Lord Jim quotes

and, perhaps, my Jim is not a type of wide commonness. But I can safely assure my readers that he is not the product of coldly perverted thinking. He’s not a figure of Northern Mists either.

One sunny morning, in the commonplace surroundings of an Eastern roadstead, I saw his form pass by⁠—appealing⁠—significant⁠—under a cloud⁠—perfectly silent.

Which is as it should be. It was for me, with all the sympathy of which I was capable, to seek fit words for his meaning. He was “one of us.”

He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.

His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a kind of dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It seemed a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at himself as at anybody else.

Therefore good water-clerks are scarce. When a water-clerk who possesses Ability in the abstract has also the advantage of having been brought up to the sea, he is worth to his employer a lot of money and some humouring.

Jim had always good wages and as much humouring as would have bought the fidelity of a fiend.

Nevertheless, with black ingratitude he would throw up the job suddenly and depart. To his employers the reasons he gave were obviously inadequate. They said “Confounded fool!” as soon as his back was turned. This was their criticism on his exquisite sensibility.

To the white men in the waterside business and to the captains of ships he was just Jim—nothing more. He had, of course, another name, but he was anxious that it should not be pronounced.

His incognito, which had as many holes as a sieve, was not meant to hide a personality but a fact.

When the fact broke through the incognito he would leave suddenly the seaport where he happened to be at the time and go to another—generally farther east.

He kept to seaports because he was a seaman in exile from the sea, and had Ability in the abstract, which is good for no other work but that of a water-clerk.

He retreated in good order towards the rising sun, and the fact followed him casually but inevitably.

Thus in the course of years he was known successively in Bombay, in Calcutta, in Rangoon, in Penang, in Batavia—and in each of these halting-places was just Jim the water-clerk.

He did not care what the end would be, and in his lucid moments overvalued his indifference. The danger, when not seen, has the imperfect vagueness of human thought.

The fear grows shadowy; and Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors, unstimulated, sinks to rest in the dullness of exhausted emotion.

Jim saw nothing but the disorder of his tossed cabin. He lay there battened down in the midst of a small devastation, and felt secretly glad he had not to go on deck.

and the ship, lonely under a wisp of smoke, held on her steadfast way black and smouldering in a luminous immensity, as if scorched by a flame flicked at her from a heaven without pity.

The nights descended on her like a benediction.

The light of a broad window under the ceiling fell from above on the heads and shoulders of the three men, and they were fiercely distinct in the half-light of the big courtroom where the audience seemed composed of staring shadows. They wanted facts.

Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!

“After you had concluded you had collided with something floating awash, say a waterlogged wreck, you were ordered by your captain to go forward and ascertain if there was any damage done. Did you think it likely from the force of the blow?”

“Oh yes. I attended the inquiry,” he would say, “and to this day I haven’t left off wondering why I went.

I am willing to believe each of us has a guardian angel, if you fellows will concede to me that each of us has a familiar devil as well.

I want you to own up, because I don’t like to feel exceptional in any way, and I know I have him—the devil, I mean. I haven’t seen him, of course, but I go upon circumstantial evidence.

That’s how he looked, and it was odious. I waited to see him overwhelmed, confounded, pierced through and through, squirming like an impaled beetle—and I was half afraid to see it too—if you understand what I mean.

Nothing more awful than to watch a man who has been found out, not in a crime but in a more than criminal weakness.

The commonest sort of fortitude prevents us from becoming criminals in a legal sense;

… if you like, but priceless—an unthinking and blessed stiffness before the outward and inward terrors, before the might of nature and the seductive corruption of men—backed by a faith invulnerable to the strength of facts, to the contagion of example, to the solicitation of ideas.

Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the backdoor of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!

“This has nothing to do with Jim, directly;

I would have trusted the deck to that youngster on the strength of a single glance, and gone to sleep with both eyes—and, by Jove! it wouldn’t have been safe. There are depths of horror in that thought.

He looked as genuine as a new sovereign, but there was some infernal alloy in his metal.

How much? The least thing—the least drop of something rare and accursed; the least drop!—but he made you—standing there with his don’t-care-hang air—he made you wonder whether perchance he were nothing more rare than brass.

“The young chap could have told them, and, though that very thing was the thing that interested the audience, the questions put to him necessarily led him away from what to me, for instance, would have been the only truth worth knowing.

You can’t expect the constituted authorities to inquire into the state of a man’s soul⁠—or is it only of his liver?

Their business was to come down upon the consequences, and frankly, a casual police magistrate and two nautical assessors are not much good for anything else. I don’t mean to imply these fellows were stupid. The magistrate was very patient.

