[Note.—This study of a gibbon was suggested by the writings of Mr Wallace, the veteran natural philosopher, still alive, who shares with Charles Darwin the honour of proposing the theory of Natural Selection. His writings not being at hand where this is written, his exact words cannot be quoted; but certainly it was because he intimated in some way how much was to be learned by the observation of an adolescent orang-outang, domesticated under natural conditions, that I undertook the upbringing and education of a young gibbon when it was offered to me. The results, for which much of the credit belongs to my wife, seem to justify completely the shrewd anticipations of Wallace.]
Why not? Are not our arms better than wings, the implements of an inferior species? A very slight knowledge of anatomy is enough to let one know that nobody can have both wings and arms. The why of that is inscrutable; [217] but the fact is undeniable. The Almighty has written that in the skeletons of all creation.
What fools we are, when we try to improve on the works of God! In His eyes, it is but as yesterday since our parents, with bent backs and feeble knees, came out of the wood, and, “hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,” they stumbled on their humble human way. Fine roads and cars, big houses and convenient clothes we have procured ourselves; but let us not unwisely forget our origin, nor fail to recognise the Mystery of Mysteries, from which we emerged, and into which we shall soon again subside.
There is something so ridiculous in human pride, it is so silly as well as so sinful, that it is profitable to dwell in thought upon the touches of Nature that link us to our humbler kindred, even to those of our monkey cousins, surviving still. Well might Goethe glory, as we know he did, in his discovery of the intermaxillary bone—the little bone which the apes have between the jaws, but which men were always supposed to lack, until the poet and anatomist found it, latent and disused, but visible yet in every son of man.
On this and many other such likenesses, it is needless now to dwell. Encyclopædias are cheap, and the works of Charles Darwin. Rather consider [218] what has been noticed less, and is equally remarkable, the likenesses in feelings, habits and gestures, which depend less upon the bones and muscles than upon the nerves, and upon the spiritual springs, still more impalpable than nerves.
In learning to swim, for example, the first lesson is, do not lift the arms out of the water; for in water or anywhere else, when men are excited, up go their arms. This is not merely a conventional stage gesture. It has become so, because it is a spontaneous movement in real life. Why? Surely, because our arboreal ancestors, whether it was a lion in their way that frightened them or a bull, would take to the trees, and the uplifted arms were the first step to safety. Besides, the little babies in the trees, long, long ago, had to hang on to their mothers by their arms. The whole significance of the gesture lies in its spontaneity. It is by taking thought that we run. We have to learn to walk, no less than to dance; but the baby, newly born, lifts up his little arms, and thinks of what he is doing no more than does an adult in despair, or a drowning man that is sinking in the sea.
Let Aristotle and Confucius say what they will about the best road in the middle, the habits of innumerable ages cannot be unlearned at dictation. [219] In the hour of danger men are apt to revert, and grope for an escape upwards, like the apes, feeling that that must be the right direction—Excelsior. So “to the hills they lift their eyes” and run, when hills are visible and trees are not.
It is not only in the hour of danger that we feel this itching for altitude. It consoled the sailors who had to climb the masts. At least, they sometimes said so, singing with gusto,
To this day it makes yachtsmen happy—at least, some of them say so, and it is otherwise not easy to understand their preference for cloths stretched on poles to more efficient modern machinery. Be that as it may, it is certainly the itching for altitude that is the inherent part of the pleasure of climbing knotted ropes and poles and slippery mountain-sides, of drifting in balloons like clouds, or whirring madly about like monstrous mechanical partridges with motors in their bellies. For myriads of ages, our noble ancestors looked down upon things in general from the trees, and the taste revives in us readily, and soon feels as natural as winking.
So, if old fashions of decoration last, and a “coat [220] of arms” is needed for some successful sailor in the sky, he could choose no more appropriate emblem than a noble little gibbon. The mighty muscles of an orang-outang or gorilla might put a man to shame, whereas the gibbon is much smaller than ourselves. He is also the nimblest of all us creatures with legs and arms, and in various ways more like us than any of the others. So let the emblem be a gibbon and a man clasping hands, and the legend these plain words of simple truth—
“TWO CHILDREN OF THE AIR.”
It was “antipathy to Darwin,” they told me, which made a reverend missionary, in the last century, exhort some neighbours of ours, some Christian Karens in Burma, to “shoot at sight” the monkeys and little apes that occasionally took a few plantains from their gardens. The loss of fruit could be minimised in other, gentler ways, as their Burman neighbours showed them. The “heathens” were so “benighted” that they spoke of the trifling losses caused by the apes exactly as the poet Burns spoke of the depredations [221] of the little mouse, whose nest his plough destroyed—
It is a wonderful coincidence, which I know for a fact, that the Burmese Buddhist gardeners used phrases expressing similarly these identical sentiments.
The Christians were taught to feel differently. So it was lucky for her that it was in a “heathen” garden that the mother of our heroine was trespassing one day in 1892. Running from the sound of the approaching gardener, she escaped with difficulty, and left her girl behind. Poor frightened little mother, what a loss was there! You never knew the fate of your child. You never saw her any more at all.
