feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Lord Jim/section_35_part_0.txt
feat_book_id: Lord Jim.chapters 36-37
feat_summary_id: chapters 36-37
feat_summary: {"name": "Chapters 36-37", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820051943/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmLordJim45.asp", "summary": "Up until the last chapter, Marlow has been telling the story of Jim to his friends, who had assembled after dinner on the verandah of the hotel. All of the men leave when Marlow completes his narrative with his departure from Patusan; only one of the listeners is ever to know the final story of Jim -- to learn what happened to the man who had accepted great responsibility on a foreign and mysterious island. Two years later the man received a packet from Marlow with four enclosures. One was a sheet of grayish \"foolscap\" in Jim's handwriting; it was apparently his attempt to write back to England. The second was a letter that Jim had received from his father. The third and fourth are documents written by Marlow. The first was a letter to the recipient and the other was Marlow's account of Jim's last days and his death. Marlow's letter to the recipient reminds him of the doubts he had about Jim. He then tells of Jim's building a system of defense for the natives in Patusan shortly after Marlow's departure. He dug a trench around an area of land and then fenced it. He next placed cannons at the corners. Jim called the enclosed area \"The Fort, Patusan,\" and it was known as a place where the natives could come for safety in times of danger. In the letter from Jim's father, which he received just before he boarded the Patna, there is a description about what each person in the family is doing. Since Jim's father was a pastor, the letter also gives advice about faith and goodness and cautions Jim not to be tempted. He warns his son not \"to do anything which you believe to be wrong.\" There is also an unfinished letter from Jim which said \"The Fort, Patusan\" and \"I must now at once.\" The letter is so abrupt that Marlow cannot make out what it means. Marlow's document that describes Jim's last days is based upon several stories that Marlow has heard about his friend. As Marlow describes what happened on Patusan, there is a sadness to his tone. He cannot believe that he will never again see Jim's face or hear his voice. Jim's tragic demise is largely due to Gentleman Brown, an immoral and dangerous Australian. Marlow called on him in Bangkok, as he lay dying from asthma. He bragged to Marlow about putting an end to Lord Jim. Ironically, Brown dies the same night he tells the story of Jim's death. Over a year after parting from Jim in Patusan and before visiting Brown, Marlow visited Batavia and called on Stein, who was still depressed over the news of Jim's death under very tragic circumstances. At the time Jim's wife, Jewel and servant Tamb'Itam were living in Stein's house, so Marlow learned more about Jim from them. Tamb'Itam keeps emphasizing the fact that Jim refused to fight, but supplies no details. Marlow first sees Jewel in the reception room. As always, she is dressed in white, but the clothing cannot cover her obvious despair over the loss of her husband. She feels betrayed by him, for he did \"leave\" her even though he had promised not to go from Patusan. She also feels angry with Jim for not saving himself. Stein wants Marlow to convince her to forgive Jim.", "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.'
  
  'It all begins with a remarkable exploit of a man called Brown, who
  stole with complete success a Spanish schooner out of a small bay near
  Zamboanga. Till I discovered the fellow my information was incomplete,
  but most unexpectedly I did come upon him a few hours before he gave up
  his arrogant ghost. Fortunately he was willing and able to talk between
  the choking fits of asthma, and his racked body writhed with malicious
  exultation at the bare thought of Jim. He exulted thus at the idea that
  he had "paid out the stuck-up beggar after all." He gloated over his
  action. I had to bear the sunken glare of his fierce crow-footed eyes if
  I wanted to know; and so I bore it, reflecting how much certain forms
  of evil are akin to madness, derived from intense egoism, inflamed by
  resistance, tearing the soul to pieces, and giving factitious vigour to
  the body. The story also reveals unsuspected depths of cunning in the
  wretched Cornelius, whose abject and intense hate acts like a subtle
  inspiration, pointing out an unerring way towards revenge.
  
  '"I could see directly I set my eyes on him what sort of a fool he was,"
  gasped the dying Brown. "He a man! Hell! He was a hollow sham. As if he
  couldn't have said straight out, 'Hands off my plunder!' blast him! That
  would have been like a man! Rot his superior soul! He had me there--but
  he hadn't devil enough in him to make an end of me. Not he! A thing like
  that letting me off as if I wasn't worth a kick! . . ." Brown struggled
  desperately for breath. . . . "Fraud. . . . Letting me off. . . . And
  so I did make an end of him after all. . . ." He choked again. . . . "I
  expect this thing'll kill me, but I shall die easy now. You . . . you
  here . . . I don't know your name--I would give you a five-pound note
  if--if I had it--for the news--or my name's not Brown. . . ." He grinned
  horribly. . . . "Gentleman Brown."
  
