all there is to it. I was concerned as to the way he would go out. It would have hurt me if, for instance,
he had taken to drink. The earth is so small that I was afraid of, some day, being waylaid by a blear-
eyed, swollen-faced, besmirched loafer, with no soles to his canvas shoes, and with a flutter of rags
about the elbows, who, on the strength of old acquaintance, would ask for a loan of five dollars. You
know the awful jaunty bearing of these scarecrows coming to you from a decent past, the rasping careless
voice, the half-averted impudent glances--those meetings more trying to a man who believes in the solidarity
of our lives than the sight of an impenitent deathbed to a priest. That, to tell you the truth, was the only
danger I could see for him and for me; but I also mistrusted my want of imagination. It might even come
to something worse, in some way it was beyond my powers of fancy to foresee. He wouldn't let me
forget how imaginative he was, and your imaginative people swing farther in any direction, as if given
a longer scope of cable in the uneasy anchorage of life. They do. They take to drink, too. It may be
I was belittling him by such a fear. How could I tell? Even Stein could say no more than that he was
romantic. 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. At any rate, they were superfluous. He did not go out, not at all; on the contrary, he came on
wonderfully, came on straight as a die and in excellent form, which showed that he could stay as well
as spurt. I ought to be delighted, for it is a victory in which I had taken my part; but I am not so pleased
as I would have expected to be. I ask myself whether his rush had really carried him out of that mist
in which he loomed interesting if not very big, with floating outlines--a straggler yearning inconsolably
for his humble place in the ranks. 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. The heaven and the earth must not be
shaken, I suppose--at least, not by us who know so many truths about either. My last words about Jim
shall be few. I affirm he had achieved greatness; but the thing would be dwarfed in the telling, or rather
in the hearing. Frankly, it is not my words that I mistrust but your minds. I could be eloquent were I not
afraid you fellows had starved your imaginations to feed your bodies. I do not mean to be offensive; it is
respectable to have no illusions--and safe--and profitable--and dull. Yet you, too, in your time must have
known the intensity of life, that light of glamour created in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow of
sparks struck from a cold stone--and as short-lived, alas!'