Page:Stringer - Wine of Life.djvu/112

102 saw a fumbling and doddering old man who walked with difficulty, as though the will and the worn-out body were no longer in co-ordination, a very lean and tall old man with a narrow, high forehead and the beak of an eagle. A sparse nimbus of hair failed to conceal the skull, as shining and yellow as polished ivory, across which it was so laboriously trained in thin streaks made docile by oil. The skin of the face itself was cheese-colour, marked with darker patches of scurfy brown, and everything about that face seemed pendulous, from the nephritic sacs under the eyes to the drooping cheek-flaps and the saggy dewlap under the slightly tremulous chin. Yet an effort had been made to conceal the scrawny throat behind a foolishly high and imprisoning starched collar. The tall and decrepid body, too, was arrayed in the dandified apparel of an earlier mode, a tight-fitting cutaway coat with a gardenia in the button-hole, pointed shoes with pearl-coloured gaiters, a coloured Parisian waist-coat across which dangled a gold-rimmed monocle on a black silk ribbon.

It was not until his visitor was well in the room and Modrynski's heavily-veined and slightly tremulous hand was screwing this monocle in between the eagle beak and the shaggy brow that Storrow noticed the old artist's eyes. There and there alone the hand of Time had been stayed. They remained, by some accident of organic repair, the eyes of youth. From behind them Intelligence looked out, as from a ruined tower. They seemed to mock the senile mask of the body through which they peered. And their still half-humorous alertness, their full-irised ironic power of penetration, left the younger man vaguely but unmistakably apprehensive.

"Ah, this is the boy from the land of the caribou!" cackled the broken old voice. The flaccid lips, slightly moist at one corner with saliva, were pursed up critically as the bony and shaking fingers held the monocle poised. Storrow, at the moment, was forcing himself to remember what this sodden and worn-out hulk of a man had ac-