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

“I refrained from looking at him, but I think I heard a short sigh; we took a turn or two in silence. ‘Upon my soul and conscience,’ he began again, ‘if such a thing can be forgotten, then I think I have a right to dismiss it from my mind. Ask any man here’⁠ ⁠… his voice changed. ‘Is it not strange,’ he went on in a gentle, almost yearning tone, ‘that all these people, all these people who would do anything for me, can never be made to understand? Never! If you disbelieved me I could not call them up. It seems hard, somehow. I am stupid, am I not? What more can I want? If you ask them who is brave⁠—who is true⁠—who is just⁠—who is it they would trust with their lives?⁠—they would say, Tuan Jim. And yet they can never know the real, real truth⁠ ⁠…’

“That’s what he said to me on my last day with him. I did not let a murmur escape me: I felt he was going to say more, and come no nearer to the root of the matter. The sun, whose concentrated glare dwarfs the earth into a restless mote of dust, had sunk behind the forest, and the diffused light from an opal sky seemed to cast upon a world without shadows and without brilliance the illusion of a calm and pensive greatness. I don’t know why, listening to him, I should have noted so distinctly the gradual darkening of the river, of the air; the irresistible slow work of the night settling silently on all the visible forms, effacing the outlines, burying the shapes deeper and deeper, like a steady fall of impalpable black dust.

“ ‘Jove!’ he began abruptly, ‘there are days when a fellow is too absurd for anything; only I know I can tell you what I like. I talk about being done with it⁠—with the bally thing at the back of my head.⁠ ⁠… Forgetting.⁠ ⁠… Hang me if I know! I can think of it quietly. After all, what has it proved? Nothing. I suppose you don’t think so.⁠ ⁠…’

“I made a protesting murmur.

“ ‘No matter,’ he said. ‘I am satisfied⁠ ⁠… nearly. I’ve got to look only at the face of the first man that comes along, to regain my confidence. They can’t be made to understand what is going on in me. What of that? Come! I haven’t done so badly.’

“ ‘Not so badly,’ I said.

“ ‘But all the same, you wouldn’t like to have me aboard your own ship hey?’

“ ‘Confound you!’ I cried. ‘Stop this.’

“ ‘Aha! You see,’ he said, crowing, as it were, over me placidly. ‘Only,’ he went on, ‘you just try to tell this to any of them here. They would think you a fool, a liar, or worse. And so I can stand it. I’ve done a thing or two for them, but this is what they have done for me.’

“ ‘My dear chap,’ I cried, ‘you shall always remain for them an insoluble mystery.’ Thereupon we were silent.

“ ‘Mystery,’ he repeated, before looking up. ‘Well, then let me always remain here.’

“After the sun had set, the darkness seemed to drive upon us, borne in every faint puff of the breeze. In the middle of a hedged path I saw the arrested, gaunt, watchful, and apparently one-legged silhouette of Tamb’ Itam; and across the dusky space my eye detected something white moving to and fro behind the supports of the roof. As soon as Jim, with Tamb’ Itam at his heels, had started upon his evening rounds, I went up to the house alone, and, unexpectedly, found myself waylaid by the girl, who had been clearly waiting for this opportunity.

“It is hard to tell you what it was precisely she wanted to wrest from me. Obviously it would be something very simple⁠—the simplest impossibility in the world; as, for instance, the exact description of the form of a cloud. She wanted an assurance, a statement, a promise, an explanation⁠—I don’t know how to call it: the thing has no name. It was dark under the projecting roof, and all I could see were the flowing lines of her gown, the pale small oval of her face, with the white flash of her teeth, and, turned towards me, the big sombre orbits of her eyes, where there seemed to be a faint stir, such as you may fancy you can detect when you plunge your gaze to the bottom of an immensely deep well. What is it that moves there? you ask yourself. Is it a blind monster or only a lost gleam from the universe? It occurred to me⁠—don’t laugh⁠—that all things being dissimilar, she was more inscrutable in her childish ignorance than the Sphinx propounding childish riddles to wayfarers. She had been carried off to Patusan before her eyes were open. She had grown up there; she had seen nothing, she had known nothing, she had no conception of anything. I ask myself whether she were sure that anything else existed. What notions she may have formed of the outside world is to me inconceivable: all that she knew of its inhabitants were a betrayed woman and a sinister pantaloon. Her lover also came to her from there, gifted with irresistible seductions; but what would become of her if he should return to these inconceivable regions that seemed always to claim back their own? Her mother had warned her of this with tears, before she died.⁠ ⁠…

“She had caught hold of my arm firmly, and as soon as I had stopped she had withdrawn her hand in haste. She was audacious and shrinking. She feared nothing, but she was checked by the profound incertitude and the extreme strangeness⁠—a brave person groping in the dark. I belonged to this Unknown that might claim Jim for its own at any moment. I was, as it were, in the secret of its nature and of its intentions⁠—the confidant of a threatening mystery⁠—armed with its power perhaps! I believe she supposed I could