finished_summaries/sparknotes/Lord Jim/section_1_part_0.txt
Lord Jim.chapters 3-5
chapters 3 - 5
{"name": "Chapters 3 - 5", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210126121516/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/lordjim/section2/", "summary": "The Patna continues toward Mecca through an impossibly still night. The passengers are asleep and Jim is on watch, imagining heroic deeds as usual. The ship's captain, a tremendously obese and violent \"New South Wales German,\" argues with the second engineer, who is drunk. A sudden impact shakes the ship, pitching the engineer forward and nearly knocking Jim and the captain off their feet. The impact is followed only by silence and a rumbling shake of the ship. The narrative suddenly skips ahead a month to a courtroom, where an inquest is being held. Jim is on the stand recounting the events of that night. He recalls that he was sent below to examine the ship for damage following the impact, which, it is mentioned, is thought to have been with a floating shipwreck. Jim tells the court that he found the hold filling with water and that he then realized that there must be \"a big hole below the waterline. \" On his way to examine the bulkhead, which divides sections of the hold, he encountered the second engineer, who had broken his arm falling from a ladder. Jim enters into a detailed, impressionistic account of subsequent events, but he is quickly cut off by the court, which wants only \"yes or no\" answers in their search for the \"facts.\" As he testifies, Jim notices \"a white man who  apart from the others, with his face worn and clouded, but with quiet eyes,\" who is watching him intently. Jim senses that the man understands his predicament . We find out that this man is Marlow, who will narrate a good bit of the story, and who will \"later on, many times, in distant parts of the world. . .show. . .himself willing to remember Jim, to remember him at length, in detail and audibly. \" In other words, Marlow is to be the keeper of Jim's story. The narrative shifts again, to Marlow, on a verandah after dinner, recounting Jim's story to a group of silent listeners. Marlow admits to his audience that he's not sure why he attended the inquiry, except for the fact that the Patna \"affair\"  had become \"notorious\" in the maritime community of that part of the world, and everyone who could came to the trial. Marlow tells his listeners that he himself saw the rescued crew of the Patna arrive in port and report to the harbor office to make a deposition. He digresses for a moment, detailing the repulsive appearance of the crew, particularly the captain, who was wearing someone else's pajamas, and then digresses still further to offer an account of his acquaintance with the harbormaster's clerk, which has no real relevance to the story except to reveal something of Marlow's character: he once gave the clerk a generous tip, he says, because the man's \"childlike belief in the sacred right to perquisites quite touched  heart.\" Marlow looked on as the Patna's crew argued with the harbormaster, and it is then that he first noticed Jim, who stood out from the rest of the debased bunch. Marlow immediately fixed on Jim as \"one of us,\" a tag that will be repeated throughout the novel. The crew, after disputing with the harbormaster for a few moments longer, disappeared into a series of rickshaws. The second engineer, with his broken arm, went to the hospital, where Marlow, going to see an injured member of his own crew, encountered him a few days later. Another member of the Patna's crew, a man with a long, drooping mustache, was also in the hospital, in the throes of delirium and hallucinations after a long drinking binge that began when he reached port. Marlow interrogated him, and was told by the man that he saw the Patna go down with his own eyes. He then rambles on about the reptiles on board the ship and the pink toads that are under his hospital bed. Marlow was asked by one of the doctors, as he left the hospital, if the man's testimony would be material to the inquiry. Marlow tells him it would not.", "analysis": "Commentary The narrative continues to play games with time, jumping between the collision on board the Patna, the inquiry into the collision, and events between the crew's rescue and the inquiry. Note that a great deal of information is still not available to the reader: What did the ship hit? Why did the crew need to be rescued? Why is an inquiry being held into the crew's behavior? And, most critically, who is Marlow, and why is he so interested in Jim? The reader is put in the same position as the crew of the Patna following the impact: something important has just happened, but we're not sure what it is, and the consequences are entirely unclear. Jim theorizes that the Patna has an enormous gouge \"below the waterline,\" but he is unable to see the damage threatening his ship, as it is hidden at the bottom of a dark, flooded compartment below the deck. Just as it is only the flooding that is apparent to Jim, it is only the aftermath of a major, still-unknown event that is visible to the reader: an injured man, a man who has drunk himself into hallucinations, and a trial, for a crime still a mystery to us. The inquiry introduces Marlow , and also serves to highlight his curious interest in Jim by way of contrast. The inquiry is interested in \"fact,\" so much so that the magistrate presiding tells Jim to curtail his explanations and reminiscences and get to the point.