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

a better fate,” he said. “And what do you deserve,” I shouted at him, “you that I find skulking here with your mouth full of your responsibility, of innocent lives, of your infernal duty? What do you know more of me than I know of you? I came here for food. D’ye hear?⁠—food to fill our bellies. And what did you come for? What did you ask for when you came here? We don’t ask you for anything but to give us a fight or a clear road to go back whence we came.⁠ ⁠…” “I would fight with you now,” says he, pulling at his little moustache. “And I would let you shoot me, and welcome,” I said. “This is as good a jumping-off place for me as another. I am sick of my infernal luck. But it would be too easy. There are my men in the same boat⁠—and, by God, I am not the sort to jump out of trouble and leave them in a d⁠—d lurch,” I said. He stood thinking for a while and then wanted to know what I had done (“out there” he says, tossing his head downstream) to be hazed about so. “Have we met to tell each other the story of our lives?” I asked him. “Suppose you begin. No? Well, I am sure I don’t want to hear. Keep it to yourself. I know it is no better than mine. I’ve lived⁠—and so did you though you talk as if you were one of those people that should have wings so as to go about without touching the dirty earth. Well⁠—it is dirty. I haven’t got any wings. I am here because I was afraid once in my life. Want to know what of? Of a prison. That scares me, and you may know it⁠—if it’s any good to you. I won’t ask you what scared you into this infernal hole, where you seem to have found pretty pickings. That’s your luck and this is mine⁠—the privilege to beg for the favour of being shot quickly, or else kicked out to go free and starve in my own way.” ’⁠ ⁠…

“His debilitated body shook with an exultation so vehement, so assured, and so malicious that it seemed to have driven off the death waiting for him in that hut. The corpse of his mad self-love uprose from rags and destitution as from the dark horrors of a tomb. It is impossible to say how much he lied to Jim then, how much he lied to me now⁠—and to himself always. Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live. Standing at the gate of the other world in the guise of a beggar, he had slapped this world’s face, he had spat on it, he had thrown upon it an immensity of scorn and revolt at the bottom of his misdeeds. He had overcome them all⁠—men, women, savages, traders, ruffians, missionaries⁠—and Jim⁠—that beefy-faced beggar. I did not begrudge him this triumph in articulo mortis, this almost posthumous illusion of having trampled all the earth under his feet. While he was boasting to me, in his sordid and repulsive agony, I couldn’t help thinking of the chuckling talk relating to the time of his greatest splendour when, during a year or more, Gentleman Brown’s ship was to be seen, for many days on end, hovering off an islet befringed with green upon azure, with the dark dot of the mission-house on a white beach; while Gentleman Brown, ashore, was casting his spells over a romantic girl for whom Melanesia had been too much, and giving hopes of a remarkable conversion to her husband. The poor man, some time or other, had been heard to express the intention of winning ‘Captain Brown to a better way of life.’⁠ ⁠… ‘Bag Gentleman Brown for Glory’⁠—as a leery-eyed loafer expressed it once⁠—‘just to let them see up above what a Western Pacific trading skipper looks like.’ And this was the man, too, who had run off with a dying woman, and had shed tears over her body. ‘Carried on like a big baby,’ his then mate was never tired of telling, ‘and where the fun came in may I be kicked to death by diseased Kanakas if I know. Why, gents! she was too far gone when he brought her aboard to know him; she just lay there on her back in his bunk staring at the beam with awful shining eyes⁠—and then she died. Dam’ bad sort of fever, I guess.⁠ ⁠…’ I remembered all these stories while, wiping his matted lump of a beard with a livid hand, he was telling me from his noisome couch how he got round, got in, got home, on that confounded, immaculate, don’t-you-touch-me sort of fellow. He admitted that he couldn’t be scared, but there was a way, ‘as broad as a turnpike, to get in and shake his twopenny soul around and inside out and upside down⁠—by God!’ ”

XLII

“I don’t think he could do more than perhaps look upon that straight path. He seemed to have been puzzled by what he saw, for he interrupted himself in his narrative more than once to exclaim, ‘He nearly slipped from me there. I could not make him out. Who was he?’ And after glaring at me wildly he would go on, jubilating and sneering. To me the conversation of these two across the creek appears now as the deadliest kind of duel on which Fate looked on with her cold-eyed knowledge of the end. No, he didn’t turn Jim’s soul inside out, but I am much mistaken if the spirit so utterly out of his reach had not been made to taste to the full the bitterness of that contest. These were the emissaries with whom the world he had renounced was pursuing him in his retreat. White men from ‘out there’ where he