III
The Captain was bowing to me with the easy impressiveness of the man to whom ceremonial is no novelty. He was smiling. There was in his smile the good humor of an adult toward a half-grown child. He stood up very straight and precise, his shoulders at exact right angles to his thick neck, his out-thrust chest almost pompous in its roundness.
He was, I judged, exactly my own height, which was five feet nine, but so thick was he in every portion of his anatomy that the physical impression which he made was overpowering. His head and face were large and, thanks to a closely cropped pompadour, gave, in spite of considerable fat, the impression of being square. The eyes were out of place in his head. Hidden under half-closed, fat lids they were mere specks in size, yet when I had once looked into them I stared in fascination.
The head, and the fat, square face with its brutalized lines were frankly, flauntingly animal. The eyes betrayed a great mind. In that gross, brutal countenance the gleam of such an intellect seemed a shocking accident, one of those perversions of Nature’s plans which result in the production of abnormalities. What was this man? Was he the common creature of his thick jowls? or was he the developed man to whom belonged those eyes? Was that animal countenance but a mask? Or did the low instincts, which its lines betrayed, dominate, while the mind struggled in vain beneath such a handicap?
Those tiny eyes held mine and studied me cruelly. Before them I felt stripped to the marrow of my soul. My dreams, my weaknesses, my failures seemed to stand out like print for Brack to read. His superior smile indicated that he had read, that he had appraised me for a weakling; and for the life of me I could not control the resentment that leaped within me.
I looked him as steadily in the eyes as I could. He saw the resentment that lay there; for an instant there flickered a new look in his eyes; then they were bland and smiling again. But that instant was enough for each of us to know that one could never be aught but the other’s enemy.
“I am glad to see you on board, Mr. Pitt, as they say in the navy,” said Captain Brack with deepest courtesy.
“I am glad to be on board, Captain Brack,” I replied steadfastly.
“It is a pleasure to have for shipmate a literary man like Mr. Pitt.”
“It is a pleasure to contemplate a voyage in such company as Captain Brack’s.”