I have never defined to myself this attraction, but there were moments when I envied him.

The sting of life could do no more to his complacent soul than the scratch of a pin to the smooth face of a rock.

This was enviable. As I looked at him, flanking on one side the unassuming pale-faced magistrate who presided at the inquiry, his self-satisfaction presented to me and to the world a surface as hard as granite. He committed suicide very soon after.

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.

’

I kept up, and anxious not to lose him, I said hurriedly that I couldn’t think of leaving him under a false impression of my—of my—I stammered.

The stupidity of the phrase appalled me while I was trying to finish it, but the power of sentences has nothing to do with their sense or the logic of their construction.

My idiotic mumble seemed to please him. He cut it short by saying, with courteous placidity that argued an immense power of self-control or else a wonderful elasticity of spirits—‘Altogether my mistake.’ I marvelled greatly at this expression:

I gave no sign of dissent. I had no intention, for the sake of barren truth, to rob him of the smallest particle of any saving grace that would come in his way. I didn’t know how much of it he believed himself.

I didn’t know what he was playing up to⁠—if he was playing up to anything at all⁠—and I suspect he did not know either; for it is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.

I made no sound all the time he was wondering what he had better do after ‘that stupid inquiry was over.’

Next man—that’s it. I have met so many men,” he pursued, with momentary sadness—“met them too with a certain—certain—impact, let us say; like this fellow, for instance—and in each case all I could see was merely the human being.

A confounded democratic quality of vision which may be better than total blindness, but has been of no advantage to me, I can assure you.

Men expect one to take into account their fine linen. But I never could get up any enthusiasm about these things. Oh! it’s a failing; it’s a failing; and then comes a soft evening; a lot of men too indolent for whist—and a story. …”

“Who? I?” said Marlow in a low voice. “Oh no! But he was; and try as I may for the success of this yarn, I am missing innumerable shades—they were so fine, so difficult to render in colourless words.

Because he complicated matters by being so simple, too⁠—the simplest poor devil!

… By Jove! he was amazing. There he sat telling me that just as I saw him before my eyes he wouldn’t be afraid to face anything—and believing in it too. I tell you it was fabulously innocent and it was enormous, enormous!

They were exasperated with him for being a halfhearted shirker: he focused on them his hatred of the whole thing; he would have liked to take a signal revenge for the abhorrent opportunity they had put in his way.

Trust a boat on the high seas to bring out the Irrational that lurks at the bottom of every thought, sentiment, sensation, emotion.

It was part of the burlesque meanness pervading that particular disaster at sea that they did not come to blows.

“I was struck by the suggestive truth of his words.

There is something peculiar in a small boat upon the wide sea. Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.

When your ship fails you, your whole world seems to fail you; the world that made you, restrained you, took care of you.

I saw his chin sunk on his breast, the clumsy folds of his coat, his clasped hands, his motionless pose, so curiously suggestive of his having been simply left there.

Time had passed indeed: it had overtaken him and gone ahead.

It had left him hopelessly behind with a few poor gifts: the iron-grey hair, the heavy fatigue of the tanned face, two scars, a pair of tarnished shoulder-straps;

how the time passes!’ Nothing could have been more commonplace than this remark; but its utterance coincided for me with a moment of vision.

It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts.

Perhaps it’s just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.

I sat silent, and he too, as if nothing could please him better. Even his thumbs were still now. Suddenly his lips began to move. ‘That is so,’ he resumed placidly. ‘

Man is born a coward (L’homme est né poltron).

It is a difficulty—parbleu! It would be too easy otherwise. But habit—habit—necessity—do you see?—the eye of others—voilà. One puts up with it. And then the example of others who are no better than yourself, and yet make good countenance. …’

His right hand went up, and he swayed forward. ‘Allow me … I contended that one may get on knowing very well that one’s courage does not come of itself (ne vient pas tout seul). There’s nothing much in that to get upset about.

One truth the more ought not to make life impossible.

… But the honour—the honour, monsieur! … The honour … that is real—that is!

“I had risen too, and, trying to throw infinite politeness into our attitudes, we faced each other mutely, like two china dogs on a mantelpiece. Hang the fellow! he had pricked the bubble.

The blight of futility that lies in wait for men’s speeches had fallen upon our conversation, and made it a thing of empty sounds.

‘Very well,’ I said, with a disconcerted smile; ‘but couldn’t it reduce itself to not being found out?’ He made as if to retort readily, but when he spoke he had changed his mind.

