Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad [world of reading TXT] 📗

he shouted at either. He would have shouted at the Viceroy himself. As he used to tell me: ‘I am as high as I can get; my pension is safe. I’ve a few pounds laid by, and if they don’t like my notions of duty I would just as soon go home as not. I am an old man, and I have always spoken my mind. All I care for now is to see my girls married before I die.’ He was a little crazy on that point. His three daughters were awfully nice, though they resembled him amazingly, and on the mornings he woke up with a gloomy view of their matrimonial prospects the office would read it in his eye and tremble, because, they said, he was sure to have somebody for breakfast. However, that morning he did not eat the renegade, but, if I may be allowed to carry on the metaphor, chewed him up very small, so to speak, and⁠—ah! ejected him again.

“Thus in a very few moments I saw his monstrous bulk descend in haste and stand still on the outer steps. He had stopped close to me for the purpose of profound meditation: his large purple cheeks quivered. He was biting his thumb, and after a while noticed me with a sidelong vexed look. The other three chaps that had landed with him made a little group waiting at some distance. There was a sallow-faced, mean little chap with his arm in a sling, and a long individual in a blue flannel coat, as dry as a chip and no stouter than a broomstick, with drooping grey moustaches, who looked about him with an air of jaunty imbecility. The third was an upstanding, broad-shouldered youth, with his hands in his pockets, turning his back on the other two who appeared to be talking together earnestly. He stared across the empty Esplanade. A ramshackle gharry, all dust and venetian blinds, pulled up short opposite the group, and the driver, throwing up his right foot over his knee, gave himself up to the critical examination of his toes. The young chap, making no movement, not even stirring his head, just stared into the sunshine. This was my first view of Jim. He looked as unconcerned and unapproachable as only the young can look. There he stood, clean-limbed, clean-faced, firm on his feet, as promising a boy as the sun ever shone on; and, looking at him, knowing all he knew and a little more too, I was as angry as though I had detected him trying to get something out of me by false pretences. He had no business to look so sound. I thought to myself⁠—well, if this sort can go wrong like that⁠ ⁠… and I felt as though I could fling down my hat and dance on it from sheer mortification, as I once saw the skipper of an Italian barque do because his duffer of a mate got into a mess with his anchors when making a flying moor in a roadstead full of ships. I asked myself, seeing him there apparently so much at ease⁠—is he silly? is he callous? He seemed ready to start whistling a tune. And note, I did not care a rap about the behaviour of the other two. Their persons somehow fitted the tale that was public property, and was going to be the subject of an official inquiry. ‘That old mad rogue upstairs called me a hound,’ said the captain of the Patna. I can’t tell whether he recognised me⁠—I rather think he did; but at any rate our glances met. He glared⁠—I smiled; hound was the very mildest epithet that had reached me through the open window. ‘Did he?’ I said from some strange inability to hold my tongue. He nodded, bit his thumb again, swore under his breath: then lifting his head and looking at me with sullen and passionate impudence⁠—‘Bah! the Pacific is big, my friendt. You damned Englishmen can do your worst; I know where there’s plenty room for a man like me: I am well aguaindt in Apia, in Honolulu, in⁠ ⁠…’ He paused reflectively, while without effort I could depict to myself the sort of people he was ‘aguaindt’ with in those places. I won’t make a secret of it that I had been ‘aguaindt’ with not a few of that sort myself. There are times when a man must act as though life were equally sweet in any company. I’ve known such a time, and, what’s more, I shan’t now pretend to pull a long face over my necessity, because a good many of that bad company from want of moral⁠—moral⁠—what shall I say?⁠—posture, or from some other equally profound cause, were twice as instructive and twenty times more amusing than the usual respectable thief of commerce you fellows ask to sit at your table without any real necessity⁠—from habit, from cowardice, from good-nature, from a hundred sneaking and inadequate reasons.

“ ‘You Englishmen are all rogues,’ went on my patriotic Flensborg or Stettin Australian. I really don’t recollect now what decent little port on the shores of the Baltic was defiled by being the nest of that precious bird. ‘What are you to shout? Eh? You tell me? You no better than other people, and that old rogue he make Gottam fuss with me.’ His thick carcass trembled on its legs that were like a pair of pillars; it trembled from head to foot. ‘That’s what you English always make⁠—make a tam’ fuss⁠—for any little thing, because I was not born in your tam’ country. Take away my certificate. Take it. I don’t want the certificate. A man like me don’t want your verfluchte certificate. I shpit on it.’ He spat. ‘I vill an Amerigan citizen begome,’ he cried, fretting and fuming and shuffling his feet as if to free his ankles from some invisible and mysterious grasp that would not let him get away from that spot. He made