John Holdsworth, Chief Mate

by William Clark Russell

But there never was a better illustration than this man’s face of the truth, that good features make but a very small portion of beauty.

I want a word to express that middle quality of aspect which is contrived by the mingling of comely lineaments with bad passions. Possibly the effect is no more than a neutralisation of nature’s good intentions, wherein we behold a handsome countenance sunk into a species of physical negation, by moral qualities tugging it hard in the direction of repellent ugliness.

A most unstriking face at which you would barely glance, and pass on absolutely unimpressed. His thin lips might mark both cruelty and selfishness; his eyes are made heavy by their drooping lids, and the irids are pale and unintelligent. He is dressed in the style of the times, of course; pantaloons strapped over his boots, a frock-coat gaping in a circle round a great quantity of black satin stock (in which are two pins and a chain). But the pantaloons are frayed at the heels and bagged at the knees; and the coat is suspiciously polished at the elbows and the rim of the collar. He walks with a quick, uneasy step, his hat slightly cocked, and his hands in his breeches pockets, and arriving at the gate of his house, opens it by giving it a kick with his foot.

He entered the sitting-room with his hat on, and found the cloth laid for dinner, but nobody in the room, which was a soiled and dingy apartment, although the house was a new one, and the paper fresh and the ceiling white. But no paper and whitewash could qualify the sordid suggestions of the old drugget imperfectly nailed over the floor, the old leather sofa and the old leather arm-chair, the mantelpiece decorated by a pair of plated candlesticks marked with indents, the dingy red curtains, the papier mâché table in the window, with the mother-of-pearl dropping out of it.

The subtle magic of feminine fingers which extracts from rubbish itself what hidden capabilities it may possess of comforting the eye with some faintest aspect of taste, seemed either never to have been exercised upon this room, or to have found itself powerless to deal with it. The only feminine sign was a small bundle of child’s stockings on the top of an old work-basket on the sofa.

Mr. Conway put his head out of the door and called, “Are you there, wife?”

“Yes,” replied Dolly’s voice from downstairs.

“How long will dinner be?”

“Five minutes!”

He threw his hat down and walked into the “surgery,” a room at the end of the passage, furnished with a chest of drawers, a toilet-table and a looking-glass, an arm-chair, an ugly circular box with a basin let into it, standing beside the arm-chair; on the toilet-table, some small hand-glasses, a pair of forceps, and three unfinished false teeth. Through the window was to be seen a slip of garden of the breadth of the house, and about fifty feet long—its neglected state, its few pining shrubs, and a flag-pole with a vane a-top that croaked to every passage of the wind, showing up very squalidly against the neighbouring garden, which was richly stocked with wall-fruit and ferns and green plants.