Page:Strindberg the Man (1920).djvu/45

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FIRST MEETING WITH STRINDBERG
41

plowed furrows in his cheeks and dug dark hollows under his eyes.

His eyes! In these there was nothing of the dreamer, of that Master Olof whom I had loved as a good brother. They were light grey and cold, the flash of the eye was sharp and repellent, and the continual forcing of the focus had, as it were, pressed the eyes farther back under the vault of the forehead. Immediately I recognized in him the persecuted man, and I saw that unceasing hounding had changed him so strangely that he had something wolfish in his nature. There was a tension in his expression as though he were ready immediately to snap back in case anyone yelped at him.

There was, besides, a different air about him from the one he had displayed in the pictures of his youth. In some of these there is something unrefined about him. In one of them he reminds you of a young fellow who has been sitting on the tailor's table[1] all his life and thereby acquired an expression of fatuity.[2] In another there pops up a sort of school teacher who pretends to be a superior spirit in spite of the fact that detachable cuffs reach down on his knuckles. Of the youthful face of 1870, which in my opinion is ideally beautiful, there was not a trace, nor did he resemble in the least the pictures of his later youth.

The Strindberg of forty met me as a cosmopolitan.

  1. ↑ Allusion to the fact that the tailor sits on the table while working.
  2. ↑ Possibly a reference to a picture taken in 1884 which is very unattractive.
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