a sort of pent-up violence.  “I feel like a fool all the time.”  I looked up at him.  This was going very far—­for Brierly—­when talking of Brierly.  He stopped short, and seizing the lapel of my coat, gave it a slight tug.  “Why are we tormenting that young chap?” he asked.  This question chimed in so well to the tolling of a certain thought of mine that, with the image of the absconding renegade in my eye, I answered at once, “Hanged if I know, unless it be that he lets you.”  I was astonished to see him fall into line, so to speak, with that utterance, which ought to have been tolerably cryptic.  He said angrily, “Why, yes.  Can’t he see that wretched skipper of his has cleared out?  What does he expect to happen?  Nothing can save him.  He’s done for.”  We walked on in silence a few steps.  “Why eat all that dirt?” he exclaimed, with an oriental energy of expression—­about the only sort of energy you can find a trace of east of the fiftieth meridian.  I wondered greatly at the direction of his thoughts, but now I strongly suspect it was strictly in character:  at bottom poor Brierly must have been thinking of himself.  I pointed out to him that the skipper of the Patna was known to have feathered his nest pretty well, and could procure almost anywhere the means of getting away.  With Jim it was otherwise:  the Government was keeping him in the Sailors’ Home for the time being, and probably he hadn’t a penny in his pocket to bless himself with.  It costs some money to run away.  “Does it?  Not always,” he said, with a bitter laugh, and to some further remark of mine—­“Well, then, let him creep twenty feet underground and stay there!  By heavens! I would.”  I don’t know why his tone provoked me, and I said, “There is a kind of courage in facing it out as he does, knowing very well that if he went away nobody would trouble to run after hmm.”  “Courage be hanged!” growled Brierly.  “That sort of courage is of no use to keep a man straight, and I don’t care a snap for such courage.  If you were to say it was a kind of cowardice now—­of softness.  I tell you what, I will put up two hundred rupees if you put up another hundred and undertake to make the beggar clear out early to-morrow morning.  The fellow’s a gentleman if he ain’t fit to be touched—­he will understand.  He must!  This infernal publicity is too shocking:  there he sits while all these confounded natives, serangs, lascars, quartermasters, are giving evidence that’s enough to burn a man to ashes with shame.  This is abominable.  Why, Marlow, don’t you think, don’t you feel, that this is abominable; don’t you now—­come—­as a seaman?  If he went away all this would stop at once.”  Brierly said these words with a most unusual animation, and made as if to reach after his pocket-book.  I restrained him, and declared coldly that the cowardice of these four men did not seem to me a matter of such great importance.  “And you call yourself a seaman, I suppose,” he pronounced angrily.  I said that’s what I called myself, and I hoped I was too.  He heard me out, and made a gesture with his big arm that seemed to deprive me of my individuality, to push me away into the crowd.  “The worst of it,” he said, “is that all you fellows have no sense of dignity; you don’t think enough of what you are supposed to be.”