[obi/Joseph.Conrad/lord.jim.txt]

Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim

                       AUTHOR'S NOTE

  When this novel first appeared in book form a notion got about
that I had been bolted away with. Some reviewers maintained that
the work starting as a short story had got beyond the writer's con-
trol. One or two discovered internal evidence of the fact, which
seemed to amuse them. They pointed out the limitations of the
narrative form. They argued that no man could have been expected
to talk all that time, and other men to listen so long. It was not,
they said, very credible.
  After thinking it over for something like sixteen years, I am not
so sure about that. Men have been known, both in the tropics and
in the temperate zone, to sit up half the night 'swapping yarns'.
This, however, is but one yarn, yet with interruptions affording
some measure of relief; and in regard to the listeners' endurance,
the postulate must be accepted that the story was interesting. It is
the necessary preliminary assumption. If I hadn't believed that it
was interesting I could never have begun to write it. As to the mere
physical possibility we all know that some speeches in Parliament
have taken nearer six than three hours in delivery; whereas all that
part of the book which is Marlow's narrative can be read through
aloud, I should say, in less than three hours. Besides -- though I
have kept strictly all such insignificant details out of the tale -- we
may presume that there must have been refreshments on that night,
a glass of mineral water of some sort to help the narrator on.
  But, seriously, the truth of the matter is, that my first thought
was of a short story, concerned only with the pilgrim ship episode;
nothing more. And that was a legitimate conception. After writing
a few pages, however, I became for some reason discontented and
I laid them aside for a time. I didn't take them out of the drawer till
the late Mr. William Blackwood suggested I should give something
again to his magazine.
  It was only then that I perceived that the pilgrim ship episode
was a good starting-point for a free and wandering tale; that it was
an event, too, which could conceivably colour the whole 'sentiment
of existence' in a simple and sensitive character. But all these pre-
liminary moods and stirrings of spirit were rather obscure at the
time, and they do not appear clearer to me now after the lapse of so
many years.
  The few pages I had laid aside were not without their weight in
the choice of subject. But the whole was re-written deliberately.
When I sat down to it I knew it would be a long book, though I
didn't foresee that it would spread itsetlf over thirteen numbers of
'Maga'.
  I have been asked at times whether this was not the book of mine
I liked best. I am a great foe to favouritism in public life, in private
life, and even in the delicate relationsbip of an author to his works.
As a matter of principle I will have no favourites; but I don't go so
far as to feel grieved and annoyed by the preference some people
give to my Lord Jim. I won't even say that I 'fail to understand . . .'
No! But once I had occasion to be puzzled and surprised.
  A friend of mine returning from Italy had talked with a lady there
who did not like the book. I regretted that, of course, but what
surprised me was the ground of her dlslike. 'You know,' she said,
'it is all so morbid.'
  The pronouncement gave me food for an hour's anxious thought.
Finally I arrived at the conclusion that, making due allowances for
the subject itself being rather foreign to women's normal sensibili-
ties, the lady could not have been an Italian. I wonder whether she
was European at all? In any case, no Latin temperament would
have perceived anything morbid in the acute consciousness of lost
honour. Such a consciousness may be wrong, or it may be right, or
it may be condemned as artificial; and, perhaps, my Jim is not a
type of wide commonness. But I can safely assure my readers that
he is not the product of coldly perverted thinking. He's not a figure
of Northern Mists either. One sunny morning, in the commonplace
surroundings of an Eastern roadstead, I saw his form pass by -
appealing - significant - under a cloud - perfectly silent. Which is
as it should be. It was for me, with all the sympathy of which I was
capable, to seek fit words for his meaning. He was 'one of us'.
                                                           J.C.
                                                          1917.

                          LORD JIM

                          CHAPTER 1

  He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and
he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders,
head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think
of a charging bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner dis-
played a kind of dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive
in it. It seemed a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much
at himself as at anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, apparelled in
immaculate white from shoes to hat, and in the various Eastern
ports where he got his living as ship-chandler's water-clerk he was
very popular.
  A water-clerk need not pass an examination in anything under
the sun, but he must have Ability in the abstract and demonstrate
it practically. His work consists in racing under sail, steam, or oars
against other water-clerks for any ship about to anchor, greeting
her captain cheerily, forcing upon him a card -- the business card
of the ship-chandler -- and on his first visit on shore piloting him
firmly but without ostentation to a vast, cavern-like shop which is
full of things that are eaten and drunk on board ship; where you
can get everything to make her seaworthy and beautiful, from a set
of chain-hooks for her cable to a book of gold-leaf for the carvings
of her stern; and where her commander is received like a brother
by a ship-chandler he has never seen before. There is a cool parlour,
easy-chairs, bottles, cigars, writing implements, a copy of harbour
regulations, and a warmth of welcome that melts the salt of a three
months' passage out of a seaman's heart. The connection thus begun
is kept up, as long as the ship remains in harbour, by the daily visits
of the water-clerk. To the captain he is faithful like a friend and
attentive like a son, with the patience of Job, the unselfish devotion
of a woman, and the jollity of a boon companion. Later on the bill
is sent in. It is a beautiful and humane occupation. Therefore good
water-clerks are scarce. When a water-clerk who possesses Ability
in the abstract has also the advantage of having been brought up
to the sea, he is worth to his employer a lot of money and some
humouring. Jim had always good wages and as much humouring
as would have bought the fidelity of a fiend. Nevertheless, with
black ingratitude he would throw up the job suddenly and depart.
