With that change in her mind that made her say “therefore,” there had come another in her soul that made her say the still stranger words, “I am ashamed.” And so she turned away from him whom she had set out to find. But before she turned he had caught sight of her; and, struck by such a strange object as an entirely smooth-skinned female of his race, he immediately followed her. She fled, spurred on by her strange, conflicting apprehensions—first, lest he should like her, next, lest he should not. He gained upon her rapidly and soon came up with her, and she sank upon the ground before him. He stood and looked at her, and she saw that there was no recognition in his eyes; but there was something else that repaid her for that loss—admiration; and presently he and her heart began to dance together. He, the lazy, listless fellow of former days, leaped and curvetted like a young antelope. He bounded his full height into the air, he roared with that enchanting roar of his, he beat his breast, he ran up to the top of an enormous tree, and came near killing her by flinging himself down so close to her that had she not swayed lightly aside, he would have dashed her to pieces. But never was a female before in so precious a peril; and as he stood before her, panting with exertion, she sidled up to him, and, laying her head upon his shoulder, and taking his hands, she led them lightly and tenderly over her soft, smooth limbs and body, that, all unknown to him, had suffered such torment for his delight. After that, as men would say, she was his’n and he was her’n. This is the kind of language that they call poetical.
She did not tell him that she was the same old girl that had made love to him before. That secret she kept very profoundly and deceitfully hidden in her own bosom, until it was brought out by another incident that has a direct bearing upon our subject. She was just about to bring forth the first fruit of their happiness, and he was off gathering the daintiest food that he could find for her, when she thoughtlessly strolled near the edge of the sandy desert, and walked along it, musing to herself and wondering if her child would be as handsome as its father, when suddenly she looked up, and there, at a short distance from her, stood the great ostrich who had before persecuted her with his attentions. He darted toward her; and she, fleeing as rapidly toward her cave as her condition would permit, was soon met again by the same defender as before, who this time, after a brief contest, slew the ostrich before her eyes. The effect of this shock was that that night her child was born. It was the most remarkable birth in the history of our race; yet not of our race, for it was not a gorilla that she produced; and here began the new departure. It was a male child which, to look forward a few years, had not the hind thumb of his mother but the toe of his father, and had even less and finer hair than he, and besides (a trait which his mother attributed to her critical encounter with the ostrich), he walked constantly erect, and with straight legs, like that large, feathered biped. Moreover, he inherited from his mother those strange thoughts, “therefore” and “I am ashamed.”
Then, explaining her terror to the father of the child whose birth it had hastened, she confessed to him, she was almost obliged to confess, that she was the poor girl who had loved him so long, and whom he had protected before against the too ardent courtship of the same suitor; he could hardly believe his ears, and his curiosity was excited to know the manner of her transformation. At first she refused to tell; but he asked her again and again; and after some months had passed and she had brought forth her second child—this time a girl, with a smooth body, like herself, and without a hind thumb, like the father, and with the straight, ostrich-way of walking, in a moment of female triumph at this charming success of the principle of development, and of the greater principle of sexual selection, she confessed to what artifice she owed her hairless skin.
