feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/shmoop/Lord Jim/section_35_part_0.txt
feat_book_id: Lord Jim.chapter 36
feat_summary_id: chapter 36
feat_summary: {"name": "Chapter 36", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210118112654/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/lord-jim/summary/chapter-36", "summary": "Two years later, one of the people who listened to Marlow's epic story on the verandah gets some snail mail. It's a package of letters from Marlow. In one of the letters, Marlow explains that the enclosed documents do what they can to piece together the last part of Jim's story. We're all ears.", "analysis": ""}
text: 
  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.
  
  The privileged man opened the packet, looked in, then, laying it down,
  went to the window. His rooms were in the highest flat of a lofty
  building, and his glance could travel afar beyond the clear panes of
  glass, as though he were looking out of the lantern of a lighthouse.
  The slopes of the roofs glistened, the dark broken ridges succeeded each
  other without end like sombre, uncrested waves, and from the depths of
  the town under his feet ascended a confused and unceasing mutter. The
  spires of churches, numerous, scattered haphazard, uprose like beacons
  on a maze of shoals without a channel; the driving rain mingled with the
  falling dusk of a winter's evening; and the booming of a big clock on a
  tower, striking the hour, rolled past in voluminous, austere bursts
  of sound, with a shrill vibrating cry at the core. He drew the heavy
  curtains.
  
  The light of his shaded reading-lamp slept like a sheltered pool, his
  footfalls made no sound on the carpet, his wandering days were over. No
  more horizons as boundless as hope, no more twilights within the forests
  as solemn as temples, in the hot quest for the Ever-undiscovered
  Country over the hill, across the stream, beyond the wave. The hour
  was striking! No more! No more!--but the opened packet under the lamp
  brought back the sounds, the visions, the very savour of the past--a
  multitude of fading faces, a tumult of low voices, dying away upon the
  shores of distant seas under a passionate and unconsoling sunshine. He
  sighed and sat down to read.
  
  At first he saw three distinct enclosures. A good many pages closely
  blackened and pinned together; a loose square sheet of greyish paper
  with a few words traced in a handwriting he had never seen before, and
  an explanatory letter from Marlow. From this last fell another letter,
  yellowed by time and frayed on the folds. He picked it up and, laying it
  aside, turned to Marlow's message, ran swiftly over the opening lines,
  and, checking himself, thereafter read on deliberately, like one
  approaching with slow feet and alert eyes the glimpse of an undiscovered
  country.
  
  '. . . I don't suppose you've forgotten,' went on the letter. 'You alone
  have showed an interest in him that survived the telling of his story,
  though I remember well you would not admit he had mastered his fate.
  You prophesied for him the disaster of weariness and of disgust with
  acquired honour, with the self-appointed task, with the love sprung from
  pity and youth. You had said you knew so well "that kind of thing," its
  illusory satisfaction, its unavoidable deception. You said also--I call
  to mind--that "giving your life up to them" (them meaning all of mankind
  with skins brown, yellow, or black in colour) "was like selling your
  soul to a brute." You contended that "that kind of thing" was only
  endurable and enduring when based on a firm conviction in the truth of
  ideas racially our own, in whose name are established the order, the
  morality of an ethical progress. "We want its strength at our backs,"
  you had said. "We want a belief in its necessity and its justice, to
  make a worthy and conscious sacrifice of our lives. Without it the
  sacrifice is only forgetfulness, the way of offering is no better than
  the way to perdition." In other words, you maintained that we must fight
  in the ranks or our lives don't count. Possibly! You ought to know--be
  it said without malice--you who have rushed into one or two places
  single-handed and came out cleverly, without singeing your wings. The
  point, however, is that of all mankind Jim had no dealings but with
  himself, and the question is whether at the last he had not confessed to
  a faith mightier than the laws of order and progress.
  
  'I affirm nothing. Perhaps you may pronounce--after you've read. There
  is much truth--after all--in the common expression "under a cloud." It
  is impossible to see him clearly--especially as it is through the eyes
  of others that we take our last look at him. I have no hesitation in
  imparting to you all I know of the last episode that, as he used to say,
  had "come to him." One wonders whether this was perhaps that supreme
  opportunity, that last and satisfying test for which I had always
  suspected him to be waiting, before he could frame a message to the
  impeccable world. You remember that when I was leaving him for the last
  time he had asked whether I would be going home soon, and suddenly cried
  after me, "Tell them . . ." I had waited--curious I'll own, and hopeful
  too--only to hear him shout, "No--nothing." That was all then--and there
  will be nothing more; there will be no message, unless such as each of
  us can interpret for himself from the language of facts, that are so
  often more enigmatic than the craftiest arrangement of words. He made,
  it is true, one more attempt to deliver himself; but that too failed, as
  you may perceive if you look at the sheet of greyish foolscap enclosed
  here. He had tried to write; do you notice the commonplace hand? It is
  headed "The Fort, Patusan." I suppose he had carried out his intention
  of making out of his house a place of defence. It was an excellent plan:
  a deep ditch, an earth wall topped by a palisade, and at the angles
  guns mounted on platforms to sweep each side of the square. Doramin had
  agreed to furnish him the guns; and so each man of his party would know
  there was a place of safety, upon which every faithful partisan could
  rally in case of some sudden danger. All this showed his judicious
  foresight, his faith in the future. What he called "my own people"--the
  liberated captives of the Sherif--were to make a distinct quarter of
  Patusan, with their huts and little plots of ground under the walls of
  the stronghold. Within he would be an invincible host in himself "The
  Fort, Patusan." No date, as you observe. What is a number and a name to
  a day of days? It is also impossible to say whom he had in his mind when
  he seized the pen: Stein--myself--the world at large--or was this only
  the aimless startled cry of a solitary man confronted by his fate? "An
  awful thing has happened," he wrote before he flung the pen down for the
  first time; look at the ink blot resembling the head of an arrow under
  these words. After a while he had tried again, scrawling heavily, as if
  with a hand of lead, another line. "I must now at once . . ." The pen
  had spluttered, and that time he gave it up. There's nothing more;
  he had seen a broad gulf that neither eye nor voice could span. I
  can understand this. He was overwhelmed by the inexplicable; he was
  overwhelmed by his own personality--the gift of that destiny which he
  had done his best to master.
  