To his employers the reasons he gave were obviously inadequate.
They said 'Confounded fool!' as soon as his back was turned. This
was their criticism on his exquisite sensibility.
  To the white men in the waterside business and to the captains
of ships he was just Jim -- nothing more. He had, of course, another
name, but he was anxious that it should not be pronounced. His
incognito, which had as many holes as a sieve, was not meant to
hide a personality but a fact. When the fact broke through the
incognito he would leave suddenly the seaport where he happened
to be at the time and go to another -- generally farther east. He kept
to seaports because he was a seaman in exile from the sea, and had
Ability in the abstract, which is good for no other work but that of
a water-clerk. He retreated in good order towards the rising sun,
and the fact followed him casually but inevitably. Thus in the course
of years he was known successively in Bombay, in Calcutta, in
Rangoon, in Penang, in Batavia -- and in each of these halting-
places was just Jim the water-clerk. Afterwards, when his keen
perception of the Intolerable drove him away for good from seaports
and white men, even into the virgin forest, the Malays of the jungle
village, where he had elected to conceal his deplorable faculty,
added a word to the monosyllable of his incognito. They called him
Tuan Jim: as one might say -- Lord Jim.
  Originally he came from a parsonage. Many commanders of fine
merchant-ships come from these abodes of piety and peace. Jim's
father possessed such certain knowledge of the Unknowable as
made for the righteousness of people in cottages without disturbing
the ease of mind of those whom an unerring Providence enables to
live in mansions. The little church on a hill had the mossy greyness
of a rock seen through a ragged screen of leaves. It had stood there
for centuries, but the trees around probably remembered the laying
of the first stone. Below, the red front of the rectory gleamed with
a warm tint in the midst of grass-plots, flower-beds, and fir-trees,
with an orchard at the back, a paved stable-yard to the left, and the
sloping glass of greenhouses tacked along a wall of bricks. The
living had belonged to the family for generations; but Jim was one
of five sons, and when after a course of light holiday literature his
vocation for the sea had declared itself, he was sent at once to a
'training-ship for officers of the mercantile marine.'
  He learned there a little trigonometry and how to cross top-gallant
yards. He was generally liked. He had the third place in navigation
and pulled stroke in the first cutter. Having a steady head with an
excellent physique, he was very smart aloft. His station was in the
fore-top, and often from there he looked down, with the contempt
of a man destined to shine in the midst of dangers, at the peaceful
multitude of roofs cut in two by the brown tide of the stream,
while scattered on the outskirts of the surrounding plain the factory
chimneys rose perpendicular against a grimy sky, each slender like
a pencil, and belching out smoke like a volcano. He could see the
big ships departing, the broad-beamed ferries constantly on the
move, the little boats floating far below his feet, with the hazy
splendour of the sea in the distance, and the hope of a stirring life
in the world of adventure.
  On the lower deck in the babel of two hundred voices he would
forget himself, and beforehand live in his mind the sea-life of light
literature. He saw himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting
away masts in a hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line;
or as a lonely castaway, barefooted and half naked, walking on
uncovered reefs in search of shellfish to stave off starvation. He
confronted savages on tropical shores, quelled mutinies on the high
seas, and in a small boat upon the ocean kept up the hearts of
despairing men -- always an example of devotion to duty, and as
unflinching as a hero in a book.
  'Something's up. Come along.'
  He leaped to his feet. The boys were streaming up the ladders.
Above could be heard a great scurrying about and shouting, and
when he got through the hatchway he stood still -- as if confounded.
  It was the dusk of a winter's day. The gale had freshened since
noon, stopping the traffic on the river, and now blew with the
strength of a hurricane in fitful bursts that boomed like salvoes of
great guns firing over the ocean. The rain slanted in sheets that
flicked and subsided, and between whiles Jim had threatening
glimpses of the tumbling tide, the small craft jumbled and tossing
along the shore, the motionless buildings in the driving mist, the
broad ferry-boats pitching ponderously at anchor, the vast landing-
stages heaving up and down and smothered in sprays. The next
gust seemed to blow all this away. The air was full of flying water.
There was a fierce purpose in the gale, a furious earnestness in the
screech of the wind, in the brutal tumult of earth and sky, that
seemed directed at him, and made him hold his breath in awe. He
stood still. It seemed to him he was whirled around.
