It is high time to tell you that Jack was a dear, pretty little monkey
of the chimpanzee kind, with tiny, delicate hands, nervous and
semi-transparent, almost like a sick child’s. He was no bigger, the
whole body of him, than a pocket-handkerchief, and you could have easily
hidden him inside your hat. He was slim and slender, daintily made, with
narrow chest and sloping shoulders—a creature all nerves, with a
wonderful little pale phiz of his own, puckered and wrinkled, and long,
drooping eyelids, greyish-white, and as thin as an onion skin, that
slowly, rhythmically, opened and closed over brown eyes ringed with
yellow. He bore the solemn, serious look of those who suffer; his eyes
seemed fixed on something beyond the visible world, and now and again he
would pass his long, dry fingers across his eyes as if to wipe away a
tear. He seldom gambolled, and never indulged in the grotesque
contortions of other apes; their restless, ceaseless activity seemed
foreign to his nature, and even his grimaces had nothing in common with
theirs.
Noise scared him; he was never angry, but habitually silent and
thoughtful. He preferred to lurk alone in dark corners, where he would
spend long hours, squatted on his tail, almost motionless, dreaming
sadly of some mysterious, unattainable future. But, for all his
unlikeness to his colleagues and their comicality, his queer little
crumpled, wrinkled face never failed to produce its effect on the
spectators. Jack was perfectly irresistible; no one _could_ look at him
for any length of time without bursting out laughing. His aspect was at
once so piteous and so ridiculous, his gaze so pathetic and so
grotesque, his deadly earnestness so side-splitting, while his eyelids
would droop suddenly ever and anon in so anxious and appealing a wink,
that the result was comic beyond belief. An old, old man’s head on a
baby’s body, a mask that was for ever changing, twitching, wrinkling,
with eyes that looked out grave, intense, solemn, from beneath a low,
flat brow crowned by what looked for all the world like a wig!
The louder the merriment he excited, the more serious Jack became. On
show days, while the audience was convulsed with mirth, the gravity of
his mien, the careworn look in his eyes, over which the lids dropped
mechanically at regular intervals, as if weighed down with their load of
melancholy, reached the acme of fantastic absurdity.
Alas! men cannot tell what monkeys are thinking of. If they knew, they
would not always laugh. Jack was dreaming of the sun, the vast green
forests, the friends he had left behind; he was dreaming of the delights
of swinging high in the air, cradled in the leafy hammocks of the
boughs, dreaming of the trailing lianas, of the romps and games with his
fellows throwing cocoanuts at one another’s heads, and of the endless
chivyings and chasings from tree-top to tree-top above the rolling
billows of the wind-tossed jungles, through which the wild
beasts—elephants, panthers, and lions—plough their way like ships on the
high seas, leaving in their wake a broad furrow of floating odours and
deep-toned sounds.