Physically he has drawn heavily on the replacement department; in nineteen-ten a fall from the mizzen threw his jaw two points west by south-west, and smashed the frontal sinus. When he speaks his denture behaves like a moving staircase, travelling upwards and round inside his skull in a jerky spiral. His smile is capricious; it might appear from anywhere, like that of the Cheshire Cat. In ninety-eight he made eyes at another man’s wife (so he says) and lost one of them. No one except Clea is supposed to know about this, but the replacement in this case was rather a crude one. In repose it is not very noticeable, but the minute he becomes animated a disparity between his two eyes becomes obvious. There is also a small technical problem — his own eye is almost permanently bloodshot. On the very first occasion when he treated me to a reedy rendering of ‘Watchman, What of the Night?’, while he stood in the corner of the room with an ancient chamber-pot in his hand, I noticed that his right eye moved a trifle slower than his left. It seemed then to be a larger imitation of the stuffed eagle’s eye which lours so glumly from a niche in the public library. In winter, however, it is the false eye and not the true which throbs unbearably making him morose and foul-mouthed until he has applied a little brandy to his stomach.
Scobie is a sort of protozoic profile in fog and rain, for he carries with him a sort of English weather, and he is never happier than when he can sit over a microscopic wood-fire in winter and talk. One by one his memories leak through the faulty machinery of his mind until he no longer knows them for his own. Behind him I see the long grey rollers of the Atlantic at work, curling up over his memories, smothering them in spray, blinding him. When he speaks of the past it is in a series of short dim telegrams — as if already communications were poor, the weather inimical to transmission. In Dawson City the ten who went up the river were frozen to death. Winter came down like a hammer, beating them senseless: whisky, gold, murder — it was like a new crusade northward into the timberlands. At this time his brother fell over the falls in Uganda; in his dream he saw the tiny figure, like a fly, fall and at once get smoothed out by the yellow claw of water. No: that was later when he was already staring along the sights of a carbine into the very brain-box of a Boer. He tries to remember exactly when it must have been, dropping his polished head into his hands; but the grey rollers intervene, the long effortless tides patrol the barrier between himself and his memory. That is why the phrase came to me: a sea-change for the old pirate: his skull looks palped and sucked down until only the thinnest integument separates his smile from the smile of the hidden skeleton. Observe the brain-case with its heavy indentations: the twigs of bone inside his wax fingers, the rods of tallow which support his quivering shins…. Really, as Clea has remarked, old Scobie is like some little old experimental engine left over from the last century, something as pathetic and friendly as Stephenson’s first Rocket.
He lives in his little sloping attic like an anchorite. ‘An anchorite!’ that is another favourite phrase; he will pop his cheek vulgarly with his finger as he utters it, allowing his rolling eye to insinuate all the feminine indulgences he permits himself in secret. This is for Clea’s benefit, however; in the presence of ‘a perfect lady’ he feels obliged to assume a protective colouring which he sheds the moment she leaves. The truth is somewhat sadder. ‘I’ve done quite a bit of scout-mastering’ he admits to me sotto voce ‘with the Hackney Troop. That was after I was invalided out. But I had to keep out of England, old boy. The strain was too much for me. Every week I expected to see a headline in the News of the World,“Another youthful victim of scoutmaster’s dirty wish.” Down in Hackney things didn’t matter so much. My kids were experts in woodcraft. Proper young Etonians I used to call them. The scoutmaster before me got twenty years. It’s enough to make one have Doubts. These things made you think. Somehow I couldn’t settle down in Hackney. Mind you, I’m a bit past everything now, but I do like to have my peace of mind — just in case. And somehow in England one doesn’t feel free any more. Look at the way they are pulling up clergymen, respected churchmen and so on. I used to lie awake worrying. Finally I came abroad as a private tooter — Toby Mannering, his father was an M.P., wanted an excuse to travel. They said he had to have a tooter. He wanted to go into the Navy. That’s how I fetched up here. I saw at once it was nice and free-and-easy here. Got a job right off with the Vice Squad under Nimrod Pasha. And here I am, dear boy. And no complaints do you see? Looking from east to west over this fertile Delta what do I see? Mile upon mile of angelic little black bottoms.’
The Egyptian Government, with the typical generous quixotry the Levant lavishes on any foreigner who shows a little warmth and friendliness, had offered him a means to live on in Alexandria. It is said that after his appointment to the Vice Squad vice assumed such alarming proportions that it was found necessary to up-grade and transfer him; but he himself always maintained that his transfer to the routine C.I.D. branch of the police had been a deserved promotion — and I for my part have never had the courage to tease him on the subject. His work is not onerous. For a couple of hours every morning he works in a ramshackle office in the upper quarter of the town, with the fleas jumping out of the rotten woodwork of his old-fashioned desk. He lunches modestly at the Lutetia and, funds permitting, buys himself an apple and a bottle of brandy for his evening meal there. The long fierce summer afternoons are spent in sleep, in turning over the newspapers which he borrows from a friendly Greek newsvendor. (As he reads the pulse in the top of his skull beats softly.) Ripeness is all.
The furnishing of his little room suggests a highly eclectic spirit; the few objects which adorn the anchorite’s life have a severely personal flavour, as if together they composed the personality of their owner. That is why Clea’s portrait gives such a feeling of completeness, for she has worked into the background the whole sum of the old man’s possessions. The shabby little crucifix on the wall behind the bed, for example; it is some years since Scobie accepted the consolations of the Holy Roman Church against old age and those defects of character which had by this time become second nature. Nearby hangs a small print of the Mona Lisa whose enigmatic smile has always reminded Scobie of his mother. (For my part the famous smile has always seemed to me to be the smile of a woman who has just dined off her husband.) However this too has somehow incorporated itself into the existence of Scobie, established a special and private relationship. It is as if his Mona Lisa were like no other; it is a deserter from Leonardo.
Then, of course, there is the ancient cake-stand which serves as his commode, bookcase and escritoire in one. Clea has accorded it the ungrudging treatment it deserves, painting it with a microscopic fidelity. It has four tiers, each fringed with a narrow but elegant level. It cost him ninepence farthing in the Euston Road in 1911, and it has travelled twice round the world with him. He will help you admire it without a trace of humour or self-consciousness. ‘Fetching little thing, what?’ he will say jauntily, as he takes a cloth and dusts it. The top tier, he will explain carefully, was designed for buttered toast: the middle for shortbreads: the bottom tier is for ‘two kinds of cake’. At the moment, however, it is fulfilling another purpose. On the top shelf lie his telescope, compass and Bible; on the middle tier lies his correspondence which consists only of his pension envelope; on the bottom tier, with tremendous gravity, lies a chamber-pot which is always referred to as ‘the heirloom’, and to which is attached a mysterious story which he will one day confide to me.