  He was jostled. 'Man the cutter!' Boys rushed past him. A coaster
running in for shelter had crashed through a schooner at anchor,
and one of the ship's instructors had seen the accident. A mob of
boys clambered on the rails, clustered round the davits. 'Collision.
Just ahead of us. Mr Symons saw it.' A push made him stagger
against the mizzen-mast, and he caught hold of a rope. The old
training-ship chained to her moorings quivered all over, bowing
gently head to wind, and with her scanty rigging humming in a
deep bass the breathless song of her youth at sea. 'Lower away!' He
saw the boat, manned, drop swiftly below the rail, and rushed after
her. He heard a splash. 'Let go; clear the falls!' He leaned over.
The river alongside seethed in frothy streaks. The cutter could be
seen in the falling darkness under the spell of tide and wind, that
for a moment held her bound, and tossing abreast of the ship. A
yelling voice in her reached him faintly: 'Keep stroke, you young
whelps, if you want to save anybody! Keep stroke!' And suddenly
she lifted high her bow, and, leaping with raised oars over a wave,
broke the spell cast upon her by the wind and tide.
  Jim felt his shoulder gripped firmly. 'Too late, youngster.' The
captain of the ship laid a restraining hand on that boy, who seemed
on the point of leaping overboard, and Jim looked up with the pain
of conscious defeat in his eyes. The captain smiled sympathetically.
'Better luck next time. This will teach you to be smart.'
  A shrill cheer greeted the cutter. She came dancing back half full
of water, and with two exhausted men washing about on her bottom
boards. The tumult and the menace of wind and sea now appeared
very contemptible to Jim, increasing the regret of his awe at their
inefficient menace. Now he knew what to think of it. It seemed to
him he cared nothing for the gale. He could affront greater perils.
He would do so -- better than anybody. Not a particle of fear was
left. Nevertheless he brooded apart that evening while the bowman
of the cutter -- a boy with a face like a girl's and big grey eyes -- was
the hero of the lower deck. Eager questioners crowded round him.
He narrated: 'I just saw his head bobbing, and I dashed my boat-
hook in the water. It caught in his breeches and I nearly went
overboard, as I thought I would, only old Symons let go the tiller
and grabbed my legs -- the boat nearly swamped. Old Symons is a
fine old chap. l don't mind a bit him being grumpy with us. He
swore at me all the time he held my leg, but that was only his way
of telling me to stick to the boat-hook. Old Symons is awfully
excitable -- isn't he? No -- not the little fair chap -- the other, the big
one with a beard. When we pulled him in he groaned, "Oh, my leg!
oh, my leg!" and turned up his eyes. Fancy such a big chap fainting
like a girl. Would any of you fellows faint for a jab with a boat-
hook? -- I wouldn't. It went into his leg so far.' He showed the boat-
hook, which he had carried below for the purpose, and produced a
sensation. 'No, silly! It was not his flesh that held him -- his breeches
did. Lots of blood, of course.'
  Jim thought it a pitiful display of vanity. The gale had ministered
to a heroism as spurious as its own pretence of terror. He felt angry
with the brutal tumult of earth and sky for taking him unawares
and checking unfairly a generous readiness for narrow escapes.
Otherwise he was rather glad he had not gone into the cutter, since
a lower achievement had served the turn. He had enlarged his
knowledge more than those who had done the work. When all men
flinched, then -- he felt sure -- he alone would know how to deal
with the spurious menace of wind and seas. He knew what to think
of it. Seen dispassionately, it seemed contemptible. He could detect
no trace of emotion in himself, and the final effect of a staggering
event was that, unnoticed and apart from the noisy crowd of boys,
he exulted with fresh certitude in his avidity for adventure, and in
a sense of many-sided courage.

                      CHAPTER 2

  After two years of training he went to sea, and entering the
regions so well known to his imagination, found them strangely
barren of adventure. He made many voyages. He knew the magic
monotony of existence between sky and water: he had to bear the
criticism of men, the exactions of the sea, and the prosaic severity
of the daily task that gives bread -- but whose only reward is in the
perfect love of the work. This reward eluded him. Yet he could not
go back, because there is nothing more enticing, disenchanting,
and enslaving than the life at sea. Besides, his prospects were good.
He was gentlemanly, steady, tractable, with a thorough knowledge
of his duties; and in time, when yet very young, he became chief
mate of a fine ship, without ever having been tested by those events
of the sea that show in the light of day the inner worth of a man,
the edge of his temper, and the fibre of his stuff; that reveal the
quality of his resistance and the secret truth of his pretences, not
only to others but also to himself.
  Only once in all that time he had again a glimpse of the earnest-
ness in the anger of the sea. That truth is not so often made apparent
as people might think. There are many shades in the danger of
adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that there appears
on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention -- that indefinable
something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man,
that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are
coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond
control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his
hope and his fear, the pain of his fatigue and his longing for rest:
which means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all he has seen,
known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that is priceless and necessary --
the sunshine, the memories, the future; which means to sweep the
whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and
appalling act of taking his life.
