t those almond eyes,
those blue-black beards, those cruel, crimson lips.
Then came Syme, and next a very old man, Professor de Worms, who still
kept the chair of Friday, though every day it was expected that his
death would leave it empty. Save for his intellect, he was in the last
dissolution of senile decay. His face was as grey as his long grey
beard, his forehead was lifted and fixed finally in a furrow of mild
despair. In no other case, not even that of Gogol, did the bridegroom
brilliancy of the morning dress express a more painful contrast. For
the red flower in his button-hole showed up against a face that was
literally discoloured like lead; the whole hideous effect was as if some
drunken dandies had put their clothes upon a corpse. When he rose or
sat down, which was with long labour and peril, something worse was
expressed than mere weakness, something indefinably connected with the
horror of the whole scene. It did not express decrepitude merely, but
corruption. Another hateful fancy crossed Syme's quivering mind. He
could not help thinking that whenever the man moved a leg or arm might
fall off.
Right at the end sat the man called Saturday, the simplest and the most
baffling of all. He was a short, square man with a dark, square face
clean-shaven, a medical practitioner going by the name of Bull. He had
that combination of savoir-faire with a sort of well-groomed coarseness
which is not uncommon in young doctors. He carried his fine clothes with
confidence rather than ease, and he mostly wore a set smile. There was
nothing whatever odd about him, except that he wore a pair of dark,
almost opaque spectacles. It may have been merely a crescendo of nervous
fancy that had gone before, but those black discs were dreadful to Syme;
they reminded him of half-remembered ugly tales, of some story about
pennies being put on the eyes of the dead. Syme's eye always caught the
black glasses and the blind grin. Had the dying Professor worn them, or
even the pale Secretary, they would have been appropriate. But on the
younger and grosser man they seemed only an enigma. They took away the
key of the face. You could not tell what his smile or his gravity meant.
Partly from this, and partly because he had a vulgar virility wanting in
most of the others it seemed to Syme that he might be the wickedest of
all those wicked men. Syme even had the thought that his eyes might be
covered up because they were too frightful to see.
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