\" Yes or no\" answers are what the court wants, but perhaps, as Marlow's presence suggests, the issues at hand require a more subtle form of inquiry. Marlow fixates on Jim's status as \"one of us,\" but what does this phrase mean? Marlow and Jim are both sailors, but so are the men who seem to have Jim on trial . Marlow initially offers us the explanation that he is interested in Jim because he is \"outwardly so typical of that good, stupid kind we like to feel marching right and left of us in life\"; in other words, he claims to pity Jim in a way, and to feel an urge to protect him. Later, though, Marlow gives a more complicated reason for his interest, saying that he \"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.\" He preliminarily concludes that Jim fascinates him because \"he look as genuine as a new sovereign, but there  some infernal alloy in his metal. \" What does this mean, and why does Marlow so deeply identify with Jim? We still don't know why it wouldn't be safe to trust Jim with a ship  nor why Jim should be considered \"infernal.\" Above all, who is this Marlow, and how is it that he has access to every part of Jim's story? Marlow is the consummate storyteller, as we see in the hypothetical setup at the end of Chapter 4 and the beginning of Chapter 5. He reorders the material at hand to maximize suspense and create meaningful juxtapositions and omissions. Most of all, he offers a record of his own involvement with and reaction to Jim's story. Marlow constructs himself as an alternate hero, an intellectual hero who is not only Jim's best reader, but also his best representative, his best hope for a continued place in the world's memory. Pay attention to Marlow's encounter with the alcoholic crewman from the Patna. This is a novel filled with coincidences and parallel structures, and this is a plot device that will recur. Coincidence is an important idea in this novel. Marlow's eventual ability to piece together all of Jim's story is due to chance meetings, mutual acquaintances, and the similarity in their occupations. He takes an interest in Jim and makes an effort to learn about him over time, but he is aided by sheer luck and some mysterious circumstances, in a part of the world where distances are great and \"civilization\" is still minimal. What does coincidence mean in Lord Jim? It is not evidence of providential design or predestined fate; rather, coincidence highlights Jim's representative quality--he is, in some way, \"one of\" all of \"us.\" It also emphasizes Jim's inability to escape his past, a fact which will assume great importance in the closing chapters of the novel; despite moving thousands of miles away from white civilization and several years forward in time, Jim is never quite able to escape whatever it is that happened on the Patna. The role of coincidence thus also suggests lingering overtones of Victorian moral codes, under which nothing goes unpunished, nothing is forgiven. Watch for repeating structures and coincidences in the plot, and look particularly for parallels between the two major episodes."}
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 circular 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 tenderness 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 constantly dissolving in
the air. Two Malays, silent and almost motionless, 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 catching 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 unattainable 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 languor
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 matched: one dull-eyed, malevolent, and of soft fleshy
curves; the other lean, all hollows, with a head long and bony like the
head of an old horse, with sunken cheeks, with sunken temples, with an
indifferent glazed glance of sunken eyes. He had been stranded out East
somewhere--in Canton, in Shanghai, or perhaps in Yokohama; he probably
did not care to remember himself the exact locality, nor yet the cause
of his shipwreck. He had been, in mercy to his youth, kicked quietly
out of his ship twenty years ago or more, and it might have been so much
worse for him that the memory of the episode had in it hardly a trace
of misfortune. Then, steam navigation expanding in these seas and men
of his craft being scarce at first, he had 'got on' after a sort. He
was eager to let strangers know in a dismal mumble that he was 'an old
stager out here.' When he moved, a skeleton seemed to sway loose in his
clothes; his walk was mere wandering, and he was given to wander thus
around the engine-room skylight, smoking, without relish, doctored
tobacco in a brass bowl at the end of a cherrywood stem four feet long,
with the imbecile gravity of a thinker evolving a system of philosophy
from the hazy glimpse of a truth. He was usually anything but free with
his private store of liquor; but on that night he had departed from his
principles, so that his second, a weak-headed child of Wapping, what
with the unexpectedness of the treat and the strength of the stuff,
had become very happy, cheeky, and talkative. The fury of the New South
Wales German was extreme; he puffed like an exhaust-pipe, and Jim,
faintly amused by the scene, was impatient for the time when he could
get below: the last ten minutes of the watch were irritating like a
gun that hangs fire; those men did not belong to the world of heroic
adventure; they weren't bad chaps though. Even the skipper himself . . .
