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_ '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!' _
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