APDL Eductation Resources/APDL Eductation Resources.iso/text/books/lord_jim/CHAP1_9

Text File | 1994-09-03 | 187.1 KB | 3,202 lines

                       AUTHOR'S NOTE


When this novel first appeared in book form a notion got about
that I had been bolted away with. Some reviewers maintained that
the work starting as a short story had got beyond the writer's con-
trol. One or two discovered internal evidence of the fact, which
seemed to amuse them. They pointed out the limitations of the
narrative form. They argued that no man could have been expected
to talk all that time, and other men to listen so long. It was not,
they said, very credible.

After thinking it over for something like sixteen years, I am not
so sure about that. Men have been known, both in the tropics and
in the temperate zone, to sit up half the night 'swapping yarns'.
This, however, is but one yarn, yet with interruptions affording
some measure of relief; and in regard to the listeners' endurance,
the postulate must be accepted that the story was interesting. It is
the necessary preliminary assumption. If I hadn't believed that it
was interesting I could never have begun to write it. As to the mere
physical possibility we all know that some speeches in Parliament
have taken nearer six than three hours in delivery; whereas all that
part of the book which is Marlow's narrative can be read through
aloud, I should say, in less than three hours. Besides -- though I
have kept strictly all such insignificant details out of the tale -- we
may presume that there must have been refreshments on that night,
a glass of mineral water of some sort to help the narrator on.

But, seriously, the truth of the matter is, that my first thought
was of a short story, concerned only with the pilgrim ship episode;
nothing more. And that was a legitimate conception. After writing
a few pages, however, I became for some reason discontented and
I laid them aside for a time. I didn't take them out of the drawer till
the late Mr. William Blackwood suggested I should give something
again to his magazine.

It was only then that I perceived that the pilgrim ship episode
was a good starting-point for a free and wandering tale; that it was
an event, too, which could conceivably colour the whole 'sentiment
of existence' in a simple and sensitive character. But all these pre-
liminary moods and stirrings of spirit were rather obscure at the
time, and they do not appear clearer to me now after the lapse of so
many years.

The few pages I had laid aside were not without their weight in
the choice of subject. But the whole was re-written deliberately.
When I sat down to it I knew it would be a long book, though I
didn't foresee that it would spread itsetlf over thirteen numbers of
'Maga'.

I have been asked at times whether this was not the book of mine
I liked best. I am a great foe to favouritism in public life, in private
life, and even in the delicate relationsbip of an author to his works.
As a matter of principle I will have no favourites; but I don't go so
far as to feel grieved and annoyed by the preference some people
give to my Lord Jim. I won't even say that I 'fail to understand . . .'
No! But once I had occasion to be puzzled and surprised.

A friend of mine returning from Italy had talked with a lady there
who did not like the book. I regretted that, of course, but what
surprised me was the ground of her dlslike. 'You know,' she said,
'it is all so morbid.'

The pronouncement gave me food for an hour's anxious thought.
Finally I arrived at the conclusion that, making due allowances for
the subject itself being rather foreign to women's normal sensibili-
ties, the lady could not have been an Italian. I wonder whether she
was European at all? In any case, no Latin temperament would
have perceived anything morbid in the acute consciousness of lost
honour. Such a consciousness may be wrong, or it may be right, or
it may be condemned as artificial; and, perhaps, my Jim is not a
type of wide commonness. But I can safely assure my readers that
he is not the product of coldly perverted thinking. He's not a figure
of Northern Mists either. One sunny morning, in the commonplace
surroundings of an Eastern roadstead, I saw his form pass by -
appealing - significant - under a cloud - perfectly silent. Which is
as it should be. It was for me, with all the sympathy of which I was
capable, to seek fit words for his meaning. He was 'one of us'.

                                                         J.C.

                                                        1917.


                        LORD JIM


                        CHAPTER 1


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 dis-
played 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 it 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 shellfish 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 ferry-boats 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. l 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 earnest-
ness 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 hatch-
way; 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 devo-
tion. 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 acci-
dent, 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 precari-
ously 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 mur-
mur, 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 cam-
pongs, 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 tum-
bled 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 mysteri-
ously into the sea evening after evening, preserving the same dis-
tance 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 stem 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 nights descended on her like a benediction.


                      CHAPTER 3


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 circu-
lar 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 tender-
ness 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 con-
stantly dissolving in the air. Two Malays, silent and almost motion-
less, 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 catch-
ing 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 unattain-
able 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 it;
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 an
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 lan-
guor 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
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 mat-
ched: 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 indiffer-
ent 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 differ-
ent.... 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 con-
sideration 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 respect-
fully -- 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 verti-
cally 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 suc-
cession 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 ques-
tions, 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 ques-
tions 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 float-
ing 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 water-line.' He
paused.

'Yes,' said the big assessor, with a dreamy smile at the blotting-
pad; his fingers played incessantly, 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 sky-
light 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 vivid-
ness; 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 exist-
ence 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!" -- some-
thing 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 motion-
less 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 5


'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 har-
row 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 exer-
tion. 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 mysteri-
ous, 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 puck-
ered 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 into 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 princi-
pal 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 child-
like 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 -- on 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, some-
thing 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 realise 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-pul-
lers, 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 appar-
ition wanted. It spoke in a voice harsh and lugubrious but intrepid,
and little by little it dawned upon Archie that this was a develop-
ment 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 resembled 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 sun-
shine. 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 recognised 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 qnder 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: curi-
osity 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 with-
out 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 voy-
age." 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 per-
dition, 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 sacri-
fice 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, look-
ing 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 strain-
ing 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 lackadaisi-
cal 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 broom-
stick. 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 centi-
pedes. 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 fam-
ous 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 merci-
ful 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 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 casell in a disuessed 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 grog-shop 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 inter-
ested 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 had 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 6


'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 funda-
mental 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 crea-
tures. 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 some 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 sea-
manship 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-satisfac-
tion 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 unmiti-
gated 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 out-
ward 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. lones.' 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. How-
ever, 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 south-
ward.'

' "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. lust 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 dis-
tance -- 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 boat --
swain'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 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-wash-
ers 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 Mather-
son 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 legit-
imate 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 think-
ing, 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 attend-
ance 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 hmm."
"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 abomin-
able; 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 scoun-
drels 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 -- practi-
cally 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 under my eyes. The demeanour of one suggested gloomy
impudence and of the other a contemptuous boredom; yet one atti-
tude might not have been truer than the other, and I was aware that
one was not true. Brierly was not bored -- he was exasperated; and
if so, then Jim might not have been impudent. According to my
theory he was not. I imagined he was hopeless. Then it was that our
glances met. They met, and the look he gave me was discouraging
of any intention I might have had to speak to him. Upon either
hypothesis -- insolence or despair -- I felt I could be of no use to
him. This was the second day of the proceedings. Very soon after
that exchange of glances the inquiry was adjourned again to the
next day. The white men began to troop out at once. Jim had been
told to stand down some time before, and was able to leave amongst
the first. I saw his broad shoulders and his head outlined in the light
of the door, and while I made my way slowly out talking with some
one -- some stranger who had addressed me casually -- I could see
him from within the court-room resting both elbows on the balus-
uade of the verandah and turning his back on the small stream of
people trickling down the few steps. There was a murmur of voices
and a shuffle of boots.

'The next case was that of assault and battery committed upon a
money-lender, I believe; and the defendant -- a venerable villager
with a straight white beard -- sat on a mat just outside the door with
his sons, daughters, sons-in-law, their wives, and, I should think,
half the population of his village besides, squatting or standing
around him. A slim dark woman, with part of her back and one
black shoulder bared, and with a thin gold ring in her nose, sud-
denly began to talk in a high-pitched, shrewish tone. The man with
me instinctively looked up at her. We were then just through the
door, passing behind Jim's burly back.

'Whether those villagers had brought the yellow dog with them,
I don't know. Anyhow, a dog was there, weaving himself in and
out amongst people's legs in that mute stealthy way native dogs
have, and my companion stumbled over him. The dog leaped away
without a sound; the man, raising his voice a little, said with a slow
laugh, "Look at that wretched cur," and directly afterwards we
became separated by a lot of people pushing in. I stood back for a
moment against the wall while the stranger managed to get down
the steps and disappeared. I saw Jim spin round. He made a step
forward and barred my way. We were alone; he glared at me with
an air of stubborn resolution. I became aware I was being held up,
so to speak, as if in a wood. The verandah was empty by then, the
noise and movement in court had ceased: a great silence fell upon
the building, in which, somewhere far within, an oriental voice
began to whine abjectly. The dog, in the very act of trying to sneak
in at the door, sat down hurriedly to hunt for fleas.

