He had lost his way amongst the sandhills of Obak on the evening of the
second day, and had wandered vainly, with his small store of dates and
water exhausted, until he had stumbled and lay prone, parched and
famished and enfeebled, with the bitter knowledge that Abou Fatma and
the Wells were somewhere within a mile of the spot on which he lay. But
even at that moment of exhaustion the knife had been a talisman and a
help. He grasped the rough wooden handle, all too small for a Western
hand, and he ran his fingers over the rough rust upon the blade, and the
weapon spoke to him and bade him take heart, since once he had been put
to the test and had not failed. But long before he saw the white houses
of Suakin that feeling of elation vanished, and the knife became an
emblem of the vain tortures of his boyhood and the miserable folly which
culminated in his resignation of his commission. He understood now the
words which Lieutenant Sutch had spoken in the grill-room of the
Criterion Restaurant, when citing Hamlet as his example, "The thing
which he saw, which he thought over, which he imagined in the act and in
the consequence--that he shrank from. Yet when the moment of action
comes sharp and immediate, does he fail?" And remembering the words,
Harry Feversham sat one May night, four years afterwards, in Captain
Willoughby's verandah, whittling away at the table with his knife, and
saying over and over again in a bitter savage voice: "It was an
illusion, but an illusion which has caused a great deal of suffering to
a woman I would have shielded from suffering.
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