THE APE.
Given a man and a woman, married, loving each other, and what a recent
clever writer calls "the inevitable consequences" ordinarily come and
cause the inevitable anxiety, more, doubtless, to the man than to the
woman. There comes a time when she he loves must bear him their first
child. In primitive existence this trouble to the man must have been
much less, must have been little more than the sympathy of an hour,
because, in nature, unaffected, there is seldom much of suffering and
almost never death prematurely. But we have changed all this. We have
violated gentle Nature's laws in our ways of living, and inasmuch as we
have done this, we have lost, to such extent, her soft protecting hand.
We breathe too little of the pure air; we are lax in physical effort,
and, even though the individual man or woman be wise, he or she must
bear the burden of the errors of an ancestry or the evils of the
present. So, to the woman gentle-bred there comes a risk in the
undergoing of that which she has most hoped for since she loved a man,
and since she would be all there is of perfect womanhood. There is
peril, and she knows it, but is braver than man at this time. There is
peril, and he knows it, and he is helpless and clinging as a child.
What can he do? Nothing, save to bring in a hard hour the presence of
one who may not bear a portion of the real trial. Yet this is
something. It has saved dear women's lives. There is something--we do
not quite understand about it yet--which is a band of more than steel
between two close together, and which holds back the one sometimes from
even the grip of that force seldom denied, which is named Death, the
one who fills the graveyards.
And, one evening, there was a man in deep trouble, and in the morning
he sat beside a bed in which was his small wife and beside her a tiny
red thing, "rather underdone," he said, in the buoyant reaction which
came upon him, for that was Harlson's way when he had emerged from
trouble; and the small red thing was the son of the two of them. And
who can tell what the man said to the woman. There are precious,
sacred overflows of love, sweet outbursts of what makes life worth the
living, never yet in words for all, never yet written in black upon
some white surface. There is a sanctuary.
It was a healthy baby, and the mother was soon herself, and the most
foolish of small women over it. I rather liked the young animal
myself, for they let me see it when its days were few, and it clutched
at my fingers in a way that won me. It was a curious young animal to
me. It took to the water wonderfully, and all three of us together
sometimes, when I would call, would summon the nurse and see the young
villain bathe. This was when he was but a few months old. He was such
a royal fellow, so brave and buoyant, that I fell in love with him.
How could a lonely man help being foolish?
An odd name had the child. It all came from the hours, when, all
danger passed, a proud and happy man sat upon a bedside and looked down
into the face of a proud and happy woman, and, at times, studied the
quality of the odd mite beside her, half hidden in the waves of pillow
and of sheet. He would look at the thing's wonderful hands, and its
wonderful pink feet, and have remarks to make. One hour he came in and
examined the creature and repeated great words from some authority:
"How many people have ever taken notice of a baby's foot, except to
admire its pinkiness and its prettiness?" said he. "And yet, to the
anatomist, it is a revelation. Take, for example, the feet of a child
of ten months, that has never walked nor stood alone. It has a power
of grasping to some extent, and is used instinctively like a hand. The
great toe has a certain independent working, like a thumb, and the
wrinkles of the sole resemble those of the palm. These markings
disappear when the pedal extremity has come to be employed for purposes
of support.
"The hands and feet of a human being are strikingly like those of the
chimpanzee in conformation, while the gorilla's resemblance to man in
these respects is even more remarkable. The higher apes have been
classified as 'quadrumana,' or 'four-handed,' because their hind feet
are hand-shaped; but this designation is improperly applied, because
the ape's posterior extremities are not really hands at all. They
merely look like hands at the first glance, whereas, in fact, they are
but feet adapted for climbing. The big toes cannot be 'opposed' to
other toes, as thumbs are to the fingers, but simply act pincer-wise,
for the purpose of grasping. Now, oddly enough, the 'infant's' feet
have this same power of grasping, pincer-fashion, and the action is
performed in precisely the same way. Advocates of evolutionary
theories take this to signify that the human foot was originally
utilized for climbing trees also, before the species was so highly
developed as it is now. Also, they assert that the fact that the art
of walking erect is learned by the child with such difficulty proves
that the race has only acquired it recently.
