on her knees onto the bench to hug him and force-feed him the better part of their play meal. His cheeks bloated, he hesitated between hugs and cookies, eventually passively accepting both. However, being timid and no glutton, he preferred the kisses, not daring to return to the candies.
One day, Adelaide told her daughter that it was not appropriate always be to hugging little boys. Jan moved off to the other end of the caf‚ to sulk, and Saskia, surprised, asked which boy; Jan is not a little boy as he is her brother. The mother did not answer, but that night in her room she asked her husband point-blank what kind of future he intended to provide for Jan. Was he addressing the situation, had he even considered the question? At fourteen he was no longer a child. Why continue sending him to school? Given that he is penniless would it not be better for him to learn a trade, a useful job which would allow him to be self-sufficient later? She recounted the earlier events. Without reading into these games more than was reasonable, she wished them to stop. Any minute now these children will learn that they are in no way related, their friendship can blossom into love, and their separation would then be far more painful than now.
So much foresight dumbfounded the good man.
"My poor little Jan!" he repeated, having indeed never thought of such things. These children are so happy together. Jan is still only fourteen. He congratulated himself at seeing him playing and laughing so nicely, eating and running so well. For a thought frequently torments him: it is that the others, his other brothers and sisters, died as a result of their closeted life, their wretched roach's life in a Rotterdam basement. Here, in the open air, with the care and food that were lacking there, he heartily wishes to save the last-born, the little Jan. Honey, the others, it was only in their twentieth year that the horrible sickness...and my little brother is still only. My God! how dreadful, at the least cough...
He was almost sobbing. Adelaide, even-tempered, powerfully moved, comforted him, multiplied her words of support in her good-times voice. He is not thinking. He cannot see clearly! He has daguerreotype of the poor brothers and sisters of which he speaks. Well, all are good looking, drawing it from their father --- Philip Maas their father --- dead of a weak chest. Adrian, meanwhile, has survived and his young brother, Jan, will live because they take from their mother, still alive, if off her head. You need only compare, look at yourself, then look at Jan. Look, look, my big puppy-dog, do you not both share the same nose, mother Maas' nose? See for yourself.
Adrian checked. A teardrop was hanging from the inner crease of his left eye. In squishing it to dry it under the pad of his thumb, he felt his nose, verified his wife's assertion, and went into the room next door, where Jan slept and from whence he thought he had heard a groan. Yes, the sleeping child also clearly showed, his face sunken in the white of the pillowcase, their mother's nose, long, round and pendulous at the tip, the colour of unripe prunes.
Jan was not sleeping, had listened and had indeed moaned plaintively. He kept quiet, pretended to be sleeping when Adrian came in, but alone again in the darkness, he opened his eyes and burrowed under his covers to cry at his leisure. So, he had been mistakened until now, Saskia was not his sister. The lie exposed tore him apart. They would send him away. He recalled the need, expressed by Adelaide, for a quick separation, and what was no less heart-wrenching, what she had said about his resembling his brother. He feared being ugly, of making Saskia laugh at him. Remembering, finally, the remainder of the conversation, he understood, without trying to figure out why, that his nose, which he already imagined flushed red in response to Saskia's malice, was, on the other hand a kind of guarantee of good health. He fell back to sleep, bewildered and not knowing whether to rejoice or lament.
Keeping all he had heard that night to himself, Jan unknowingly took on the habit of scratching his nostrils. The frequency of this gesture surprised Saskia, who teasingly asked why he always looked like a preening cat. He shut himself up in silence, kept to the shadows, intimidated by the least glance his way, imagining that which he most feared was occurring: that his nose was expanding and reddening by the minute. From then on he bore the humble smile and resigned sadness that were to be his forever.
They apprenticed him to a gardener. At first he would spend his evenings at home with his family, but during the winter he would often stay in a room at his employer's, a small bachelor- pad, simple and clean, at the back of the garden atop a storage- shed for the greenhouses. As the heater, the upkeep of which was his responsibility, was located in this shed, he enjoyed, on the floor above, a temperature that allowed him to spend a portion of his nights engaged in one of his favourite pursuits: the books which, little by little, filled the shelves he had built around his room. His master limited himself to jokingly chiding him when he had to call on him several times after a long night. Jan provided him, in a seemingly carefree manner, with the welcome results of a number of horticultural techniques forgotten and rediscovered in old books. The good man, guileless and honest, soon let him sleep, allowing him to work how and when he wished, telling all, with a wink of his eye, that his apprentice would go far, would bring back --- who knows? --- the Haarlem of legend, where the bulb of certain tulips sold for several thousand florins.
Saskia, having become a beautiful young woman, blond, pink-complexioned, her bosom giving, like a summer's peach, a longing for a bite, happy with the excellent reputation garnered by the one she continued to call her brother, would greet him with a bright smile, reproaching him for his infrequent visits. He was smart enough yet, he still buried himself in those terrible books. If only that would shrink my nose, Jan would answer, smiling. She told him off for bearing a grudge so long, thinking that he was referring to some childish teasing from long ago, and she insisted, to punish him, that he take her for an outing every Sunday.
When one day, at the noon hour, sitting pensive behind the cash where she was taking her mother's place, she had, after her customary greeting to him, more quickly than usual returned to her embroidery and thoughts, he had laughingly wagered with her that he could guess what she was thinking about. What an idea! She was thinking...no she was not thinking of anything, really. Bending over he whispered a name in her ear, that of Martin Heltzius, the son of a textile manufacturer, and, seeing her blush and her bosom heaving, he tenderly apologized. A few days before, Heltzius junior, for whom Jan had fagged when they were together in school, accosted him, something he never did, and feigning a cheerfulness that the jiggling of his chubby body belied, had him come to his home, offered him tea and cigars, took him to soak up the sun along the shores of the Spaarne, arm in arm as if they were inseparable. Jan, wishing to calm his fears, told him to relax, that he understood the friendly interest he bore towards his dear sister Saskia, and would happily pass on a message. Martin jumped up and hugged him around the neck in the middle of the street. He was a good boy, one of wealthiest born of the Haarlem merchant-class. Jan became the two lovers' confidant, not, however, without having assured himself, with a tactful honesty, that her mother would approve of such a marriage for Saskia.
In the middle of a flowerbed, having perused the newspaper he had just received, he returned his attention to unpotting some hyacinths, when his master, unfolding the newspaper he had tossed on a bench, asked him what number had come up in the Amsterdam Orphans' lottery. Jan had not looked. He had some tickets, but had given them to Saskia as a present. The florist insisted this was not the case, that Saskia had only accepted half the tickets, if he would keep the other half. He eventually remembered that he must indeed have, somewhere up there in the drawer of his table, among some seed packets, five extra tickets. Once he was done, he would try to remember to go and have a look.
The old fellow, less patient, wants to see right away, climbs the stairs, turns over the drawer, full of a jumble of things, moves over into the light of the open window, tickets in one hand, newspaper in the other, reads, tries to call the one he loves like a son, but can only frantically wave the ticket, held out at arms' length, choking, collapsing in joy against the casement-window. Jan rushes up to help him, compares the ticket with the newspaper, sees that to avoid any error they reprint the winning number several times throughout the paper, in letters and in numbers, and says calmly that he is lucky, for now he can buy Saskia the long-chain pocket watch she has so long wished for.
"At least go and tell your parents."
"Not the way I am, no sir"
Then, his hands black with potting soil, his sleeves pulled up, without a tie, in gardeners' boots and apron, he slowly proceeded to wash up.
Before he was even finished, his boss, who could wait to bring the story to the Brinckleymann Caf‚, or to disseminate it on the way, brought back a good part of the city with him, Adelaide and her husband in the lead. The crowd was arriving from everywhere, and two young French painters seeing all these people usually so calm, waving about wildly as they ran towards the same garden, admonished a group of Englishmen to observe the punctuality of a behaviour where all had simultaneously been taken with a bout of colic. The clapping had died down and the staircase was cracking under the press of those wishing to congratulate him. Among all those there, including the silent and intimidated winner and his crazed employer, dancing with joy, the happiest was Adrian, who wrapping his little brother up in his arms, could only speak in monosyllables. The floor of the little room was at risk of collapsing. Those who could, got in where they could. Many curiosity-seekers were still coming in, to see the newspaper in which it was printed, to see the ticket, and especially to see Jan, the winner of the jackpot, who when poor had only had friends, and now shook the many hands extended towards him and mumbled some thank-yous, overcome in the end, not by his sudden fortune, but by the emotions of others. Upon the request of those below, he had to present himself in the window frame in the image of a conqueror. The bravos rang out twice as loud in a last burst. Jan, returning to his elder brother, held out his hand to him.
"Well you know, brother, it's halfsies."
"What?"
"You won't refuse me. Accept half..."
"No, it's yours, and yours alone. Not a guilder for me or my wife. We don't need anything. You, you're young."
Adelaide had pinched her husband on the elbow, but not early enough to interrupt his answer. Besides, Adrian was delighted at his own quickness, for he knew and understood that to avoid the domestic scene he now foresaw, he would now have hesitated to appear disinterestedness, however sincere it might be. He further added, in the faint hope of softening his irascible wife:
"My word, little brother, you'll be able to buy the little Saskia a lovely present."
"Ah now, you blabbermouth, we can't hear anyone but you," said Adelaide with the ghost of a smile, "Mr. Jan knows better than you what he should do."
