"There is no use your telling me that you are going to be good," cried
Lord Henry, dipping his white fingers into a red copper bowl filled
with rose-water. "You are quite perfect.  Pray, don't change."

Dorian Gray shook his head.  "No, Harry, I have done too many dreadful
things in my life.  I am not going to do any more.  I began my good
actions yesterday."

"Where were you yesterday?"

"In the country, Harry.  I was staying at a little inn by myself."

"My dear boy," said Lord Henry, smiling, "anybody can be good in the
country.  There are no temptations there.  That is the reason why
people who live out of town are so absolutely uncivilized.
Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to.  There are
only two ways by which man can reach it.  One is by being cultured, the
other by being corrupt.  Country people have no opportunity of being
either, so they stagnate."

"Culture and corruption," echoed Dorian.  "I have known something of
both.  It seems terrible to me now that they should ever be found
together.  For I have a new ideal, Harry.  I am going to alter.  I
think I have altered."

"You have not yet told me what your good action was.  Or did you say
you had done more than one?" asked his companion as he spilled into his
plate a little crimson pyramid of seeded strawberries and, through a
perforated, shell-shaped spoon, snowed white sugar upon them.

"I can tell you, Harry.  It is not a story I could tell to any one
else.  I spared somebody.  It sounds vain, but you understand what I
mean.  She was quite beautiful and wonderfully like Sibyl Vane.  I
think it was that which first attracted me to her.  You remember Sibyl,
don't you?  How long ago that seems!  Well, Hetty was not one of our
own class, of course.  She was simply a girl in a village.  But I
really loved her.  I am quite sure that I loved her.  All during this
wonderful May that we have been having, I used to run down and see her
two or three times a week.  Yesterday she met me in a little orchard.
The apple-blossoms kept tumbling down on her hair, and she was
laughing.  We were to have gone away together this morning at dawn.
Suddenly I determined to leave her as flowerlike as I had found her."

"I should think the novelty of the emotion must have given you a thrill
of real pleasure, Dorian," interrupted Lord Henry.  "But I can finish
your idyll for you.  You gave her good advice and broke her heart.
That was the beginning of your reformation."

"Harry, you are horrible!  You mustn't say these dreadful things.
Hetty's heart is not broken.  Of course, she cried and all that.  But
there is no disgrace upon her.  She can live, like Perdita, in her
garden of mint and marigold."

"And weep over a faithless Florizel," said Lord Henry, laughing, as he
leaned back in his chair.  "My dear Dorian, you have the most curiously
boyish moods.  Do you think this girl will ever be really content now
with any one of her own rank?  I suppose she will be married some day
to a rough carter or a grinning ploughman.  Well, the fact of having
met you, and loved you, will teach her to despise her husband, and she
will be wretched.  From a moral point of view, I cannot say that I
think much of your great renunciation.  Even as a beginning, it is
poor.  Besides, how do you know that Hetty isn't floating at the
present moment in some starlit mill-pond, with lovely water-lilies
round her, like Ophelia?"

"I can't bear this, Harry!  You mock at everything, and then suggest
the most serious tragedies.  I am sorry I told you now.  I don't care
what you say to me.  I know I was right in acting as I did.  Poor
Hetty!  As I rode past the farm this morning, I saw her white face at
the window, like a spray of jasmine.  Don't let us talk about it any
more, and don't try to persuade me that the first good action I have
done for years, the first little bit of self-sacrifice I have ever
known, is really a sort of sin.  I want to be better.  I am going to be
better.  Tell me something about yourself.  What is going on in town?
I have not been to the club for days."

"The people are still discussing poor Basil's disappearance."

"I should have thought they had got tired of that by this time," said
Dorian, pouring himself out some wine and frowning slightly.

"My dear boy, they have only been talking about it for six weeks, and
the British public are really not equal to the mental strain of having
more than one topic every three months.  They have been very fortunate
lately, however.  They have had my own divorce-case and Alan Campbell's
suicide.  Now they have got the mysterious disappearance of an artist.
Scotland Yard still insists that the man in the grey ulster who left
for Paris by the midnight train on the ninth of November was poor
Basil, and the French police declare that Basil never arrived in Paris
at all.  I suppose in about a fortnight we shall be told that he has
been seen in San Francisco.  It is an odd thing, but every one who
disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco.  It must be a
delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world."

"What do you think has happened to Basil?" asked Dorian, holding up his
Burgundy against the light and wondering how it was that he could
discuss the matter so calmly.

"I have not the slightest idea.  If Basil chooses to hide himself, it
is no business of mine.  If he is dead, I don't want to think about
him.  Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me.  I hate it."

"Why?" said the younger man wearily.

"Because," said Lord Henry, passing beneath his nostrils the gilt
trellis of an open vinaigrette box, "one can survive everything
nowadays except that.  Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in
the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.  Let us have our
coffee in the music-room, Dorian.  You must play Chopin to me.  The man
with whom my wife ran away played Chopin exquisitely.  Poor Victoria!
I was very fond of her.  The house is rather lonely without her.  Of
course, married life is merely a habit, a bad habit.  But then one
regrets the loss even of one's worst habits.  Perhaps one regrets them
the most.  They are such an essential part of one's personality."

Dorian said nothing, but rose from the table, and passing into the next
room, sat down to the piano and let his fingers stray across the white
and black ivory of the keys.  After the coffee had been brought in, he
stopped, and looking over at Lord Henry, said, "Harry, did it ever
occur to you that Basil was murdered?"

Lord Henry yawned.  "Basil was very popular, and always wore a
Waterbury watch.  Why should he have been murdered?  He was not clever
enough to have enemies.  Of course, he had a wonderful genius for
painting.  But a man can paint like Velasquez and yet be as dull as
possible.  Basil was really rather dull.  He only interested me once,
and that was when he told me, years ago, that he had a wild adoration
for you and that you were the dominant motive of his art."

"I was very fond of Basil," said Dorian with a note of sadness in his
voice.  "But don't people say that he was murdered?"

"Oh, some of the papers do.  It does not seem to me to be at all
probable.  I know there are dreadful places in Paris, but Basil was not
the sort of man to have gone to them.  He had no curiosity.  It was his
chief defect."

"What would you say, Harry, if I told you that I had murdered Basil?"
said the younger man.  He watched him intently after he had spoken.

"I would say, my dear fellow, that you were posing for a character that
doesn't suit you.  All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime.
It is not in you, Dorian, to commit a murder.  I am sorry if I hurt
your vanity by saying so, but I assure you it is true.  Crime belongs
exclusively to the lower orders.  I don't blame them in the smallest
degree.  I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us,
simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations."

"A method of procuring sensations?  Do you think, then, that a man who
has once committed a murder could possibly do the same crime again?
Don't tell me that."

"Oh! anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often," cried Lord
Henry, laughing.  "That is one of the most important secrets of life.
I should fancy, however, that murder is always a mistake.  One should
never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.  But let us
pass from poor Basil.  I wish I could believe that he had come to such
a really romantic end as you suggest, but I can't. I dare say he fell
into the Seine off an omnibus and that the conductor hushed up the
scandal.  Yes:  I should fancy that was his end.  I see him lying now
on his back under those dull-green waters, with the heavy barges
floating over him and long weeds catching in his hair.  Do you know, I
don't think he would have done much more good work.  During the last
ten years his painting had gone off very much."

Dorian heaved a sigh, and Lord Henry strolled across the room and began
to stroke the head of a curious Java parrot, a large, grey-plumaged
bird with pink crest and tail, that was balancing itself upon a bamboo
perch.  As his pointed fingers touched it, it dropped the white scurf
of crinkled lids over black, glasslike eyes and began to sway backwards
and forwards.

