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space and time, requiring for their existence a fourteen-hundred-ton
steamer and twenty-seven minutes by the watch; they made a whole that
had features, shades of expression, a complicated aspect that could be
remembered by the eye, and something else besides, something invisible,
a directing spirit of perdition that dwelt within, like a malevolent
soul in a detestable body. He was anxious to make this clear. This
had not been a common affair, everything in it had been of the utmost
importance, and fortunately he remembered everything. He wanted to go on
talking for truth's sake, perhaps for his own sake also; and while his
utterance was deliberate, his mind positively flew round and round the
serried circle of facts that had surged up all about him to cut him off
from the rest of his kind: it was like a creature that, finding itself
imprisoned within an enclosure of high stakes, dashes round and round,
distracted in the night, trying to find a weak spot, a crevice, a place
to scale, some opening through which it may squeeze itself and escape.
This awful activity of mind made him hesitate at times in his
speech. . . .
'The captain kept on moving here and there on the bridge; he seemed calm
enough, only he stumbled several times; and once as I stood speaking to
him he walked right into me as though he had been stone-blind. He made
no definite answer to what I had to tell. He mumbled to himself; all I
heard of it were a few words that sounded like "confounded steam!" and
"infernal steam!"--something about steam. I thought . . .'
He was becoming irrelevant; a question to the point cut short his
speech, like a pang of pain, and he felt extremely discouraged and
weary. He was coming to that, he was coming to that--and now, checked
brutally, he had to answer by yes or no. He answered truthfully by a
curt 'Yes, I did'; and fair of face, big of frame, with young, gloomy
eyes, he held his shoulders upright above the box while his soul writhed
within him. He was made to answer another question so much to the point
and so useless, then waited again. His mouth was tastelessly dry, as
though he had been eating dust, then salt and bitter as after a drink
of sea-water. He wiped his damp forehead, passed his tongue over parched
lips, felt a shiver run down his back. The big assessor had dropped his
eyelids, and drummed on without a sound, careless and mournful; the eyes
of the other above the sunburnt, clasped fingers seemed to glow with
kindliness; the magistrate had swayed forward; his pale face hovered
near the flowers, and then dropping sideways over the arm of his chair,
he rested his temple in the palm of his hand. The wind of the punkahs
eddied down on the heads, on the dark-faced natives wound about in
voluminous draperies, on the Europeans sitting together very hot and in
drill suits that seemed to fit them as close as their skins, and holding
their round pith hats on their knees; while gliding along the walls the
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