The gardener carried the captured one in a basket to my wife, who agreed to adopt her, and named her Charlotte, or “Charlie” Darwin. For immediate company of her own size, she had a nice tabby, with whom she became quickly familiar. The little cats in the woods survive by haunting the trees, and doubtless live on terms of neutrality with the monkeys and the apes. The big leopard [222] is the common enemy of both the little cats and the monkeys. When once a suckling leopard, the size of a kitten, was given us, and my wife tried to coax a tabby to be wet nurse, and the cats of the house were all standing round observant of the stranger, the suckling gave a little leopard’s growl, and instantly the cats were panic-stricken, and fled to the roof, and stayed there long after the departure of the suckling, till hunger brought them down. The universal welcome these same cats extended to Charlie showed that her tribe was considered friendly. The first thing I remember of her, perhaps, also, her earliest recollection of our house, was her cheerfully dipping her nose in the cats’ dish, and sharing their milk.
She never needed a wet nurse, being more than half-grown when we received her. In fact, our neighbour had caught her pulling plantains. Among the common monkeys, the anxious mothers seem to have a rule of thumb to keep their young within reach, by using the tails as French nursemaids use the leading-strings. “The length of your tail, my child—no farther shall you go.” But our Charlie was of the human-like species, and no more had a tail than the reader himself. Besides, she was old enough to be out of leading-strings. Mother and daughter had been alike [223] absorbed in the fruit, and in an absent-minded way had let the gardener surprise them. He said he had never even flung a stone at a monkey, and always been content to chase them away. So Charlie Darwin and her mother had doubtless been presuming on his good-nature, as females are apt to do. But the sight of pretty Charlie tempted him, and he knocked her down, with a clod of earth, he said, and made her prisoner unhurt.
She soon grew to her full height, swelling visibly from week to week, almost from day to day, but the full height of her tribe is below army requirements. She was never much above two feet. Next to the size, the chief difference between her and the reader, if the reader is a girl, was that her arms were proportionally longer and stronger, and her legs shorter and weaker. Her Latin name was Hylobates Hooluck; but, as she never went to school, much less to college, it was never used. And nobody spoke of her as a gibbon. Plain “Charlie Darwin” she was always called, and seemed to like it.
She was not proud, though, if she had been, she might have been excused. The brightness of her face made her a centre of attraction. She seemed to dress well; for though she was never insulted [224] with humanly manipulated rags, her beautiful fur appeared to be like a perfectly fitting black satin dress, of Oriental cut, and gave Miss Charlie Darwin the look of a modest lady, at home in a drawing-room. Her sparkling eyes, like moist beads, were surmounted by big white eyebrows. These set off her features so well that one could understand why European ladies, in more leisurely days than ours, took time to mark their faces with beauty spots.
When moving or standing about in the drawing-room, she tottered at times, and would put her hand on anything convenient to support herself, as many an old lady likes to do; and often she would sit down, with a sigh of pleasure. But Charlie did not sit long anywhere. Her restless agility showed her youth. At tea-time, in particular, she was very much alive. She was devoted to fruit; but her natural good manners, some said, her female curiosity, said others, made her sample everything. She neglected the plain bread but, like other young people, had an almost undiscriminating love for cakes. Shortbread was an exception. She was very partial to it; and it was rare fun to give her none and keep it out of easy reach, and watch the result. She sat demurely unconcerned, as a woman can, [225] till she supposed she was unobserved. Then swiftly and softly she ran to where it was, never taking her eyes off the company, as if too interested in what they were saying to think of anything else; and deftly took the shortbread and resumed her seat, as if it were a matter of no consequence.
The only imperfection in her table manners was her way of drinking from a saucer, lapping her tea as the cats lapped milk. In vain my wife showed her a better example. Habits of that kind are easier to learn than to unlearn; and, after all, men also drink in that way at times, under primitive conditions, lapping of the water with the tongue, as a dog lappeth. (See Judges vii, 5.)
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 [226] 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, [227] 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. [228] 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.
There is an excellent man in Burma who is said to have lived many years upon nuts; and an acquaintance of his told me he had been led to the discovery that this was the ideal food, by the [229] consideration that nuts must be the staple food of monkeys. I suggested to vary his diet by a regular consumption of ants. Charlie was very fond of them. She would even pause in eating cake to pick up an ant if she saw one. I doubt if she would have done so for a nut. She used to pick up any ant, even the smallest, with finger and thumb with the utmost facility, and put the prize between her fine teeth and crunch it.
My wife had an egg in her hand one day on the veranda when she was talking to Charlie, who was sitting on the veranda rail. With sudden alacrity, Charlie grabbed the egg, and, holding it with both hands, tried to break the shell with her teeth. She failed. It is likely all the eggs she had received from her mother in the woods had thinner shells than those of hens, and so she did not think of using much force. She turned the big egg round and round in her hands with looks of astonishment; and then, in a business-like way, as if she knew there was just one thing to be done, she broke it on the veranda railing on which she was sitting, and guzzled the contents with such gusto that she smeared her face and soiled her dainty fur with the yoke. The next time she received an egg she was supplied with a saucer to break it in; but never disguised [230] her preference for the primitive way of doing she had learned in the woods. So, to make her use the saucer, my wife had herself to break the egg.
The plan of education adopted was in the style of Rabelais. “Do what you like,” was the first commandment. Or she might be said to have accepted Goethe’s gospel of self-culture, for she “developed” diligently. She never was teased by any kind of collars, chains, or bonds. There was never any restriction upon her, except that of hunger, which tethers us all, and in satisfying her hunger she could do what she liked.