"Yes," he continued, turning round and taking his handkerchief out of
his pocket; "his painting had quite gone off.  It seemed to me to have
lost something.  It had lost an ideal.  When you and he ceased to be
great friends, he ceased to be a great artist.  What was it separated
you?  I suppose he bored you.  If so, he never forgave you.  It's a
habit bores have.  By the way, what has become of that wonderful
portrait he did of you?  I don't think I have ever seen it since he
finished it.  Oh!  I remember your telling me years ago that you had
sent it down to Selby, and that it had got mislaid or stolen on the
way.  You never got it back?  What a pity! it was really a
masterpiece.  I remember I wanted to buy it.  I wish I had now.  It
belonged to Basil's best period.  Since then, his work was that curious
mixture of bad painting and good intentions that always entitles a man
to be called a representative British artist.  Did you advertise for
it?  You should."

"I forget," said Dorian.  "I suppose I did.  But I never really liked
it.  I am sorry I sat for it.  The memory of the thing is hateful to
me.  Why do you talk of it?  It used to remind me of those curious
lines in some play--Hamlet, I think--how do they run?--

    "Like the painting of a sorrow,
     A face without a heart."

Yes:  that is what it was like."

Lord Henry laughed.  "If a man treats life artistically, his brain is
his heart," he answered, sinking into an arm-chair.

Dorian Gray shook his head and struck some soft chords on the piano.
"'Like the painting of a sorrow,'" he repeated, "'a face without a
heart.'"

The elder man lay back and looked at him with half-closed eyes.  "By
the way, Dorian," he said after a pause, "'what does it profit a man if
he gain the whole world and lose--how does the quotation run?--his own
soul'?"

The music jarred, and Dorian Gray started and stared at his friend.
"Why do you ask me that, Harry?"

"My dear fellow," said Lord Henry, elevating his eyebrows in surprise,
"I asked you because I thought you might be able to give me an answer.
That is all.  I was going through the park last Sunday, and close by
the Marble Arch there stood a little crowd of shabby-looking people
listening to some vulgar street-preacher. As I passed by, I heard the
man yelling out that question to his audience.  It struck me as being
rather dramatic.  London is very rich in curious effects of that kind.
A wet Sunday, an uncouth Christian in a mackintosh, a ring of sickly
white faces under a broken roof of dripping umbrellas, and a wonderful
phrase flung into the air by shrill hysterical lips--it was really very
good in its way, quite a suggestion.  I thought of telling the prophet
that art had a soul, but that man had not.  I am afraid, however, he
would not have understood me."

"Don't, Harry.  The soul is a terrible reality.  It can be bought, and
sold, and bartered away.  It can be poisoned, or made perfect.  There
is a soul in each one of us.  I know it."

"Do you feel quite sure of that, Dorian?"

"Quite sure."

"Ah! then it must be an illusion.  The things one feels absolutely
certain about are never true.  That is the fatality of faith, and the
lesson of romance.  How grave you are!  Don't be so serious.  What have
you or I to do with the superstitions of our age?  No:  we have given
up our belief in the soul.  Play me something.  Play me a nocturne,
Dorian, and, as you play, tell me, in a low voice, how you have kept
your youth.  You must have some secret.  I am only ten years older than
you are, and I am wrinkled, and worn, and yellow.  You are really
wonderful, Dorian.  You have never looked more charming than you do
to-night. You remind me of the day I saw you first.  You were rather
cheeky, very shy, and absolutely extraordinary.  You have changed, of
course, but not in appearance.  I wish you would tell me your secret.
To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take
exercise, get up early, or be respectable.  Youth!  There is nothing
like it.  It's absurd to talk of the ignorance of youth.  The only
people to whose opinions I listen now with any respect are people much
younger than myself.  They seem in front of me.  Life has revealed to
them her latest wonder.  As for the aged, I always contradict the aged.
I do it on principle.  If you ask them their opinion on something that
happened yesterday, they solemnly give you the opinions current in
1820, when people wore high stocks, believed in everything, and knew
absolutely nothing.  How lovely that thing you are playing is!  I
wonder, did Chopin write it at Majorca, with the sea weeping round the
villa and the salt spray dashing against the panes?  It is marvellously
romantic.  What a blessing it is that there is one art left to us that
is not imitative!  Don't stop.  I want music to-night. It seems to me
that you are the young Apollo and that I am Marsyas listening to you.
I have sorrows, Dorian, of my own, that even you know nothing of.  The
tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.  I am
amazed sometimes at my own sincerity.  Ah, Dorian, how happy you are!
What an exquisite life you have had!  You have drunk deeply of
everything.  You have crushed the grapes against your palate.  Nothing
has been hidden from you.  And it has all been to you no more than the
sound of music.  It has not marred you.  You are still the same."

"I am not the same, Harry."

"Yes, you are the same.  I wonder what the rest of your life will be.
Don't spoil it by renunciations.  At present you are a perfect type.
Don't make yourself incomplete.  You are quite flawless now.  You need
not shake your head:  you know you are.  Besides, Dorian, don't deceive
yourself.  Life is not governed by will or intention.  Life is a
question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which
thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.  You may fancy
yourself safe and think yourself strong.  But a chance tone of colour
in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once
loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten
poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music
that you had ceased to play--I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things
like these that our lives depend.  Browning writes about that
somewhere; but our own senses will imagine them for us.  There are
moments when the odour of _lilas blanc_ passes suddenly across me, and I
have to live the strangest month of my life over again.  I wish I could
change places with you, Dorian.  The world has cried out against us
both, but it has always worshipped you.  It always will worship you.
You are the type of what the age is searching for, and what it is
afraid it has found.  I am so glad that you have never done anything,
never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything
outside of yourself!  Life has been your art.  You have set yourself to
music.  Your days are your sonnets."

Dorian rose up from the piano and passed his hand through his hair.
"Yes, life has been exquisite," he murmured, "but I am not going to
have the same life, Harry.  And you must not say these extravagant
things to me.  You don't know everything about me.  I think that if you
did, even you would turn from me.  You laugh.  Don't laugh."

"Why have you stopped playing, Dorian?  Go back and give me the
nocturne over again.  Look at that great, honey-coloured moon that
hangs in the dusky air.  She is waiting for you to charm her, and if
you play she will come closer to the earth.  You won't?  Let us go to
the club, then.  It has been a charming evening, and we must end it
charmingly.  There is some one at White's who wants immensely to know
you--young Lord Poole, Bournemouth's eldest son.  He has already copied
your neckties, and has begged me to introduce him to you.  He is quite
delightful and rather reminds me of you."

"I hope not," said Dorian with a sad look in his eyes.  "But I am tired
to-night, Harry.  I shan't go to the club.  It is nearly eleven, and I
want to go to bed early."

"Do stay.  You have never played so well as to-night. There was
something in your touch that was wonderful.  It had more expression
than I had ever heard from it before."

"It is because I am going to be good," he answered, smiling.  "I am a
little changed already."

"You cannot change to me, Dorian," said Lord Henry.  "You and I will
always be friends."

"Yet you poisoned me with a book once.  I should not forgive that.
Harry, promise me that you will never lend that book to any one.  It
does harm."

