* * * * *
Marlow got up to get another cigar. The night was getting on to what I
may call its deepest hour, the hour most favourable to evil purposes of
men's hate, despair or greed--to whatever can whisper into their ears the
unlawful counsels of protest against things that are; the hour of ill-
omened silence and chill and stagnation, the hour when the criminal plies
his trade and the victim of sleeplessness reaches the lowest depth of
dreadful discouragement; the hour before the first sight of dawn. I know
it, because while Marlow was crossing the room I looked at the clock on
the mantelpiece. He however never looked that way though it is possible
that he, too, was aware of the passage of time. He sat down heavily.
"Our friend Powell," he began again, "was very anxious that I should
understand the topography of that cabin. I was interested more by its
moral atmosphere, that tension of falsehood, of desperate acting, which
tainted the pure sea-atmosphere into which the magnanimous Anthony had
carried off his conquest and--well--his self-conquest too, trying to act
at the same time like a beast of prey, a pure spirit and the "most
generous of men." Too big an order clearly because he was nothing of a
monster but just a common mortal, a little more self-willed and
self-confident than most, may be, both in his roughness and in his
delicacy.
As to the delicacy of Mr. Powell's proceedings I'll say nothing. He
found a sort of depraved excitement in watching an unconscious man--and
such an attractive and mysterious man as Captain Anthony at that. He
wanted another peep at him. He surmised that the captain must come back
soon because of the glass two-thirds full and also of the book put down
so brusquely. God knows what sudden pang had made Anthony jump up so. I
am convinced he used reading as an opiate against the pain of his
magnanimity which like all abnormal growths was gnawing at his healthy
substance with cruel persistence. Perhaps he had rushed into his cabin
simply to groan freely in absolute and delicate secrecy. At any rate he
tarried there. And young Powell would have grown weary and compunctious
at last if it had not become manifest to him that he had not been alone
in the highly incorrect occupation of watching the movements of Captain
Anthony.
Powell explained to me that no sound did or perhaps could reach him from
the saloon. The first sign--and we must remember that he was using his
eyes for all they were worth--was an unaccountable movement of the
curtain. It was wavy and very slight; just perceptible in fact to the
sharpened faculties of a secret watcher; for it can't be denied that our
wits are much more alert when engaged in wrong-doing (in which one
mustn't be found out) than in a righteous occupation.