His gorge rose at the mass of panting flesh from which issued
gurgling mutters, a cloudy trickle of filthy expressions; but he was
too pleasurably languid to dislike actively this or any other thing. The
quality of these men did not matter; he rubbed shoulders with them, but
they could not touch him; he shared the air they breathed, but he was
different. . . . Would the skipper go for the engineer? . . . The life
was easy and he was too sure of himself--too sure of himself to . . .
The line dividing his meditation from a surreptitious doze on his feet
was thinner than a thread in a spider's web.

The second engineer was coming by easy transitions to the consideration
of his finances and of his courage.

'Who's drunk? I? No, no, captain! That won't do. You ought to know by
this time the chief ain't free-hearted enough to make a sparrow drunk,
b'gosh. I've never been the worse for liquor in my life; the stuff ain't
made yet that would make _me_ drunk. I could drink liquid fire against
your whisky peg for peg, b'gosh, and keep as cool as a cucumber. If I
thought I was drunk I would jump overboard--do away with myself, b'gosh.
I would! Straight! And I won't go off the bridge. Where do you expect
me to take the air on a night like this, eh? On deck amongst that vermin
down there? Likely--ain't it! And I am not afraid of anything you can
do.'

The German lifted two heavy fists to heaven and shook them a little
without a word.

'I don't know what fear is,' pursued the engineer, with the enthusiasm
of sincere conviction. 'I am not afraid of doing all the bloomin' work
in this rotten hooker, b'gosh! And a jolly good thing for you that there
are some of us about the world that aren't afraid of their lives, or
where would you be--you and this old thing here with her plates like
brown paper--brown paper, s'elp me? It's all very fine for you--you
get a power of pieces out of her one way and another; but what about
me--what do I get? A measly hundred and fifty dollars a month and
find yourself. I wish to ask you respectfully--respectfully, mind--who
wouldn't chuck a dratted job like this? 'Tain't safe, s'elp me, it
ain't! Only I am one of them fearless fellows . . .'

He let go the rail and made ample gestures as if demonstrating in
the air the shape and extent of his valour; his thin voice darted in
prolonged squeaks upon the sea, he tiptoed back and forth for the better
emphasis of utterance, and suddenly pitched down head-first as though he
had been clubbed from behind. He said 'Damn!' as he tumbled; an instant
of silence followed upon his screeching: Jim and the skipper staggered
forward by common accord, and catching themselves up, stood very stiff
and still gazing, amazed, at the undisturbed level of the sea. Then they
looked upwards at the stars.

What had happened? The wheezy thump of the engines went on. Had the
earth been checked in her course? They could not understand; and
suddenly the calm sea, the sky without a cloud, appeared formidably
insecure in their immobility, as if poised on the brow of yawning
destruction. The engineer rebounded vertically full length and collapsed
again into a vague heap. This heap said 'What's that?' in the muffled
accents of profound grief. A faint noise as of thunder, of thunder
infinitely remote, less than a sound, hardly more than a vibration,
passed slowly, and the ship quivered in response, as if the thunder had
growled deep down in the water. The eyes of the two Malays at the wheel
glittered towards the white men, but their dark hands remained closed
on the spokes. The sharp hull driving on its way seemed to rise a few
inches in succession through its whole length, as though it had become
pliable, and settled down again rigidly to its work of cleaving the
smooth surface of the sea. Its quivering stopped, and the faint noise
of thunder ceased all at once, as though the ship had steamed across a
narrow belt of vibrating water and of humming air.

A month or so afterwards, when Jim, in answer to pointed questions,
tried to tell honestly the truth of this experience, he said, speaking
of the ship: 'She went over whatever it was as easy as a snake crawling
over a stick.' The illustration was good: the questions were aiming at
facts, and the official Inquiry was being held in the police court of an
Eastern port. He stood elevated in the witness-box, with burning cheeks
in a cool lofty room: the big framework of punkahs moved gently to and
fro high above his head, and from below many eyes were looking at him
out of dark faces, out of white faces, out of red faces, out of faces
attentive, spellbound, as if all these people sitting in orderly rows
upon narrow benches had been enslaved by the fascination of his voice.