"My dear boy, you are really beginning to moralize.  You will soon be
going about like the converted, and the revivalist, warning people
against all the sins of which you have grown tired.  You are much too
delightful to do that.  Besides, it is no use.  You and I are what we
are, and will be what we will be.  As for being poisoned by a book,
there is no such thing as that.  Art has no influence upon action.  It
annihilates the desire to act.  It is superbly sterile.  The books that
the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
That is all.  But we won't discuss literature.  Come round to-morrow. I
am going to ride at eleven.  We might go together, and I will take you
to lunch afterwards with Lady Branksome.  She is a charming woman, and
wants to consult you about some tapestries she is thinking of buying.
Mind you come.  Or shall we lunch with our little duchess?  She says
she never sees you now.  Perhaps you are tired of Gladys?  I thought
you would be.  Her clever tongue gets on one's nerves.  Well, in any
case, be here at eleven."

"Must I really come, Harry?"

"Certainly.  The park is quite lovely now.  I don't think there have
been such lilacs since the year I met you."

"Very well.  I shall be here at eleven," said Dorian.  "Good night,
Harry."  As he reached the door, he hesitated for a moment, as if he
had something more to say.  Then he sighed and went out.

It was a lovely night, so warm that he threw his coat over his arm and
did not even put his silk scarf round his throat.  As he strolled home,
smoking his cigarette, two young men in evening dress passed him.  He
heard one of them whisper to the other, "That is Dorian Gray." He
remembered how pleased he used to be when he was pointed out, or stared
at, or talked about.  He was tired of hearing his own name now.  Half
the charm of the little village where he had been so often lately was
that no one knew who he was.  He had often told the girl whom he had
lured to love him that he was poor, and she had believed him.  He had
told her once that he was wicked, and she had laughed at him and
answered that wicked people were always very old and very ugly.  What a
laugh she had!--just like a thrush singing.  And how pretty she had
been in her cotton dresses and her large hats!  She knew nothing, but
she had everything that he had lost.

When he reached home, he found his servant waiting up for him.  He sent
him to bed, and threw himself down on the sofa in the library, and
began to think over some of the things that Lord Henry had said to him.

Was it really true that one could never change?  He felt a wild longing
for the unstained purity of his boyhood--his rose-white boyhood, as
Lord Henry had once called it.  He knew that he had tarnished himself,
filled his mind with corruption and given horror to his fancy; that he
had been an evil influence to others, and had experienced a terrible
joy in being so; and that of the lives that had crossed his own, it had
been the fairest and the most full of promise that he had brought to
shame.  But was it all irretrievable?  Was there no hope for him?

Ah! in what a monstrous moment of pride and passion he had prayed that
the portrait should bear the burden of his days, and he keep the
unsullied splendour of eternal youth!  All his failure had been due to
that.  Better for him that each sin of his life had brought its sure
swift penalty along with it.  There was purification in punishment.
Not "Forgive us our sins" but "Smite us for our iniquities" should be
the prayer of man to a most just God.

The curiously carved mirror that Lord Henry had given to him, so many
years ago now, was standing on the table, and the white-limbed Cupids
laughed round it as of old.  He took it up, as he had done on that
night of horror when he had first noted the change in the fatal
picture, and with wild, tear-dimmed eyes looked into its polished
shield.  Once, some one who had terribly loved him had written to him a
mad letter, ending with these idolatrous words: "The world is changed
because you are made of ivory and gold.  The curves of your lips
rewrite history."  The phrases came back to his memory, and he repeated
them over and over to himself.  Then he loathed his own beauty, and
flinging the mirror on the floor, crushed it into silver splinters
beneath his heel.  It was his beauty that had ruined him, his beauty
and the youth that he had prayed for.  But for those two things, his
life might have been free from stain.  His beauty had been to him but a
mask, his youth but a mockery.  What was youth at best?  A green, an
unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts.  Why had he
worn its livery?  Youth had spoiled him.

It was better not to think of the past.  Nothing could alter that.  It
was of himself, and of his own future, that he had to think.  James
Vane was hidden in a nameless grave in Selby churchyard.  Alan Campbell
had shot himself one night in his laboratory, but had not revealed the
secret that he had been forced to know.  The excitement, such as it
was, over Basil Hallward's disappearance would soon pass away.  It was
already waning.  He was perfectly safe there.  Nor, indeed, was it the
death of Basil Hallward that weighed most upon his mind.  It was the
living death of his own soul that troubled him.  Basil had painted the
portrait that had marred his life.  He could not forgive him that.  It
was the portrait that had done everything.  Basil had said things to
him that were unbearable, and that he had yet borne with patience.  The
murder had been simply the madness of a moment.  As for Alan Campbell,
his suicide had been his own act.  He had chosen to do it.  It was
nothing to him.

A new life!  That was what he wanted.  That was what he was waiting
for.  Surely he had begun it already.  He had spared one innocent
thing, at any rate.  He would never again tempt innocence.  He would be
good.

As he thought of Hetty Merton, he began to wonder if the portrait in
the locked room had changed.  Surely it was not still so horrible as it
had been?  Perhaps if his life became pure, he would be able to expel
every sign of evil passion from the face.  Perhaps the signs of evil
had already gone away.  He would go and look.

He took the lamp from the table and crept upstairs.  As he unbarred the
door, a smile of joy flitted across his strangely young-looking face
and lingered for a moment about his lips.  Yes, he would be good, and
the hideous thing that he had hidden away would no longer be a terror
to him.  He felt as if the load had been lifted from him already.

He went in quietly, locking the door behind him, as was his custom, and
dragged the purple hanging from the portrait.  A cry of pain and
indignation broke from him.  He could see no change, save that in the
eyes there was a look of cunning and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of
the hypocrite.  The thing was still loathsome--more loathsome, if
possible, than before--and the scarlet dew that spotted the hand seemed
brighter, and more like blood newly spilled.  Then he trembled.  Had it
been merely vanity that had made him do his one good deed?  Or the
desire for a new sensation, as Lord Henry had hinted, with his mocking
laugh?  Or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things
finer than we are ourselves?  Or, perhaps, all these?  And why was the
red stain larger than it had been?  It seemed to have crept like a
horrible disease over the wrinkled fingers.  There was blood on the
painted feet, as though the thing had dripped--blood even on the hand
that had not held the knife.  Confess?  Did it mean that he was to
confess?  To give himself up and be put to death?  He laughed.  He felt
that the idea was monstrous.  Besides, even if he did confess, who
would believe him?  There was no trace of the murdered man anywhere.
Everything belonging to him had been destroyed.  He himself had burned
what had been below-stairs. The world would simply say that he was mad.
They would shut him up if he persisted in his story.... Yet it was
his duty to confess, to suffer public shame, and to make public
atonement.  There was a God who called upon men to tell their sins to
earth as well as to heaven.  Nothing that he could do would cleanse him
till he had told his own sin.  His sin?  He shrugged his shoulders.
The death of Basil Hallward seemed very little to him.  He was thinking
of Hetty Merton.  For it was an unjust mirror, this mirror of his soul
that he was looking at.  Vanity?  Curiosity?  Hypocrisy?  Had there
been nothing more in his renunciation than that?  There had been
something more.  At least he thought so.  But who could tell? ... No.
There had been nothing more.  Through vanity he had spared her.  In
hypocrisy he had worn the mask of goodness.  For curiosity's sake he
had tried the denial of self.  He recognized that now.

But this murder--was it to dog him all his life?  Was he always to be
burdened by his past?  Was he really to confess?  Never.  There was
only one bit of evidence left against him.  The picture itself--that
was evidence.  He would destroy it.  Why had he kept it so long?  Once
it had given him pleasure to watch it changing and growing old.  Of
late he had felt no such pleasure.  It had kept him awake at night.
When he had been away, he had been filled with terror lest other eyes
should look upon it.  It had brought melancholy across his passions.
Its mere memory had marred many moments of joy.  It had been like
conscience to him.  Yes, it had been conscience.  He would destroy it.