  Jim, disabled by a falling spar at the beginning of a week of which
his Scottish captain used to say afterwards, 'Man! it's a pairfect
meeracle to me how she lived through it!' spent many days stretched
on his back, dazed, battered, hopeless, and tormented as if at the
bottom of an abyss of unrest. He did not care what the end would
be, and in his lucid moments overvalued his indifference. The
danger, when not seen, has the imperfect vagueness of human
thought. The fear grows shadowy; and Imagination, the enemy of
men, the father of all terrors, unstimulated, sinks to rest in the
dullness of exhausted emotion. Jim saw nothing but the disorder of
his tossed cabin. He lay there battened down in the midst of a small
devastation, and felt secretly glad he had not to go on deck. But
now and again an uncontrollable rush of anguish would grip him
bodily, make him gasp and writhe under the blankets, and then the
unintelligent brutality of an existence liable to the agony of such
sensations filled him with a despairing desire to escape at any cost.
Then fine weather returned, and he thought no more about It.
  His lameness, however, persisted, and when the ship arrived at
an Eastern port he had to go to the hospital. His recovery was slow,
and he was left behind.
  There were only two other patients in the white men's ward: the
purser of a gunboat, who had broken his leg falling down a hatch-
way; and a kind of railway contractor from a neighbouring province,
afflicted by some mysterious tropical disease, who held the doctor
for an ass, and indulged in secret debaucheries of patent medicine
which his Tamil servant used to smuggle in with unwearied devo-
tion. They told each other the story of their lives, played cards a
little, or, yawning and in pyjamas, lounged through the day in easy-
chairs without saying a word. The hospital stood on a hill, and a
gentle breeze entering through the windows, always flung wide
open, brought into the bare room the softness of the sky, the languor
of the earth, the bewitching breath of the Eastern waters. There
were perfumes in it, suggestions of infinite repose, the gift of endless
dreams. Jim looked every day over the thickets of gardens, beyond
the roofs of the town, over the fronds of palms growing on the
shore, at that roadstead which is a thoroughfare to the East, -- at
the roadstead dotted by garlanded islets, lighted by festal sunshine,
its ships like toys, its brilliant activity resembling a holiday pageant,
with the eternal serenity of the Eastern sky overhead and the smiling
peace of the Eastern seas possessing the space as far as the horizon.
  Directly he could walk without a stick, he descended into the
town to look for some opportunity to get home. Nothing offered
just then, and, while waiting, he associated naturally with the men
of his calling in the port. These were of two kinds. Some, very few
and seen there but seldom, led mysterious lives, had preserved an
undefaced energy with the temper of buccaneers and the eyes of
dreamers. They appeared to live in a crazy maze of plans, hopes,
dangers, enterprises, ahead of civilisation, in the dark places of the
sea; and their death was the only event of their fantastic existence
that seemed to have a reasonable certitude of achievement. The
majority were men who, like himself, thrown there by some acci-
dent, had remained as officers of country ships. They had now a
horror of the home service, with its harder conditions, severer view
of duty, and the hazard of stormy oceans. They were attuned to the
eternal peace of Eastern sky and sea. They loved short passages,
good deck-chairs, large native crews, and the distinction of being
white. They shuddered at the thought of hard work, and led precari-
ously easy lives, always on the verge of dismissal, always on the
verge of engagement, serving Chinamen, Arabs, half-castes -- would
have served the devil himself had he made it easy enough. They
talked everlastingly of turns of luck: how So-and-so got charge of a
boat on the coast of China -- a soft thing; how this one had an
easy billet in Japan somewhere, and that one was doing well in the
Siamese navy; and in all they said -- in their actions, in their looks,
in their persons -- could be detected the soft spot, the place of decay,
the determination to lounge safely through existence.
  To Jim that gossiping crowd, viewed as seamen, seemed at first
more unsubstantial than so many shadows. But at length he found
a fascination in the sight of those men, in their appearance of doing
so well on such a small allowance of danger and toil. In time, beside
the original disdain there grew up slowly another sentiment; and
suddenly, giving up the idea of going home, he took a berth as chief
mate of the Patna.
  The Patna was a local steamer as old as the hills, lean like a
greyhound, and eaten up with rust worse than a condemned water-
tank. She was owned by a Chinaman, chartered by an Arab, and
commanded by a sort of renegade New South Wales German, very
anxious to curse publicly his native country, but who, apparently
on the strength of Bismarck's victorious policy, brutalised all those
he was not afraid of, and wore a 'blood-and-iron' air,' combined
with a purple nose and a red moustache. After she had been painted
outside and whitewashed inside, eight hundred pilgrims (more or
less) were driven on board of her as she lay with steam up alongside
a wooden jetty.