  'I send you also an old letter--a very old letter. It was found
  carefully preserved in his writing-case. It is from his father, and
  by the date you can see he must have received it a few days before he
  joined the Patna. Thus it must be the last letter he ever had from home.
  He had treasured it all these years. The good old parson fancied his
  sailor son. I've looked in at a sentence here and there. There is
  nothing in it except just affection. He tells his "dear James" that the
  last long letter from him was very "honest and entertaining." He would
  not have him "judge men harshly or hastily." There are four pages of it,
  easy morality and family news. Tom had "taken orders." Carrie's husband
  had "money losses." The old chap goes on equably trusting Providence and
  the established order of the universe, but alive to its small dangers
  and its small mercies. One can almost see him, grey-haired and serene in
  the inviolable shelter of his book-lined, faded, and comfortable study,
  where for forty years he had conscientiously gone over and over again
  the round of his little thoughts about faith and virtue, about the
  conduct of life and the only proper manner of dying; where he had
  written so many sermons, where he sits talking to his boy, over there,
  on the other side of the earth. But what of the distance? Virtue is one
  all over the world, and there is only one faith, one conceivable conduct
  of life, one manner of dying. He hopes his "dear James" will never
  forget that "who once gives way to temptation, in the very instant
  hazards his total depravity and everlasting ruin. Therefore resolve
  fixedly never, through any possible motives, to do anything which you
  believe to be wrong." There is also some news of a favourite dog; and a
  pony, "which all you boys used to ride," had gone blind from old age and
  had to be shot. The old chap invokes Heaven's blessing; the mother and
  all the girls then at home send their love. . . . No, there is nothing
  much in that yellow frayed letter fluttering out of his cherishing
  grasp after so many years. It was never answered, but who can say what
  converse he may have held with all these placid, colourless forms of men
  and women peopling that quiet corner of the world as free of danger
  or strife as a tomb, and breathing equably the air of undisturbed
  rectitude. It seems amazing that he should belong to it, he to whom so
  many things "had come." Nothing ever came to them; they would never be
  taken unawares, and never be called upon to grapple with fate. Here they
  all are, evoked by the mild gossip of the father, all these brothers
  and sisters, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, gazing with clear
  unconscious eyes, while I seem to see him, returned at last, no longer
  a mere white speck at the heart of an immense mystery, but of full
  stature, standing disregarded amongst their untroubled shapes, with a
  stern and romantic aspect, but always mute, dark--under a cloud.
  
  'The story of the last events you will find in the few pages enclosed
  here. You must admit that it is romantic beyond the wildest dreams
  of his boyhood, and yet there is to my mind a sort of profound and
  terrifying logic in it, as if it were our imagination alone that could
  set loose upon us the might of an overwhelming destiny. The imprudence
  of our thoughts recoils upon our heads; who toys with the sword shall
  perish by the sword. This astounding adventure, of which the most
  astounding part is that it is true, comes on as an unavoidable
  consequence. Something of the sort had to happen. You repeat this to
  yourself while you marvel that such a thing could happen in the year of
  grace before last. But it has happened--and there is no disputing its
  logic.
  
  'I put it down here for you as though I had been an eyewitness. My
  information was fragmentary, but I've fitted the pieces together, and
  there is enough of them to make an intelligible picture. I wonder how
  he would have related it himself. He has confided so much in me that at
  times it seems as though he must come in presently and tell the story
  in his own words, in his careless yet feeling voice, with his offhand
  manner, a little puzzled, a little bothered, a little hurt, but now and
  then by a word or a phrase giving one of these glimpses of his very
  own self that were never any good for purposes of orientation. It's
  difficult to believe he will never come. I shall never hear his voice
  again, nor shall I see his smooth tan-and-pink face with a white line
  on the forehead, and the youthful eyes darkened by excitement to a
  profound, unfathomable blue.'
  
  
feat_summary_name: Chapter 36
target: Two years later, one of the people who listened to Marlow's epic story on the verandah gets some snail mail. It's a package of letters from Marlow. In one of the letters, Marlow explains that the enclosed documents do what they can to piece together the last part of Jim's story. We're all ears.