  'He said all these things in profound gasps, staring at me with his
  yellow eyes out of a long, ravaged, brown face; he jerked his left arm;
  a pepper-and-salt matted beard hung almost into his lap; a dirty ragged
  blanket covered his legs. I had found him out in Bankok through that
  busybody Schomberg, the hotel-keeper, who had, confidentially, directed
  me where to look. It appears that a sort of loafing, fuddled vagabond--a
  white man living amongst the natives with a Siamese woman--had
  considered it a great privilege to give a shelter to the last days of
  the famous Gentleman Brown. While he was talking to me in the wretched
  hovel, and, as it were, fighting for every minute of his life, the
  Siamese woman, with big bare legs and a stupid coarse face, sat in a
  dark corner chewing betel stolidly. Now and then she would get up for
  the purpose of shooing a chicken away from the door. The whole hut shook
  when she walked. An ugly yellow child, naked and pot-bellied like a
  little heathen god, stood at the foot of the couch, finger in mouth,
  lost in a profound and calm contemplation of the dying man.
  
  'He talked feverishly; but in the middle of a word, perhaps, an
  invisible hand would take him by the throat, and he would look at me
  dumbly with an expression of doubt and anguish. He seemed to fear that
  I would get tired of waiting and go away, leaving him with his tale
  untold, with his exultation unexpressed. He died during the night, I
  believe, but by that time I had nothing more to learn.
  
  'So much as to Brown, for the present.
  
  'Eight months before this, coming into Samarang, I went as usual to see
  Stein. On the garden side of the house a Malay on the verandah greeted
  me shyly, and I remembered that I had seen him in Patusan, in Jim's
  house, amongst other Bugis men who used to come in the evening to talk
  interminably over their war reminiscences and to discuss State affairs.
  Jim had pointed him out to me once as a respectable petty trader owning
  a small seagoing native craft, who had showed himself "one of the best
  at the taking of the stockade." I was not very surprised to see him,
  since any Patusan trader venturing as far as Samarang would naturally
  find his way to Stein's house. I returned his greeting and passed on. At
  the door of Stein's room I came upon another Malay in whom I recognised
  Tamb' Itam.
  
  'I asked him at once what he was doing there; it occurred to me that
  Jim might have come on a visit. I own I was pleased and excited at the
  thought. Tamb' Itam looked as if he did not know what to say. "Is Tuan
  Jim inside?" I asked impatiently. "No," he mumbled, hanging his head
  for a moment, and then with sudden earnestness, "He would not fight. He
  would not fight," he repeated twice. As he seemed unable to say anything
  else, I pushed him aside and went in.
  
  'Stein, tall and stooping, stood alone in the middle of the room between
  the rows of butterfly cases. "Ach! is it you, my friend?" he said
  sadly, peering through his glasses. A drab sack-coat of alpaca hung,
  unbuttoned, down to his knees. He had a Panama hat on his head, and
  there were deep furrows on his pale cheeks. "What's the matter now?"
  I asked nervously. "There's Tamb' Itam there. . . ." "Come and see the
  girl. Come and see the girl. She is here," he said, with a half-hearted
  show of activity. I tried to detain him, but with gentle obstinacy he
  would take no notice of my eager questions. "She is here, she is here,"
  he repeated, in great perturbation. "They came here two days ago. An old
  man like me, a stranger--sehen Sie--cannot do much. . . . Come this way.
  . . . Young hearts are unforgiving. . . ." I could see he was in utmost
  distress. . . . "The strength of life in them, the cruel strength of
  life. . . ." He mumbled, leading me round the house; I followed him,
  lost in dismal and angry conjectures. At the door of the drawing-room he
  barred my way. "He loved her very much," he said interrogatively, and
  I only nodded, feeling so bitterly disappointed that I would not trust
  myself to speak. "Very frightful," he murmured. "She can't understand
  me. I am only a strange old man. Perhaps you . . . she knows you. Talk
  to her. We can't leave it like this. Tell her to forgive him. It was
  very frightful." "No doubt," I said, exasperated at being in the dark;
  "but have you forgiven him?" He looked at me queerly. "You shall hear,"
  he said, and opening the door, absolutely pushed me in.
  
