Lord Jim E-book

                                      1900
                                    LORD JIM

                                by Joseph Conrad









Electronically Enhanced Text (c) Copyright 1996, World Library(R)



                             CHAPTER ONE
-
  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. He was spotlessly neat, apparelled in
immaculate white from shoes to hat, and in the various Eastern ports
where he got his living as ship-chandler's water-clerk he was very
popular.
  A water-clerk need not pass an examination in anything under the
sun, but he must have Ability in the abstract and demonstrate it
practically. His work consists in racing under sail, steam, or oars
against other water-clerks for any ship about to anchor, greeting
her captain cheerily, forcing upon him a card- the business card of
the ship-chandler- and on his first visit on shore piloting him firmly
but without ostentation to a vast, cavern-like shop which is full of
things that are eaten and drunk on board ship; where you can get
everything to make her seaworthy and beautiful, from a set of
chain-hooks for her cable to a book of gold-leaf for the carvings of
her stern; and where her commander is received like a brother by a
ship-chandler he has never seen before. There is a cool parlour,
easy-chairs, bottles, cigars, writing implements, a copy of harbour
regulations, and a warmth of welcome that melts the salt of a three
months' passage out of a seaman's heart. The connection thus begun
is kept up, as long as the ship remains in harbour, by the daily
visits of the water-clerk. To the captain he is faithful like a friend
and attentive like a son, with the patience of Job, the unselfish
devotion of a woman, and the jollity of a boon companion. Later on the
bill is sent in. It is a beautiful and humane occupation. 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 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. Afterwards, when his keen perception of the
Intolerable drove him away for good from seaports and white men,
even into the virgin forest, the Malays of the jungle village, where
he had elected to conceal his deplorable faculty, added a word to
the monosyllable of his incognito. They called him Tuan Jim: as one
might say- Lord Jim.
  Originally he came from a parsonage. Many commanders of fine
merchant-ships come from these abodes of piety and peace. Jim's father
possessed such certain knowledge of the Unknowable as made for the
righteousness of people in cottages without disturbing the ease of
mind of those whom an unerring Providence enables to live in mansions.
The little church on a hill had the mossy greyness of a rock seen
through a ragged screen of leaves. It had stood there for centuries,
but the trees around probably remembered the laying of the first
stone. Below, the red front of the rectory gleamed with a warm tint in
the midst of grass-plots, flower-beds, and fir-trees, with an
orchard at the back, a paved stable-yard to the left, and the
sloping glass of greenhouses tacked along a wall of bricks. The living
had belonged to the family for generations; but Jim was one of five
sons, and when after a course of light holiday literature his vocation
for the sea had declared itself, he was sent at once to a
"training-ship for officers of the mercantile marine."
  He learned there a little trigonometry and how to cross
top-gallant yards. He was generally liked. He had the third place in
navigation and pulled stroke in the first cutter. Having a steady head
with an excellent physique, he was very smart aloft. His station was
in the fore-top, and often from there he looked down, with the
contempt of a man destined to shine in the midst of dangers, at the
peaceful multitude of roofs cut in two by the brown tide of the
stream, while scattered on the outskirts of the surrounding plain
the factory chimneys rose perpendicular against a grimy sky, each
slender like a pencil, and belching out smoke like a volcano. He could
see the big ships departing, the broad-beamed ferries constantly on
the move, the little boats floating far below his feet, with the
hazy splendour of the sea in the distance, and the hope of a
stirring life in the world of adventure.
                                                  
  On the lower deck in the babel of two hundred voices he would forget
himself, and beforehand live in his mind the sea-life of light
literature. He saw himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting
away masts in a hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line; or
as a lonely castaway, barefooted and half naked, walking on
uncovered reefs in search of shell-fish to stave off starvation. He
confronted savages on tropical shores, quelled mutinies on the high
seas, and in a small boat upon the ocean kept up the hearts of
despairing men- always an example of devotion to duty, and as
unflinching as a hero in a book.
  "Something's up. Come along."
  He leaped to his feet. The boys were streaming up the ladders. Above
could be heard a great scurrying about and shouting, and when he got
through the hatchway he stood still- as if confounded.
  It was the dusk of a winter's day. The gale had freshened since
noon, stopping the traffic on the river and now blew with the strength
of a hurricane in fitful bursts that boomed like salvoes of great guns
firing over the ocean. The rain slanted in sheets that flicked and
subsided, and between whiles Jim had threatening glimpses of the
tumbling tide, the small craft jumbled and tossing along the shore,
the motionless buildings in the driving mist, the broad ferryboats
pitching ponderously at anchor, the vast landing-stages heaving up and
down and smothered in sprays. The next gust seemed to blow all this
away. The air was full of flying water. There was a fierce purpose
in the gale, a furious earnestness in the screech of the wind, in
the brutal tumult of earth and sky, that seemed directed at him, and
made him hold his breath in awe. He stood still. It seemed to him he
was whirled around.
  He was jostled. "Man the cutter!" Boys rushed past him. A coaster
running in for shelter had crashed through a schooner at anchor, and
one of the ship's instructors had seen the accident. A mob of boys
clambered on the rails, clustered round the davits. "Collision. Just
ahead of us. Mr. Symons saw it." A push made him stagger against the
mizzen-mast, and he caught hold of a rope. The old training-ship
chained to her moorings quivered all over, bowing gently head to wind,
and with her scanty rigging humming in a deep bass the breathless song
of her youth at sea. "Lower away!" He saw the boat, manned, drop
swiftly below the rail, and rushed after her. He heard a splash.
"Let go; clear the falls!" He leaned over. The river alongside seethed
in frothy streaks. The cutter could be seen in the falling darkness
under the spell of tide and wind, that for a moment held her bound,
and tossing abreast of the ship. A yelling voice in her reached him
faintly: "Keep stroke, you young whelps, if you want to save
anybody! Keep stroke!" And suddenly she lifted high her bow, and,
leaping with raised oars over a wave, broke the spell cast upon her by
the wind and tide.
                                                 
  Jim felt his shoulder gripped firmly. "Too late, youngster." The
captain of the ship laid a restraining hand on that boy, who seemed on
the point of leaping overboard, and Jim looked up with the pain of
conscious defeat in his eyes. The captain smiled sympathetically.
"Better luck next time. This will teach you to be smart."
  A shrill cheer greeted the cutter. She came dancing back half full
of water, and with two exhausted men washing about on her bottom
boards. The tumult and the menace of wind and sea now appeared very
contemptible to Jim, increasing the regret of his awe at their
inefficient menace. Now he knew what to think of it. It seemed to
him he cared nothing for the gale. He could affront greater perils. He
would do so- better than anybody. Not a particle of fear was left.
Nevertheless he brooded apart that evening while the bowman of the
cutter- a boy with a face like a girl's and big grey eyes- was the
hero of the lower deck. Eager questioners crowded round him. He
narrated: "I just saw his head bobbing, and I dashed my boat-hook in
the water. It caught in his breeches and I nearly went overboard, as I
thought I would, only old Symons let go the tiller and grabbed my
legs- the boat nearly swamped. Old Symons is a fine old chap. I
don't mind a bit him being grumpy with us. He swore at me all the time
he held my leg, but that was only his way of telling me to stick to
the boat-hook. Old Symons is awfully excitable- isn't he? No- not
the little fair chap- the other, the big one with a beard. When we
pulled him in he groaned, 'Oh, my leg! oh, my leg!' and turned up
his eyes. Fancy such a big chap fainting like a girl. Would any of you
fellows faint for a jab with a boat-hook?- I wouldn't. It went into
his leg so far." He showed the boat-hook, which he had carried below
for the purpose and produced a sensation. "No, silly! It was not his
flesh that held him- his breeches did. Lots of blood, of course."
  Jim thought it a pitiful display of vanity. The gale had
ministered to a heroism as spurious as its own pretence of terror.
He felt angry with the brutal tumult of earth and sky for taking him
unawares and checking unfairly a generous readiness for narrow
escapes. Otherwise he was rather glad he had not gone into the cutter,
since a lower achievement had served the turn. He had enlarged his
knowledge more than those who had done the work. When all men
flinched, then- he felt sure- he alone would know how to deal with the
spurious menace of wind and seas. He knew what to think of it. Seen
dispassionately, it seemed contemptible. He could detect no trace of
emotion in himself, and the final effect of a staggering event was
that, unnoticed and apart from the noisy crowd of boys, he exulted
with fresh certitude in his avidity for adventure, and in a sense of
many-sided courage.


                             CHAPTER TWO
-
  AFTER two years of training he went to sea, and entering the regions
so well known to his imagination, found them strangely barren of
adventure. He made many voyages. He knew the magic monotony of
existence between sky and water: he had to bear the criticism of
men, the exactions of the sea, and the prosaic severity of the daily
task that gives bread- but whose only reward is in the perfect love of
the work. This reward eluded him. Yet he could not go back, because
there is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than
the life at sea. Besides, his prospects were good. He was gentlemanly,
steady, tractable, with a thorough knowledge of his duties; and in
time, when yet very young, he became chief mate of a fine ship,
without ever having been tested by those events of the sea that show
in the light of day the inner worth of a man, the edge of his
temper, and the fibre of his stuff; that reveal the quality of his
resistance and the secret truth of his pretences, not only to others
but also to himself.
  Only once in all that time he had again the glimpse of the
earnestness in the anger of the sea. That truth is not so often made
apparent as people might think. There are many shades in the danger of
adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that there appears
on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention- that
indefinable something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a
man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are
coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond
control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his
hope and his fear, the pain of his fatigue and his longing for rest:
which means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all he has seen,
known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that is priceless and
necessary- the sunshine, the memories, the future,- which means to
sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the
simple and appalling act of taking his life.
  Jim, disabled by a falling spar at the beginning of a week of
which his Scottish captain used to say afterwards, "Man! it's a
pairfect meeracle to me how she lived through it!" spent many days
stretched on his back, dazed, battered, hopeless, and tormented as
if at the bottom of an abyss of unrest. 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 dulness 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. But now and again
an uncontrollable rush of anguish would grip him bodily, make him gasp
and writhe under the blankets, and then the unintelligent brutality of
an existence liable to the agony of such sensations filled him with
a despairing desire to escape at any cost. Then fine weather returned,
and he thought no more about it.
  His lameness, however, persisted, and when the ship arrived at an
Eastern port he had to go to the hospital. His recovery was slow,
and he was left behind.
  There were only two other patients in the white men's ward: the
purser of a gunboat, who had broken his leg falling down a hatchway;
and a kind of railway contractor from a neighbouring province,
afflicted by some mysterious tropical disease, who held the doctor for
an ass, and indulged in secret debaucheries of patent medicine which
his Tamil servant used to smuggle in with unwearied devotion. They
told each other the story of their lives, played cards a little, or,
yawning and in pyjamas, lounged through the day in easy-chairs without
saying a word. The hospital stood on a hill, and a gentle breeze
entering through the windows, always flung wide open, brought into the
bare room the softness of the sky, the languor of the earth, the
bewitching breath of the Eastern waters. There were perfumes in it,
suggestions of infinite repose, the gift of endless dreams. Jim looked
every day over the thickets of gardens, beyond the roofs of the
town, over the fronds of palms growing on the shore, at that roadstead
which is a thoroughfare to the East,- at the roadstead dotted by
garlanded islets, lighted by festal sunshine, its ships like toys, its
brilliant activity resembling a holiday pageant, with the eternal
serenity of the Eastern sky overhead and the smiling peace of the
Eastern seas possessing the space as far as the horizon.
                                                  
