Nothing can really make up to a child for the loss of a mother. True
mother's love is like immeasurable space, and gives humanity its first
taste of the Infinite. The fishes know it not, and hardly the
crocodiles; but, as we move up the scale of being, it comes more and
more into evidence. The rage of "a bear that has lost her whelps" is
proverbial. I had a friend in the Chitral expedition who told me that
they caught the children of an unlucky she-bear; and the bereaved
mother, "though she must have been starving among the snows," followed
the army for days, and the sentries had to be on the look-out for her.
She desisted at length, and probably died there of starvation and
despair.
Among our poor cousins, the apes, there is many a mother might put to
shame alike the drabs of the slums and the fashionable females of the
decadent sets. So it was not strange that Charlie Darwin moped. Though
her stomach was well filled, she had lost her mother.
Her mother was not the whole of her loss. She had lost her clan; for
these little beings live together, and the germs of human society are
visible in their associations "for better or worse." The human soul
can no more develop in solitude than a tree can grow in a vacuum; and
in the same way little Charlie seemed to feel an aching void.
Repeatedly, in the early weeks after she came to us, she would go to
sit on one of the trees on the edge of the compound (or yard); and
there she would long remain motionless, gazing across the road to the
woods from which she had come. At other times, she would go to the
other side of the yard, and sit and gaze across the river, at forests
on the farther side. "Where can they all be? Oh, where's my mother?"
Her hankering for what she had lost for ever was so plain that we were
not surprised when she went away to look for them all.
She was absent for several days. Except that she was not in any of the
other gardens or adjacent woods, nothing was ever known of her
whereabouts. Many pairs of sharp eyes were watching for her in many
directions, to earn a good reward; but nobody earned it. She came back
herself. Early one morning it was reported that she was in the tree at
the door, the tree where she generally ended in returning from a round
in the garden. Her custom had been to come to the ground there and
walk across the road and run upstairs. But her natural awkwardness
after such an absence, and possibly her uncertainty about the
reception she might expect, made her stay in the tree this morning. A
servant climbed to fetch her down, and she bit him. She descended to
within a few yards of the ground to speak to me, though it was only
"Oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo!" But as soon as she saw my wife coming down the
stairs she hurried to meet her. It was really like a child coming
home. My wife handed her a plantain, and she at once began to eat.
Then holding it in her right hand, and biting at it, she gave her left
hand to my wife; and in that way they went upstairs together.
Charlie was too busy eating to say much that forenoon; and, when she
did speak, her words were like water spilt upon the ground. "Words," I
say; for I do think it likely that her multitudinous intonations, if
intelligible to us--that is to say, if we had understood them as her
mother could have done--would have had the effect of words. But we
could not understand her, at least not well, though my wife, perhaps
taking pity upon my curiosity, declared she could gather that Charlie
had had a hard time, and travelled a great deal, and got little to
eat, and failed to find any of her relations; and that she was minded
now to be content with my wife for a mother, and make friends with
humanity, and never run away any more. And, certainly, she never did.