I kept my eye on his shabby plodding with a sort of notion that it was a punishment for the heroics of his fancy—an expiation for his craving after more glamour than he could carry.

He had loved too well to imagine himself a glorious racehorse, and now he was condemned to toil without honour like a costermonger’s donkey.

He did it very well. He shut himself in, put his head down, said never a word. Very well; very well indeed—except for certain fantastic and violent outbreaks, on the deplorable occasions when the irrepressible Patna case cropped up.

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 awestricken multitude to be horrified at his guilt and be moved to tears at his fate—no air of sombre retribution.

I had a sense of responsibility. If I spoke, would that motionless and suffering youth leap into the obscurity—clutch at the straw? I found out how difficult it may be sometimes to make a sound.

There is a weird power in a spoken word.

And why the devil not? I was asking myself persistently while I drove on with my writing.

Not a vestige of the Argonauts ever turned up; not a sound came out of the waste. Finis!

The Pacific is the most discreet of live, hot-tempered oceans: the chilly Antarctic can keep a secret too, but more in the manner of a grave.

“And there is a sense of blessed finality in such discretion, which is what we all more or less sincerely are ready to admit—for what else is it that makes the idea of death supportable? End! Finis!

still, the idea obtrudes itself that he made so much of his disgrace while it is the guilt alone that matters. He was not—if I may say so—clear to me.

He was not clear. And there is a suspicion he was not clear to himself either.

There were his fine sensibilities, his fine feelings, his fine longings—a sort of sublimated, idealised selfishness. He was—if you allow me to say so—very fine; very fine—and very unfortunate. A little coarser nature would not have borne the strain;

I at least had no illusions; but it was I, too, who a moment ago had been so sure of the power of words, and now was afraid to speak, in the same way one dares not move for fear of losing a slippery hold.

It is when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.

It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence;

It is when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.

It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence; the envelope of flesh and blood on which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand, and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable, and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp.

It was the fear of losing him that kept me silent, for it was borne upon me suddenly and with unaccountable force that should I let him slip away into the darkness I would never forgive myself.

I smiled to think that, after all, it was yet he, of us two, who had the light. And I felt sad. A clean slate, did he say?

As if the initial word of each our destiny were not graven in imperishable characters upon the face of a rock.

”

“But as to me, left alone with the solitary candle, I remained strangely unenlightened.

I was no longer young enough to behold at every turn the magnificence that besets our insignificant footsteps in good and in evil.

I smiled to think that, after all, it was yet he, of us two, who had the light. And I felt sad. A clean slate, did he say?

There were many others of the sort, more than I could count on the fingers of my two hands. They were all equally tinged by a high-minded absurdity of intention which made their futility profound and touching.

To fling away your daily bread so as to get your hands free for a grapple with a ghost may be an act of prosaic heroism.

Men had done it before (though we who have lived know full well that it is not the haunted soul but the hungry body that makes an outcast), and men who had eaten and meant to eat every day had applauded the creditable folly.

He was indeed unfortunate, for all his recklessness could not carry him out from under the shadow. There was always a doubt of his courage.

The truth seems to be that it is impossible to lay the ghost of a fact.

You can face it or shirk it—and I have come across a man or two who could wink at their familiar shades. Obviously Jim was not of the winking sort;

“ ‘Man is amazing, but he is not a masterpiece,’ he said, keeping his eyes fixed on the glass case. ‘

Perhaps the artist was a little mad.

Eh? What do you think? Sometimes it seems to me that man is come where he is not wanted, where there is no place for him; for if not, why should he want all the place?

“ ‘

Man is amazing, but he is not a masterpiece

,’ he said, keeping his eyes fixed on the glass case. ‘Perhaps the artist was a little mad. Eh? What do you think? Sometimes it seems to me that man is come where he is not wanted, where there is no place for him;

A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns—nicht wahr? … No! I tell you!

The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.

So if you ask me—how to be?’

“ ‘Yes! Very funny this terrible thing is.

A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea.

If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns—nicht wahr? … No! I tell you!

The light had destroyed the assurance which had inspired him in the distant shadows. He sat down and, with both elbows on the desk, rubbed his forehead. ‘And yet it is true—it is true.

In the destructive element immerse.

’ … He spoke in a subdued tone, without looking at me, one hand on each side of his face. ‘That was the way. To follow the dream, and again to follow the dream—and so—ewig—usque ad finem.

and indeed very few of us have the will or the capacity to look consciously under the surface of familiar emotions. There are the girls we love, the men we look up to, the tenderness, the friendships, the opportunities, the pleasures!

