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

admiration, but was evidently on the alert all the time. It seems he had been used to make a confidante of her all along⁠—and that she on her part could and did give him a lot of useful hints as to Patusan affairs there is no doubt. He assured me more than once that he had never found himself the worse for her advice. At any rate, he was proceeding to explain his plan fully to her there and then, when she pressed his arm once, and vanished from his side. Then Cornelius appeared from somewhere, and, perceiving Jim, ducked sideways, as though he had been shot at, and afterwards stood very still in the dusk. At last he came forward prudently, like a suspicious cat. ‘There were some fishermen there⁠—with fish,’ he said in a shaky voice. ‘To sell fish⁠—you understand.’⁠ ⁠… It must have been then two o’clock in the morning⁠—a likely time for anybody to hawk fish about!

“Jim, however, let the statement pass, and did not give it a single thought. Other matters occupied his mind, and besides he had neither seen nor heard anything. He contented himself by saying, ‘Oh!’ absently, got a drink of water out of a pitcher standing there, and leaving Cornelius a prey to some inexplicable emotion⁠—that made him embrace with both arms the worm-eaten rail of the verandah as if his legs had failed⁠—went in again and lay down on his mat to think. By-and-by he heard stealthy footsteps. They stopped. A voice whispered tremulously through the wall, ‘Are you asleep?’ ‘No! What is it?’ he answered briskly, and there was an abrupt movement outside, and then all was still, as if the whisperer had been startled. Extremely annoyed at this, Jim came out impetuously, and Cornelius with a faint shriek fled along the verandah as far as the steps, where he hung on to the broken banister. Very puzzled, Jim called out to him from the distance to know what the devil he meant. ‘Have you given your consideration to what I spoke to you about?’ asked Cornelius, pronouncing the words with difficulty, like a man in the cold fit of a fever. ‘No!’ shouted Jim in a passion. ‘I did not, and I don’t intend to. I am going to live here, in Patusan.’ ‘You shall d-d-die h-h-here,’ answered Cornelius, still shaking violently, and in a sort of expiring voice. The whole performance was so absurd and provoking that Jim didn’t know whether he ought to be amused or angry. ‘Not till I have seen you tucked away, you bet,’ he called out, exasperated yet ready to laugh. Half seriously (being excited with his own thoughts, you know) he went on shouting, ‘Nothing can touch me! You can do your damnedest.’ Somehow the shadowy Cornelius far off there seemed to be the hateful embodiment of all the annoyances and difficulties he had found in his path. He let himself go⁠—his nerves had been overwrought for days⁠—and called him many pretty names⁠—swindler, liar, sorry rascal: in fact, carried on in an extraordinary way. He admits he passed all bounds, that he was quite beside himself⁠—defied all Patusan to scare him away⁠—declared he would make them all dance to his own tune yet, and so on, in a menacing, boasting strain. Perfectly bombastic and ridiculous, he said. His ears burned at the bare recollection. Must have been off his chump in some way.⁠ ⁠… The girl, who was sitting with us, nodded her little head at me quickly, frowned faintly, and said, ‘I heard him,’ with childlike solemnity. He laughed and blushed. What stopped him at last, he said, was the silence, the complete deathlike silence, of the indistinct figure far over there, that seemed to hang collapsed, doubled over the rail in a weird immobility. He came to his senses, and ceasing suddenly, wondered greatly at himself. He watched for a while. Not a stir, not a sound. ‘Exactly as if the chap had died while I had been making all that noise,’ he said. He was so ashamed of himself that he went indoors in a hurry without another word, and flung himself down again. The row seemed to have done him good though, because he went to sleep for the rest of the night like a baby. Hadn’t slept like that for weeks. ‘But I didn’t sleep,’ struck in the girl, one elbow on the table and nursing her cheek. ‘I watched.’ Her big eyes flashed, rolling a little, and then she fixed them on my face intently.”

XXXI

“You may imagine with what interest I listened. All these details were perceived to have some significance twenty-four hours later. In the morning Cornelius made no allusion to the events of the night. ‘I suppose you will come back to my poor house,’ he muttered, surlily, slinking up just as Jim was entering the canoe to go over to Doramin’s campong. Jim only nodded, without looking at him. ‘You find it good fun, no doubt,’ muttered the other in a sour tone. Jim spent the day with the old nakhoda, preaching the necessity of vigorous action to the principal men of the Bugis community, who had been summoned for a big talk. He remembered with pleasure how very eloquent and persuasive he had been. ‘I managed to put some backbone into them that time, and no mistake,’ he said. Sherif Ali’s last raid had swept the outskirts of the settlement, and some women belonging to the town had been carried off to the stockade. Sherif Ali’s emissaries had been seen in the marketplace the day before, strutting about haughtily in white cloaks, and boasting of the Rajah’s friendship for their master. One of them stood forward in the shade of a tree, and, leaning on the long barrel of a rifle, exhorted the people to prayer and repentance, advising them to kill all the strangers in their midst, some of whom, he said, were infidels