Lord Jim
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
schnapps. 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 4
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