I saw someone in front of me lying in a bed.  I could not at once decide if it was a man or a woman.  Indeed at first I doubted if it was anything human.  But, afterwards, I knew it to be a man,—­for this reason, if for no other, that it was impossible such a creature could be feminine.  The bedclothes were drawn up to his shoulders; only his head was visible.  He lay on his left side, his head resting on his left hand; motionless, eyeing me as if he sought to read my inmost soul.  And, in very truth, I believe he read it.  His age I could not guess; such a look of age I had never imagined.  Had he asserted that he had been living through the ages, I should have been forced to admit that, at least, he looked it.  And yet I felt that it was quite within the range of possibility that he was no older than myself,—­there was a vitality in his eyes which was startling.  It might have been that he had been afflicted by some terrible disease, and it was that which had made him so supernaturally ugly.

There was not a hair upon his face or head, but, to make up for it, the skin, which was a saffron yellow, was an amazing mass of wrinkles.  The cranium, and, indeed, the whole skull, was so small as to be disagreeably suggestive of something animal.  The nose, on the other hand, was abnormally large; so extravagant were its dimensions, and so peculiar its shape, it resembled the beak of some bird of prey.  A characteristic of the face—­and an uncomfortable one I—­was that, practically, it stopped short at the mouth.  The mouth, with its blubber lips, came immediately underneath the nose, and chin, to all intents and purposes, there was none.  This deformity—­for the absence of chin amounted to that—­it was which gave to the face the appearance of something not human,—­that, and the eyes.  For so marked a feature of the man were his eyes, that, ere long, it seemed to me that he was nothing but eyes.

His eyes ran, literally, across the whole of the upper portion of his face,—­remember, the face was unwontedly small, and the columna of the nose was razor-edged.  They were long, and they looked out of narrow windows, and they seemed to be lighted by some internal radiance, for they shone out like lamps in a lighthouse tower.  Escape them I could not, while, as I endeavoured to meet them, it was as if I shrivelled into nothingness.  Never before had I realised what was meant by the power of the eye.  They held me enchained, helpless, spell-bound.  I felt that they could do with me as they would; and they did.  Their gaze was unfaltering, having the bird-like trick of never blinking; this man could have glared at me for hours and never moved an eyelid.

It was he who broke the silence.  I was speechless.

‘Shut the window.’  I did as he bade me.  ‘Pull down the blind.’  I obeyed.  ‘Turn round again.’  I was still obedient.  ’What is your name?’

Then I spoke,—­to answer him.  There was this odd thing about the words I uttered, that they came from me, not in response to my will power, but in response to his.  It was not I who willed that I should speak; it was he.  What he willed that I should say, I said.  Just that, and nothing more.  For the time I was no longer a man; my manhood was merged in his.  I was, in the extremest sense, an example of passive obedience.