  They streamed aboard over three gangways, they streamed in
urged by faith and the hope of paradise, they streamed in with a
continuous tramp and shuffle of bare feet, without a word, a mur-
mur, or a look back; and when clear of confining rails spread on all
sides over the deck, flowed forward and aft, overflowed down the
yawning hatchways, filled the inner recesses of the ship -- like water
filling a cistern, like water flowing into crevices and crannies, like
water rising silently even with the rim. Eight hundred men and
women with faith and hopes, with affections and memories, they
had collected there, coming from north and south and from the
outskirts of the East, after treading the jungle paths, descending
the rivers, coasting in praus along the shallows, crossing in small
canoes from island to island, passing through suffering, meeting
strange sights, beset by strange fears, upheld by one desire. They
came from solitary huts in the wilderness, from populous cam-
pongs, from villages by the sea. At the call of an idea they had left
their forests, their clearings, the protection of their rulers, their
prosperity, their poverty, the surroundings of their youth and the
graves of their fathers. They came covered with dust, with sweat,
with grime, with rags -- the strong men at the head of family parties,
the lean old men pressing forward without hope of return; young
boys with fearless eyes glancing curiously, shy little girls with tum-
bled long hair; the timid women muffled up and clasping to their
breasts, wrapped in loose ends of soiled head-cloths, their sleeping
babies, the unconscious pilgrims of an exacting belief.
  'Look at dese cattle,' said the German skipper to his new chief
mate.
  An Arab, the leader of that pious voyage, came last. He walked
slowly aboard, handsome and grave in his white gown and large
turban. A string of servants followed, loaded with his luggage; the
Patna cast off and backed away from the wharf.
  She was headed between two small islets, crossed obliquely the
anchoring-ground of sailing-ships, swung through half a circle in
the shadow of a hill, then ranged close to a ledge of foaming reefs.
The Arab, standing up aft, recited aloud the prayer of travellers by
sea. He invoked the favour of the Most High upon that journey,
implored His blessing on men's toil and on the secret purposes of
their hearts; the steamer pounded in the dusk the calm water of the
Strait; and far astern of the pilgrim ship a screw-pile lighthouse,
planted by unbelievers on a treacherous shoal, seemed to wink at
her its eye of flame, as if in derision of her errand of faith.
  She cleared the Strait, crossed the bay, continued on her way
through the 'One-degree' passage. She held on straight for the Red
Sea under a serene sky, under a sky scorching and unclouded,
enveloped in a fulgor of sunshine that killed all thought, oppressed
the heart, withered all impulses of strength and energy. And under
the sinister splendour of that sky the sea, blue and profound,
remained still, without a stir, without a ripple, without a wrinkle --
viscous, stagnant, dead. The Patna, with a slight hiss, passed over
that plain, luminous and smooth, unrolled a black ribbon of smoke
across the sky, left behind her on the water a white ribbon of foam
that vanished at once, like the phantom of a track drawn upon a
lifeless sea by the phantom of a steamer.
  Every morning the sun, as if keeping pace in his revolutions with
the progress of the pilgrimage, emerged with a silent burst of light
exactly at the same distance astern of the ship, caught up with her
at noon, pouring the concentrated fire of his rays on the pious
purposes of the men, glided past on his descent, and sank mysteri-
ously into the sea evening after evening, preserving the same dis-
tance ahead of her advancing bows. The five whites on board lived
amidships, isolated from the human cargo. The awnings covered
the deck with a white roof from stem to stern, and a faint hum, a
low murmur of sad voices, alone revealed the presence of a crowd
of people upon the great blaze of the ocean. Such were the days,
still, hot, heavy, disappearing one by one into the past, as if falling
into an abyss for ever open in the wake of the ship; and the ship,
lonely under a wisp of smoke, held on her steadfast way black and
smouldering in a luminous immensity, as if scorched by a flame
flicked at her from a heaven without pity.
  The nights descended on her like a benediction.

                        CHAPTER 3

  A marvellous stillness pervaded the world, and the stars, together
with the serenity of their rays, seemed to shed upon the earth the
assurance of everlasting security. The young moon recurved, and
shining low in the west, was like a slender shaving thrown up from
a bar of gold, and the Arabian Sea, smooth and cool to the eye like
a sheet of ice, extended its perfect level to the perfect circle of a
dark horizon. The propeller turned without a check, as though its
beat had been part of the scheme of a safe universe; and on each
side of the Patna two deep folds of water, permanent and sombre
on the unwrinkled shimmer, enclosed within their straight and
diverging ridges a few white swirls of foam bursting in a low hiss,
a few wavelets, a few ripples, a few undulations that, left behind,
agitated the surface of the sea for an instant after the passage of the
ship, subsided splashing gently, calmed down at last into the circu-
lar stillness of water and sky with the black speck of the moving
hull remaining everlastingly in its centre.
