After a time I felt securer, and gave my mind again to the dead I had
killed. What must I do?
It occurred to me that perhaps I ought to bury him. At any rate, I
ought to hide him. I reflected coolly, and then put my gun within easy
reach and dragged him by the arm towards a place where the mud seemed
soft, and thrust him in. His powder-flask slipped from his loin-cloth,
and I went back to get it. Then I pressed him down with the butt of my
rifle.
Afterwards this all seemed to me most horrible, but at the time it was
entirely a matter-of-fact transaction. I looked round for any other
visible evidence of his fate, looked round as one does when one packs
one’s portmanteau in an hotel bedroom.
When I got my bearings, and carefully returned towards the ship. I had
the mood of grave concentration of a boy who has lapsed into poaching.
And the business only began to assume proper proportions for me as I
got near the ship, to seem any other kind of thing than the killing of
a bird or rabbit.
In the night, however, it took on enormous and portentous forms. “By
God!” I cried suddenly, starting wide awake; “but it was murder!”
I lay after that wide awake, staring at my memories. In some odd way
these visions mixed up with my dream of in my uncle in his despair. The
black body which saw now damaged and partly buried, but which,
nevertheless, I no longer felt was dead but acutely alive and
perceiving, I mixed up with the ochreous slash under my uncle’s face. I
tried to dismiss this horrible obsession from my mind, but it prevailed
over all my efforts.
The next day was utterly black with my sense of that ugly creature’s
body. I am the least superstitious of men, but it drew me. It drew me
back into those thickets to the very place where I had hidden him.
Some evil and detestable beast had been at him, and he lay disinterred.
Methodically I buried his swollen and mangled carcass again, and
returned to the ship for another night of dreams. Next day for all the
morning I resisted the impulse to go to him, and played nap with
Pollack with my secret gnawing at me, and in the evening started to go
and was near benighted. I never told a soul of them of this thing I had
done.
Next day I went early, and he had gone, and there were human footmarks
and ugly stains round the muddy hole from which he had been dragged.
I returned to the ship, disconcerted and perplexed. That day it was the
men came aft, with blistered hands and faces, and sullen eyes. When
they proclaimed, through Edwards, their spokesman, “We’ve had enough of
this, and we mean it,” I answered very readily, “So have I. Let’s go.”