It was very loud, it rang startling in his own ears, it was the only
sound audible in the world, for the terribly distinct questions that
extorted his answers seemed to shape themselves in anguish and pain
within his breast,--came to him poignant and silent like the
terrible questioning of one's conscience. Outside the court the sun
blazed--within was the wind of great punkahs that made you shiver, the
shame that made you burn, the attentive eyes whose glance stabbed. The
face of the presiding magistrate, clean shaved and impassible, looked at
him deadly pale between the red faces of the two nautical assessors. The
light of a broad window under the ceiling fell from above on the heads
and shoulders of the three men, and they were fiercely distinct in the
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 floating 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 skylight 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 vividness; 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 existence 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!"--something 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 motionless
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.



'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 harrow 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 exertion. 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 mysterious,
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 puckered 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 principal
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 childlike 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, something 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-pullers, 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 apparition
wanted. It spoke in a voice harsh and lugubrious but intrepid, and
little by little it dawned upon Archie that this was a development 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
sunshine. 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 under 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:
curiosity is the most obvious of sentiments, and it held me there to see
the effect of a full information upon that young fellow who, hands
in pockets, and turning his back upon the sidewalk, gazed across the
grass-plots of the Esplanade at the yellow portico of the Malabar Hotel
with the air of a man about to go for a walk as soon as his friend is
ready. That's how he looked, and it was odious. I waited to see him
overwhelmed, confounded, pierced through and through, squirming like an
impaled beetle--and I was half afraid to see it too--if you understand
what I mean. Nothing more awful than to watch a man who has been found
out, not in a crime but in a more than criminal weakness. The commonest
sort of fortitude prevents us from becoming criminals in a legal sense;
it is from weakness unknown, but perhaps suspected, as in some parts of
the world you suspect a deadly snake in every bush--from weakness
that may lie hidden, watched or unwatched, prayed against or manfully
scorned, repressed or maybe ignored more than half a lifetime, not one
of us is safe. We are snared into doing things for which we get called
names, and things for which we get hanged, and yet the spirit may well
survive--survive the condemnation, survive the halter, by Jove! And
there are things--they look small enough sometimes too--by which some of
us are totally and completely undone. I watched the youngster there.
I liked his appearance; I knew his appearance; he came from the right
place; he was one of us. He stood there for all the parentage of his
kind, for men and women by no means clever or amusing, but whose very
existence is based upon honest faith, and upon the instinct of courage.
I don't mean military courage, or civil courage, or any special kind of
courage. I mean just that inborn ability to look temptations straight in
the face--a readiness unintellectual enough, goodness knows, but without
pose--a power of resistance, don't you see, ungracious if you like, but
priceless--an unthinking and blessed stiffness before the outward and
inward terrors, before the might of nature and the seductive corruption
of men--backed by a faith invulnerable to the strength of facts, to the
contagion of example, to the solicitation of ideas. Hang ideas! They are
tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking
a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief
in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently
and would like to die easy!

'This has nothing to do with Jim, directly; only he was outwardly so
typical of that good, stupid kind we like to feel marching right and
left of us in life, of the kind that is not disturbed by the vagaries of
intelligence and the perversions of--of nerves, let us say. He was the
kind of fellow you would, on the strength of his looks, leave in charge
of the deck--figuratively and professionally speaking. I say I would,
and I ought to know. Haven't I turned out youngsters enough in my time,
for the service of the Red Rag, to the craft of the sea, to the craft
whose whole secret could be expressed in one short sentence, and yet
must be driven afresh every day into young heads till it becomes the
component part of every waking thought--till it is present in every
dream of their young sleep! The sea has been good to me, but when I
remember all these boys that passed through my hands, some grown up now
and some drowned by this time, but all good stuff for the sea, I don't
think I have done badly by it either. Were I to go home to-morrow, I bet
that before two days passed over my head some sunburnt young chief mate
would overtake me at some dock gateway or other, and a fresh deep voice
speaking above my hat would ask: "Don't you remember me, sir? Why!