  Directly he could walk without a stick, he descended into the town
to look for some opportunity to get home. Nothing offered just then,
and, while waiting, he associated naturally with the men of his
calling in the port. These were of two kinds. Some, very few and
seen there but seldom, led mysterious lives, had preserved an
undefaced energy with the temper of buccaneers and the eyes of
dreamers. They appeared to live in a crazy maze of plans, hopes,
dangers, enterprises, ahead of civilisation, in the dark places of the
sea, and their death was the only event of their fantastic existence
that seemed to have a reasonable certitude of achievement. The
majority were men who, like himself, thrown there by some accident,
had remained as officers of country ships. They had now a horror of
the home service, with its harder conditions, severer view of duty,
and the hazard of stormy oceans. They were attuned to the eternal
peace of Eastern sky and sea. They loved short passages, good
deck-chairs, large native crews, and the distinction of being white.
They shuddered at the thought of hard work, and led precariously
easy lives, always on the verge of dismissal, always on the verge of
engagement, serving Chinamen, Arabs, half-castes- would have served
the devil himself had he made it easy enough. They talked
everlastingly of turns of luck: how So-and-so got charge of a boat
on the coast of China- a soft thing; how this one had an easy billet
in Japan somewhere, and that one was doing well in the Siamese navy;
and in all they said- in their actions, in their looks, in their
persons- could be detected the soft spot, the place of decay, the
determination to lounge safely through existence.
  To Jim that gossiping crowd, viewed as seamen, seemed at first
more unsubstantial than so many shadows. But at length he found a
fascination in the sight of those men, in their appearance of doing so
well on such a small allowance of danger and toil. In time, beside the
original disdain there grew up slowly another sentiment; and suddenly,
giving up the idea of going home, he took a berth as chief mate of the
Patna.
  The Patna was a local steamer as old as the hills, lean like a
greyhound, and eaten up with rust worse than a condemned water-tank.
She was owned by a Chinaman, chartered by an Arab, and commanded by
a sort of renegade New South Wales German, very anxious to curse
publicly his native country, but who, apparently on the strength of
Bismarck's victorious policy, brutalised all those he was not afraid
of, and wore a "blood-and-iron" air, combined with a purple nose and a
red moustache. After she had been painted outside and whitewashed
inside, eight hundred pilgrims (more or less) were driven on board
of her as she lay with steam up alongside a wooden jetty.
  They streamed aboard over three gangways, they streamed in urged
by faith and the hope of paradise, they streamed in with a
continuous tramp and shuffle of bare feet, without a word, a murmur,
or a look back; and when clear of confining rails spread on all
sides over the deck, flowed forward and aft, overflowed down the
yawning hatchways, filled the inner recesses of the ship-like water
filling a cistern, like water flowing into crevices and crannies, like
water rising silently even with the rim. Eight hundred men and women
with faith and hopes, with affections and memories, they had collected
there, coming from north and south and from the outskirts of the East,
after treading the jungle paths, descending the rivers, coasting in
praus along the shallows, crossing in small canoes from island to
island, passing through suffering, meeting strange sights, beset by
strange fears, upheld by one desire. They came from solitary huts in
the wilderness, from populous campongs, from villages by the sea. At
the call of an idea they had left their forests, their clearings,
the protection of their rulers, their prosperity, their poverty, the
surroundings of their youth and the graves of their fathers. They came
covered with dust, with sweat, with grime, with rags- the strong men
at the head of family parties, the lean old men pressing forward
without hope of return; young boys with fearless eyes glancing
curiously, shy little girls with tumbled long hair; the timid women
muffled up and clasping to their breasts, wrapped in loose ends of
soiled head-cloths, their sleeping babies, the unconscious pilgrims of
an exacting belief.
  "Look at dese cattle," said the German skipper to his new chief
mate.
                                                 
  An Arab, the leader of that pious voyage, came last. He walked
slowly aboard, handsome and grave in his white gown and large
turban. A string of servants followed, loaded with his luggage; the
Patna cast off and backed away from the wharf.
  She was headed between two small islets, crossed obliquely the
anchoring-ground of sailing-ships, swung through half a circle in
the shadow of a hill, then ranged close to a ledge of foaming reefs.
The Arab standing up aft, recited aloud the prayer of travellers by
sea. He invoked the favour of the Most High upon that journey,
implored His blessing on men's toil and on the secret purposes of
their hearts; the steamer pounded in the dusk the calm water of the
Strait; and far astern of the pilgrim ship a screw-pile lighthouse,
planted by unbelievers on a treacherous shoal, seemed to wink at her
its eye of flame, as if in derision of her errand of faith.
  She cleared the Strait, crossed the bay, continued on her way
through the "One-degree" passage. She held on straight for the Red Sea
under a serene sky, under a sky scorching and unclouded, enveloped
in a fulgor of sunshine that killed all thought, oppressed the
heart, withered all impulses of strength and energy. And under the
sinister splendour of that sky the sea, blue and profound, remained
still, without a stir, without a ripple, without a wrinkle- viscous,
stagnant, dead. The Patna, with a slight hiss, passed over that
plain luminous and smooth, unrolled a black ribbon of smoke across the
sky, left behind her on the water a white ribbon of foam that vanished
at once, like the phantom of a track drawn upon a lifeless sea by
the phantom of a steamer.
  Every morning the sun, as if keeping pace in his revolutions with
the progress of the pilgrimage, emerged with a silent burst of light
exactly at the same distance astern of the ship, caught up with her at
noon, pouring the concentrated fire of his rays on the pious
purposes of the men, glided past on his descent, and sank mysteriously
into the sea evening after evening, preserving the same distance ahead
of her advancing bows. The five whites on board lived amidships,
isolated from the human cargo. The awnings covered the deck with a
white roof from stern to stern, and a faint hum, a low murmur of sad
voices, alone revealed the presence of a crowd of people upon the
great blaze of the ocean. Such were the days, still, hot, heavy,
disappearing one by one into the past, as if falling into an abyss for
ever open in the wake of the ship; 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 night descended on her like a benediction.


                            CHAPTER THREE
-
  A MARVELLOUS stillness pervaded the world, and the stars, together
with the serenity of their rays, seemed to shed upon the earth the
assurance of everlasting security. The young moon recurved, and
shining low in the west, was like a slender shaving thrown up from a
bar of gold, and the Arabian Sea, smooth and cool to the eye like a
sheet of ice, extended its perfect level to the perfect circle of a
dark horizon. The propeller turned without a check, as though its beat
had been part of the scheme of a safe universe; and on each side of
the Patna two deep folds of water, permanent and sombre on the
unwrinkled shimmer, enclosed within their straight and diverging
ridges a few white swirls of foam bursting in a low hiss, a few
wavelets, a few ripples, a few undulations that, left behind, agitated
the surface of the sea for an instant after the passage of the ship,
subsided splashing gently, calmed down at last into the circular
stillness of water and sky with the black speck of the moving hull
remaining everlastingly in its centre.
  Jim on the bridge was penetrated by the great certitude of unbounded
safety and peace that could be read on the silent aspect of nature
like the certitude of fostering love upon the placid tenderness of a
mother's face. Below the roof of awnings, surrendered to the wisdom of
white men and to their courage, trusting the power of their unbelief
and the iron shell of their fire-ship, the pilgrims of an exacting
faith slept on mats, on blankets, on bare planks, on every deck, in
all the dark corners, wrapped in dyed cloths, muffled in soiled
rags, with their heads resting on small bundles, with their faces
pressed to bent forearms: the men, the women, the children; the old
with the young, the decrepit with the lusty- all equal before sleep,
death's brother.
  A draught of air, fanned from forward by the speed of the ship,
passed steadily through the long gloom between the high bulwarks,
swept over the rows of prone bodies; a few dim flames in globe-lamps
were hung short here and there under the ridge-poles, and in the
blurred circles of light thrown down and trembling slightly to the
unceasing vibration of the ship appeared a chin upturned, two closed
eyelids, a dark hand with silver rings, a meagre limb draped in a torn
covering, a head bent back, a naked foot, a throat bared and stretched
as if offering itself to the knife. The well-to-do had made for
their families shelters with heavy boxes and dusty mats; the poor
reposed side by side with all they had on earth tied up in a rag under
their heads; the lone old men slept, with drawn-up legs, upon their
prayer-carpets, with their hands over their ears and one elbow on each
side of the face; a father, his shoulders up and his knees under his
forehead, dozed dejectedly by a boy who slept on his back with tousled
hair and one arm commandingly extended; a woman covered from head to
foot, like a corpse, with a piece of white sheeting, had a naked child
in the hollow of each arm; the Arab's belongings, piled right aft,
made a heavy mound of broken outlines, with a cargo-lamp swung
above, and a great confusion of vague forms behind: gleams of
paunchy brass pots, the foot-rest of a deck-chair, blades of spears,
the straight scabbard of an old sword leaning against a heap of
pillows, the spout of a tin coffee-pot. The patent log on the taffrail
periodically rang a single tinkling stroke for every mile traversed on
an errand of faith. Above the mass of sleepers a faint and patient
sigh at times floated, the exhalation of a troubled dream; and short
metallic clangs bursting out suddenly in the depths of the ship, the
harsh scrape of a shovel, the violent slam of a furnace-door, exploded
brutally, as if the men handling the mysterious things below had their
breasts full of fierce anger: while the slim high hull of the
steamer went on evenly ahead, without a sway of her bare masts,
cleaving continuously the great calm of the waters under the
inaccessible serenity of the sky.
  Jim paced athwart, and his footsteps in the vast silence were loud
to his own ears, as if echoed by the watchful stars: his eyes
roaming about the line of the horizon, seemed to gaze hungrily into
the unattainable, and did not see the shadow of the coming event.
The only shadow on the sea was the shadow of the black smoke pouring
heavily from the funnel its immense streamer, whose end was constantly
dissolving in the air. Two Malays, silent and almost motionless,
steered, one on each side of the wheel, whose brass rim shone
fragmentarily in the oval of light thrown out by the binnacle. Now and
then a hand, with black fingers alternately letting go and catching
hold of revolving spokes, appeared in the illumined part; the links of
wheel-chains ground heavily in the grooves of the barrel. Jim would
glance at the compass, would glance around the unattainable horizon,
would stretch himself till his joints cracked with a leisurely twist
of the body, in the very excess of well-being; and, as if made
audacious by the invincible aspect of the peace, he felt he cared
for nothing that could happen to him to the end of his days. From time
to time he glanced idly at a chart pegged out with four drawing-pins
on a low three-legged table abaft the steering-gear case. The sheet of
paper portraying the depths of the sea presented a shiny surface under
the light of a bull's-eye lamp lashed to a stanchion, a surface as
level and smooth as the glimmering surface of the waters. Parallel
rulers with a pair of dividers reposed on the ship's position at
last noon was marked with a small black cross, and the straight
pencil-line drawn firmly as far as Perim figured the course of the
ship- the path of souls towards the holy place, the promise of
salvation, the reward of eternal life- while the pencil with its sharp
end touching the Somali coast lay round and still like a naked
ship's spar floating in the pool of a sheltered dock. "How steady
she goes," thought Jim with wonder, with something like gratitude
for this high peace of sea and sky. At such times his thoughts would
be full of valorous deeds: he loved these dreams and the success of
his imaginary achievements. They were the best parts of life, its
secret truth, its hidden reality. They had a gorgeous virility, the
charm of vagueness, they passed before him with a heroic tread; they
carried his soul away with them and made it drunk with the divine
philtre of an unbounded confidence in itself. There was nothing he
could not face. He was so pleased with the idea that he smiled,
keeping perfunctorily his eyes ahead; and when he happened to glance
back he saw the white streak of the wake drawn as straight by the
ship's keel upon the sea as the black line drawn by the pencil upon
the chart.
  The ash-buckets racketed, clanking up and down the stoke-hold
ventilators, and this tin-pot clatter warned him the end of his
watch was near. He sighed with content, with regret as well at
having to part from that serenity which fostered the adventurous
freedom of his thoughts. He was a little sleepy, too, and felt a
pleasurable languor running through every limb as though all the blood
in his body had turned to warm milk. His skipper had come up
noiselessly, in pyjamas and with his sleeping-jacket flung wide
open. Red of face, only half awake, the left eye partly closed, the
right staring stupid and glassy, he hung his big head over the chart
and scratched his ribs sleepily. There was something obscene in the
sight of his naked flesh. His bared breast glistened soft and greasy
as though he had sweated out his fat in his sleep. He pronounced a
professional remark in a voice harsh and dead, resembling the
rasping sound of a wood-file on the edge of a plank; the fold of his
double chin hung like a bag triced up close under the hinge of his
jaw. Jim started, and his answer was full of deference; but the odious
and fleshy figure, as though seen for the first time in a revealing
moment, fixed itself in his memory for ever as the incarnation of
everything vile and base that lurks in the world we love: in our own
hearts we trust for our salvation in the men that surround us, in
the sights that fill our eyes, in the sounds that fill our ears, and
in the air that fills our lungs.
                                                
