t of the man
expanding and collapsing under the wide-open jacket. He glanced
aside, and saw the bosom of the woman near him rise and fall in quick
respirations that moved slightly up and down her hand, which was pressed
to her breast with all the fingers spread out and a little curved, as if
grasping something too big for its span. And nearly a minute passed. One
of those minutes when the voice is silenced, while the thoughts flutter
in the head, like captive birds inside a cage, in rushes desperate,
exhausting and vain.

During that minute of silence Lingard's anger kept rising, immense and
towering, such as a crested wave running over the troubled shallows of
the sands. Its roar filled his cars; a roar so powerful and distracting
that, it seemed to him, his head must burst directly with the expanding
volume of that sound. He looked at that man. That infamous figure
upright on its feet, still, rigid, with stony eyes, as if its rotten
soul had departed that moment and the carcass hadn't had the time yet
to topple over. For the fraction of a second he had the illusion and the
fear of the scoundrel having died there before the enraged glance of his
eyes. Willems' eyelids fluttered, and the unconscious and passing tremor
in that stiffly erect body exasperated Lingard like a fresh outrage. The
fellow dared to stir! Dared to wink, to breathe, to exist; here, right
before his eyes! His grip on the revolver relaxed gradually. As
the transport of his rage increased, so also his contempt for the
instruments that pierce or stab, that interpose themselves between the
hand and the object of hate. He wanted another kind of satisfaction.
Naked hands, by heaven! No firearms. Hands that could take him by the
throat, beat down his defence, batter his face into shapeless flesh;
hands that could feel all the desperation of his resistance and
overpower it in the violent delight of a contact lingering and furious,
intimate and brutal.

He let go the revolver altogether, stood hesitating, then throwing his
hands out, strode forward--and everything passed from his sight. He
could not see the man, the woman, the earth, the sky--saw nothing, as if
in that one stride he had left the visible world behind to step into a
black and deserted space. He heard screams round him in that obscurity,
screams like the melancholy and pitiful cries of sea-birds that dwell on
the lonely reefs of great oceans. Then suddenly a face appeared within a
few inches