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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