  'You know Stein's big house and the two immense reception-rooms,
  uninhabited and uninhabitable, clean, full of solitude and of shining
  things that look as if never beheld by the eye of man? They are cool
  on the hottest days, and you enter them as you would a scrubbed cave
  underground. I passed through one, and in the other I saw the girl
  sitting at the end of a big mahogany table, on which she rested her
  head, the face hidden in her arms. The waxed floor reflected her dimly
  as though it had been a sheet of frozen water. The rattan screens were
  down, and through the strange greenish gloom made by the foliage of the
  trees outside a strong wind blew in gusts, swaying the long draperies
  of windows and doorways. Her white figure seemed shaped in snow; the
  pendent crystals of a great chandelier clicked above her head like
  glittering icicles. She looked up and watched my approach. I was chilled
  as if these vast apartments had been the cold abode of despair.
  
  'She recognised me at once, and as soon as I had stopped, looking down
  at her: "He has left me," she said quietly; "you always leave us--for
  your own ends." Her face was set. All the heat of life seemed withdrawn
  within some inaccessible spot in her breast. "It would have been easy to
  die with him," she went on, and made a slight weary gesture as if giving
  up the incomprehensible. "He would not! It was like a blindness--and yet
  it was I who was speaking to him; it was I who stood before his eyes;
  it was at me that he looked all the time! Ah! you are hard, treacherous,
  without truth, without compassion. What makes you so wicked? Or is it
  that you are all mad?"
  
  'I took her hand; it did not respond, and when I dropped it, it hung
  down to the floor. That indifference, more awful than tears, cries, and
  reproaches, seemed to defy time and consolation. You felt that nothing
  you could say would reach the seat of the still and benumbing pain.
  
  'Stein had said, "You shall hear." I did hear. I heard it all, listening
  with amazement, with awe, to the tones of her inflexible weariness.
  She could not grasp the real sense of what she was telling me, and her
  resentment filled me with pity for her--for him too. I stood rooted to
  the spot after she had finished. Leaning on her arm, she stared with
  hard eyes, and the wind passed in gusts, the crystals kept on clicking
  in the greenish gloom. She went on whispering to herself: "And yet he
  was looking at me! He could see my face, hear my voice, hear my grief!
  When I used to sit at his feet, with my cheek against his knee and his
  hand on my head, the curse of cruelty and madness was already within
  him, waiting for the day. The day came! . . . and before the sun had
  set he could not see me any more--he was made blind and deaf and without
  pity, as you all are. He shall have no tears from me. Never, never. Not
  one tear. I will not! He went away from me as if I had been worse than
  death. He fled as if driven by some accursed thing he had heard or seen
  in his sleep. . . ."
  
  'Her steady eyes seemed to strain after the shape of a man torn out of
  her arms by the strength of a dream. She made no sign to my silent bow.
  I was glad to escape.
  
  'I saw her once again, the same afternoon. On leaving her I had gone
  in search of Stein, whom I could not find indoors; and I wandered out,
  pursued by distressful thoughts, into the gardens, those famous gardens
  of Stein, in which you can find every plant and tree of tropical
  lowlands. I followed the course of the canalised stream, and sat for
  a long time on a shaded bench near the ornamental pond, where some
  waterfowl with clipped wings were diving and splashing noisily. The
  branches of casuarina trees behind me swayed lightly, incessantly,
  reminding me of the soughing of fir trees at home.
  
  'This mournful and restless sound was a fit accompaniment to my
  meditations. She had said he had been driven away from her by a
  dream,--and there was no answer one could make her--there seemed to be
  no forgiveness for such a transgression. And yet is not mankind itself,
  pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and
  its power upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and of excessive
  devotion? And what is the pursuit of truth, after all?
  
  'When I rose to get back to the house I caught sight of Stein's drab
  coat through a gap in the foliage, and very soon at a turn of the path
  I came upon him walking with the girl. Her little hand rested on his
  forearm, and under the broad, flat rim of his Panama hat he bent over
  her, grey-haired, paternal, with compassionate and chivalrous deference.
  I stood aside, but they stopped, facing me. His gaze was bent on the
  ground at his feet; the girl, erect and slight on his arm, stared
  sombrely beyond my shoulder with black, clear, motionless eyes.
  "Schrecklich," he murmured. "Terrible! Terrible! What can one do?" He
  seemed to be appealing to me, but her youth, the length of the days
  suspended over her head, appealed to me more; and suddenly, even as I
  realised that nothing could be said, I found myself pleading his cause
  for her sake. "You must forgive him," I concluded, and my own voice
  seemed to me muffled, lost in un irresponsive deaf immensity. "We all
  want to be forgiven," I added after a while.
  
  '"What have I done?" she asked with her lips only.
  
  '"You always mistrusted him," I said.
  
  '"He was like the others," she pronounced slowly.
  