He looked round and saw the knife that had stabbed Basil Hallward.  He
had cleaned it many times, till there was no stain left upon it.  It
was bright, and glistened.  As it had killed the painter, so it would
kill the painter's work, and all that that meant.  It would kill the
past, and when that was dead, he would be free.  It would kill this
monstrous soul-life, and without its hideous warnings, he would be at
peace.  He seized the thing, and stabbed the picture with it.

There was a cry heard, and a crash.  The cry was so horrible in its
agony that the frightened servants woke and crept out of their rooms.
Two gentlemen, who were passing in the square below, stopped and looked
up at the great house.  They walked on till they met a policeman and
brought him back.  The man rang the bell several times, but there was
no answer.  Except for a light in one of the top windows, the house was
all dark.  After a time, he went away and stood in an adjoining portico
and watched.

"Whose house is that, Constable?" asked the elder of the two gentlemen.

"Mr. Dorian Gray's, sir," answered the policeman.

They looked at each other, as they walked away, and sneered.  One of
them was Sir Henry Ashton's uncle.

Inside, in the servants' part of the house, the half-clad domestics
were talking in low whispers to each other.  Old Mrs. Leaf was crying
and wringing her hands.  Francis was as pale as death.

After about a quarter of an hour, he got the coachman and one of the
footmen and crept upstairs.  They knocked, but there was no reply.
They called out.  Everything was still.  Finally, after vainly trying
to force the door, they got on the roof and dropped down on to the
balcony.  The windows yielded easily--their bolts were old.

When they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid portrait
of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his
exquisite youth and beauty.  Lying on the floor was a dead man, in
evening dress, with a knife in his heart.  He was withered, wrinkled,
and loathsome of visage.  It was not till they had examined the rings
that they recognized who it was.

Approximately six months have passed. As Chapter 19 opens, Dorian and Lord Henry apparently have just dined at the older man's home. Despite recently having gone through a divorce, Lord Henry is his usual witty self. Dorian seems more pensive, even grave. They are discussing Dorian's vow to change his behavior. Lord Henry says that Dorian is perfectly fine as he is. Dorian, however, says that he has done "too many dreadful things" in his life. He wants to reform. In fact, he began the previous day. He was staying alone at a small inn in the country and was seeing a young girl named Hetty Merton. She reminded him of Sibyl Vane in her beauty and innocence. A simple village girl, Dorian is fairly sure that he loved her. They were to run off together that morning at dawn, but he spared the child by leaving her "as flowerlike as I had found her." Lord Henry brings up the disappearance of Basil; he also mentions his own divorce and Alan Campbell's suicide. Lord Henry allows that only death and vulgarity cannot be explained. He asks Dorian to play the piano. Dorian plays for a while but stops and asks Lord Henry if he ever thought that Basil might have been murdered. Lord Henry dismisses the idea with a quip. When Dorian asks what Lord Henry would say if Dorian claimed to be the murderer, Lord Henry states that the crime does not suit Dorian; it is too vulgar. Lord Henry then asks about Basil's portrait of Dorian. Dorian confirms that it was lost or stolen, but he never cared much for it anyway. Lord Henry tells of walking through the park the previous Sunday and observing a group of people listening to a preacher who asked, "What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" Lord Henry found this "uncouth Christian" to be "curious" and "hysterical." Dorian, however, is not amused. Lord Henry has no interest in a serious discussion and indirectly asks Dorian to reveal the secret of his youth. To retrieve his youth, says the older man, "I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable." He wishes he could change places with Dorian, and he is pleased that the younger man has never actually "done anything." Dorian's life has been his art. For once, Dorian is in no mood for flattery and says he wishes to retire early. The subject of the "yellow book" occurs to Dorian, and he asks Lord Henry never to lend the destructive volume to anyone else. They agree to meet the next morning. Back home, Dorian wonders if he will ever really change. He reflects on Basil's death and Alan Campbell's suicide, but what really bothers him is the death of his own soul. He rationalizes that Basil painted the damaging portrait and said "unbearable" things to Dorian. Alan Campbell's suicide was the man's own doing, not Dorian's. They are nothing to him. His own life is his only concern. Wondering if the portrait has changed since his virtuous behavior toward Hetty Merton, he creeps upstairs to see. In the attic room, Dorian lifts the cloth off the portrait. If anything, the picture looks even more evil. Around the eyes there is "a look of cunning and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite." Blood has spread over the fingers, onto the feet, even to the other hand. Dorian shudders. He wonders if he should confess Basil's murder but dismisses the idea. The portrait itself is the only evidence against him. He no longer enjoys its record of his debauchery. He worries that it will be discovered and decides to destroy it. The knife he used to murder Basil is still in the room. Using it to "kill the past," he grabs the knife and stabs the portrait. The servants are awakened by a horrible scream and a crash. Two passersby outside are so alarmed that they summon a policeman. No one inside Dorian's house responds when the officer rings at the door. After fifteen minutes or so, Francis ascends the staircase with two other servants. No one answers their knock on the attic door, and they cannot force it open. They climb to the roof, drop to the balcony, open a window, and go into the attic. There, they find an old and ugly man lying in front of their master's portrait. In the portrait, Dorian appears as beautiful and young as he had the day before.

In the Faust legend, the main character ultimately confronts the loss of his soul but is incapable of seeking redemption through confession and absolution. He despairs and feels that he is beneath pardon or that there is no God or power strong enough to save him. In this sense, the Faust protagonist still suffers the sin of pride in that he sees his own case as so special that it is beyond God's help. Despair is the one unpardonable sin because the sinner is incapable of asking to be pardoned. Traditionally, despair is symbolized by suicide. In the closing chapters of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian's behavior and attitude are consistent with this Faust tradition. Dorian has matured from the naive, vain youth in Basil's studio. He has grown into a man who was at first despicable but in the end is almost likable. Perhaps he is more pitiable than likable. However, he cannot find salvation because he is incapable of setting aside his pride, confessing, and asking for absolution. In Chapter 19, as the after-dinner scene opens at Lord Henry's, Dorian is bursting with pride because of a recent act of decency. He has returned Hetty Merton to her country life after winning her devotion. Unfortunately, instead of seeing this act as only one small step, Dorian expects instant reward. When he checks the portrait for some sign of his newfound virtue, he finds only a look of cunning about the eyes and a wrinkle of hypocrisy in the mouth. There seems to be fresh blood on the hands. Instead of redeeming his soul, his act of supposed redemption has tarnished his soul even more because the act was motivated by selfishness. Dorian cannot redeem his soul because he is still primarily interested in himself. He dismisses the deaths of Basil and Alan Campbell. The first, he decides, was inevitable; the second made his own choice. In neither case does Dorian accept his own responsibility. Still, he is torn because he realizes that the "soul is a terrible reality." He thinks that a person should pray for punishment, but he fails to understand that the only way of absolving immoral responsibility is to pray for forgiveness. In the novel's powerful final paragraphs, Dorian, in effect, commits suicide. He despises the figure in the portrait, but that is who he has become. When he slashes at the painting with the knife, appropriately the same knife that killed Basil, Dorian kills himself. The horrible cry, which awakens the servants and startles the men on the street, carries with it the agony of eighteen years of horror. Glossary idyll a scene or event of rural simplicity. Perdita and Florizel lovers in William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Ophelia a leading character in William Shakespeare's Hamlet; she dies by drowning, although Shakespeare leaves unclear if her drowning is a suicide or an accident. Scotland Yard headquarters of the London Metropolitan Police, housed at New Scotland Yard on the Thames embankment. Burgundy a wine, usually red, produced in the Burgundy  region of southeastern France. vinaigrette French, from Old French vinaigre, "vinegar"; a small, often decorated container used for aromatic restoratives, such as smelling salts or vinegar solutions. Chopin Frederic Francois Chopin , Polish pianist and composer of works for piano and orchestra; resident of France from 1829 until his death. Velasquez Diego Rodriquez de Silva y Velasquez , Spanish painter. Seine the river that runs through Paris. Like the painting of a sorrow, / A face without a heart from Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 7, 108-09. Jav an island of Indonesia. scurf scaly or shredded dry skin. nocturne a musical composition intended to evoke thoughts or feelings of night. Majorca largest of Spain's Balearic Islands, in the Mediterranean Sea, about 120 miles southeast of Barcelona. Apollo in Greek mythology, the god of the sun, music, and poetry; a young man of great physical beauty. Marsyas in Greek mythology, he lost a music contest and his life to Apollo. palate the roof of the mouth. lilas blanc French, meaning "white lilac." iniquities sins. idolatrous excessively adoring. visage facial expression; appearance.

