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

afraid you try to crawl out of it,’ he said. ‘Who’s a cur now⁠—hey?’ Then, at last, I understood.

“He had been scanning my features as though looking for a place where he would plant his fist. ‘I will allow no man,’⁠ ⁠… he mumbled threateningly. It was, indeed, a hideous mistake; he had given himself away utterly. I can’t give you an idea how shocked I was. I suppose he saw some reflection of my feelings in my face, because his expression changed just a little. ‘Good God!’ I stammered, ‘you don’t think I⁠ ⁠…’ ‘But I am sure I’ve heard,’ he persisted, raising his voice for the first time since the beginning of this deplorable scene. Then with a shade of disdain he added, ‘It wasn’t you, then? Very well; I’ll find the other.’ ‘Don’t be a fool,’ I cried in exasperation; ‘it wasn’t that at all.’ ‘I’ve heard,’ he said again with an unshaken and sombre perseverance.

“There may be those who could have laughed at his pertinacity; I didn’t. Oh, I didn’t! There had never been a man so mercilessly shown up by his own natural impulse. A single word had stripped him of his discretion⁠—of that discretion which is more necessary to the decencies of our inner being than clothing is to the decorum of our body. ‘Don’t be a fool,’ I repeated. ‘But the other man said it, you don’t deny that?’ he pronounced distinctly, and looking in my face without flinching. ‘No, I don’t deny,’ said I, returning his gaze. At last his eyes followed downwards the direction of my pointing finger. He appeared at first uncomprehending, then confounded, and at last amazed and scared as though a dog had been a monster and he had never seen a dog before. ‘Nobody dreamt of insulting you,’ I said.

“He contemplated the wretched animal, that moved no more than an effigy: it sat with ears pricked and its sharp muzzle pointed into the doorway, and suddenly snapped at a fly like a piece of mechanism.

“I looked at him. The red of his fair sunburnt complexion deepened suddenly under the down of his cheeks, invaded his forehead, spread to the roots of his curly hair. His ears became intensely crimson, and even the clear blue of his eyes was darkened many shades by the rush of blood to his head. His lips pouted a little, trembling as though he had been on the point of bursting into tears. I perceived he was incapable of pronouncing a word from the excess of his humiliation. From disappointment too⁠—who knows? Perhaps he looked forward to that hammering he was going to give me for rehabilitation, for appeasement? Who can tell what relief he expected from this chance of a row? He was naive enough to expect anything; but he had given himself away for nothing in this case. He had been frank with himself⁠—let alone with me⁠—in the wild hope of arriving in that way at some effective refutation, and the stars had been ironically unpropitious. He made an inarticulate noise in his throat like a man imperfectly stunned by a blow on the head. It was pitiful.

“I didn’t catch up again with him till well outside the gate. I had even to trot a bit at the last, but when, out of breath at his elbow, I taxed him with running away, he said, ‘Never!’ and at once turned at bay. I explained I never meant to say he was running away from me. ‘From no man⁠—from not a single man on earth,’ he affirmed with a stubborn mien. I forbore to point out the one obvious exception which would hold good for the bravest of us; I thought he would find out by himself very soon. He looked at me patiently while I was thinking of something to say, but I could find nothing on the spur of the moment, and he began to walk on. I kept up, and anxious not to lose him, I said hurriedly that I couldn’t think of leaving him under a false impression of my⁠—of my⁠—I stammered. The stupidity of the phrase appalled me while I was trying to finish it, but the power of sentences has nothing to do with their sense or the logic of their construction. My idiotic mumble seemed to please him. He cut it short by saying, with courteous placidity that argued an immense power of self-control or else a wonderful elasticity of spirits⁠—‘Altogether my mistake.’ I marvelled greatly at this expression: he might have been alluding to some trifling occurrence. Hadn’t he understood its deplorable meaning? ‘You may well forgive me,’ he continued, and went on a little moodily, ‘All these staring people in court seemed such fools that⁠—that it might have been as I supposed.’

“This opened suddenly a new view of him to my wonder. I looked at him curiously and met his unabashed and impenetrable eyes. ‘I can’t put up with this kind of thing,’ he said, very simply, ‘and I don’t mean to. In court it’s different; I’ve got to stand that⁠—and I can do it too.’

“I don’t pretend I understood him. The views he let me have of himself were like those glimpses through the shifting rents in a thick fog⁠—bits of vivid and vanishing detail, giving no connected idea of the general aspect of a country. They fed one’s curiosity without satisfying it; they were no good for purposes of orientation. Upon the whole he was misleading. That’s how I summed him up to myself after he left me late in the evening. I had been staying at the Malabar House for a few days, and on my pressing invitation he dined with me there.”

VII

“An outward-bound mail-boat had come in that afternoon, and the big dining-room of the hotel was more than half full of people with a-hundred-pounds-round-the-world tickets in their pockets. There were married couples looking domesticated and bored with each other in the midst of their