This old man, who looked more German than anything else, although he had

one of those unfathomable faces in which nationality is lost, was bald,

and so grave that his baldness might have been a tonsure. Every time he

passed before the Virgin on the prow, he raised his felt hat, so that

you could see the swollen and senile veins of his skull. A sort of full

gown, torn and threadbare, of brown Dorchester serge, but half hid his

closely fitting coat, tight, compact, and hooked up to the neck like a

cassock. His hands inclined to cross each other, and had the mechanical

junction of habitual prayer. He had what might be called a wan

countenance; for the countenance is above all things a reflection, and

it is an error to believe that idea is colourless. That countenance was

evidently the surface of a strange inner state, the result of a

composition of contradictions, some tending to drift away in good,

others in evil, and to an observer it was the revelation of one who was

less and more than human--capable of falling below the scale of the

tiger, or of rising above that of man. Such chaotic souls exist. There

was something inscrutable in that face. Its secret reached the abstract.

You felt that the man had known the foretaste of evil which is the

calculation, and the after-taste which is the zero. In his

impassibility, which was perhaps only on the surface, were imprinted two

petrifactions--the petrifaction of the heart proper to the hangman, and

the petrifaction of the mind proper to the mandarin. One might have said

(

for the monstrous has its mode of being complete) that all things were

possible to him, even emotion. In every savant there is something of the

corpse, and this man was a savant. Only to see him you caught science

imprinted in the gestures of his body and in the folds of his dress. His

was a fossil face, the serious cast of which was counteracted by that

116

The Man Who Laughs