While the house was liberty hall to her, and milk and fruit and rice and cakes and, in short, the necessaries of civilised life were there, the garden was in dry weather preferred, except of course at tea-time, and at night. Of roses and orchids she could have said what the toper said of beer—she may have had too much, but never enough. To be quite candid, she eyed the opening buds as boys eye fruit. She seldom waited till they bloomed fully before she ate them. When such visitors as native ladies had natural flowers in their top decorations, they had to be warned against Charlie’s attentions. It was funny to see her grave little face looking up at the lady caressing her, while the long, lithe arm was reached furtively [231] round to the top or back of the lady’s head, and the pretty flower there was deftly detached and brought to Charlie’s lips, without any pretence of chivalry.
One bad result of liberty, which happily did not take place, was suggested by the sad fate of a common brown monkey in Rangoon. It lived in the garden of a friend of mine, not far from the Scots Church, and was quiet and respectable until it took to drink. Everything was done to reclaim it, and it was on the road to a complete reformation, when it unfortunately discovered, at the top of a toddy-palm near where it lived, a pot into which a good deal of toddy had run. It could not resist the sudden temptation, and drank so much that it fell from the tree and broke its neck. It is well known that baboons are often sots, and the little brown monkeys are at times no better. Great, therefore, was my relief to see that Charlie, after sniffing the wines and spirits in the decanters one day, showed plainly that she did not like the smell. There were toddy-palms near our house too, but nothing ever induced her to try the effect of alcohol. In this matter, the saving clause, it now strikes me, was that there never was alcohol on the table till dinner-time, and by that time she was always asleep. The force of example is [232] very great on these little bits of men and women, a susceptibility of theirs which is one of their most human characteristics. I once heard a man boasting of having seduced a pet monkey into carousing with him, and drinking beer enough to have a headache in the morning, “just like master.” Charlie was never so tempted.
Our house was an old-fashioned, comfortable wooden building, all on one floor, and the floor about 10 feet above the ground, with a deep roof made of wooden shingles. When Charlie decided to run away no more she selected as her sleeping-place a part of the eaves with a convenient view of the interior, and yet far enough from the wall to be out of reach of anybody but a monkey or a bird. Unfortunately (for themselves) our pigeons had deserted their own little house and settled where Charlie decided to sleep. It was interesting and easy to watch what happened. Charlie took what room she wanted, and ignored their existence. For some weeks, I think, they lived together peaceably. Then the birds discovered that their new neighbour was fond of pigeons’ eggs, and went away, not because they were meek, for pigeons are pugnacious birds, but because they could not defend their nests.
Another gibbon known to me in Burma was less [233] fortunate in his dealings with “our feathered friends.” He was so young and inexperienced that he treated crows as Charlie treated the pigeons, and was mobbed by them to such purpose that long afterwards, when he was full-grown and able to go with his mistress to the tennis-court, holding on by her skirts, or hand in hand with her, it was a favourite joke of wicked men to cry, “Caw-caw-caw.” Thereat, in ecstasies of alarm, the little man deserted his mistress, and ran and hid himself under the nearest bush. Luckily for Charlie, there were no crows in our yard, only pigeons, whom she could push aside with impunity. They accepted their fate, and the place where they had lived so long knew them no more.
It was curious to see little Charlie, so weak that she trembled at a dog if it came within reach of her, thus exercising the law of the jungle, that might is right, on what was weaker still.
Charlie’s favourite seat was upon the veranda rail. It gave her a wide and beautiful view of the garden and the river and forests, to say nothing of the far-off mountains [234] blue, her native home, for Hylobates Hooluck is by choice a mountaineer. Indoors, without moving more than her head, by merely looking round, she could see the drawing-room, whereof the veranda was an extension, and, through wide doorways never closed, the much more interesting dining-room beyond.
Dr Clark, once famous as Gladstone’s physician, is said to have been fond of telling how he watched a little girl sitting in front of a fire, to which a footman brought coals. The man took no notice of her till she coughed violently; and then he looked round, and a few kind words passed.
“Why did you cough?“ asked the doctor, when the man had gone.
“To make James look at me,” said the candid child; but it is surprising in a man like Clark that he is said to have quoted this as an indication of the inferiority of women. If he really did so, it was because he had not thought the matter out, and was confused by words. The difference between men and women is one of kind, not of degree. It is not a difference of less or more, but of sex. A million women could not make one man; but neither could a million men make one women.
Now it is true that a normal little boy, sitting [235] where the girl sat, would not have felt an inclination to attract the attention of a maid, mending the fire; and it is true that normal little girls are continually acting as the doctor saw that little one act. The gentle sex spontaneously craves to be noticed by the other. Why? Surely, because they have been specialised in character no less than in physical form for domestic life; and their essential business ever is to study and humour the men, whose function is to feed and protect them and their children. “He for God only, she for God in him,” remains as true as gravitation, even if we fling the Hebrew Bible aside, and give the great Reality some other name.
That this specialisation of sex comes from a far-off date was curiously manifested by our little Charlie. Indeed it was easy to see, and easy to verify by observation in the hills, that “her people” lived under social arrangements like the patriarchal family. Sir Henry Maine, if he had known it, might have reinforced his argument on ancient law from an antiquity manifested by the habits of these small people, compared to which the oldest days of Rome were but as yesterday. So completely womanly was our pet that many of her doings were conundrums to masculine wits. It takes a woman to understand a woman. He was a wiser [236] man than usual who said—“When I say I know women, I mean that I know I don’t know them.”
Perhaps no man could ever have guessed what Charlie found amiss with our fine tom-cat. “Don’t you see? Tom takes no notice of her,” it was explained. “He ignores her existence.”
