Mr. Shatov stood ceremoniously waiting and bowing as on the previous evening, a stranger again; conversational interchange was far away at the end of some chance opening that the hour might not bring. Miriam clasped her volume; she could fill the time triumphantly in correcting his accent and intonation, after a few remarks about the comet.
Confronting him she could not imagine him related to Emerson. No continental could fully appreciate Emerson; except perhaps Maeterlinck. It would have been better to try something more simple, with less depth of truth in it. Darwin or Shakespeare. But Shakespeare was poetry; he could not go about in England talking Shakespeare. And Darwin was bad, for men.
He listened in his subdued controlled way to her remark and again she saw him surrounded by his world of foreign universities and professors, and wondered for a sharp instant whether she were betraying some dreadful English, middle-class, newspaper ignorance; perhaps there were no longer any comets; they were called by some other name … he might know whether there was still a nebular theory and whether anything more had been done about the electrical contact of metals … that man in the Revue des deux Mondes saying that the first outbreak of American literature was unfortunately feminine. Mill thought intuition at least as valuable as ratiocination. … Mill; he could read Mill. Emerson would be a secret attack on him, an eloquent spokesman for things no foreigner would agree with. “Ah yes,” he said thoughtfully, “I always have had great interest for astronomy, but now please tell me,” he lifted yesterday’s radiant face. Had there been yesterday that glow of crimson tie showing under the point of his black beard and the gold watch-chain across the blackness of his waistcoat? “how I shall obtain admission to the British Moozayum.”
Miriam gave instructions delightedly. Mr. Shatov hunched crookedly in his chair, his head thrown up and listening towards her, his eyebrows raised as if he were singing and on his firm small mouth the pursed look of a falsetto note. His brown eyes were filmed, staring averted, as if fixed on some faraway thing that did not move; it was like the expression in the eyes of Mr. Helsing but older and less scornful. There was no scorn at all, only a weary cynically burning knowledge, yet the eyes were wide and beautiful with youth. Yesterday’s look of age and professorship had gone; he was wearing a little short coat; in spite of the beard he was a student, only just come from being one amongst many, surrounded in the crowding sociable foreign way; it gave his whole expression a warmth; the edges of his fine soft richly-dented black hair, the contours of his pale face, the careless hunching of his clothes seemed in a strange generous way unknown in England, at the disposal of his fellow-creatures. Only in his eyes was the contradictory lonely look of age. But when they came round to meet hers, his head still reined up and motionless, she seemed to face the chubby upright determination of a baby, and the deep melancholy in the eyes was like the melancholy of a puppy.
“Pairhaps,” he said, “one of your doctors shall sairtify me for a fit and proper person.”
Miriam stared her double stupefaction. For a moment, as if to give her time to consider his suggestion, his smile remained, still deferential but with the determined boldness of a naughty child lurking behind it; then his eyes fell, too soon to catch her answering smile. She could not, with his determined unaverted and now nervously quivering face before her, either discourage the astounding suggestion or resent his complacent possession of information about her.
“I should tell you,” he apologised gently, “that Mrs. Bailey has say me you are working in the doctors’ quarter of London.”
“They are not doctors,” said Miriam, feeling stiffly English, and in her known post as dental secretary utterly outside his world of privileged studious adventure, “and you want a householder who is known to you and not a hotel or boardinghouse keeper.”
“That is very English. But no matter. Perhaps it shall be sufficient that I am graduate.”
“You could go down and see the librarian, you must write a statement.”
“That is an excellent idee.”
“I am a reader, but not a householder.”
“No matter. That is most excellent. You shall pairhaps introduce me to this gentleman. Ah, that is very good. I shall be most happy to find myself in that institution. It is one of my heartmost dreams of England to find myself in midst of all these leeter-aytchoors. … When can we go?”
There was a ring on the little finger of the hand that drew from an inner pocket a limp leather pocketbook; pale old gold curving up to a small pimple of jewels. The ringed hand moving above the dip of the double watch-chain gave to his youth a strange look of mellow wealthy middle age.
“Ah. I must write in English. Please tell me. But shall we not go at once, this evanink?”
“We can’t; the reading-room closes at eight.”
“That is very English; well; tell me what I shall write.”
Miriam watched as he wrote with a small quick smoothly moving pencil. The pale gold of the ring was finely chased. The small cluster of tiny soft-toned pearls encircling and curving up to a small point of diamond were set in a circlet of enamel, a marvellous rich deep blue. She had her Emerson ready when the writing was done.
“What is Emerson?” he enquired, sitting back to restore his book to its pocket. “I do not know this writer.” His reared head had again the look of heady singing, young, confronting everything, and with all the stored knowledge that can be given to wealthy youth prepared to meet her precious book. If he did not like it there was something shallow in all the wonderful continental knowledge; if he found anything in it; if he understood it at all,
