Spruce Hopkins boasted no particular thrills. His thoughts followed really a rather narrow gauge, and he could weigh with premature or precocious carefulness the two sides of a practical question when his decision would have halted perhaps at alternatives involving the emotions.
He had a superb figure, graceful, plastic, and eloquent of strength. His face leaned, so to speak, a little to the Brahmin type, but any introspection it might have accompanied or suggested was lost in the radiance of the eyes, the tempting sweetness of his smile, the full-blown glory of his infectious laughter, the spiced offerings of his genial tongue, the crisp charm of his wavy, glossy, chestnut-tinted hair, and that slight but irreducible soupcon of swagger which gave him distinction.
And then there was myself; you see me, a hardy man (a blush rose to Erickson’s cheeks; he could not overcome some apprehension of my recalling his recent humiliation), a sailor man with a little land schooling, loving yarns, telling yarns, and—believing ’em.
“Why, yes, Erickson,” I interrupted, “I suppose you have been quite willing to believe some gilded tales that those friends, your late companions here in New York, told you, but even a captivating gullibility hardly explains how a young giant like you were found on your back, strapped to a table, and about to be skewered like a spitted pig.”
“Ah, sir, patience. You shall know all, but—at the end, at the end; even if I could resist a plausible story, I could not always resist what goes with a good story.”
“SCHNAPPS?” I interjected.
“Please, sir, patience. It is worth while. I have seen what no living man— Perhaps I shall never see again my fellow travelers, the three who sat with me on the hotel porch three years ago.” He bent his head, his bruised, rough hand was passed over his face, and I thought a flare of flame, shot from a cleaving coal, showed on it the glistening trail of moisture. “—what no living man has ever seen, a country more wonderful than dreams or legends or fairy stories have described or painted. Oh, sir, in that new world in the north, something of the imagery of the mythology of my forefathers seems repeated; very vaguely indeed. There I have seen Nilfheim, I have seen Hwergelmer and Muspelheim, the world of fire and light, but different, yes very different, and perhaps— Well, no, not Valhalla, but something like Yggdrasill, and if it was not Gladsheim, what was it?”
He resumed.
It was Professor Bjornsen speaking, with his big hands clutching his head on either side, buried indeed in the luxuriant wealth of his ruddy hair, with his staring eyes fixed on the table as if he saw through it, looking at the land of his prophecies, while we all listened, with our eyes measuring the cliffs up to the green fringes that ran, a dark zone against the sky, on their sun-blazed peaks.
“Signs, signals, came to the explorers of Europe long before Columbus set his face westward; long before, standing at the peak of his little caravel, he dared the perils and the powers of the bewitched western ocean, the woods and weeds of Cipango floated to the shores of Europe. There are signs and signals now, gentlemen”; the Professor brought his long fingers down with a smart, startling slap on the table that brought our own hands nervously to the sides of the unsupported glasses, lest they capsize in his assault of enthusiasm, while his disordered hair flamed aureole-like over his bulging forehead, beneath which smiled exultantly his piercing green eyes.