Tom’s manners were simply perfect Piccadilly. If Charlie had been conventional middle-class English, she would have been humbled. If French or German, she might have been amused or angry, according to circumstances. Being as irrepressibly democratic as the Burmans and Mongolians in general, she was simply puzzled; and in playing at tig or some other game with the other cats, which was a habit of hers, she might often be observed to be watching Tom with a perplexed look, like a kindly teacher “taking stock” of a backward pupil. Tom never looked at her.
One day, as she sat on the veranda rail, she was seen to be intently studying him. He lay motionless, as if asleep, under an easy chair, his tail projecting far. She leapt lightly down to the floor, ran noiselessly along it, as if on tip-toe, and was in the act of reaching forth her hand to the tail, when Tom sprang to attention, and the threatened tail began to swell and sway from side to side in the air. Unabashed, (for indeed [237] I never saw her abashed, only frightened, and on this occasion she was not frightened), she gleefully ran round the chair, chasing the tail, with merry cries of “Oo-oo-oo-oo-oo!”
Tom sulkily turned one way and another, keeping his tail out of reach, and visibly perplexed. Charlie enjoyed the game immensely. It lasted a long time, and then Tom lost patience, and thrust out his paw, with the claws extended.
He could hardly have hoped to touch her. He might as easily have caught a swallow. The claws did not come within five inches of her; but the savage gesture was an outrage to her feelings. She ejaculated what sounded like a squeak, but perhaps should be called a scream; and as he remained callous and far from apologetic, she turned her back upon the clown and resumed her seat upon the rail. Tom, for his part, with a greater air of dignity than usual, if possible, the sacred tail uplifted inviolate, that is to say, untouched, stalked grandly away; but he had not gone two yards before Charlie leapt upon the floor again, as noiseless as a shadow, and swift “as arrow from a bow,” she darted after him and seized the end of his tail between her finger and thumb. She seemed to pinch it, and certainly gave it a sharp tug; and then, like [238] magic, when Tom whirled round, she was sitting on the rail again, making faces at him, and audibly chuckling in the intervals of triumphant hooting, “Oo-oo-oo-oo-oo!”
He gazed at her awhile in bewilderment, and moved away.
Ever after she returned from seeking her mother, Charlie eyed the woods like a frightened child, and vehemently plumped for civilisation. No wonder! Death is ever at hand for all beings; but in the woods it seems to press upon you. The very tigers have a recurring prospect of death by starvation, a fact which should mitigate our hatred of them, while confirming our hostility. The Lilliputian tribe of gibbons have lively days, quite full of trouble. They are so human, and yet so much weaker than humanity, struggling to save their carcasses from leopards and Christians by sheer agility and co-operation, living from hand to mouth, [239] picking from the bushes what they can, where any bush may hide a mortal enemy.
I had noticed among the hills that one heard nothing of them at nights; and, watching Charlie’s ways, I soon saw why. Having found a cozy corner for herself in the eaves, at the expense of the pigeons, she retired to it at dark, as regularly as Shakespeare’s ploughman. She, “with a body filled and vacant mind, got her to rest, ... never saw horrid night, the child of Hell, slept in Elysium....”
She detested lamps more than Ruskin did steam-engines. He sometimes went in trains. She would have nothing to do with lamps. She—went to bed. Vain was it to light her roost and offer fruit of the most attractive quality. You could set the cocks a-crowing with your artificial dawn; but Charlie knew too much. She lifted her head, and that was all. She looked at you a second or two, blinking sleepily; and turned to rest again. We are children of the light, the apes and we, no less than children of the air; and Charlie would not quit her sleeping place until the sun relit the world.
Then she rose and came into our room for fruit. In a country near the Equator, like Lower Burma, sunrise and sunset fall between five and [240] seven o’clock all the year round; and Charlie’s hours differed little from those of the villagers. So she came in with the dawn and the morning coffee; but, at that early hour, she would take nothing but fruit, perhaps because she was in a hurry to go out of doors. She did not even give us her company while she was eating. Fruit in hand, she toddled out and away.
She always toddled on the floor, like a child, when she went slowly; but her usual gait was a light run, such as they now practise in some Continental armies, as the least fatiguing way for infantry to cover the ground at times, especially going downhill. You bend forward a little (how much, depends on your centre of gravity), and trot, trot, trot, never straightening the legs. I saw the crew of H.M.S. Devastation running about in that way, during some manœuvres in the seventies, and heard men talking of it as “a way we have in the navy, keeps the boys awake, we never walk.” So I would have claimed the discovery for the British navy, when a foreign doctor claimed to have invented it, if I had not known that both had been forestalled long ago by the little apes.
Necessity had doubtless been the mother of invention for them, as it is so often for us. These [241] little creatures dare not walk in the woods, as men and big apes can do. When on the ground they have to run for their lives, at the top of their speed. Up in the trees they are safe from a tiger, and even from a leopard, as a rule, if they see him. But on the ground there is no beast needs do them reverence. The smallest adult jungle dog could singly kill the sturdiest of gibbons. That was why Charlie had learned from her mother to trot like a man-of-war’s man on any flat surface.
When I paid a morning visit to the stable, she often met me there. She had not walked across the compound; but from some high tree had noticed me and come whirling down. I have seen her rub her hand upon the pony’s rock-salt, and then put it to her lips and look at me making various inviting sounds, as if to say, “Try this; it’s not at all bad.” At other times, like a child, she put grain between her teeth and crunched it. I think I have seen her spit it out; but cannot remember seeing her swallow it.
She would accompany me as far as the gate, I on the ground, she up aloft, and rather quicker for the short distance; but she stopped at the edge of the compound, looking timidly at the [242] woods on the farther side of the road, and never venturing beyond the fence.
