Lord Jim
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 dare say 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; dam’ 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,
Mister--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 lapel 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 opposite the
harbour office, in sight of the very spot from which the immense captain
of the Patna had vanished as utterly as a tiny feather blown away in a
hurricane. I smiled. Brierly went on: “This is a disgrace. We’ve got all
kinds amongst us--some anointed scoundrels in the lot; but, hang it, we
must preserve professional decency or we become no better than so many
tinkers going about loose. We are trusted. Do you understand?--trusted!
Frankly, I don’t care a snap for all the pilgrims that ever came out of
Asia, but a decent man would not have behaved like this to a full cargo
of old rags in bales. We aren’t an organised body of men, and the only
thing that holds us together is just the name for that kind of decency.
Such an affair destroys one’s confidence. A man may go pretty near
through his whole sea-life without any call to show a stiff upper lip.
But when the call comes . . . Aha! . . . If I . . .”
‘He broke off, and in a changed tone, “I’ll give you two hundred rupees
now, Marlow, and you just talk to that chap. Confound him! I wish he had
never come out here. Fact is, I rather think some of my people know his.
The old man’s a parson, and I remember now I met him once when staying
with my cousin in Essex last year. If I am not mistaken, the old
chap seemed rather to fancy his sailor son. Horrible. I can’t do it
myself--but you . . .”
‘Thus, apropos of Jim, I had a glimpse of the real Brierly a few days
before he committed his reality and his sham together to the keeping of
the sea. Of course I declined to meddle. The tone of this last “but
you” (poor Brierly couldn’t help it), that seemed to imply I was no
more noticeable than an insect, caused me to look at the proposal with
indignation, and on account of that provocation, or for some other
reason, I became positive in my mind that the inquiry was a severe
punishment to that Jim, and that his facing it--practically of his own
free will--was a redeeming feature in his abominable case. I hadn’t been
so sure of it before. Brierly went off in a huff. At the time his state
of mind was more of a mystery to me than it is now.
‘Next day, coming into court late, I sat by myself. Of course I could
not forget the conversation I had with Brierly, and now I had them both