Lord Jim Joseph Conrad (epub ebook reader .txt) 📖

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.

“ ‘Goodbye, 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.⁠ ⁠…

XXXVI

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 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