little So-and-so. Such and such a ship. It was my first voyage." And I
would remember a bewildered little shaver, no higher than the back of
this chair, with a mother and perhaps a big sister on the quay, very
quiet but too upset to wave their handkerchiefs at the ship that glides
out gently between the pier-heads; or perhaps some decent middle-aged
father who had come early with his boy to see him off, and stays all the
morning, because he is interested in the windlass apparently, and stays
too long, and has got to scramble ashore at last with no time at all
to say good-bye. The mud pilot on the poop sings out to me in a drawl,
"Hold her with the check line for a moment, Mister Mate. There's a
gentleman wants to get ashore. . . . Up with you, sir. Nearly got
carried off to Talcahuano, didn't you? Now's your time; easy does
it. . . . All right. Slack away again forward there." The tugs, smoking
like the pit of perdition, get hold and churn the old river into fury;
the gentleman ashore is dusting his knees--the benevolent steward has
shied his umbrella after him. All very proper. He has offered his bit of
sacrifice to the sea, and now he may go home pretending he thinks
nothing of it; and the little willing victim shall be very sea-sick
before next morning. By-and-by, when he has learned all the little
mysteries and the one great secret of the craft, he shall be fit to live
or die as the sea may decree; and the man who had taken a hand in this
fool game, in which the sea wins every toss, will be pleased to have his
back slapped by a heavy young hand, and to hear a cheery sea-puppy
voice: "Do you remember me, sir? The little So-and-so."

'I tell you this is good; it tells you that once in your life at least
you had gone the right way to work. I have been thus slapped, and I have
winced, for the slap was heavy, and I have glowed all day long and gone
to bed feeling less lonely in the world by virtue of that hearty thump.
Don't I remember the little So-and-so's! I tell you I ought to know the
right kind of looks. I would have trusted the deck to that youngster on
the strength of a single glance, and gone to sleep with both eyes--and,
by Jove! it wouldn't have been safe. There are depths of horror in that
thought. He looked as genuine as a new sovereign, but there was some
infernal alloy in his metal. How much? The least thing--the least
drop of something rare and accursed; the least drop!--but he made
you--standing there with his don't-care-hang air--he made you wonder
whether perchance he were nothing more rare than brass.

'I couldn't believe it. I tell you I wanted to see him squirm for
the honour of the craft. The other two no-account chaps spotted their
captain, and began to move slowly towards us. They chatted together as
they strolled, and I did not care any more than if they had not been
visible to the naked eye. They grinned at each other--might have been
exchanging jokes, for all I know. I saw that with one of them it was a
case of a broken arm; and as to the long individual with grey moustaches
he was the chief engineer, and in various ways a pretty notorious
personality. They were nobodies. They approached. The skipper gazed
in an inanimate way between his feet: he seemed to be swollen to an
unnatural size by some awful disease, by the mysterious action of an
unknown poison. He lifted his head, saw the two before him waiting,
opened his mouth with an extraordinary, sneering contortion of his
puffed face--to speak to them, I suppose--and then a thought seemed to
strike him. His thick, purplish lips came together without a sound, he
went off in a resolute waddle to the gharry and began to jerk at the
door-handle with such a blind brutality of impatience that I expected to
see the whole concern overturned on its side, pony and all. The driver,
shaken out of his meditation over the sole of his foot, displayed at
once all the signs of intense terror, and held with both hands, looking
round from his box at this vast carcass forcing its way into his
conveyance. The little machine shook and rocked tumultuously, and the
crimson nape of that lowered neck, the size of those straining thighs,
the immense heaving of that dingy, striped green-and-orange back, the
whole burrowing effort of that gaudy and sordid mass, troubled one's
sense of probability with a droll and fearsome effect, like one of those
grotesque and distinct visions that scare and fascinate one in a fever.
He disappeared. I half expected the roof to split in two, the little box
on wheels to burst open in the manner of a ripe cotton-pod--but it only
sank with a click of flattened springs, and suddenly one venetian blind
rattled down. His shoulders reappeared, jammed in the small opening; his
head hung out, distended and tossing like a captive balloon, perspiring,
furious, spluttering. He reached for the gharry-wallah with vicious
flourishes of a fist as dumpy and red as a lump of raw meat. He roared
at him to be off, to go on. Where? Into the Pacific, perhaps. The driver
lashed; the pony snorted, reared once, and darted off at a gallop.
