I secured an interview with Carraway in the bathroom soon after sunset.
'Any better?' I asked for about the twentieth time.
He shook his head dejectedly.
'All right. We must go to the doctor to-morrow morning. But, O Carraway, do go to him to-night, don't be afraid. It's only imagination. Do go.'
'I'll see,' he said in a dazed, dreary sort of way, 'I'll see, but I want to play the last card I have in my hand before I go. It's a trump card perhaps.'
'On my honor,' I said, 'You're tormenting yourself for nothing.
You're as white as ever you were.'
Then I said 'Good-night.' I stopped for a moment outside the door, and heard him begin splashing and scrubbing. The thing was getting on my own nerves.
I went off up on deck, and smoked hard, then I read, and wrote letters, and smoked again, and went to bed very late. I had steered clear of the bathroom and all Carraway's haunts so far as I could. Yes, and I had gone over to the second class, and I had asked the parson to do as he wanted. I had asked him the day before. Now I asked him over again.
The steward handed me a letter when he brought me my coffee in the morning. I opened it and read:
DEAR SIR, Perhaps my negrophoby is wrong. Anyhow, it's real to me. I had and have it, and see no way to get rid of it properly here on earth. Now God has touched me, me the negrophobe, and colored me. And to me the thing seems very hard to bear. Therefore I am trying the sea to-night.