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

He is gone, leaving on the breakfast-table a formal little note of apology, which is either silly or heartless. Probably both⁠—and it’s all one to me. Allow me to say, lest you should have some more mysterious young men in reserve, that I have shut up shop, definitely and forever. This is the last eccentricity I shall be guilty of. Do not imagine for a moment that I care a hang; but he is very much regretted at tennis-parties, and for my own sake I’ve told a plausible lie at the club.⁠ ⁠…’ I flung the letter aside and started looking through the batch on my table, till I came upon Jim’s handwriting. Would you believe it? One chance in a hundred! But it is always that hundredth chance! That little second engineer of the Patna had turned up in a more or less destitute state, and got a temporary job of looking after the machinery of the mill. ‘I couldn’t stand the familiarity of the little beast,’ Jim wrote from a seaport seven hundred miles south of the place where he should have been in clover. ‘I am now for the time with Egström & Blake, ship-chandlers, as their⁠—well⁠—runner, to call the thing by its right name. For reference I gave them your name, which they know of course, and if you could write a word in my favour it would be a permanent employment.’ I was utterly crushed under the ruins of my castle, but of course I wrote as desired. Before the end of the year my new charter took me that way, and I had an opportunity of seeing him.

“He was still with Egström & Blake, and we met in what they called ‘our parlour’ opening out of the store. He had that moment come in from boarding a ship, and confronted me head down, ready for a tussle. ‘What have you got to say for yourself?’ I began as soon as we had shaken hands. ‘What I wrote you⁠—nothing more,’ he said stubbornly. ‘Did the fellow blab⁠—or what?’ I asked. He looked up at me with a troubled smile. ‘Oh, no! He didn’t. He made it a kind of confidential business between us. He was most damnably mysterious whenever I came over to the mill; he would wink at me in a respectful manner⁠—as much as to say “We know what we know.” Infernally fawning and familiar⁠—and that sort of thing.’ He threw himself into a chair and stared down his legs. ‘One day we happened to be alone and the fellow had the cheek to say, “Well, Mr. James”⁠—I was called Mr. James there as if I had been the son⁠—“here we are together once more. This is better than the old ship⁠—ain’t it?”⁠ ⁠… Wasn’t it appalling, eh? I looked at him, and he put on a knowing air. “Don’t you be uneasy, sir,” he says. “I know a gentleman when I see one, and I know how a gentleman feels. I hope, though, you will be keeping me on this job. I had a hard time of it too, along of that rotten old Patna racket.” Jove! It was awful. I don’t know what I should have said or done if I had not just then heard Mr. Denver calling me in the passage. It was tiffin-time, and we walked together across the yard and through the garden to the bungalow. He began to chaff me in his kindly way⁠ ⁠… I believe he liked me⁠ ⁠…’

“Jim was silent for a while.

“ ‘I know he liked me. That’s what made it so hard. Such a splendid man! That morning he slipped his hand under my arm.⁠ ⁠… He, too, was familiar with me.’ He burst into a short laugh, and dropped his chin on his breast. ‘Pah! When I remembered how that mean little beast had been talking to me,’ he began suddenly in a vibrating voice, ‘I couldn’t bear to think of myself⁠ ⁠… I suppose you know⁠ ⁠…’ I nodded.⁠ ⁠… ‘More like a father,’ he cried; his voice sank. ‘I would have had to tell him. I couldn’t let it go on⁠—could I?’ ‘Well?’ I murmured, after waiting a while. ‘I preferred to go,’ he said slowly; ‘this thing must be buried.’

“We could hear in the shop Blake upbraiding Egström in an abusive, strained voice. They had been associated for many years, and every day from the moment the doors were opened to the last minute before closing, Blake, a little man with sleek, jetty hair and unhappy, beady eyes, could be heard rowing his partner incessantly with a sort of scathing and plaintive fury. The sound of that everlasting scolding was part of the place like the other fixtures; even strangers would very soon come to disregard it completely unless it be perhaps to mutter ‘Nuisance,’ or to get up suddenly and shut the door of the ‘parlour.’ Egström himself, a rawboned, heavy Scandinavian, with a busy manner and immense blonde whiskers, went on directing his people, checking parcels, making out bills or writing letters at a stand-up desk in the shop, and comported himself in that clatter exactly as though he had been stone-deaf. Now and again he would emit a bothered perfunctory ‘Sssh,’ which neither produced nor was expected to produce the slightest effect. ‘They are very decent to me here,’ said Jim. ‘Blake’s a little cad, but Egström’s all right.’ He stood up quickly, and walking with measured steps to a tripod telescope standing in the window and pointed at the roadstead, he applied his eye to it. ‘There’s that ship which had been becalmed outside all the morning has got a breeze now and is coming in,’ he remarked patiently; ‘I must go and board.’ We shook hands in silence, and he turned to go. ‘Jim!’ I cried. He looked round with his hand on the lock. ‘You⁠—you have thrown away something like a fortune.’ He came back to me all the way from the door. ‘Such a splendid old chap,’ he said. ‘How could I?