Lord Jim
up slowly, looked at his dead friend, lifting the sheet, than dropped it
without a word. Slowly he walked back.
‘“He came! He came!” was running from lip to lip, making a murmur to
which he moved. “He hath taken it upon his own head,” a voice said
aloud. He heard this and turned to the crowd. “Yes. Upon my head.” A few
people recoiled. Jim waited awhile before Doramin, and then said gently,
“I am come in sorrow.” He waited again. “I am come ready and unarmed,”
he repeated.
‘The unwieldy old man, lowering his big forehead like an ox under a
yoke, made an effort to rise, clutching at the flintlock pistols on his
knees. From his throat came gurgling, choking, inhuman sounds, and his
two attendants helped him from behind. People remarked that the ring
which he had dropped on his lap fell and rolled against the foot of
the white man, and that poor Jim glanced down at the talisman that had
opened for him the door of fame, love, and success within the wall of
forests fringed with white foam, within the coast that under the western
sun looks like the very stronghold of the night. Doramin, struggling to
keep his feet, made with his two supporters a swaying, tottering group;
his little eyes stared with an expression of mad pain, of rage, with
a ferocious glitter, which the bystanders noticed; and then, while Jim
stood stiffened and with bared head in the light of torches, looking him
straight in the face, he clung heavily with his left arm round the neck
of a bowed youth, and lifting deliberately his right, shot his son’s
friend through the chest.
‘The crowd, which had fallen apart behind Jim as soon as Doramin had
raised his hand, rushed tumultuously forward after the shot. They say
that the white man sent right and left at all those faces a proud and
unflinching glance. Then with his hand over his lips he fell forward,
dead.
‘And that’s the end. He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart,
forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic. Not in the wildest days
of his boyish visions could he have seen the alluring shape of such an
extraordinary success! For it may very well be that in the short moment
of his last proud and unflinching glance, he had beheld the face of that
opportunity which, like an Eastern bride, had come veiled to his side.
‘But we can see him, an obscure conqueror of fame, tearing himself out
of the arms of a jealous love at the sign, at the call of his exalted
egoism. He goes away from a living woman to celebrate his pitiless
wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct. Is he satisfied--quite, now, I
wonder? We ought to know. He is one of us--and have I not stood up once,
like an evoked ghost, to answer for his eternal constancy? Was I so very
wrong after all? Now he is no more, there are days when the reality of
his existence comes to me with an immense, with an overwhelming force;
and yet upon my honour there are moments, too when he passes from my
eyes like a disembodied spirit astray amongst the passions of this
earth, ready to surrender himself faithfully to the claim of his own
world of shades.
‘Who knows? He is gone, inscrutable at heart, and the poor girl is
leading a sort of soundless, inert life in Stein’s house. Stein has
aged greatly of late. He feels it himself, and says often that he is
“preparing to leave all this; preparing to leave . . .” while he waves
his hand sadly at his butterflies.’
September 1899--July 1900.