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

water for the glitter of the sunshine. From time to time one of them would creep out, stand up to take a look all round, and get under again. I could hear spells of snoring below the sail. Some of them could sleep. One of them at least. I couldn’t! All was light, light, and the boat seemed to be falling through it. Now and then I would feel quite surprised to find myself sitting on a thwart.⁠ ⁠…’

“He began to walk with measured steps to and fro before my chair, one hand in his trousers-pocket, his head bent thoughtfully, and his right arm at long intervals raised for a gesture that seemed to put out of his way an invisible intruder.

“ ‘I suppose you think I was going mad,’ he began in a changed tone. ‘And well you may, if you remember I had lost my cap. The sun crept all the way from east to west over my bare head, but that day I could not come to any harm, I suppose. The sun could not make me mad.⁠ ⁠…’ His right arm put aside the idea of madness.⁠ ⁠… ‘Neither could it kill me.⁠ ⁠…’ Again his arm repulsed a shadow.⁠ ⁠… ‘That rested with me.’

“ ‘Did it?’ I said, inexpressibly amazed at this new turn, and I looked at him with the same sort of feeling I might be fairly conceived to experience had he, after spinning round on his heel, presented an altogether new face.

“ ‘I didn’t get brain fever, I did not drop dead either,’ he went on. ‘I didn’t bother myself at all about the sun over my head. I was thinking as coolly as any man that ever sat thinking in the shade. That greasy beast of a skipper poked his big cropped head from under the canvas and screwed his fishy eyes up at me. “Donnerwetter! you will die,” he growled, and drew in like a turtle. I had seen him. I had heard him. He didn’t interrupt me. I was thinking just then that I wouldn’t.’

“He tried to sound my thought with an attentive glance dropped on me in passing. ‘Do you mean to say you had been deliberating with yourself whether you would die?’ I asked in as impenetrable a tone as I could command. He nodded without stopping. ‘Yes, it had come to that as I sat there alone,’ he said. He passed on a few steps to the imaginary end of his beat, and when he flung round to come back both his hands were thrust deep into his pockets. He stopped short in front of my chair and looked down. ‘Don’t you believe it?’ he inquired with tense curiosity. I was moved to make a solemn declaration of my readiness to believe implicitly anything he thought fit to tell me.”

XI

“He heard me out with his head on one side, and I had another glimpse through a rent in the mist in which he moved and had his being. The dim candle spluttered within the ball of glass, and that was all I had to see him by; at his back was the dark night with the clear stars, whose distant glitter disposed in retreating planes lured the eye into the depths of a greater darkness; and yet a mysterious light seemed to show me his boyish head, as if in that moment the youth within him had, for a moment, glowed and expired. ‘You are an awful good sort to listen like this,’ he said. ‘It does me good. You don’t know what it is to me. You don’t’⁠ ⁠… words seemed to fail him. It was a distinct glimpse. He was a youngster of the sort you like to see about you; of the sort you like to imagine yourself to have been; of the sort whose appearance claims the fellowship of these illusions you had thought gone out, extinct, cold, and which, as if rekindled at the approach of another flame, give a flutter deep, deep down somewhere, give a flutter of light⁠ ⁠… of heat!⁠ ⁠… Yes; I had a glimpse of him then⁠ ⁠… and it was not the last of that kind.⁠ ⁠… ‘You don’t know what it is for a fellow in my position to be believed⁠—make a clean breast of it to an elder man. It is so difficult⁠—so awfully unfair⁠—so hard to understand.’

“The mists were closing again. I don’t know how old I appeared to him⁠—and how much wise. Not half as old as I felt just then; not half as uselessly wise as I knew myself to be. Surely in no other craft as in that of the sea do the hearts of those already launched to sink or swim go out so much to the youth on the brink, looking with shining eyes upon that glitter of the vast surface which is only a reflection of his own glances full of fire. There is such magnificent vagueness in the expectations that had driven each of us to sea, such a glorious indefiniteness, such a beautiful greed of adventures that are their own and only reward. What we get⁠—well, we won’t talk of that; but can one of us restrain a smile? In no other kind of life is the illusion more wide of reality⁠—in no other is the beginning all illusion⁠—the disenchantment more swift⁠—the subjugation more complete. Hadn’t we all commenced with the same desire, ended with the same knowledge, carried the memory of the same cherished glamour through the sordid days of imprecation? What wonder that when some heavy prod gets home the bond is found to be close; that besides the fellowship of the craft there is felt the strength of a wider feeling⁠—the feeling that binds a man to a child. He was there before me, believing that age and wisdom can find a remedy against the pain of truth, giving me a glimpse of himself as a young fellow in a scrape that is the very devil of a