Lord Jim
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 condemnation, 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 to-morrow, 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 a
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 6000 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