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in pockets, and turning his back upon the sidewalk, gazed across the
grass-plots of the Esplanade at the yellow portico of the Malabar Hotel
with the air of a man about to go for a walk as soon as his friend is
ready. 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;
it is from weakness unknown, but perhaps suspected, as in some parts of
the world you suspect a deadly snake in every bush--from weakness
that may lie hidden, watched or unwatched, prayed against or manfully
scorned, repressed or maybe ignored more than half a lifetime, not one
of us is safe. We are snared into doing things for which we get called
names, and things for which we get hanged, and yet the spirit may well
survive--survive the condemnation, survive the halter, by Jove! And
there are things--they look small enough sometimes too--by which some of
us are totally and completely undone. I watched the youngster there.
I liked his appearance; I knew his appearance; he came from the right
place; he was one of us. He stood there for all the parentage of his
kind, for men and women by no means clever or amusing, but whose very
existence is based upon honest faith, and upon the instinct of courage.
I don't mean military courage, or civil courage, or any special kind of
courage. I mean just that inborn ability to look temptations straight in
the face--a readiness unintellectual enough, goodness knows, but without
pose--a power of resistance, don't you see, ungracious 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 back-door 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; only he was outwardly so
typical of that good, stupid kind we like to feel marching right and
left of us in life, of the kind that is not disturbed by the vagaries of
intelligence and the perversions of--of nerves, let us say. He was the
kind of fellow you would, on the strength of his looks, leave in charge
of the deck--figuratively and professionally speaking. I say I would,
and I ought to know. Haven't I turned out youngsters enough in my time,
for the service of the Red Rag, to the craft of the sea, to the craft
whose whole secret could be expressed in one short sentence, and yet
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