  Jim on the bridge was penetrated by the great certitude of
unbounded safety and peace that could be read on the silent aspect
of nature like the certitude of fostering love upon the placid tender-
ness of a mother's face. Below the roof of awnings, surrendered to
the wisdom of white men and to their courage, trusting the power
of their unbelief and the iron shell of their fire-ship, the pilgrims of
an exacting faith slept on mats, on blankets, on bare planks, on
every deck, in all the dark corners, wrapped in dyed cloths, muffled
in soiled rags, with their heads resting on small bundles, with their
faces pressed to bent forearms: the men, the women, the children;
the old with the young, the decrepit with the lusty -- all equal before
sleep, death's brother.
  A draught of air, fanned from forward by the speed of the ship,
passed steadily through the long gloom between the high bulwarks,
swept over the rows of prone bodies; a few dim flames in globe-
lamps were hung short here and there under the ridge-poles, and
in the blurred circles of light thrown down and trembling slightly
to the unceasing vibration of the ship appeared a chin upturned,
two closed eyelids, a dark hand with silver rings, a meagre limb
draped in a torn covering, a head bent back, a naked foot, a throat
bared and stretched as if offering itself to the knife. The well-to-do
had made for their families shelters with heavy boxes and dusty
mats; the poor reposed side by side with all they had on earth tied
up in a rag under their heads; the lone old men slept, with drawn-
up legs, upon their prayer-carpets, with their hands over their ears
and one elbow on each side of the face; a father, his shoulders up
and his knees under his forehead, dozed dejectedly by a boy who
slept on his back with tousled hair and one arm commandingly
extended; a woman covered from head to foot, like a corpse, with
a piece of white sheeting, had a naked child in the hollow of each
arm; the Arab's belongings, piled right aft, made a heavy mound
of broken outlines, with a cargo-lamp swung above, and a great
confusion of vague forms behind: gleams of paunchy brass pots,
the foot-rest of a deck-chair, blades of spears, the straight scabbard
of an old sword leaning against a heap of pillows, the spout of a tin
coffee-pot. The patent log on the taffrail periodically rang a single
tinkling stroke for every mile traversed on an errand of faith. Above
the mass of sleepers a faint and patient sigh at times floated, the
exhalation of a troubled dream; and short metallic clangs bursting
out suddenly in the depths of the ship, the harsh scrape of a shovel,
the violent slam of a furnace-door, exploded brutally, as if the men
handling the mysterious things below had their breasts full of fierce
anger: while the slim high hull of the steamer went on evenly ahead,
without a sway of her bare masts, cleaving continuously the great
calm of the waters under the inaccessible serenity of the sky.
  Jim paced athwart, and his footsteps in the vast silence were loud
to his own ears, as if echoed by the watchful stars: his eyes, roaming
about the line of the horizon, seemed to gaze hungrily into the
unattainable, and did not see the shadow of the coming event. The
only shadow on the sea was the shadow of the black smoke pouring
heavily from the funnel its immense streamer, whose end was con-
stantly dissolving in the air. Two Malays, silent and almost motion-
less, steered, one on each side of the wheel, whose brass rim shone
fragmentarily in the oval of light thrown out by the binnacle. Now
and then a hand, with black fingers alternately letting go and catch-
ing hold of revolving spokes, appeared in the illumined part; the
links of wheel-chains ground heavily in the grooves of the barrel.
Jim would glance at the compass, would glance around the unattain-
able horizon, would stretch himself till his joints cracked, with a
leisurely twist of the body, in the very excess of well-being; and, as
if made audacious by the invincible aspect of the peace, he felt he
cared for nothing that could happen to him to the end of his days.
From time to time he glanced idly at a chart pegged out with four
drawing-pins on a low three-legged table abaft the steering-gear
case. The sheet of paper portraying the depths of the sea presented
a shiny surface under the light of a bull's-eye lamp lashed to a
stanchion, a surface as level and smooth as the glimmering surface
of the waters. Parallel rulers with a pair of dividers reposed on it;
the ship's position at last noon was marked with a small black cross,
and the straight pencil-line drawn firmly as far as Perim figured the
course of the ship -- the path of souls towards the holy place, the
promise of salvation, the reward of eternal life -- while the pencil
with its sharp end touching the Somali coast lay round and still like
a naked ship's spar floating in the pool of a sheltered dock. 'How
steady she goes,' thought Jim with wonder, with something like
gratitude for this high peace of sea and sky. At such times his
thoughts would be full of valorous deeds: he loved these dreams
and the success of his imaginary achievements. They were the best
parts of life, its secret truth, its hidden reality. They had a gorgeous
virility, the charm of vagueness, they passed before him with an
heroic tread; they carried his soul away with them and made it
drunk with the divine philtre of an unbounded confidence in itself.