Towards eight o’clock, I was told, she was generally among the trees near the gate, where she had a view of the roads by which I would return; but it was not a matter of personal affection. Whenever she saw me in the distance, she knew that breakfast would be ready in half an hour, and hastened indoors to look round, having a fine youthful appetite, freshened by exercise. Her business-like, straight return journey was considered so safe a sign that I was in sight that the cook believed her rather than the clock. The explanation was that breakfast was required at an irregular time, between nine and ten, but regularly about half an hour after my return. So Charlie was pronounced “really useful.”
When we were at dinner she was always asleep; but, with equal regularity, she was always impatiently awaiting us at the breakfast table.
A chair was set for her, of course, but never used, except as a stepping-stone to the table. It [243] did not suit her size, and we did not have one specially made for her, as the giants did for Gulliver. She so obviously did not want it that it would have been superfluous.
The knives and forks she examined curiously, but without admiration. Like the Asiatics of old, she kept or made her fingers clean enough to eat with, and desired no better implements. I never saw her use a spoon, except to rap on the table.
Sitting upon the table, she faced my wife and watched her, as if she felt, but in a friendly way, as Frederick the Great felt towards the Emperor Joseph, whose portrait he kept in view, saying, “That is the person to keep mine eye upon.”
Though clever at imitation, she adhered to her own ways of eating and drinking, and did not imitate ours. This may have been because her habits of that kind were fixed before she came to us; but we thought her way of lapping was like the cat’s.
She did not remain seated upon the table, but walked about upon it, like a petite Madame Sans-Gêne, or little Miss Free-and-Easy. At first she was circumspect in her movements and did no damage. But familiarity brings carelessness, and [244] carelessness catastrophes. As the Chinese say, too:—
So the day came when she tripped, and there was a loud smash. Then she whisked herself to the pole of a curtain hanging near. So quick she went that observers could not agree whether she touched the curtain on the way, or mounted with a hop, skip and jump.
Once there, she found that that perch had great natural advantages. It commanded a complete view of the back premises as well as the dining-room, and yet was not many yards from the table. So she always stayed there, for choice, afterwards.
The place visibly pleased her from its elevation. She liked looking down, and disliked looking up. She showed her preference with a naïve candour that left no room for doubt, and has always seemed to me to illustrate and illuminate the laws of Society.
Of course, she was regularly served. Whatever she called for was handed up. And more than once I recollect that we affected to forget her, and did not look at her or heed her. Then down she [245] came, and walked about on the table, helping herself and chattering in our faces, with many a grimace and “Oo-oo-oo,” our small, black Madame Sans-Gêne, with the big white eyebrows, the little Miss Free-and-Easy.
Once it happened that Charlie was left in charge of a neighbour, as she was young and we had to go from home; and in the neighbour’s house a dog bit her. When next she saw my wife she flung her arms round my wife’s neck, and clung to her with sobs and moans, and all the gestures natural to her sex in affliction, and ever afterwards she seemed to feel that dogs were hostile.
I recollect that once our house was filled with visitors, some local tin-god and official attendants, and one of the aforesaid attendants had a bright little terrier at his heels. Poor dog, his master could not silence the irreverent barkings that interrupted even the divinity his master was attending. Cuffs and kicks were useless. Charlie, up aloft, had fixed the terrier with her glittering eye, and “Oo-oo-oo-ed” at him till he was frantic. When [246] he was thrashed into a moment’s silence, and she saw she was observed, she nimbly scuttled away among the upper carpentry, only to reappear in a few seconds elsewhere, and catch the dog’s eye again, and “Oo-oo-oo” at him afresh; and then the barking recommenced, and the inevitable beating and yelping, which she seemed to enjoy immensely.
Although she went about on her hind legs, as we do, she did not despise her four-footed acquaintances, and was always intimate with the tabby, to whom she had been introduced on arrival. It was a pretty sight to watch them dip their little heads together into the saucer of milk. They always started fair, but pussy lapped the better. The milk diminished so fast that Charlie could see that her share would be the smaller one at that rate. Then tenderly but irresistibly she put her strong right arm round pussy’s neck and pulled her back, out of reach of the saucer. Charlie went on lapping herself, looking round often at the cat, winking vigorously with both eyes, and uttering various friendly vowel sounds. Here, perhaps, it had better be noted, for the [247] information of philologists, that hers was exclusively a vowel language. I never heard her sound a consonant. It would therefore have been difficult to represent it phonetically. The modulations of tones were too delicate for an Aryan ear; but a Chinaman might have been more successful, and my Burmans caught them well. Her meaning could best have been recorded by ideograms, like the oldest of the Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphs. But there was no use for such a thing. She did not need it, and would not have learned it.
It was probably the accompanying gestures that made pussy understand her. To be pulled back from the saucer, and tightly held out of reach of it, is what may be called an unmistakable hint. Puss acquiesced. When Charlie thought their shares had been equalled she relaxed the embrace, and puss began again; but though she resumed drinking in a polite, deferential way, as if saying, “By your leave, ma’am,” puss never abated her speed of lapping, and so had soon to be withdrawn once more. Occasionally this took place as often as three or four times in the emptying of one saucer; and seldom did it fail to happen once. In fact I noticed that at length they used to begin operations with Charlie’s arm upon pussy’s neck, ready for action. Day after day [248] this went on. Puss never struggled. When the milk was thus equally finished they parted friends. The great rule of equity law, that “Equality is equity,” was never better practised; and so profoundly is it in accordance with the nature of things that even a cat can understand it, when constrained.