But the fact remains that you must touch your reward with clean hands, lest it turn to dead leaves, to thorns, in your grasp.

I think it is the lonely, without a fireside or an affection they may call their own, those who return not to a dwelling but to the land itself, to meet its disembodied, eternal, and unchangeable spirit—it is those who understand best its severity, its …

Yes! few of us understand, but we all feel it though, and I say all without exception, because those who do not feel do not count.

Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life.

I don’t know how much Jim understood; but I know he felt, he felt confusedly but powerfully, the demand of some such truth or some such illusion—I don’t care how you call it, there is so little difference, and the difference means so little.

I could not make such a mistake. I knew very well he was of those about whom there is no inquiry; I had seen better men go out, disappear, vanish utterly, without provoking a sound of curiosity or sorrow.

The spirit of the land, as becomes the ruler of great enterprises, is careless of innumerable lives.

Woe to the stragglers! We exist only in so far as we hang together. He had straggled in a way; he had not hung on;

I had seen better men go out, disappear, vanish utterly, without provoking a sound of curiosity or sorrow. The spirit of the land, as becomes the ruler of great enterprises, is careless of innumerable lives.

Woe to the stragglers! We exist only in so far as we hang together.

He had straggled in a way; he had not hung on; but he was aware of it with an intensity that made him touching, just as a man’s more intense life makes his death more touching than the death of a tree.

I only knew he was one of us. And what business had he to be romantic? I am telling you so much about my own instinctive feelings and bemused reflections because there remains so little to be told of him.

He existed for me, and after all it is only through me that he exists for you.

I’ve led him out by the hand; I have paraded him before you. Were my commonplace fears unjust? I won’t say—not even now. You may be able to tell better, since the proverb has it that the onlookers see most of the game.

And besides, the last word is not said—probably shall never be said.

Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention?

I have given up expecting those last words, whose ring, if they could only be pronounced, would shake both heaven and earth. There is never time to say our last word—the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submission, revolt.

its sheen descended, cold and pale, like the ghost of dead sunlight.

There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery.

It is to our sunshine, which—say what you like—is all we have to live by, what the echo is to the sound: misleading and confusing whether the note be mocking or sad.

A brooding gloom lay over this vast and monotonous landscape; the light fell on it as if into an abyss.

The land devoured the sunshine; only far off, along the coast, the empty ocean, smooth and polished within the faint haze, seemed to rise up to the sky in a wall of steel.

“And there I was with him, high in the sunshine on the top of that historic hill of his. He dominated the forest, the secular gloom, the old mankind.

There was something occult in all this, no doubt; for what is the strength of ropes and of men’s arms?

There is a rebellious soul in things which must be overcome by powerful charms and incantations.

Thus old Sura—a very respectable householder of Patusan—with whom I had a quiet chat one evening. However, Sura was a professional sorcerer also, who attended all the rice sowings and reapings for miles around for the purpose of subduing the stubborn souls of things.

I know, of course, he was in every sense alone of his kind there, but the unsuspected qualities of his nature had brought him in such close touch with his surroundings that this isolation seemed only the effect of his power.

His loneliness added to his stature.

There was nothing within sight to compare him with, as though he had been one of those exceptional men who can be only measured by the greatness of their fame; and his fame, remember, was the greatest thing around for many a day’s journey.

… our common fate fastens upon the women with a peculiar cruelty.

It does not punish like a master, but inflicts lingering torment, as if to gratify a secret, unappeasable spite.

One would think that, appointed to rule on earth, it seeks to revenge itself upon the beings that come nearest to rising above the trammels of earthly caution;

There is in his espousal of memory and affection belonging to another human being something characteristic of his seriousness.

He had a conscience, and it was a romantic conscience.

Through her whole life the wife of the unspeakable Cornelius had no other companion, confidante, and friend but her daughter.

… a third on more than one occasion, unpleasantly aware every time of Cornelius, who nursed the aggrieved sense of his legal paternity, slinking in the neighbourhood with that peculiar twist of his mouth as if he were perpetually on the point of gnashing his teeth.

But do you notice how, three hundred miles beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail-boat lines, the haggard utilitarian lies of our civilisation wither and die, to be replaced by pure exercises of imagination, that have the futility, often the charm, and sometimes the deep hidden truthfulness, of works of art?

Romance had singled Jim for its own—and that was the true part of the story, which otherwise was all wrong. He did not hide his jewel. In fact, he was extremely proud of it.

Her mother had taught her to read and write; she had learned a good bit of English from Jim, and she spoke it most amusingly, with his own clipping, boyish intonation.