She curtsied, then embraced and invited Jan, now Mr. Jan, my dear Mr. Jan, and went home repeating: "'Til this evening, 'til this evening," at the bottom of the stairs. Adrian followed her. Jan, delivered, went back to his cleaning up. Then, dressed, with several hours to kill, he chose a book and decided to go for a walk. The remarks, the glances, the exclamations, the questions with which each passerby assailed him, his story already spread everywhere, not to mention a group of children who stuck to him like glue, forced him towards an alley into which he entered, in order to take a shortcut. Gossips to the left and to the right, assembled and drawing close to look him over and complement him, formed two rows of ample bosoms between whose happy jiggling he had to proceed slowly and prudently, like a river-pilot entering one of those difficult canals, from which he knows he will never emerge if he unfortunately comes under the sway of the canal-bank eddies. This pass traversed, he escaped to the Brinckeylmann Caf‚. 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 areas, 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 congratulating 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 she. Her daughter suspected nothing as she had been visiting a school friend since breakfast. He is to tell her himself, upon her imminent return, of his newfound wealth, and she, her mother, will devote herself within the next few days to prepare her.
"Never!"
Jan came to attention. He thinks the girl does not love him. She grumbled that she very much like this to occur, but a single motion on his part quelled her angry outburst. He added: she loves me as a brother, not as one should love a fianc‚. Besides, it is immediately, as soon as she returns, that, without hiding anything from her, without prior coaching, her mother will ask her. Lord! as much as he adores her, and though this is the first and probably the last time that he will admit it, it is not for his own sake that he insists on this procedure. No indeed, it is for her, the dear child, who thus surprised will allow her innermost feelings to be apparent. We will see, will we not? At the very idea that he might have dreamed of her as his wife will bring her to tears; or rather, no, he swears to himself, she will burst out laughing.
Poorly concealing his uneasiness, Adelaide signalled 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, thirty thousand florins! Now she will go and take flowers from his lovely gardens. She no longer dared do so, 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 are 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 than Jan, Mr. Jan, did her the honour of asking for her hand in marriage. She should answer truthfully, frankly.
"My hand? What for? Ah!"
And suddenly, with great candour --- yes, truly! with great candour --- she burst into unquenchable laughter. She, at her age, to be taken in by such a silly story! And my 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 I who no longer allowed myself 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, thirty thousand 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 had put aside for her, at the great jeweller's on Bartel Joris St., the watch she had long admired, and 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 the humble and pure altar of his heart. Raising his head, he returned to the city.
The day he was handed, upon simply presenting his winning ticket at the lottery offices, thirty thousand florins, more than 60,000 F, Jan, accompanied and advised by his brother, deposited them with one of his bankers in Amsterdam, where honour 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 them. Fate brought them 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. Chapter III
Having lived in Saskia's old room that faced onto the square, right in from 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 groups the portraits of nineteen 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 Caf‚ Brinckeylmann, 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 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 Spaarme 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 neighbourhood, 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 absent- mindedly 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 exist 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 generalisations, 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 are to the goal, they press 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, does not bother them, for its discovery exalts the seeker and provides him with the ecstasy of certainty, which once tasted, render him insensible to all other pleasures. Their imagination, neither powerful nor expansive is instead smoky, scattered, foggy. Capable only of dreaming, yet not poets, they cannot supply their own materials, but must find them in an arithmetic text, never seeing in science, but what is not there. Naysayers or believers, the seekers of the absolute are recruited among them. They require vast quantities of money and conceit for them to be dangerous, and their attributes being generally contrary to their temperament, the majority, like Jan, remain harmless creatures, innocuous reformers of humanity and healers of its woes: poverty, war, prostitution, vivisection. Their books deal with everything, and besides run the gamut from the sun to the moon, supporting scripture upon Mesmer's teachings, and true geniuses upon such innocents as themselves. While in medi‘val times they had their chance to write, on occasion some modern scholar will dig up one of these "Summas," and not wishing to admit to the pointlessness of having exhumed it, they will 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 can be predicted, mothers and doctors assert, from the babbles of a child or from hallucinatory ramblings.
Jan had named his book: H‘mo, drawn from the Greek word "blood." H‘mo was the name with which he baptised 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 H‘mo. 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 is 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 is thus God incarnate in all things through his breath; the universe is the Spirit and the Spirit is God; whence arises that mystery which greater number of religions admit to, from the Hindu Trimouty 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 is in everything, which is 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 is cause and effect, matter and energy, body and action, creation and creator, universe and God, is 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 is a gathering of stars, a nebula link to a central sun: the soul. The soul, as everything else in the universe is an electrically charged fluid. Adam and Eve's sin was to have usurped God's role in mixing their fluids; they created, but in by lessening themselves. Every man is the result of a such a reduction in two prior beings, those which have created him, and this loss constitutes original sin. Man and woman, brought together, burn in a supreme collision, sparking love at the sacred moment when the melted portion of their two fluids breaks away as a soul of its own. This man and this woman, if they love each other without reproducing themselves, thus lose part of their electricity, diminishing God by the entire quantity of divinity that they have not passed on to a child. It is the crime perpetrated by Onan and recommended by Malthus, the crime of nations that shall 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 are set, the world explained, man as he is, understood. The true Hæmo, 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 neighbours 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 Adeliade'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.
While he did not find what he wanted, for the naturalist only undertook custom work --- he discovered something better. The famous wild animal fair was in town. He went wandering through. Around the auction block, the avenues were lined with the sheds, tents and caravans of the menagerie owners, come to renew or complete their personnel, before winding their way through Europe. All the curses of Babel, dominated by the "goddamns" of the great British circuses, coalesced into a single argument startlingly accompanied by all of the creatures' voices, from the ill-tempered gibberish of the parrots to the roars of the wild beasts. The ebony gavel's short sharp strikes seemed to fracture and split apart the enormous mass of noise into thousands of smaller echoes, whose last vibrations fell into silence. A huge African elephant, brought out unfettered, shifted heavily a back resembling granite rounded and scored by diluvial pebbles, its motionless eyes seemingly maintaining over the crowd it dwarfed, the soft pensive gaze of a patriarch who has seen the worst and overcome it. At the door of the Zoological Gardens, where the parade of buyers and their purchases did not end, was the exit, far from Ararat, of a new Noah's Ark. Jan after mature consideration brought back a cockatoo and some monkeys: living forms of nature, no longer the dead remains which narrow minds of no synthetic capacity continue to manipulate.
The cockatoo belongs to the small Philippine species, with a white body, wings and tail, and a red crest. Attaching him to a bronze perch by way of a silvery chain around his leg, Jan did not bother with him, except to maintain a supply of seeds and water. His studious contemplations were immediately taken up by the monkeys.
He had four of them, in three cages: one langur, one Alouatta howler-monkey, and two marmosets. Lining them up on a trestle between the office window and his desk, he would only take his eyes off them to flip through stories about them in travelogues, where nothing would surprise him, his imagination far outstripping the most bizarre descriptions. The squirrel-like marmosets, agile and restless, perched on the crossbars at the top of the cage, their tail, longer than their body, twisted around their neck like a woman's boa, were of little interest to him, even often annoyed him with their high-pitched squalling when they argued over a sowbug or a spider, But the langur, old and morose, crouching with his feet in his hands, his black, hooded face and stiff dirty-white beard lowered, closed his eyes as if remembering the splendour of the Brahman temples where he had leapt about free and venerated. His dreaming took him to the land of the huge Buddhas, of the sun splitting the bark of the guava trees, beneath which the fakirs let the nails of their clenched fists grow through their flesh for fifty years. The Alouatta, while rather sick, huddled in a corner like the langur, silent, almost inert, the goitrous sac of his laryngeal pouch hanging loosely, thought he heard the frightening cries with which these monkeys nightly terrify the American forests.
Reading those works of popular science where good folk tire themselves out debunking ideas which scientists have never themselves had, he threw himself into tearing down the latter and coming to the rescue of the former, easily addressing, here as elsewhere, the toughest questions. He, who placed oysters with fish and eels with snakes, would then, with an ineffable degree of ignorance, make categorical statements regarding the field of heredity and the hypotheses of the fixity of species and evolution. Thus, would he say, do alleged scholars place monkeys amongst their ancestors? This vile creature, which spends its days delousing itself in front of me would be among my ancestors! Bah! to the answer so often cited from the French naturalist Edouard ClaparŠde, who assured a bishop that he would rather be an improved monkey than a degenerate Adam. Such opinions struck Jan as insulting, and he mulled over them continuously.
Worse off yet, one night, as he was just about to blow out the light, he discovered a chapter in a zoology text that described the great cynocephalic apes as having a sexual interest in Black women. He was haunted with nightmares. In the middle of the night he woke, terrified, feeling --- feeling in an indubitable manner --- the bastard born of such an unholy alliance tugging on his hair, puckering up to kiss him like a human would, while strangling him with a triple wrapping of its long prehensile tail. Wishing to wipe a sweat born of fear from his brow, he met with a furry hand and almost fainted. It was one of the marmosets, which had managed to spread apart the arched wires of their aviary-like cage. They had taken refuge in the warmest part of the room, Jan finding them curled up under the corners of his pillow. He let them stay, petted them, laughed at his fears, but nonetheless dared not go back to sleep, but rather began to smoke.
