Lord Jim
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 2
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 a 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 dullness 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