Where? To Apia? To Honolulu? He had 6000 miles of tropical belt to
disport himself in, and I did not hear the precise address. A snorting
pony snatched him into "Ewigkeit" in the twinkling of an eye, and I
never saw him again; and, what's more, I don't know of anybody that ever
had a glimpse of him after he departed from my knowledge sitting inside
a ramshackle little gharry that fled round the corner in a white smother
of dust. He departed, disappeared, vanished, absconded; and absurdly
enough it looked as though he had taken that gharry with him, for
never again did I come across a sorrel pony with a slit ear and a
lackadaisical Tamil driver afflicted by a sore foot. The Pacific is
indeed big; but whether he found a place for a display of his talents
in it or not, the fact remains he had flown into space like a witch on a
broomstick. The little chap with his arm in a sling started to run after
the carriage, bleating, "Captain! I say, Captain! I sa-a-ay!"--but after
a few steps stopped short, hung his head, and walked back slowly. At the
sharp rattle of the wheels the young fellow spun round where he stood.
He made no other movement, no gesture, no sign, and remained facing in
the new direction after the gharry had swung out of sight.

'All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since I am
trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of
visual impressions. Next moment the half-caste clerk, sent by Archie
to look a little after the poor castaways of the Patna, came upon the
scene. He ran out eager and bareheaded, looking right and left, and
very full of his mission. It was doomed to be a failure as far as the
principal person was concerned, but he approached the others with fussy
importance, and, almost immediately, found himself involved in a violent
altercation with the chap that carried his arm in a sling, and who
turned out to be extremely anxious for a row. He wasn't going to be
ordered about--"not he, b'gosh." He wouldn't be terrified with a pack
of lies by a cocky half-bred little quill-driver. He was not going to be
bullied by "no object of that sort," if the story were true "ever so"!
He bawled his wish, his desire, his determination to go to bed. "If you
weren't a God-forsaken Portuguee," I heard him yell, "you would know
that the hospital is the right place for me." He pushed the fist of
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 centipedes.
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
famous 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 merciful 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 case in a distressed 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 interested 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 have 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.'
Chapters 3 - 5
The Patna continues toward Mecca through an impossibly still night. The passengers are asleep and Jim is on watch, imagining heroic deeds as usual. The ship's captain, a tremendously obese and violent "New South Wales German," argues with the second engineer, who is drunk. A sudden impact shakes the ship, pitching the engineer forward and nearly knocking Jim and the captain off their feet. The impact is followed only by silence and a rumbling shake of the ship. The narrative suddenly skips ahead a month to a courtroom, where an inquest is being held. Jim is on the stand recounting the events of that night. He recalls that he was sent below to examine the ship for damage following the impact, which, it is mentioned, is thought to have been with a floating shipwreck. Jim tells the court that he found the hold filling with water and that he then realized that there must be "a big hole below the waterline. " On his way to examine the bulkhead, which divides sections of the hold, he encountered the second engineer, who had broken his arm falling from a ladder. Jim enters into a detailed, impressionistic account of subsequent events, but he is quickly cut off by the court, which wants only "yes or no" answers in their search for the "facts." As he testifies, Jim notices "a white man who  apart from the others, with his face worn and clouded, but with quiet eyes," who is watching him intently. Jim senses that the man understands his predicament . We find out that this man is Marlow, who will narrate a good bit of the story, and who will "later on, many times, in distant parts of the world. . .show. . .himself willing to remember Jim, to remember him at length, in detail and audibly. " In other words, Marlow is to be the keeper of Jim's story. The narrative shifts again, to Marlow, on a verandah after dinner, recounting Jim's story to a group of silent listeners. Marlow admits to his audience that he's not sure why he attended the inquiry, except for the fact that the Patna "affair"  had become "notorious" in the maritime community of that part of the world, and everyone who could came to the trial. Marlow tells his listeners that he himself saw the rescued crew of the Patna arrive in port and report to the harbor office to make a deposition. He digresses for a moment, detailing the repulsive appearance of the crew, particularly the captain, who was wearing someone else's pajamas, and then digresses still further to offer an account of his acquaintance with the harbormaster's clerk, which has no real relevance to the story except to reveal something of Marlow's character: he once gave the clerk a generous tip, he says, because the man's "childlike belief in the sacred right to perquisites quite touched  heart." Marlow looked on as the Patna's crew argued with the harbormaster, and it is then that he first noticed Jim, who stood out from the rest of the debased bunch. Marlow immediately fixed on Jim as "one of us," a tag that will be repeated throughout the novel. The crew, after disputing with the harbormaster for a few moments longer, disappeared into a series of rickshaws. The second engineer, with his broken arm, went to the hospital, where Marlow, going to see an injured member of his own crew, encountered him a few days later. Another member of the Patna's crew, a man with a long, drooping mustache, was also in the hospital, in the throes of delirium and hallucinations after a long drinking binge that began when he reached port. Marlow interrogated him, and was told by the man that he saw the Patna go down with his own eyes. He then rambles on about the reptiles on board the ship and the pink toads that are under his hospital bed. Marlow was asked by one of the doctors, as he left the hospital, if the man's testimony would be material to the inquiry. Marlow tells him it would not.