There was nothing he could not face. He was so pleased with the
idea that he smiled, keeping perfunctorily his eyes ahead; and when
he happened to glance back he saw the white streak of the wake
drawn as straight by the ship's keel upon the sea as the black line
drawn by the pencil upon the chart.
  The ash-buckets racketed, clanking up and down the stoke-hold
ventilators, and this tin-pot clatter warned him the end of his watch
was near. He sighed with content, with regret as well at having to
part from that serenity which fostered the adventurous freedom of
his thoughts. He was a little sleepy too, and felt a pleasurable lan-
guor running through every limb as though all the blood in his body
had turned to warm milk. His skipper had come up noiselessly, in
pyjamas and with his sleeping-jacket flung wide open. Red of face,
only half awake, the left eye partly closed, the right staring stupid
and glassy, he hung his big head over the chart and scratched his
ribs sleepily. There was something obscene in the sight of his naked
flesh. His bared breast glistened soft and greasy as though he had
sweated out his fat in his sleep. He pronounced a professional
remark in a voice harsh and dead, resembling the rasping sound of
a wood-file on the edge of a plank; the fold of his double chin hung
like a bag triced up close under the hinge of his jaw. Jim started,
and his answer was full of deference; but the odious and fleshy
figure, as though seen for the first time in a revealing moment, fixed
itself in his memory for ever as the incarnation of everything vile
and base that lurks in the world we love: in our own hearts we trust
for our salvation, in the men that surround us, in the sights that fill
our eyes, in the sounds that fill our ears, and in the air that fills our
lungs.
  The thin gold shaving of the moon floating slowly downwards
had lost itself on the darkened surface of the waters, and the eternity
beyond the sky seemed to come down nearer to the earth, with the
augmented glitter of the stars, with the more profound sombreness
in the lustre of the half-transparent dome covering the flat disc of
an opaque sea. The ship moved so smoothly that her onward motion
was imperceptible to the senses of men, as though she had been a
crowded planet speeding through the dark spaces of ether behind
the swarm of suns, in the appalling and calm solitudes awaiting the
breath of future creations. 'Hot is no name for it down below,' said
a voice.
  Jim smiled without looking round. The skipper presented an
unmoved breadth of back: it was the renegade's trick to appear
pointedly unaware of your existence unless it suited his purpose to
turn at you with a devouring glare before he let loose a torrent of
foamy, abusive jargon that came like a gush from a sewer. Now he
emitted only a sulky grunt; the second engineer at the head of
the bridge-ladder, kneading with damp palms a dirty sweat-rag,
unabashed, continued the tale of his complaints. The sailors had a
good time of it up here, and what was the use of them in the world
he would be blowed if he could see. The poor devils of engineers
had to get the ship along anyhow, and they could very well do the
rest too; by gosh they -- 'Shut up!' growled the German stolidly.
'Oh yes! Shut up -- and when anything goes wrong you fly to us,
don't you?' went on the other. He was more than half cooked, he
expected; but anyway, now, he did not mind how much he sinned,
because these last three days he had passed through a fine course of
training for the place where the bad boys go when they die -- b'gosh,
he had -- besides being made jolly well deaf by the blasted racket
below. The durned, compound, surface-condensing, rotten scrap-
heap rattled and banged down there like an old deck-winch, only
more so; and what made him risk his life every night and day that
God made amongst the refuse of a breaking-up yard flying round
at fifty-seven revolutions, was more than he could tell. He must have
been born reckless, b'gosh. He . . . 'Where did you get drink?'
inquired the German, very savage; but motionless in the light of
the binnacle, like a clumsy effigy of a man cut out of a block of fat.
Jim went on smiling at the retreating horizon; his heart was full of
generous impulses, and his thought was contemplating his own
superiority. 'Drink!' repeated the engineer with amiable scorn: he
was hanging on with both hands to the rail, a shadowy figure with
flexible legs. 'Not from you, captain. You're far too mean, b'gosh.
