Lord Jim
in smoke, with ashy patches on the skin of their naked shoulders
and breasts. Their heads were bound in dirty but carefully folded
headkerchiefs, and the old man began at once to state a complaint,
voluble, stretching a lank arm, screwing up at Jim his old bleared eyes
confidently. The Rajah’s people would not leave them alone; there had
been some trouble about a lot of turtles’ eggs his people had collected
on the islets there--and leaning at arm’s-length upon his paddle, he
pointed with a brown skinny hand over the sea. Jim listened for a time
without looking up, and at last told him gently to wait. He would hear
him by-and-by. They withdrew obediently to some little distance, and sat
on their heels, with their paddles lying before them on the sand; the
silvery gleams in their eyes followed our movements patiently; and the
immensity of the outspread sea, the stillness of the coast, passing
north and south beyond the limits of my vision, made up one colossal
Presence watching us four dwarfs isolated on a strip of glistening sand.
‘“The trouble is,” remarked Jim moodily, “that for generations these
beggars of fishermen in that village there had been considered as the
Rajah’s personal slaves--and the old rip can’t get it into his head that
. . .”
‘He paused. “That you have changed all that,” I said.
‘“Yes I’ve changed all that,” he muttered in a gloomy voice.
‘“You have had your opportunity,” I pursued.
‘“Have I?” he said. “Well, yes. I suppose so. Yes. I have got back my
confidence in myself--a good name--yet sometimes I wish . . . No! I
shall hold what I’ve got. Can’t expect anything more.” He flung his arm
out towards the sea. “Not out there anyhow.” He stamped his foot upon
the sand. “This is my limit, because nothing less will do.”
‘We continued pacing the beach. “Yes, I’ve changed all that,” he went
on, with a sidelong glance at the two patient squatting fishermen; “but
only try to think what it would be if I went away. Jove! can’t you see
it? Hell loose. No! To-morrow I shall go and take my chance of drinking
that silly old Tunku Allang’s coffee, and I shall make no end of fuss
over these rotten turtles’ eggs. No. I can’t say--enough. Never. I must
go on, go on for ever holding up my end, to feel sure that nothing can
touch me. I must stick to their belief in me to feel safe and to--to”
. . . He cast about for a word, seemed to look for it on the sea . . .
“to keep in touch with” . . . His voice sank suddenly to a murmur . . .
“with those whom, perhaps, I shall never see any more. With--with--you,
for instance.”
‘I was profoundly humbled by his words. “For God’s sake,” I said, “don’t
set me up, my dear fellow; just look to yourself.” I felt a gratitude,
an affection, for that straggler whose eyes had singled me out, keeping
my place in the ranks of an insignificant multitude. How little that
was to boast of, after all! I turned my burning face away; under the
low sun, glowing, darkened and crimson, like an ember snatched from the
fire, the sea lay outspread, offering all its immense stillness to the
approach of the fiery orb. Twice he was going to speak, but checked
himself; at last, as if he had found a formula--
‘“I shall be faithful,” he said quietly. “I shall be faithful,” he
repeated, without looking at me, but for the first time letting his eyes
wander upon the waters, whose blueness had changed to a gloomy purple
under the fires of sunset. Ah! he was romantic, romantic. I recalled
some words of Stein’s. . . . “In the destructive element immerse! . . .
To follow the dream, and again to follow the dream--and
so--always--usque ad finem . . .” He was romantic, but none the
less true. Who could tell what forms, what visions, what faces, what
forgiveness he could see in the glow of the west! . . . A small boat,
leaving the schooner, moved slowly, with a regular beat of two oars,
towards the sandbank to take me off. “And then there’s Jewel,” he said,
out of the great silence of earth, sky, and sea, which had mastered my
very thoughts so that his voice made me start. “There’s Jewel.” “Yes,”
I murmured. “I need not tell you what she is to me,” he pursued.
“You’ve seen. In time she will come to understand . . .” “I hope so,” I
interrupted. “She trusts me, too,” he mused, and then changed his tone.
“When shall we meet next, I wonder?” he said.
‘“Never--unless you come out,” I answered, avoiding his glance. He
didn’t seem to be surprised; he kept very quiet for a while.
‘“Good-bye, then,” he said, after a pause. “Perhaps it’s just as well.”
‘We shook hands, and I walked to the boat, which waited with her nose
on the beach. The schooner, her mainsail set and jib-sheet to windward,
curveted on the purple sea; there was a rosy tinge on her sails. “Will
you be going home again soon?” asked Jim, just as I swung my leg over
the gunwale. “In a year or so if I live,” I said. The forefoot grated on
the sand, the boat floated, the wet oars flashed and dipped once, twice.
Jim, at the water’s edge, raised his voice. “Tell them . . .” he began.
I signed to the men to cease rowing, and waited in wonder. Tell who? The
half-submerged sun faced him; I could see its red gleam in his eyes that
looked dumbly at me. . . . “No--nothing,” he said, and with a slight
wave of his hand motioned the boat away. I did not look again at the
shore till I had clambered on board the schooner.