Saskia's son, a great big child, now five months old, was out to nurse some leagues away, near a small fishing village served, during the bathing season which was now just beginning, by a number of train lines from the city. He decided to go and give it a hug, and the better to stretch his legs and refresh his mind, he left on foot in the wee hours of the morning.
The beach rising in a series of imperceptible undulations formed at its top a first hog-backed dune followed by a much steeper one. Built against the second, a score of homes made up the hamlet. Built all askew , miserable, sinking, cracked, their ends almost spanning the narrow vale, their doors consequently only on the sides, these homes seemed to have slid down from the top of the slopes, settled there, resigned to their fate, and already half buried beneath the sands that surrounded them. There are a few gardens plots sheltered between a home and the black limbs of a dried up Tamarix hedge, where onions and lettuce grow thinly and do not thrive, even with constant watering. Even the most rustic of plants cannot take root in this shifting aridity. When the great winds powder the flat roofs, were it not for the thin wisps of smoke that, in the rapidly quelled air quickly resettling into a heavy inert layer within the funnel-like vale, rise straight up, as if a motionless column, to swell, waver and dissipate at the elevation where the breezes blow, one might think each house to be a gigantic mole- hill rising from the ground. Chapter IV
The men, all fishermen, spend their days outside this hole, on the sea, where their hard, rough work stretches their lungs. The children, if they manage to get out of the cradle, climb on all fours to the crest of the slope, then they too run down the seaward side, in the salubrious air that allows their growth. But the women and the elderly, remaining indoors, their eyesight eroded by the glittering reflection of the sun on the white sand, drag themselves about with withered limbs, worn out with an‘mia, their chests shaken by endless bouts of coughing, the sand insinuating itself into the narrowest ramifications of their bronchi and choking them, as it does those of sandstone miners, whose watches, notwithstanding boxes double-stuffed with cotton and suet, constantly stop.
The families succeed one another in lesser and lesser numbers, though the mothers spew babies from their flaccid bellies like doe-rabbits their litters, and that no adults ever permanently leave this miserable hovel, all permeated by a strange love of the land which depresses, makes them languish and even die under more favourable climates. In this they resemble the Inuit taken from the cold, the hunger and the stark bareness of the Pole, or a colony of madrepores taken from the reef it was born on. The good season is horribly stifling, without a breath of fresh air; the winter one long night under a low cloud ceiling. The only resource, the sea, is close, but miserly with its bounty, always difficult, too frequently in a fury. Calmly it beats against the dune, at ebb-tide like a great howling pack, at high-tide the barkers smelling carnage and throwing themselves in angry but futile assaults; during storms, men fear the creatures' victory, the dune at risk of collapsing, a great rumble rolling over their heads, combined with the chaos of the skies from which the great off-shore birds, lost and injured, drop.
A few hundred metres away, visible from the vale's wasteland, whose dismal aspect it increases by its startling contrast, a green paradise, enclosed in flagstone walls and a quickset hedge spreads across a hillside which is nothing more than the end of the abundant pastures of the mainland. The trees are, under the influence of the sea-winds, gnarled on the crest and twisted and bare towards the flats, becoming, as they penetrate further and further into the vale, smoother and thinner, their foliage in softly rustling tufts. Long ago, the homes arranged there formed a leper-colony; nowadays vegetable growers live there in the quiet routine of a simple and profitable existence. They have cattle, pigs, bees, vegetables, fruit, and the rabbits expand their warrens and multiply in this nacient dune whose soil has become resistant, yet easy to till.
They have, among other things, managed to transform the bottom of the valley, where there converges as in a concave mirror the least ray of sunlight, into a true natural greenhouse, and the hiker on the high trails, leaning over the gulf carpeted in vegetation like an oversized bowl, is intoxicated by all his senses with warm breaths, delicately blending colours, and suave aromas.
It goes without saying that as good neighbours the fishermen and farmers are close enemies. The adults content, in their rare meetings to glare suspiciously and mutter curses under their breath; the children, more up front, disdain the appearance of a false peace. On the shore, their games are separate; frequent fights tear the clean clothes of little gardeners, finish tattering those of the little cabin-boys, flattens the noses and blacken the eyes of both. Lucky are they when the parents, drawn by their cries or the tales of the beaten, do not take things into their own hands for one side or the other, and finish the fight between themselves, with more serious cuffs.
Enmity had long reigned, but a serious incident broke the camel's back. The women took in nursing infants, the farmers to increase their prosperity, the fishermen from below to lessen their misery. The former asked for more pay and never bargained; the lovely location of their bright little homes, and their placid and gay disposition providing them a good reputation. Their work at hand, near the hedges, under the shade of the trees, they helped their spouses, wandered about the vegetable beds in the garden, without ceasing from keeping an eye on the sleepers in the cradles, so as to be able to rush over at the slightest call from the charming and avid lips. The caring, patience and genuine mothering of one, saved, kept alive a rachitic premature birth, not deemed viable by the obstetrician. Its body wrinkled and with the appearance of being macerated, looking, amidst the lacy frills, like a museum fotus specimen drawn from its vat of alcohol, had become the wildest little demon, laughing, rolling and splashing about in the puddles along the shoreline. The father, a rich textile-manufacturer, was ecstatic. No ingrate, he showered the good woman with gifts which, should she have wanted to, would have allowed her to wait out her old age in well deserved retirement. Furthermore, he took steps to see that she receive a large sized gold medal from the Haarlem Medical Board.
The honour of this deserved reward was reflected on her companions, the tenderest upper class woman of the city giving birth to a poor weak little creature, preferred, notwithstanding their distance away, to have it raised by the farmers' wives, than by the best wet-nurse she might have had at home. They were hotly contested, hired eight months in advance. It became fashionable to put new-borns in their hands, even the healthiest of them. Stout-hearted, they knew, while remaining worthy of the fad, how to profit by it; always suckling they demanded after each weaning, more love from their husbands, and more money from their customers.
Their competitors, the fisherman's wives, vexed at not being able to present such credentials, thought of taking on more than one at once. They kept the prices where they were, but took on two infants; some even tried to have three at once. Of course, they were not able to keep them satisfied, and also bottle fed them. It is quicker to fill than a woman's breast and the milk is just as good they would affirm; it is better, they should have said, should they have wished to talk of that which the poor little creatures left with them were forced to draw, drop by drop, from their withered breasts. Soon their trade became rather shady. Factory workers, serving wenches at country fairs, homeless itinerants now stuffed themselves with men, fearless of any consequences, ran off to rendez-vous without fear of what had at one time held them back a little, coming back with four ears rather than two. They quietly gave birth , brought their bastards to the fisherman's wives, paid three months in advance at a set price, and need not add a word to be relieved of any future worries. Within the first fortnight the child was tossed in a corner, given a bottle never rinsed out and almost always with air at the nipple. Retting and stinking in its diaper, it soon looked upon this world with distrust, seemingly knowing that the best thing to do was leave it, and simply died. The courts, with their habit of sticking their noses where there is a bad smell, soon managed to nose out these more than once reported charnel-houses of the innocents. The investigation was simple, the evidence was abundant. The most capable of these angel-makers was imprisoned, and all were condemned to end their activities.
Their ancient jealousy toward the farmer's wives grew even more inflamed. They refused the free vegetables which these women, unselfish as are common folk with their prosperity offered them quite frequently. This help admittedly consisted of cabbage stumps, scraps of food, and useless morsels, for the farmers' wives combines frugality with charity.
It was then that the sickness which declared itself among the children changed the jealousy to hatred. The farmers thought that their children had contracted it from the fishermen's children, dirty, atrophied by a slow hunger; the sickness from below, they called it. The sickness from above, clamoured the fishermen's wives, who, on this occasion were right.
The affliction, very insidious, began with a light spotting on the chest and especially on the arms. Pink, only skin deep, hardly visible prior to rubbing, the one washing the first infant stricken accused herself of having made them appear washing down the child too vigorously and using rough towels. They are so tender, these little lettuce-hearts, she wrote the mother, telling her of a simple effervescence of the blood caused no doubt by the summer heat.
The mother, an actress from Amsterdam playing at the Kuursal in Ostende for the holidays, received the letter at the very moment she was locking up her suitcases. Even though she had left quickly, she stopped off to visit her son, surprised by the redness which would disappear only to reappear under the softest sponge. She recommended calling the doctor if things got worse, and made her way back to the railroad, the call of her blood relieved by the five minutes she had devoted to family matters. Until the end of the season she gave herself entirely to her art. An impassioned fan taking her away to Italy, she contented herself with sending off a six-month's advance, and warning them that she would come by as soon as she returned, probably the next spring.
At the same time she found aphthae in the child's mouth, she found others on her breasts. She believed them to be fissures as she had once had before, and neither she nor the child seemingly suffering from them, she attached no importance to them. One morning when she was working some distance away, a neighbour, to quieten down the wakeful and crying little one, suckled it in her place, a common courtesy they had among themselves. The neighbour's areola also developed the same cracking, but she was not overly concerned about it. Many children thus transmitted these sores to one another , which moved from the lips, spread out, became raw, pallid, coppery.
To all, these were milk-crusts, common little sores which they greased with the forth from stews, their universal recipe. They got used to it, and only began to worry when some of the youngest, no longer able to suckle, began to waste away.
No one had yet notified the doctors. As the first to call them was liable for their travelling fee, everyone else would profit from the presence of one of them to only pay for a simple consultation. But an abundance of anonymous denunciations reached the district intendant, in which neighbours mutually accused each other of have brought scabies or tinea to the community. The district intendant referred the matter, according to the chain of command to the provincial governor. The provincial governor, after mature reflection, promised to consult the hygiene committee which he presided over.