"There, darling," he said, "you see how it is. We have but come into
possession of a little ape! What shall we do?"
She was not troubled. In his eyes she saw that which is worth more to
the young mother than all else the world can give, but she entered into
the spirit of his mood. She replied, gently, that she didn't know what
to do, but had he the bad taste to kiss an Ape? And he admitted that
he had, and kissed the object gently, as if afraid of breaking it, and
kissed the gentle mother a hundred to one.
I liked the Ape--for so they came to allude to that sturdy babe. He
may be my heir some day--though he was named, as Jean insisted, for his
father--and I had many a frolic with him in his babyhood, when I was
allowed to enter the sanctuary of that home. He was a little viking, a
little raider, this child, conceived in the forest. There seemed to
have come to him the daring and the vigor of outdoor things, and the
force of nature. A great man-child was this.
I was not alone in the rejoicing over the infant, though really he was,
it seems to me, as dear to me, the isolated man, as to his parents.
They rioted in their vast possession, and were very foolish people.
But why should I keep repeating that these two were very foolish people
together?
They were like other fathers and mothers, in some respects, but one
difference I noted. They seemed almost to adore the child, but he was
never first with either of them. He but bound the two more closely
together, and the looks of the man were sometimes almost worshipful as
he looked upon the mother of his child. And she--she understood, and
they were glad together. Their kingdom had been but enlarged.
It is not to be supposed that this whimsical couple--for they were
really whimsical, these friends of mine, as must have appeared often in
my account could rear a child without grotesqueries. The woman, I am
afraid, was, before she became a mother, addicted to monkey tricks,
even to the extent of bounding leopard-like upon the man from
unexpected places, and the Ape was, in his early days, bred in a way
barbaric. They had great times with the Ape.
One day Grant Harlson had his business for the day concluded early. He
could reach home as a little after five o'clock, where dinner came at
six. One of the fiercest of summer rains was falling. He started
buoyantly. He wanted his wife and boy.
He reached the house and entered. No wife was there to greet him; no
drunken-footed babe, for the Ape had learned to walk now, albeit
unsteadily; not even a servant girl to make some explanation. He
stalked through the house wonderingly, back to the kitchen, which
looked out upon a green back-yard where they had erected a tent, and
had there had dinners and inhaled the odor of the grass. He found in
the kitchen the two girls, who were all delight, and exhibited but
slight awe at his presence. He recognized that all was well, and
looked out through the descending sheets of water.
There, beside the quaint tent set upon the green-sward, were two
people. One was a graceful woman, one a sturdy, shouting child.
Neither was garbed save in the simplest way. She wore a wrap of some
sort, a careless thing, the boy a night-gown, and they were moving
about in the warm rain and bathing in nature's way, and particularly
happy.
The man was righteously indignant at all desertion of him. He shouted
manfully, and at last attracted the attention of the pair. He told
them to come in to him. As well have talked to the wild winds. He
looked from the porch upon the riant, dissipated two, and commanded and
cajoled and made tremendous threats, but to no purpose. He reproached
his wife with unwifely disobedience, and with the crime of turning her
own offspring against his father, and the two but mocked him! Then he
disappeared, and appeared five minutes later in a frayed old swimming
suit, and there was terror in the camp of the foe! He made a charge
through sheets of rain, and a fair woman was, in most unmanly way, laid
in a puddle, and her son set aloft in pride upon his prostrate and
laughing mother. And high jinks ensued. So did these two conduct
themselves!
But an hour later, when guests came to the dinner, the Ape had gone to
his nursery without a whimper, and no more grave and courteous man or
more stately and gracious dame sat down at table that evening in all
the city of a million people.