' "Did you speak to me?" asked Jim very low, and bending for-
ward, not so much towards me but at me, if you know what I mean.
I said "No" at once. Something in the sound of that quiet tone of
his warned me to be on my defence. I watched him. It was very
much like a meeting in a wood, only more uncertain in its issue,
since he could possibly want neither my money nor my life -- nothing
that I could simply give up or defend with a clear conscience. "You
say you didn't," he said, very sombre. "But I heard." "Some mis-
take," I protested, utterly at a loss, and never taking my eyes off
him. To watch his face was like watching a darkening sky before a
clap of thunder, shade upon shade imperceptibly coming on, the
doom growing mysteriously intense in the calm of maturing viol-
ence.

' "As far as I know, I haven't opened my lips in your hearing,"
I affirmed with perfect truth. I was getting a little angry, too, at the
absurdity of this encounter. It strikes me now I have never in my
life been so near a beating -- I mean it literally; a beating with fists.
I suppose I had some hazy prescience of that eventuality being in
the air. Not that he was actively threatening me. On the contrary,
he was strangely passive -- don't you know? but he was lowering,
and, though not exceptionally big, he looked generally fit to demol-
ish a wall. The most reassuring symptom I noticed was a kind of
slow and ponderous hesitation, which I took as a tribute to the
evident sincerity of my manner and of my tone. We faced each
other. In the court the assault case was proceeding. I caught the
words: "Well -- buffalo -- stick -- in the greatness of my fear...."

' "What did you mean by staring at me all the morning?" said
Jim at last. He looked up and looked down again. "Did you expect
us all to sit with downcast eyes out of regard for your susceptibili-
ties?" I retorted sharply. I was not going to submit meekly to any
of his nonsense. He raised his eyes again, and this time continued
to look me straight in the face. "No. That's all right," he pro-
nounced with an air of deliberating with himself upon the truth of
this statement -- "that's all right. I am going through with that.
Only" -- and there he spoke a little faster -- "I won't let any man
call me names outside this court. There was a fellow with you. You
spoke to him -- oh yes -- I know; 'tis all very fine. You spoke to him,
but you meant me to hear...."

'I assured him he was under some extraordinary delusion. I had
no conception how it came about. "You thought I would be afraid
to resent this," he said, with just a faint tinge of bitterness. I was
interested enough to discern the slightest shades of expression, but
I was not in the least enlightened; yet I don't know what in these
words, or perhaps just the intonation of that phrase, induced me
suddenly to make all possible allowances for him. I ceased to be
annoyed at my unexpected predicament. It was some mistake on
his part; he was blundering, and I had an intuition that the blunder
was of an odious, of an unfortunate nature. I was anxious to end
this scene on grounds of decency, just as one is anxious to cut short
some unprovoked and abominable confidence. The funniest part
was, that in the midst of all these considerations of the higher order
I was conscious of a certain trepidation as to the possibility -- nay,
likelihood -- of this encounter ending in some disreputable brawl
which could not possibly be explained, and would make me ridicu-
lous. I did not hanker after a three days' celebrity as the man who
got a black eye or something of the sort from the mate of the Patna.
He, in all probability, did not care what he did, or at any rate would
be fully justified in his own eyes. It took no magician to see he was
amazingly angry about something, for all his quiet and even torpid
demeanour. I don't deny I was extremely desirous to pacify him at
all costs, had I only known what to do. But I didn't know, as you
may well imagine. It was a blackness without a single gleam. We
confronted each other in silence. He hung fire for about fifteen
seconds, then made a step nearer, and I made ready to ward off a
blow, though I don't think I moved a muscle. "If you were as big
as two men and as strong as six," he said very softly, "I would tell
you what I think of you. You . . ." "Stop!" I exclaimed. This
checked him for a second. "Before you tell me what you think of
me," I went on quickly, "will you kindly tell me what it is I've
said or done?" During the pause that ensued he surveyed me with
indignation, while I made supernatural efforts of memory, in which
I was hindered by the oriental voice within the court-room expostul-
ating with impassioned volubility against a charge of falsehood.
Then we spoke almost together. "I will soon show you I am not,"
he said, in a tone suggestive of a crisis. "I declare I don't know," I
protested earnestly at the same time. He tried to crush me by the
scorn of his glance. "Now that you see I am not afraid you try to
crawl out of it," he said. "Who's a cur now -- hey?" Then, at last,
I understood.

'He had been scanning my features as though looking for a place
where he would plant his fist. "I will allow no man," . . . he mum-
bled threateningly. It was, indeed, a hideous mistake; he had given
himself away utterly. I can't give you an idea how shocked I was. I
suppose he saw some reflection of my feelings in my face, because
his expression changed just a little. "Good God!" I stammered,
"you don't think I . . ." "But I am sure I've heard," he persisted,
raising his voice for the first time since the beginning of this deplor-
able scene. Then with a shade of disdain he added, "It wasn't you,
then? Very well; I'll find the other." "Don't be a fool," I cried in
exasperation; "it wasn't that at all." "I've heard," he said again
with an unshaken and sombre perseverance.

'There may be those who could have laughed at his pertinacity;
I didn't. Oh, I didn't! There had never been a man so mercilessly
shown up by his own natural impulse. A single word had stripped
him of his discretion -- of that discretion which is more necessary
to the decencies of our inner being than clothing is to the decorum
of our body. "Don't be a fool," I repeated. "But the other man said
it, you don't deny that?" he pronounced distinctly, and looking in
my face without flinching. "No, I don't deny," said I, returning
his gaze. At last his eyes followed downwards the direction of my
pointing finger. He appeared at first uncomprehending, then con-
founded, and at last amazed and scared as though a dog had been
a monster and he had never seen a dog before. "Nobody dreamt of
insulting you," I said.

'He contemplated the wretched animal, that moved no more than
an effigy: it sat with ears pricked and its sharp muzzle pointed
into the doorway, and suddenly snapped at a fly like a piece of
mechanism.

'I looked at him. The red of his fair sunburnt complexion deep-
ened suddenly under the down of his cheeks, invaded his forehead,
spread to the roots of his curly hair. His ears became intensely
crimson, and even the clear blue of his eyes was darkened many
shades by the rush of blood to his head. His lips pouted a little,
trembling as though he had been on the point of bursting into tears.
I perceived he was incapable of pronouncing a word from the excess
of his humiliation. From disappointment too -- who knows? Perhaps
he looked forward to that hammering he was going to give me
for rehabilitation, for appeasement? Who can tell what relief he
expected from this chance of a row? He was naive enough to expect
anything; but he had given himself away for nothing in this case.
He had been frank with himself -- let alone with me -- in the wild
hope of arriving in that way at some effective refutation, and the
stars had been ironically unpropitious. He made an inarticulate
noise in his throat like a man imperfectly stunned by a blow on the
head. It was pitiful.

'I didn't catch up again with him till well outside the gate. I had
even to trot a bit at the last, but when, out of breath at his elbow,
I taxed him with running away, he said, "Never!" and at once
turned at bay. I explained I never meant to say he was running away
from me. "From no man -- from not a single man on earth," he
affirmed with a stubborn mien. I forbore to point out the one obvi-
ous exception which would hold good for the bravest of us; I
thought he would find out by himself very soon. He looked at me
patiently while I was thinking of something to say, but I could find
nothing on the spur of the moment, and he began to walk on. I kept
up, and, anxious not to lose him, I said hurriedly that I couldn't
think of leaving him under a false impression of my -- of my -- I
stammered. The stupidity of the phrase appalled me while I was
trying to finish it, but the power of sentences has nothing to do with
their sense or the logic of their construction. My idiotic mumble
seemed to please him. He cut it short by saying, with courteous
placidity that argued an immense power of self-control or else a
wonderful elasticity of spirits -- "Altogether my mistake." I mar-
velled greatly at this expression: he might have been alluding to
some trifling occurrence. Hadn't he understood its deplorable
meaning? "You may well forgive me," he continued, and went on
a little moodily, "All these staring people in court seemed such fools
that -- that it might have been as I supposed."

'This opened suddenly a new view of him to my wonder. I looked
at him curiously and met his unabashed and impenetrable eyes. "I
can't put up with this kind of thing," he said, very simply, "and I
don't mean to. In court it's different; I've got to stand that -- and I
can do it too."