However, it was on the eve of the elections for the Upper House. A rather unpleasant candidate threatened to win, which would have represented a horrible failure for the minister in power and his minions. The governor in particular saw his chances for advancement evaporating; so, ignoring everything else, he did his best to direct the spontaneity of the vote towards his best interests, providing the voters with good counsel from behind the scenes, in such a manner as not to provoke to their doltish suspicions. He was successful. Leaving the opposition to fulminate, with a strong understanding of modern concepts of liberty, he recognized their right to criticize. He then laid siege to his superiors, striking while the iron was still hot, boasting of his victory, obtaining the posting he deserved. And, named to that post, he left, satisfied in leaving it in the hands of his successor and best friend, upon whom the opposition critics took their revenge by contesting his qualifications and affirming him to be far inferior to his predecessor. For the new governor, taking care of the many files which were in arrears, right from the start, would go a long way towards proving his abilities and diligence.
On holidays, but anxious to get to work, the new title holder moved into his government offices a week after his holidays were over. He received and made the necessary official visits, then those of convenience, changed the office's personnel, and sent useful circulars to his representatives, asking them what improvements might be made in terms of the respective services they provided, but especially to enjoin them not to reform or modify the wise traditions heretofore enforced. Then moving on to things of lesser interest, yet nonetheless requiring a solution, he convened the hygiene commission for the next fortnight.
The committee members quickly gathered, but in insufficient numbers to form a quorum. It was proposed to reconvene in a week or so. The elected secretary complained that he was marrying off his daughter on that date, and that one should at least put it off for a fortnight. This time, however, the question entered the stage of a definite inquiry: three members were designated to lead the inquiry, a pharmacist, a veterinarian, and an engineer second-class for bridges and canals. In a touching spirit of accord, rather rare it is true, the doctors had refused to take part in this investigatory commission, putting forward as a pretext that if they went there for free, as hygienists, to a village infected by an alleged epidemic, the inhabitants would bank on being able to call upon them in this manner all the time, so that in the end the administration would have encouraged the most foolish and blame- worthy of peasant traits, avarice. Is not the primary responsibility of the sick to heal themselves?
The delegates put in a lot of work. Vegetable farmers and fishermen, men and women were questioned, and the names, addresses and professions of the infants' parents, consigned to a statistical databank. Samples were taken from every well, every piece of salted meat and fish kept in the households. The cows, and as a secondary form of animal production the goats, were first examined themselves, then the grasses in which they were pastured, then their stables, which were measured and their cubic feet of volume determined. They were then each milked individually, and twenty vials of milk, sealed and labelled made up the rest of the samples. Plans were drawn up, the scope determined, the surveys required determined. A monument of science, of understanding and patience, a clear account shedding light on everything, of what had been done and what was left to do, of the results obtained and of those to obtain, these gentlemen's report received in the General Assembly the congratulations of the president, and unanimous praise from their colleagues.
Each one of them insisted, with noble modesty, on the items which remained to be elucidated. The pharmacist admitted that the chemical and microscopic analyses of already over a kilogram of lard and of fish which had been seized, had not revealed anything. The veterinarian, a rather wordy speaker, but a scrupulous experimenter, was feeding the suspect milk samples to small rabbits, and formally promised to persevere, though the young animals in the laboratory which he had set up, at his own expense, in the two halves of a sawn-through barrel, had not yet presented anything abnormal, except a quantity of fleas which he thought to be well above average, an observation he made in passing, reserving the right to later draw whatever conclusions from it suggest. The engineer second-class of bridges and canals presented estimates for the most urgent expenses, digs to be made to see whether drinking-water wells or fountains were receiving any infiltrations from septic systems.
Without hesitation, the council agreed upon opening a line of credit. It offered to provide its time and energies, without discussion and without asking anything for itself. Was it not desirable for the State not haggle over the necessary expenditures to continue the studies so well undertaken? But the honourable governor, who had taken on the responsibility of forwarding the request to whom it may concert, did not end up needing to do so. A wet-nurse, who might be excused of having maintained in this backwater town some of the common folk's doubts regarding the administration's vigilance, decided to bring in a doctor who would quickly rule out the wells, the animals or the latrines. There had been much exaggeration; all it was was syphilis, indeed a contagious disease, but well known and which the honourable governor, thankful of one less worry, did not have to take care of. The sessions of the hygiene committee suspended, the pharmacist left off his analyses of the drinking water for the more remunerative task making up hydrargyrum pills and salves, and the veterinarian, not without some regrets drowned the dogs, and returned the young rabbits to their mother's warren.
At this point, eight children were contaminated; two wives, one widow, and four men: the two husbands of the two wives, and the widow's two lovers.
The families of the uninfected infants were ordered to take them back. Alas! the little Heltzius has shown symptoms the day before. Jan, whose visit, after a night of insomnia, had occurred right after the doctor's had been the first to bring back the deplorable news. And Saskia took to crying from morning 'til night, frightened by all that was withheld from her, that one whispered in each others' ears, and especially by the prudent interdiction made to her against bringing her child home, or even to go and cuddle it.
The disease, now that it had been diagnosed and fought with all the means that could be put into practice, and that specific recommendations limited its ravages to the fifteen people already stricken, seemed to hurry to do the most damage possible to its victims. In some odd injustice, the actress' kid who had brought it to the community seemed to have gotten over it. It also remained benign in the well-fed and well tended children of the farmers, as well as Saskia's which had little more than an inflammation of the throat. It incubated slowly in the humans. But it progressed unchecked in the weak flesh of the fisherman's rough brats; their eyelids and nostrils were stuck together, pale, ichorous; their joints knotted; their cracked lips receding, pursed like the opening of a tightly tied draw- string bag, tearing when the pill was pushed between them; on the palms of their hands and the soles of their feet blisters grew, burst, and emptied of their fetid sanious fluid, joined their irregular edges in a large purplish sore.
Jan did not wait for Saskia to plead with him before going for further news. Sometimes with Martin Heltzius, but more frequently alone, he arrived on foot, handing out alms and pity. The fishermen who at first ran from him with the wariness of the poor, now invited him to relax for a moment. One afternoon, he took shelter in one woman's house during a violent summer storm. Black as ink, the low cloud cover seemed to have captured a strange light which did not emanating from any distinct sun, and which insinuated itself into the darkest recesses, attenuated and even erased the distinction between objects and their shadows, bathing everything in an uncertain, static, dead pallor. Most of the women, before going down to the beach, where they walked about anxiously, listening, watching the waves, trying to discover behind the great swell which the North Sea sent to crash at their feet, their men and elders' vessels, had collected the sick little ones in the same hovel as Jan was in. The convalescents slept; one, almost a corpse, showed no movement of the chest; the face of another whom the virus had bloated with confluent tumours, look as though the pustules of a toad were crawling over his face; and all were breathing and droning with such monotony as to render Jan sleepy, and make him dream of, on this doleful day, to the cruel limbo into which innocent new- borns expiate some heinous sin of their father's.
The sky having cleared up, the fisherman's wife whom he thanked, climbed with him the switch-backed trail he took over the dunes to take a breath of fresh air and view from a greater height the horizon over the sea, where she too had her man. Before the farmers, comparing their homes on the fertile lands to her hovel in a bare sand pit, she spat out spitefully:
"Oh! those monsters, to think they are the ones that poisoned us all. They accuse the infants of having brought to the beach the rot of the cities. Who knows? These soils which only they dare cultivate are indeed rich, but rich with corpses, those having formerly belonged in the leper colony. Traitors, they allowed the old boats which had fed their ancestors to fall into disrepair, for their cowardly mole's life sheltered from the storms. By stirring up the burial grounds and sowing their filthy wheat, have they not brought forth into the air the germs of pestilence which were buried there? Horrors! the white bread of their harvests, which they showed us from afar to taunt us, they ate leprosy and the pox with it."
Jan calmed her down with a little money and sent her on her way.
He found Saskia's son to have already regained, thanks to the efficacy of the treatment, his initial vivacity and good humour. The doctor allowed the wet nurse to bring him back permanently to Haarlem, and for the mother to smother him in kisses. But Jan always feared a relapse. He read medical texts, and as the ignorant do not realize that the authors are forced to describe all the cases, emphasizing the worse and enumerating them one after another, but that any given individual may only show the least dangerous symptoms at any given phase of the disease. All their lives, long or short, he saw those children which were thought to be cured, bu tainted by the foul virus, transmitting in turn this eternal menace to their children's bone marrow. Then he remembered his big brothers and sisters, inheriting their father's consumption, this even worse disease which had killed off ten of the twelve, in their youth, in the midst of happy, healthy times.
Stung with disgust by man's fate, a peculiar pity for the sadness and rancours of life, brought him to blame life itself. What insanity is it that wishes to bring to life creatures doomed to misery, he would say, while he preserved that of a pregnant beggar-woman extending her hand to him. The listeners at the Brinckeylmann Caf‚ would sit wide-eyed at his thoughts on the subject, took up their conversation again with a wing of the eye, and a tapping of fingers on their brows.
"Poor Mr. Jan! his walks along the seaside, this summer, had chased away his bizarre thoughts, but since he's been keeping himself cloistered again, here they are again, worse than ever."