He was now naturally not with her so much as during the first months of their union, and his behavior toward her was more placid and serene. Every gorilla matron among my hearers must have had the same experience. Pursuit must always be more or less eager; possession must always be more or less quiet. And if any of my lady hearers have been dissatisfied or disturbed by the manifestation of this inevitable and eternal truth—[Here there was a movement among the females, and one rose and shrieked out, “Disturbed! dissatisfied! To be sure we are. You’re all a set of brutes. Sea-serpents, and hippopotamuses, and ostriches are nothing to you!” The males just turned their heads with bland, pitying smiles, and then gave their attention again to the lecturer, who continued]—if, I say, they have been dissatisfied or disturbed by the manifestation of this inevitable and eternal truth, to which the relations of male and female are merely not an exception, they only show that they expect that the operations of laws of nature will be suspended for the gratification of their pride. During one of his absences, in the still noon of a summer’s day, she heard a faint scream in the distance. But, faint as it was, it seemed unlike those that are sometimes heard in the forest solitudes, and yet like a sound she remembered to have heard before, she could not recollect when or where. In the course of a few weeks it was explained, when one day he appeared, accompanied by another smooth-skinned gorilla girl, who she saw at once was one of those whose love he had before despised, and who was now his wife. To be brief, he found that of the ten who had devoted themselves to him, and who had vowed to have no other love, only three had yielded to the courtship of his rivals, and the remaining six he persuaded to qualify them selves for his admiration, and the nuptials which they had so long and so eagerly coveted. They all illustrated equally well with his first wife the beautiful principles of development and sexual selection, and soon he was surrounded with a large and growing family of smooth-skinned, hind-thumbless, erectly-walking children, of whom the males chiefly said, “therefore,” and the females, “I am ashamed.”
The appearance of this new family in the gorilla country caused a profound sensation throughout our species. The tradition of the sea-serpent alliance and its deplorable consequences were remembered and discussed. The conservative feeling was fully aroused. A mass-meeting, in the nature of a general conseil de famille, was held; and it was finally decided that, to prevent confusion and the deterioration of the race (for what consequences might not be apprehended from female fancy for smooth-skinned, hind-thumbless lovers, who walked like ostriches! what wide-spread disaster might not ensue upon the application of the principle of sexual selection under these new circumstances!), that this new family of non-descript creatures, who, whatever they might be, were certainly not gorillas, should be driven from our borders. Whatever might have been the wishes of the new family in this regard, they (most of them being yet of tender years) could not resist such a determination on the part of a whole tribe, and they submitted. The world was before them where to choose; and they chose to go northward toward the borders of the great sea. Ere long they were seen moving in that direction, the father of the family lounging listlessly in his old way in advance, the females following, carrying the provender and such of the children as were too small to walk. And thus began the first migration. This was the first step in the Fall of Man, which he, in one of those traditions of which I spoke, has embodied and perverted into a tale which he calls, and well calls, “The Expulsion from Paradise.”
One of the most ruinous steps in the descent of this new species, which gradually deteriorated until it became Man and produced the Darwin, was the living in what they call huts or houses, which, as you all know, are a kind of small, movable cave, very hot and dry, and shut up against the air. This, men like the Darwin say, became necessary to protect them against the inclemency of the weather. There was no such necessity. On the contrary, it is the use of this contrivance which has made the new creature weak, unable to live naturally like his ancestor, the gorilla, and obliged him to go on year after year, and generation after generation, adding impediment to impediment, and incumbrance to incumbrance, that he may supply artificial wants which grow upon him year by year, till at last—the poor besotted creature! he deems that one of his species happiest who has most possessions, that is, most occasion of care and trouble. His hut he has at last deprived of the only good quality it once possessed, its movableness (for it would be a nice thing to be able to take your cave around with you when food becomes scarce, instead of being obliged to go after the food and then return to the cave); and, in his self-delusion, he now builds it of some heavy, immovable material, and fills it so full of all kinds of gim-cracks that his highest praise of one of these immovable caves is that it is filled with all the modern inconveniences; and, to keep these in disorder, he has a rapacious multitude of his own species whom he calls carpenters, and masons, and painters, and plumbers. These sorts of man seem to have come into his family through some operation of the law of sexual selection with the bird family; for they are all dreaded because of their bills; and of them all, I am told the plumber’s bill is at once the most dreadful, and the most inscrutable in its origin.