  The thin gold shaving of the moon floating slowly downwards had lost
itself on the darkened surface of the waters, and the eternity
beyond the sky seemed to come down nearer to the earth, with the
augmented glitter of the stars, with the more profound sombreness in
the lustre of the half-transparent dome covering the flat disc of an
opaque sea. The ship moved so smoothly that her onward motion was
imperceptible to the senses of men, as though she had been a crowded
planet speeding through the dark spaces of ether behind the swarm of
suns, in the appalling and calm solitudes awaiting the breath of
future creations. "Hot is no name for it down below," said a voice.
  Jim smiled without looking round. The skipper presented an unmoved
breadth of back: it was the renegade's trick to appear pointedly
unaware of your existence unless it suited his purpose to turn at
you with a devouring glare before he let loose a torrent of foamy,
abusive jargon that came like a gush from a sewer. Now he emitted only
a sulky grunt; the second engineer at the head of the bridge-ladder,
kneading with damp palms a dirty sweat-rag, unabashed, continued the
tale of his complaints. The sailors had a good time of it up here, and
what was the use of them in the world he would be blowed if he could
see. The poor devils of engineers had to get the ship along anyhow,
and they could very well do the rest too; by gosh they- "Shut up"
growled the German stolidly. "Oh yes! Shut up- and when anything
goes wrong you fly to us, don't you?" went on the other. He was more
than half cooked, he expected; but anyway, now, he did not mind how
much he sinned, because these last three days he had passed through
a fine course of training for the place where the bad boys go when
they die- b'gosh, he had- besides being made jolly well deaf by the
blasted racket below. The durned, compound, surface-condensing, rotten
scrap-heap rattled and banged down there like an old deck-winch,
only more so; and what made him risk his life every night and day that
God made amongst the refuse of a breaking-up yard flying round at
fifty-seven revolutions, was more than he could tell. He must have
been born reckless, b'gosh. He...
  "Where did you get drink?" inquired the German, very savage, but
motionless in the light of the binnacle, like a clumsy effigy of a man
cut out of a block of fat. Jim went on smiling at the retreating
horizon; his heart was full of generous impulses, and his thought
was contemplating his own superiority. "Drink!" repeated the
engineer with amiable scorn: he was hanging on with both hands to
the rail, a shadowy figure with flexible legs. "Not from you, captain.
You're far too mean, b'gosh. You would let a good man die sooner
than give him a drop of shnaps. That's what you Germans call
economy. Penny wise, pound foolish." He became sentimental. The
chief had given him a four-finger nip about ten o'clock- "only one,
s'elp me!"- good old chief; but as to getting the old fraud out of his
bunk- a five-ton crane couldn't do it. Not it. Not to-night anyhow. He
was sleeping sweetly like a little child, with a bottle of prime
brandy under his pillow. From the thick throat of the commander of the
Patna came a low rumble, on which the sound of the word schwein
fluttered high and low like a capricious feather in a faint stir of
air. He and the chief engineer had been cronies for a good few
years- serving the same jovial, crafty, old Chinaman, with horn-rimmed
goggles and strings of red silk plaited into the venerable grey
hairs of his pigtail. The quay-side opinion in the Patna's home-port
was that these two in the way of brazen peculation "had done
together pretty well everything you can think of." Outwardly they were
badly matched: one dull-eyed, malevolent, and of soft fleshy curves;
the other lean, all hollows, with a head long and bony like the head
of an old horse, with sunken cheeks, with sunken temples, with an
indifferent glazed glance of sunken eyes. He had been stranded out
East somewhere- in Canton, in Shanghai, or perhaps in Yokohama; he
probably did not care to remember himself the exact locality, nor
yet the cause of his shipwreck. He had been, in mercy to his youth,
kicked quietly out of his ship twenty years ago or more, and it
might have been so much worse for him that the memory of the episode
had in it hardly a trace of misfortune. Then, steam navigation
expanding in these seas and men of his craft being scarce at first, he
had "got on" after a sort. He was eager to let strangers know in a
dismal mumble that he was "an old stager out here." When he moved a
skeleton seemed to sway loose in his clothes; his walk was mere
wandering, and he was given to wander thus around the engine-room
skylight, smoking, without relish, doctored tobacco in a brass bowl at
the end of a cherrywood stem four feet long, with the imbecile gravity
of a thinker evolving a system of philosophy from the hazy glimpse
of a truth. He was usually anything but free with his private store of
liquor; but on that night he had departed from his principles, so that
his second, a weak-headed child of Wapping, what with the
unexpectedness of the treat and the strength of the stuff, had
become very happy, cheeky, and talkative. The fury of the New South
Wales German was extreme; he puffed like an exhaust-pipe, and Jim,
faintly amused by the scene, was impatient for the time when he
could get below: the last ten minutes of the watch were irritating
like a gun that hangs fire; those men did not belong to the world of
heroic adventure; they weren't bad chaps though. Even the skipper
himself... His gorge rose at the mass of panting flesh from which
issued gurgling mutters, a cloudy trickle of filthy expressions; but
he was too pleasurably languid to dislike actively this or any other
thing. The quality of these men did not matter; he rubbed shoulders
with them, but, they could not touch him; he shared the air they
breathed, but he was different.... Would the skipper go for the
engineer?... The life was easy and he was too sure of himself- too
sure of himself to... The line dividing his meditation from a
surreptitious doze on his feet was thinner than a thread in a spider's
web.
  The second engineer was coming by easy transitions to the
consideration of his finances and of his courage.
  "Who's drunk? I? No, no, captain! That won't do. You ought to know
by this time the chief ain't free-hearted enough to make a sparrow
drunk, b'gosh. I've never been the worse for liquor in my life; the
stuff ain't made yet that would make me drunk. I could drink liquid
fire against your whisky peg for peg, b'gosh, and keep as cool as a
cucumber. If I thought I was drunk I would jump overboard- do away
with myself, b'gosh. I would! Straight! And I won't go off the bridge.
Where do you expect me to take the air on a night like this, eh? On
deck amongst that vermin down there? Likely- ain't it! And I am not
afraid of anything you can do."
                                               
  The German lifted two heavy fists to heaven and shook them a
little without a word.
  "I don't know what fear is," pursued the engineer. with the
enthusiasm of sincere conviction. "I am not afraid of doing all the
bloomin' work in this rotten hooker, b'gosh! And a jolly good thing
for you that there are some of us about the world that aren't afraid
of their lives, or where would you be- you and this old thing here
with her plates like brown paper- brown paper, s'elp me? It's all very
fine for you- you get a power of pieces out of her one way and
another; but what about me- what do I get? A measly hundred and
fifty dollars a month and find yourself. I wish to ask you
respectfully- respectfully, mind- who wouldn't chuck a dratted job
like this? 'Tain't safe, s'elp me, it ain't! Only I am one of them
fearless fellows...."
  He let go the rail and made ample gestures as if demonstrating in
the air the shape and extent of his valour; his thin voice darted in
prolonged squeaks upon the sea, he tiptoed back and forth for the
better emphasis of utterance, and suddenly pitched down head-first
as though he had been clubbed from behind. He said "Damn!" as he
tumbled; an instant of silence followed upon his screeching: Jim and
the skipper staggered forward by common accord, and catching
themselves up, stood very stiff and still gazing, amazed, at the
undisturbed level of the sea. Then they looked upwards at the stars.
  What had happened? The wheezy thump of the engines went on. Had
the earth been checked in her course? They could not understand; and
suddenly the calm sea, the sky without a cloud, appeared formidably
insecure in their immobility, as if poised on the brow of yawning
destruction. The engineer rebounded vertically full length and
collapsed again into a vague heap. This heap said "What's that?" in
the muffled accents of profound grief. A faint noise as of thunder, of
thunder infinitely remote, less than a sound, hardly more than a
vibration, passed slowly, and the ship quivered in response, as if the
thunder had growled deep down in the water. The eyes of the two Malays
at the wheel glittered towards the white men, but their dark hands
remained closed on the spokes. The sharp hull driving on its way
seemed to rise a few inches in succession through its whole length, as
though it had become pliable, and settled down again rigidly to its
work of cleaving the smooth surface of the sea. Its quivering stopped,
and the faint noise of thunder ceased all at once, as though the
ship had steamed across a narrow belt of vibrating water and of
humming air.


