Part 29

In the eighth book of his autobiography (Dichtung, etc.), Goethe moralises that "with the infinite idiosyncrasy of human nature on the one side, and the infinite variety in the modes of life and pleasure on the other, it is a wonder that the human race has not worn itself out long ago." He explains the mystery by a toughness which, it is now safe to say, must have been inherited from our arboreal ancestors, for Charlie had it in full measure.

The fact was that, when she grew up, she suffered from ennui, and no wonder! She had food without seeking it, and was safe from the continual dangers that kept her lively and busy in the woods. Without a husband "to make her uneasy," as the old song says, and no children to work for, she was in the same painful quandary as so many good maiden ladies I know, whose "only labour is to kill the time, and labour dire it is, and weary woe." Often enough it is not their fault, as it was not Charlie's.

"Full many a gem of purest ray serene, The dark, unfathomed caves of ocean bear; Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air."

To do her justice, Charlie set to work to amuse herself, unhasting, unresting, in a way worthy of Goethe's disciple, and not only found agreeable sensations for herself, but provided them for her admirers.

As a child of Nature, she tolerated drawing-room monotonies chiefly for the sake of cake and shortbread; but she dearly loved to see men coming to call, especially if, as generally happened, they wore high headgear. Our house had much open woodwork aloft, which suited her as if it had been designed for her convenience. After very little practice she was able to send flying far the hat or turban of any man coming up the front stairs. It added to the joke that they had been duly warned against her. She would show herself and move away when looked at--the shy, innocent creature--but it was only to another beam, where she was unobserved, whence she could stoop upon the passer-by, and with a dexterous touch uncover him. The variety of expressions on the faces of the men, as they looked up at the sweet little cherub who was grinning aloft, was perhaps as amusing to her as to anybody else.

There was a proud Mohammedan who swore his turban should escape, and, flinging dignity to the winds, desirous at any cost of scoring over those whose headgears had descended, he kept his hand on his. So Charlie's usual side-blow merely shook it. The man cried out triumphant--too soon. With the quickness of thought Charlie changed her tactics. Instead of repeating the ineffectual side-stroke, she caught the turban in the middle and pulled it up. The man whirled round indignant, and she dropped it at his feet with a grin. He told her she was a heathen. She answered, "Oo-oo-oo!"

To drop things from a height seemed a perennial pleasure to her. That is a characteristic of many monkeys, and, in many forms, is visible in men and women. To keep to monkeys, I recollect a playmate in the seventies who wept with laughing as he told me how his pet monkey, being driven in spite of his protests out of the drawing-room, had taken refuge, poor exile, in the kitchen. My friend was not allowed to go into exile with him, and was bidden hold his tongue when he called attention to alarming noises. The monkey was meanwhile sitting on the highest shelf in the kitchen, solacing his solitude by pitching the best china of the household upon the brick floor.

Among the most agreeable of the sensations which Charlie was addicted to seeking was that of sliding in a sitting posture--the "sitting glissade" they call it in the Alps. She had no snows, but contented herself with the boards, upon the ridges and dips in our shingle roof. From the highest apex of the roof to near the eaves she came sliding down, pretty quick, partly by force of gravity, partly by pushing herself with her hands. Her hands clattered and rattled on the shingle roof with a great noise, which added to her joy. Once down to near the eaves, she would stop and run to the top again, with looks and cries like those of boys sliding on the ice.

It is surely needless to multiply references to show how human this spontaneous performance was. As the Cimbrians came down the valley of the Adige, about a hundred years before Christ, the Romans saw with amazement the barbarians, "almost naked among the ice," says the historian, as if reporting an eye-witness, sit upon their shields and slide down the Alpine slopes. There is no detail of these old wars that sticks better in the memory than this, and one is reminded of it by our new fashions of adult sliding, so wonderfully like the sport of the brave invading savages, two thousand years ago.

As for her love of noise, nobody can call for proof of the humanity of that. It is self-evident.

Even if the idealists are right who claim that the only cure for ennui, and the only way to peace of heart and mind, is the "love of God," or the "love of beauty," or the "love of knowledge and wisdom," or "art," which is not always trumpery, or "music," which is not always noise, or whatever other name we give to the harmony and the visions vouchsafed to the pure and good and wise, not even the idealists, indeed they least of all, can claim to be different in kind from little Charlie. The difference is only in degree. In her humble way, like an inquisitive child, she was for ever investigating things, stroking a tiger's skin, for example, comparing it with other materials on the floor, turning back the cat's outer ear and gazing into it like a surgeon; touching, tasting, handling, whatever was within her reach; for ever on the outlook for anything fresh, like the idle Athenians, who crowded round the first preacher of salvation, in search of something new. This universal craving of mankind is a natural inheritance from busy forefathers who lived aloft, and had to be continually on the look-out. And as Charlie sometimes sat and dreamily gazed upon the world in general, with a puzzled look, and beheld with mingled joy and bewilderment the glorious sun, she seemed to me to be better qualified than any sophisticated Athenian to pay real homage to the "Unknown God."

13. CORROBORATING ARISTOTLE & CO.

Wondering, if not worshipping, as she blinked at the morning sun, Charlie Darwin then and all the rest of the day was continually giving opportunities of observation such as would have rejoiced the heart of Wallace. The gibbons in a Zoo are more out of their element than men in a jail. They are surrounded by strange sights and sounds, and stupefied and quasi-paralysed by lack of occupation. We can learn little more from them living there than from their little bodies when they are dead. Nor are pets more satisfactory. At any rate all others I have seen, but Charlie, were too sophisticated. You could no more learn from them their native life, than you could learn the ways of English children in the country by watching poor little guttersnipes, who have never been out of town.

