Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (best ebook reader for chromebook .txt) 📕

romance. At the door of my room he faced me. ‘Yes,’ I said, as though carrying on a discussion, ‘and amongst other things you dreamed foolishly of a certain butterfly; but when one fine morning your dream came in your way you did not let the splendid opportunity escape. Did you? Whereas he⁠ ⁠…’ Stein lifted his hand. ‘And do you know how many opportunities I let escape; how many dreams I had lost that had come in my way?’ He shook his head regretfully. ‘It seems to me that some would have been very fine⁠—if I had made them come true. Do you know how many? Perhaps I myself don’t know.’ ‘Whether his were fine or not,’ I said, ‘he knows of one which he certainly did not catch.’ ‘Everybody knows of one or two like that,’ said Stein; ‘and that is the trouble⁠—the great trouble.⁠ ⁠…’

“He shook hands on the threshold, peered into my room under his raised arm. ‘Sleep well. And tomorrow we must do something practical⁠—practical.⁠ ⁠…’

“Though his own room was beyond mine I saw him return the way he came. He was going back to his butterflies.”

XXI

“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 that 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. ‘Schön. 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