Mr. Marsh had enjoyed an excellent education in England. He had the average Englishman's faculty of expressing himself in excellent commonplaces so that every other Englishman knew exactly what he meant. But his hearers on this occasion were not all Englishmen, and suddenly out of the dusk of the corner came a voice speaking English but not of England at all. Mr. Spokesly, standing a short distance off, was startled at the full-throated brazen clang of it booming through the obscurity of the vast chamber. It was a voice eloquent of youth and impudent virile good-humour, a voice with a strange harsh under-twang which the speaker's ancestors had brought out of central Asia, where they had bawled barbaric war-songs across the frozen spaces.
"Broke his what? I don't understand what you mean," said the voice, and a fair-haired young man in a gray uniform, a short, thick golden moustache on his lip, came up suddenly out of the gloom into the radiance of the candles and began to stride to and fro. The interruption was trivial, yet it gave the key to the young man's character, courageous, cultured, precise, and impatient of inferior minds.
"His fall," explained Mr. Marsh politely. "The point is, I believe he was alive almost up to the moment, you know, of our entry. He even moved slightly as I stepped in—a sort of last gasp. I even heard something of that nature. A sigh. Good evening, gentlemen."
The last words were addressed to Mr. Spokesly and his friend in the Public Debt, who crossed the path of the young man striding up and down and were introduced to the company.
"You can corroborate what I say," said Mr. Marsh. "You know I mentioned it at the time—a sort of sigh?"
"What is a sigh, or a moment, for that matter, more or less?" demanded the young man striding up and down. "To me there is something much more important in his motive. Why did this captain of yours end himself? This is a question important to science. I am a student of Lombroso and Molle and the Englishman Ellis. Was this man epileptic? Did he have delusions of grandeur?"
"This gentleman," said Mr. Marsh, "was the officer on deck at the time," and he looked at Mr. Spokesly anxiously, as though waiting fresh details of the affair.
"Yes, he had delusions," said Mr. Spokesly, clearing his throat. "Thought everybody was against him. He took drugs too. My own idea is he took the wrong stuff or too much of it, in his excitement. He was down there in his room when we crashed. And he had another—delusion I suppose you could call it. He didn't like women."
"Didn't like.... Well, who does?" challenged the vigorous metallic voice with a carefully modified yet resonant laugh. One or two laughs, equally modified, floated from obscure corners where cigar-ends glowed, and the animated figure paused in its rapid movement. "I mean, no man likes women as they are unless he is a true sensualist. What we aspire to is the ideal they represent. Your captain must have been a sensualist."
"Because his last breath was a sigh, you mean?" said Mr. Marsh. "I heard it you know. A long-drawn gasp."