  '"Not like the others," I protested, but she continued evenly, without
  any feeling--
  
  '"He was false." And suddenly Stein broke in. "No! no! no! My poor
  child! . . ." He patted her hand lying passively on his sleeve. "No! no!
  Not false! True! True! True!" He tried to look into her stony face. "You
  don't understand. Ach! Why you do not understand? . . . Terrible," he
  said to me. "Some day she _shall_ understand."
  
  '"Will you explain?" I asked, looking hard at him. They moved on.
  
  'I watched them. Her gown trailed on the path, her black hair fell
  loose. She walked upright and light by the side of the tall man, whose
  long shapeless coat hung in perpendicular folds from the stooping
  shoulders, whose feet moved slowly. They disappeared beyond that
  spinney (you may remember) where sixteen different kinds of bamboo grow
  together, all distinguishable to the learned eye. For my part, I was
  fascinated by the exquisite grace and beauty of that fluted grove,
  crowned with pointed leaves and feathery heads, the lightness, the
  vigour, the charm as distinct as a voice of that unperplexed luxuriating
  life. I remember staying to look at it for a long time, as one would
  linger within reach of a consoling whisper. The sky was pearly grey. It
  was one of those overcast days so rare in the tropics, in which memories
  crowd upon one, memories of other shores, of other faces.
  
  'I drove back to town the same afternoon, taking with me Tamb' Itam
  and the other Malay, in whose seagoing craft they had escaped in the
  bewilderment, fear, and gloom of the disaster. The shock of it seemed to
  have changed their natures. It had turned her passion into stone, and
  it made the surly taciturn Tamb' Itam almost loquacious. His surliness,
  too, was subdued into puzzled humility, as though he had seen the
  failure of a potent charm in a supreme moment. The Bugis trader, a shy
  hesitating man, was very clear in the little he had to say. Both were
  evidently over-awed by a sense of deep inexpressible wonder, by the
  touch of an inscrutable mystery.'
  
  There with Marlow's signature the letter proper ended. The privileged
  reader screwed up his lamp, and solitary above the billowy roofs of the
  town, like a lighthouse-keeper above the sea, he turned to the pages of
  the story.
  
feat_summary_name: Chapters 36-37
target: Up until the last chapter, Marlow has been telling the story of Jim to his friends, who had assembled after dinner on the verandah of the hotel. All of the men leave when Marlow completes his narrative with his departure from Patusan; only one of the listeners is ever to know the final story of Jim -- to learn what happened to the man who had accepted great responsibility on a foreign and mysterious island. Two years later the man received a packet from Marlow with four enclosures. One was a sheet of grayish "foolscap" in Jim's handwriting; it was apparently his attempt to write back to England. The second was a letter that Jim had received from his father. The third and fourth are documents written by Marlow. The first was a letter to the recipient and the other was Marlow's account of Jim's last days and his death. Marlow's letter to the recipient reminds him of the doubts he had about Jim. He then tells of Jim's building a system of defense for the natives in Patusan shortly after Marlow's departure. He dug a trench around an area of land and then fenced it. He next placed cannons at the corners. Jim called the enclosed area "The Fort, Patusan," and it was known as a place where the natives could come for safety in times of danger. In the letter from Jim's father, which he received just before he boarded the Patna, there is a description about what each person in the family is doing. Since Jim's father was a pastor, the letter also gives advice about faith and goodness and cautions Jim not to be tempted. He warns his son not "to do anything which you believe to be wrong." There is also an unfinished letter from Jim which said "The Fort, Patusan" and "I must now at once." The letter is so abrupt that Marlow cannot make out what it means. Marlow's document that describes Jim's last days is based upon several stories that Marlow has heard about his friend. As Marlow describes what happened on Patusan, there is a sadness to his tone. He cannot believe that he will never again see Jim's face or hear his voice. Jim's tragic demise is largely due to Gentleman Brown, an immoral and dangerous Australian. Marlow called on him in Bangkok, as he lay dying from asthma. He bragged to Marlow about putting an end to Lord Jim. Ironically, Brown dies the same night he tells the story of Jim's death. Over a year after parting from Jim in Patusan and before visiting Brown, Marlow visited Batavia and called on Stein, who was still depressed over the news of Jim's death under very tragic circumstances. At the time Jim's wife, Jewel and servant Tamb'Itam were living in Stein's house, so Marlow learned more about Jim from them. Tamb'Itam keeps emphasizing the fact that Jim refused to fight, but supplies no details. Marlow first sees Jewel in the reception room. As always, she is dressed in white, but the clothing cannot cover her obvious despair over the loss of her husband. She feels betrayed by him, for he did "leave" her even though he had promised not to go from Patusan. She also feels angry with Jim for not saving himself. Stein wants Marlow to convince her to forgive Jim.