Carl, who had entered softly, in frightening contrast to his mood, stood by the door watching him .God-damned syphilitic old idiot, he thought. ... As the Professor worked, or read, or whatever it was he was doing, he fingered gently the great bruised weal on the side of his face which was the legacy of Carl's last visit. Carl, on that occasion, had not meant to hit him so hard; now, fresh from a defeat to which he knew the Professor must have contributed, he wished he had taken his whole head off. . . . The Professor snuffled as he read, and touched his discoloured cheek, and presently refreshed himself from a glass, discreetly drawn from behind a pile of library paper-backs on the desk. He sniffed, and sipped, and suddenly exclaimed: "Brilliant!" and pushed the glass, of amber-coloured liquid, back into its hiding-place. Disgusting old soak, thought Carl; he's back on the bottle again. . . . Carl came forward a step or two, until he was inside the cabin and the circle of light, and said, on a false note of friendship:
"Good evening, Professor. Getting ahead with the good work?"
The old man jumped, and then stood up, trembling and shaking as if he were at the height of a fever. Jesus, thought Carl, he's far gone. . . . Carl came farther forwards, and very deliberately, very cruelly, reached behind the pile of books and drew out the glass of whisky. He raised it, and sniffed. Then he said: "You actually like tomato-juice?"
The Professor trembled again; his hand went up to the hideous bruise on his cheek, as if it were the only thing he was sure about. He looked at Carl fearfully, at a loss for words. There had been so many punishment sessions recently; at this late and horrible stage, Carl coming into his cabin could only mean Carl angry, Carl violent and shouting, Carl swinging his fist at him as if he were cutting wood, pounding meat, killing lice. ... He said, in terror and anguish:
"Forgive me, Carl. . . . It's the first today—the first for two days. ... I swear it. . . . But when you get to my age. ... A little whisky, I happened to find it in my flask, I must have forgotten it was there. . . ." He laughed, on a frightful note of nervous despair; he might have been some old, old comedian, coaxing the last laugh from leaden bellies, from stony Northern faces, before he retired to teach comedy routines to the young. ... "I hope you'll understand a slight lapse. . . ."
"Oh, I understand you all right, Professor." There was still no hint in Carl's voice of the volcano of fury within; only the genial manner, as false as porcelain teeth, would have given warning to a younger man, a man more alive to danger. "I understand you better than anyone in the world, I would say. . . . What exactly are you working on now?"
The Professor, doubtful, glanced down at his manuscript. "You really want to know, Carl?"
"Certainly I want to know."
"Well—" the Professor drew courage, foolishly, from the calm, perfidious air, "—I wasn't so much working, as reading through something I wrote last week. ... I try to add a little each day, as you know. . . . But perhaps you don't know, Carl—" again the laugh, the invitation to murder, "—that on the next section of our voyage we will come to a part of Africa which used to be called the Slave Coast, the Bight of Benin. West Africa, that is—they call it something different now, and I hope to heaven they are more fortunate than in the past—but in those days, in those days . . ." He had sat down again at his desk; his hand reached shakily for the whisky glass, and then, remembering, he withdrew it, and touched his raw cheek again. "The Slave Coast," he muttered. "Infamous. . . . Brutal. ... It was a kind of piracy, Carl," he said, looking up, a scholar ready to justify his area of research, "otherwise it would have no place in my book. There was one terrible story—one of many terrible stories—which I believe is new. It will reach the world for the first time in this volume." With thin-veined hands he stroked his manuscript, dog-eared, tattered, as if it were some ancient altar cloth, an offering for the Lord. "At the time of the suppression of the slave trade in 1807, on the very coast towards which we will soon be sailing, it became imperative for one of the slave ships to conceal the fact that she was carrying slaves. She was about to be searched on the high seas—there was a British man-of-war within a few miles, coming up to board her—" his old eyes glittered, one could not tell which side he was on, "—and the captain of the slave ship, a most wicked man, had two hundred of these poor wretches, in iron fetters, battened down below. You know what he did, Carl?—you know what he did?" The Professor's voice rose to a scholarly extreme of indignation. "He brought them all out on deck, and he shackled them on to the anchor-chain, one man to every five links, and then he lowered the chain down into the water—slowly, slowly—and then he let it go. Two hundred wretched human beings, Carl—two hundred black souls, dropped fathoms deep into—-"
"Professor," said Carl.
There was so much idle menace in his voice, such loaded disinterest, that even the Professor, enthralled with his terrible story, was brought up short. He turned in his chair, shakily, reluctantly, and cupped his livid cheek as if it would help him to hear. "Yes, Carl?"
"Do you remember my giving you a message for Diane?"
"A message, Carl? Now let me see. . . ." The Professor, in an absurd caricature of efficiency, actually looked at his desk calendar, completely bare of any writing, before he said: "I don't seem to recall the exact particulars, Carl. . . . Was it about the costume ball?"
"No, it wasn't about the costume ball. That was more than a month ago." Try as he would, under the extreme pressure of his anger, Carl could not prevent some of the tension creeping into his voice. "This was the night before last. I asked you to tell her something. Remember?"
The Professor was aware of danger now. The hand touching his ruined cheek became protective, actively frightened. "Not exactly, Carl. ... I have so very many things on my mind, these days. . . . If you could just say—"
"So you didn't give her the message?"
"Well, Carl—it's quite possible—"
"I told you," said Carl, with crystal-clear enunciation, "to tell Diane to do nothing—nothing—unless she cleared it with me first. I told you to tell her the heat was on, and she was to drop everything and keep absolutely quiet. I gave you that message, right here in this room." He came forward a step or two, as if the air round him had suddenly grown too hot. "Did you, in fact, tell her?"
"Well, God bless my soul!" exclaimed the Professor. The wavering laugh bespoke the edge of terror. "It must have slipped my mind completely. But I'll tell you what, Carl. Would you like me to go along now—"
"You imbecile!" The burst of fury, when it came, was like a thunder-clap. "You stupid, rotten, drunken, son of a whore!" His hand came up, and the Professor, shielding the bruised side of his face, was knocked nearly senseless by a back-handed blow on his other cheek. "Do you know what you've done?" asked Carl. He was nearly screaming. "You've ruined this whole deal! You didn't give my message to Diane, and she didn't lay off, and now she's been locked up, and we've all got to leave the ship at Durban! And when I come down here, you're sucking down the Scotch and writing a book!"
He raised his hand again, and the Professor, half-conscious, cowered away. But it was no good, simple violence was not enough. Carl's eyes turned to the manuscript, the ridiculous bundle of old pages lying on the desk. He seized it; it was bound in stiff cardboard covers, and these he stripped away with swift motions, with tearing hands. He was left with the bare pages themselves; the top ones were yellowing, the whole dog-eared collection was ripe for the trash-can.