As I have told you, the hut or house was not first used for protection against cold and wet. It came in this wise. Many generations after the first migration a female of the new family was born much lighter in color than the original rich black tint of the species; and when she grew up, she preserved this unpleasant peculiarity. But, strange to say, she was liked by one of the largest and strongest of her species, who took her for his third wife, and made much of her. She, observing that things turned black in the sun, took a notion that unless she could be protected against his rays she also would become black, and lose the peculiar charm to which she owed her marriage to so desirable a husband, and his very marked admiration and attention; and yet she could not bear a cave; it was altogether too damp and gloomy, and, indeed, very unbecoming to the complexion. She therefore insisted with much pouting and sulkiness, including some secret slaps and pinches of the other wives’ children, and alternate fits of temper and sickness that turned the family topsy-turvy (the good old gorilla family discipline, ladies, which permitted the use of a stick not larger than the husband’s hind thumb having sadly deteriorated among these degenerate creatures), that if her husband really loved her and cared anything to preserve the beauty he professed so much to admire, he would make something that would protect her skin against the sun.
After long cogitation he produced a wonderful structure. He took three dry saplings, about one-half again taller than himself, and putting one end of each in the ground, about his own length apart, he joined their tops, and upon the outside of these he piled dried twigs and broad leaves, leaving an opening in the front. To this he led his now radiant beauty, and she took possession with great glee and greater pride. At first she stayed in it all the time, night and day. She allowed no one else but her husband to enter. The other wives affected great scorn of her and her rubbish-hole, as they called it, which they would not go near or seem to notice; but if their children came to peep in, she drove them away with blows and sticks and stones. It was her delight to sit just within the doorway, and nod with condescending affability to the other females who came to see the great curiosity; and they came from miles around.
Her pride, and the airs she took upon herself, set the whole female community agog. She was a wife for whom the wonderful hut had been built to preserve her complexion. She held up her nose in the air, as if the earth and the other females on it were too mean for her to look upon. In the course of a few days the first wife began to make things very uncomfortable. [“Very proper of her,” screamed one of the matrons—an exclamation which was followed by a hum of approval.] She spanked her three children, of whom she had been very fond, on various pretexts; but in her heart, the boys, because they were boys and looked like their father, and the girl, because she was his favorite and looked like herself. She took no notice of her husband, but passed him in glum silence [“Served him right,” screamed another matron]; in this (mildly continued the lecturer) showing the proverbial tact and wisdom of her sex; for the only consequence was that he passed more time than ever at the hut. At last, one evening, when he had brought her some very fine fruit, she flung it down untasted, and went into a kind of convulsion. She screamed, she chattered, she clenched her hands, and gnashed her teeth, and flung herself upon the ground, kicking and tossing her arms about. At first he was inclined to administer to her the remedy which she had applied to the children; but, as he really loved her, he was weak, and asked what was the matter. At first, there was no answer, only more screams, more kicking, more flinging of the arms about. At last, however, it came: “The matter? Her complexion was the matter!” (She was as black as a crocodile’s back.) “How could he expect her not to have fits, unprotected as she was from the sun? But what did her complexion matter? What did he care about that? Why did he not go to his other wife? She could have a hut built for her, where she could sit and sneer at every one else.” The consequence, ladies, you all know. She also had her hut, in the door of which she sat with her nose in the air. And of this the consequence was that the second wife’s complexion also needed protection; and soon she too had her hut, and sat with her nose in the air. Whereupon there was great commotion in the whole community. Was it to be endured that that fellow’s wives should sit in huts and sniff? Would a husband of any spirit, not to say a husband who cared anything for his wives, endure that? There was an outbreak of complexion fever among all the females. Such a thing as a complexion was never before heard of; but now every female had one; and nothing would preserve it, or save her from convulsions, but a hut for its protection. And it was remarkable that the blacker the female the more sensitive she became on this subject, and the more imperatively necessary it was that she should be provided with shelter. And so, ere long, it came to pass that a hut ceased to be any distinction whatever, and that, when all the females got what they wanted, the chief value it was to have had in their eyes was entirely gone, and it would only have been a mark of destitution to be without one. The thing having become a necessity, and a matter of course, the males, to save trouble, made huts large enough for all their females; and as time went on they plastered the twigs and leaves with clay. The males passed more and more time with their females in these she contrivances, and became themselves, of course, more and more effeminate. And thus it was that this new branch of our family became more and more a house-dwelling species.