He went back to keeping strictly to himself as he had in the past, of muttering to himself as he walked along with great strides. Even his best friends, Saskia and his brother Adrian, had no conviction in their whispered voices, when they defended him from accusations of being mad.. Then, one morning, at dawn, after another one of his many sleepless nights, he got up, leaned on his elbows at his open window, and gave in to his oft-envisaged yet vague desires.
The old French painter, who had smoked so many pipes under the same roof, came to mind without him knowing why. The exile had seen the seas outside Haarlem, upon the horizon which he, today, under the lingering fog little by little drawn away by the sun, saw the spongy soil of the polders spread out in vast pastures. Everything changes, everything passes, thought Jan, except those great men whose name, on occasion, survives even their works.
That morning, the neighbours and passers-by found him finally settled down. He walked calmly, singing to himself, hands in his pockets, no longer waving about madly like a free-whirling windmill. Truth was that after months of experiments by trial and error and further studies, his small obsession had led his visionary's mind, bubbling with ideas, to set a goal for him: he was going to work at regenerating the human race.
He distributed among his parents and friends his parrot and his monkeys, this giving up of the menagerie convincing many he had regained his sanity. His books, atlases, and tools of all sorts, packed in crates, were secretly taken to the railroad station. He told his brother he was taking a trip to Belgium, but quickly left Brussels for Paris, and Paris for Marseilles, from where he wrote to Adrian and Saskia, not to wait for him for another year, for, given that he was already so close to Algeria, he had decided to visit it. His collection of books, atlases and equipment complete, under the cover of a humble protestant missionary he took ship for the Pillars of Hercules, Guinea, Gabon and the unknown.
The cabin, very large and round, has a wall built of woven bamboo and bark, whose fissures are filled with a coating of clay, and for a roof a solid conical structure of narrow, thick planks five to six metres long, which support palm leaves sown together with straps made from lianas. The hinges and lock on the woven-reed-door are made with knots of similar lianas, and the whole place is painted with white-wash. Matting covers a portion of the floor; the fireplace is in the middle on some stones, and it's smoke rises freely through an opening left in the top of the roof. The table is made from slabs of slate nailed to three posts driven into the soil, and bears some coarse pottery and some books. Chests, stools, pitchers, mats, pineapple fibre nets, kindling and logs for the fire are strewn on the ground; animal pelts, fish, clusters of fruit, bananas, grapes, cobs of corn, and yaw tubers are drying on the wall, amongst a number of weapons hanging from water-buffalo horns; hung so as to dangle in the smoke are legs and shoulders of antelope and boar, turning under the radiating heat. Chapter V
The fire no longer burns, but the heated atmosphere and a heap of warm coals indicates that it had been burning for a long time. No light, other than the red coals and the reflections they made here and there on various objects: gun barrels, tool blades, and the curved surfaces of a glazed jar.
A man in tattered clothing, chest, legs and arms bare, crouched near the fire, elbows on knees, face held in his hands. From time to time he rose and on his tip-toes crossed over to a place where darkness accumulated, bent over a low, wide cot built of rushes, leaves, grass and pelts. At his approach, a moan came from the darkness; he arranges and carefully spreads the covers as if for someone sick, whispers a few soft, calming words and returns to his place, no longer hearing --- the moans having ended --- anything but the irregular, halting, rough and sometimes wheezy breathing of the poor creature, his mate, whom even in sleep seems a martyr.
He lights upon the revived fire a hemp wick soaking in a bowl of oil, draws a stool close to him and leans a large octavo volume on it. The light flickers in the column of air drawn up by the chimney's opening, but provides sufficient light. It is indeed Jan Maas, little changed; still Jan Maas the meek baby-faced dreamer from the land of tulips, except that he is clothed in rags, that his nose is more prominent between his thin tanned cheeks, and that his eyes, deep and sparkling, indicate a fever. And always, as was the case when he attended lectures, his mind wandered in spite of himself, while his finger flipped through the pages.
The book is a treatise on child birth. Among the medical illustrations which follow one another under his absent- minded thumb, one strikes his attention. Representing the methodology for undertaking one of the most difficult manipulations with the forceps, it appears abominable, and his gaze troubled by a brighter flicker of the fire, believes it to be spotted with blood. He blows out his light as if he hopes it would also put out his fear, pushed away the book, and slipped back into the shadows. "My God, let's hope this case is not the same. Let's wait...I've seen so many already!" he sighed, drawn by these words to review his past.
The long crossing, his arrival at the French mission in the Bay of Gabon, going up the river, the joys and fears, the wild beasts, savages worse than the beasts, fevers worse than the savages, numerous dangers besides that of being eaten by a tribe of Pahouins who had kept him fattened --- all these things, though they had lasted months and months, were of so little importance to Jan, that they floated about his mind in an indistinct fog. Adventures whose true yet brief description would have been enough to cover ten explorers with glory were forgotten before the motives he had to undertake them. A walking, talking mummy, he has walked amongst the most fearsome and spectacular of what central Africa has to offer, his eyes turned inward, hypnotised by the intensity of this internal contemplation. Nothing having taken hold of his mind outside those facts or thoughts directly linked to his goal, his memories began with first encounter with the great apes in their free state.
Having become the pampered guest of the Pahouins who were preparing to devour him, when he had administered large doses of quinine to their sick chief and saved him from a malignant fever, and himself by a singular cause and effect, from being impaled and roasted, he joined a few of their warriors in beating out antelopes. A very young girl, an intrepid huntress, followed them. Having remained behind, to admire her already chubby nakedness in a fountain --- attention to style, following findings which Jan thought to be new, existing in all latitudes --- they suddenly heard her cry out for help. A gorilla was kidnapping her, a huge male holding her by the waist in one of his arms. In his attempt to escape, half-erect, he compensated for the extra breadth of her hips, by using his second hand; with the top of his bent-over phalanges he supported himself against the soil. The young Pahouin's fianc‚, boldly running after the kidnapper, struck him from a distance with a poisoned arrow. Sensing himself injured, the d'ginna, such was the name the other hunters were shouting, stopped, softly put her down in the grass and began to rape her, disdainful of the menacing screamers which leapt after him, driven mad by an overbearing desire to satisfy his lust, before he died. To drag him from the body of his victim, they had had to finish him off with spears and clubs. Thrown onto his back, the herculean grasp of his arms had relaxed. His lips, in spite of having receded over his canines, seemed rather to flutter for a kiss than to tense for a bite, and his look, rather than the cruel expression which ought to have been imparted upon them by his bloody death, maintained a the fluid languor of ecstasy. The young Pahouin girl, with the annoyed gesture with which a European woman flounces her dress, slapped around her kidneys to erase the grass marks, and smiled. On the way back, under her breath, he told Jan that she had not been very afraid, the hairy men of the woods never hurt women; and Jan, still studying their manners, asked why then had she cried out for help. She answered that had she not, considered tainted for seven weeks, her marriage into the tribe would have had to been delayed.
He thanked God, for thus had he unravelled the tangled mess which his numerous predecessors had accumulated: differing observations, simple exaggerations or legends collected among the natives. He guessed that in the attending chaos the office-bound naturalists admit or reject certain facts, according to whether they find that they support current theories or not. He is struck by the weakness of other peoples' frequent accusations of the French being weak-minded; is it not instead among them, that so many scientists, when they present the results of their most conscientious studies, always fear offending religious sensibilities? Is it not among them that many, to avoid taking a position, join that school of dishonest cheats in which the positivists boast of their disdain for the big questions, and of ever coming to any hard and fast conclusions? Weak minds, he tells himself in an echo of sermons heard in the temple in his youth, cannot grasp that Creation, as one studies it in greater and greater detail, will manifestly reveal the Creator in his inherent justice and eternal beauty. He vows to himself not to retreat before any new truths, certain that they cannot but support his faith. It is for allowing him to so quickly elucidate the question of contact between native women and apes, that he thanks God.
He lives some two leagues from the Pahouin village, in the middle of a clearing deliberately chosen amidst the old- growth forest, the limits of which are unknown to him, except towards the village where it ended among the mangroves on the shores of the Como River.
His new friends had built his cabin in the shelter of a huge fig tree, standing there alone like some great king of the vegetation. They had cleared and planted a wide zone around it, and had offered to organize a great beating out of elephants and d'ginnas of whose terrible proximity they had warned him of, insisting rather that he abandon his project of living alone and continue to live among them. Bearing a sincere affection for him, even revering him, after the cure he had effected on Akayrawiro, their chief, as equal to the most skilled of shamans, these brave folk could not have conceived, given his refusal to eat them, that on the contrary, the proximity of the fierce apes led him to speed up the construction of his shelter. He accepted their services as carpenters and gardeners, but not as hunters, hoping to make them understand that it was not dead and not in order to tan their hides that he wanted gorillas and chimpanzees, but living, so he could educate them, help them to climb the last rung of the animal ladder, to finally raise them, not only to the level of the guileless and naive cannibals, but to his, evolutionary philosopher and fervent Lutheran.