Art has no influence upon action. . . . The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. Chapter Nineteen Several weeks have passed, it seems, and Dorian visits Lord Henry. Dorian claims that he wants to reform himself and be virtuous. As evidence of his newfound resolve, Dorian describes a recent trip to the country during which he passed up an opportunity to seduce and defile an innkeeper's innocent daughter. Lord Henry dismisses Dorian's intentions to reform, and he turns the conversation to other subjects--Alan Campbell's recent suicide and the continued mystery of Basil Hallward's disappearance. Dorian asks if Lord Henry has ever considered that Basil might have been murdered. Lord Henry dismisses the idea, noting that Basil lacked enemies. Dorian then asks: "What would you say, Harry, if I told you that I had murdered Basil?" Lord Henry laughs and responds that murder is too vulgar for a man like Dorian. The conversation drifts away from Basil. Lord Henry then asks Dorian, "'hat does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose'--how does the quotation run?--'his own soul'?" Dorian starts nervously; Lord Henry explains that he heard a street preacher posing this question to a crowd. He mocks the man in his typical fashion, but Dorian cuts him short, insisting that the soul is very real. Lord Henry laughs at the suggestion, wondering aloud how Dorian has managed to remain so young after all these years. He wishes he knew Dorian's secret and praises Dorian's life as being "exquisite." He commends Dorian's mode of living and begs him not to spoil it by trying to be virtuous. Dorian somberly asks his friend not to loan anyone else the "yellow book," which has had such a corrupting effect upon his own character, but Lord Henry discounts his "moraliz" and remarks that "rt has no influence upon action. . . . The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame." Before leaving, Lord Henry invites Dorian to visit him the next day. Chapter Twenty That night, Dorian goes to the locked room to look at his portrait. He hopes his decision to amend his life will have changed the painting, and he considers that perhaps his decision not to ruin the innkeeper's daughter's reputation will be reflected in the painted face. But when Dorian looks at his portrait, he sees there is no change--except that "in the eyes there was a look of cunning, and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite." He realizes his pitiful attempt to be good was no more than hypocrisy, an attempt to minimize the seriousness of his crimes that falls far short of atonement. Furious, he seizes a knife--the same weapon with which he killed Basil--and drives it into the portrait in an attempt to destroy it. From below, Dorian's servants hear a cry and a clatter. Breaking into the room, they see the portrait, unharmed, showing Dorian Gray as a beautiful young man. On the floor is the body of an old man, horribly wrinkled and disfigured, with a knife plunged into his heart. It is not until the servants examine the rings on the old man's hands that they identify him as Dorian Gray.

The contrast between Lord Henry and Dorian in Chapter Nineteen is instructive. When the novel begins, Lord Henry appears as a figure of worldly wisdom who seduces the naive Dorian with fawning compliments and a celebration of selfishness and hedonism. Now that Dorian has actually lived the philosophy that Lord Henry so eloquently champions, however, he stands as proof of the limitations--indeed, even the misguided notions--of that philosophy. In the novel's final pages, Dorian is world-weary and borne down by the weight of his sins, while Lord Henry seems almost childishly naive as he repeats his long-held but poorly informed beliefs. When Dorian all but confesses to Basil's murder, Lord Henry flippantly dismisses him, since his worldview holds that "rime belongs exclusively to the lower orders." Only Lord Henry, who has never actually done any of the things he has inspired Dorian to do, could have the luxury of this thought. By keeping himself free from sin, even as he argues the virtues of sinning, Lord Henry lacks the terrible awareness of guilt and its debilitating effects. While the street preacher's rhetorical question about earthly gain at the cost of spiritual loss  haunts Dorian, it holds no real meaning for Lord Henry. At this stage, however, not even truthful self-awareness is enough to save Dorian. In his final moments, he attempts to repent the murder of Basil, the suicides of Sibyl Vane and Alan Campbell, and his countless other sins by refraining from seducing and ruining a naive village girl. The discrepancy between the enormity of his crimes and this minor act of contrition is too great. Furthermore, he realizes that he does not want to confess his sins but rather have them simply go away. The portrait reflects this hypocrisy and drives him to his final, desperate act. He decides it is better to destroy the last evidence of his sin--the painting of his soul--than face up to his own depravity. The depravity he seeks to destroy is, in essence, himself; therefore, by killing it, he kills himself. The end of the novel suggests a number of possible interpretations of Dorian's death. It may be his punishment for living the life of a hedonist, and for prizing beauty too highly, in which case the novel would be a criticism of the philosophy of aestheticism. But it is just as possible that Dorian is suffering for having violated the creeds of aestheticism. In other words, one can argue that Dorian's belief that his portrait reflects the state of his soul violates the principles of aestheticism, since, within that philosophy, art has no moral component. This reading is more in keeping with Wilde's personal philosophies and with the events of his life. In fact, elements of The Picture of Dorian Gray have an almost prophetic ring to them. Like Basil Hallward, Wilde would meet a tragic end brought about by his unrestrained worship of a beautiful young man. Additionally, like Alan Campbell, whom Dorian blackmails with vague threats of exposed secrets, Wilde would be punished for sexual indiscretions. Given the public nature of Wilde's trial and entire life--he was, in many ways, the first celebrity personality--it is impossible to ignore these parallels while reading The Picture of Dorian Gray. In De Profundis, Wilde's long letter to his lover, written from prison, he admits the limitations of the modes of thought and living that structured his life:  I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flaneur, a dandy; a man of fashion. . . . Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others, I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has someday to cry aloud on the house-tops. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace.  The philosophy that The Picture of Dorian Gray proposes can be extremely seductive and liberating. But Wilde's words here reveal that society, conscience, or more likely both together ultimately make living that philosophy extremely difficult and even painful.


He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he
advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head
forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging
bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a kind of
dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It seemed
a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at himself as at
anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, apparelled in immaculate white
from shoes to hat, and in the various Eastern ports where he got his
living as ship-chandler's water-clerk he was very popular.