                             CHAPTER FOUR
-
  A MONTH or so afterwards, when Jim, in answer to pointed
questions, tried to tell honestly the truth of this experience, he
said, speaking of the ship: "She went over whatever it was as easy
as a snake crawling over a stick." The illustration was good: the
questions were aiming at facts, and the official Inquiry was being
held in the police court of an Eastern port. He stood elevated in
the witness-box, with burning cheeks in a cool lofty room: the big
framework of punkahs moved gently to and fro high above his head,
and from below many eyes were looking at him out of dark faces, out of
white faces, out of red faces, out of faces attentive, spellbound,
as if all these people sitting in orderly rows upon narrow benches had
been enslaved by the fascination of his voice. It was very loud, it
rang startling in his own ears, it was the only sound audible in the
world, for the terribly distinct questions that extorted his answers
seemed to shape themselves in anguish and pain within his breast,-
came to him poignant and silent like the terrible questioning of one's
conscience. Outside the court the sun blazed- within was the wind of
great punkahs that made you shiver, the shame that made you burn,
the attentive eyes whose glance stabbed. The face of the presiding
magistrate, clean shaved and impassible, looked at him deadly pale
between the red faces of the two nautical assessors. 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 court-room 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 water-logged 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?" asked the assessor sitting to
the left. He had a thin horseshoe beard, salient cheek-bones and
with both elbows on the desk clasped his rugged hands before his face,
looking at Jim with thoughtful blue eyes; the other, a heavy, scornful
man, thrown back in his seat, his left arm extended full length,
drummed delicately with his finger-tips on a blotting-pad: in the
middle the magistrate upright in the roomy arm-chair, his head
inclined slightly on the shoulder, had his arms crossed on his
breast and a few flowers in a glass vase by the side of his inkstand.
  "I did not," said Jim. "I was told to call no one and to make no
noise for fear of creating a panic. I thought the precaution
reasonable. I took one of the lamps that were hung under the awnings
and went forward. After opening the forepeak hatch I heard splashing
in there. I lowered then the lamp the whole drift of its lanyard,
and saw that the forepeak was more than half full of water already.
I knew then there must be a big hole below the waterline." He paused.
  "Yes," said the big assessor, with a dreamy smile at the
blotting-pad; his fingers played incesssantly, touching the paper
without noise.
  "I did not think of danger just then. I might have been a little
startled: all this happened in such a quiet way and so very
suddenly. I knew there was no other bulkhead in the ship but the
collision bulkhead separating the forepeak from the forehold. I went
back to tell the captain. I came upon the second engineer getting up
at the foot of the bridge-ladder: he seemed dazed, and told me he
thought his left arm was broken; he had slipped on the top step when
getting down while I was forward. He exclaimed, 'My God! That rotten
bulkhead'll give way in a minute, and the damned thing will go down
under us like a lump of lead.' He pushed me away with his right arm
and ran before me up the ladder, shouting as he climbed. His left
arm hung by his side. I followed up in time to see the captain rush at
him and knock him down flat on his back. He did not strike him
again: he stood bending over him and speaking angrily but quite low. I
fancy he was asking him why the devil he didn't go and stop the
engines, instead of making a row about it on deck. I heard him say,
'Get up! Run! fly!' He swore also. The engineer slid down the
starboard ladder and bolted round the skylight to the engine-room
companion which was on the port-side. He moaned as he ran...."
                                                 
  He spoke slowly; he remembered swiftly and with extreme vividness;
he could have reproduced like an echo the moaning of the engineer
for the better information of these men who wanted facts. After his
first feeling of revolt he had come round to the view that only a
meticulous precision of statement would bring out the true horror
behind the appalling face of things. The facts those men were so eager
to know had been visible, tangible, open to the senses, occupying
their place in space and time, requiring for their existence a
fourteen-hundred-ton steamer and twenty-seven minutes by the watch;
they made a whole that had features, shades of expression, a
complicated aspect that could be remembered by the eye, and
something else besides, something invisible, a directing spirit of
perdition that dwelt within, like a malevolent soul in a detestable
body. He was anxious to make this clear. This had not been a common
affair, everything in it had been of the utmost importance, and
fortunately he remembered everything. He wanted to go on talking for
truth's sake, perhaps for his own sake also; and while his utterance
was deliberate, his mind positively flew round and round the serried
circle of facts that had surged up all about him to cut him off from
the rest of his kind: it was like a creature that, finding itself
imprisoned within an enclosure of high stakes, dashes round and round,
distracted in the night, trying to find a weak spot, a crevice, a
place to scale, some opening through which it may squeeze itself and
escape. This awful activity of mind made him hesitate at times in
his speech....
  "The captain kept on moving here and there on the bridge; he
seemed calm enough, only he stumbled several times; and once as I
stood speaking to him he walked right into me as though he had been
stone-blind. He made no definite answer to what I had to tell. He
mumbled to himself; all I heard of it were a few words that sounded
like 'confounded steam!' and 'infernal steam!'- something about steam.
I thought..."
  He was becoming irrelevant; a question to the point cut short his
speech, like a pang of pain, and he felt extremely discouraged and
weary. He was coming to that, he was coming to that- and now,
checked brutally, he had to answer by yes or no. He answered
truthfully by a curt "Yes, I did"; and fair of face, big of frame,
with young, gloomy eyes, he held his shoulders upright above the box
while his soul writhed within him. He was made to answer another
question so much to the point and so useless, then waited again. His
mouth was tastelessly dry, as though he had been eating dust, then
salt and bitter as after a drink of sea-water. He wiped his damp
forehead, passed his tongue over parched lips, felt a shiver run
down his back. The big assessor had dropped his eyelids, and drummed
on without a sound, careless and mournful; the eyes of the other above
the sunburnt, clasped fingers seemed to glow with kindliness; the
magistrate had swayed forward; his pale face hovered near the flowers,
and then dropping sideways over the arm of his chair, he rested his
temple in the palm of his hand. The wind of the punkahs eddied down on
the heads, on the dark-faced natives wound about in voluminous
draperies, on the Europeans sitting together very hot and in drill
suits that seemed to fit them as close as their skins, and holding
their round pith hats on their knees; while gliding along the walls
the court peons, buttoned tight in long white coats, flitted rapidly
to and fro, running on bare toes, red-sashed, red turban on head, as
noiseless as ghosts, and on the alert like so many retrievers.
  Jim's eyes, wandering in the intervals of his answers, rested upon a
white man who sat apart from the others, with his face worn and
clouded, but with quiet eyes that glanced straight, interested and
clear. Jim answered another question and was tempted to cry out,
"What's the good of this! what's the good!" He tapped with his foot
slightly, bit his lip, and looked away over the heads. He met the eyes
of the white man. The glance directed at him was not the fascinated
stare of the others. It was an act of intelligent volition. Jim
between two questions forgot himself so far as to find leisure for a
thought. This fellow- ran the thought- looks at me as though he
could see somebody or something past my shoulder. He had come across
that man before- in the street perhaps. He was positive he had never
spoken to him. For days, for many days, he had spoken to no one, but
had held silent, incoherent, and endless converse with himself, like a
prisoner alone in his cell or like a wayfarer lost in a wilderness. At
present he was answering questions that did not matter though they had
a purpose, but he doubted whether he would ever again speak out as
long as he lived. The sound of his own truthful statements confirmed
his deliberate opinion that speech was of no use to him any longer.
That man there seemed to be aware of his hopeless difficulty. Jim
looked at him, then turned away resolutely, as after a final parting.
  And later on, many times, in distant parts of the world, Marlow
showed himself willing to remember Jim, to remember him at length,
in detail and audibly.
                                                
  Perhaps it would be after dinner, on a verandah draped in motionless
foliage and crowned with flowers, in the deep dusk speckled by fiery
cigar-ends. The elongated bulk of each cane-chair harboured a silent
listener. Now and then a small red glow would move abruptly, and
expanding light up the fingers of a languid hand, part of a face in
profound repose, or flash a crimson gleam into a pair of pensive
eyes overshadowed by a fragment of an unruffled forehead; and with the
very first word uttered Marlow's body, extended at rest in the seat,
would become very still, as though his spirit had winged its way
back into the lapse of time and were speaking through his lips from
the past.


                             CHAPTER FIVE
-
  "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. He is there right enough, and, being
malicious, he lets me in for that kind of thing. What kind of thing,
you ask? Why, the inquiry thing, the yellow-dog thing- you wouldn't
think a mangy, native tyke would be allowed to trip up people in the
verandah of a magistrate's court, would you?- the kind of thing that
by devious, unexpected, truly diabolical ways causes me to run up
against men with soft spots, with hard spots, with hidden plague
spots, by Jove! and loosens their tongues at the sight of me for their
infernal confidences; as though, forsooth, I had no confidences to
make to myself, as though- God help me!- I didn't have enough
confidential information about myself to harrow my own soul till the
end of my appointed time. And what I have done to be thus favoured I
want to know. I declare I am as full of my own concerns as the next
man, and I have as much memory as the average pilgrim in this
valley, so you see I am not particularly fit to be a receptacle of
confessions. Then why? Can't tell- unless it be to make time pass away
after dinner. Charley, my dear chap, your dinner was extremely good,
and in consequence these men here look upon a quiet rubber as a
tumultuous occupation. They wallow in your good chairs and think to
themselves, 'Hang exertion. Let that Marlow talk.'
  "Talk! So be it. And it's easy enough to talk of Master Jim, after a
good spread, two hundred feet above the sea-level, with a box of
decent cigars handy, on a blessed evening of freshness and starlight
that would make the best of us forget we are only on sufferance here
and got to pick our way in cross lights, watching every precious
minute and every irremediable step, trusting we shall manage yet to go
out decently in the end- but not so sure of it after all- and with
dashed little help to expect from those we touch elbows with right and
left. Of course there are men here and there to whom the whole of life
is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty,
perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten before the
end is told- before the end is told- even if there happens to be any
end to it.
  "My eyes met his for the first time at that inquiry. You must know
that everybody connected in any way with the sea was there, because
the affair had been notorious for days, ever since that mysterious
cable message came from Aden to start us all cackling. I say
mysterious, because it was so in a sense though it contained a naked
fact, about as naked and ugly as a fact can well be. The whole
waterside talked of nothing else. First thing in the morning as I
was dressing in my state-room, I would hear through the bulkhead my
Parsee Dubash jabbering about the Patna with the steward, while he
drank a cup of tea, by favour, in the pantry. No sooner on shore I
would meet some acquaintance, and the first remark would be, 'Did
you ever hear of anything to beat this?' and according to his kind the
man would smile cynically, or look sad, or let out a swear or two.
Complete strangers would accost each other familiarly, just for the
sake of easing their minds on the subject: every confounded loafer
in the town came in for a harvest of drinks over this affair: you
heard of it in the harbour office, at every ship-broker's, at your
agent's, from whites, from natives, from half-castes, from the very
boatmen squatting half-naked on the stone steps as you went up- by
Jove! There was some indignation, not a few jokes, and no end of
discussions as to what had become of them, you know. This went on
for a couple of weeks or more, and the opinion that whatever was
mysterious in this affair would turn out to be tragic as well, began
to prevail, when one fine morning, as I was standing in the shade by
the steps of the harbour office, I perceived four men walking
towards me along the quay. I wondered for a while where that queer lot
had sprung from, and suddenly, I may say, I shouted to myself, 'Here
they are!'
  "There they were, sure enough, three of them as large as life, and
one much larger of girth than any living man has a right to be, just
landed with a good breakfast inside of them from an outward-bound Dale
Line steamer that had come in about an hour after sunrise. There could
be no mistake; I spotted the jolly skipper of the Patna at the first
glance: the fattest man in the whole blessed tropical belt clear round
that good old earth of ours. Moreover, nine months or so before, I had
come across him in Samarang. His steamer was loading in the Roads, and
he was abusing the tyrannical institutions of the German empire, and
soaking himself in beer all day long and day after day in De Jongh's
back-shop, till De Jongh, who charged a guilder for every bottle
without as much as the quiver of an eyelid, would beckon me aside,
and, with his little leathery face all puckered up, declare
confidentially, 'Business is business, but this man, captain, he
make me very sick. Tfui!'
  "I was looking at him from the shade. He was hurrying on a little in
advance, and the sunlight beating on him brought out his bulk in a
startling way. He made me think of a trained baby elephant walking
on hind-legs. He was extravagantly gorgeous too- got up in a soiled
sleeping-suit, bright green and deep orange vertical stripes, with a
pair of ragged straw slippers on his bare feet, and somebody's
cast-off pith hat, very dirty and two sizes too small for him, tied up
with a manilla rope-yarn on the top of his big head. You understand
a man like that hasn't the ghost of a chance when it comes to
borrowing clothes. Very well. On he came in hot haste, without a
look right or left, passed within three feet of me, and in the
innocence of his heart went on pelting upstairs in the harbour
office to make his deposition, or report, or whatever you like to call
it.
                                                 
