’Cornelius broke upon it.  He bolted out, vermin-like, from the long grass growing in a depression of the ground.  I believe his house was rotting somewhere near by, though I’ve never seen it, not having been far enough in that direction.  He ran towards me upon the path; his feet, shod in dirty white shoes, twinkled on the dark earth; he pulled himself up, and began to whine and cringe under a tall stove-pipe hat.  His dried-up little carcass was swallowed up, totally lost, in a suit of black broadcloth.  That was his costume for holidays and ceremonies, and it reminded me that this was the fourth Sunday I had spent in Patusan.  All the time of my stay I had been vaguely aware of his desire to confide in me, if he only could get me all to himself.  He hung about with an eager craving look on his sour yellow little face; but his timidity had kept him back as much as my natural reluctance to have anything to do with such an unsavoury creature.  He would have succeeded, nevertheless, had he not been so ready to slink off as soon as you looked at him.  He would slink off before Jim’s severe gaze, before my own, which I tried to make indifferent, even before Tamb’ Itam’s surly, superior glance.  He was perpetually slinking away; whenever seen he was seen moving off deviously, his face over his shoulder, with either a mistrustful snarl or a woe-begone, piteous, mute aspect; but no assumed expression could conceal this innate irremediable abjectness of his nature, any more than an arrangement of clothing can conceal some monstrous deformity of the body.

’I don’t know whether it was the demoralisation of my utter defeat in my encounter with a spectre of fear less than an hour ago, but I let him capture me without even a show of resistance.  I was doomed to be the recipient of confidences, and to be confronted with unanswerable questions.  It was trying; but the contempt, the unreasoned contempt, the man’s appearance provoked, made it easier to bear.  He couldn’t possibly matter.  Nothing mattered, since I had made up my mind that Jim, for whom alone I cared, had at last mastered his fate.  He had told me he was satisfied . . . nearly.  This is going further than most of us dare.  I—­who have the right to think myself good enough—­dare not.  Neither does any of you here, I suppose? . . .’

Marlow paused, as if expecting an answer.  Nobody spoke.

‘Quite right,’ he began again.  ’Let no soul know, since the truth can be wrung out of us only by some cruel, little, awful catastrophe.  But he is one of us, and he could say he was satisfied . . . nearly.  Just fancy this!  Nearly satisfied.  One could almost envy him his catastrophe.  Nearly satisfied.  After this nothing could matter.  It did not matter who suspected him, who trusted him, who loved him, who hated him—­especially as it was Cornelius who hated him.