3. RUNNING AWAY
Nothing can really make up to a child for the loss of a mother. True mother’s love is like immeasurable space, and gives humanity its first taste of the Infinite. The fishes know it not, and hardly the crocodiles; but, as we move up the scale of being, it comes more and more into evidence. The rage of “a bear that has lost her whelps” is proverbial. I had a friend in [226] ]the Chitral expedition who told me that they caught the children of an unlucky she-bear; and the bereaved mother, “though she must have been starving among the snows,” followed the army for days, and the sentries had to be on the look-out for her. She desisted at length, and probably died there of starvation and despair.
Among our poor cousins, the apes, there is many a mother might put to shame alike the drabs of the slums and the fashionable females of the decadent sets. So it was not strange that Charlie Darwin moped. Though her stomach was well filled, she had lost her mother.
Her mother was not the whole of her loss. She had lost her clan; for these little beings live together, and the germs of human society are visible in their associations “for better or worse.” The human soul can no more develop in solitude than a tree can grow in a vacuum; and in the same way little Charlie seemed to feel an aching void. Repeatedly, in the early weeks after she came to us, she would go to sit on one of the trees on the edge of the compound (or yard); and there she would long remain motionless, gazing across the road to the woods from which she had come. At other times, she would go to the other side of the yard, and sit and gaze across the river, [227] ]at forests on the farther side. “Where can they all be? Oh, where’s my mother?” Her hankering for what she had lost for ever was so plain that we were not surprised when she went away to look for them all.
She was absent for several days. Except that she was not in any of the other gardens or adjacent woods, nothing was ever known of her whereabouts. Many pairs of sharp eyes were watching for her in many directions, to earn a good reward; but nobody earned it. She came back herself. Early one morning it was reported that she was in the tree at the door, the tree where she generally ended in returning from a round in the garden. Her custom had been to come to the ground there and walk across the road and run upstairs. But her natural awkwardness after such an absence, and possibly her uncertainty about the reception she might expect, made her stay in the tree this morning. A servant climbed to fetch her down, and she bit him. She descended to within a few yards of the ground to speak to me, though it was only “Oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo!” But as soon as she saw my wife coming down the stairs she hurried to meet her. It was really like a child coming home. My wife handed her a plantain, and she at once began to eat. [228] ]Then holding it in her right hand, and biting at it, she gave her left hand to my wife; and in that way they went upstairs together.
Charlie was too busy eating to say much that forenoon; and, when she did speak, her words were like water spilt upon the ground. “Words,” I say; for I do think it likely that her multitudinous intonations, if intelligible to us—that is to say, if we had understood them as her mother could have done—would have had the effect of words. But we could not understand her, at least not well, though my wife, perhaps taking pity upon my curiosity, declared she could gather that Charlie had had a hard time, and travelled a great deal, and got little to eat, and failed to find any of her relations; and that she was minded now to be content with my wife for a mother, and make friends with humanity, and never run away any more. And, certainly, she never did.
4. SETTLING DOWN
There is an excellent man in Burma who is said to have lived many years upon nuts; and an acquaintance of his told me he had been led to the discovery that this was the ideal food, by the [229] ]consideration that nuts must be the staple food of monkeys. I suggested to vary his diet by a regular consumption of ants. Charlie was very fond of them. She would even pause in eating cake to pick up an ant if she saw one. I doubt if she would have done so for a nut. She used to pick up any ant, even the smallest, with finger and thumb with the utmost facility, and put the prize between her fine teeth and crunch it.
My wife had an egg in her hand one day on the veranda when she was talking to Charlie, who was sitting on the veranda rail. With sudden alacrity, Charlie grabbed the egg, and, holding it with both hands, tried to break the shell with her teeth. She failed. It is likely all the eggs she had received from her mother in the woods had thinner shells than those of hens, and so she did not think of using much force. She turned the big egg round and round in her hands with looks of astonishment; and then, in a business-like way, as if she knew there was just one thing to be done, she broke it on the veranda railing on which she was sitting, and guzzled the contents with such gusto that she smeared her face and soiled her dainty fur with the yoke. The next time she received an egg she was supplied with a saucer to break it in; but never disguised [230] ]her preference for the primitive way of doing she had learned in the woods. So, to make her use the saucer, my wife had herself to break the egg.
The plan of education adopted was in the style of Rabelais. “Do what you like,” was the first commandment. Or she might be said to have accepted Goethe’s gospel of self-culture, for she “developed” diligently. She never was teased by any kind of collars, chains, or bonds. There was never any restriction upon her, except that of hunger, which tethers us all, and in satisfying her hunger she could do what she liked.