“For some days after he’d come to aboard the whaler, he doesn’t seem to have done much or thought of much; he just lay in his bunk and shivered. They were very good to him; gave him blankets and the best food they had, and let him lie, for his mind was all in a fog. They spread the fur coat atop of the blankets, and whenever he’d lift his head or stretch his hand, there it would be. It didn’t worry him much at first, but as his strength came back, the fog in his brain lifted, all but a few patches. And he’d lie fingering the greasy fur, and wonder—and wonder—how it came there . . . .
“I’ve known men, bolder or weaker than M’Cabe, who’d have let those patches rest. But he couldn’t. He kept trying to blow the fog clear. He’d lie there, shaking under the fur coat, and fighting for memory till he was as weak as a rag, and the cook, who was especially good to him, would bring him a tin of bitter brown coffee and a hot stove-lid for his feet. . . . Those blank patches in his mind were like lead, like iron; he might wreck himself against them like a prisoner against a stone wall; his own brain, his own memory, would yield him nothing.
“How did he get the fur coat? What he struggled for was the complete picture; and in the centre, it was smeared with a great black brush. He could not remember.
“He saw himself and the other man in the boat, landing on the island, digging their burrows in the icy sand; saw again all the monotony of that suffering; saw them gathering eggs, whirling arms like windmills in the fog as they fought the great gulls. He could taste again the salty frost on his lips. He could see the other man running round the icy rocks, and a shadow of himself following anxiously. He could see the rime on the fur coat, the pockets bulging with eggs, a button that was loose and worried him for fear it would be lost. And he could see himself being hauled into the boat by the collar of that coat. But between these two—blackness.
“Did the other man die? They didn’t find him. Did he take off the coat, leave it behind him, and fall from the rocks while scrambling for eggs? Did M’Cabe push him off? Did he kill him first and then take off the coat and throw the body into the sea? ‘He didn’t feel his end near and will the coat to me,’ says M’Cabe, ‘he’d have wished to be buried with it on, he was that jealous of it.’ Many and many a time I’ve sat there with him and gone over every inch of that dirty old coat, hunting for a cut, a tear, a stain that might help him to remember, and he in a sweat of fear. ‘Father, it’ll come in another minute,’ he’d say, ‘in a minute I’ll know.’ But he never knew, he doesn’t know. The fog never lifted. The man in the fur coat running round the rocks in the mist—himself being hauled into the boat by the collar of that coat: whatever lay between of accident, of murder, of death—whatever lay between, is locked in the mysterious archives of the brain, like a book, the covers of which he may never be permitted to open. He goes about his world, as it were, looking at his hands; and he does not know if they are clean, or if there is on them—blood.”