I was going from Hamburg to London in a small steamer. We were two
passengers; I and a little female monkey, whom a Hamburg merchant was
sending as a present to his English partner.
She was fastened by a light chain to one of the seats on deck, and was
moving restlessly and whining in a little plaintive pipe like a bird’s.
Every time I passed by her she stretched out her little, black, cold hand,
and peeped up at me out of her little mournful, almost human eyes. I took
her hand, and she ceased whining and moving restlessly about.
There was a dead calm. The sea stretched on all sides like a motionless
sheet of leaden colour. It seemed narrowed and small; a thick fog overhung
it, hiding the very mast-tops in cloud, and dazing and wearying the eyes
with its soft obscurity. The sun hung, a dull red blur in this obscurity;
but before evening it glowed with strange, mysterious, lurid light.
Long, straight folds, like the folds in some heavy silken stuff, passed one
after another over the sea from the ship’s prow, and broadening as they
passed, and wrinkling and widening, were smoothed out again with a shake,
and vanished. The foam flew up, churned by the tediously thudding wheels;
white as milk, with a faint hiss it broke up into serpentine eddies, and
then melted together again and vanished too, swallowed up by the mist.
Persistent and plaintive as the monkey’s whine rang the small bell at the
stern.
From time to time a porpoise swam up, and with a sudden roll disappeared
below the scarcely ruffled surface.
And the captain, a silent man with a gloomy, sunburnt face, smoked a short
pipe and angrily spat into the dull, stagnant sea.
To all my inquiries he responded by a disconnected grumble. I was obliged
to turn to my sole companion, the monkey.
I sat down beside her; she ceased whining, and again held out her hand to
me.
The clinging fog oppressed us both with its drowsy dampness; and buried
in the same unconscious dreaminess, we sat side by side like brother and
sister.