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As it could not for the moment find any outward expression, his anger took on the form of melancholy:
He had been quite unprepared for this particular blow, striking under every conceivable kind of armour, and for some minutes he could hardly bear the pain, but sat there blinking in the sun. ‘Christ,’ he said at last. ‘Another day.’
And there is little to be done with a thoroughly unwilling crew.’ ‘No,’ said Jack. ‘There is no forcing a willing mind.’
‘It is a very curious thing, you know,’ he went on, gazing out of the stern window with a look of mild, ingenuous wonder, ‘a prodigious curious thing, but there cannot be many men who are both damned fools and no seamen, who reach post rank in the Royal Navy – men with no interest, I mean, of course – and yet it so happens that I have served under no less than two of them.
‘No, no, my dear sir,’ said James Dillon, ‘never let a mere word grieve your heart.
now that he could put a meaning to the remote, dreadful noise he heard it far more clearly.
I reasoned as closely and cogently as ever I could – better than ever I thought I could – and he did not follow me at all. His attention wandered. “Look,” says he, “there’s a redbreast in that yew by the path.” All he knew was that I was opposed to him, so he closed his mind; if, indeed, he was capable of following me, which perhaps he was not.
you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile.’
‘I cannot tell what possessed me to speak so rancorously,’ he said, passing his hand over his forehead and looking both unhappy and bewildered. ‘I do not think I have ever done so before. Have not expressed myself well – clumsy, inaccurate, not what I meant nor what I meant to say. We understood one another better before ever I opened my mouth.’
‘The identity I am thinking of is something that hovers between a man and the rest of the world: a mid-point between his view of himself and theirs of him – for each, of course, affects the other continually. A reciprocal fluxion, sir. There is nothing absolute about this identity of mine. Were you, you personally, to spend some days in Spain at present you would find yours change, you know, because of the general opinion there that you are a false harsh brutal murdering villain, an odious man.’
it seems to me that emotion and its expression are almost the same thing.
His conscience was very far from being perfectly easy. If Harte had meant this, he had been devilish successful; and he, Jack, had been a famous green-horn, an egregious flat. Was such malignity possible? Such cleverness in a mere horned scrub? He would have liked to put this to Stephen, for Stephen had a headpiece; and Jack, almost for the first time in his life, was by no means sure of his perfect comprehension, natural intelligence and penetration.
