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Jim went on smiling at the retreating horizon; his heart was full of generous impulses, and his thought was contemplating his own superiority.
They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!
We are snared into doing things for which we get called names, and things for which we get hanged, and yet the spirit may well survive—survive the condemnation, survive the halter, by Jove! And there are things—they look small enough sometimes too—by which some of us are totally and completely undone.
They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!
Whether they knew it or not, the interest that drew them here was purely psychological—the expectation of some essential disclosure as to the strength, the power, the horror, of human emotions. Naturally nothing of the kind could be disclosed.
Its object was not the fundamental why, but the superficial how, of this affair.
The sting of life could do no more to his complacent soul than the scratch of a pin to the smooth face of a rock.
If I understand anything of men, the matter was no doubt of the gravest import, one of those trifles that awaken ideas—start into life some thought with which a man unused to such a companionship finds it impossible to live.
Yes. Adrift—on shore—after ten years’ service—and with a poor woman and four children six thousand miles off depending on my half-pay for every mouthful they ate.
‘Ay, ay! neither you nor I, sir, had ever thought so much of ourselves.’
He would be confident and depressed all in the same breath, as if some conviction of innate blamelessness had checked the truth writhing within him at every turn.
for it is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.
A certain readiness to perish is not so very rare, but it is seldom that you meet men whose souls, steeled in the impenetrable armour of resolution, are ready to fight a losing battle to the last; the desire of peace waxes stronger as hope declines, till at last it conquers the very desire of life. Which of us here has not observed this, or maybe experienced something of that feeling in his own person—this extreme weariness of emotions, the vanity of effort, the yearning for rest? Those striving with unreasonable forces know it well,—the shipwrecked castaways in boats, wanderers lost in a
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was made to look at the convention that lurks in all truth and on the essential sincerity of falsehood.
propitiatory
Everything was gone and—all was over . . .’ he fetched a deep sigh . . . ‘with me.’”
It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome. Nevertheless, there can be but few of us who had never known one of these rare moments of awakening when we see, hear, understand ever so much—everything—in a flash—before we fall back again into our agreeable somnolence.
That never yet made a man. You must see things exactly as they are—if you don’t, you may just as well give in at once. You will never do anything in this world.
To bury him would have been such an easy kindness! It would have been so much in accordance with the wisdom of life, which consists in putting out of sight all the reminders of our folly, of our weakness, of our mortality; all that makes against our efficiency—the memory of our failures, the hints of our undying fears, the bodies of our dead friends.
It is when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.
I had a disturbing sense of being no help but rather an obstacle to some mysterious, inexplicable, impalpable striving of his wounded spirit.
For whole days we did not exchange a word; I felt extremely unwilling to give orders to my officers in his presence. Often, when alone with him on deck or in the cabin, we didn’t know what to do with our eyes.
Man is amazing, but he is not a masterpiece,’
‘Yes,’ said I, ‘strictly speaking, the question is not how to get cured, but how to live.’
Stein lifted his hand. ‘And do you know how many opportunities I let escape; how many dreams I had lost that had come in my way?’ He shook his head regretfully. ‘It seems to me that some would have been very fine—if I had made them come true.
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.
Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention?
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!”
A magnificent chance! Well, it was magnificent, but chances are what men make them, and how was I to know?
Could settle the deadliest quarrel in the country by crooking his little finger. The trouble was to get at the truth of anything. Was not sure to this day whether he had been fair to all parties. It worried him.
‘Do you know,’ he commented profoundly, ‘I rather think I was not quite myself for whole weeks on end about that time.’ ‘Oh yes. You were though,’ I couldn’t help contradicting.
‘I—I love her dearly. More than I can tell. Of course one cannot tell. You take a different view of your actions when you come to understand, when you are made to understand every day that your existence is necessary—you see, absolutely necessary—to another person. I am made to feel that. Wonderful! But only try to think what her life has been. It is too extravagantly awful! Isn’t it?
Why should she fear? She knew him to be strong, true, wise, brave. He was all that. Certainly. He was more. He was great—invincible—and the world did not want him, it had forgotten him, it would not even know him.
‘Nobody, nobody is good enough,’ I began with the greatest earnestness.
Well—let’s leave it to Chance, whose ally is Time, that cannot be hurried, and whose enemy is Death, that will not wait.
He was going to try ever so many experiments; I had admired his energy, his enterprise, and his shrewdness. Nothing on earth seemed less real now than his plans, his energy, and his enthusiasm; and raising my eyes, I saw part of the moon glittering through the bushes at the bottom of the chasm.
I must go on, go on for ever holding up my end, to feel sure that nothing can touch me. I must stick to their belief in me to feel safe and to—to”. . . He cast about for a word, seemed to look for it on the sea . . . ‘to keep in touch with’ . . . His voice sank suddenly to a murmur . . . ‘with those whom, perhaps, I shall never see any more. With—with—you, for instance.’
him
follow, and the reign of the white man who protected
pounder
Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.
‘Men act badly sometimes without being much worse than others,’ he said after some hesitation.
It was not a vulgar and treacherous massacre; it was a lesson, a retribution—a demonstration of some obscure and awful attribute of our nature which, I am afraid, is not so very far under the surface as we like to think.
Loneliness was closing on him. People had trusted him with their lives—only for that; and yet they could never, as he had said, never be made to understand him.
Now he is no more, there are days when the reality of his existence comes to me with an immense, with an overwhelming force; and yet upon my honour there are moments, too when he passes from my eyes like a disembodied spirit astray amongst the passions of this earth, ready to surrender himself faithfully to the claim of his own world of shades.
