“All this was taking place, more than two years afterwards, on board that nautical ruin the Fire-Queen this Jones had got charge of—quite by a funny accident, too—from Matherson—mad Matherson they generally called him—the same who used to hang out in Haï-phong, you know, before the occupation days, The old chap snuffled on—
“‘Ay, sir, Captain Brierly will be remembered here, if there’s no other place on earth. I wrote fully to his father and did not get a word in reply—neither Thank you, nor Go to the devil!—nothing! Perhaps they did not want to know.’
“The sight of that watery-eyed old Jones mopping his bald head with a red cotton handkerchief, the sorrowing yelp of the dog, the squalor of that flyblown cuddy which was the only shrine of his memory, threw a veil of inexpressibly mean pathos over Brierly’s remembered figure, the posthumous revenge of fate for that belief in his own splendour which had almost cheated his life of its legitimate terrors. Almost! Perhaps wholly. Who can tell what flattering view he had induced himself to take of his own suicide?
“‘Why did he commit the rash act, Captain Marlow—can you think?’ asked Jones, pressing his palms together. ‘Why? It beats me! Why?’ He slapped his low and wrinkled forehead. ‘If he had been poor and old and in debt—and never a show—or else mad. But he wasn’t of the kind that goes mad, not he. You trust me. What a mate don’t know about his skipper isn’t worth knowing. Young, healthy, well off, no cares…I sit here sometimes thinking, thinking, till my head fairly begins to buzz. There was some reason.’
“‘You may depend on it, Captain Jones,’ said I, ‘it wasn’t anything that would have disturbed much either of us two,’ I said; and then, as if a light had been flashed into the muddle of his brain, poor old Jones found a last word of amazing profundity. He blew his nose, nodding at me dolefully: ‘Ay, ay! neither you nor I, sir, had ever thought so much of ourselves.’
“Of course the recollection of my last conversation with Brierly is tinged with the knowledge of his end that followed so close upon it. I spoke with him for the last time during the progress of the inquiry. It was after the first adjournment, and he came up with me in the street. He was in a state of irritation, which I noticed with surprise, his usual behaviour when he condescended to converse being perfectly cool, with a trace of amused tolerance, as if the existence of his interlocutor had been a rather good joke. ‘They caught me for that inquiry, you see,’ he began, and for a while enlarged complainingly upon the inconveniences of daily attendance in court. ‘And goodness knows how long it will last. Three days, I suppose.’ I heard him out in silence; in my then opinion it was a way as good as another of putting on side. ‘What’s the use of it? It is the stupidest set out you can imagine,’ he pursued, hotly. I remarked that there was no option. He interrupted me with a sort of pent-up violence. ‘I feel like a fool all the time.’ I looked up at him. This was going very far—for Brierly—when talking of Brierly. He stopped short, and seizing the lappel of my coat, gave it a slight tug. ‘Why are we tormenting that young chap?’ he asked. This question chimed in so well to the tolling of a certain thought of mine that, with the image of the absconding renegade in my eye, I answered at once, ‘Hanged if I know, unless it be that he lets you.’ I was astonished to see him fall into line, so to speak, with that utterance, which ought to have been tolerably cryptic. He said angrily, ‘Why, yes. Can’t he see that wretched skipper of his has cleared out? What does he expect to happen? Nothing can save him. He’s done for.’ We walked on in silence a few steps. ‘Why eat all that dirt?’ he exclaimed, with an oriental energy of expression—about the only sort of energy you can find a trace of east of the fiftieth meridian. I wondered greatly at the direction of his thoughts, but now I strongly suspect it was strictly in character: at bottom poor Brierly must have been thinking of himself. I pointed out to him that the skipper of the Patna was known to have feathered his nest pretty well, and could procure almost anywhere the means of getting away. With Jim it was otherwise: the Government was keeping him in the Sailors’ Home for the time being, and probably he hadn’t a penny in his pocket to bless himself with. It costs some money to run away. ‘Does it? Not always,’ he said, with a bitter laugh, and to some further remark of mine—’Well, then, let him creep twenty feet underground and stay there! By heavens! I would.’ I don’t know why his tone provoked me, and I said, ‘There is a kind of courage in facing it out as he does, knowing very well that if he went away nobody would trouble to run after him.’ ‘Courage be hanged!’ growled Brierly. ‘That sort of courage is of no use to keep a man straight, and I don’t care a snap for such courage. If you were to say it was a kind of cowardice now—of softness. I tell you what, I will put up two hundred rupees if you put up another hundred and undertake to make the beggar clear out early to-morrow morning. The fellow’s a gentleman if he ain’t fit to be touched—he will understand. He must! This infernal publicity is too shocking: there he sits while all these confounded natives, serangs, lascars, quartermasters, are giving evidence that’s enough to burn a man to ashes with shame. This is abominable. Why, Marlow, don’t you think, don’t you feel, that this is abominable; don’t you now—come—as a seaman? If he went away all this would stop at once.’ Brierly said these words with a most unusual animation, and made as if to reach after his pocket-book. I restrained him, and declared coldly that the cowardice of these four men did not seem to me a matter of such great importance. ‘And you call yourself a seaman, I suppose,’ he pronounced, angrily. I said that’s what I called myself, and I hoped I was too. He heard me out, and made a gesture with his big arm that seemed to deprive me of my individuality, to push me away into the crowd. ‘The worst of it,’ he said, ‘is that all you fellows have no sense of dignity; you don’t think enough of what you are supposed to be.’