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

that after more than three years it had preserved its actuality, you must know that I had seen him only very lately. I had come straight from Samarang, where I had loaded a cargo for Sydney: an utterly uninteresting bit of business⁠—what Charley here would call one of my rational transactions⁠—and in Samarang I had seen something of Jim. He was then working for De Jongh, on my recommendation. Water-clerk. ‘My representative afloat,’ as De Jongh called him. You can’t imagine a mode of life more barren of consolation, less capable of being invested with a spark of glamour⁠—unless it be the business of an insurance canvasser. Little Bob Stanton⁠—Charley here knew him well⁠—had gone through that experience. The same who got drowned afterwards trying to save a lady’s-maid in the Sephora disaster. A case of collision on a hazy morning off the Spanish coast⁠—you may remember. All the passengers had been packed tidily into the boats and shoved clear of the ship, when Bob sheered alongside again and scrambled back on deck to fetch that girl. How she had been left behind I can’t make out; anyhow, she had gone completely crazy⁠—wouldn’t leave the ship⁠—held to the rail like grim death. The wrestling-match could be seen plainly from the boats; but poor Bob was the shortest chief mate in the merchant service, and the woman stood five feet ten in her shoes and was as strong as a horse, I’ve been told. So it went on, pull devil, pull baker, the wretched girl screaming all the time, and Bob letting out a yell now and then to warn his boat to keep well clear of the ship. One of the hands told me, hiding a smile at the recollection, ‘It was for all the world, sir, like a naughty youngster fighting with his mother.’ The same old chap said that ‘At the last we could see that Mr. Stanton had given up hauling at the gal, and just stood by looking at her, watchful like. We thought afterwards he must’ve been reckoning that, maybe, the rush of water would tear her away from the rail by-and-by and give him a show to save her. We daren’t come alongside for our life; and after a bit the old ship went down all on a sudden with a lurch to starboard⁠—plop. The suck in was something awful. We never saw anything alive or dead come up.’ Poor Bob’s spell of shore-life had been one of the complications of a love affair, I believe. He fondly hoped he had done with the sea forever, and made sure he had got hold of all the bliss on earth, but it came to canvassing in the end. Some cousin of his in Liverpool put up to it. He used to tell us his experiences in that line. He made us laugh till we cried, and, not altogether displeased at the effect, undersized and bearded to the waist like a gnome, he would tiptoe amongst us and say, ‘It’s all very well for you beggars to laugh, but my immortal soul was shrivelled down to the size of a parched pea after a week of that work.’ I don’t know how Jim’s soul accommodated itself to the new conditions of his life⁠—I was kept too busy in getting him something to do that would keep body and soul together⁠—but I am pretty certain his adventurous fancy was suffering all the pangs of starvation. It had certainly nothing to feed upon in this new calling. It was distressing to see him at it, though he tackled it with a stubborn serenity for which I must give him full credit. I kept my eye on his shabby plodding with a sort of notion that it was a punishment for the heroics of his fancy⁠—an expiation for his craving after more glamour than he could carry. He had loved too well to imagine himself a glorious racehorse, and now he was condemned to toil without honour like a costermonger’s donkey. He did it very well. He shut himself in, put his head down, said never a word. Very well; very well indeed⁠—except for certain fantastic and violent outbreaks, on the deplorable occasions when the irrepressible Patna case cropped up. Unfortunately that scandal of the Eastern seas would not die out. And this is the reason why I could never feel I had done with Jim for good.

“I sat thinking of him after the French lieutenant had left, not, however, in connection with De Jongh’s cool and gloomy backshop, where we had hurriedly shaken hands not very long ago, but as I had seen him years before in the last flickers of the candle, alone with me in the long gallery of the Malabar House, with the chill and the darkness of the night at his back. The respectable sword of his country’s law was suspended over his head. Tomorrow⁠—or was it today? (midnight had slipped by long before we parted)⁠—the marble-faced police magistrate, after distributing fines and terms of imprisonment in the assault-and-battery case, would take up the awful weapon and smite his bowed neck. Our communion in the night was uncommonly like a last vigil with a condemned man. He was guilty too. He was guilty⁠—as I had told myself repeatedly, guilty and done for; nevertheless, I wished to spare him the mere detail of a formal execution. I don’t pretend to explain the reasons of my desire⁠—I don’t think I could; but if you haven’t got a sort of notion by this time, then I must have been very obscure in my narrative, or you too sleepy to seize upon the sense of my words. I don’t defend my morality. There was no morality in the impulse which induced me to lay before him Brierly’s plan of evasion⁠—I may call it⁠—in all its primitive simplicity. There were the rupees⁠—absolutely ready in my pocket and very much at his service. Oh! a loan; a loan of