A troop of young elephants destroyed his crops. One night when he was returning from nursing a sick man in the village, a panther lurked around him, without however attacking him. At noon, on a day of blazing sun, as, leaning against the inner wall of his cabin, he reads, he hears above him and outdoors a strange scraping, slow and heavy: a magnificent python, as large as a man's thigh in the middle, is climbing sideways up the slope of his cone-shaped roof, festooning it like a sculpture of barbaric splendour, the jewel-like scintillations of its scales barely muted by the deep shadows imposed by the fig tree. No longer being a novice tourist, Jan does as he has seen the blacks do in similar circumstances; the tail, on the edge of the roof, hangs; he grabs it with two hands, tears across the clearing pulling the snake, which thus dragged cannot coil itself, unwinding like a inert and monstrous blood-sausage, then smashes its head against a tree trunk by throwing it like a stone from a sling. To hill his larder he hunts kudus, slender antelopes with the gracefulness of a gazelle, and, with fewer regrets, the Phacochorus, frightening boars which resemble hairy hippopotami.
The rainy season arrives. The floods doubling the width of the rivers, the frequency and intensity of storms only allow for short outings and prevent any visits to the Pahouins. Tropical storms where the storm clouds crash to the ground in a wild cavalcade of leaps and sounds, and spread, even in the daytime, such a nocturnal opacity over the land, that neither the straight nor the crooked bolts of lightning can penetrate, and dissolve into huge livid flashes.
After one such storm, during which he, for forty- eight hours, had believed his uprooted home to be constantly spinning through the air, he heard plaintive human voices calling him from the edge of the forest. He goes and bursts out with happiness. Finally the gorillas have come, the long-expected and mysterious guests, of whom he had not seen a trace since the one he had seen trying to rape the native woman.
They are this time a couple, a large older male and a female appearing, with her lesser size, to be much younger. The moaning comes from her. In the fork of the tree where they are both sheltered, she has been caught by the stem a nearby tree, half-broken during the storm, but which had straightened up afterwards, pinning her wrist like a vice. The male is shaking her around the waist. Immediately, Jan, his gun thrown over his shoulder, climbs the lianas to reach their refuge. At first, the male is content to make, with one hand, the same gestures with which a man might warn away the importunate, then, seeing him continue to climb, lets go of his mate, growls, slips down onto the lower branch upon which Jan's foot is about to alight. While instinctively loading his rifle, the good Jan continues to talk to the other as if he knew Dutch, repeating that he wishes him no harm, but rather to help release his mate, and putting a tender intonation like that of an indulgent school teacher into his voice he appeases the infant's anger. Bloodshot eyes, bared teeth grinding, nostrils flared, the hair on its brow erect, the large square bulk of his pectorals rounding at every breath, the d'ginna continue to advance. Jan, to keep him at a distance, extended the rifle like a stick. In a fury it advanced, takes the barrel by the end, bites it, and, the shot going off by itself, he tumbles down, the back of his head blown off, from branch to branch, into the thick understory, with a unique quasi-human cry, whose imaginary echo, like the last gasp of a murdered man, would later, on several occasions, lead his adversary to wake up with a start.
However, the female by her uncoordinated and futile movements was exhausting herself. Her feet leaving the fork in the tree, she spun hanging freely by an arm like some ancient martyr. Jan even if he already blames himself for her death, even though he did not shoot deliberately, rids himself of his gun and approaches. She claws him in the face. He pets her, puts her back on her feet, lifts her to relieve the tension and ease the pain of her pinched muscles. All this he does with such precautions that she calms down, quiets down little by little, and her eyes follow him and seem to implore and encourage him, while, with a saw-toothed knife he widens the cracks in the tree limb with successive notches, so as not to further damage her wrist. Freed she holds on to him, wraps her good arm around his neck, and allows herself to fall to the ground, her pain such a rapid and capable tamer. Having barely reached the ground, she already cannot stand, and falls fully onto her side, her moans worsening. Jan believes her to be more severely injured than he first thought. He carefully feels her limbs, ascertaining that besides her right hand being crushed to a bloody pulp, she has a contusion on her left knee. He picks her up and takes her off like a mother would her infant.
Nothing disturbed his devotion or his patience. "How are you my little d'ginna?" he would ask her minute to minute, so baptising her individually with her generic name. D'ginna turned herself over on the bed, silent, sleepy from fatigue, refusing warm honey-flavoured herbal teas. She would like cold water, her looks and the fingers of her left hand extended toward the water jug indicating this on several occasions. He dare not give her any because of her fever. The knee was improving, the swelling going down under a simple clay compress, a treatment borrowed from the Pahouins, and she would support herself, walking without much of limp. In vain did he employ all the medical knowledge he had acquired during his voyages or in the books he constantly flipped through. The wound, in this miasmatic atmosphere, ill-suited to healing, took on more and more the aspect of bad wounds, the flesh as if bleached, the pus fotid, ragged tears, weeping and pale, ran deeply through the scattered, crusty boils. A cold turgidity, which kept the imprint of a finger, was spreading over the wrist and forearm. Jan was frightened having noticed the corpse-like odour of gangrene, which he had so often smelled among lightly injured natives who nonetheless died soon after, had decided to allow, according to the expression of an old surgeon he had known, the "boon of steel" to intervene. Until now he had hesitated. No help. One of his best knives, some boiled batting, a needle and thread were prepared; he restrained the patient in a veritable straight- jacket and amputated the arm above the elbow, in the healthy portion, where a series of tourniquets stopped the blood flow, allowing him to delay the ligature of the larger blood vessels. He need not have tied up the patient for she was so low that she barely reacted and fell, after the bandaging was complete, into a torpid sleep.
He watched over her, barely sparing himself quarter hours of sleep. The trauma-induced fever lifted, all fear of complications gone, he took off the bandage, and ascertained, to his great joy, the complete success of the operation. On the rounded stump, free of suppuration and of a magnificent purple, the folded back flaps of skin were knitting, and in the middle, the sawn off end of the humerus now only offering a bare surface to observation. The healing finished, he still continued to apply the dressing and batting to the injured area, a precaution born of tenderness and to continue to protect from any shock or abrupt change in temperature, the soft scar tissue, prone to soreness. Her appetite and strength were returning. Eating, moving about with the ill-considered precipitation of convalescents, who seemingly wish to make up for lost time, she gave herself stomach and muscular aches. He had to ration her food and playtime. She growls, even once bites his thumb, so hard he collapses in pain, stretched out on the ground. The remains of the day came in from outside through door that was ajar. She leapt towards it, sucked in noisily, then, as if dizzy from this breath of fresh air, she closed the door, came back inside on her three limbs, and stumbling on her still somewhat stiff knee and swinging her stump about, she lay down next to her saviour, put her arm across his shoulders and caressed him softly, with the motion he himself had so often cajoled her with, to calm the irritation of her fresh wounds and stop her from removing the dressings.
Awakened, he takes a few seconds to completely come to. D'ginna continues to rock him, with the monotonous and sleep- inducing hum of an unspoken canticle. She licks his hands. Not thinking, he scratches her head like one would with a young dog, he thanks her for the affection which, for the first time, she is showering him. Suddenly he sits up halfway, surprised by an unusual contact. The darkness is unfathomable. Blushing at sensing himself blushing, ashamed of his own shame, he had supposed the animals's caresses to be without motive. When these same caresses, now so precisely directed that, even chaste as he has been, he cannot but comprehend their intention, he runs outside, troubled and silent with disgust.
He quickly recovers in the coolness of the open air. Believing them once again to be the result of happenstance, or that he had a nightmare when he was passed out, he mechanically swallows a few mouthfuls of manioc and smoked meat, and prepares himself for a night of forgetfulness by stuffing a number of pipes with a Gabonese plant which is more intoxicating than tobacco, a sort of hashish-hemp whose smoke has the added property of repelling mosquitoes. D'ginna is not hungry either, and sleeps so calmly that he ends up being reassured. Obviously he was overcome with an unhealthy urge. Smiling at his alarm regarding his modesty, he goes to sleep somewhat overexcited, rolling from side to side before finding a comfortable position.
Were it empty the cabin would be no quieter.
Jan's bed consists simply of leaves and grasses swept over towards D'ginna's bed, richer by a pile of mats and dried pelts. Exhausted by the night's madness, he barely slept, when, upon the same caresses as before he felt the same excitement as before. It was no longer possible to have any doubt. He lit the lamp and dared not blow it out. D'ginna returning to her spot and leaning her shoulder against the wall of the hut, was resting as she had during her life in the wild, when she would sit with her back to the truck of a tree in the fork of a tall, strong limb. Her hands knotted under her knees, her eyes closed, she feigned sleep, but the movement of her lips thrust forward like a snout, and arranged in the familiar pout of grumpy children to whom one has refused something, belied this. Jan, walking to relieve his nervous excitement, saw her as he passed back and forth before her, batting her eyes at him in the same way the young serving girls in Haarlem, tried to goad him from his reticence, when upon festival nights he would saunter alone along the walkways of Kenau Park. Perhaps it was a trick of the light wavering under the winds of his comings and goings; for the tenth tune at least, he felt that insomnia and fatigue were abusing his senses, and he returned to his bed. D'ginna softly slipping in beside him brought him back to reality. Should he sneak off to the cold of the tall grasses? He knew too well the treacherous of such nights, when miasmas constantly emanating from the soil which accumulates, activates and incubates in centuries of organic matter, the most pernicious of viruses, slow but more pitiless killers than the wild beasts. He was staggering about, asleep on his feet. Taking refuge in his books, the usual cure for his pains and troubles, he came across the modern theories on the origins of man, theories whose complexities and apparent contradictions he had a great deal of difficulty in sorting out, his lack of a bold outlook never allowing him a sufficient understanding of the concepts of space and especially of time so important to such studies. Automatically he turned to examine the false calmness of D'ginna still leaning against the wall. Thus this creature was not his immediate ancestor, as so many frivolous minds would accuse the scientists of teaching, and which the latter appropriately concur in denying, but descended with him, like two branches of a same genetic tree, from an animal awkward in walking erect and without articulate speech. His imagination inflamed, Jan eliminated the immeasurable time passed and thought of this common ancestor, a four-legged giant, hairy and without speech, unknown and unseen since the Miocene. From one side were the great apes born, which must be those amongst the current anthropoids which would most resemble him; from the other, primitive man, still similar to him, but who would soon flake the flints of Thenay, and appropriating unto himself the sun, domesticating it for his short-term needs by discovering fire and keeping it alive in the shelter of caves. So D'ginna looked not so different from him; of an inferior but related race. His life among the Pahouins aided in him accepting this conclusion, as soon as it began to emerge as the germ of an idea in his brain. He dropped to his knees under the massive blow of a sudden idea. His arteries carried this excitement through him. Does he not bear the renown, the scientific glory of all his dreams, for which he has suffered so much? The possibility of sexual relations would it not prove an identity in nature? He got up, drew closer, and believing himself to be acting in the fullness of his free will, judging himself not to be giving int to the excitement of any vile desires, he took D'ginna, now reticent, and married her.