  "It appears he addressed himself in the first instance to the
principal shipping-master. Archie Ruthvel had just come in, and, as
his story goes, was about to begin his arduous day by giving a
dressing-down to his chief clerk. Some of you might have known him- an
obliging little Portuguese half-caste with a miserably skinny neck,
and always on the hop to get something from the shipmasters in the way
of eatables- a piece of salt pork, a bag of biscuits, a few
potatoes, or what not. One voyage, I recollect, I tipped him a live
sheep out of the remnant of my sea-stock: not that I wanted him to
do anything for me- he couldn't, you know- but because his childlike
belief in the sacred right to perquisites quite touched my heart. It
was so strong as to be almost beautiful. The race- the two races
rather- and the climate... However, never mind. I know where I have
a friend for life.
  "Well, Ruthvel says he was giving him a severe lecture- an
official morality, I suppose- when he heard a kind of subdued
commotion at his back, and turning his head he saw, in his own
words, something round and enormous, resembling a
sixteen-hundred-weight sugar-hogshead wrapped in striped
flannelette, up-ended in the middle of the large floor space in the
office. He declares he was so taken aback that for quite an
appreciable time he did not realize the thing was alive, and sat still
wondering for what purpose and by what means that object had been
transported in front of his desk. The archway from the ante-room was
crowded with punkah-pullers, sweepers, police peons, the coxswain
and crew of the harbour steam-launch, all craning their necks and
almost climbing on each other's backs. Quite a riot. By that time
the fellow had managed to tug and jerk his hat clear of his head,
and advanced with slight bows at Ruthvel, who told me the sight was so
discomposing that for some time he listened quite unable to make out
what that apparition wanted. It spoke in a voice harsh and
lugubrious but intrepid, and little by little it dawned upon Archie
that this was a development of the Patna case. He says that as soon as
he understood who it was before him he felt quite unwell- Archie is so
sympathetic and easily upset- but pulled himself together and
shouted 'Stop! I can't listen to you. You must go to the Master
Attendant. I can't possibly listen to you. Captain Elliot is the man
you want to see. This way, this way.' He jumped up, ran round that
long counter, pulled, shoved: the other let him, surprised but
obedient at first, and only at the door of the private office some
sort of animal instinct made him hang back and snort like a frightened
bullock. 'Look here! what's up? Let go? Look here!' Archie flung
open the door without knocking. 'The master of the Patna, sir,' he
shouts. 'Go in, captain.' He saw the old man lift his head from some
writing so sharp that his nose-nippers fell off, banged the door to,
and fled to his desk, where he had some papers waiting for his
signature: but he says the row that burst out in there was so awful
that he couldn't collect his senses sufficiently to remember the
spelling of his own name. Archie's the most sensitive
shipping-master in the two hemispheres. He declares he felt as
though he had thrown a man to a hungry lion. No doubt the noise was
great. I heard it down below, and I have every reason to believe it
was heard clear across the Esplanade as far as the band-stand. Old
father Elliot had a great stock of words and could shout- and didn't
mind who he shouted at either. He would have shouted at the Viceroy
himself. As he used to tell me: 'I am as high as I can get; my pension
is safe. I've a few pounds laid by, and if they don't like my
notions of duty I would just as soon go home as not. I am an old
man, and I have always spoken my mind. All I care for now is to see my
girls married before I die.' He was a little crazy on that point.
His three daughters were awfully nice, though they resemble him
amazingly, and on the mornings he woke up with a gloomy view of
their matrimonial prospects the office would read it in his eye and
tremble, because, they said, he was sure to have somebody for
breakfast. However, that morning he did not eat the renegade, but,
if I may be allowed to carry on the metaphor, chewed him up very
small, so to speak, and- ah! ejected him again.
  "Thus in a very few moments I saw his monstrous bulk descend in
haste and stand still on the outer steps. He had stopped close to me
for the purpose of profound meditation: his large purple cheeks
quivered. He was biting his thumb, and after a while noticed me with a
sidelong vexed look. The other three chaps that had landed with him
made a little group waiting at some distance. There was a
sallow-faced, mean little chap with his arm in a sling, and a long
individual in a blue flannel coat, as dry as a chip and no stouter
than a broomstick, with drooping grey moustaches, who looked about him
with an air of jaunty imbecility. The third was an upstanding,
broad-shouldered youth, with his hands in his pockets, turning his
back on the other two who appeared to be talking together earnestly.
He stared across the empty Esplanade. A ramshackle gharry, all dust
and venetian blinds, pulled up short opposite the group, and the
driver, throwing up his right foot over his knee, gave himself up to
the critical examination of his toes. The young chap, making no
movement, not even stirring his head, just stared into the sunshine.
This was my first view of Jim. He looked as unconcerned and
unapproachable as only the young can look. There he stood,
clean-limbed, clean-faced, firm on his feet, as promising a boy as the
sun ever shone on; and, looking at him, knowing all he knew and a
little more too, I was as angry as though I had detected him trying to
get something out of me by false pretences. He had no business to look
so sound. I thought to myself- well, if this sort can go wrong like
that... and I felt as though I could fling down my hat and dance on it
from sheer mortification, as I once saw the skipper of an Italian
barque do because his duffer of a mate got into a mess with his
anchors when making a flying moor in a roadstead full of ships. I
asked myself, seeing him there apparently so much at ease- is he
silly? is he callous? He seemed ready to start whistling a tune. And
note, I did not care a rap about the behaviour of the other two. Their
persons somehow fitted the tale that was public property, and was
going to be the subject of an official inquiry. 'That old mad rogue
upstairs called me a hound,' said the captain of the Patna. I can't
tell whether he recognized me- I rather think he did; but at any
rate our glances met. He glared- I smiled; hound was the very
mildest epithet that had reached me through the open window. 'Did he?'
I said from some strange inability to hold my tongue. He nodded, bit
his thumb again, swore under his breath: then lifting his head and
looking at me with sullen and passionate impudence- 'Bah! the
Pacific is big, my friendt. You damned Englishmen can do your worst; I
know where there's plenty room for a man like me: I am well aguaindt
in Apia, in Honolulu, in...' He paused reflectively, while without
effort I could depict to myself the sort of people he was 'aguaindt'
with in those places. I won't make a secret of it that I had been
'aguaindt' with not a few of that sort myself. There are times when
a man must act as though life were equally sweet in any company.
I've known such a time, and, what's more, I shan't now pretend to pull
a long face over my necessity, because a good many of that bad company
from want of moral- moral- what shall I say?- posture, or from some
other equally profound cause, were twice as instructive and twenty
times more amusing than the usual respectable thief of commerce you
fellows ask to sit at your table without any real necessity- from
habit, from cowardice, from good-nature, from a hundred sneaking and
inadequate reasons.
  "'You Englishmen are all rogues,' went on my patriotic Flensborg
or Stettin Australian. I really don't recollect now what decent little
port on the shores of the Baltic was defiled by being the nest of that
precious bird. 'What are you to shout? Eh? 'You tell me? You no better
than other people, and that old rogue he make Gottam fuss with me.'
His thick carcass trembled on its legs that were like a pair of
pillars; it trembled from head to foot. 'That's what you English
always make- make a tam' fuss- for any little thing, because I was not
born in your tam' country. Take away my certificate. Take it. I
don't want the certificate. A man like me don't want your verfluchte
certificate. I shpit on it.' He spat. 'I vill an Amerigan citizen
begome,' he cried, fretting and fuming and shuffling his feet as if to
free his ankles from some invisible and mysterious grasp that would
not let him get away from that spot. He made himself so warm that
the top of his bullet head positively smoked. Nothing mysterious
prevented me from going away: curiosity is the most obvious of
sentiments, and it held me there to see the effect of a full
information upon that young fellow who, hands 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
condemnations, 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 must be driven afresh every day into
young heads till it becomes the component part of every waking
thought- till it is present in every dream of their young sleep! The
sea has been good to me, but when I remember all these boys that
passed through my hands, some grown up now and some drowned by this
time, but all good stuff for the sea, I don't think I have done
badly by it either. Were I to go home tomorrow, I bet that before
two days passed over my head some sunburnt young chief mate would
overtake me at some dock gateway or other, and a fresh deep voice
speaking above my hat would ask: 'Don't you remember me, sir? Why!
little So-and-so. Such and such a ship. It was my first voyage.' And I
would remember a bewildered little shaver, no higher than the back
of this chair, with a mother and perhaps a big sister on the quay,
very quiet but too upset to wave their handkerchiefs at the ship
that glides out gently between the pier-heads: or perhaps some
decent middle-aged father who had come early with his boy to see him
off, and stays all the morning because he is interested in the
windlass apparently, and stays too long, and has got to scramble
ashore at last with no time at all to say good-bye. The mud pilot on
the poop sings out to me in a drawl, 'Hold her with the check line for
a moment, Mister Mate. There's a gentleman wants to get ashore....
Up with you, sir. Nearly got carried off to Talcahuano, didn't you?
Now's your time; easy does it.... All right. Slack away again
forward there.' The tugs, smoking like the pit of perdition, get
hold and churn the old river into fury; the gentleman ashore is
dusting his knees- the benevolent steward has shied his umbrella after
him. All very proper. He has offered his bit of sacrifice to the
sea, and now he may go home pretending he thinks nothing of it; and
the little willing victim shall be very sea-sick before next
morning. By-and-by, when he has learned all the little mysteries and
the one great secret of the craft, he shall be fit to live or die as
the sea may decree; and the man who had taken a hand in this fool
game, in which the sea wins every toss, will be pleased to have his
back slapped by a heavy young hand, and to hear a cheery sea-puppy
voice: 'Do you remember me, sir? The little So-and-so.'
                                                
