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 can'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