Ships That Pass In The Night | Page 7

of attachment.
He had no friends in Petershof, and apparently had no friends anywhere. No one wrote to him, except his old mother; the papers which were sent to him came from a stationer's.
He read all during meal-time. But now and again he spoke a few words with Bernardine Holme, whose place was next to him. It never occurred to him to say good morning, nor to give a greeting of any kind, nor to show a courtesy. One day during lunch, however, he did take the trouble to stoop and pick up Bernardine Holme's shawl, which had fallen for the third time to the ground.
"I never saw a female wear a shawl more carelessly than you," he said. "You don't seem to know anything about it."
His manner was always gruff. Every one complained of him. Every one always had complained of him. He had never been heard to laugh. Once or twice he had been seen to smile on occasions when people talked confidently of recovering their health. It was a beautiful smile worthy of a better cause. It was a smile which made one pause to wonder what could have been the original disposition of the Disagreeable Man before ill-health had cut him off from the affairs of active life. Was he happy or unhappy? It was not known. He gave no sign of either the one state or the other. He always looked very ill, but he did not seem to get worse. He had never been known to make the faintest allusion to his own health. He never "smoked" his thermometer in public; and this was the more remarkable in an hotel where people would even leave off a conversation and say: "Excuse me, Sir or Madam, I must now take my temperature. We will resume the topic in a few minutes."
He never lent any papers or books, and he never borrowed any.
He had a room at the top of the hotel, and he lived his life, amongst his chemistry bottles, his scientific books, his microscope, and his camera. He never sat in any of the hotel drawing-rooms. There was nothing striking nor eccentric about his appearance. He was neither ugly nor good-looking, neither tall nor short, neither fair nor dark. He was thin and frail, and rather bent. But that might be the description of any one in Petershof. There was nothing pathetic about him, no suggestion even of poetry, which gives a reverence to suffering, whether mental or physical. As there was no expression on his face, so also there was no expression in his eyes: no distant longing, no far-off fixedness; nothing, indeed, to awaken sad sympathy.
The only positive thing about him was his rudeness. Was it natural or cultivated? No one in Petershof could say. He had always been as he was; and there was no reason to suppose that he would ever be different.
He was, in fact, like the glacier of which he had such a fine view from his room; like the glacier, an unchanging feature of the neighbourhood.
No one loved it better than the Disagreeable Man did; he watched the sunlight on it, now pale golden, now fiery red. He loved the sky, the dull grey, or the bright blue. He loved the snow forests, and the snow-girt streams, and the ice cathedrals, and the great firs patient beneath their snow-burden. He loved the frozen waterfalls, and the costly diamonds in the snow. He knew, too, where the flowers nestled in their white nursery. He was, indeed, an authority on Alpine botany. The same tender hands which plucked the flowers in the spring-time, dissected them and laid them bare beneath the microscope. But he did not love them the less for that.
Were these pursuits a comfort to him? Did they help him to forget that there was a time when he, too, was burning with ambition to distinguish himself, and be one of the marked men of the age?
Who could say?



CHAPTER VI.
THE TRAVELLER AND THE TEMPLE OF KNOWLEDGE.
COUNTLESS ages ago a Traveller, much worn with journeying, climbed up the last bit of rough road which led to the summit of a high mountain. There was a temple on that mountain. And the Traveller had vowed that he would reach it before death prevented him. He knew the journey was long, and the road rough. He knew that the mountain was the most difficult of ascent of that mountain chain, called "The Ideals." But he had a strongly-hoping heart and a sure foot. He lost all sense of time, but he never lost the feeling of hope.
"Even if I faint by the way-side," he said to himself, "and am not able to reach the summit, still it is something to be on the road which leads to the High Ideals."
That was