Sitting on the shaky planks, surrounded by either twenty-five or twenty-seven packages, they stared into the gray heat-haze where the river curved, and the leaden trunks and streamers of the trees, prolonged by reflection in the shining slime, muddled the distance, as if by a frowzy bead-curtain. Space and time hung about the place like gray, shoddy garments, infinitely too large for man and his shrunken activities here.

After a long wait, a mean and weakly chug chug was heard, and the dirty launch had suddenly appeared to mark where the trees were, after all, divided. Emily stood up in her skimpy cotton frock and watched its approach with fluttering heart. This then was the steamship, a major factor in Tennyson’s dictum, Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. She was glad she was not going to Cathay.

Its poor appearance, however, did not damp her excitement, for the splendors of the civilization she was now going to visit had been too strongly impressed upon her in her reading to be negatived by the shortcomings of a little African mailboat. Nor were they entirely canceled by the prospect of a life of unsatisfied emotion, which was all she had to look forward to.

“For,” said the sensible little creature, “mind is still mind, whatever may befall the heart; perhaps the more so. I will visit Madame Tussaud’s and the Tower of London, and become as well-informed as any of my sex, if not as happy. I will drain each new experience to its dregs, as far as is consistent with proportioned and virtuous conduct, and, since my life is to be a tragedy, I will see to it that it does not descend into mawkishness through a deficiency of intellectual content.”

And, reminding herself that this was her first journey by water, and the beginning of a new life, she looked keenly about her as she tripped up the gangway.

“I hope,” she thought fervently, “that I shall not be sick.”

Soon the packages were all stowed away on board, and the captain, in accents which boredom rendered as flat and colorless as the mudbanks among which he sailed, declared that all was serene. Ropes were unhitched, the engine strove and stank once more, and they were off. If Mr. Fatigay had been less absorbed in his own thoughts at the moment, he might have noticed that the tall fringes of the jungle were festooned with the innumerable dark faces, like gigantic plums, of a host of chimpanzees, mostly toms, who had come to look their last on this Helen of the jungle. Darkest Africa would be the darker for her going; this she could not doubt, who saw it written so unmistakably in those crowded mournful faces, so simple and sincere.

Day after day the little boat ticked its way through the uneasy stupor of the Congo, under high bluffs where vultures sat, soaked in metallic light, on the gallowsy branches of dead trees; over shallow places where reeds, swarming with filthy larvae, poked up from the mud like mangy hair; past sandbanks hideously alive with the scuttling panic of crocodiles; past squalid settlements where nothing stirred but a scream, or, worse still, a laugh; and on down to where the great estuary began, and the port sweltered behind the roll of hot flashing breakers at the ocean bar.

The boat on to which they were to exchange for the sea voyage was due to sail on the day of their tardy arrival, so that Emily, who had been looking forward to her first sight of a town of size, had to content herself with an inspection of the quays, and with but a distant glimpse of white buildings and tin-roofed shacks dancing in the quivering air. Her disappointment, though, was soon forgotten at the sight of the crowded ship, and at the thought that now she might come into contact, more or less as an equal, with the sort of people among whom she was to live.

It was, as she afterwards discovered, through the generous consideration of her master, that she was not disappointed of this pleasure also, and forced to spend the three weeks of the voyage penned in a narrow cage between decks, in disgusting proximity to crates of serpents and the reeking young of the greater cats.

Mr. Fatigay could not endure the thought of his sensitive pet languishing in such hateful confinement, and his desire for her presence beside him, no less than his fears for her health, had prompted him to apply to the Company for a special ticket, that she might share his stateroom on the voyage. To this they had agreed, providing that she was to be suitably attired, and that he would take all responsibility for her behavior, and that the full passenger’s fare was to be paid. As to her good conduct, he had no doubts at all, for she had proved so apt a pupil in even the subtlest points of the etiquette in which he had instructed her; besides, he knew that a sweeter-natured creature had never drawn breath than Emily. The fare had been a serious consideration, for his savings amounted to no great figure, and he had an instinct that Miss Amy Flint, his bride to be, would be ill-content at any rash expenditure on his part. But here, he felt, Amy would agree that he was justified. As for dress, it had been a simple matter to purchase a plain cotton frock and a shady, if unmodish, sunbonnet from the village store.

Emily was pleasedly conscious of her outfit as, holding tightly to his strong hand, she accompanied him through the bustle and life of the promenade deck in search of their cabin. She wondered what all these tall, bronzed men and elegantly costumed women would say to one another about her, and she thought it possible that the simplicity of her dress, and the modest way in which she bent her head as she passed among them, might commend her to their good graces as one who was not inclined to presume nor to give herself airs because her talents had raised her to a milieu so widely different from the condition into which she had been born.

“Who can that dumpy little brown creature be?” was what they actually were saying. “The one going along with that shabby fellow there. One of those women anthropologists, I suppose.”

And as such they accepted her, taking the silent nods and smiles with which she acknowledged their formal good mornings as resulting from the shyness and reserve of the dowdy student, until, a day or two later, when Mr. Fatigay, on being asked if his wife was not a great traveler, since she stood the sea so well, replied in surprise:

“My wife? Excuse me, but I have no wife. At least, not yet. . .”

“Then who, pray,” demanded his interrogator, for, being the wife of a Cape magistrate, she considered herself responsible for the morals of all who met her, and not responsible for those of the lost legion who did not, “who, pray, is that lady in the sunbonnet over there, who, I am told, shares your stateroom, sir, where, for some reason, she always takes her meals?”

“Oh!” said Mr. Fatigay. “That! That’s not a lady: That’s Emily.”

Then, suddenly aware of his interlocutor’s puffed and purpled visage, he made haste to add, “That is to say, she’s not what you might call a woman at all. She’s my pet chimpanzee.”

“Oh, really!” cried the lady, the storm which had been gathering on her brow now melting into an expression of astonishment and interest. “Really! In that sunbonnet, and the way she walks, everyone has taken it for granted she was your wife.