  "I tell you this is good; it tells you that once in your life at
least you had gone the right way to work. I have been thus slapped,
and I have winced, for the slap was heavy, and I have glowed all day
long and gone to bed feeling less lonely in the world by virtue of
that hearty thump. Don't I remember the little So-and-so's! I tell you
I ought to know the right kind of looks. 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.
  "I couldn't believe it. I tell you I wanted to see him squirm for
the honour of the craft. The other two no-account chaps spotted
their captain, and began to move slowly towards us. They chatted
together as they strolled, and I did not care any more than if they
had not been visible to the naked eye. They grinned at each other-
might have been exchanging jokes, for all I know. I saw that with
one of them it was the case of a broken arm; and as to the long
individual with grey moustaches he was the chief engineer, and in
various ways a pretty notorious personality. They were nobodies.
They approached. The skipper gazed in an inanimate way between his
feet: he seemed to be swollen to an unnatural size by some awful
disease, by the mysterious action of an unknown poison. He lifted
his head, saw the two before him waiting, opened his mouth with an
extraordinary, sneering contortion of his puffed face- to speak to
them, I suppose- and then a thought seemed to strike him. His thick,
purplish lips came together without a sound, he went off in a resolute
waddle to the gharry and began to jerk at the door-handle with such
a blind brutality of impatience that I expected to see the whole
concern overturned on its side, pony and all. The driver, shaken out
of his meditation over the sole of his foot, displayed at once all the
signs of intense terror, and held with both hands, looking round
from his box at this vast carcass forcing its way into his conveyance.
The little machine shook and rocked tumultuously, and the crimson nape
of that lowered neck, the size of those straining thighs, the
immense heaving of that dingy, striped green-and-orange back, the
whole burrowing effort of that gaudy and sordid mass troubled one's
sense of probability with a droll and fearsome effect, like one of
those grotesque and distinct visions that scare and fascinate one in a
fever. He disappeared. I half expected the roof to split in two, the
little box on wheels to burst open in the manner of a ripe cotton-pod-
but it only sank with a click of flattened springs, and suddenly one
venetian blind rattled down. His shoulders reappeared, jammed in the
small opening; his head hung out, distended and tossing like a captive
balloon, perspiring, furious, spluttering. He reached for the
gharry-wallah with vicious flourishes of a fist as dumpy and red as
a lump of raw meat. He roared at him to be off, to go on. Where?
Into the Pacific, perhaps. The driver lashed; the pony snorted, reared
once, and darted off at a gallop. Where? To Apia? to Honolulu? He
had 6,000 miles of tropical belt to disport himself in, and I did
not hear the precise address. A snorting pony snatched him into
'ewigkeit' in the twinkling of an eye, and I never saw him again; and,
what's more, I don't know of anybody that ever had a glimpse of him
after he departed from my knowledge sitting inside a ramshackle little
gharry that fled round the corner in a white smother of dust. He
departed, disappeared, vanished, absconded; and absurdly enough it
looked as though he had taken that gharry with him, for never again
did I come across a sorrel pony with a slit ear and a lackadaisical
Tamil driver afflicted by a sore foot. The Pacific is indeed big;
but whether he found a place for a display of his talents in it or
not, the fact remains he had flown into space like a witch on a
broomstick. The little chap with his arm in a sling started to run
after the carriage, bleating, 'Captain! I say, Captain! I sa-a-ay!-
but after a few steps stopped short, hung his head, and walked back
slowly. At the sharp rattle of the wheels the young fellow spun
round where he stood. He made no other movement, no gesture, no
sign, and remained facing in the new direction after the gharry had
swung out of sight.
  "All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since
I am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous
effect of visual impressions. Next moment the half-caste clerk, sent
by Archie to look a little after the poor castaways of the Patna, came
upon the scene. He ran out eager and bareheaded, looking right and
left, and very full of his mission. It was doomed to be a failure as
far as the principal person was concerned, but he approached the
others with fussy importance, and, almost immediately, found himself
involved in a violent altercation with the chap that carried his arm
in a sling and who turned out to be extremely anxious for a row. He
wasn't going to be ordered about- 'not he, b'gosh.' He wouldn't be
terrified with a pack of lies by a cocky half-bred little
quill-driver. He was not going to be bullied by 'no object of that
sort,' if the story were true 'ever so!' He bawled his wish, his
desire, his determination to go to bed. 'If you weren't a God-forsaken
Portuguee,' I heard him yell, 'you would know that the hospital is the
right place for me.' He pushed the fist of his sound arm under the
other's nose; a crowd began to collect; the half-caste, flustered, but
doing his best to appear dignified, tried to explain his intentions. I
went away without waiting to see the end.
  "But it so happened that I had a man in the hospital at the time,
and going there to see about him the day before the opening of the
Inquiry. I saw in the white men's ward that little chap tossing on his
back. with his arm in splints, and quite light-headed. To my great
surprise the other one, the long individual with drooping white
moustache, had also found his way there. I remembered I had seen him
slinking away during the quarrel, in a half prance, half shuffle,
and trying very hard not to look scared. He was no stranger to the
port, it seems, and in his distress was able to make tracks straight
for Mariani's billiard-room and grog-shop near the bazaar. That
unspeakable vagabond, Mariani, who had known the man and had
ministered to his vices in one or two other places, kissed the ground,
in a manner of speaking, before him, and shut him up with a supply
of bottles in an upstairs room of his infamous hovel. It appears he
was under some hazy apprehension as to his personal safety, and wished
to be concealed. However, Mariani told me a long time after (when he
came on board one day to dun my steward for the price of some
cigars) that he would have done more for him without asking any
questions, from gratitude for some unholy favour received very many
years ago- as far as I could make out. He thumped twice his brawny
chest, rolled enormous black and white eyes glistening with tears:
'Antonio never forget- Antonio never forget!' What was the precise
nature of the immoral obligation I never learned, but be it what it
may, he had every facility given him to remain under lock and key,
with a chair, a table, a mattress in a corner, and a litter of
fallen plaster on the floor, in an irrational state of funk, and
keeping up his pecker with such tonics as Mariani dispensed. This
lasted till the evening of the third day, when, after letting out a
few horrible screams, he found himself compelled to seek safety in
flight from a legion of centipedes. He burst the door open, made one
leap for dear life down the crazy little stairway, landed bodily on
Mariani's stomach, picked himself up, and bolted like a rabbit into
the streets. The police plucked him off a garbage-heap in the early
morning. At first he had a notion they were carrying him off to be
hanged, and fought for liberty like a hero, but when I sat down by his
bed he had been very quiet for two days. His lean bronzed head, with
white moustaches, looked fine and calm on the pillow, like the head of
a war-worn soldier with a child-like soul, had it not been for a
hint of spectral alarm that lurked in the blank glitter of his glance,
resembling a nondescript form of a terror crouching silently behind
a pane of glass. He was so extremely calm, that I began to indulge
in the eccentric hope of hearing something explanatory of the famous
affair from his point of view. Why I longed to go grubbing into the
deplorable details of an occurrence which, after all, concerned me
no more than as a member of an obscure body of men held together by
a community of inglorious toil and by fidelity to a certain standard
of conduct, I can't explain. You may call it an unhealthy curiosity if
you like; but I have a distinct notion I wished to find something.
Perhaps, unconsciously, I hoped I would find that something, some
profound and redeeming cause, some merciful explanation, some
convincing shadow of an excuse. I see well enough now that I hoped for
the impossible- for the laying of what is the most obstinate ghost
of man's creation, of the uneasy doubt uprising like a mist, secret
and gnawing like a worm, and more chilling than the certitude of
death- the doubt of the sovereign power enthroned in a fixed
standard of conduct. It is the hardest thing to stumble against; it is
the thing that breeds yelling panics and good little quiet villainies;
it's the true shadow of calamity. Did I believe in a miracle? and
why did I desire it so ardently? Was it for my own sake that I
wished to find some shadow of an excuse for that young fellow whom I
had never seen before, but whose appearance alone added a touch of
personal concern to the thoughts suggested by the knowledge of his
weakness- made it a thing of mystery and terror- like a hint of a
destructive fate ready for us all whose youth- in its day- had
resembled his youth? I fear that such was the secret motive of my
prying. I was, and no mistake, looking for a miracle. The only thing
that at this distance of time strikes me as miraculous is the extent
of my imbecility. I positively hoped to obtain from that battered
and shady invalid some exorcism against the ghost of doubt. I must
have been pretty desperate too, for, without a loss of time, after a
few indifferent and friendly sentences which he answered with
languid readiness, just as any decent sick man would do, I produced
the word Patna wrapped up in a delicate question as in a wisp of floss
silk. I was delicate selfishly; I did not want to startle him; I had
no solicitude for him; I was not furious with him and sorry for him:
his experience was of no importance, his redemption would have had
no point for me. He had grown old in minor iniquities, and could no
longer inspire aversion or pity. He repeated Patna? interrogatively,
seemed to make a short effort of memory and said: 'Quite right. I am
an old stager out here. I saw her go down.' I made ready to vent my
indignation at such a stupid lie, when he added smoothly. 'She was
full of reptiles.'
  "This made me pause. What did he mean? The unsteady phantom of
terror behind his glassy eyes seemed to stand still and look into mine
wistfully. 'They turned me out of my bunk in the middle watch to
look at her sinking,' he pursued in a reflective tone. His voice
sounded alarmingly strong all at once. I was sorry for my folly. There
was no snowy-winged coif of a nursing sister to be seen flitting in
the perspective of the ward; but away in the middle of a long row of
empty iron bedsteads an accident case from some ship in the Roads
sat up brown and gaunt with a white bandage set rakishly on the
forehead. Suddenly my interesting invalid shot out an arm thin like
a tentacle and clawed my shoulder. 'Only my eyes were good enough to
see. I am famous for my eyesight. That's why they called me, I expect.
None of them was quick enough to see her go, but they saw that she was
gone right enough, and sang out together- like this.'... A wolfish
howl searched the very recesses of my soul. 'Oh! make 'im dry up,'
whined the accident case irritably. 'You don't believe me, I suppose,'
went on the other, with an air of ineffable conceit. 'I tell you there
are no such eyes as mine this side of the Persian Gulf. Look under the
bed.'
                                                