Her tenderness hovered over him like a flutter of wings.

She lived so completely in his contemplation that she had acquired something of his outward aspect, something that recalled him in her movements, in the way she stretched her arm, turned her head, directed her glances.

A sign, a call! How telling in its expression was her ignorance. A few words! How she came to know them, how she came to pronounce them, I can’t imagine.

Women find their inspiration in the stress of moments that for us are merely awful, absurd, or futile.

To discover that she had a voice at all was enough to strike awe into the heart. Had a spurned stone cried out in pain it could not have appeared a greater and more pitiful miracle.

I would have given anything for the power to soothe her frail soul, tormenting itself in its invincible ignorance like a small bird beating about the cruel wires of a cage. Nothing easier than to say, Have no fear! Nothing more difficult.

How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?

It is an enterprise you rush into while you dream, and are glad to make your escape with wet hair and every limb shaking. The bullet is not run, the blade not forged, the man not born;

How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat? It is an enterprise you rush into while you dream, and are glad to make your escape with wet hair and every limb shaking.

The bullet is not run, the blade not forged, the man not born; even the winged words of truth drop at your feet like lumps of lead.

You require for such a desperate encounter an enchanted and poisoned shaft dipped in a lie too subtle to be found on earth. An enterprise for a dream, my masters!

In its noble struggles, too—who knows?

The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world. It is valiant enough to bear the burden, but where is the courage that would cast it off?

“I suppose I must have fallen into a sentimental mood;

“Quite right,” he began again. “Let no soul know, since the truth can be wrung out of us only by some cruel, little, awful catastrophe. But he is one of us, and he could say he was satisfied … nearly. Just fancy this!

Nearly satisfied. One could almost envy him his catastrophe.

Nearly satisfied. After this nothing could matter. It did not matter who suspected him, who trusted him, who loved him, who hated him—especially as it was Cornelius who hated him.

“Quite right,” he began again. “

Let no soul know, since the truth can be wrung out of us only by some cruel, little, awful catastrophe.

But he is one of us, and he could say he was satisfied … nearly. Just fancy this! Nearly satisfied. One could almost envy him his catastrophe. Nearly satisfied. After this nothing could matter.

Tamb’ Itam, surly and faithful; Cornelius, leaning his forehead against the fence under the moonlight—I am certain of them. They exist as if under an enchanter’s wand. But the figure round which all these are grouped—that one lives, and I am not certain of him.

No magician’s wand can immobilise him under my eyes. He is one of us.

“Jim, as I’ve told you, accompanied me on the first stage of my journey back to the world he had renounced, and the way at times seemed to lead through the very heart of untouched wilderness. The empty reaches sparkled under the high sun;

… river shutting off the houses of Patusan, all this dropped out of my sight bodily, with its colour, its design, and its meaning, like a picture created by fancy on a canvas, upon which, after long contemplation, you turn your back for the last time.

It remains in the memory motionless, unfaded, with its life arrested, in an unchanging light.

There are the ambitions, the fears, the hate, the hopes, and they remain in my mind just as I had seen them—intense and as if forever suspended in their expression.

What do you say? Was it still veiled? I don’t know. For me that white figure in the stillness of coast and sea seemed to stand at the heart of a vast enigma.

The twilight was ebbing fast from the sky above his head, the strip of sand had sunk already under his feet, he himself appeared no bigger than a child⁠—then only a speck, a tiny white speck, that seemed to catch all the light left in a darkened world.

… And, suddenly, I lost him. …”

“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?

The corpse of his mad self-love uprose from rags and destitution as from the dark horrors of a tomb. It is impossible to say how much he lied to Jim then, how much he lied to me now—and to himself always.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.

Standing at the gate of the other world in the guise of a beggar, he had slapped this world’s face, he had spat on it, he had thrown upon it an immensity of scorn and revolt at the bottom of his misdeeds.

Later on he said jokingly that she was the best man of them all. ‘If you and Dain Waris had done what you wanted, not one of these poor devils would be alive today.’ ‘Are they very bad?’ she asked, leaning over his chair.

‘Men act badly sometimes without being much worse than others,’ he said after some hesitation.

“Tamb’ Itam followed his master to the landing-stage outside the fort.

On her remonstrating against this on the score of his fatigue, he said that something might happen for which he would never forgive himself.

‘I am responsible for every life in the land,’ he said.

He was moody at first; she served him with her own hands, taking the plates and dishes (of the dinner-service presented him by Stein) from Tamb’ Itam. He brightened up after a while;