Commentary The narrative continues to play games with time, jumping between the collision on board the Patna, the inquiry into the collision, and events between the crew's rescue and the inquiry. Note that a great deal of information is still not available to the reader: What did the ship hit? Why did the crew need to be rescued? Why is an inquiry being held into the crew's behavior? And, most critically, who is Marlow, and why is he so interested in Jim? The reader is put in the same position as the crew of the Patna following the impact: something important has just happened, but we're not sure what it is, and the consequences are entirely unclear. Jim theorizes that the Patna has an enormous gouge "below the waterline," but he is unable to see the damage threatening his ship, as it is hidden at the bottom of a dark, flooded compartment below the deck. Just as it is only the flooding that is apparent to Jim, it is only the aftermath of a major, still-unknown event that is visible to the reader: an injured man, a man who has drunk himself into hallucinations, and a trial, for a crime still a mystery to us. The inquiry introduces Marlow , and also serves to highlight his curious interest in Jim by way of contrast. The inquiry is interested in "fact," so much so that the magistrate presiding tells Jim to curtail his explanations and reminiscences and get to the point." Yes or no" answers are what the court wants, but perhaps, as Marlow's presence suggests, the issues at hand require a more subtle form of inquiry. Marlow fixates on Jim's status as "one of us," but what does this phrase mean? Marlow and Jim are both sailors, but so are the men who seem to have Jim on trial . Marlow initially offers us the explanation that he is interested in Jim because he is "outwardly so typical of that good, stupid kind we like to feel marching right and left of us in life"; in other words, he claims to pity Jim in a way, and to feel an urge to protect him. Later, though, Marlow gives a more complicated reason for his interest, saying that he "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." He preliminarily concludes that Jim fascinates him because "he look as genuine as a new sovereign, but there  some infernal alloy in his metal. " What does this mean, and why does Marlow so deeply identify with Jim? We still don't know why it wouldn't be safe to trust Jim with a ship  nor why Jim should be considered "infernal." Above all, who is this Marlow, and how is it that he has access to every part of Jim's story? Marlow is the consummate storyteller, as we see in the hypothetical setup at the end of Chapter 4 and the beginning of Chapter 5. He reorders the material at hand to maximize suspense and create meaningful juxtapositions and omissions. Most of all, he offers a record of his own involvement with and reaction to Jim's story. Marlow constructs himself as an alternate hero, an intellectual hero who is not only Jim's best reader, but also his best representative, his best hope for a continued place in the world's memory. Pay attention to Marlow's encounter with the alcoholic crewman from the Patna. This is a novel filled with coincidences and parallel structures, and this is a plot device that will recur. Coincidence is an important idea in this novel. Marlow's eventual ability to piece together all of Jim's story is due to chance meetings, mutual acquaintances, and the similarity in their occupations. He takes an interest in Jim and makes an effort to learn about him over time, but he is aided by sheer luck and some mysterious circumstances, in a part of the world where distances are great and "civilization" is still minimal. What does coincidence mean in Lord Jim? It is not evidence of providential design or predestined fate; rather, coincidence highlights Jim's representative quality--he is, in some way, "one of" all of "us." It also emphasizes Jim's inability to escape his past, a fact which will assume great importance in the closing chapters of the novel; despite moving thousands of miles away from white civilization and several years forward in time, Jim is never quite able to escape whatever it is that happened on the Patna. The role of coincidence thus also suggests lingering overtones of Victorian moral codes, under which nothing goes unpunished, nothing is forgiven. Watch for repeating structures and coincidences in the plot, and look particularly for parallels between the two major episodes.