  "Of course I stooped instantly. I defy anybody not to have done
so. 'What can you see?' he asked. 'Nothing,' I said, feeling awfully
ashamed of myself. He scrutinised my face with wild and withering
contempt. 'Just so,' he said, 'but if I were to look I could see-
there's no eyes like mine, I tell you.' Again he clawed, pulling at me
downwards in his eagerness to relieve himself by a confidential
communication. 'Millions of pink toads. There's no eyes like mine.
Millions of pink toads. It's worse than seeing a ship sink. I could
look at sinking ships and smoke my pipe all day long. Why don't they
give me back my pipe? I would get a smoke while I watched these toads.
The ship was full of them. They've got to be watched, you know.' He
winked facetiously. The perspiration dripped on him off my head, my
drill coat clung to my wet back: the afternoon breeze swept
impetuously over the row of bedsteads, the stiff folds of curtains
stirred perpendicularly, rattling on brass rods, the covers of empty
beds blew about noiselessly near the, bare floor all along the line,
and I shivered to the very marrow. The soft wind of the tropics played
in that naked ward as bleak as a winter's gale in an old barn at home.
'Don't you let him start his hollering, mister,' hailed from afar
the accident case in a distressed angry shout that came ringing
between the walls like a quavering call down a tunnel. The clawing
hand hauled at my shoulder; he leered at me knowingly. 'The ship was
full of them, you know, and we had to clear out on the strict Q.T.,'
he whispered with extreme rapidity. 'All pink. All pink- as big as
mastiffs, with an eye on the top of the head and claws all round their
ugly mouths. Ough! Ough!' Quick jerks as of galvanic shocks
disclosed under the flat coverlet the outlines of meagre and
agitated legs; he let go my shoulder and reached after something in
the air; his body trembled tensely like a released harp-string; and
while I looked down, the spectral horror in him broke through his
glassy gaze. Instantly his face of an old soldier, with its noble
and calm outlines, became decomposed before my eyes by the
corruption of stealthy cunning, of an abominable caution and of
desperate fear. He restrained a cry- 'Ssh! what are they doing now
down there?' he asked, pointing to the floor with fantastic
precautions of voice and gesture, whose meaning, borne upon my mind in
a lurid flash, made me very sick of my cleverness. 'They are all
asleep,' I answered, watching him narrowly. That was it. That's what
he wanted to hear; these were the exact words that could calm him.
He drew a long breath. 'Ssh! Quiet, steady. I am an old stager out
here. I know them brutes. Bash in the head of the first that stirs.
There's too many of them, and she won't swim more than ten minutes.'
He panted again. 'Hurry up,' he yelled suddenly, and went on in a
steady scream: "They are all awake- millions of them. They are
trampling on me! Wait! Oh, wait! I'll smash them in heaps like
flies. Wait for me! Help! H-e-elp!' An interminable and sustained howl
completed my discomfiture. I saw in the distance the accident case
raise deplorably both his hands to his bandaged head; a dresser,
aproned to the chin, showed himself in the vista of the ward, as if
seen in the small end of a telescope. I confessed myself fairly
routed, and without more ado, stepping out through one of the long
windows, escaped into the outside gallery. The howl pursued me like
a vengeance. I turned into a deserted landing, and suddenly all became
very still and quiet around me, and I descended the bare and shiny
staircase in a silence that enabled me to compose my distracted
thoughts. Down below I met one of the resident surgeons who was
crossing the courtyard and stopped me. 'Been to see your man, Captain?
I think we may let him go to-morrow. These fools have no notion of
taking care of themselves, though. I say, we've got the chief engineer
of that pilgrim ship here. A curious case. D.T.'s of the worst kind.
He has been drinking hard in that Greek's or Italian's grogshop for
three days. What can you expect? Four bottles of that kind of brandy a
day, I am told. Wonderful, if true. Sheeted with boiler-iron inside, I
should think. The head, ah! the head, of course, gone, but the curious
part is there's some sort of method in his raving. I am trying to find
out. Most unusual- that thread of logic in such a delirium.
Traditionally he ought to see snakes, but he doesn't. Good old
tradition's at a discount nowadays. Eh! His- er- visions are
batrachian. Ha! ha! No, seriously, I never remember being so
interested in a case of jim-jams before. He ought to be dead, don't
you know, after such a festive experiment. Oh! he is a tough object.
Four-and-twenty years of the tropics too. You ought really to take a
peep at him. Noble-looking old boozer. Most extraordinary man I ever
met- medically, of course. Won't you?'
  "I have been all along exhibiting the usual polite signs of
interest, but now assuming an air of regret I murmured of want of
time, and shook hands in a hurry. 'I say,' he cried after me, 'he
can't attend that inquiry. Is his evidence material, you think?'
  "'Not in the least,' I called back from the gateway."


                             CHAPTER SIX
-
  "THE authorities were evidently of the same opinion. The inquiry was
not adjourned. It was held on the appointed day to satisfy the law,
and it was well attended because of its human interest, no doubt.
There was no incertitude as to facts- as to the one material fact, I
mean. How the Patna came by her hurt it was impossible to find out;
the court did not expect to find out; and in the whole audience
there was not a man who cared. Yet, as I've told you, all the
sailors in the port attended, and the waterside business was fully
represented. Whether they knew it or not, the interest that drew
them there was purely psychological- the expectation of some essential
disclosure as to the strength, the power, the horror, of human
emotions. Naturally nothing of the kind could be disclosed. The
examination of the only man able and willing to face it was beating
futilely round the well-known fact, and the play of questions upon
it was as instructive as the tapping with a hammer on an iron box,
were the object to find out what's inside. However, an official
inquiry could not be any other thing. Its object was not the
fundamental why, but the superficial how, of this affair.
  "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. One of the assessors was
a sailing-ship skipper with a reddish beard, and of a pious
disposition. Brierly was the other. Big Brierly. Some of you must have
heard of Big Brierly- the captain of the crack ship of the Blue Star
line. That's the man.
  "He seemed consumedly bored by the honour thrust upon him. He had
never in his life made a mistake, never had an accident, never a
mishap, never a check in his steady rise, and he seemed to be one of
those lucky fellows who know nothing of indecision, much less of
self-mistrust. At thirty-two he had one of the best commands going
in the Eastern trade- and, what's more, he thought a lot of what he
had. There was nothing like it in the world, and I suppose if you
had asked him point-blank he would have confessed that in his
opinion there was not such another commander. The choice had fallen
upon the right man. The rest of mankind that did not command the
sixteen-knot steel steamer Ossa were rather poor creatures. He had
saved lives at sea, had rescued ships in distress, had a gold
chronometer presented to him by the underwriters, and a pair of
binoculars with a suitable inscription from foreign Government, in
commemoration of these services. He was acutely aware of his merits
and of his rewards. I liked him well enough, though some I know- meek,
friendly men at that- couldn't stand him at any price. I haven't the
slightest doubt he considered himself vastly my superior- indeed,
had you been Emperor of East and West, you could not have ignored your
inferiority in his presence- but I couldn't get up any real
sentiment of offence. He did not despise me for anything I could help,
for anything I was- don't you know? I was a negligible quantity simply
because I was not the fortunate man of the earth, not Montague Brierly
in command of the Ossa, not the owner of an inscribed gold chronometer
and of silver-mounted binoculars testifying to the excellence of my
seamanship and to my indomitable pluck; not possessed of an acute
sense of my merits and of my rewards, besides the love and worship
of a black retriever, the most wonderful of its kind- for never was
such a man loved thus by such a dog. No doubt, to have all this forced
upon you was exasperating enough; but when I reflected that I was
associated in these fatal disadvantages with twelve hundred millions
of other more or less human beings, I found I could bear my share of
his good-natured and contemptuous pity for the sake of something
indefinite and attractive in the man. 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.
  "No wonder Jim's case bored him, and while I thought with
something akin to fear of the immensity of his contempt for the
young man under examination, he was probably holding silent inquiry
into his own case. The verdict must have been of unmitigated guilt,
and he took the secret of the evidence with him in that leap into
the sea. If I understand anything of men, the matter was no doubt of
the gravest import, one of those trifles that awaken ideas- start into
life some thought with which a man unused to such a companionship
finds it impossible to live. I am in a position to know that it wasn't
money, and it wasn't drink, and it wasn't woman. He jumped overboard
at sea barely a week after the end of the inquiry, and less than three
days after leaving port on his outward passage; as though on that
exact spot in the midst of waters he had suddenly perceived the
gates of the other world flung open wide for his reception.
  "Yet it was not a sudden impulse. His grey-headed mate, a first-rate
sailor and a nice old chap with strangers, but in his relations with
his commander the surliest chief officer I've ever seen, would tell
the story with tears in his eyes. It appears that when he came on deck
in the morning Brierly had been writing in the chart-room. 'It was ten
minutes to four,' he said, 'and the middle watch was not relieved
yet of course. He heard my voice on the bridge speaking to the
second mate, and called me in. I was loth to go, and that's the truth,
Captain Marlow- I couldn't stand poor Captain Brierly, I tell you with
shame; we never know what a man is made of. He had been promoted
over too many heads, not counting my own, and he had a damnable
trick of making you feel small, nothing but by the way he said "Good
morning." I never addressed him, sir, but on matters of duty, and then
it was as much as I could do to keep a civil tongue in my head.' (He
flattered himself there. I often wondered how Brierly could put up
with his manners for more than half a voyage.) 'I've a wife and
children,' he went on, 'and I had been ten years in the Company,
always expecting the next command- more fool I. Says he, just like
this: "Come in here, Mr. Jones," in that swagger voice of his- "Come
in here, Mr. Jones." In I went. "We'll lay down her position," says
he, stooping over the chart, a pair of dividers in hand. By the
standing orders, the officer going off duty would have done that at
the end of his watch. However, I said nothing, and looked on while
he marked off the ship's position with a tiny cross and wrote the date
and the time. I can see him this moment writing his neat figures:
seventeen, eight, four A.M. The year would be written in red ink at
the top of the chart. He never used his charts more than a year,
Captain Brierly didn't. I've the chart now. When he had done he stands
looking down at the mark he had made and smiling to himself, then
looks up at me. "Thirty-two miles more as she goes," says he, "and
then we shall be clear, and you may alter the course twenty degrees to
the southward."
                                                  
