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_ 'But next morning, at the first bend of the river shutting off the
houses of Patusan, all this dropped out of my sight bodily, with its
colour, its design, and its meaning, like a picture created by fancy on
a canvas, upon which, after long contemplation, you turn your back
for the last time. It remains in the memory motionless, unfaded, with
its life arrested, in an unchanging light. There are the ambitions, the
fears, the hate, the hopes, and they remain in my mind just as I had
seen them--intense and as if for ever suspended in their expression.
I had turned away from the picture and was going back to the world
where events move, men change, light flickers, life flows in a clear
stream, no matter whether over mud or over stones. I wasn't going to
dive into it; I would have enough to do to keep my head above the
surface. But as to what I was leaving behind, I cannot imagine any
alteration. The immense and magnanimous Doramin and his little
motherly witch of a wife, gazing together upon the land and nursing
secretly their dreams of parental ambition; Tunku Allang, wizened
and greatly perplexed; Dain Waris, intelligent and brave, with his
faith in Jim, with his firm glance and his ironic friendliness; the girl,
absorbed in her frightened, suspicious adoration; Tamb' Itam, surly
and faithful; Cornelius, leaning his forehead against the fence under
the moonlight--I am certain of them. They exist as if under an
enchanter's wand. But the figure round which all these are grouped--that
one lives, and I am not certain of him. No magician's wand can
immobilise him under my eyes. He is one of us.
'Jim, as I've told you, accompanied me on the first stage of my
journey back to the world he had renounced, and the way at times
seemed to lead through the very heart of untouched wilderness. The
empty reaches sparkled under the high sun; between the high walls
of vegetation the heat drowsed upon the water, and the boat, impelled
vigorously, cut her way through the air that seemed to have settled
dense and warm under the shelter of lofty trees.
'The shadow of the impending separation had already put an
immense space between us, and when we spoke it was with an effort,
as if to force our low voices across a vast and increasing distance. The
boat fairly flew; we sweltered side by side in the stagnant superheated
air; the smell of mud, of mush, the primeval smell of fecund earth,
seemed to sting our faces; till suddenly at a bend it was as if a great
hand far away had lifted a heavy curtain, had flung open un immense
portal. The light itself seemed to stir, the sky above our heads
widened, a far-off murmur reached our ears, a freshness enveloped us,
filled our lungs, quickened our thoughts, our blood, our regrets--and,
straight ahead, the forests sank down against the dark-blue ridge
of the sea.
'I breathed deeply, I revelled in the vastness of the opened horizon,
in the different atmosphere that seemed to vibrate with the toil of life,
with the energy of an impeccable world. This sky and this sea were
open to me. The girl was right--there was a sign, a call in them--
something to which I responded with every fibre of my being. I let
my eyes roam through space, like a man released from bonds who
stretches his cramped limbs, runs, leaps, responds to the inspiring
elation of freedom. "This is glorious!" I cried, and then I looked at
the sinner by my side. He sat with his head sunk on his breast and said
"Yes," without raising his eyes, as if afraid to see writ large on the
clear sky of the offing the reproach of his romantic conscience.
'I remember the smallest details of that afternoon. We landed on a
bit of white beach. It was backed by a low cliff wooded on the brow,
draped in creepers to the very foot. Below us the plain of the sea, of
a serene and intense blue, stretched with a slight upward tilt to the
thread-like horizon drawn at the height of our eyes. Great waves of
glitter blew lightly along the pitted dark surface, as swift as feathers
chased by the breeze. A chain of islands sat broken and massive facing
the wide estuary, displayed in a sheet of pale glassy water reflecting
faithfully the contour of the shore. High in the colourless sunshine a
solitary bird, all black, hovered, dropping and soaring above the
same spot with a slight rocking motion of the wings. A ragged, sooty
bunch of flimsy mat hovels was perched over its own inverted image
upon a crooked multitude of high piles the colour of ebony. A tiny
black canoe put off from amongst them with two tiny men, all black,
who toiled exceedingly, striking down at the pale water: and the
canoe seemed to slide painfully on a mirror. This bunch of miserable
hovels was the fishing village that boasted of the white lord's especial
protection, and the two men crossing over were the old headman and
his son-in-law. They landed and walked up to us on the white sand,
lean, dark-brown as if dried in smoke, with ashy patches on the skin
of their naked shoulders and breasts. Their heads were bound in dirty
but carefully folded headkerchiefs, and the old man began at once to
state a complaint, voluble, stretching a lank arm, screwing up at Jim
his old bleared eyes confidently. The Rajah's people would not leave
them alone; there had been some trouble about a lot of turtles' eggs
his people had collected on the islets there--and leaning at arm's-length
upon his paddle, he pointed with a brown skinny hand over the sea.
Jim listened for a time without looking up, and at last told him
gently to wait. He would hear him by-and-by. They withdrew
obediently to some little distance, and sat on their heels, with their
paddles lying before them on the sand; the silvery gleams in their
eyes followed our movements patiently; and the immensity of the
outspread sea, the stillness of the coast, passing north and south
beyond the limits of my vision, made up one colossal Presence watching
us four dwarfs isolated on a strip of glistening sand.