'I don't pretend I understood him. The views he let me have of
himself were like those glimpses through the shifting rents in a
thick fog -- bits of vivid and vanishing detail, giving no connected
idea of the general aspect of a country. They fed one's curiosity
without satisfying it; they were no good for purposes of orientation.
Upon the whole he was misleading. That's how I summed him up
to myself after he left me late in the evening. I had been staying at
the Malabar House for a few days, and on my pressing invitation
he dined with me there.'


                     CHAPTER 7


'An outward-bound mail-boat had come in that afternoon, and
the big dining-room of the hotel was more than half full of people
with a-hundred-pounds-round-the-world tickets in their pockets.
There were married couples looking domesticated and bored with
each other in the midst of their travels; there were small parties
and large parties, and lone individuals dining solemnly or feasting
boisterously, but all thinking, conversing, joking, or scowling as
was their wont at home; and just as intelligently receptive of new
impressions as their trunks upstairs. Henceforth they would be
labelled as having passed through this and that place, and so would
be their luggage. They would cherish this distinction of their per-
sons, and preserve the gummed tickets on their portmanteaus as
documentary evidence, as the only permanent trace of their improv-
ing enterprise. The dark-faced servants tripped without noise over
the vast and polished floor; now and then a girl's laugh would be
heard, as innocent and empty as her mind, or, in a sudden hush of
crockery, a few words in an affected drawl from some wit embroid-
ering for the benefit of a grinning tableful the last funny story of
shipboard scandal. Two nomadic old maids, dressed up to kill,
worked acrimoniously through the bill of fare, whispering to each
other with faded lips, wooden-faced and bizarre, like two sumptu-
ous scarecrows. A little wine opened Jim's heart and loosened his
tongue. His appetite was good, too, I noticed. He seemed to have
buried somewhere the opening episode of our acquaintance. It was
like a thing of which there would be no more question in this world.
And all the time I had before me these blue, boyish eyes looking
straight into mine, this young face, these capable shoulders, the
open bronzed forehead with a white line under the roots of cluster-
ing fair hair, this appearance appealing at sight to all my sympathies:
this frank aspect, the artless smile, the youthful seriousness. He
was of the right sort; he was one of us. He talked soberly, with a
sort of composed unreserve, and with a quiet bearing that might
have been the outcome of manly self-control, of impudence, of
callousness, of a colossal unconsciousness, of a gigantic deception.
Who can tell! From our tone we might have been discussing a third
person, a football match, last year's weather. My mind floated in a
sea of conjectures till the turn of the conversation enabled me,
without being offensive, to remark that, upon the whole, this
inquiry must have been pretty trying to him. He darted his arm
across the tablecloth, and clutching my hand by the side of my
plate, glared fLxedly. I was startled. "It must be awfully hard," I
stammered, confused by this display of speechless feeling. "It is --
hell," he burst out in a muffled voice.

'This movement and these words caused two well-groomed male
globe-trotters at a neighbouring table to look up in alarm from their
iced pudding. I rose, and we passed into the front gallery for coffee
and cigars.

'On little octagon tables candles burned in glass globes; clumps
of stiff-leaved plants separated sets of cosy wicker chairs; and
between the pairs of columns, whose reddish shafts caught in a
long row the sheen from the tall windows, the night, glittering and
sombre, seemed to hang like a splendid drapery. The riding lights
of ships winked afar like setting stars, and the hills across the road-
stead resembled rounded black masses of arrested thunder-clouds.

' "I couldn't clear out," Jim began. "The skipper did -- that's all
very well for him. I couldn't, and I wouldn't. They all got out of it
in one way or another, but it wouldn't do for me."

'I listened with concentrated attention, not daring to stir in my
chair; I wanted to know -- and to this day I don't know, I can only
guess. He would be confident and depressed all in the same breath,
as if some conviction of innate blamelessness had checked the truth
writhing within him at every turn. He began by saying, in the tone
in which a man would admit his inability to jump a twenty-foot
wall, that he could never go home now; and this declaration recalled
to my mind what Brierly had said, "that the old parson in Essex
seemed to fancy his sailor son not a little."

'I can't tell you whether Jim knew he was especially "fancied,"
but the tone of his references to "my Dad" was calculated to give
me a notion that the good old rural dean was about the finest man
that ever had been worried by the cares of a large family since the
beginning of the world. This, though never stated, was implied
with an anxiety that there should be no mistake about it, which was
really very true and charming, but added a poignant sense of lives
far off to the other elements of the story. "He has seen it all in the
home papers by this time," said Jim. "I can never face the poor old
chap." I did not dare to lift my eyes at this till I heard him add, "I
could never explain. He wouldn't understand." Then I looked up.
He was smoking reflectively, and after a moment, rousing himself,
began to talk again. He discovered at once a desire that I should not
confound him with his partners in -- in crime, let us call it. He was
not one of them; he was altogether of another sort. I gave no sign
of dissent. I had no intention, for the sake of barren truth, to rob
him of the smallest particle of any saving grace that would come in
his way. I didn't know how much of it he believed himself. I didn't
know what he was playing up to -- if he was playing up to anything
at all -- and I suspect he did not know either; for it is my belief no
man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from
the grim shadow of self-knowledge. I made no sound all the time
he was wondering what he had better do after "that stupid inquiry
was over."

'Apparently he shared Brierly's contemptuous opinion of these
proceedings ordained by law. He would not know where to turn,
he confessed, clearly thinking aloud rather than talking to me. Cer-
tificate gone, career broken, no money to get away, no work that
he could obtain as far as he could see. At home he could perhaps
get something; but it meant going to his people for help, and that
he would not do. He saw nothing for it but ship before the mast --
could get perhaps a quartermaster's billet in some steamer. Would
do for a quartermaster.... "Do you think you would?" I asked
pitilessly. He jumped up, and going to the stone balustrade looked
out into the night. In a moment he was back, towering above my
chair with his youthful face clouded yet by the pain of a conquered
emotion. He had understood very well I did not doubt his ability
to steer a ship. In a voice that quavered a bit he asked me why did
I say that? I had been "no end kind" to him. I had not even laughed
at him when -- here he began to mumble -- "that mistake, you know --
made a confounded ass of myself." I broke in by saying rather
warmly that for me such a mistake was not a matter to laugh at. He
sat down and drank deliberately some coffee, emptying the small
cup to the last drop. "That does not mean I admit for a moment
the cap fitted," he declared distinctly. "No?" I said. "No," he
affirmed with quiet decision. "Do you know what you would have
done? Do you? And you don't think yourself" . . . he gulped some-
thing . . . "you don't think yourself a -- a -- cur?"

'And with this -- upon my honour! -- he looked up at me inquisi-
tively. It was a question it appears -- a bond-fide question! However,
he didn't wait for an answer. Before I could recover he went on,
with his eyes straight before him, as if reading off something written
on the body of the night. "It is all in being ready. I wasn't; not --
not then. I don't want to excuse myself; but I would like to explain --
I would like somebody to understand -- somebody -- one person at
least! You! Why not you?"

'It was solemn, and a little ridiculous too, as they always are,
those struggles of an individual trying to save from the fire his idea
of what his moral identity should be, this precious notion of a
convention, only one of the rules of the game, nothing more, but
all the same so terribly effective by its assumption of unlimited
power over natural instincts, by the awful penalties of its failure.
He began his story quietly enough. On board that Dale Line
steamer that had picked up these four floating in a boat upon the
discreet sunset glow of the sea, they had been after the first day
looked askance upon. The fat skipper told some story, the others
had been silent, and at first it had been accepted. You don't cross-
examine poor castaways you had the good luck to save, if not from
cruel death, then at least from cruel suffering. Afterwards, with
time to think it over, it might have struck the officers of the Avon-
dale that there was "something fishy" in the affair; but of course
they would keep their doubts to themselves. They had picked up
the captain, the mate, and two engineers of the steamer Patna sunk
at sea, and that, very properly, was enough for them. I did not ask
Jim about the nature of his feelings during the ten days he spent on
board. From the way he narrated that part I was at liberty to infer
he was partly stunned by the discovery he had made -- the discovery
about himself -- and no doubt was at work trying to explain it away
to the only man who was capable of appreciating all its tremendous
magnitude. You must understand he did not try to minimise its
importance. Of that I am sure; and therein lies his distinction. As
to what sensations he experienced when he got ashore and heard
the unforeseen conclusion of the tale in which he had taken such
a pitiful part, he told me nothing of them, and it is difficult to
imagine.

