He spoke slowly; he remembered swiftly and with extreme vividness; he could have reproduced like an echo the moaning of the engineer for the better information of these men who wanted facts.  After his first feeling of revolt he had come round to the view that only a meticulous precision of statement would bring out the true horror behind the appalling face of things.  The facts those men were so eager to know had been visible, tangible, open to the senses, occupying their place in 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