Kabanata Kabanata 36 · With these words Marlow had ended his narrative, and his audience had

. 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.’