Chapter Chapter 21 · ‘I don’t suppose any of you have ever heard of Patusan?’ Marlow resumed,

. ‘I don’t suppose any of you have ever heard of Patusan?’ Marlow resumed,

after a silence occupied in the careful lighting of a cigar. ‘It does

not matter; there’s many a heavenly body in the lot crowding upon us of

a night that mankind had never heard of, it being outside the sphere

of its activities and of no earthly importance to anybody but to the

astronomers who are paid to talk learnedly about its composition,

weight, path--the irregularities of its conduct, the aberrations of its

light--a sort of scientific scandal-mongering. Thus with Patusan. It

was referred to knowingly in the inner government circles in Batavia,

especially as to its irregularities and aberrations, and it was known

by name to some few, very few, in the mercantile world. Nobody, however,

had been there, and I suspect no one desired to go there in person,

just as an astronomer, I should fancy, would strongly object to being

transported into a distant heavenly body, where, parted from his earthly

emoluments, he would be bewildered by the view of an unfamiliar heavens.

However, neither heavenly bodies nor astronomers have anything to do

with Patusan. It was Jim who went there. I only meant you to understand

that had Stein arranged to send him into a star of the fifth magnitude

the change could not have been greater. He left his earthly failings

behind him and what sort of reputation he had, and there was a totally

new set of conditions for his imaginative faculty to work upon. Entirely

new, entirely remarkable. And he got hold of them in a remarkable way.

‘Stein was the man who knew more about Patusan than anybody else. More

than was known in the government circles I suspect. I have no doubt he

had been there, either in his butterfly-hunting days or later on, when

he tried in his incorrigible way to season with a pinch of romance the

fattening dishes of his commercial kitchen. There were very few places

in the Archipelago he had not seen in the original dusk of their being,

before light (and even electric light) had been carried into them for

the sake of better morality and--and--well--the greater profit, too.

It was at breakfast of the morning following our talk about Jim that he

mentioned the place, after I had quoted poor Brierly’s remark: “Let him

creep twenty feet underground and stay there.” He looked up at me with

interested attention, as though I had been a rare insect. “This could be

done, too,” he remarked, sipping his coffee. “Bury him in some sort,”

I explained. “One doesn’t like to do it of course, but it would be the

best thing, seeing what he is.” “Yes; he is young,” Stein mused. “The

youngest human being now in existence,” I affirmed. “Schon. There’s

Patusan,” he went on in the same tone. . . . “And the woman is dead

now,” he added incomprehensibly.

‘Of course I don’t know that story; I can only guess that once before

Patusan had been used as a grave for some sin, transgression, or

misfortune. It is impossible to suspect Stein. The only woman that

had ever existed for him was the Malay girl he called “My wife the

princess,” or, more rarely, in moments of expansion, “the mother of my

Emma.” Who was the woman he had mentioned in connection with Patusan I

can’t say; but from his allusions I understand she had been an educated

and very good-looking Dutch-Malay girl, with a tragic or perhaps only a

pitiful history, whose most painful part no doubt was her marriage with

a Malacca Portuguese who had been clerk in some commercial house in

the Dutch colonies. I gathered from Stein that this man was an

unsatisfactory person in more ways than one, all being more or less

indefinite and offensive. It was solely for his wife’s sake that Stein

had appointed him manager of Stein & Co.’s trading post in Patusan;

but commercially the arrangement was not a success, at any rate for

the firm, and now the woman had died, Stein was disposed to try another

agent there. The Portuguese, whose name was Cornelius, considered

himself a very deserving but ill-used person, entitled by his abilities

to a better position. This man Jim would have to relieve. “But I don’t

think he will go away from the place,” remarked Stein. “That has nothing

to do with me. It was only for the sake of the woman that I . . . But as

I think there is a daughter left, I shall let him, if he likes to stay,

keep the old house.”