The next day, the experimenter's enthusiasm having waned, he believed his actions to be the result of a diabolical temptation, that he was now forever among the fallen, weeping in regret for his former candour, he ran off into the forest, avoiding the puddles of water where he could have mired himself. But the night, inciting him troubling memories worse than his remorse, he fought in vain. Insidious doubts assailed him, the monstrous sexual relationship was well consummated, and the poor Jan soon presented a rare case of a splitting of the will. In the day, he tended to the ordinary chores of a new Crusoe, more carefree than he has been in the past, remembering nothing, indifferent to the tattoo-like traces of D'ginna's howling embraces. As soon as dusk came, like poorly healed wounds of a rabid dog, which reopen and needle him to more ferocious battles, each of the former caresses seemed to spread, to become poisoned; and he would run to his mistress begging her for new ones, deeper and harsher.
He was only cured of this form of sleep-walking one morning while gardening, when he noticed his mate's pregnancy. Picking fleas from the folds of her groin, squatting in the sun, leaning back a bit, her belly in this position cast a rounded shadow so ridiculous that at first Jan refused to believe what was right before his eyes. Floored when he understood, the pact broken, the bewitchment dissipated, his memory now clear, he accepted, as a form of expiation, the reality of his adventure, and vowed he would confess to his crime with complete candour. I shall be dishonoured, he thought, but immortal; the good, ignorant, common folk will hound me from civilised countries so that my sight will not taint their women and girls, but in deference to the results that will bring them the experimental solution to the most difficult anthropological questions, the fanatics of this science, in their conscience, in their spoken teachings if not in their written works, would forgive me that which the vulgar would term my filthy bestiality.
Months went by.
The river back within its banks, the trails practicable, the Pahouins arrived to consult him regarding their sick, the number of which increased after each winter season. Still believing him capable of outperforming their shamans, and conquered besides by his goodwill, they spared him nothing, renewing his supplies of oil, honey, corn, fishing tackle, hunting snares for birds and other small game, and happy to finally see his dream of possessing a great ape fulfilled, they congratulate him in having found a pregnant female, knowing, they told him, that when they are in this state their male with defend them to their last breath. One of their javelins, with shark-like sawtooths, could not have slashed Jan's heart any worse than this complement. He hid his sudden sadness. Having accompanied them back to the banks of the Como and being alone, the thought that perhaps they were right, that D'ginna was probably already pregnant when he had killed her powerful mate, plunged him into such a cruel perplexity that he did not eat or sleep for several days.
For the simple calculation which would remove any doubt, the required elements were all missing. As eddies, chasms and cataracts conceal the direction of torrents, as admiring the marvels of the forest takes away any leisure one might have to pick out landmarks, the disgust, the regrets, the triumphs and delirium of kisses exchanged has prevented him from counting the days. He does not know when he settled in the clearing, when he met D'ginna, when their lovemaking began, at what date he noticed her pregnancy and the number of months since. Had he this information, the main element would still be missing, the gestation period of the African great apes. The best of his books, a well known medical dictionary translated into French, only indicates that they menstruate periodically, a capacity incorrectly assessed by naturalists as being limited only to human beings, and the suppression of which in the woman is a clear sign of impending motherhood. D'ginna never having shown such a flow was thus either pregnant before their intimate relations, or became so immediately after. And in this was Jan's despair, being unable, of these two mutually exclusive truths, definitely eliminate the first.
For what seemed minutes, centuries to Jan, D'ginna was bracing herself, howling out in her agonizing exertions, her mouth foaming over, her body twisted into a bow, held up from the bed by only the nape of the neck and the heels. She collapses. It was immediately clear that this was but a false respite for an animal machinery at the brink of collapse, husbanding its strength for another terrible fit, the foam between her lips continuing to escape, bloody, spuming, and localised contractions sweeping like knots across the muscle mass, leaving behind furrows of hairs erect and vibrant on the skin, as if they were on the vocal cords. Chapter VI
As he was leaning over her to whisper encouraging words, trying to avoid looking at her or touching her, as her fiery eyes would burn into him, and at the least contact she would throw him back with a near galvanic jolt, a cry, a thousand fold sharper than all the others, and which one might have thought to be the rending arising from the release of a soul from it bodily housing, penetrated Jan to his very bones. He had pulled her sideways, on the edge of the covers, and held her knees up and bent over her pelvis, a position he believed to be conducive to the widening of the birth canal. Sudden he felt his thighs soaked, the amniotic sac had broken. Amongst the shapeless, tepid, pale wastes which followed and wriggled at his feet, and from which wails emerged which made him mad with both joy and terror combined, Jan, abandoning the mother fallen quiet again, untangled, not without difficulty, the new born and undertook the complete removal of the placentary membranes and the ligature of the umbilical cord.
Had he there, in his arms, simply a young gorilla, or the feverishly awaited and yet unnamed first and immortal originator of a new race? A pure ape, or an ape-man? Anthropoid or anthropopithecus?
Having wiped it and covered it in old rags, specially prepared, he brought it outside, not wishing to undertake under the artificial light of his lamp the examination upon which would depend his defeat or triumph, his shame or his pride. Beneath the stars, glittering so brightly in a blue so deep that they seemed diamond encrusted water-lilies undergoing the barely perceptible rocking of an infinite sea, he pushed aside the swaddling clothes. A quick look was sufficient to confirm his glory. It was indeed a little human being, his child, his son. Kneeling and shaking, suddenly drunk with joy, his chest set back and his face beaming in exaltation, he raised his son in his two hands and held him out to each of the cardinal points, as if to have him adopted and blessed by all the sky bearing witness.
However, D'ginna woke with a long sigh of deliverance. He cleaned her bed, changed the wet, soiled grasses and pelts, rolled up in the opposite corner the refuse and dirty objects until they could be sorted, washed, kept or buried. She remained stretched out on her back; he put the little ne down beside her, and immediately saw him extend his mouth towards her breasts, take one and begin suckling on it, his cheeks bulging at each suction, his eyelids lowered like a taster entirely wrapped up in his cup, and its tiny hands, already useful, caressing the maternal bosom and pressing upon it to facilitate the flow of the savoury stream between his lips. Jan smiled, attentive to the safety in and precision of this admirable instinctive movement, and did not lay down beside the fire he wished to keep going all night, until his mate fell asleep again, exhausted but still hugging to her breast, with her single arm, the satiated infant, who nonetheless would not let go of her.
In order to stop her from going out or oven to get up, having read in an obstetrics book how much the good health of the delivered mother depended on her remaining in bed, he did not leave the cabin for several days. The provisions were abundant. Thankfully so, because the wet-nurse, without choice foods, would have been unable to satisfy the glutton whose ravenous hunger was a constant torment. He did profit by it, for he rapidly grew physically stronger, and was soon capable of hanging from his parents' necks.
One morning, holding him thus in one arm and giving the other to D'ginna, weak still, Jan took them to the Zondag- Zay, basin, a gigantic bowl at the base of an outcropping of granite, rising in terraces into a sort of natural pyramid resting against a hillside. After each flood, the retreating river would leave behind a pond which the springs of the adjacent slope would also supply. The water remains there, between two overflows, abundant and clear, its evaporation slowed by the powerful shadows of the overhanging outcrops. Given the day he had discovered it, Jan called this place, barely a kilometre from his cabin and unknown before him to the natives, Zondag-Zay, from the two Dutch words for "Sunday" and "lake."
Stepping up the pace they arrived at dawn.
Water striders skated over the lake, the circular ridges born beneath their delicate legs alone troubling, and this almost imperceptibly so, the stillness of the surface, whose cobalt hue, darker near the rocks, softened towards the edges into a soft blue. Not a reed, not a moss hung on the rocky walls. Not a sound. A ray of light slipping between the canopy of two trees extended an oval of light to the very depths, a dormer- window of golden daylight open in this huge mirror of blue. Having waded in at this location, while D'ginna was sitting on the bank resting, Jan detached the soft sleeping bundle still hanging from his neck, woke it with a kiss, held it under the armpits, and dipped it into the luminous water.
"I baptise you Hemo," he said.
