revelations of that kind. Dull dog that de Barral--he grumbled. He
could not or would not take the trouble to characterise for me the
appearance of that man now officially a criminal (we had gone across the
road for a drink) but told me with a sourly, derisive snigger that,
after the sentence had been pronounced the fellow clung to the dock long
enough to make a sort of protest. `You haven't given me time. If I had
been given time I would have ended by being made a peer like some of
them.' And he had permitted himself his very first and last gesture in
all these days, raising a hard-clenched fist above his head.

"The pressman disapproved of that manifestation. It was not his
business to understand it. Is it ever the business of any pressman to
understand anything? I guess not. It would lead him too far away from
the actualities which are the daily bread of the public mind. He
probably thought the display worth very little from a picturesque point
of view; the weak voice, the colourless personality as incapable of an
attitude as a bed-post, the very fatuity of the clenched hand so
ineffectual at that time and place--no, it wasn't worth much. And then,
for him, an accomplished craftsman in his trade, thinking was distinctly
`bad business.' His business was to write a readable account. But I
who had nothing to write, I permitted myself to use my mind as we sat
before our still untouched glasses. And the disclosure which so often
rewards a moment of detachment from mere visual impressions gave me a
thrill very much approaching a shudder. I seemed to understand that,
with the shock of the agonies and perplexities of his trial, the
imagination of that man, whose moods, notions and motives wore
frequently an air of grotesque mystery--that his imagination had been at
last roused into activity. And this was awful. Just try to enter into
the feelings of a man whose imagination wakes up at the very moment he
is about to enter the tomb..."

"You must not think," went on Marlow after a pause, "that on that
morning with Fyne I went consciously in my mind over all this, let us
call it information; no, better say, this fund of knowledge which I had,
or rather which existed, in me in regard to de Barral. Information is
something one goes out to seek and puts away when found as you might do
a piece of lead: ponderous, useful, unvibrating, dull. Whereas
knowledge comes to one, this sort of knowledge, a chance acquisiti