But where had Charlie learned that “Equality is equity,” a rule that has been found beyond the grasp of a “common”-minded chancellor? Surely, in the family circle. Her whole character, and, in particular, the readiness to imitate, upon which I do not dwell only because everybody knows that kind of thing, was that of one who had inherited family instincts, whose ancestors had lived in families for immemorial generations. The habits of living species are slowly modified in the lapse of millenniums; and we were not teaching Charlie tricks, but letting her develop naturally, and observing her.
The mention of imitation reminds me that Charlie could handle my wife’s hand-mirror as well as any lady; but the first sight of it raised [249] hopes that were disappointed. She was seen to be moving it back and forward with one hand, while with the other she was groping behind it, until at last she was satisfied that there was no other gibbon there. The great life-sorrow of Charlie was that she never saw another like herself again. It was pathetic to see her looking in the mirror, and then at other inmates of the house, as if asking herself, “Why am I so different?” She was like Robinson Crusoe, without a chance of deliverance; or she might be compared to Gulliver among the giants. Though in proportion not so small as he was, she was too small to feel at home or among equals; and for animals as for men to be weak is to be miserable, and strength and weakness are largely matters of comparison. We petted her so that she did not feel that much; and though nothing could supply the lack of kindred beings, the lapse of time benumbed the pain, and she was consoled.
One of the best-known bits of English literature is the sentence which keeps the memory of old Hobbes green, his fancy picture of a state of Nature.—
“No arts, no letters, no society, and which is
[250]
worst of all” (especially for philosophers),
“continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life
of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
The great mistake in this nightmare description is the supposition that men were ever solitary by natural habits. Never, never, O Hobbes, since men began to be, never but in artificial conglomerations defying the laws of Nature, and dying in consequence, never did men and women stand alone. Individualism in its extreme form is actual insanity. In moderate forms it has always been common. It fills our jails to-day. It is almost universal among the cat tribes; but wherever and whenever it spreads among men it leads to death. The most primitive of human creatures ever known to maintain themselves have been found to live in families. The human apes, nay, the very baboons do likewise. So it is contrary to science or sifted common-sense to think of our arboreal ancestors as solitaries.
What probably misled Hobbes was the remark of Tacitus, in his Germany (XVI), that the Germans, who may have seemed to Hobbes, as to a great French historian, “the last arrived of the barbarians,” lived “scattered and apart, just as a spring, a meadow, or a wood has attracted them.” But Tacitus goes on to tell how they lived in [251] villages, and were united in tribes or clans, just like the people of Afghanistan both then and now, or the Highland clans till the eighteenth century.
What misled Hobbes is matter of conjecture. That he was mistaken is certain. It would be contrary to all analogies based on our existing knowledge, that is to say, it would be sheer hallucination to imagine that, between our cousins the human apes, and primitive humanity, who both live in families, there was a different kind of creatures in human form, who lived like cats, each for himself, and every man against everybody else. Hobbes, himself, if he were alive to-day, would laugh at that, and in the light of new knowledge he would be the first to allow that, though life in a state of Nature has its drawbacks, solitude was never one of them. Civilisation is the art of living together; and it commenced with family life in immemorial antiquity, before we left the trees, so that it may be said to be older than humanity itself.
It is a common remark of Japanese philosophers, applying Western science to their Eastern histories, that filial affection is unknown to [252] the beasts, and the last feeling to develop in spiritual evolution, and consequently the first to deteriorate. That is how they have been known to explain the moral inferiority of Western civilisation; for, as lawyers, on legal-political questions, do always—of course in a perfectly honourable manner—adapt their legal principles to their politics, so do philosophers, unconsciously, shape theories to suit their national prejudices. Why not? A man whose trade is words can find reasons for anything; but a man who cares for nothing but the truth soon learns not to theorise beyond his knowledge.
However, I never quarrel with anybody, least of all with the philosophers. They can either stretch their theory, or else say Charlie was not a beast. One or other of these two things they must do, when they know how she convinced her sceptical master that she loved as a dutiful child and was utterly devoted to the lady who had received and fed and protected her—master’s wife. A little girl who risks her life for her stepmother is sure to be well furnished by nature with filial piety.
Many were the experiments made to test this, as soon as time enough had elapsed to let filial affection germinate in Charlie, if the germ of it [253] were in her. My wife had long been sure of it, but I was doubting yet, when an indisputable experiment settled the question in Charlie’s favour, and so, perhaps, gave her a place in history.
By the happiest of inspirations, one morning, my wife began crying and sobbing while Charlie was still within hearing, at the other end of the house but not yet outside the eaves. “Pretend to slap me,” she said, “and make a noise.”
I obeyed, and Charlie heard. Swift as a flash, she reappeared on the partition wall, between the bedroom and the dressing-room, and moving restlessly upon it, with arms now and then uplifted in distress, she “Oo-oo-oo-ed” at the top of her voice, and made hideous grimaces at me, and uttered guttural grunts we had never heard before, quite German or Pathan in accent, noises that seemed to emanate from the deepest depths of her being.
By the help of a mirror, I could see her without directly looking at her. Finding threats and expostulations unheeded, she took a leap of more than two yards, and landed on the curtain poles of the bed. I could not then pretend not to see her; but, to her horror, I heeded her no more than before. Then she made another big leap, and landed on my shoulders, and, as I felt before I felt her feet, clapped a hand upon each eye. If it had [254] been serious fighting, as she believed it was, she might have had my eyes out before I was aware of her movement—so quick was she, “like a needle.” At least, she could have blinded me for the moment—at the probable cost of her life. She had, in fact, in her desperation, for my wife’s sake, ventured to try the identical feat that Ulysses practised on the cannibal monster Polyphemus, whom he blinded in his cave. If one reflects that she could hardly have weighed a stone, and the man she attacked was rather above than below the average of men in size and weight, one cannot refuse to her the praise that properly belongs to a Jack-the-Giant-Killer or tricky Ulysses.
