Some Said He Was A Nihilist Escaping; Others Set Him
Down For A Harmless Spendthrift, Who Had Squandered Fifty Thousand
Roubles, And Whose Father Had Now Despatched Him To America By Way
Of Penance.
Either tale might flourish in security; there was no
contradiction to be feared, for the hero spoke not one word of
English.
I got on with him lumberingly enough in broken German,
and learned from his own lips that he had been an apothecary. He
carried the photograph of his betrothed in a pocket-book, and
remarked that it did not do her justice. The cut of his head stood
out from among the passengers with an air of startling strangeness.
The first natural instinct was to take him for a desperado; but
although the features, to our Western eyes, had a barbaric and
unhomely cast, the eye both reassured and touched. It was large
and very dark and soft, with an expression of dumb endurance, as if
it had often looked on desperate circumstances and never looked on
them without resolution.
He cried out when I used the word. 'No, no,' he said, 'not
resolution.'
'The resolution to endure,' I explained.
And then he shrugged his shoulders, and said, 'Ach, ja,' with
gusto, like a man who has been flattered in his favourite
pretensions. Indeed, he was always hinting at some secret sorrow;
and his life, he said, had been one of unusual trouble and anxiety;
so the legends of the steerage may have represented at least some
shadow of the truth.
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