In the suit-case, which was unlocked, and which I opened feverishly, there was a suit almost identical with that hanging on the hook, a little linen, a few changes of underclothing, a small supply of socks, collars, and other such necessities, all more or less new, some of them still unworn, but with not so much as an initial to give a clue to the owner. It struck me—and I made the observation with a frightened inward laugh—that a man running away from detection for a crime would fit himself out in just this way.
Having repacked the bags, I stood at a loss, in the sense that for the first time I felt stunned. The position was promising to be more serious than I had thought it possible for it to become. There were so many things to think of that I couldn’t see them all before me at a glance.
Standing in the middle of the narrow floor, steadying myself by a hand on the edge of Drinkwater’s bunk, I suddenly caught my reflection in the glass. It was a new line to follow up. A look into my own eyes would reforge those links with myself that had trembled away. I went closer, staring at the man who now confronted me.
It is an odd experience to gaze at yourself and see a stranger; but that is what happened to me now. The face that gazed back at me was one which, as far as I could tell, I had never seen in my life. I had seen faces like it, hundreds of them, but never precisely this face. It was the typical face of the brown-eyed, brown-haired Anglo-Saxon, lean, leathery, and tanned; but I could no more connect it with my intimate self than I could Drinkwater’s face, or Jean-Marie’s.
It was that of a man who might have been thirty-two, but who possibly looked older. I mean by that that there was a haggardness in it which seemed to come of experience rather than from time. Had you passed this face in the street you would have said that it was that of a tall, good-looking young fellow with a brown mustache, but you would have added that the eyes had the queer, far-away luminosity of eyes that have "seen things." They would have reminded you of Drinkwater’s eyes—not that they were like them, but only because of their fixed retention of images that have passed away from the brain.