'I wonder whether he felt the ground cut from under his feet? I
wonder? But no doubt he managed to get a fresh foothold very
soon. He was ashore a whole fortnight waiting in the Sailors' Home,
and as there were six or seven men staying there at the time, I had
heard of him a little. Their languid opinion seemed to be that, in
addition to his other shortcomings, he was a sulky brute. He had
passed these days on the verandah, buried in a long chair, and
coming out of his place of sepulture only at meal-times or late at
night, when he wandered on the quays all by himself, detached
from his surroundings, irresolute and silent, like a ghost without a
home to haunt. "I don't think I've spoken three words to a living
soul in all that time," he said, making me very sorry for him; and
directly he added, "One of these fellows would have been sure to
blurt out something I had made up my mind not to put up with,
and I didn't want a row. No! Not then. I was too -- too . . . I had
no heart for it." "So that bulkhead held out after all," I remarked
cheerfully. "Yes," he murmured, "it held. And yet I swear to you
I felt it bulge under my hand. " "It's extraordinary what strains old
iron will stand sometimes," I said. Thrown back in his seat, his legs
stiffly out and arms hanging down, he nodded slightly several times.
You could not conceive a sadder spectacle. Suddenly he lifted his
head; he sat up; he slapped his thigh. "Ah! what a chance missed!
My God! what a chance missed!" he blazed out, but the ring of the
last "missed" resembled a cry wrung out by pain.

'He was silent again with a still, far-away look of fierce yearning
after that missed distinction, with his nostrils for an instant dilated,
sniffing the intoxicating breath of that wasted opportunity. If you
think I was either surprised or shocked you do me an injustice in
more ways than one! Ah, he was an imaginative beggar! He would
give himself away; he would give himself up. I could see in his
glance darted into the night all his inner being carried on, projected
headlong into the fanciful realm of recklessly heroic aspirations. He
had no leisure to regret what he had lost, he was so wholly and
naturally concerned for what he had failed to obtain. He was very
far away from me who watched him across three feet of space. With
every instant he was penetrating deeper into the impossible world
of romantic achievements. He got to the heart of it at last! A strange
look of beatitude overspread his features, his eyes sparkled in the
light of the candle burning between us; he positively smiled! He
had penetrated to the very heart -- to the very heart. It was an
ecstatic smile that your faces -- or mine either -- will never wear, my
dear boys. I whisked him back by saying, "If you had stuck to the
ship, you mean!"

'He turned upon me, his eyes suddenly amazed and full of pain,
with a bewildered, startled, suffering face, as though he had tum-
bled down from a star. Neither you nor I will ever look like this on
any man. He shuddered profoundly, as if a cold finger-tip had
touched his heart. Last of all he sighed.

'I was not in a merciful mood. He provoked one by his contradic-
tory indiscretions. "It is unfortunate you didn't know beforehand!"
I said with every unkind intention; but the perfidious shaft fell
harmless -- dropped at his feet like a spent arrow, as it were, and he
did not think of picking it up. Perhaps he had not even seen it.
Presently, lolling at ease, he said, "Dash it all! I tell you it bulged.
I was holding up my lamp along the angle-iron in the lower deck
when a flake of rust as big as the palm of my hand fell off the plate,
all of itself." He passed his hand over his forehead. "The thing
stirred and jumped off like something alive while I was looking at
it. " "That made you feel pretty bad," I observed casually. "Do you
suppose," he said, "that I was thinking of myself, with a hundred
and sixty people at my back, all fast asleep in that fore-'tween-deck
alone -- and more of them aft; more on the deck -- sleeping -- knowing
nothing about it -- three times as many as there were boats for,
even if there had been time? I expected to see the iron open out as
I stood there and the rush of water going over them as they lay....
What could I do -- what?"

'I can easily picture him to myself in the peopled gloom of the
cavernous place, with the light of the globe-lamp falling on a small
portion of the bulkhead that had the weight of the ocean on the
other side, and the breathing of unconscious sleepers in his ears. I
can see him glaring at the iron, startled by the falling rust, overbur-
dened by the knowledge of an imminent death. This, I gathered,
was the second time he had been sent forward by that skipper of
his, who, I rather think, wanted to keep him away from the bridge.
He told me that his first impulse was to shout and straightway
make all those people leap out of sleep into terror; but such an
overwhelming sense of his helplessness came over him that he was
not able to produce a sound. This is, I suppose, what people mean
by the tongue cleaving to the roof of the mouth. "Too dry," was
the concise expression he used in reference to this state. Without a
sound, then, he scrambled out on deck through the number one
hatch. A windsail rigged down there swung against him acciden-
tally, and he remembered that the light touch of the canvas on his
face nearly knocked him off the hatchway ladder.

'He confessed that his knees wobbled a good deal as he stood on
the foredeck looking at another sleeping crowd. The engines having
been stopped by that time, the steam was blowing off. Its deep
rumble made the whole night vibrate like a bass string. The ship
trembled to it.

'He saw here and there a head lifted off a mat, a vague form
uprise in sitting posture, listen sleepily for a moment, sink down
again into the billowy confusion of boxes, steam-winches, venti-
lators. He was aware all these people did not know enough to take
intelligent notice of that strange noise. The ship of iron, the men
with white faces, all the sights, all the sounds, everything on board
to that ignorant and pious multitude was strange alike, and as trust-
worthy as it would for ever remain incomprehensible. It occurred
to him that the fact was fortunate. The idea of it was simply terrible.

'You must remember he believed, as any other man would have
done in his place, that the ship would go down at any moment; the
bulging, rust-eaten plates that kept back the ocean, fatally must
give way, all at once like an undermined dam, and let in a sudden
and overwhelming flood. He stood still looking at these recumbent
bodies, a doomed man aware of his fate, surveying the silent com-
pany of the dead. They were dead! Nothing could save them! There
were boats enough for half of them perhaps, but there was no time.
No time! No time! It did not seem worth while to open his lips, to
stir hand or foot. Before he could shout three words, or make three
steps, he would be floundering in a sea whitened awfully by the
desperate struggles of human beings, clamorous with the distress
of cries for help. There was no help. He imagined what would
happen perfectly; he went through it all motionless by the hatchway
with the lamp in his hand -- he went through it to the very last
harrowing detail. I think he went through it again while he was
telling me these things he could not tell the court.

' "I saw as clearly as I see you now that there was nothing I could
do. It seemed to take all life out of my limbs. I thought I might just
as well stand where I was and wait. I did not think I had many
seconds . . ." Suddenly the steam ceased blowing off. The noise,
he remarked, had been distracting, but the silence at once became
intolerably oppressive.

' "I thought I would choke before I got drowned," he said.

'He protested he did not think of saving himself. The only dis-
tinct thought formed, vanishing, and re-forming in his brain, was:
eight hundred people and seven boats; eight hundred people and
seven boats.

' "Somebody was speaking aloud inside my head," he said a little
wildly. "Eight hundred people and seven boats -- and no time! Just
think of it." He leaned towards me across the little table, and I tried
to avoid his stare. "Do you think I was afraid of death?" he asked
in a voice very fierce and low. He brought down his open hand with
a bang that made the coffee-cups dance. "I am ready to swear I was
not -- I was not.... By God -- no!" He hitched himself upright and
crossed his arms; his chin fell on his breast.

'The soft clashes of crockery reached us faintly through the high
windows. There was a burst of voices, and several men came out in
high good-humour into the gallery. They were exchanging jocular
reminiscences of the donkeys in Cairo. A pale anxious youth step-
ping softly on long legs was being chaffed by a strutting and rubi-
cund globe-trotter about his purchases in the bazaar. "No, really --
do you think I've been done to that extent?" he inquired, very
earnest and deliberate. The band moved away, dropping into chairs
as they went; matches flared, illuminating for a second faces without
the ghost of an expression and the flat glaze of white shirt-fronts;
the hum of many conversations animated with the ardour of feasting
sounded to me absurd and infinitely remote.

' "Some of the crew were sleeping on the number one hatch
within reach of my arm," began Jim again.

