d was so much better that in a
day or two he was to get up, I sat with them in the studio.
Dirk and I were talking. Mrs. Stroeve sewed, and I thought I
recognised the shirt she was mending as Strickland's. He lay
on his back; he did not speak. Once I saw that his eyes were
fixed on Blanche Stroeve, and there was in them a curious irony.
Feeling their gaze, she raised her own, and for a moment
they stared at one another. I could not quite understand
her expression. Her eyes had in them a strange perplexity,
and perhaps -- but why? -- alarm. In a moment Strickland
looked away and idly surveyed the ceiling, but she continued
to stare at him, and now her look was quite inexplicable.

In a few days Strickland began to get up. He was nothing but
skin and bone. His clothes hung upon him like rags on a
scarecrow. With his untidy beard and long hair, his features,
always a little larger than life, now emphasised by illness,
he had an extraordinary aspect; but it was so odd that it was
not quite ugly. There was something monumental in his
ungainliness. I do not know how to express precisely the
impression he made upon me. It was not exactly spirituality
that was obvious, though the screen of the flesh seemed almost
transparent, because there was in his face an outrageous
sensuality; but, though it sounds nonsense, it seemed as
though his sensuality were curiously spiritual. There was in
him something primitive. He seemed to partake of those
obscure forces of nature which the Greeks personified in
shapes part human and part beast, the satyr and the faun.
I thought of Marsyas, whom the god flayed because he had dared
to rival him in song. Strickland seemed to bear in his heart
strange harmonies and unadventured patterns, and I foresaw for
him an end of torture and despair. I had again the feeling
that he was possessed of a devil; but you could not say that
it was a devil of evil, for it was a primitive force that
existed before good and ill.

He was still too weak to paint, and he sat in the studio,
silent, occupied with God knows what dreams, or reading.
The books he liked were queer; sometimes I would find him poring
over the poems of Mallarme, and he read them as a child reads,
forming the words with his lips, and I wondered what strange
emotion he got from those subtle cadences and obscure phrases;
and again I found him absorbed in the detective novels of Gaboriau.
I amused myself by thinking that in his c