As she was one day near the edge of the great desert, musing on her ever-present theme, she became gradually conscious that she was not alone; then that a tall personage was in her presence; and then that a great exhibition of fuss and feathers was going on before her. It was an ostrich, one of the largest and most distinguished of his race. He had seen her frequently come to this place, so unfrequented by her people, and walk about it with slow and pensive air. What was her motive? What could it be but one? Was not he there? There was nothing else there but the sand and the sunlight; and yet she came almost daily. He drew the same conclusion that the hippopotamus did, but without equal reason or good fortune. Under the circumstances, however, and misled as he was, what could he do but make himself agreeable to the lady, and pay some attention to her? No he-creature with a spark of masculine spirit in him could do less. So he began to strut up and down before her, and to expand his wings and his tail. He ran violently about. He lifted up his voice and squawked. He ate sand, and, burrowing in it with his huge bill and finding the hoof and leg-bone of a horse that had died many years before in the desert, he brought it triumphantly, and, laying it down at her feet, ate it up before her eyes. Could anything be more agreeable—any attention more flattering to the female heart? What, then, must have been her gratification when after a few moments she saw him again eat up one just like it? Deeming himself quite irresistible after this last performance, he fluttered directly toward her. The family of man has its stories and traditions, all of which have some foundation in fact, but are much magnified or perverted or misunderstood. This story of their ancestors they tell, transferring the heroine to their own race, and making him a male swan called Jupiter, and her a kind of female man called Leda. According to man, the swan was received with open arms; but the gorilla girl fled from the ostrich. His intentions, I have no doubt, were strictly honorable; while in the man story I regret to say the Jupiter’s were not; but they were none the less unwelcome to her. Mistaking her flight for the coquetry of her sex, he pursued; and although love for another and consequent aversion to him lent her wings, he had real wings, as well as long legs, and by the use of both he was gaining on the object of his pursuit, when not far off she saw the object of her affections. She sped toward him and flung herself panting into his arms. He held her there for a moment, and then moved, partly by gratitude for her many services, and partly by the feeling that, although he did not want her himself, yet, as she had thought of him, no one else should have her, he laid her lightly down, and with a club made such a vigorous attack upon the ostrich that the latter soon turned and fled back to his sand, his hen, and his horsehoofs.[[6]]
[6]. The learned lecturer here gives but a feeble imitation of a passage, upon “the courtship of birds,” cited in “The Descent of Man,” etc., chapter xiv., of which, widely circulated as that popular work is, I need here reproduce only the concluding part, if, indeed, even in the interests of science, I could venture to give more:
—“elle refuse constamment ses caresses; les avances empressées, les agaceries, les tournoiements, les tendres roncoulements, rien ne peut lui plaire ni l’emouvoir; gonflee, boudeuse, blottie dans un coin de sa prison, elle n’en sort que pour boir et manger, on pour repousser avec une espèce de rage des caresses devenus trop pressantes.”
Whether this incident in the history of our species is to be altogether deplored, I do not feel competent to decide. True, the perfection of the gorilla form and the purity of its traits were preserved. We remained at the head of the animal creation, unequalled in our combination of beauty and strength; but might we not by this profferred alliance have been elevated? Might we not have hoped to add to all our other superiority the beauty and the power of wings? Might we not have become as the angels—nay, very angels ourselves? Might not we, instead of poor, feeble, pusillanimous man, have furnished the traits which were to be sublimed into the forms of archangels and ministering spirits? Might not we have become seraphs and our children cherubs? Man has his Raphael, as he has his Darwin, whose imagination framed from things actual things impossible—winged men and pin-feathered man-children—creatures never known on Earth or in Heaven. But the Darwin himself is my authority for telling you that, if our kinswoman had yielded to her winged suitor, the Raphael would have only needed to paint gorilla portraits. Think of the change, the superiority, as well in beauty as in truthfulness, that would have been made in his works if female caprice had not prevented this application of the principle of sexual selection? This, however, was not to be; and that it was not, is one of those mysterious dispensations at which we must wonder, but to which we are taught that we must thankfully submit.
