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 [257] ]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 [258] ]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 [259] ]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 [260] ]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.”