Word: fatigay
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Just Another Intellectual. Collier's japes with apes begin with Alfred Fatigay, a tired African mission schoolmaster who leaves Boboma on the Upper Congo to return to England and marry his fiancée Amy, an intellectual sort of girl. For company he takes with him "a well-grown, sagacious, fine specimen" of a chimpanzee named Emily. All goes very well for a while ("In England the Primate takes precedence of all but Royal Dukes"). But Emily, no ordinary chimp, knows how to read. She takes a course in the British Museum, and she thinks she had better start...
...Poor Fatigay, however, is browbeaten by his fiancée Amy, and falls on evil times. Selling matches outside the Ritz, he is rescued from verminous destitution by Emily, who by now has taken to driving a Hispano-Suiza (an equipage which dates the book to Michael Arlen times). The cute chimp has managed to turn herself into Juanita Spaniola. a ?100-a-week exotic dancer, and her vocabulary is more than 500 words-greater than that of today's J. Fred Muggs...
Monkeyshining Paradox. Emily, by impersonating the bride, thoughtfully intervenes to save Fatigay from marriage to the heartless Amy. ("Marriage between cousins is perfectly legal," says the clergyman when the imposture is discovered.) As Mr. and Mrs. Fatigay return to the Congo, the groom tells shipboard interviewers: "My message to your readers is simply this. It is true my wife is not a woman. She is an angel . . . Behind every great man there may be a woman, and beneath every performing flea a hot plate, but beside the only happy man I know of-there is a chimp...
...Fatigay taught school to naked little Africans in the jungle; he was the only white man in the village. It was a lonely life, made supportable by his admirably simple temperament, by letters from his capricious English fiancee, and by the devotion of his pet chimpanzee, Emily. Emily loved Mr. Fatigay, but of her devotion the good man was long unaware...
...favorite with her master and the natives alike, Emily was allowed the freedom of the village. She went religiously to school, and soon learned to read, but not write. Mr. Fatigay used to talk to her in the evenings, quite freely, but had no idea how much she understood. She understood everything. When Mr. Fatigay's lonely pedagogical exile was over, he took Emily with him to England. Amy, his fiancee, returned Emily's jealousy with interest, but made the mistake of despising her rival. By a clever ruse Emily substituted herself for Amy at the wedding (they...
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