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

with turned-out, shiny lips. I found him lying extended on his back in a cane chair, odiously unbuttoned, with a large green leaf of some sort on the top of his steaming head, and another in his hand which he used lazily as a fan.⁠ ⁠… Going to Patusan? Oh yes. Stein’s Trading Company. He knew. Had a permission? No business of his. It was not so bad there now, he remarked negligently, and, he went on drawling, ‘There’s some sort of white vagabond has got in there, I hear.⁠ ⁠… Eh? What you say? Friend of yours? So!⁠ ⁠… Then it was true there was one of these verdamte⁠—What was he up to? Found his way in, the rascal. Eh? I had not been sure. Patusan⁠—they cut throats there⁠—no business of ours.’ He interrupted himself to groan. ‘Phoo! Almighty! The heat! The heat! Well, then, there might be something in the story too, after all, and⁠ ⁠…’ He shut one of his beastly glassy eyes (the eyelid went on quivering) while he leered at me atrociously with the other. ‘Look here,’ says he mysteriously, ‘if⁠—do you understand?⁠—if he has really got hold of something fairly good⁠—none of your bits of green glass⁠—understand?⁠—I am a government official⁠—you tell the rascal⁠ ⁠… Eh? What? Friend of yours?’⁠ ⁠… He continued wallowing calmly in the chair.⁠ ⁠… ‘You said so; that’s just it; and I am pleased to give you the hint. I suppose you, too, would like to get something out of it? Don’t interrupt. You just tell him I’ve heard the tale, but to my Government I have made no report. Not yet. See? Why make a report? Eh? Tell him to come to me if they let him get alive out of the country. He had better look out for himself. Eh? I promise to ask no questions. On the quiet⁠—you understand? You too⁠—you shall get something from me. Small commission for the trouble. Don’t interrupt. I am a government official, and make no report. That’s business. Understand? I know some good people that will buy anything worth having, and can give him more money than the scoundrel ever saw in his life. I know his sort.’ He fixed me steadfastly with both his eyes open, while I stood over him utterly amazed, and asking myself whether he was mad or drunk. He perspired, puffed, moaning feebly, and scratching himself with such horrible composure that I could not bear the sight long enough to find out. Next day, talking casually with the people of the little native court of the place, I discovered that a story was travelling slowly down the coast about a mysterious white man in Patusan who had got hold of an extraordinary gem⁠—namely, an emerald of an enormous size, and altogether priceless. The emerald seems to appeal more to the Eastern imagination than any other precious stone. The white man had obtained it, I was told, partly by the exercise of his wonderful strength and partly by cunning, from the ruler of a distant country, whence he had fled instantly, arriving in Patusan in utmost distress, but frightening the people by his extreme ferocity, which nothing seemed able to subdue. Most of my informants were of the opinion that the stone was probably unlucky⁠—like the famous stone of the Sultan of Succadana, which in the old times had brought wars and untold calamities upon that country. Perhaps it was the same stone⁠—one couldn’t say. Indeed the story of a fabulously large emerald is as old as the arrival of the first white men in the Archipelago; and the belief in it is so persistent that less than forty years ago there had been an official Dutch inquiry into the truth of it. Such a jewel⁠—it was explained to me by the old fellow from whom I heard most of this amazing Jim-myth⁠—a sort of scribe to the wretched little Rajah of the place;⁠—such a jewel, he said, cocking his poor purblind eyes up at me (he was sitting on the cabin floor out of respect), is best preserved by being concealed about the person of a woman. Yet it is not every woman that would do. She must be young⁠—he sighed deeply⁠—and insensible to the seductions of love. He shook his head sceptically. But such a woman seemed to be actually in existence. He had been told of a tall girl, whom the white man treated with great respect and care, and who never went forth from the house unattended. People said the white man could be seen with her almost any day; they walked side by side, openly, he holding her arm under his⁠—pressed to his side⁠—thus⁠—in a most extraordinary way. This might be a lie, he conceded, for it was indeed a strange thing for anyone to do: on the other hand, there could be no doubt she wore the white man’s jewel concealed upon her bosom.” XXIX

“This was the theory of Jim’s marital evening walks. I made a third on more than one occasion, unpleasantly aware every time of Cornelius, who nursed the aggrieved sense of his legal paternity, slinking in the neighbourhood with that peculiar twist of his mouth as if he were perpetually on the point of gnashing his teeth. But do you notice how, three hundred miles beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail-boat lines, the haggard utilitarian lies of our civilisation wither and die, to be replaced by pure exercises of imagination, that have the futility, often the charm, and sometimes the deep hidden truthfulness, of works of art? Romance had singled Jim for its own⁠—and that was the true part of the story, which otherwise was all wrong. He did not hide his jewel. In fact, he was extremely proud of it.

“It comes to me now that I had, on the whole, seen very little of her. What I remember best is the even, olive pallor of her complexion, and the intense blue-black gleams of her