'You must know they kept Kalashee watch in that ship, all hands
sleeping through the night, and only the reliefs of quartermasters
and look-out men being called. He was tempted to grip and shake
the shoulder of the nearest lascar, but he didn't. Something held
his arms down along his sides. He was not afraid -- oh no! only he
just couldn't -- that's all. He was not afraid of death perhaps, but
I'll tell you what, he was afraid of the emergency. His confounded
imagination had evoked for him all the horrors of panic, the tram-
pling rush, the pitiful screams, boats swamped -- all the appalling
incidents of a disaster at sea he had ever heard of. He might have
been resigned to die, but I suspect he wanted to die without added
terrors, quietly, in a sort of peaceful trance. A certain readiness to
perish is not so very rare, but it is seldom that you meet men whose
souls, steeled in the impenetrable armour of resolution, are ready
to fight a losing battle to the last; the desire of peace waxes stronger
as hope declines, till at last it conquers the very desire of life. Which
of us here has not observed this, or maybe experienced something
of that feeling in his own person -- this extreme weariness of
emotions, the vanity of effort, the yearning for rest? Those striving
with unreasonable forces know it well -- the shipwrecked castaways
in boats, wanderers lost in a desert, men battling against the
unthinking might of nature, or the stupid brutality of crowds.'


                     CHAPTER 8


'How long he stood stock-still by the hatch expecting every
moment to feel the ship dip under his feet and the rush of water
take him at the back and toss him like a chip, I cannot say. Not
very long -- two minutes perhaps. A couple of men he could not
make out began to converse drowsily, and also, he could not tell
where, he detected a curious noise of shuffling feet. Above these
faint sounds there was that awful stillness preceding a catastrophe,
that trying silence of the moment before the crash; then it came
into his head that perhaps he would have time to rush along and
cut all the lanyards of the gripes, so that the boats would float off
as the ship went down.

'The Patna had a long bridge, and all the boats were up there,
four on one side and three on the other -- the smallest of them on
the port side and nearly abreast of the steering-gear. He assured
me, with evident anxiety to be believed, that he had been most
careful to keep them ready for instant service. He knew his duty. I
dare say he was a good enough mate as far as that went. "I always
believed in being prepared for the worst," he commented, staring
anxiously in my face. I nodded my approval of the sound principle,
averting my eyes before the subtle unsoundness of the man.

'He started unsteadily to run. He had to step over legs, avoid
stumbling against the heads. Suddenly some one caught hold of his
coat from below, and a distressed voice spoke under his elbow. The
light of the lamp he carried in his right hand fell upon an upturned
dark face whose eyes entreated him together with the voice. He had
picked up enough of the language to understand the word water
repeated several times in a tone of insistence, of prayer, almost of
despair. He gave a jerk to get away, and felt an arm embrace his
leg.

' "The beggar clung to me like a drowning man," he said
impressively. "Water, water! What water did he mean? What did
he know? As calmly as I could I ordered him to let go. He was
stopping me, time was pressing, other men began to stir; I wanted
time -- time to cut the boats adrift. He got hold of my hand now,
and I felt that he would begin to shout. It flashed upon me it was
enough to start a panic, and I hauled off with my free arm and slung
the lamp in his face. The glass jingled, the light went out, but the
blow made him let go, and I ran off -- I wanted to get at the boats;
I wanted to get at the boats. He leaped after me from behind. I
turned on him. He would not keep quiet; he tried to shout; I had
half throttled him before I made out what he wanted. He wanted
some water -- water to drink; they were on strict allowance, you
know, and he had with him a young boy I had noticed several times.
His child was sick -- and thirsty. He had caught sight of me as I
passed by, and was begging for a little water. That's all. We were
under the bridge, in the dark. He kept on snatching at my wrists;
there was no getting rid of him. I dashed into my berth, grabbed
my water-bottle, and thrust it into his hands. He vanished. I didn't
find out till then how much I was in want of a drink myself." He
leaned on one elbow with a hand over his eyes.

'I felt a creepy sensation all down my backbone; there was some-
thing peculiar in all this. The fingers of the hand that shaded his
brow trembled slightly. He broke the short silence.

' "These things happen only once to a man and . . . Ah! well!
When I got on the bridge at last the beggars were getting one of the
boats off the chocks. A boat! I was running up the ladder when a
heavy blow fell on my shoulder, just missing my head. It didn't
stop me, and the chief engineer -- they had got him out of his bunk
by then -- raised the boat-stretcher again. Somehow I had no mind
to be surprised at anything. All this seemed natural -- and awful --
and awful. I dodged that miserable maniac, lifted him off the deck
as though he had been a little child, and he started whispering in
my arms: 'Don't! don't! I thought you were one of them niggers.'
I flung him away, he skidded along the bridge and knocked the legs
from under the little chap -- the second. The skipper, busy about
the boat, looked round and came at me head down, growling like a
wild beast. I flinched no more than a stone. I was as solid standing
there as this," he tapped lightly with his knuckles the wall beside
his chair. "It was as though I had heard it all, seen it all, gone
through it all twenty times already. I wasn't afraid of them. I drew
back my fist and he stopped short, muttering-

' " 'Ah! it's you. Lend a hand quick.'

' "That's what he said. Quick! As if anybody could be quick
enough. 'Aren't you going to do something?' I asked. 'Yes. Clear
out,' he snarled over his shoulder.

' "I don't think I understood then what he meant. The other two
had picked themselves up by that time, and they rushed together
to the boat. They tramped, they wheezed, they shoved, they cursed
the boat, the ship, each other -- cursed me. All in mutters. I didn't
move, I didn't speak. I watched the slant of the ship. She was as
still as if landed on the blocks in a dry dock -- only she was like
this," He held up his hand, palm under, the tips of the fingers
inclined downwards. "Like this," he repeated. "I could see the line
of the horizon before me, as clear as a bell, above her stem-head; I
could see the water far off there black and sparkling, and still -- still
as a-pond, deadly still, more still than ever sea was before -- more
still than I could bear to look at. Have you watched a ship floating
head down, checked in sinking by a sheet of old iron too rotten to
stand being shored up? Have you? Oh yes, shored up? I thought of
that -- I thought of every mortal thing; but can you shore up a
bulkhead in five minutes -- or in fifty for that matter? Where was I
going to get men that would go down below? And the timber -- the
timber! Would you have had the courage to swing the maul for the
first blow if you had seen that bulkhead? Don't say you would: you
had not seen it; nobody would. Hang it -- to do a thing like that you
must believe there is a chance, one in a thousand, at least, some
ghost of a chance; and you would not have believed. Nobody would
have believed. You think me a cur for standing there, but what
would you have done? What! You can't tell -- nobody can tell. One
must have time to turn round. What would you have me do? Where
was the kindness in making crazy with fright all those people I
could not save single-handed -- that nothing could save? Look here!
As true as I sit on this chair before you . . ."

'He drew quick breaths at every few words and shot quick glances
at my face, as though in his anguish he were watchful of the effect.
He was not speaking to me, he was only speaking before me, in a
dispute with an invisible personality, an antagonistic and insepar-
able partner of his existence -- another possessor of his soul. These
were issues beyond the competency of a court of inquiry: it was a
subtle and momentous quarrel as to the true essence of life, and did
not want a judge. He wanted an ally, a helper, an accomplice. I felt
the risk I ran of being circumvented, blinded, decoyed, bullied,
perhaps, into taking a definite part in a dispute impossible of
decision if one had to be fair to all the phantoms in possession -- to
the reputable that had its claims and to the disreputable that had
its exigencies. I can't explain to you who haven't seen him and who
hear his words only at second hand the mixed nature of my feelings.
It seemed to me I was being made to comprehend the Inconceiv-
able -- and I know of nothing to compare with the discomfort of
such a sensation. I was made to look at the convention that lurks in
all truth and on the essential sincerity of falsehood. He appealed to
all sides at once -- to the side turned perpetually to the light of day,
and to that side of us which, like the other hemisphere of the moon,
exists stealthily in perpetual darkness, with only a fearful ashy light
falling at times on the edge. He swayed me. I own to it, I own up.
The occasion was obscure, insignificant -- what you will: a lost
youngster, one in a million -- but then he was one of us; an incident
as completely devoid of importance as the flooding of an ant-heap,
and yet the mystery of his attitude got hold of me as though he had
been an individual in the forefront of his kind, as if the obscure
truth involved were momentous enough to affect mankind's con-
ception of itself. .. . '

Marlow paused to put new life into his expiring cheroot, seemed
to forget all about the story, and abruptly began again.

