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_ With these words Marlow had ended his narrative, and his audience
had broken up forthwith, under his abstract, pensive gaze. Men
drifted off the verandah in pairs or alone without loss of time, without
offering a remark, as if the last image of that incomplete story, its
incompleteness itself, and the very tone of the speaker, had made
discussion in vain and comment impossible. Each of them seemed to
carry away his own impression, to carry it away with him like a secret;
but there was only one man of all these listeners who was ever to hear
the last word of the story. It came to him at home, more than two years
later, and it came contained in a thick packet addressed in Marlow's
upright and angular handwriting.
The privileged man opened the packet, looked in, then, laying it
down, went to the window. His rooms were in the highest flat of a
lofty building, and his glance could travel afar beyond the clear panes
of glass, as though he were looking out of the lantern of a lighthouse.
The slopes of the roofs glistened, the dark broken ridges succeeded
each other without end like sombre, uncrested waves, and from the
depths of the town under his feet ascended a confused and unceasing
mutter. The spires of churches, numerous, scattered haphazard,
uprose like beacons on a maze of shoals without a channel; the driving
rain mingled with the falling dusk of a winter's evening; and the
booming of a big clock on a tower, striking the hour, rolled past in
voluminous, austere bursts of sound, with a shrill vibrating cry at the
core. He drew the heavy curtains.
The light of his shaded reading-lamp slept like a sheltered pool, his
footfalls made no sound on the carpet, his wandering days were over.
No more horizons as boundless as hope, no more twilights within the
forests as solemn as temples, in the hot quest for the Ever-undiscovered
Country over the hill, across the stream, beyond the wave. The
hour was striking! No more! No more!--but the opened packet under
the lamp brought back the sounds, the visions, the very savour of the
past--a multitude of fading faces, a tumult of low voices, dying away
upon the shores of distant seas under a passionate and unconsoling
sunshine. He sighed and sat down to read.
At first he saw three distinct enclosures. A good many pages closely
blackened and pinned together; a loose square sheet of greyish paper
with a few words traced in a handwriting he had never seen before,
and an explanatory letter from Marlow. From this last fell another
letter, yellowed by time and frayed on the folds. He picked it up and,
laying it aside, turned to Marlow's message, ran swiftly over the
opening lines, and, checking himself, thereafter read on deliberately, like
one approaching with slow feet and alert eyes the glimpse of an
undiscovered country.
'. . . I don't suppose you've forgotten,' went on the letter. 'You
alone have showed an interest in him that survived the telling of his
story, though I remember well you would not admit he had mastered
his fate. You prophesied for him the disaster of weariness and of
disgust with acquired honour, with the self-appointed task, with the
love sprung from pity and youth. You had said you knew so well "that
kind of thing," its illusory satisfaction, its unavoidable deception.
You said also--I call to mind--that "giving your life up to them" (them
meaning all of mankind with skins brown, yellow, or black in colour)
"was like selling your soul to a brute." You contended that "that kind
of thing" was only endurable and enduring when based on a firm
conviction in the truth of ideas racially our own, in whose name are
established the order, the morality of an ethical progress. "We want its
strength at our backs," you had said. "We want a belief in its necessity
and its justice, to make a worthy and conscious sacrifice of our lives.
Without it the sacrifice is only forgetfulness, the way of offering is no
better than the way to perdition." In other words, you maintained
that we must fight in the ranks or our lives don't count. Possibly! You
ought to know--be it said without malice--you who have rushed
into one or two places single-handed and came out cleverly, without
singeing your wings. The point, however, is that of all mankind Jim
had no dealings but with himself, and the question is whether at the
last he had not confessed to a faith mightier than the laws of order and
progress.
'I affirm nothing. Perhaps you may pronounce--after you've read.
There is much truth--after all--in the common expression "under a
cloud." It is impossible to see him clearly--especially as it is through
the eyes of others that we take our last look at him. I have no hesitation
in imparting to you all I know of the last episode that, as he used to
say, had "come to him." One wonders whether this was perhaps that
supreme opportunity, that last and satisfying test for which I had
always suspected him to be waiting, before he could frame a message
to the impeccable world. You remember that when I was leaving him
for the last time he had asked whether I would be going home soon,
and suddenly cried after me, "Tell them . . ." I had waited--curious
I'll own, and hopeful too--only to hear him shout, "No--nothing."