' "The trouble is," remarked Jim moodily, "that for generations
these beggars of fishermen in that village there had been considered
as the Rajah's personal slaves--and the old rip can't get it into his head
that . . ."
'He paused. "That you have changed all that," I said.
' "Yes I've changed all that," he muttered in a gloomy voice.
' "You have had your opportunity," I pursued.
' "Have I?" he said. "Well, yes. I suppose so. Yes. I have got back
my confidence in myself--a good name--yet sometimes I wish . . .
No! I shall hold what I've got. Can't expect anything more." He flung
his arm out towards the sea. "Not out there anyhow." He stamped
his foot upon the sand. "This is my limit, because nothing less will
do."
'We continued pacing the beach. "Yes, I've changed all that," he
went on, with a sidelong glance at the two patient squatting fishermen;
"but only try to think what it would be if I went away. Jove! can't
you see it? Hell loose. No! To-morrow I shall go and take my chance
of drinking that silly old Tunku Allang's coffee, and I shall make no
end of fuss over these rotten turtles' eggs. No. I can't say--enough.
Never. 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."
'I was profoundly humbled by his words. "For God's sake," I said,
"don't set me up, my dear fellow; just look to yourself." I felt a
gratitude, an affection, for that straggler whose eyes had singled me out,
keeping my place in the ranks of an insignificant multitude. How
little that was to boast of, after all! I turned my burning face away;
under the low sun, glowing, darkened and crimson, like un ember
snatched from the fire, the sea lay outspread, offering all its immense
stillness to the approach of the fiery orb. Twice he was going to speak,
but checked himself; at last, as if he had found a formula--
' "I shall be faithful," he said quietly. "I shall be faithful," he
repeated, without looking at me, but for the first time letting his eyes
wander upon the waters, whose blueness had changed to a gloomy
purple under the fires of sunset. Ah! he was romantic, romantic. I
recalled some words of Stein's. . . . "In the destructive element
immerse! . . . To follow the dream, and again to follow the dream--and
so--always--usque ad finem . . ." He was romantic, but none the
less true. Who could tell what forms, what visions, what faces, what
forgiveness he could see in the glow of the west! . . . A small boat,
leaving the schooner, moved slowly, with a regular beat of two oars,
towards the sandbank to take me off. "And then there's Jewel," he
said, out of the great silence of earth, sky, and sea, which had
mastered my very thoughts so that his voice made me start. "There's
Jewel." "Yes," I murmured. "I need not tell you what she is to me,"
he pursued. "You've seen. In time she will come to understand . . ."
"I hope so," I interrupted. "She trusts me, too," he mused, and then
changed his tone. "When shall we meet next, I wonder?" he said.
' "Never--unless you come out," I answered, avoiding his glance.
He didn't seem to be surprised; he kept very quiet for a while.
' "Good-bye, then," he said, after a pause. "Perhaps it's just as
well."
'We shook hands, and I walked to the boat, which waited with her
nose on the beach. The schooner, her mainsail set and jib-sheet to
windward, curveted on the purple sea; there was a rosy tinge on her
sails. "Will you be going home again soon?" asked Jim, just as I
swung my leg over the gunwale. "In a year or so if I live," I said. The
forefoot grated on the sand, the boat floated, the wet oars flashed and
dipped once, twice. Jim, at the water's edge, raised his voice. "Tell
them . . ." he began. I signed to the men to cease rowing, and waited
in wonder. Tell who? The half-submerged sun faced him; I could
see its red gleam in his eyes that looked dumbly at me. . . . "No--
nothing," he said, and with a slight wave of his hand motioned the
boat away. I did not look again at the shore till I had clambered on
board the schooner.
'By that time the sun had set. The twilight lay over the east, and
the coast, turned black, extended infinitely its sombre wall that
seemed the very stronghold of the night; the western horizon was one
great blaze of gold and crimson in which a big detached cloud floated
dark and still, casting a slaty shadow on the water beneath, and I saw
Jim on the beach watching the schooner fall off and gather headway.
'The two half-naked fishermen had arisen as soon as I had gone;
they were no doubt pouring the plaint of their trifling, miserable,
oppressed lives into the ears of the white lord, and no doubt he was
listening to it, making it his own, for was it not a part of his luck--the
luck "from the word Go"--the luck to which he had assured me he
was so completely equal? They, too, I should think, were in luck, and
I was sure their pertinacity would be equal to it. Their dark-skinned
bodies vanished on the dark background long before I had lost sight
of their protector. He was white from head to foot, and remained
persistently visible with the stronghold of the night at his back, the
sea at his feet, the opportunity by his side--still veiled. What do you
say? Was it still veiled? I don't know. For me that white figure in the
stillness of coast and sea seemed to stand at the heart of a vast enigma.
The twilight was ebbing fast from the sky above his head, the strip of
sand had sunk already under his feet, he himself appeared no bigger
than a child--then only a speck, a tiny white speck, that seemed to
catch all the light left in a darkened world. . . . And, suddenly, I lost
him. . . . _
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