That she was generally timid, as was natural for her size and sex, merely clenches the argument about her filial feeling. Say, if you like, that it was excitement, half-hysterical, that did it. What caused the excitement but her devotion?
Luckily for myself, I had been watching her closely. My hands were on her little wrists in a moment, and no harm was done; and my wife’s caresses soon composed her.
I would gladly have repeated the experiment oftener than was allowed, which was only after long intervals about twice; and on every such occasion, the whole drama was rehearsed, the small [255] spontaneous performer never failing to make her death-defying leap. And every time she did it, she was rewarded not with tit-bits only, but with what children dearly love, a pleasant sight. My wife thrashed me. Then Charlie laughed. She rolled from side to side, as she sat on the partition wall, as if “unable to contain herself.” She “Oo-oo-oo-ed” approval, and danced for joy.
In the eighth book of his autobiography (Dichtung, etc.), Goethe moralises that “with the infinite idiosyncrasy of human nature on the one side, and the infinite variety in the modes of life and pleasure on the other, it is a wonder that the human race has not worn itself out long ago.” He explains the mystery by a toughness which, it is now safe to say, must have been inherited from our arboreal ancestors, for Charlie had it in full measure.
The fact was that, when she grew up, she suffered from ennui, and no wonder! She had food without seeking it, and was safe from the continual dangers that kept her lively and busy in the woods. Without a husband “to [256] make her uneasy,” as the old song says, and no children to work for, she was in the same painful quandary as so many good maiden ladies I know, whose “only labour is to kill the time, and labour dire it is, and weary woe.” Often enough it is not their fault, as it was not Charlie’s.
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.”
Wondering, if not worshipping, as she blinked at the morning sun, Charlie Darwin then and all the rest of the day was continually giving opportunities of observation such as would have rejoiced the heart of Wallace. The [261] gibbons in a Zoo are more out of their element than men in a jail. They are surrounded by strange sights and sounds, and stupefied and quasi-paralysed by lack of occupation. We can learn little more from them living there than from their little bodies when they are dead. Nor are pets more satisfactory. At any rate all others I have seen, but Charlie, were too sophisticated. You could no more learn from them their native life, than you could learn the ways of English children in the country by watching poor little guttersnipes, who have never been out of town.
But Charlie was the real wild maid of the woods, the genuine gibbon, unadulterated. She never needed to conform to our ways unless she saw fit to do so, to please herself. It was live and let live, on both sides. She was at home in every sense. Cousins of hers, perhaps actual brothers and sisters, or her bereaved mother, were roving free, not very far away—as free as any wild beast ever is, that is to say, living from hand to mouth as usual, seeking provender. And after all, that is how Nature first made man—
One day as I was listening to mingled sounds from [262] across the river, thinking I heard the “Oo-oo-oos” of the gibbons, mingled with dogs’ barking and human cries, there seemed to be a look of recognition on Charlie’s face, and she also listened; but neither then nor at any time did she make a second attempt to join her relatives, so that her master began to hope that, perhaps, when she was older, some likely bachelor of their clan might be attracted to civilisation by her. It was quite certain she would never revert. She had had her fill of barbarism.
The melancholy moping of her first few days, when she used to eye the woods, never returned after it went away. From dawn to dusk, her mercurial activity never ceased, and that fact seemed to her master to illuminate one of the most interesting problems in mental evolution.
It is not yet very long since Sandow and others have taught us that the best way to develop the muscles is to use them frequently in gentle exercises, avoiding great spasmodic efforts, which strain and weaken them. The same law applies to the mind. There was a Latin jingle to that effect current long ago in schools, which is worth preserving as a bit of old-fashioned wisdom. I never saw it in print, but was taught it orally [263] many years ago by one who had learned it in the same way sixty years before.
The meaning is this—
Assuming for the sake of brevity that the reader agrees to this, which is a matter about which men of sense are generally agreed, what has to be told is that Charlie Darwin, our Charlie, illustrating evolution without studying it, unconsciously suggested that the approved method of steady and gentle exertion was merely a continuation of Nature’s way upwards, the identical way that Nature took to bring the apes above the other beasts, and then improve the apes. Their hands provided a ready means of action for many purposes, and their habits of diet, which made them ever ready to eat, provided a perpetual supply of motive power. The great progressive movement, so begun, has never stopped. The restlessness and the ennui which cause so many crimes and follies are Nature’s impulse, misused or neglected. [264] It comes from habits older than the hills. It is the vital force of each. With it, we may do evil, if we will; but we can do nothing at all without it. The cats can gorge themselves and sleep in happiness and health; but Nature has made that impossible for gibbons and for men.
Of course the only novelty here is the suggestion that continual employment was Nature’s way of stimulating the growth of the brain. The doctrine that beings, with such brains as men and apes have now, can find content and peace in healthy occupation, and in no other way, is a very old discovery; but, as there are many to whom philosophy is folly written large, it may make the truth more credible to them to mention that Charlie’s habits proved this beyond a doubt, and so corroborated the profoundest conclusion of Aristotle (Ethics).