But Charlie was the real wild maid of the woods, the genuine gibbon, unadulterated. She never needed to conform to our ways unless she saw fit to do so, to please herself. It was live and let live, on both sides. She was at home in every sense. Cousins of hers, perhaps actual brothers and sisters, or her bereaved mother, were roving free, not very far away--as free as any wild beast ever is, that is to say, living from hand to mouth as usual, seeking provender. And after all, that is how Nature first made man--

"Ere the base laws of servitude began, When wild in woods the noble savage ran."

One day as I was listening to mingled sounds from across the river, thinking I heard the "Oo-oo-oos" of the gibbons, mingled with dogs' barking and human cries, there seemed to be a look of recognition on Charlie's face, and she also listened; but neither then nor at any time did she make a second attempt to join her relatives, so that her master began to hope that, perhaps, when she was older, some likely bachelor of their clan might be attracted to civilisation by her. It was quite certain she would never revert. She had had her fill of barbarism.

The melancholy moping of her first few days, when she used to eye the woods, never returned after it went away. From dawn to dusk, her mercurial activity never ceased, and that fact seemed to her master to illuminate one of the most interesting problems in mental evolution.

It is not yet very long since Sandow and others have taught us that the best way to develop the muscles is to use them frequently in gentle exercises, avoiding great spasmodic efforts, which strain and weaken them. The same law applies to the mind. There was a Latin jingle to that effect current long ago in schools, which is worth preserving as a bit of old-fashioned wisdom. I never saw it in print, but was taught it orally many years ago by one who had learned it in the same way sixty years before.

"Gutta cavat lapidem Non vi, sed sæpe cadendo; Sic vir fit doctus Non vi, sed sæpe legendo."

The meaning is this--

A man's made learned by reading oft, And not by rush and shock; Just as the water, falling down, Drip-dripping, wears the rock.

Assuming for the sake of brevity that the reader agrees to this, which is a matter about which men of sense are generally agreed, what has to be told is that Charlie Darwin, our Charlie, illustrating evolution without studying it, unconsciously suggested that the approved method of steady and gentle exertion was merely a continuation of Nature's way upwards, the identical way that Nature took to bring the apes above the other beasts, and then improve the apes. Their hands provided a ready means of action for many purposes, and their habits of diet, which made them ever ready to eat, provided a perpetual supply of motive power. The great progressive movement, so begun, has never stopped. The restlessness and the ennui which cause so many crimes and follies are Nature's impulse, misused or neglected. It comes from habits older than the hills. It is the vital force of each. With it, we may do evil, if we will; but we can do nothing at all without it. The cats can gorge themselves and sleep in happiness and health; but Nature has made that impossible for gibbons and for men.

Of course the only novelty here is the suggestion that continual employment was Nature's way of stimulating the growth of the brain. The doctrine that beings, with such brains as men and apes have now, can find content and peace in healthy occupation, and in no other way, is a very old discovery; but, as there are many to whom philosophy is folly written large, it may make the truth more credible to them to mention that Charlie's habits proved this beyond a doubt, and so corroborated the profoundest conclusion of Aristotle (Ethics).

She also ratified the rhetoric of John Ruskin. His declamations against the excessive division of labour were the derision of practical people in the nineteenth century. "Polishing the pins with men's souls! Bah!" With shrugs and sneers they intimated that he was a lunatic. If he had not been rich, he might have been jailed as an incendiary. Rich or poor, he would have been in danger anywhere but in free and happy England. And now England's patience is rewarded by the discovery that Ruskin was essentially right. If our brains have been developed by our innate readiness to "turn our hands to anything," then, assuredly, to restrict activity to one or two mechanical movements is to reverse the natural process, and so torture the mind worse than the constraining bandages torture the feet of Chinese ladies. The damage done to vital organs in that way cannot be compensated by any wages.

Thus were the conclusions of Aristotle and the rhetoric of Ruskin reinforced by the example of Charlie Darwin.

14. THE LAST CHAPTER

By May 1893, when Charlie had been about a year in her master's house, he had been about two and a half years in the same station, in charge of the same district, doing the same kind of work. The average for the province was a few months. So he should not have been surprised that he was then, on the shortest possible notice, transferred from where he was, in the Sittang valley, in the east of Burma, to a district with headquarters on Ramri Island, off the western coast.

What to do with Charlie in such a hurry, with such a destination, would have been a troublesome question if she had not by that time become independent and able to support herself. It was not that any gibbon-Romeo had found her out. That happy fate had been impossible in the time allowed. If, indeed, we had continued to dwell there in the woods for another year or so, it was the confident expectation of the neighbouring gardeners that some enterprising young gibbon would have recognised her charms, and appreciated the combined advantages of freedom and plenty. An official post, with abundance to eat and drink and nothing to do, truly it was the very kind of soft job that Mr Kipling's heroes roam the world to find. Yes, assuredly, the gardeners were right. We would have had another civilised gibbon very soon. Already somebody was considering on what terms, as to housing and settlements, the managers of the Rangoon Zoo might obtain the family. But, like many another spinster, Charlie lost her chance through no fault of her own. We could not stay, and when suddenly the time came to go, Charlie was ready. She had won her independence differently.