’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. . . .
CHAPTER 36
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.