'My fault of course. One has no business really to get interested.
It's a weakness of mine. His was of another kind. My weakness
consists in not having a discriminating eye for the incidental -- for
the externals -- no eye for the hod of the rag-picker or the fine linen
of the next man. Next man -- that's it. I have met so many men,' he
pursued, with momentary sadness -- 'met them too with a certain --
certain -- impact, let us say; like this fellow, for instance -- and in
each case all I could see was merely the human being. A confounded
democratic quality of vision which may be better than total blind-
ness, but has been of no advantage to me, I can assure you. Men
expect one to take into account their fine linen. But I never could
get up any enthusiasm about these things. Oh! it's a failing; it's a
failing; and then comes a soft evening; a lot of men too indolent for
whist -- and a story.... '

He paused again to wait for an encouraging remark, perhaps, but
nobody spoke; only the host, as if reluctantly performing a duty,
murmured --

'You are so subtle, Marlow.'

'Who? I?' said Marlow in a low voice. 'Oh no! But he was; and
try as I may for the success of this yarn, I am missing innumerable
shades -- they were so fine, so difficult to render in colourless words.
Because he complicated matters by being so simple, too -- the sim-
plest poor devil! . . . By Jove! he was amazing. There he sat telling
me that just as I saw him before my eyes he wouldn't be afraid to
face anything -- and believing in it too. I tell you it was fabulously
innocent and it was enormous, enormous! I watched him covertly,
just as though I had suspected him of an intention to take a jolly
good rise out of me. He was confident that, on the square, "on the
square, mind!" there was nothing he couldn't meet. Ever since he
had been "so high" -- "quite a little chap," he had been preparing
himself for all the difficulties that can beset one on land and water.
He confessed proudly to this kind of foresight. He had been elabor-
ating dangers and defences, expecting the worst, rehearsing his
best. He must have led a most exalted existence. Can ypu fancy
it? A succession of adventures, so much glory, such a victorious
progress! and the deep sense of his sagacity crowning every day of
his inner life. He forgot himself; his eyes shone; and with every
word my heart, searched by the light of his absurdity, was growing
heavier in my breast. I had no mind to laugh, and lest I should
smile I made for myself a stolid face. He gave signs of irritation.

' "It is always the unexpected that happens," I said in a propitiat-
ory tone. My obtuseness provoked him into a contemptuous "Psh-
aw!" I suppose he meant that the unexpected couldn't touch him;
nothing less than the unconceivable itself could get over his perfect
state of preparation. He had been taken unawares -- and he whis-
pered to himself a malediction upon the waters and the firmament,
upon the ship, upon the men. Everything had betrayed him! He
had been tricked into that sort of high-minded resignation which
prevented him lifting as much as his little finger, while these others
wko had a very clear perception of the actual necessity were tum-
bling against each other and sweating desperately over that boat
business. Something had gone wrong there at the last moment. It
appears that in their flurry they had contrived in some mysterious
way to get the sliding bolt of the foremost boat-chock jammed tight,
and forthwith had gone out of the remnants of their minds over the
deadly nature of that accident. It must have been a pretty sight, the
fierce industry of these beggars toiling on a motionless ship that
floated quietly in the silence of a world asleep, fighting against time
for the freeing of that boat, grovelling on all-fours, standing up in
despair, tugging, pushing, snarling at each other venomously, ready
to kill, ready to weep, and only kept from flying at each other's
throats by the fear of death that stood silent behind them like an
inflexible and cold-eyed taskmaster. Oh yes! It must have been a
pretty sight. He saw it all, he could talk about it with scorn and
bitterness; he had a minute knowledge of it by means of some sixth
sense, I conclude, because he swore to me he had remained apart
without a glance at them and at the boat -- without one single glance.
And I believe him. I should think he was too busy watching the
threatening slant of the ship, the suspended menace discovered in
the midst of the most perfect security -- fascinated by the sword
hanging by a hair over his imaginative head.

'Nothing in the world moved before his eyes, and he could depict
to himself without hindrance the sudden swing upwards of the dark
sky-line, the sudden tilt up of the vast plain of the sea, the swift
still rise, the brutal fling, the grasp of the abyss, the struggle without
hope, the starlight closing over his head for ever like the vault of a
tomb -- the revolt of his young life -- the black end. He could! By
Jove! who couldn't? And you must remember he was a finished
artist in that peculiar way, he was a gifted poor devil with the faculty
of swift and forestalling vision. The sights it showed him had turned
him into cold stone from the soles of his feet to the nape of his neck;
but there was a hot dance of thoughts in his head, a dance of lame,
blind, mute thoughts -- a whirl of awful cripples. Didn't I tell you
he confessed himself before me as though I had the power to bind
and to loose? He burrowed deep, deep, in the hope of my absol-
ution, which would have been of no good to him. This was one of
those cases which no solemn deception can palliate, where no man
can help; where his very Maker seems to abandon a sinner to his
own devices.

'He stood on the starboard side of the bridge, as far as he could
get from the struggle for the boat, which went on with the agitation
of madness and the stealthiness of a conspiracy. The two Malays
had meantime remained holding to the wheel. Just picture to your-
selves the actors in that, thank God! unique, episode of the sea,
four beside themselves with fierce and secret exertions, and three
looking on in complete immobility, above the awnings covering
the profound ignorance of hundreds of human beings, with their
weariness, with their dreams, with their hopes, arrested, held by
an invisible hand on the brink of annihilation. For that they were
so, makes no doubt to me: given the state of the ship, this was the
deadliest possible description of accident that could happen. These
beggars by the boat had every reason to go distracted with funk.
Frankly, had I been there, I would not have given as much as a
counterfeit farthing for the ship's chance to keep above water to the
end of each successive second. And still she floated! These sleeping
pilgrims were destined to accomplish their whole pilgrimage to the
bitterness of some other end. It was as if the Omnipotence whose
mercy they confessed had needed their humble testimony on earth
for a while longer, and had looked down to make a sign, "Thou shalt
not!" to the ocean. Their escape would trouble me as a prodigiously
inexplicable event, did I not know how tough old iron can be -- as
tough sometimes as the spirit of some men we meet now and then,
worn to a shadow and breasting the weight of life. Not the least
wonder of these twenty minutes, to my mind, is the behaviour of
the two helmsmen. They were amongst the native batch of all sorts
brought over from Aden to give evidence at the inquiry. One of
them, labouring under intense bashfulness, was very young, and
with his smooth, yellow, cheery countenance looked even younger
than he was. I remember perfectly Brierly asking him, through the
interpreter, what he thought of it at the time, and the interpreter,
after a short colloquy, turning to the court with an important air --

' "He says he thought nothing."

'The other, with patient blinking eyes, a blue cotton handker-
chief, faded with much washing, bound with a smart twist over a
lot of grey wisps, his face shrunk into grim hollows, his brown
skin made darker by a mesh of wrinkles, explained that he had a
knowledge of some evil thing befalling the ship, but there had been
no order; he could not remember an order; why should he leave the
helm? To some further questions he jerked back his spare shoul-
ders, and declared it never came into his mind then that the white
men were about to leave the ship through fear of death. He did not
believe it now. There might have been secret reasons. He wagged
his old chin knowingly. Aha! secret reasons. He was a man of great
experience, and he wanted that white Tuan to know -- he turned
towards Brierly, who didn't raise his head -- that he had acquired a
knowledge of many things by serving white men on the sea for a
great number of years -- and, suddenly, with shaky excitement he
poured upon our spellbound attention a lot of queer-sounding
names, names of dead-and-gone skippers, names of forgotten coun-
try ships, names of familiar and distorted sound, as if the hand of
dumb time had been at work on them for ages. They stopped him
at last. A silence fell upon the court, -- a silence that remained
unbroken for at least a minute, and passed gently into a deep mur-
mur. This episode was the sensation of the second day's proceed-
ings -- affecting all the audience, affecting everybody except Jim,
who was sitting moodily at the end of the first bench, and never
looked up at this extraordinary and damning witness that seemed
possessed of some mysterious theory of defence.

'So these two lascars stuck to the helm of that ship without steer-
age-way, where death would have found them if such had been their
destiny. The whites did not give them half a glance, had probably
forgotten their existence. Assuredly Jim did not remember it. He
remembered he could do nothing; he could do nothing, now he was
alone. There was nothing to do but to sink with the ship. No use
making a disturbance about it. Was there? He waited upstanding,
without a sound, stiffened in the idea of some sort of heroic discre-
tion. The first engineer ran cautiously across the bridge to tug at
his sleeve.

' "Come and help! For God's sake, come and help!"

'He ran back to the boat on the points of his toes, and returned
directly to worry at his sleeve, begging and cursing at the same
time.