She also ratified the rhetoric of John Ruskin. His declamations against the excessive division of labour were the derision of practical people in the nineteenth century. “Polishing the pins with men’s souls! Bah!” With shrugs and sneers they intimated that he was a lunatic. If he had not been rich, he might have been jailed as an incendiary. Rich or poor, he would have been in danger anywhere but in free and happy England. [265] And now England’s patience is rewarded by the discovery that Ruskin was essentially right. If our brains have been developed by our innate readiness to “turn our hands to anything,” then, assuredly, to restrict activity to one or two mechanical movements is to reverse the natural process, and so torture the mind worse than the constraining bandages torture the feet of Chinese ladies. The damage done to vital organs in that way cannot be compensated by any wages.
Thus were the conclusions of Aristotle and the rhetoric of Ruskin reinforced by the example of Charlie Darwin.
By May 1893, when Charlie had been about a year in her master’s house, he had been about two and a half years in the same station, in charge of the same district, doing the same kind of work. The average for the province was a few months. So he should not have been surprised that he was then, on the shortest possible notice, transferred from where he was, in the Sittang valley, in the east of Burma, to a district with headquarters on Ramri Island, off the western coast.
[266] What to do with Charlie in such a hurry, with such a destination, would have been a troublesome question if she had not by that time become independent and able to support herself. It was not that any gibbon-Romeo had found her out. That happy fate had been impossible in the time allowed. If, indeed, we had continued to dwell there in the woods for another year or so, it was the confident expectation of the neighbouring gardeners that some enterprising young gibbon would have recognised her charms, and appreciated the combined advantages of freedom and plenty. An official post, with abundance to eat and drink and nothing to do, truly it was the very kind of soft job that Mr Kipling’s heroes roam the world to find. Yes, assuredly, the gardeners were right. We would have had another civilised gibbon very soon. Already somebody was considering on what terms, as to housing and settlements, the managers of the Rangoon Zoo might obtain the family. But, like many another spinster, Charlie lost her chance through no fault of her own. We could not stay, and when suddenly the time came to go, Charlie was ready. She had won her independence differently.
It came about in this way. Our house was on the edge of the town. There was nothing beyond [267] it but some Buddhist temples and the rifle-range. The way to both these places of resort was the road by the side of which, among the trees, Charlie finished her morning exercises, and sat watching for my return, impatient for breakfast. So she was soon noticed by the people, policemen, volunteers or villagers, who were often passing about that very time, and they never failed to stop and watch her. Monkeys are not uncommon; but a gibbon is a rare and popular sight on the plains of Burma. Few of the passers-by had ever seen so human a beast before, not even the Hindu policemen, who hold monkeys in special honour.
Of all the tribes who have both arms and legs, including ourselves, the gibbons appear to be, proportionately, the strongest in the arms. Those of Malaysia, in particular, called “agile” by naturalists, are among the record leapers of the world, clearing at a fling a space beyond the capacity of perhaps any other being without wings. Darwin and Wallace would explain this by pointing out that they are the prey of animals that lie in wait to catch them as they pass from tree to tree, so that those of them who touched the ground the least would be the most likely to survive. The same tendencies are visible in Burma, and though Charlie’s immediate kindred are not [268] such record-makers as her cousins in Malaysia, they are fine performers, and so was she.
By slow degrees, not all at once, the little acrobat in black velvet tights became aware of the friendly attention of the observing crowds. It was a visible addition to the pleasure of both sides to be conscious of each other. The people began to applaud. When they saw her enjoy their applause, they applauded the more. She seemed so like a prima donna or actress, that I have never, since then, made the common mistake of supposing the “little airs” of a woman on a public scene to be affectation. Once, in particular, I was watching her unobserved, when she seemed, in her excitement, to have forgotten for the moment breakfast and everything else. She was apparently resting when first I caught sight of her, and she did not see me. At any rate, she was sitting with her back to the audience, looking over her shoulder at intervals to make sure that they were still waiting. Then she began to go bounding round the tree. After a little of this, she went in a corkscrew direction upwards, and when high up flung herself to a neighbouring tree. The feat was received with a burst of applause, in the midst of which she went whirling round and came to the top of the tree, and sat there, on the airiest [269] pinnacle, surveying the admiring crowd with complacency.
This happened oftener and oftener. When I was transferred, all sorts of people offered to take her. So, first, she went to see how she liked the surroundings of the house of the Sergeant-Instructor of the Volunteers. Her subsequent history was reported thus.—
The Sergeant’s house adjoined the barracks of the Hindu (Sikh) policemen, who had been the most appreciative of her many admirers; and Charlie was not a chained monkey, but a free woman, though a Lilliputian. It soon appeared that she now needed more admiration than any one man could give. She took less and less notice of the Sergeant and his wife, and stayed more and more in the trees beside the barracks, and at last it was agreed that she was to be common property, while all were there together, but that the Hindus were to take her when they marched away. And that was how Charlie became a camp-follower and the pet of a battalion.
We next heard of her in 1897, when a native officer called upon us at Toungoo, expressly to give us news of her. She was then with her battalion in Rangoon, and as popular as ever. The details he gave have slipped from memory, [270] all but one, which he repeated in English, addressing my wife: “Karlie” (so they pronounced her name) “Karlie is now very fat.”
In later years I tried to find out more, but failed. These little people do not live long. There was a rumour that she died in 1905; and, doubtless, she did die, her body returning to dust and air, and her perplexed spirit, as her Hindu friends, and indeed her old master too, would agree to say, subsiding into the great ocean of being that floods the world.