‘By that time the sun had set. The twilight lay over the east, and the
coast, turned black, extended infinitely its sombre wall that seemed the
very stronghold of the night; the western horizon was one great blaze of
gold and crimson in which a big detached cloud floated dark and still,
casting a slaty shadow on the water beneath, and I saw Jim on the beach
watching the schooner fall off and gather headway.
‘The two half-naked fishermen had arisen as soon as I had gone; they
were no doubt pouring the plaint of their trifling, miserable, oppressed
lives into the ears of the white lord, and no doubt he was listening to
it, making it his own, for was it not a part of his luck--the luck “from
the word Go”--the luck to which he had assured me he was so completely
equal? They, too, I should think, were in luck, and I was sure their
pertinacity would be equal to it. Their dark-skinned bodies vanished on
the dark background long before I had lost sight of their protector. He
was white from head to foot, and remained persistently visible with
the stronghold of the night at his back, the sea at his feet, the
opportunity by his side--still veiled. What do you say? Was it still
veiled? I don’t know. For me that white figure in the stillness of coast
and sea seemed to stand at the heart of a vast enigma. The twilight
was ebbing fast from the sky above his head, the strip of sand had sunk
already under his feet, he himself appeared no bigger than a child--then
only a speck, a tiny white speck, that seemed to catch all the light
left in a darkened world. . . . And, suddenly, I lost him. . . .
CHAPTER 36
With these words Marlow had ended his narrative, and his audience had
broken up forthwith, under his abstract, pensive gaze. Men drifted off
the verandah in pairs or alone without loss of time, without offering
a remark, as if the last image of that incomplete story, its
incompleteness itself, and the very tone of the speaker, had made
discussion in vain and comment impossible. Each of them seemed to carry
away his own impression, to carry it away with him like a secret; but
there was only one man of all these listeners who was ever to hear the
last word of the story. It came to him at home, more than two years
later, and it came contained in a thick packet addressed in Marlow’s
upright and angular handwriting.
The privileged man opened the packet, looked in, then, laying it down,
went to the window. His rooms were in the highest flat of a lofty
building, and his glance could travel afar beyond the clear panes of
glass, as though he were looking out of the lantern of a lighthouse.
The slopes of the roofs glistened, the dark broken ridges succeeded each
other without end like sombre, uncrested waves, and from the depths of
the town under his feet ascended a confused and unceasing mutter. The
spires of churches, numerous, scattered haphazard, uprose like beacons
on a maze of shoals without a channel; the driving rain mingled with the
falling dusk of a winter’s evening; and the booming of a big clock on a
tower, striking the hour, rolled past in voluminous, austere bursts
of sound, with a shrill vibrating cry at the core. He drew the heavy
curtains.
The light of his shaded reading-lamp slept like a sheltered pool, his
footfalls made no sound on the carpet, his wandering days were over. No
more horizons as boundless as hope, no more twilights within the forests
as solemn as temples, in the hot quest for the Ever-undiscovered
Country over the hill, across the stream, beyond the wave. The hour
was striking! No more! No more!--but the opened packet under the lamp
brought back the sounds, the visions, the very savour of the past--a
multitude of fading faces, a tumult of low voices, dying away upon the
shores of distant seas under a passionate and unconsoling sunshine. He
sighed and sat down to read.
At first he saw three distinct enclosures. A good many pages closely
blackened and pinned together; a loose square sheet of greyish paper
with a few words traced in a handwriting he had never seen before, and
an explanatory letter from Marlow. From this last fell another letter,
yellowed by time and frayed on the folds. He picked it up and, laying it
aside, turned to Marlow’s message, ran swiftly over the opening lines,
and, checking himself, thereafter read on deliberately, like one
approaching with slow feet and alert eyes the glimpse of an undiscovered
country.
‘. . . I don’t suppose you’ve forgotten,’ went on the letter. ‘You alone
have showed an interest in him that survived the telling of his story,
though I remember well you would not admit he had mastered his fate.
You prophesied for him the disaster of weariness and of disgust with
acquired honour, with the self-appointed task, with the love sprung from
pity and youth. You had said you knew so well “that kind of thing,” its
illusory satisfaction, its unavoidable deception. You said also--I call
to mind--that “giving your life up to them” (them meaning all of mankind
with skins brown, yellow, or black in colour) “was like selling your
soul to a brute.” You contended that “that kind of thing” was only
endurable and enduring when based on a firm conviction in the truth of
ideas racially our own, in whose name are established the order, the
morality of an ethical progress. “We want its strength at our backs,”
you had said. “We want a belief in its necessity and its justice, to
make a worthy and conscious sacrifice of our lives. Without it the
sacrifice is only forgetfulness, the way of offering is no better than
the way to perdition.” In other words, you maintained that we must fight
in the ranks or our lives don’t count. Possibly! You ought to know--be
it said without malice--you who have rushed into one or two places
single-handed and came out cleverly, without singeing your wings. The
point, however, is that of all mankind Jim had no dealings but with
himself, and the question is whether at the last he had not confessed to
a faith mightier than the laws of order and progress.
‘I affirm nothing. Perhaps you may pronounce--after you’ve read. There
is much truth--after all--in the common expression “under a cloud.” It
is impossible to see him clearly--especially as it is through the eyes
of others that we take our last look at him. I have no hesitation in
imparting to you all I know of the last episode that, as he used to say,