irrevocably from a land sanctioned by her presence, her young life. I turned uneasily to the other side. At the heavy black table, in the light of a single candle, the Cuban and the Nova Scotian were discussing, their heads close together.
'I tell you no,' Nichols was saying in a fluent, abominable, literal translation into Spanish. 'Take the knife so... thumb upwards. Stab down in the soft between the neck and the shoulder-blade. You get right into the lungs with the point. I've tried it: ten times. Never stick the back. The chances are he moves, and you hit a bone. There are no bones there. It's the way they kill pigs in New Jersey.'
The Cuban bent his brows as if he were reflecting over a chessboard. 'Ma....' he pondered. His knife was lying on the table. He unsheathed it, then got up, and moved behind the seated Nova Scotian.
'You say... there?' he asked, pressing his little finger at the base of Nichols' skinny column of a neck. 'And then...' He measured the length of the knife on Nichols's back twice with elaborate care, breathing through his nostrils. Then he said with a convinced, musing air, 'It is true. It would go down into the lungs.'
'And there are arteries and things,' Nichols said.
'Yes, yes,' the Cuban answered, sheathing the knife and thrusting it into his belt.
'With a knife that length it's perfect.' Nichols waved his shadowy hand towards Salazar's scarf. Salazar moved off a little.
'I see the advantages,' he said. 'No crying out, because of the blood in the lungs. I thank yous Senor Escoces.'
Nichols rose, lurching to his full height, and looked in my direction. I closed my eyes. I did not wish him to talk to me. I heard him say:
'Well,
He swayed an immense shadow through the door. Salazar took the candle and followed him into the corridor.
Yes, that was it, why she was so great a part, a whole wall, a whole beam of my life's house. I saw her suddenly in the blackness, her full red lips, her quivering nostrils, the curve of her breasts, her lithe movements from the hips, the way she set her feet down, the white flower waxen in the darkness of her hair, and the robin-wing flutter of her lids over her gray eyes when she smiled. I moved convulsively in my intense desire. I would have given my soul, my share of eternity, my honour, only to see that flutter of the lids over the shining gray eyes. I never felt I was beneath the imponderable pressure of a prison's wall till then. She was infinite miles away; I could not even imagine what inanimate things surrounded her. She must be talking to someone else; fluttering her lids like that. I recognized with a physical agony that was more than jealousy how slight was my hold upon her. It was not in her race, in her blood as in mine, to love me and my type. She had lived all her life in the middle of Romance, and the very fire and passion of her South must make me dim prose to her. I remember the flicker of Salazar's returning candle, cast in lines like an advancing scythe across the two walls from the corridor. I slept.
I had the feeling of appalled horror suddenly invading my sleep; a vast voice seemed to be exclaiming:
'Tell me where she is!'
I looked at the glowing horn of a lanthorn. It was O'Brien who held it. He stood over me, very sombre.
'Tell me where she is,' he said, the moment my eyes opened.
I said, 'She's... she's———I don't know.'
It appalls me even now to think how narrow was my escape. It was only because I had gone to sleep in the thought that I did not know, that I answered that I did not know. Ah—he was a cunning devil! To suddenly wake one; to get one's thoughts before one had had time to think! I lay looking at him, shivering. I couldn't even see much of his face.
'Where is she?' he said again. 'Where? Dead? Dead? God have mercy on your soul if the child is dead!'
I was still trembling. If I had told him!—I could hardly believe I had not. He continued bending over me with an attitude that hideously mocked solicitude.
'Where is she?' he asked again.
'Ransack the island,' I said. He glared at me, lifting the lamp. 'The whole earth, if you like.'
He ground his teeth, bending very low over me; then stood up, raising his head into the shadow above the lamp.
'What do I care for all the admirals?' he was speaking to himself. 'No ship shall leave Havana till....' He groaned. I heard him slap his forehead, and say distractedly, 'But perhaps she is not in a ship.'
There was a silence in which I heard him breathe heavily, and then he amazed me by saying:
'Have pity.'
I laughed, lying on my back. 'On you!'
He bent down. 'Fool! on yourself.'
A vast and towering shadow ran along the wall.
There wasn't a sound. The face of Salazar appeared behind him, and an uplifted hand grasping a knife. O'Brien saw the horror in my eyes. I gasped to him: 'Look....' and before he could move the knife went softly home between neck and shoulder. Salazar glided to the door and turned to wave his hand at me. O'Brien's lips were pressed tightly together, the handle of the knife was against his ear, the lanthorn hung at the end of his rigid arm for a moment. As he lowered it, the blood spurted from his shoulder as if from a burst stand-pipe, only black and warm. It fell over my face, over my hands, everywhere. For a minute of eternity his agonized eyes searched my features, as if to discern whether I had connived, whether I condoned.
I had started up, my face coming right against his. I felt an immense horror. What did it mean? What had he done? He had been such a power for so long, so inevitably, over my whole life that I could not even begin to understand that this was not some new subtle villainy of his. He shook his head slowly, his ear disturbing the knife.
