forward; his pale face hovered near the flowers, and
then dropping sideways over the arm of his chair,
he rested his temple in the palm of his hand.
The wind of the punkahs eddied down on the heads,
on the dark-faced natives wound about in voluminous
draperies, on the Europeans sitting together very hot
and in drill suits that seemed to fit them as close
as their skins, and holding their round pith hats
on their knees; while gliding along the walls the
court peons, buttoned tight in long white coats, flitted
rapidly to and fro, running on bare toes, red-sashed,
red turban on head, as noiseless as ghosts, and on
the alert like so many retrievers.
Jim’s eyes, wandering in the intervals of his
answers, rested upon a white man who sat apart from
the others, with his face worn and clouded, but with
quiet eyes that glanced straight, interested and clear.
Jim answered another question and was tempted to cry
out, ’What’s the good of this! what’s
the good!’ He tapped with his foot slightly,
bit his lip, and looked away over the heads.
He met the eyes of the white man. The glance
directed at him was not the fascinated stare of the
others. It was an act of intelligent volition.
Jim between two questions forgot himself so far as
to find leisure for a thought. This fellow—ran
the thought—looks at me as though he could
see somebody or something past my shoulder. He
had come across that man before—in the street
perhaps. He was positive he had never spoken
to him. For days, for many days, he had spoken
to no one, but had held silent, incoherent, and endless
converse with himself, like a prisoner alone in his
cell or like a wayfarer lost in a wilderness.
At present he was answering questions that did not
matter though they had a purpose, but he doubted whether
he would ever again speak out as long as he lived.
The sound of his own truthful statements confirmed
his deliberate opinion that speech was of no use to
him any longer. That man there seemed to be aware
of his hopeless difficulty. Jim looked at him,
then turned away resolutely, as after a final parting.
And later on, many times, in distant parts of the
world, Marlow showed himself willing to remember Jim,
to remember him at length, in detail and audibly.
Perhaps it would be after dinner, on a verandah draped
in motionless foliage and crowned with flowers, in
the deep dusk speckled by fiery cigar-ends. The
elongated bulk of each cane-chair harboured a silent
listener. Now and then a small red glow would
move abruptly, and expanding light up the fingers
of a languid hand, part of a face in profound repose,
or flash a crimson gleam into a pair of pensive eyes
overshadowed by a fragment of an unruffled forehead;
and with the very first word uttered Marlow’s
body, extended at rest in the seat, would become very
still, as though his spirit had winged its way back
into the lapse of time and were speaking through his
lips from the past.