A water-clerk need not pass an examination in anything under the sun,
but he must have Ability in the abstract and demonstrate it practically.
His work consists in racing under sail, steam, or oars against other
water-clerks for any ship about to anchor, greeting her captain
cheerily, forcing upon him a card--the business card of the
ship-chandler--and on his first visit on shore piloting him firmly but
without ostentation to a vast, cavern-like shop which is full of things
that are eaten and drunk on board ship; where you can get everything
to make her seaworthy and beautiful, from a set of chain-hooks for her
cable to a book of gold-leaf for the carvings of her stern; and where
her commander is received like a brother by a ship-chandler he has never
seen before. There is a cool parlour, easy-chairs, bottles, cigars,
writing implements, a copy of harbour regulations, and a warmth of
welcome that melts the salt of a three months' passage out of a seaman's
heart. The connection thus begun is kept up, as long as the ship remains
in harbour, by the daily visits of the water-clerk. To the captain he
is faithful like a friend and attentive like a son, with the patience
of Job, the unselfish devotion of a woman, and the jollity of a boon
companion. Later on the bill is sent in. It is a beautiful and humane
occupation. Therefore good water-clerks are scarce. When a water-clerk
who possesses Ability in the abstract has also the advantage of having
been brought up to the sea, he is worth to his employer a lot of money
and some humouring. Jim had always good wages and as much humouring
as would have bought the fidelity of a fiend. Nevertheless, with black
ingratitude he would throw up the job suddenly and depart. To his
employers the reasons he gave were obviously inadequate. They said
'Confounded fool!' as soon as his back was turned. This was their
criticism on his exquisite sensibility.

To the white men in the waterside business and to the captains of ships
he was just Jim--nothing more. He had, of course, another name, but he
was anxious that it should not be pronounced. His incognito, which had
as many holes as a sieve, was not meant to hide a personality but a
fact. When the fact broke through the incognito he would leave
suddenly the seaport where he happened to be at the time and go to
another--generally farther east. He kept to seaports because he was a
seaman in exile from the sea, and had Ability in the abstract, which is
good for no other work but that of a water-clerk. He retreated in good
order towards the rising sun, and the fact followed him casually but
inevitably. Thus in the course of years he was known successively in
Bombay, in Calcutta, in Rangoon, in Penang, in Batavia--and in each of
these halting-places was just Jim the water-clerk. Afterwards, when his
keen perception of the Intolerable drove him away for good from seaports
and white men, even into the virgin forest, the Malays of the jungle
village, where he had elected to conceal his deplorable faculty, added a
word to the monosyllable of his incognito. They called him Tuan Jim: as
one might say--Lord Jim.

Originally he came from a parsonage. Many commanders of fine
merchant-ships come from these abodes of piety and peace. Jim's father
possessed such certain knowledge of the Unknowable as made for the
righteousness of people in cottages without disturbing the ease of mind
of those whom an unerring Providence enables to live in mansions. The
little church on a hill had the mossy greyness of a rock seen through a
ragged screen of leaves. It had stood there for centuries, but the trees
around probably remembered the laying of the first stone. Below, the
red front of the rectory gleamed with a warm tint in the midst of
grass-plots, flower-beds, and fir-trees, with an orchard at the back,
a paved stable-yard to the left, and the sloping glass of greenhouses
tacked along a wall of bricks. The living had belonged to the family for
generations; but Jim was one of five sons, and when after a course of
light holiday literature his vocation for the sea had declared itself,
he was sent at once to a 'training-ship for officers of the mercantile
marine.'

He learned there a little trigonometry and how to cross top-gallant
yards. He was generally liked. He had the third place in navigation
and pulled stroke in the first cutter. Having a steady head with an
excellent physique, he was very smart aloft. His station was in the
fore-top, and often from there he looked down, with the contempt of a
man destined to shine in the midst of dangers, at the peaceful multitude
of roofs cut in two by the brown tide of the stream, while scattered
on the outskirts of the surrounding plain the factory chimneys rose
perpendicular against a grimy sky, each slender like a pencil, and
belching out smoke like a volcano. He could see the big ships departing,
the broad-beamed ferries constantly on the move, the little boats
floating far below his feet, with the hazy splendour of the sea in the
distance, and the hope of a stirring life in the world of adventure.

On the lower deck in the babel of two hundred voices he would forget
himself, and beforehand live in his mind the sea-life of light
literature. He saw himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting
away masts in a hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line; or as a
lonely castaway, barefooted and half naked, walking on uncovered reefs
in search of shellfish to stave off starvation. He confronted savages on
tropical shores, quelled mutinies on the high seas, and in a small boat
upon the ocean kept up the hearts of despairing men--always an example
of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book.

'Something's up. Come along.'

He leaped to his feet. The boys were streaming up the ladders. Above
could be heard a great scurrying about and shouting, and when he got
through the hatchway he stood still--as if confounded.

It was the dusk of a winter's day. The gale had freshened since noon,
stopping the traffic on the river, and now blew with the strength of a
hurricane in fitful bursts that boomed like salvoes of great guns firing
over the ocean. The rain slanted in sheets that flicked and subsided,
and between whiles Jim had threatening glimpses of the tumbling tide,
the small craft jumbled and tossing along the shore, the motionless
buildings in the driving mist, the broad ferry-boats pitching
ponderously at anchor, the vast landing-stages heaving up and down and
smothered in sprays. The next gust seemed to blow all this away. The
air was full of flying water. There was a fierce purpose in the gale, a
furious earnestness in the screech of the wind, in the brutal tumult of
earth and sky, that seemed directed at him, and made him hold his breath
in awe. He stood still. It seemed to him he was whirled around.

He was jostled. 'Man the cutter!' Boys rushed past him. A coaster
running in for shelter had crashed through a schooner at anchor, and one
of the ship's instructors had seen the accident. A mob of boys clambered
on the rails, clustered round the davits. 'Collision. Just ahead of us.
Mr. Symons saw it.' A push made him stagger against the mizzen-mast, and
he caught hold of a rope. The old training-ship chained to her moorings
quivered all over, bowing gently head to wind, and with her scanty
rigging humming in a deep bass the breathless song of her youth at sea.
'Lower away!' He saw the boat, manned, drop swiftly below the rail,
and rushed after her. He heard a splash. 'Let go; clear the falls!' He
leaned over. The river alongside seethed in frothy streaks. The cutter
could be seen in the falling darkness under the spell of tide and wind,
that for a moment held her bound, and tossing abreast of the ship.
A yelling voice in her reached him faintly: 'Keep stroke, you young
whelps, if you want to save anybody! Keep stroke!' And suddenly she
lifted high her bow, and, leaping with raised oars over a wave, broke
the spell cast upon her by the wind and tide.

Jim felt his shoulder gripped firmly. 'Too late, youngster.' The captain
of the ship laid a restraining hand on that boy, who seemed on the
point of leaping overboard, and Jim looked up with the pain of conscious
defeat in his eyes. The captain smiled sympathetically. 'Better luck
next time. This will teach you to be smart.'

A shrill cheer greeted the cutter. She came dancing back half full of
water, and with two exhausted men washing about on her bottom boards.
The tumult and the menace of wind and sea now appeared very contemptible
to Jim, increasing the regret of his awe at their inefficient menace.
Now he knew what to think of it. It seemed to him he cared nothing for
the gale. He could affront greater perils. He would do so--better than
anybody. Not a particle of fear was left. Nevertheless he brooded apart
that evening while the bowman of the cutter--a boy with a face like
a girl's and big grey eyes--was the hero of the lower deck. Eager
questioners crowded round him. He narrated: 'I just saw his head
bobbing, and I dashed my boat-hook in the water. It caught in his
breeches and I nearly went overboard, as I thought I would, only old
Symons let go the tiller and grabbed my legs--the boat nearly swamped.
Old Symons is a fine old chap. I don't mind a bit him being grumpy with
us. He swore at me all the time he held my leg, but that was only his
way of telling me to stick to the boat-hook. Old Symons is awfully
excitable--isn't he? No--not the little fair chap--the other, the big
one with a beard. When we pulled him in he groaned, "Oh, my leg! oh,
my leg!" and turned up his eyes. Fancy such a big chap fainting like
a girl. Would any of you fellows faint for a jab with a boat-hook?--I
wouldn't. It went into his leg so far.' He showed the boat-hook, which
he had carried below for the purpose, and produced a sensation. 'No,
silly! It was not his flesh that held him--his breeches did. Lots of
blood, of course.'