And extending him to all four cardinal points of mariner's card, like the night of his birth, and shouting out each time: "Hemo! Hemo! Hemo! Hemo!" he offered him to the sun, which upon its first contact dried him and enveloped him in a transparent haze similar to the radiant halos with which the painters of the Adoration of the Magi surround the divine child's cradle. He added:
"Yes, as I decided, when I daren't hope for you in my secret dreams, you will be named Hemo, for the new blood which flows in your veins. Yes, baptised by this water, free from all other contact until now, go, Hemo, grow, and true saviour of our worn out races, be the founder of a regenerated humanity, purified of all original sin, I mean of all unhealthy traits, through its return to the primitive womb."
As a king in his swaddling-clothes is not cognisant of the future splendours of his destiny and prefers his bottle to the honours bestowed upon his by the Senate and ambassadors, Hemo wailed, extending his lips and limbs, made active by the coolness of the bath, towards his motionless mother. Jan, the ceremony finished was readying himself to join her, when he stopped, one foot in the air, frozen. A real voice, and not an echo, was repeating with a dreadful clamour: "Hemo! Hemo!" Jan leapt out of the Zondag-Zay, held the infant to his chest and put it before D'ginna alarmed at his sudden movement, but as indifferent to the vociferations as if she were unable to hear them.
Mandrills were filling in the upper tiers of the pyramid. Having his back to them, entirely wrapped up in his role as Saint John the Baptist in the Jordan, Jan had not seen them; frightened at first, he laughed at his fear and soon understood the calm maintained by D'ginna. From where she sat she had seen the arrival of the mandrills, and used to their jabbering, she was not surprised by it. They were indeed their usual cries, the howling of a bewildered crowd: "Oh! Oh! Oh!" they cried out, and which the first moments of surprise had poorly translated as Jan. Having come down little by little, they lined themselves up on the other side; the females entering the lake would dip the curled up feet of their infants, and raising them in their fisted hands howled to the four winds, accompanied by the males who sedately crouching on the shore waited for them.
At this disgraceful parody, Jan, in a fit of anger, lost the indulgence of disdain, put Hemo down on the grass, loaded his rifle which he kept across his shoulder, and fired in a rapid uncontrolled motion into the middle of them. One dead tumbled under the water; the troop, for whom it was child's play to leap across the great crevasses and to climb the irregular terraces, disappeared as if by magic onto the other flank of the rocky outcrops. Alone, a large stout one, no doubt the leader such troops have, pretended to be brave, approaching along the shore. D'ginna, of a species akin to his own, was, generally speaking, no great surprise to him. But before the Dutchman, upright on two legs, his face pink, the poor cynocephalus, looking positively timid, embarrassingly brought to bay, after, it is true, having assured himself that all his subjects, having all fled in a cowardly manner, would have nothing to jeer at. Now, annoyed at seeing Jan redder in the face from an urge to laugh than his former disgust, he wished to show that he too bore other colours than the hideous blue off his wrinkled cheeks, and turning his back, he went off slowly trumpeting in a deep baritone, and raising the stump of his rudimentary tail, so as to allow one to long admire, between the violet calluses of his flaming red rump, the bright crimson of his crotal sac.
Jan and D'ginna took other walks, but the Zondag-Zay remained their favourite.
In the afternoon, the nocturnal mists having dissipated, they travelled in the forest, undisturbed, the friendliness of the natives and especially this need, this great educator of Crusoes, which had taught Jan of the riches and dangers of the fauna and flora.
They were at ease among the forests of palm trees, their terminal limbs ending at such great heights, impenetrable to rains and to light, so that all other plants were choked out beneath and that the smooth trunks, propylaea opening upon the infinite, framed to all sides vistas of bare colonnades. They were crushed by the low ceiling of the colossal baobabs, whose branches, fallen back to earth, formed, under the most blinding of light, dark labyrinths seemingly dug out amidst the mysterious greenery. They were caressed by the swinging of the lianas in the undergrowth or about each tree trunk, with countless morning- glories, orchids, bignonias, vines, and passion-flowers springing forth, climbing, twisting, dishevelled and taking on every shape, every colour, every aroma. Here Jan would harvest large quantities of a type of mango whose seed crushed into a paste was as good as cacao; excellent oils which could be made to pour down from the least incision into a wide variety of trees; kola nuts which bind so tightly to the lingual papillae that they become insentive to unpleasant flavours and make one think brackish water is fresh; ginger, nutmeg, vanilla, cardamum seeds so aromatic that they were termed seeds of paradise, gamboge, elimi resin, rubber. He avoided the terrible ranks of the venemous plants, some misleading by the smiling hypocrisy of the pale nuances and suave aromas, but most on the contrary marked in such a manner as to warn the traveller ahead of time, with their succulent, hairless, verdigris-coloured stems, sweating death into ampullae, tumours pockmarking them like the back of a toad, with eczema and dartre eating away at them like chancres of some secret disease, and as well with their huge flowers, calices yawning scarlet maws with poorly excised fangs, adhering like the lips of a lurid pus-filled wound, swelling out into muzzles ready to spit out their venom, their phlegm a tainted mucus, their skin peeling off like that of lepers. A mere atom drowned among the triumph of rising sap, before virtually identical sister species of Apocynum, one secreting a delightful honey, the other a narcotic milky latex, beneath the eternal indifference of a sun which cooks to a tee poisons and balms, incubates and hatches crocodile eggs in the mud and those in the fifty bird nests suspended in the radiant sky, on the midrib of a single banana leaf, Jan understood the disheartening triteness of human endeavours before Nature personified, and tired, intoxicated, ashamed of working, he would mold himself a bed with grasses and would loll in it, curled up in ball, as if frightened of dissolving into the enormity of ambient life.
D'ginna, langorous after her childbirth, usually left him to co back into the cabin. Even when she accompanied him all the way, he continued to take care of Hemo alone, since the time when he had entrusted her with him to pick some grapes, and she had moved and forced him to search for an hour before finding them. Having climbed up into a clump of fig trees, baby at her breast, she had not responded to his repeated calls either by signal or by noise. When, attracted by the happy droneof the suckling infant, he had found her motionless and silent in the middle of the freshening dusk spread over them by the abundant silvery foliage, she had purposefully hidden herself with all the care of a hunted creature. Had she wished to escape? From the ill- tempered manner in which she received his harmless scolding once upon the ground, to her stealing longing looks into the far distance, he believed so. Overcome by a great sadness at this discovery, he vowed to keep an eye on her and never again leave her alone in charge of Hemo.
Inside, outside, on the matting, on the mosses, she seemed quiet, eyes half-closed, finding no fun in games, in the amusing, noisy boisterousness which with Hemo would regale the cabin and neighbouring area from morning 'til night. Those first babbling words which resonate like ineffable music in the heart of a mother, the first gesturing in begging to be given a toy which a mother senses intuitively, the first steps she encourages, backing up little by little, luring the child with the promises of refreshment at her breast and a warm bosom between her arms, all of these left D'ginna indifferent and in no way altered her sleepiness or her boredom. She only moved to scratch her own itches, and the little one was only deloused and washed by Jan, who was quite capable of all these tasks, father from head to toe, and even so much so that he was only that.
Haarlem's incorrigible dreamer, the fanatical theoritician of progressive evolution, the discoverer of Eden, the rejuvenator of humanity, the Adamite ancestor were all dead, and D'ginna's mate no less. He no longer took care of her, and would in good faith have denied their lovemaking, had she suddenly been gifted with the power of speech and had spoken of it. Forgetful of the past to the extent that today, prolonging their midday nap because of an impending storm, he rejected her from the bed where she came to brush against him, perhaps tempt him, asking her with some impatience what sort of bee was in her bonnet. Like those old men, who at the happy age of lost virility wish to get rid of their mistresses in order to devote themselves to the adoration of the son she bore them, adopting him as sole heir to name and fortune, so Jan, even if ensured himself of never be unpleasant with her, to never deviate from the strictest propriety, his attitude belied his words, and nervous yawns would complete a smile with which he attempted to correct the inflexibility of his resistance to her nonetheless frequent flirting. Completely separated from her, he even secured himself against the recurrence of any such desires by building himself, near the crown of the roof, a kind of small loft, with a hamac from which he could draw up the ladder and so completely isolate himself . Every night he went up alone; during the day he played with Hemo.
One such days, when they had capered about a great deal and the little one, thirsty, held onto the hamac with one hand and waved the other towards his mother crouched below, Jan brought him down, and a little tired, went back up for a nap.
The slamming of the door woke him. He bent over the side of the hamac.
The cabin was empty.
Leapin to the threshold at the risk of breaking a leg, he sees D'ginna taking Hemo and having already travelled two thirds of the way across the clearing. Five minutes later and they would have been in the forest, and most likely lost to him. For there was no mistake: turning every ten paces, and tearing off at great speed as soon as she sees herself being pursued, she was trying to escape.
Almost reaching the woods and to be concealed from observation, she leapt to the side and skirted the forest. Was she frightened by some snake, the terror of all apes, or did she reflect upon the fact that her lone functional arm, beside the burden of Hemo at her neck, would make the climbing of trees too difficult, and the lianas would only tangle her up and lessen her chances of escape? She now seemed to no longer hesitate, and headed straight for a point where the cover gradually thinning gave way to open country. Jan had never explored the limits of this blind alley of the clearing, which D'ginna knew full well from their walks together. Hoping t