Sitting on the wide veranda, however, almost alone, his personality expands naïvely, and something quite poetic appears in the twilight of that hour and of his nature, like the sweet but inconsiderable bloom on a ragged nocturnal weed.

I have said almost alone in order to prepare you, lest, hearing his voice rise and fall with more point and direction than a man employs who idly mutters to himself, and noticing, as we draw near enough to see into the shadows of the veranda, that no other white-clad figure is stretched out there, you should conclude that he is mad. This is not quite so. Like Vaughan, he is least alone when most alone. He has not noticed it, but he, whose shyness limits his conversation to a string of Empire-builder’s clichés when he is in the company of his compatriots, he becomes positively fluent and individual only when in the presence of that which moves in the corner behind his chair. He becomes quite a chatterbox. What is it that moves? Look! It’s Emily! Here she comes!

Do you wonder, when you see her emerge into the shaft of lamplight, smiling her Irish smile, brushing the floor with the knuckles of her strong capable hands, do you wonder that the branches of the great tree, that which shades the bedrooms from the aching moon, are sometimes torn asunder, when a dark face juts out over a straining hairy torso [Henry’s face, who has shared her arboreal infancy, a face all convulsed in the puzzled clown-grief the Prologue speaker plays on us in Pagliacci: “A word! A moment. . . .”] But no word comes, naturally, and the moment is lost, and the heavy boughs press inward and close, drowning that woeful face in a flurry of white blossoms and shining leaves, as if in moon-breaking water. Can you wonder that on the silvered grass-patch her mother and sisters sometimes stand, tangled in each other’s comforting arms till they look like a Laocoön group cut from a briar root, wondering if she sleeps well, that winsome baffling creature who has left them for a life set farther beyond the scope of their simple minds than is that of Hollywood from the filmstar’s folks, Mamma and Poppa in some little hometown on the prairie.

Can you wonder that, petite, dark and vivacious, she is the life and soul of the lonely bungalow, so that the passing trader or Colonial Office man has no sooner thrust out his legs into the cool comfort of his evening’s rest, than he says, “Now then, old man, where’s that chimp of yours? Let’s see Emily. Ho! Ho! Ho!”

But as she ambles forward on such occasions, turning a somersault, perhaps, as slowly and gravely as day and night, see! her smile dawning at the end of it has something of trouble and strain splintering under its sensitive flexibility. Loyal in her support of Mr. Fatigay, quixotically hospitable in her determination to give such guests what they are most fitted to enjoy, she is nonetheless ill at ease. Yet she masks it. This generous hypocrisy is the first sweet ferment of the noble savage heart. It is civilization. This chimp is civilized.

She had not been so before she had come into the possession of the good schoolmaster. That was a year ago, before her captor, an anthropologist, whom she had revered rather than loved, had exchanged her to Mr. Fatigay for the more conveniently portable possession of a five-pound note. Then, though eminently deserving of that second-rate sort of praise implicit in such adjectives as ‘well-grown’, ‘sagacious’, and the like, she gave no sign, and was herself unconscious, of any claim to esteem in terms less niggardly and low. What seeds lay latent in her of qualities with such a claim, sprouted only under the sunshine of Mr. Fatigay’s smiles, and the gentle warm monotonous rain of the evening monologues, in which, when work was done, he expressed his hopes, dreams, ambitions to the friendly dumbness by his side.

“Ah, Emily!” he would say, with something of the gesture as well as of the onomatopoeia with which he habitually strove to make English clearer to the infant natives, “How nice to be at ease again!” lolling his head, and then, in mild explosion, “What a day! What a day!” And he would continue with a monosyllabic expressiveness which I, who have never taught the young, am quite unable to imitate. From simple allusions to physical fatigues and pleasures, he would proceed to higher matters, and would sometimes have daubed in a very fair self-portrait, rather larger than life, before an awareness of his reflection, gesticulating in the dark mirror-bright eye of the chimp, would bring him back to self-consciousness.

“Why, Emily!” he would say fondly, but with an uneasy titter. “One would think you understood every word I said.”

And, indeed, Emily had soon come to understand the more concrete terms he used, her comprehension falling back only when he soared into abstractions beyond her experience and his expressiveness. Yet it was in the course just of these, she noted, that his rare fits of enthusiasm would come upon him, and having seen him thus transformed and shining, she longed restlessly to know what it was he said then. She had seen the same light play, but rather more coldly, like an aurora borealis, over his prism and silent face when he sat sometimes with a dry and unattractive object in his hands, evidently voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone. Emily could not read.

She was, however, a schoolmaster’s pet, and on the frequent occasions on which she had accompanied him to the schoolroom, she saw pictures enough of cats with the letters CAT printed beside them. Is it so hard to understand how she came by a curiosity as to the nature of letters, and even, perhaps, of the abstracter function of literature? Our scientists may think so, who have chosen to measure the intelligence of the chimpanzee solely by its reactions to a banana. They suspend the delicacy from the ceiling of a cage, and assess the subject’s mentality in terms of the number of boxes he or she will pile one upon another in order to secure it. They fail to see that nothing is revealed except the value which that particular chimp chooses to set upon the fruit.