Jim thought it a pitiful display of vanity. The gale had ministered to
a heroism as spurious as its own pretence of terror. He felt angry with
the brutal tumult of earth and sky for taking him unawares and checking
unfairly a generous readiness for narrow escapes. Otherwise he was
rather glad he had not gone into the cutter, since a lower achievement
had served the turn. He had enlarged his knowledge more than those who
had done the work. When all men flinched, then--he felt sure--he alone
would know how to deal with the spurious menace of wind and seas. He
knew what to think of it. Seen dispassionately, it seemed contemptible.
He could detect no trace of emotion in himself, and the final effect of
a staggering event was that, unnoticed and apart from the noisy crowd of
boys, he exulted with fresh certitude in his avidity for adventure, and
in a sense of many-sided courage.
After two years of training he went to sea, and entering the regions so
well known to his imagination, found them strangely barren of adventure.
He made many voyages. He knew the magic monotony of existence between
sky and water: he had to bear the criticism of men, the exactions of the
sea, and the prosaic severity of the daily task that gives bread--but
whose only reward is in the perfect love of the work. This reward eluded
him. Yet he could not go back, because there is nothing more enticing,
disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea. Besides, his
prospects were good. He was gentlemanly, steady, tractable, with a
thorough knowledge of his duties; and in time, when yet very young, he
became chief mate of a fine ship, without ever having been tested by
those events of the sea that show in the light of day the inner worth of
a man, the edge of his temper, and the fibre of his stuff; that reveal
the quality of his resistance and the secret truth of his pretences, not
only to others but also to himself.

Only once in all that time he had again a glimpse of the earnestness in
the anger of the sea. That truth is not so often made apparent as people
might think. There are many shades in the danger of adventures and
gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on the face of
facts a sinister violence of intention--that indefinable something which
forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication
of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose
of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty
that means to tear out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his
fatigue and his longing for rest: which means to smash, to destroy, to
annihilate all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that is
priceless and necessary--the sunshine, the memories, the future; which
means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by
the simple and appalling act of taking his life.

Jim, disabled by a falling spar at the beginning of a week of which his
Scottish captain used to say afterwards, 'Man! it's a pairfect meeracle
to me how she lived through it!' spent many days stretched on his back,
dazed, battered, hopeless, and tormented as if at the bottom of an
abyss of unrest. He did not care what the end would be, and in his lucid
moments overvalued his indifference. The danger, when not seen, has
the imperfect vagueness of human thought. The fear grows shadowy; and
Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors, unstimulated,
sinks to rest in the dullness of exhausted emotion. Jim saw nothing
but the disorder of his tossed cabin. He lay there battened down in the
midst of a small devastation, and felt secretly glad he had not to go on
deck. But now and again an uncontrollable rush of anguish would grip
him bodily, make him gasp and writhe under the blankets, and then the
unintelligent brutality of an existence liable to the agony of such
sensations filled him with a despairing desire to escape at any cost.
Then fine weather returned, and he thought no more about It.

His lameness, however, persisted, and when the ship arrived at an
Eastern port he had to go to the hospital. His recovery was slow, and he
was left behind.

There were only two other patients in the white men's ward: the purser
of a gunboat, who had broken his leg falling down a hatchway; and a kind
of railway contractor from a neighbouring province, afflicted by
some mysterious tropical disease, who held the doctor for an ass, and
indulged in secret debaucheries of patent medicine which his Tamil
servant used to smuggle in with unwearied devotion. They told each other
the story of their lives, played cards a little, or, yawning and in
pyjamas, lounged through the day in easy-chairs without saying a word.
The hospital stood on a hill, and a gentle breeze entering through the
windows, always flung wide open, brought into the bare room the softness
of the sky, the languor of the earth, the bewitching breath of the
Eastern waters. There were perfumes in it, suggestions of infinite
repose, the gift of endless dreams. Jim looked every day over the
thickets of gardens, beyond the roofs of the town, over the fronds of
palms growing on the shore, at that roadstead which is a thoroughfare
to the East,--at the roadstead dotted by garlanded islets, lighted by
festal sunshine, its ships like toys, its brilliant activity resembling
a holiday pageant, with the eternal serenity of the Eastern sky overhead
and the smiling peace of the Eastern seas possessing the space as far as
the horizon.

Directly he could walk without a stick, he descended into the town to
look for some opportunity to get home. Nothing offered just then, and,
while waiting, he associated naturally with the men of his calling in
the port. These were of two kinds. Some, very few and seen there but
seldom, led mysterious lives, had preserved an undefaced energy with the
temper of buccaneers and the eyes of dreamers. They appeared to live
in a crazy maze of plans, hopes, dangers, enterprises, ahead of
civilisation, in the dark places of the sea; and their death was the
only event of their fantastic existence that seemed to have a reasonable
certitude of achievement. The majority were men who, like himself,
thrown there by some accident, had remained as officers of country
ships. They had now a horror of the home service, with its harder
conditions, severer view of duty, and the hazard of stormy oceans. They
were attuned to the eternal peace of Eastern sky and sea. They
loved short passages, good deck-chairs, large native crews, and the
distinction of being white. They shuddered at the thought of hard work,
and led precariously easy lives, always on the verge of dismissal,
always on the verge of engagement, serving Chinamen, Arabs,
half-castes--would have served the devil himself had he made it easy
enough. They talked everlastingly of turns of luck: how So-and-so got
charge of a boat on the coast of China--a soft thing; how this one had
an easy billet in Japan somewhere, and that one was doing well in the
Siamese navy; and in all they said--in their actions, in their looks, in
their persons--could be detected the soft spot, the place of decay, the
determination to lounge safely through existence.

To Jim that gossiping crowd, viewed as seamen, seemed at first more
unsubstantial than so many shadows. But at length he found a fascination
in the sight of those men, in their appearance of doing so well on
such a small allowance of danger and toil. In time, beside the original
disdain there grew up slowly another sentiment; and suddenly, giving up
the idea of going home, he took a berth as chief mate of the Patna.

The Patna was a local steamer as old as the hills, lean like a
greyhound, and eaten up with rust worse than a condemned water-tank. She
was owned by a Chinaman, chartered by an Arab, and commanded by a sort
of renegade New South Wales German, very anxious to curse publicly
his native country, but who, apparently on the strength of Bismarck's
victorious policy, brutalised all those he was not afraid of, and wore a
'blood-and-iron' air,' combined with a purple nose and a red moustache.
After she had been painted outside and whitewashed inside, eight hundred
pilgrims (more or less) were driven on board of her as she lay with
steam up alongside a wooden jetty.

