By the help of a mirror, I could see her without directly looking at her. Finding threats and expostulations unheeded, she took a leap of more than two yards, and landed on the curtain poles of the bed. I could not then pretend not to see her; but, to her horror, I heeded her no more than before. Then she made another big leap, and landed on my shoulders, and, as I felt before I felt her feet, clapped a hand upon each eye. If it had [254] ]been serious fighting, as she believed it was, she might have had my eyes out before I was aware of her movement—so quick was she, “like a needle.” At least, she could have blinded me for the moment—at the probable cost of her life. She had, in fact, in her desperation, for my wife’s sake, ventured to try the identical feat that Ulysses practised on the cannibal monster Polyphemus, whom he blinded in his cave. If one reflects that she could hardly have weighed a stone, and the man she attacked was rather above than below the average of men in size and weight, one cannot refuse to her the praise that properly belongs to a Jack-the-Giant-Killer or tricky Ulysses.
That she was generally timid, as was natural for her size and sex, merely clenches the argument about her filial feeling. Say, if you like, that it was excitement, half-hysterical, that did it. What caused the excitement but her devotion?
Luckily for myself, I had been watching her closely. My hands were on her little wrists in a moment, and no harm was done; and my wife’s caresses soon composed her.
I would gladly have repeated the experiment oftener than was allowed, which was only after long intervals about twice; and on every such occasion, the whole drama was rehearsed, the small [255] ]spontaneous performer never failing to make her death-defying leap. And every time she did it, she was rewarded not with tit-bits only, but with what children dearly love, a pleasant sight. My wife thrashed me. Then Charlie laughed. She rolled from side to side, as she sat on the partition wall, as if “unable to contain herself.” She “Oo-oo-oo-ed” approval, and danced for joy.
12. AGREEABLE SENSATIONS
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 [256] ]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,