' "I believe he would have kissed my hands," said Jim savagely,
"and, next moment, he starts foaming and whispering in my face,
'If I had the time I would like to crack your skull for you.' I pushed
him away. Suddenly he caught hold of me round the neck. Damn
him! I hit him. I hit out without looking. 'Won't you save your own
life -- you infernal coward?' he sobs. Coward! He called me an
infernal coward! Ha! ha! ha! ha! He called me -- ha! ha! ha! . . ."

'He had thrown himself back and was shaking with laughter. I
had never in my life heard anything so bitter as that noise. It fell
like a blight on all the merriment about donkeys, pyramids, bazaars,
or what not. Along the whole dim length of the gallery the voices
dropped, the pale blotches of faces turned our way with one accord,
and the silence became so profound that the clear tinkle of a tea-
spoon falling on the tesselated floor of the verandah rang out like a
tiny and silvery scream.

' "You mustn't laugh like this, with all these people about," I
remonstrated. "It isn't nice for them, you know."

'He gave no sign of having heard at first, but after a while, with
a stare that, missing me altogether, seemed to probe the heart of
some awful vision, he muttered carelessly -- "Oh! they'll think I am
drunk . "

'And after that you would have thought from his appearance he
would never make a sound again. But -- no fear! He could no more
stop telling now than he could have stopped living by the mere
exertion of his will.'


                     CHAPTER 9


' "I was saying to myself, 'Sink -- curse you! Sink!' " These were
the words with which he began again. He wanted it over. He was
severely left aione, and he formulated in his head this address to
the ship in a tone of imprecation, while at the same time he enjoyed
the privilege of witnessing scenes -- as far as I can judge -- of low
comedy. They were still at that bolt. The skipper was ordering,
"Get under and try to lift"; and the others naturally shirked. You
understand that to be squeezed flat under the keel of a boat wasn't
a desirable position to be caught in if the ship went down suddenly.
"Why don't you -- you the strongest?" whined the little engineer.
"Gott-for-dam! I am too thick," spluttered the skipper in despair.
It was funny enough to make angels weep. They stood idle for a
moment, and suddenly the chief engineer rushed again at Jim.

' "Come and help, man! Are you mad to throw your only chance
away? Come and help, man! Man! Look there -- look!"

'And at last Jim looked astern where the other pointed with
maniacal insistence. He saw a silent black squall which had eaten
up already one-third of the sky. You know how these squalls come
up there about that time of the year. First you see a darkening of
the horizon -- no more; then a cloud rises opaque like a wall. A
straight edge of vapour lined with sickly whitish gleams flies up
from the south-west, swallowing the stars in whole constellations;
its shadow flies over the waters, and confounds sea and sky into one
abyss of obscurity. And all is still. No thunder, no wind, no sound;
not a flicker of lightning. Then in the tenebrous immensity a livid
arch appears; a swell or two like undulations of the very darkness
run past, and, suddenly, wind and rain strike together with a pecu-
liar impetuosity as if they had burst through something solid. Such
a cloud had come up while they weren't looking. They had just
noticed it, and were perfectly justified in surmising that if in abso-
lute stillness there was some chance for the ship to keep afloat a few
minutes longer, the least disturbance of the sea would make an end
of her instantly. Her first nod to the swell that precedes the burst
of such a squall would be also her last, would become a plunge,
would, so to speak, be prolonged into a long dive, down, down to
the bottom. Hence these new capers of their fright, these new antics
in which they displayed their extreme aversion to die.

' "It was black, black," pursued Jim with moody steadiness. "It
had sneaked upon us from behind. The infernal thing! I suppose
there had been at the back of my head some hope yet. I don't know.
But that was all over anyhow. It maddened me to see myself caught
like this. I was angry, as though I had been trapped. I was trapped!
The night was hot, too, I remember. Not a breath of air."

'He remembered so well that, gasping in the chair, he seemed to
sweat and choke before my eyes. No doubt it maddened him; it
knocked him over afresh -- in a manner of speaking -- but it made
him also remember that important purpose which had sent him
rushing on that bridge only to slip clean out of his mind. He had
intended to cut the lifeboats clear of the ship. He whipped out hus
knife and went to work slashing as though he had seen nothing,
had heard nothing, had known of no one on board. They thought
him hopelessly wrong-headed and crazy, but dared not protest nois-
ily against this useless loss of time. When he had done he returned
to the very same spot from which he had started. The chief was
there, ready with a clutch at him to whisper close to his head,
scathingly, as though he wanted to bite his ear --

' "You silly fool! do you think you'll get the ghost of a show when
all that lot of brutes is in the water? Why, they will batter your head
for you from these boats."

'He wrung his hands, ignored, at Jim's elbow. The skipper kept
up a nervous shuffle in one place and mumbled, "Hammer! ham-
mer! Mein Gott! Get a hammer."

'The little engineer whimpered like a child, but, broken arm and
all, he turned out the least craven of the lot as it seems, and, actually,
mustered enough pluck to run an errand to the engine-room. No
trifle, it must be owned in fairness to him. Jim told me he darted
desperate looks like a cornered man, gave one low wail, and dashed
off. He was back instantly clambering, hammer in hand, and with-
out a pause flung himself at the bolt. The others gave up Jim at
once and ran off to assist. He heard the tap, tap of the hammer, the
sound of the released chock falling over. The boat was clear. Only
then he turned to look -- only then. But he kept his distance -- he
kept his distance. He wanted me to know he had kept his distance;
that there was nothing in common between him and these men --
who had the hammer. Nothing whatever. It is more than probable
he thought himself cut off from them by a space that could not be
traversed, by an obstacle that could not be overcome, by a chasm
without bottom. He was as far as he could get from them -- the
whole breadth of the ship.

'His feet were glued to that remote spot and his eyes to their
indistinct group bowed together and swaying strangely in the com-
mon torment of fear. A hand-lamp lashed to a stanchion above a
little table rigged up on the bridge -- the Patna had no chart-room
amidships -- threw a light on their labouring shoulders, on their
arched and bobbing backs. They pushed at the bow of the boat;
they pushed out into the night; they pushed, and would no more
look back at him. They had given him up as if indeed he had been
too far, too hopelessly separated from themselves, to be worth an
appealing word, a glance, or a sign. They had no leisure to look
back upon his passive heroism, to feel the sting of his abstention.
The boat was heavy; they pushed at the bow with no breath to spare
for an encouraging word: but the turmoil of terror that had scattered
their self-command like chaff before the wind, converted their
desperate exertions into a bit of fooling, upon my word, fit for
knockabout clowns in a farce. They pushed with their hands, with
their heads, they pushed for dear life with all the weight of their
bodies, they pushed with all the might of their souls -- only no
sooner had they succeeded in canting the stem clear of the davit
than they would leave off like one man and start a wild scramble
into her. As a natural consequence the boat would swing in
abruptly, driving them back, helpless and jostling against each
other. They would stand nonplussed for a while, exchanging in
fierce whispers all the infamous names they could call to mind, and
go at it again. Three times this occurred. He described it to me with
morose thoughtfulness. He hadn't lost a single movement of that
comic business. "I loathed them. I hated them. I had to look at
all that," he said without emphasis, turning upon me a sombrely
watchful glance. "Was ever there any one so shamefully tried?"

'He took his head in his hands for a moment, like a man driven
to distraction by some unspeakable outrage. These were things he
could not explain to the court -- and not even to me; but I would
have been little fitted for the reception of his confidences had I not
been able at times to understand the pauses between the words. In
this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a
spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in
his ordeal -- a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of
death or dishonour.

'He related facts which I have not forgotten, but at this distance
of time I couldn't recall his very words: I only remember that he
managed wonderfully to convey the brooding rancour of his mind
into the bare recital of events. Twice, he told me, he shut his eyes
in the certitude that the end was upon him already, and twice he
had to open them again. Each time he noted the darkening of the
great stillness. The shadow of the silent cloud had fallen upon the
ship from the zenith, and seemed to have extinguished every sound
of her teeming life. He could no longer hear the voices under the
awnings. He told me that each time he closed his eyes a flash of
thought showed him that crowd of bodies, laid out for death, as
plain as daylight. When he opened them, it was to see the dim
struggle of four men fighting like mad with a stubborn boat. "They
would fall back before it time after time, stand swearing at each
other, and suddenly make another rush in a bunch.... Enough to
make you die laughing," he commented with downcast eyes; then
raising them for a moment to my face with a dismal smile, "I ought
to have a merry life of it, by God! for I shall see that funny sight a
good many times yet before I die." His eyes fell again. "See and
hear.... See and hear," he repeated twice, at long intervals, filled
by vacant staring.