  "'We were passing to the north of the Hector Bank that voyage. I
said, "All right, sir," wondering what he was fussing about, since I
had to call him before altering the course anyhow. Just then eight
bells were struck: we came out on the bridge, and the second mate
before going off mentions in the usual way- "Seventy-one on the
log." Captain Brierly looks at the compass and then all round. It
was dark and clear, and all the stars were out as plain as on a frosty
night in high latitudes. Suddenly he says with a sort of a little
sigh: "I am going aft, and shall set the log at zero for you myself,
so that there can be no mistake. Thirty-two miles more on this
course and then you are safe. Let's see- the correction on the log
is six per cent. additive; say, then, thirty by the dial to run, and
you may come twenty degrees to starboard at once. No use losing any
distance- is there?" I had never heard him talk so much at a
stretch, and to no purpose as it seemed to me. I said nothing. He went
down the ladder, and the dog, that was always at his heels whenever he
moved, night or day, followed, sliding nose first, after him. I
heard his boot-heels tap, tap on the after-deck, then he stopped and
spoke to the dog- "Go back, Rover. On the bridge, boy! Go on- get."
Then he calls out to me from the dark, "Shut that dog up in the
chart-room, Mr. Jones- will you?"
  "'This was the last time I heard his voice, Captain Marlow. These
are the last words he spoke in the hearing of any living human
being, sir." At this point the old chap's voice got quite unsteady.
'He was afraid the poor brute would jump after him, don't you see?' he
pursued with a quaver. 'Yes, Captain Marlow. He set the log for me;
he- would you believe it?- he put a drop of oil in it too. There was
the oil-feeder where he left it near by. The boatswain's mate got
the hose along aft to wash down at half-past five; by-and-by he knocks
off and runs up on the bridge- "Will you please come aft, Mr.
Jones," he says. "There's a funny thing. I don't like to touch it." It
was Captain Brierly's gold chronometer watch carefully hung under
the rail by its chain.
  "'As soon as my eyes fell on it something struck me, and I knew,
sir. My legs got soft under me. It was as if I had seen him go over;
and I could tell how far behind he was left too. The taffrail-log
marked eighteen miles and three-quarters, and four iron
belaying-pins were missing round the mainmast. Put them in his pockets
to help him down, I suppose; but, Lord! what's four iron pins to a
powerful man like Captain Brierly. Maybe his confidence in himself was
just shook a bit at the last. That's the only sign of fluster he
gave in his whole life, I should think; but I am ready to answer for
him, that once over he did not try to swim a stroke, the same as he
would have had pluck enough to keep up all day long on the bare chance
had he fallen overboard accidentally. Yes, sir. He was second to none-
if he said so himself, as I heard him once. He had written two letters
in the middle watch, one to the Company and the other to me. He gave
me a lot of instructions as to the passage- I had been in the trade
before he was out of his time- and no end of hints as to my conduct
with our people in Shanghai, so that I should keep the command of
the Ossa. He wrote like a father would to a favourite son, Captain
Marlow, and I was five-and-twenty years his senior and had tasted salt
water before he was fairly breeched. In his letter to the owners- it
was left open for me to see- he said that he had always done his
duty by them- up to that moment and even now he was not betraying
their confidence, since he was leaving the ship to as competent a
seaman as could be found- meaning me, sir, meaning me! He told them
that if the last act of his life didn't take away all his credit
with them, they would give weight to my faithful service and to his
warm recommendation, when about to fill the vacancy made by his death.
And much more like this, sir. I couldn't believe my eyes. It made me
feel queer all over,' went on the old chap in great perturbation,
and squashing something in the corner of his eye with the end of a
thumb as broad as a spatula. 'You would think, sir, he had jumped
overboard only to give an unlucky man a last show to get on. What with
the shock of him going in this awful rash way, and thinking myself a
made man by that chance, I was nearly off my chump for a week. But
no fear. The captain of the Pelion was shifted into the Ossa- came
aboard in Shanghai- a little popinjay, sir, in a grey check suit, with
his hair parted in the middle. "Aw- I am- aw- your new captain,
Mister- Mister- aw- Jones." He was drowned in scent- fairly stunk with
it, Captain Marlow. I daresay it was the look I gave him that made him
stammer. He mumbled something about my natural disappointment- I had
better know at once that his chief officer got the promotion to the
Pelion- he had nothing to do with it, of course- supposed the office
knew best- sorry.... Says I, "Don't you mind old Jones, sir; damn
his soul, he's used to it." I could see directly I had shocked his
delicate ear, and while we sat at our first tiffin together he began
to find fault in a nasty manner with this and that in the ship. I
never heard such a voice out of a Punch and Judy show. I set my
teeth hard, and glued my eyes to my plate, and held my peace as long
as I could; but at last I had to say something: up he jumps tiptoeing,
ruffling all his pretty plumes, like a little fighting cock. "You'll
find you have a different person to deal with than the late Captain
Brierly." "I've found it," says I, very glum, but pretending to be
mighty busy with my steak. "You are an old ruffian, Mr.- aw- Jones;
and what's more, you are known for an old ruffian in the employ," he
squeaks at me. The damned bottle-washers stood about listening with
their mouths stretched from ear to ear. "I may be a hard case,"
answers I, "but I ain't so far gone as to put up with the sight of you
sitting in Captain Brierly's chair." With that I lay down my knife and
fork. "You would like to sit in it yourself- that's where the shoe
pinches," he sneers. I left the saloon, got my rags together, and
was on the quay with all my dunnage about my feet before the
stevedores had turned to again. Yes. Adrift- on shore- after ten
years' service- and with a poor woman and four children six thousand
miles off depending on my half-pay for every mouthful they ate. Yes,
sir! I chucked it rather than hear Captain Brierly abused. He left
me his night-glasses- here they are; and he wished me to take care
of the dog- here he is. Hallo, Rover, poor boy. Where's the captain,
Rover?' The dog looked up at us with mournful yellow eyes, gave one
desolate bark, and crept under the table.
  "All this was taking place, more than two years afterwards, on board
that nautical ruin the Fire-Queen this Jones had got charge of-
quite by a funny accident, too- from Matherson- mad Matherson they
generally called him- the same who used to hang out in Hai-phong,
you know, before the occupation days. The old chap snuffled on-
  "'Ay, sir, Captain Brierly will be remembered here, if there's no
other place on earth. I wrote fully to his father and did not get a
word in reply- neither Thank you, nor Go to the devil!- nothing!
Perhaps they did not want to know.'
                                                 
  "The sight of that watery-eyed old Jones mopping his bald head
with a red cotton handkerchief, the sorrowing yelp of the dog, the
squalor of that fly-blown cuddy which was the only shrine of his
memory, threw a veil of inexpressibly mean pathos over Brierly's
remembered figure, the posthumous revenge of fate for that belief in
his own splendour which had almost cheated his life of its
legitimate terrors. Almost! Perhaps wholly. Who can tell what
flattering view he had induced himself to take of his own suicide?
  "'Why did he commit the rash act, Captain Marlow- can you think?'
asked Jones, pressing his palms together. 'Why? It beats me! Why?'
He slapped his low and wrinkled forehead. 'If he had been poor and old
and in debt- and never a show- or else mad. But he wasn't of the
kind that goes mad, not he. You trust me. What a mate don't know about
his skipper isn't worth knowing. Young, healthy, well off, no
cares.... I sit here sometimes thinking, thinking, till my head fairly
begins to buzz. There was some reason.'
  "'You may depend on it, Captain Jones," said I, 'it wasn't
anything that would have disturbed much either of us two,' I said; 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.'
  "Of course the recollection of my last conversation with Brierly
is tinged with the knowledge of his end that followed so close upon
it. I spoke with him for the last time during the progress of the
inquiry. It was after the first adjournment, and he came up with me in
the street. He was in a state of irritation, which I noticed with
surprise, his usual behaviour when he condescended to converse being
perfectly cool, with a trace of amused tolerance, as if the
existence of his interlocutor had been a rather good joke. 'They
caught me for that inquiry, you see,' he began, and for a while
enlarged complainingly upon the inconveniences of daily attendance
in court. 'And goodness knows how long it will last. Three days, I
suppose.' I heard him out in silence; in my then opinion it was a
way as good as another of putting on side. 'What's the use of it? It
is the stupidest set out you can imagine,' he pursued, hotly. I
remarked that there was no option. He interrupted me with a sort of
pent-up violence. 'I feel like a fool all the time.' I looked up at
him. This was going very far- for Brierly- when talking of Brierly. He
stopped short, and seizing the lappel of my coat, gave it a slight
tug. 'Why are we tormenting that young chap?' he asked. This
question chimed in so well to the tolling of a certain thought of mine
that, with the image of the absconding renegade in my eye, I
answered at once, 'Hanged if I know, unless it be that he lets you.' I
was astonished to see him fall into line, so to speak, with that
utterance, which ought to have been tolerably cryptic. He said
angrily, 'Why, yes. Can't he see that wretched skipper of his has
cleared out? What does he expect to happen? Nothing can save him. He's
done for.' We walked on in silence a few steps. 'Why eat all that
dirt?' he exclaimed, with an oriental energy of expression- about
the only sort of energy you can find a trace of east of the fiftieth
meridian. I wondered greatly at the direction of his thoughts, but now
I strongly suspect it was strictly in character: at bottom poor
Brierly must have been thinking of himself. I pointed out to him
that the skipper of the Patna was known to have feathered his nest
pretty well, and could procure almost anywhere the means of getting
away. With Jim it was otherwise: the Government was keeping him in the
Sailors' Home for the time being, and probably he hadn't a penny in
his pocket to bless himself with. It costs some money to run away.
'Does it? Not always,' he said, with a bitter laugh, and to some
further remark of mine- 'Well, then, let him creep twenty feet
underground and stay there! By heavens! I would.' I don't know why his
tone provoked me, and I said, 'There is a kind of courage in facing it
out as he does, knowing very well that if he went away nobody would
trouble to run after him.' 'Courage be hanged!' growled Brierly. 'That
sort of courage is of no use to keep a man straight, and I don't
care a snap for such courage. If you were to say it was a kind of
cowardice now- of softness. I tell you what, I will put up two hundred
rupees if you put up another hundred and undertake to make the
beggar clear out early to-morrow morning. The fellow's a gentleman
if he ain't fit to be touched- he will understand. He must! This
infernal publicity is too shocking: there he sits while all these
confounded natives, serangs, lascars, quartermasters, are giving
evidence that's enough to burn a man to ashes with shame. This is
abominable. Why, Marlow, don't you think, don't you feel, that this is
abominable; don't you now- come- as a seaman? If he went away all this
would stop at once.' Brierly said these words with a most unusual
animation, and made as if to reach after his pocket-book. I restrained
him, and declared coldly that the cowardice of these four men did
not seem to me a matter of such great importance. 'And you call
yourself a seaman. I suppose,' he pronounced, angrily. I said that's
what I called myself, and I hoped I was too. He heard me out, and made
a gesture with his big arm that seemed to deprive me of my
individuality, to push me away into the crowd. 'The worst of it,' he
said, 'is that all you fellows have no sense of dignity; you don't
think enough of what you are supposed to be.'
  "We had been walking slowly meantime, and now stopped opposit