‘Patusan is a remote district of a native-ruled state, and the chief

settlement bears the same name. At a point on the river about forty

miles from the sea, where the first houses come into view, there can

be seen rising above the level of the forests the summits of two steep

hills very close together, and separated by what looks like a deep

fissure, the cleavage of some mighty stroke. As a matter of fact, the

valley between is nothing but a narrow ravine; the appearance from the

settlement is of one irregularly conical hill split in two, and with the

two halves leaning slightly apart. On the third day after the full, the

moon, as seen from the open space in front of Jim’s house (he had a very

fine house in the native style when I visited him), rose exactly behind

these hills, its diffused light at first throwing the two masses into

intensely black relief, and then the nearly perfect disc, glowing

ruddily, appeared, gliding upwards between the sides of the chasm, till

it floated away above the summits, as if escaping from a yawning grave

in gentle triumph. “Wonderful effect,” said Jim by my side. “Worth

seeing. Is it not?”

‘And this question was put with a note of personal pride that made me

smile, as though he had had a hand in regulating that unique spectacle.

He had regulated so many things in Patusan--things that would have

appeared as much beyond his control as the motions of the moon and the

stars.

‘It was inconceivable. That was the distinctive quality of the part into

which Stein and I had tumbled him unwittingly, with no other notion than

to get him out of the way; out of his own way, be it understood. That

was our main purpose, though, I own, I might have had another motive

which had influenced me a little. I was about to go home for a time;

and it may be I desired, more than I was aware of myself, to dispose of

him--to dispose of him, you understand--before I left. I was going home,

and he had come to me from there, with his miserable trouble and his

shadowy claim, like a man panting under a burden in a mist. I cannot

say I had ever seen him distinctly--not even to this day, after I had

my last view of him; but it seemed to me that the less I understood

the more I was bound to him in the name of that doubt which is the

inseparable part of our knowledge. I did not know so much more about

myself. And then, I repeat, I was going home--to that home distant

enough for all its hearthstones to be like one hearthstone, by which the

humblest of us has the right to sit. We wander in our thousands over the

face of the earth, the illustrious and the obscure, earning beyond the

seas our fame, our money, or only a crust of bread; but it seems to me

that for each of us going home must be like going to render an account.

We return to face our superiors, our kindred, our friends--those whom we

obey, and those whom we love; but even they who have neither, the most

free, lonely, irresponsible and bereft of ties,--even those for whom

home holds no dear face, no familiar voice,--even they have to meet the

spirit that dwells within the land, under its sky, in its air, in its

valleys, and on its rises, in its fields, in its waters and its trees--a

mute friend, judge, and inspirer. Say what you like, to get its joy,

to breathe its peace, to face its truth, one must return with a clear

conscience. All this may seem to you sheer sentimentalism; and indeed

very few of us have the will or the capacity to look consciously under

the surface of familiar emotions. There are the girls we love, the men

we look up to, the tenderness, the friendships, the opportunities, the

pleasures! But the fact remains that you must touch your reward with

clean hands, lest it turn to dead leaves, to thorns, in your grasp. I

think it is the lonely, without a fireside or an affection they may call

their own, those who return not to a dwelling but to the land itself, to

meet its disembodied, eternal, and unchangeable spirit--it is those who

understand best its severity, its saving power, the grace of its secular

right to our fidelity, to our obedience. Yes! few of us understand, but

we all feel it though, and I say _all_ without exception, because those

who do not feel do not count. Each blade of grass has its spot on earth

whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land

from which he draws his faith together with his life. I don’t know

how much Jim understood; but I know he felt, he felt confusedly but

powerfully, the demand of some such truth or some such illusion--I don’t

care how you call it, there is so little difference, and the difference

means so little. The thing is that in virtue of his feeling he mattered.

