I think it likely that few people besides myself have ever actually seen
and spoken with a “cave-man.”
Yet everybody nowadays knows all about the cave-man. The fifteen-cent
magazines and the new fiction have made him a familiar figure. A few
years ago, it is true, nobody had ever heard of him. But lately,
for some reason or other, there has been a run on the cave-man. No
up-to-date story is complete without one or two references to him. The
hero, when the heroine slights him, is said to “feel for a moment the
wild, primordial desire of the cave-man, the longing to seize her, to
drag her with him, to carry her away, to make her his.” When he takes
her in his arms it is recorded that “all the elemental passion of the
cave-man surges through him.” When he fights, on her behalf against a
dray-man or a gun-man or an ice-man or any other compound that makes up
a modern villain, he is said to “feel all the fierce fighting joy of the
cave-man.” If they kick him in the ribs, he likes it. If they beat
him over the head, he never feels it; because he is, for the moment,
a cave-man. And the cave-man is, and is known to be, quite above
sensation.
The heroine, too, shares the same point of view. “Take me,” she murmurs
as she falls into the hero’s embrace, “be my cave-man.” As she says it
there is, so the writer assures us, something of the fierce light of the
cave-woman in her eyes, the primordial woman to be wooed and won only by
force.
So, like everybody else, I had, till I saw him, a great idea of the
cave-man. I had a clear mental picture of him--huge, brawny, muscular,
a wolfskin thrown about him and a great war-club in his hand. I knew
him as without fear with nerves untouched by our effete civilization,
fighting, as the beasts fight, to the death, killing without pity and
suffering without a moan.
It was a picture that I could not but admire.
I liked, too--I am free to confess it--his peculiar way with women. His
system was, as I understood it, to take them by the neck and bring them
along with him. That was his fierce, primordial way of “wooing” them.
And they liked it. So at least we are informed by a thousand credible
authorities. They liked it. And the modern woman, so we are told, would
still like it if only one dared to try it on. There’s the trouble; if
one only _dared_!
I see lots of them--I’ll be frank about it--that I should like to grab,
to sling over my shoulder and carry away with me; or, what is the same
thing, allowing for modern conditions, have an express man carry them.
I notice them at Atlantic City, I see them in Fifth Avenue--yes,
everywhere. But would they come? That’s the _deuce_ of it. Would they
come right along, like the cave-woman, merely biting off my ear as
they came, or are they degenerate enough to bring an action against me,
indicting the express company as a party of the second part?
Doubts such as these prevent me from taking active measures. But they
leave me, as they leave many another man, preoccupied and fascinated
with the cave-man.
One may imagine, then, my extraordinary interest in him when I actually
met him in the flesh. Yet the thing came about quite simply, indeed more
by accident than by design, an adventure open to all.
It so happened that I spent my vacation in Kentucky--the region, as
everybody knows, of the great caves. They extend--it is a matter of
common knowledge--for hundreds of miles; in some places dark and sunless
tunnels, the black silence broken only by the dripping of the water from
the roof; in other places great vaults like subterranean temples, with
vast stone arches sweeping to the dome, and with deep, still water of
unfathomed depth as the floor; and here and there again they are lighted
from above through rifts in the surface of the earth, and are dry and
sand strewn--fit for human habitation.
In such caves as these--so has the obstinate legend run for
centuries--there still dwell cave-men, the dwindling remnant of their
race. And here it was that I came across him.
I had penetrated into the caves far beyond my guides. I carried a
revolver and had with me an electric lantern, but the increasing
sunlight in the cave as I went on had rendered the latter needless.
There he sat, a huge figure, clad in a great wolfskin. Besides him lay
a great club. Across his knee was a spear round which he was binding
sinews that tightened under his muscular hand. His head was bent over
his task. His matted hair had fallen over his eyes. He did not see me
till I was close beside him on the sanded floor of the cave. I gave a
slight cough.
“Excuse me!” I said.
The Cave-man gave a startled jump.
“My goodness,” he said, “you startled me!”