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To shave costs threepence, another threepence for loss of time nearly ten pounds a year, three hundred pounds since Pym's chin first bristled. With his beard he could have bought an annuity or a cottage in the country, he could have had a wife and children, and driven his dog-cart, and been made a church-warden. All gone, all shaved, and for what?
Pym's eloquence, inferior in boldness and originality to that of Eliot or Wentworth, was better suited by its massive and logical force to convince and guide a great party; and it was backed by a calmness of temper, a dexterity and order in the management of public business, and a practical power of shaping the course of debate, which gave a form and method to Parliamentary proceedings such as they had never had before.
He wore a yellow dressing-gown, or could scarcely be said to wear it, for such of it as was not round his neck he had converted into a cushion for his head, which is perhaps the part of him we should have turned to first It was a big round head, the plentiful gray hair in tangles, possibly because in Pym's last flitting the comb had dropped over the banisters; the features were ugly and beyond life-size, yet the forehead had altered little except in colour since the day when he was near being made a fellow of his college; there was sensitiveness left in the thick nose, humour in the eyes, though they so often watered; the face had gone to flabbiness at last, but not without some lines and dents, as if the head had resisted the body for a space before the whole man rolled contentedly downhill.
To-morrow evening I will take up the story of Dirk Peters where it joins the sudden break in Pym's journal, and will carry you along to the time when the inhabitants of Hili-li thought that the atmosphere of some other land would be more conducive to Peters' longevity and health, as well as to their own tranquillity.
"This brings me to the point in Peters' story at which I may most naturally explain certain of Poe's statements or, rather, of A. Gordon Pym's statements which have caused more comment than any other part of the narrative. Hand me your Poe, please.
Yet at this moment of seventeen thanks to her clear colours, her small thinness, and the beautiful hair so richly piled about her delicate head Lucy Purcell was undeniably a pretty girl, and since her arrival in Manchester she had been much more blissfully certain of the fact than she had ever succeeded in being while she was still under the repressive roof of Miss Pym's boarding-school for young ladies, Pestalozzi House, Blackburn.
As the aged mystic whispered to Pym, the young man's face turned ghastly, then worked convulsively, then settled into firm resolve. And Peters never again saw on the face of the youth whom he loved with the love of a mother and of a father in one never again saw the old, careless, boyish smile. Did the old man shall we call him a man? did the old man whisper into Pym's ear the secret of eternity?
At first Pym's only comment was, "It is the same old drivel as before; what more can they want?" But presently he looked up, puzzled. "Is this chapter yours or mine?" he demanded. "It is about half and half," said Tommy. "Is mine the first half? Where does yours begin?"
Peters, from whom some information might be expected, is still alive, and a resident of Illinois, but cannot be met with at present. He may hereafter be found, and will, no doubt, afford material for a conclusion of Mr. Pym's account.
"You wait and see," Gerald repeated. "I say, you aren't going into this swell place! You can't?" The boy paused, appalled at the majesty of Pym's. "Yes, I am they can't turn us out as long as we behave. You come along, too. I'll stand lunch." I don't know why Gerald clung so to this boy. He wasn't a very nice boy.
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