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Updated: May 24, 2025
At last he was on one knee by the mate's side, and a match shed its little illumination. The mate's face was odd in its quietude, and the sou'- wester of oilskin was still on his head, held there by the string under the chin. From under its edge blood flowed steadily, thickly, appallingly. "But " cried Conroy. The match-flame stung his fingers and he dropped it. "Oh Lord!" he said.
The motor-launch beat away from the Rangoon. Monty, standing in the stern, lit a pipe, and stared over the match-flame at the empty troopship. Jimmy Doon, sitting in the bows, surveyed the hill-locked harbour, and said to me: "Well, there's one comfort: we shan't be killed on Gallipoli." "Why not?" "Because we shall certainly die at Mudros."
What had sounded like the ticking of a clock was now the noise of its dripping. "Drip!" it went; "drip-drip!" The match-flame stung his fingers and went out. "Hell!" cried Goodwin, and out of the darkness panic swooped on him. There was a moment when he tried to find the door and could not, alone in the blackness of the room with the murdered man.
What did it matter to him how much ground it covered, or when it began, or when it would die, when his own life was as uncertain that minute as a match-flame in the wind. Why had they brought him there to show him that burning coal-pit? Not out of any desire to display the natural wonders of the land. The answer was in the fact itself.
"A quare chap is Yorkey," he continued gently shielding a match-flame and puffing with noisy respiration "a good polisman knows th' Criminal Code from A tu Z eyah! but mighty quare. I misdoubt how th' tu av yez will get along." He sighed deeply, muttering half to himself, "I may have tu take shteps this time! . . ." A rather ominous beginning, thought George.
Physical action became imperative; he walked unsteadily across the room, pulled the serge curtains across the window, abruptly shutting out both stars and roofs, and turning to the dressing-table, groped for matches and struck a light. Four candles stood in an old silver candelabra; he touched them with the match-flame, they flickered, spat, rose to a steady glow.
Its ampler light revealed much that the match-flame had missed from its field the manner in which the sou'wester and the head it covered were caved in at one side, the cut in the sou'wester through which clotted hair protruded, the whole ghastliness of death that comes by violence.
They found the surface of a table, struck and knocked over a glass that stood upon it, and found a box of matches. "Ah!" grunted Goodwin triumphantly. The match-flame languished ere it stood steady and let the room be seen. Goodwin had passed the bed and was standing with his back to it. With the match in his fingers and his eyes dazzled by its light, he turned and approached it.
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