That was all then--and there will be nothing more; there will be no
message, unless such as each of us can interpret for himself from the
language of facts, that are so often more enigmatic than the craftiest
arrangement of words. He made, it is true, one more attempt to
deliver himself; but that too failed, as you may perceive if you look at
the sheet of greyish foolscap enclosed here. He had tried to write; do
you notice the commonplace hand? It is headed "The Fort, Patusan." I
suppose he had carried out his intention of making out of his
house a place of defence. It was an excellent plan: a deep ditch, an
earth wall topped by a palisade, and at the angles guns mounted on
platforms to sweep each side of the square. Doramin had agreed to
furnish him the guns; and so each man of his party would know there
was a place of safety, upon which every faithful partisan could rally
in case of some sudden danger. All this showed his judicious foresight,
his faith in the future. What he called "my own people"--the liberated
captives of the Sherif--were to make a distinct quarter of Patusan,
with their huts and little plots of ground under the walls of the
stronghold. Within he would be an invincible host in himself "The
Fort, Patusan." No date, as you observe. What is a number and a
name to a day of days? It is also impossible to say whom he had in
his mind when he seized the pen: Stein--myself--the world at large--or
was this only the aimless startled cry of a solitary man confronted
by his fate? "An awful thing has happened," he wrote before he flung
the pen down for the first time; look at the ink blot resembling the
head of an arrow under these words. After a while he had tried again,
scrawling heavily, as if with a hand of lead, another line. "I must now
at once . . ." The pen had spluttered, and that time he gave it up.
There's nothing more; he had seen a broad gulf that neither eye nor
voice could span. I can understand this. He was overwhelmed by the
inexplicable; he was overwhelmed by his own personality--the gift
of that destiny which he had done his best to master.
'I send you also an old letter--a very old letter. It was found
carefully preserved in his writing-case. It is from his father, and by
the date you can see he must have received it a few days before he joined
the Patna. Thus it must be the last letter he ever had from home. He
had treasured it all these years. The good old parson fancied his sailor
son. I've looked in at a sentence here and there. There is nothing in it
except just affection. He tells his "dear James" that the last long
letter from him was very "honest and entertaining." He would not have
him "judge men harshly or hastily." There are four pages of it, easy
morality and family news. Tom had "taken orders." Carrie's husband
had "money losses." The old chap goes on equably trusting Providence
and the established order of the universe, but alive to its small
dangers and its small mercies. One can almost see him, grey-haired
and serene in the inviolable shelter of his book-lined, faded, and
comfortable study, where for forty years he had conscientiously
gone over and over again the round of his little thoughts about faith
and virtue, about the conduct of life and the only proper manner of
dying; where he had written so many sermons, where he sits talking
to his boy, over there, on the other side of the earth. But what of the
distance? Virtue is one all over the world, and there is only one faith,
one conceivable conduct of life, one manner of dying. He hopes his
"dear James" will never forget that "who once gives way to temptation,
in the very instant hazards his total depravity and everlasting
ruin. Therefore resolve fixedly never, through any possible motives,
to do anything which you believe to be wrong." There is also some
news of a favourite dog; and a pony, "which all you boys used to ride,"
had gone blind from old age and had to be shot. The old chap invokes
Heaven's blessing; the mother and all the girls then at home send
their love. . . . No, there is nothing much in that yellow frayed letter
fluttering out of his cherishing grasp after so many years. It was never
answered, but who can say what converse he may have held with all
these placid, colourless forms of men and women peopling that quiet
corner of the world as free of danger or strife as a tomb, and breathing
equably the air of undisturbed rectitude. It seems amazing that he
should belong to it, he to whom so many things "had come. "Nothing
ever came to them; they would never be taken unawares, and never
be called upon to grapple with fate. Here they all are, evoked by the
mild gossip of the father, all these brothers and sisters, bone of his
bone and flesh of his flesh, gazing with clear unconscious eyes, while
I seem to see him, returned at last, no longer a mere white speck at
the heart of an immense mystery, but of full stature, standing
disregarded amongst their untroubled shapes, with a stern and romantic
aspect, but always mute, dark--under a cloud.
'The story of the last events you will find in the few pages enclosed
here. You must admit that it is romantic beyond the wildest dreams
of his boyhood, and yet there is to my mind a sort of profound and
terrifying logic in it, as if it were our imagination alone that could
set loose upon us the might of an overwhelming destiny. The
imprudence of our thoughts recoils upon our heads; who toys with
the sword shall perish by the sword. This astounding adventure,
of which the most astounding part is that it is true, comes on as an
unavoidable consequence. Something of the sort had to happen.
You repeat this to yourself while you marvel that such a thing could
happen in the year of grace before last. But it has happened--and
there is no disputing its logic.
'I put it down here for you as though I had been an eyewitness.
My information was fragmentary, but I've fitted the pieces together,
and there is enough of them to make an intelligible picture. I wonder
how he would have related it himself. He has confided so much in
me that at times it seems as though he must come in presently and
tell the story in his own words, in his careless yet feeling voice, with
his offhand manner, a little puzzled, a little bothered, a little hurt,
but now and then by a word or a phrase giving one of these glimpses
of his very own self that were never any good for purposes of
orientation. It's difficult to believe he will never come. I shall
never hear his voice again, nor shall I see his smooth tan-and-pink
face with a white line on the forehead, and the youthful eyes darkened
by excitement to a profound, unfathomable blue.' _
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