'He roused himself.

' "I made up my mind to keep my eyes shut," he said, "and I
couldn't. I couldn't, and I don't care who knows it. Let them go
through that kind of thing before they talk. Just let them -- and do
better -- that's all. The second time my eyelids flew open and my
mouth too. I had felt the ship move. She just dipped her bows --
and lifted them gently -- and slow! everlastingly slow; and ever so
little. She hadn't done that much for days. The cloud had raced
ahead, and this first swell seemed to travel upon a sea of lead. There
was no life in that stir. Itmanaged, though, to knock over something
in my head. What would you have done? You are sure of yourself --
aren't you? What would you do if you felt now -- this minute -- the
house here move, just move a little under your chair. Leap! By
heavens! you would take one spring from where you sit and land in
that clump of bushes yonder."

'He flung his arm out at the night beyond the stone balustrade.
I held my peace. He looked at me very steadily, very severe. There
could be no mistake: I was being bullied now, and it behoved me
to make no sign lest by a gesture or a word I should be drawn into
a fatal admission about myself which would have had some bearing
on the case. I was not disposed to take any risk of that sort. Don't
forget I had him before me, and really he was too much like one of
us not to be dangerous. But if you want to know I don't mind telling
you that I did, with a rapid glance, estimate the distance to the
mass of denser blackness in the middle of the grass-plot before the
verandah. He exaggerated. I would have landed short by several
feet -- and that's the only thing of which I am fairly certain.

'The last moment had come, as he thought, and he did not move.
His feet remained glued to the planks if his thoughts were knocking
about loose in his head. It was at this moment too that he saw one
of the men around the boat step backwards suddenly, clutch at the
air with raised arms, totter and collapse. He didn't exactly fall, he
only slid gently into a sitting posture, all hunched up, and with his
shoulders propped against the side of the engine-room skylight.
"That was the donkey-man. A haggard, white-faced chap with a
ragged moustache. Acted third engineer," he explained.

' "Dead," I said. We had heard something of that in court.

' "So they say," he pronounced with sombre indifference. "Of
course I never knew. Weak heart. The man had been complaining
of being out of sorts for some time before. Excitement. Over-exer-
tion. Devil only knows. Ha! ha! ha! It was easy to see he did not
want to die either. Droll, isn't it? May I be shot if he hadn't been
fooled into killing himself! Fooled -- neither more nor less. Fooled
into it, by heavens! just as I . . . Ah! If he had only kept still; if he
had only told them to go to the devil when they came to rush him
out of his bunk because the ship was sinking! If he had only stood
by with his hands in his pockets and called them names!"

'He got up, shook his fist, glared at me, and sat down.

' "A chance missed, eh?" I murmured.

' "Why don't you laugh?" he said. "A joke hatched in hell. Weak
heart! . . . I wish sometimes mine had been."

'This irritated me. "Do you?" I exclaimed with deep-rooted
irony. "Yes! Can'tyou understand?" he cried. "I don't know what
more you could wish for," I said angrily. He gave me an utterly
uncomprehending glance. This shaft had also gone wide of the
mark, and he was not the man to bother about stray arrows. Upon
my word, he was too unsuspecting; he was not fair game. I was glad
that my missile had been thrown away, -- that he had not even heard
the twang of the bow.

'Of course he could not know at the time the man was dead. The
next minute -- his last on board -- was crowded with a tumult of
events and sensations which beat about him like the sea upon a
rock. I use the simile advisedly, because from his relation I am
forced to believe he had preserved through it all a strange illusion
of passiveness, as though he had not acted but had suffered bimself
to be handled by the infernal powers who had selected him for the
victim of their practical joke. The first thing that came to him was
the grinding surge of the heavy davits swinging out at last -- a jar
which seemed to enter his body from the deck through the soles of
his feet, and travel up his spine to the crown of his head. Then, the
squall being very near now, another and a heavier swell lifted the
passive hull in a threatening heave that checked his breath, while
his brain and his heart together were pierced as with daggers by
panic-stricken screams. "Let go! For God's sake, let go! Let go!
She's going." Following upon that the boat-falls ripped through
the blocks, and a lot of men began to talk in startled tones under
the awnings. "When these beggars did break out, their yelps were
enough to wake the dead," he said. Next, after the splashing shock
of the boat literally dropped in the water, came the hollow noises
of stamping and tumbling in her, mingled with confused shouts:
"Unhook! Unhook! Shove! Unhook! Shove for your life! Here's
the squall down on us.... " He heard, high above his head, the
faint muttering of the wind; he heard below his feet a cry of pain.
A lost voice alongside started cursing a swivel hook. The ship began
to buzz fore and aft like a disturbed hive, and, as quietly as he was
telling me of all this -- because just then he was very quiet in attitude,
in face, in voice -- he went on to say without the slightest warning
as it were, "I stumbled over his legs."

'This was the first I heard of his having moved at all. I could not
restrain a grunt of surprise. Something had started him off at last,
but of the exact moment, of the cause that tore him out of his
immobility, he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the
wind that laid it low. All this had come to him: the sounds, the
sights, the legs of the dead man -- by Jove! The infernal joke was
being crammed devilishly down his throat, but -- look you -- he was
not going to admit of any sort of swallowing motion in his gullet.
It's extraordinary how he could cast upon you the spirit of his
illusion. I listened as if to a tale of black magic at work upon a
corpse.

' "He went over sideways, very gently, and this is the last thing
I remember seeing on board," he continued. "I did not care what
he did. It looked as though he were picking himself up: I thought
he was picking himself up, of course: I expected him to bolt past
me over the rail and drop into the boat after the others. I could hear
them knocking about down there, and a voice as if crying up a shaft
called out 'George!' Then three voices together raised a yell. They
came to me separately: one bleated, another screamed, one howled.
Ough!"

'He shivered a little, and I beheld him rise slowly as if a steady
hand from above had been pulling him out of the chair by his hair.
Up, slowly -- to his full height, and when his knees had locked stiff
the hand let him go, and he swayed a little on his feet. There was a
suggestion of awful stillness in his face, in his movements, in his
very voice when he said "They shouted" -- and involuntarily I
pricked up my ears for the ghost of that shout that would be heard
directly through the false effect of silence. "There were eight hun-
dred people in that ship," he said, impaling me to the back of my
seat with an awful blank stare. "Eight hundred living people, and
they were yelling after the one dead man to come down and be
saved. 'Jump, George! Jump! Oh, jump!' I stood by with my hand
on the davit. I was very quiet. It had come over pitch dark. You
could see neither sky nor sea. I heard the boat alongside go bump,
bump, and not another sound down there for a while, but the ship
under me was full of talking noises. Suddenly the skipper howled
'Mein Gott! The squall! The squall! Shove off!' With the first hiss
of rain, and the first gust of wind, they screamed, 'Jump, George!
We'll catch you! Jump!' The ship began a slow plunge; the rain
swept over her like a broken sea; my cap flew off my head; my
breath was driven back into my throat. I heard as if I had been on
the top of a tower another wild screech, 'Geo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!'
She was going down, down, head first under me.... "

'He raised his hand deliberately to his face, and made picking
motions with his fingers as though he had been bothered with cob-
webs, and afterwards he looked into the open palm for quite half
a second before he blurted out --

' "I had jumped . . . " He checked himself, averted his
gaze.... "It seems," he added.

'His clear blue eyes turned to me with a piteous stare, and looking
at him standing before me, dumfounded and hurt, I was oppressed
by a sad sense of resigned wisdom, mingled with the amused and
profound pity of an old man helpless before a childish disaster.

' "Looks like it," I muttered.

' "I knew nothing about it till I looked up," he explained hastily.
And that's possible too. You had to listen to him as you would to a
small boy in trouble. He didn't know. It had happened somehow.
It would never happen again. He had landed partly on somebody
and fallen across a thwart. He felt as though all his ribs on his left
side must be broken; then he rolled over, and saw vaguely the ship
he had deserted uprising above him, with the red side-light glowing
large in the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen through a mist.
"She seemed higher than a wall; she loomed like a cliff over the
boat . . . I wished I could die," he cried. "There was no going
back. It was as if I had jumped into a well -- into an everlasting deep
hole.... " '