He would never go home now. Not he. Never. Had he been capable of

picturesque manifestations he would have shuddered at the thought

and made you shudder too. But he was not of that sort, though he was

expressive enough in his way. Before the idea of going home he would

grow desperately stiff and immovable, with lowered chin and pouted lips,

and with those candid blue eyes of his glowering darkly under a frown,

as if before something unbearable, as if before something revolting.

There was imagination in that hard skull of his, over which the thick

clustering hair fitted like a cap. As to me, I have no imagination (I

would be more certain about him today, if I had), and I do not mean to

imply that I figured to myself the spirit of the land uprising above the

white cliffs of Dover, to ask me what I--returning with no bones broken,

so to speak--had done with my very young brother. I could not make

such a mistake. I knew very well he was of those about whom there is

no inquiry; I had seen better men go out, disappear, vanish utterly,

without provoking a sound of curiosity or sorrow. The spirit of

the land, as becomes the ruler of great enterprises, is careless of

innumerable lives. Woe to the stragglers! We exist only in so far as we

hang together. He had straggled in a way; he had not hung on; but he was

aware of it with an intensity that made him touching, just as a man’s

more intense life makes his death more touching than the death of a

tree. I happened to be handy, and I happened to be touched. That’s all

there is to it. I was concerned as to the way he would go out. It would

have hurt me if, for instance, he had taken to drink. The earth is so

small that I was afraid of, some day, being waylaid by a blear-eyed,

swollen-faced, besmirched loafer, with no soles to his canvas shoes,

and with a flutter of rags about the elbows, who, on the strength of old

acquaintance, would ask for a loan of five dollars. You know the awful

jaunty bearing of these scarecrows coming to you from a decent past,

the rasping careless voice, the half-averted impudent glances--those

meetings more trying to a man who believes in the solidarity of our

lives than the sight of an impenitent death-bed to a priest. That, to

tell you the truth, was the only danger I could see for him and for

me; but I also mistrusted my want of imagination. It might even come

to something worse, in some way it was beyond my powers of fancy to

foresee. He wouldn’t let me forget how imaginative he was, and your

imaginative people swing farther in any direction, as if given a longer

scope of cable in the uneasy anchorage of life. They do. They take to

drink too. It may be I was belittling him by such a fear. How could I

tell? Even Stein could say no more than that he was romantic. I only

knew he was one of us. And what business had he to be romantic? I

am telling you so much about my own instinctive feelings and bemused

reflections because there remains so little to be told of him. He

existed for me, and after all it is only through me that he exists for

you. I’ve led him out by the hand; I have paraded him before you. Were

my commonplace fears unjust? I won’t say--not even now. You may be able

to tell better, since the proverb has it that the onlookers see most of

the game. At any rate, they were superfluous. He did not go out, not at

all; on the contrary, he came on wonderfully, came on straight as a die

and in excellent form, which showed that he could stay as well as spurt.

I ought to be delighted, for it is a victory in which I had taken my

part; but I am not so pleased as I would have expected to be. I ask

myself whether his rush had really carried him out of that mist in

which he loomed interesting if not very big, with floating outlines--a

straggler yearning inconsolably for his humble place in the ranks. And

besides, the last word is not said,--probably shall never be said. Are

not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our

stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention? I have given

up expecting those last words, whose ring, if they could only be

pronounced, would shake both heaven and earth. There is never time to

say our last word--the last word of our love, of our desire, faith,

remorse, submissions, revolt. The heaven and the earth must not be

shaken, I suppose--at least, not by us who know so many truths about

either. My last words about Jim shall be few. I affirm he had achieved

greatness; but the thing would be dwarfed in the telling, or rather in

the hearing. Frankly, it is not my words that I mistrust but your minds.

I could be eloquent were I not afraid you fellows had starved your

imaginations to feed your bodies. I do not mean to be offensive; it is

respectable to have no illusions--and safe--and profitable--and dull.

Yet you, too, in your time must have known the intensity of life, that

light of glamour created in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow

of sparks struck from a cold stone--and as short-lived, alas!’