This affair, strange to say, had a direct influence in the development of that singular and enfeebled variety of our species known as Man. Our kinswoman was more set by it than ever before in her aversion to all other suitors, and in her devotion to the one object of her love. The momentary clasp of his arms, and his defence of her against another suitor not only bound her to him more strongly than before, but seems to have developed in her a strange faculty which never was known before in any of our species, and which has never appeared in any other in the direct line. Her solitary wanderings were now more limited in extent than they were before this remarkable occurrence. Her experience of the desert kept her within the line of sand which she sometimes approached, but never passed again. Yet she continued to muse alone, and constantly upon the one theme, her strong, thick coat of hair, now become odious to her, and how it might be softened and diminished. Pining away in her despair, she leaned one day against a tree, and remained there for a long time wrapped in sad reverie. Coming to herself again, she was about to continue her walk, when she found that she could not move away. Her arm, from the shoulder to the elbow, stuck fast to the tree. It was a gum-tree, and she had not seen that a broad stream of thick, half-dried gum was on that part of the trunk against which she leaned. The hair on the outside of her arm had been imbedded in the gum, which, drying as she leaned, held her fast, a prisoner. She looked about for help. None was near, not even that cold and cruel gorilla who had told her that he could not love her. Nothing was left but to tear herself away by main strength. Summoning all her fortitude and her force, she threw herself forward and fell upon the ground with a scream that might have been heard afar off, for she had torn out by the roots every hair that had touched the tree.
For many days she suffered in her loneliness; but her pain passed gradually away. But then came the depressing thought that she must now be more repulsive than before, a mutilated creature, with a bare patch on one arm, from the shoulder to the elbow. At first this was worse to bear than the pain of the injury; but ere long she was led from despair to hope by a strange way of thinking which man calls reason, which I have mentioned before, and which I am happy to say is unknown to gorillas; and the consequence of which, in this case, will cause you all to sympathize with me in my felicitations. The thought that if the object of her love longed for a female with a coat softer and finer and sparser than his own, he might, as she said, therefore (but who of us can tell what therefore means?), possibly like one better yet who had no hairy coat at all. And she thought, too, that as she had deprived herself by accident of a small part of her coat, she might (using again the unmeaning word) therefore get rid of the whole of it intentionally by the same means. “At least,” she said, “I shall be in no worse condition than I am now, as far as he is concerned, and what do I care for the others? And if I die, there is but one gone that cares little to remain.” She went to the tree. The gum had flowed again; and in like manner, and with like pain as before, she bared her lower arm of hair. Thus she went on, week after week, as she could endure the torment, and find gum-trees in their flow, until at last she had bared her whole body.
During this process she kept herself more secluded than ever, lest by chance he to please whom she suffered should see her before her sacrificial transformation was complete. She shuddered at the thought of his catching her half made up, in a sort of grand fleshly deshabille. Fortune favored her, and no one saw her until her whole body was as smooth as the inside of her hand. Then she restrained her impatience, and fed and nursed herself with a care she had not taken for many months, that she might regain all the litheness and the grace that she felt that she had lost. Even when she thought that she had gained all this (but how little seemed the all!), she hesitated and kept shyly to herself for many days—a foolish backwardness, of which I am sure no young gorilla lady before me would be guilty! But at last, feeling that nothing more was to be gained by delay, and that her fate might as well be decided first as last, she sallied forth.
Fortune favored her again; for she soon saw at a short distance the object of her search. At first she started to run to him; but hardly had she taken a few steps when she hesitated, halted, and finally turned away, overcome by a feeling entirely new to her. She had been for many weeks preparing herself, through pain and care, to please this very male gorilla, whom in former days she waited on and cooed to and coaxed, without a thought except of the pleasure she had and the pleasure she hoped for, although in vain. But now that she had some reason to hope that she would find the favor that she longed for, she shrunk within herself and feared to offer him that which it was her only desire in life that he should want and take.