They streamed aboard over three gangways, they streamed in urged by
faith and the hope of paradise, they streamed in with a continuous tramp
and shuffle of bare feet, without a word, a murmur, or a look back; and
when clear of confining rails spread on all sides over the deck, flowed
forward and aft, overflowed down the yawning hatchways, filled the inner
recesses of the ship--like water filling a cistern, like water flowing
into crevices and crannies, like water rising silently even with the
rim. Eight hundred men and women with faith and hopes, with affections
and memories, they had collected there, coming from north and south
and from the outskirts of the East, after treading the jungle paths,
descending the rivers, coasting in praus along the shallows, crossing in
small canoes from island to island, passing through suffering, meeting
strange sights, beset by strange fears, upheld by one desire. They
came from solitary huts in the wilderness, from populous campongs, from
villages by the sea. At the call of an idea they had left their forests,
their clearings, the protection of their rulers, their prosperity,
their poverty, the surroundings of their youth and the graves of their
fathers. They came covered with dust, with sweat, with grime, with
rags--the strong men at the head of family parties, the lean old men
pressing forward without hope of return; young boys with fearless eyes
glancing curiously, shy little girls with tumbled long hair; the timid
women muffled up and clasping to their breasts, wrapped in loose ends of
soiled head-cloths, their sleeping babies, the unconscious pilgrims of
an exacting belief.

'Look at dese cattle,' said the German skipper to his new chief mate.

An Arab, the leader of that pious voyage, came last. He walked slowly
aboard, handsome and grave in his white gown and large turban. A string
of servants followed, loaded with his luggage; the Patna cast off and
backed away from the wharf.

She was headed between two small islets, crossed obliquely the
anchoring-ground of sailing-ships, swung through half a circle in the
shadow of a hill, then ranged close to a ledge of foaming reefs. The
Arab, standing up aft, recited aloud the prayer of travellers by sea.
He invoked the favour of the Most High upon that journey, implored His
blessing on men's toil and on the secret purposes of their hearts; the
steamer pounded in the dusk the calm water of the Strait; and far astern
of the pilgrim ship a screw-pile lighthouse, planted by unbelievers on
a treacherous shoal, seemed to wink at her its eye of flame, as if in
derision of her errand of faith.

She cleared the Strait, crossed the bay, continued on her way through
the 'One-degree' passage. She held on straight for the Red Sea under a
serene sky, under a sky scorching and unclouded, enveloped in a fulgor
of sunshine that killed all thought, oppressed the heart, withered all
impulses of strength and energy. And under the sinister splendour of
that sky the sea, blue and profound, remained still, without a stir,
without a ripple, without a wrinkle--viscous, stagnant, dead. The
Patna, with a slight hiss, passed over that plain, luminous and smooth,
unrolled a black ribbon of smoke across the sky, left behind her on the
water a white ribbon of foam that vanished at once, like the phantom of
a track drawn upon a lifeless sea by the phantom of a steamer.

Every morning the sun, as if keeping pace in his revolutions with the
progress of the pilgrimage, emerged with a silent burst of light exactly
at the same distance astern of the ship, caught up with her at noon,
pouring the concentrated fire of his rays on the pious purposes of the
men, glided past on his descent, and sank mysteriously into the sea
evening after evening, preserving the same distance ahead of her
advancing bows. The five whites on board lived amidships, isolated from
the human cargo. The awnings covered the deck with a white roof from
stem to stern, and a faint hum, a low murmur of sad voices, alone
revealed the presence of a crowd of people upon the great blaze of the
ocean. Such were the days, still, hot, heavy, disappearing one by one
into the past, as if falling into an abyss for ever open in the wake
of the ship; and the ship, lonely under a wisp of smoke, held on her
steadfast way black and smouldering in a luminous immensity, as if
scorched by a flame flicked at her from a heaven without pity.

The nights descended on her like a benediction.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.

Lord Jim begins with the powerful physical description of a man "an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built." He has a deep voice and immaculate dress, being white "from shoes to hat," and he makes his living as a water-clerk in "various Eastern ports." He is "very popular." This image is layered with attributes that arise in a consideration of what is required to be a water-clerk of quality. Thus the reader learns that the man has "Ability in the abstract" and that he is able to apply it "practically." The man is called "Jim." Jim comes to be known as "Tuan Jim" or "Lord Jim" among the Malays of the jungle village where he lives "incognito." Answering just how he becomes "Lord Jim" and just why he is "incognito" is the project of the tale. Jim is rootless, moving farther and farther east, escaping whatever fact of his history that seems to be following him. Born the son of a parson, he is answering the call of the sea. He is smart, physically fit, and a dreamer of danger and success. The reader, however, now learns of a collision at sea where Jim leapt to his feet but was beaten. "Too late, youngster," the captain of the ship tells him, as the glory of the rescue falls like a wreath over the bowman, who jumped first, "a boy with a face like a girl's and big grey eyes." Jim is angry and frustrated with his missed opportunity to be a hero. Two years of training and life on the sea pass, and Jim feels let down by the humdrum nature of his experiences. The sea, he feels, is not so full of the adventures he once imagined. Jim is "chief mate of a fine ship, without ever having been tested" . He spends some time on his back because of an injury and is left at a hospital in an "Eastern port." When able, Jim descends into the nearby port town and studies the nature of men and life around him, all sharing the same calling of the sea. In time, he discards the idea of returning to England and chooses, instead, to become chief mate of the Patna, an old local steamer, manned by a vastly overweight New South Wales German captain. The steamer is headed for Mecca with eight hundred pilgrims led by an Arab leader in white, who offers a prayer. There are only five white men on board. At night, as Jim contemplates the Arabian Sea from the bridge of the steamer, the speed steady, and the human landscape of passengers asleep, fathers and sons, beneath him, he considers his romantic dreams--"the success of his imaginary achievements" . The German captain appears with too little clothing; the second engineer complains. A conversation takes place regarding drink and being drunk, and then fear and courage, but "those men did not belong to the world of heroic adventure" . Suddenly, the three of them are lurched by the force of a disturbance beneath the boat. The sound is like the "faint noise of thunder ... hardly more than a vibration" .

Lord Jim begins with a direct, close-up view of its subject: Jim.  His physical description is at first powerfully impressed upon the reader, and then the reader encounters the mysterious manner in which he drifts through the world.  He is a clean-cut, well-liked young man, but the mystery is that he is constantly trying to outrun or escape a fact of his past.  The reader is brought into a state of curiosity.  Who is this young man?  Why is he trying to maintain himself incognito?  Why is he a water-clerk, when he appears to be gifted with intelligence and talent?  And, most importantly, what is the fact from which he is so energetically trying to escape? The reference to Jim as having "Ability in the abstract" is crucial to the construction of his character in the novel.  He is gifted with a kind of genius, but it only exists in an abstract way.  The effort is then to realize this "ability" in the real world, to take action, to create change, and to realize the potential of such an "ability."  It is further important to note that Jim is never given a surname throughout the narrative.  In this way, the lone "Jim" strikes the reader as intimately present yet anonymous, illustrating precisely the kind of ambiguity for which Conrad is famous. When the reader is then told that Jim becomes "Tuan Jim" or "Lord Jim," Conrad drives the dramatic motion of the novel by causing curiosity regarding how Jim will attain this title. The view in the narrative then cuts to a significant moment in his personal history, the occasion when he was too late in seizing the opportunity to rescue a person at sea.  Angry with the lost opportunity, Jim expresses his romantic temperament; this part of the tale also allows us to see his motivations for pursuing a life at sea in the first place.  He is a dreamer, and he seems to be confident of some aspect of his self as being more than capable of achieving his dreams.  This dreaming quality is characteristic of much of the driving force for young men to pursue a life at sea, and in this way Jim becomes a quintessential example of youthful aspiration.  A question is then immediately suggested: how will Jim mature?  How will he move from being a dreaming young man to the man running from his past and then a man with the title "Lord Jim"? One night, Jim observes his fellow crew members, thinking that they are not part of the world of "heroic adventure."  Thus Jim differentiates himself: "he shared the air they breathed, but he was different" .  Now, as the sudden and strange vibration occurs beneath the ship, the situation leads us to ask: will Jim be able to prove his difference?