The Ambition of MacIlhenny
The Ambition of MacIlhenny
After mentioning that last name it seems like rank waste of time to say his first name was Sandy. He couldn’t help it, his parents couldn’t help it, no one could help it; one name follows the other naturally.
Well, then, being Sandy MacIlhenny, of course he was Scotch. I mention it for mere form’s sake, as you knew it beforehand, just as you knew what his first name was. But, fortunately for us all, he had lived in America so many years that he had lost or thrown away his dialect, and the only thing in his speech that could suggest his native heath was the marked preference for the letter “u” instead of “i” in whisky, (and I think, myself, “whusky” has a more filling sound) and a “burring,” a b’r’r’r to his “r’s,” as though a very large, bewildered “bumble-bee” were blundering about the end of his broad tongue, and then bumping back to the roof of his mouth.
Poor MacIlhenny’s life was a tragedy, and yet it was played, to the very last act, to an accompaniment of jeers and laughter—not malicious, not bitter, but simple, thoughtless laughter.
A description of his personal appearance might, I think, go a good way toward explaining the cause of that general laughter. Had he been simply ugly, all had been well—there’s nothing injurious in ugliness; it may even be a power. He was worse than that. In our English language there is a word that may have been created at the very moment of Sandy’s birth, for the express use of those wishing to describe him perfectly but briefly—that word is “grotesque.”
He was tall, very tall, with a sudden, rounding droop of the shoulders that gave him the look of a button-hook or interrogation point, while his thickness through the body was about that of a choice, salt codfish. If he was furnished with the usual number of internal organs they must have been pressed like autumn leaves in a dictionary, or else he did not wear them all at one time; that’s how thin he was. Then he was the only tall man I ever saw pacing through life on bowed-legs. No, not knock-kneed! Sandy’s legs were bowed to a roundness that let one see, at a glance, just how a picture of certain portions of the landscape would look in a perfectly round frame. No man on earth could command respect while standing on a pair of legs like Sandy’s, unless they were concealed beneath the protecting petticoat of church or college. He had very high cheek-bones, across which the skin was drawn so tightly that they looked like a pair of unexpected knuckles. His chin was long and straight, without the slightest indentation or curve about it. His nose shared in the general lengthiness and was thin and pointed, while, owing to the narrowness of his entire structural plan, each small, greenish-blue eye turned inwardly and gazed with fixed resentment at the intervening bridge that seemed to be crowding them.