“I was asked,” remarked the newspaper man. “Only I couldn’t go. But when did you arrive from Malata?”
“I arrived yesterday at daylight. I am anchored out there in the bay—off Garden Point. I was in Dunster’s office before he had finished reading his letters. Have you ever seen young Dunster reading his letters? I had a glimpse of him through the open door. He holds the paper in both hands, hunches his shoulders up to his ugly ears, and brings his long nose and his thick lips on to it like a sucking apparatus. A commercial monster.”
“Here we don’t consider him a monster,” said the newspaper man looking at his visitor thoughtfully.
“Probably not. You are used to see his face and to see other faces. I don’t know how it is that, when I come to town, the appearance of the people in the street strike me with such force. They seem so awfully expressive.”
“And not charming.”
“Well—no. Not as a rule. The effect is forcible without being clear. . . . I know that you think it’s because of my solitary manner of life away there.”
“Yes. I do think so. It is demoralising. You don’t see any one for months at a stretch. You’re leading an unhealthy life.”
The other hardly smiled and murmured the admission that true enough it was a good eleven months since he had been in town last.
“You see,” insisted the other. “Solitude works like a sort of poison. And then you perceive suggestions in faces—mysterious and forcible, that no sound man would be bothered with. Of course you do.”
Geoffrey Renouard did not tell his journalist friend that the suggestions of his own face, the face of a friend, bothered him as much as the others. He detected a degrading quality in the touches of age which every day adds to a human countenance. They moved and disturbed him, like the signs of a horrible inward travail which was frightfully apparent to the fresh eye he had brought from his isolation in Malata, where he had settled after five strenuous years of adventure and exploration.