what do you deserve,’ I shouted at him, ’you that I find skulking here with your mouth full of your responsibility, of innocent lives, of your infernal duty?  What do you know more of me than I know of you?  I came here for food.  D’ye hear?—­food to fill our bellies.  And what did you come for?  What did you ask for when you came here?  We don’t ask you for anything but to give us a fight or a clear road to go back whence we came. . . .’  ’I would fight with you now,’ says he, pulling at his little moustache.  ‘And I would let you shoot me, and welcome,’ I said.  ’This is as good a jumping-off place for me as another.  I am sick of my infernal luck.  But it would be too easy.  There are my men in the same boat—­and, by God, I am not the sort to jump out of trouble and leave them in a d—­d lurch,’ I said.  He stood thinking for a while and then wanted to know what I had done (’out there’ he says, tossing his head down-stream) to be hazed about so.  ‘Have we met to tell each other the story of our lives?’ I asked him.  ’Suppose you begin.  No?  Well, I am sure I don’t want to hear.  Keep it to yourself.  I know it is no better than mine.  I’ve lived—­and so did you, though you talk as if you were one of those people that should have wings so as to go about without touching the dirty earth.  Well—­it is dirty.  I haven’t got any wings.  I am here because I was afraid once in my life.  Want to know what of?  Of a prison.  That scares me, and you may know it—­if it’s any good to you.  I won’t ask you what scared you into this infernal hole, where you seem to have found pretty pickings.  That’s your luck and this is mine—­the privilege to beg for the favour of being shot quickly, or else kicked out to go free and starve in my own way.’ . . .”

’His debilitated body shook with an exultation so vehement, so assured, and so malicious that it seemed to have driven off the death waiting for him in that hut.  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.  He had overcome them all—­men, women, savages, traders, ruffians, missionaries—­and Jim—­“that beefy-faced beggar.”  I did not begrudge him this triumph in articulo mortis, this almost posthumous illusion of having trampled all the earth under his feet.  While he was boasting to me, in his sordid and repulsive agony, I couldn’t help thinking of the chuckling talk relating to the time of his greatest splendour when, during a year or more, Gentleman Brown’s ship was to be seen, for many days on end, hovering off an islet befringed with green upon