finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Lord Jim/section_8_part_0.txt
Lord Jim.chapter 9
chapter 9
{"name": "Chapter 9", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219145744/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/l/lord-jim/summary-and-analysis/chapter-9", "summary": "Watching the other officers battle to free the lifeboats, Jim was so maddened by the sudden \"black, black\" squall and the impending disaster that he grabbed his knife and sliced the ropes holding the lifeboats; then he gazed on the almost comical struggling scene below \"of four men fighting like mad with a stubborn lifeboat.\" All their efforts were futile. He hated these insect-like men. He told Marlow that had he, Marlow, been on board, he too \"would have leaped\" overboard, as Jim did when he heard the captain yelling from a lifeboat to jump! Jim recalled the black rain squall that \"sneaked up\" and loomed overhead, eating up \"a third of the sky\" before it broke over the ship and began to awaken the Moslems. The threat of drowning during a furious storm from heaven, lost among a frenzied mob of screaming natives, filled Jim with such alarm that it seemed as though life itself were pounding against him, beating on him \"like the sea upon a rock.\" It was pitch black. Jim could not see. He could hear only the skipper and an engineer yelling for a comrade who died suddenly of a heart attack. The Patna seemed to slip, then go into a slow, downward plunge and at that moment, Jim jumped. He jumped without thought and without realizing that he had jumped. He no longer felt as if he were in control of his actions. Something else -- something larger and more powerful than he -- was now controlling him; all that he could do was passively accept the unknown. He felt that he was a hopeless victim, lost at the bottom \"of an everlasting deep hole.\"", "analysis": "Chapter 9 finally presents Jim's jump from the presumably sinking ship. But the jump is surrounded by so many real and so many impressionistic details that it is difficult to separate the real from the impressionistic. From a distance, Jim wants to laugh at the tragic-comic frantic actions of the captain and the crew: \"It was funny enough to make angels weep.\" Then suddenly a squall came up and the crew was sure that the squall would immediately sink the ship: \"In absolute 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.\" At this, the others \"displayed their extreme aversion to die.\" Jim soon realizes \"that there was nothing in common between him and these men,\" and when Jim expresses his anger at them for their cowardly actions, the entire crew here  turns against him, calling him a fool and pointing out that he wouldn't have a ghost of a chance if they awaken \"that lot of brutes . They will batter your head for you.\" Consequently, after the captain and the crew are safely in the water, they call for George, the third engineer  to jump into the lifeboat, but they do not call for Jim to jump. And later, Jim's life is endangered by the hatred of these cowards. Amidst the confusion, the oncoming squall, the definite sensation of the ship sinking, the terrified and desperate activities of the captain and the crew, and the sudden dipping of the bow of the ship, Jim is completely lost in confusion. Again he aligns Marlow and the readers by asking \"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.\" The answer, of course, is that almost every one of us, amid such confusion and confronted with certain death, would also have jumped. Even Marlow admits how uncomfortable it made him feel, and he was careful not to answer because of his fear of being \"drawn into a fatal admission about myself.\" And furthermore, Marlow reiterates that \"really he  was too much like one of us . . .\" Thus, amidst all the confusion, with the captain and the crew calling for George  to jump, and with Jim feeling that the ship \"was going down, down, head first under me. . .\" he apparently jumped. Jim puts his actions in the past: \"I had jumped . . . it seems.\" He doesn't actually remember the jump, only the painful landing in the boat and then he feels regretfully that he \"had jumped into a well -- into an everlasting deep hole.\" The rest of his life will hereafter be determined by this one act, and later, his every job and his every act until, finally, his tragic decision concerning Gentleman Brown will be determined by this tragic jump."}
'"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
alone, 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 southwest, 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 peculiar 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 absolute 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 his 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
noisily 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! hammer! 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 without 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 common
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. It managed, 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-exertion. 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't _you_ 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 himself 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 hundred 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 cobwebs, 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. . . ."'

Chapter 9
Watching the other officers battle to free the lifeboats, Jim was so maddened by the sudden "black, black" squall and the impending disaster that he grabbed his knife and sliced the ropes holding the lifeboats; then he gazed on the almost comical struggling scene below "of four men fighting like mad with a stubborn lifeboat." All their efforts were futile. He hated these insect-like men. He told Marlow that had he, Marlow, been on board, he too "would have leaped" overboard, as Jim did when he heard the captain yelling from a lifeboat to jump! Jim recalled the black rain squall that "sneaked up" and loomed overhead, eating up "a third of the sky" before it broke over the ship and began to awaken the Moslems. The threat of drowning during a furious storm from heaven, lost among a frenzied mob of screaming natives, filled Jim with such alarm that it seemed as though life itself were pounding against him, beating on him "like the sea upon a rock." It was pitch black. Jim could not see. He could hear only the skipper and an engineer yelling for a comrade who died suddenly of a heart attack. The Patna seemed to slip, then go into a slow, downward plunge and at that moment, Jim jumped. He jumped without thought and without realizing that he had jumped. He no longer felt as if he were in control of his actions. Something else -- something larger and more powerful than he -- was now controlling him; all that he could do was passively accept the unknown. He felt that he was a hopeless victim, lost at the bottom "of an everlasting deep hole."
Chapter 9 finally presents Jim's jump from the presumably sinking ship. But the jump is surrounded by so many real and so many impressionistic details that it is difficult to separate the real from the impressionistic. From a distance, Jim wants to laugh at the tragic-comic frantic actions of the captain and the crew: "It was funny enough to make angels weep." Then suddenly a squall came up and the crew was sure that the squall would immediately sink the ship: "In absolute 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." At this, the others "displayed their extreme aversion to die." Jim soon realizes "that there was nothing in common between him and these men," and when Jim expresses his anger at them for their cowardly actions, the entire crew here  turns against him, calling him a fool and pointing out that he wouldn't have a ghost of a chance if they awaken "that lot of brutes . They will batter your head for you." Consequently, after the captain and the crew are safely in the water, they call for George, the third engineer  to jump into the lifeboat, but they do not call for Jim to jump. And later, Jim's life is endangered by the hatred of these cowards. Amidst the confusion, the oncoming squall, the definite sensation of the ship sinking, the terrified and desperate activities of the captain and the crew, and the sudden dipping of the bow of the ship, Jim is completely lost in confusion. Again he aligns Marlow and the readers by asking "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." The answer, of course, is that almost every one of us, amid such confusion and confronted with certain death, would also have jumped. Even Marlow admits how uncomfortable it made him feel, and he was careful not to answer because of his fear of being "drawn into a fatal admission about myself." And furthermore, Marlow reiterates that "really he  was too much like one of us . . ." Thus, amidst all the confusion, with the captain and the crew calling for George  to jump, and with Jim feeling that the ship "was going down, down, head first under me. . ." he apparently jumped. Jim puts his actions in the past: "I had jumped . . . it seems." He doesn't actually remember the jump, only the painful landing in the boat and then he feels regretfully that he "had jumped into a well -- into an everlasting deep hole." The rest of his life will hereafter be determined by this one act, and later, his every job and his every act until, finally, his tragic decision concerning Gentleman Brown will be determined by this tragic jump.