and I could
tell you instances.... However, this is not the place, nor the time, and we are
concerned with Jim - who was unmarried. If his imaginative conscience or his
pride; if all the extravagant ghosts and austere shades that were the disastrous
familiars of his youth would not let him run away from the block, I, who of
course can't be suspected of such familiars, was irresistibly impelled to go and
see his head roll off. I wended my way towards the court. I didn't hope to be
very much impressed or edified, or interested or even frightened - though, as
long as there is any life before one, a jolly good fright now and then is a
salutary discipline. But neither did I expect to be so awfully depressed. The
bitterness of his punishment was in its chill and mean atmosphere. The real
significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of
mankind, and from that point of view he was no mean traitor, but his execution
was a hole-and-corner affair. There was no high scaffolding, no scarlet cloth
(did they have scarlet cloth on Tower Hill? They should have had), no
awe-stricken multitude to be horrified at his guilt and be moved to tears at his
fate - no air of sombre retribution. There was, as I walked along, the clear
sunshine, a brilliance too passionate to be consoling, the streets full of
jumbled bits of colour like a damaged kaleidoscope: yellow, green, blue,
dazzling white, the brown nudity of an undraped shoulder, a bullock-cart with a
red canopy, a company of native infantry in a drab body with dark heads marching
in dusty laced boots, a native policeman in a sombre uniform of scanty cut and
belted in patent leather, who looked up at me with orientally pitiful eyes as
though his migrating spirit were suffering exceedingly from that unforeseen -
what d'ye call 'em? - avatar - incarnation. Under the shade of a lonely tree in
the courtyard, the villagers connected with the assault case sat in a
picturesque group, looking like a chromolithograph of a camp in a book of
Eastern travel. One missed the obligatory thread of smoke in the foreground and
the pack-animals grazing. A blank yellow wall rose behind overtopping the tree,
reflecting the glare. The court-room was sombre, seemed more vast. High up in
the dim space the punkahs were swaying short to and fro, to and fro. Here and
there a draped figure, dwarfed by the bare walls