And is of sense forlorn;
A sadder and a wiser cat,
He rose the morrow morn.”
6. EVENING AND MORNING
Ever after she returned from seeking her mother, Charlie eyed the woods like a frightened child, and vehemently plumped for civilisation. No wonder! Death is ever at hand for all beings; but in the woods it seems to press upon you. The very tigers have a recurring prospect of death by starvation, a fact which should mitigate our hatred of them, while confirming our hostility. The Lilliputian tribe of gibbons have lively days, quite full of trouble. They are so human, and yet so much weaker than humanity, struggling to save their carcasses from leopards and Christians by sheer agility and co-operation, living from hand to mouth, [239] ]picking from the bushes what they can, where any bush may hide a mortal enemy.
I had noticed among the hills that one heard nothing of them at nights; and, watching Charlie’s ways, I soon saw why. Having found a cozy corner for herself in the eaves, at the expense of the pigeons, she retired to it at dark, as regularly as Shakespeare’s ploughman. She, “with a body filled and vacant mind, got her to rest, ... never saw horrid night, the child of Hell, slept in Elysium....”
She detested lamps more than Ruskin did steam-engines. He sometimes went in trains. She would have nothing to do with lamps. She—went to bed. Vain was it to light her roost and offer fruit of the most attractive quality. You could set the cocks a-crowing with your artificial dawn; but Charlie knew too much. She lifted her head, and that was all. She looked at you a second or two, blinking sleepily; and turned to rest again. We are children of the light, the apes and we, no less than children of the air; and Charlie would not quit her sleeping place until the sun relit the world.
Then she rose and came into our room for fruit. In a country near the Equator, like Lower Burma, sunrise and sunset fall between five and [240] ]seven o’clock all the year round; and Charlie’s hours differed little from those of the villagers. So she came in with the dawn and the morning coffee; but, at that early hour, she would take nothing but fruit, perhaps because she was in a hurry to go out of doors. She did not even give us her company while she was eating. Fruit in hand, she toddled out and away.
She always toddled on the floor, like a child, when she went slowly; but her usual gait was a light run, such as they now practise in some Continental armies, as the least fatiguing way for infantry to cover the ground at times, especially going downhill. You bend forward a little (how much, depends on your centre of gravity), and trot, trot, trot, never straightening the legs. I saw the crew of H.M.S. Devastation running about in that way, during some manœuvres in the seventies, and heard men talking of it as “a way we have in the navy, keeps the boys awake, we never walk.” So I would have claimed the discovery for the British navy, when a foreign doctor claimed to have invented it, if I had not known that both had been forestalled long ago by the little apes.
Necessity had doubtless been the mother of invention for them, as it is so often for us. These [241] ]little creatures dare not walk in the woods, as men and big apes can do. When on the ground they have to run for their lives, at the top of their speed. Up in the trees they are safe from a tiger, and even from a leopard, as a rule, if they see him. But on the ground there is no beast needs do them reverence. The smallest adult jungle dog could singly kill the sturdiest of gibbons. That was why Charlie had learned from her mother to trot like a man-of-war’s man on any flat surface.