You would let a good man die sooner than give him a drop of
schnapps. That's what you Germans call economy. Penny wise,
pound foolish.' He became sentimental. The chief had given him a
four-finger nip about ten o'clock -- 'only one, s'elp me!' -- good old
chief; but as to getting the old fraud out of his bunk -- a five-ton
crane couldn't do it. Not it. Not to-night anyhow. He was sleeping
sweetly like a little child, with a bottle of prime brandy under his
pillow. From the thick throat of the commander of the Patna came
a low rumble, on which the sound of the word Schwein fluttered
high and low like a capricious feather in a faint stir of air. He and
the chief engineer had been cronies for a good few years -- serving
the same jovial, crafty, old Chinaman, with horn-rimmed goggles
and strings of red silk plaited into the venerable grey hairs of his
pigtail. The quay-side opinion in the Patna's home-port was that
these two in the way of brazen peculation 'had done together pretty
well everything you can think of.' Outwardly they were badly mat-
ched: one dull-eyed, malevolent, and of soft fleshy curves; the other
lean, all hollows, with a head long and bony like the head of an old
horse, with sunken cheeks, with sunken temples, with an indiffer-
ent glazed glance of sunken eyes. He had been stranded out East
somewhere -- in Canton, in Shanghai, or perhaps in Yokohama; he
probably did not care to remember himself the exact locality, nor
yet the cause of his shipwreck. He had been, in mercy to his youth,
kicked quietly out of his ship twenty years ago or more, and it might
have been so much worse for him that the memory of the episode
had in it hardly a trace of misfortune. Then, steam navigation
expanding in these seas and men of his craft being scarce at first,
he had 'got on' after a sort. He was eager to let strangers know in a
dismal mumble that he was 'an old stager out here.' When he
moved, a skeleton seemed to sway loose in his clothes; his walk
was mere wandering, and he was given to wander thus around the
engine-room skylight, smoking, without relish, doctored tobacco
in a brass bowl at the end of a cherrywood stem four feet long, with
the imbecile gravity of a thinker evolving a system of philosophy
from the hazy glimpse of a truth. He was usually anything but free
with his private store of liquor; but on that night he had departed
from his principles, so that his second, a weak-headed child of
Wapping, what with the unexpectedness of the treat and the
strength of the stuff, had become very happy, cheeky, and talkative.
The fury of the New South Wales German was extreme; he puffed
like an exhaust-pipe, and Jim, faintly amused by the scene, was
impatient for the time when he could get below: the last ten minutes
of the watch were irritating like a gun that hangs fire; those men
did not belong to the world of heroic adventure; they weren't bad
chaps though. Even the skipper himself . . . His gorge rose at the
mass of panting flesh from which issued gurgling mutters, a cloudy
trickle of filthy expressions; but he was too pleasurably languid to
dislike actively this or any other thing. The quality of these men
did not matter; he rubbed shoulders with them, but they could not
touch him; he shared the air they breathed, but he was differ-
ent.... Would the skipper go for the engineer? ... The life was
easy and he was too sure of himself -- too sure of himself to . . . The
line dividing his meditation from a surreptitious doze on his feet
was thinner than a thread in a spider's web.
  The second engineer was coming by easy transitions to the con-
sideration of his finances and of his courage.
  'Who's drunk? I? No, no, captain! That won't do. You ought to
know by this time the chief ain't free-hearted enough to make a
sparrow drunk, b'gosh. I've never been the worse for liquor in my
life; the stuff ain't made yet that would make me drunk. I could
drink liquid fire against your whisky peg for peg, b'gosh, and keep
as cool as a cucumber. If I thought I was drunk I would jump
overboard -- do away with myself, b'gosh. I would! Straight! And
I won't go off the bridge. Where do you expect me to take the air
on a night like this, eh? On deck amongst that vermin down there?
Likely -- ain't it! And I am not afraid of anything you can do.'
  The German lifted two heavy fists to heaven and shook them a
little without a word.
  'I don't know what fear is,' pursued the engineer, with the
enthusiasm of sincere conviction. 'I am not afraid of doing all the
bloomin' work in this rotten hooker, b'gosh! And a jolly good thing
for you that there are some of us about the world that aren't afraid
of their lives, or where would you be -- you and this old thing here
with her plates like brown paper -- brown paper, s'elp me? It's all
very fine for you -- you get a power of pieces out of her one way and
another; but what about me -- what do I get? A measly hundred and
fifty dollars a month and find yourself. I wish to ask you respect-
fully -- respectfully, mind -- who wouldn't chuck a dratted job like
this? 'Tain't safe, s'elp me, it ain't! Only I am one of them fearless
fellows . . .'
  He let go the rail and made ample gestures as if demonstrating
in the air the shape and extent of his valour; his thin voice darted
in prolonged squeaks upon the sea, he tiptoed back and forth for
the better emphasis of utterance, and suddenly pitched down head-
first as though he had been clubbed from behind. He said 'Damn!'
as he tumbled; an instant of silence followed upon his screeching:
Jim and the skipper staggered forward by common accord, and
catching themselves up, stood very stiff and still gazing, amazed,
at the undisturbed level of the sea. Then they looked upwards at
the stars.
  What had happened? The wheezy thump of the engines went
on. Had the earth been checked in her course? They could not
understand; and suddenly the calm sea, the sky without a cloud,
appeared formidably insecure in their immobility, as if poised on
the brow of yawning destruction. The engineer rebounded verti-
cally full length and collapsed again into a vague heap. This heap
said 'What's that?' in the muffled accents of profound grief. A faint
noise as of thunder, of thunder infinitely remote, less than a sound,
hardly more than a vibration, passed slowly, and the ship quivered
in response, as if the thunder had growled deep down in the water.
The eyes of the two Malays at the wheel glittered towards the white
men, but their dark hands remained closed on the spokes. The
sharp hull driving on its way seemed to rise a few inches in suc-
cession through its whole length, as though it had become pliable,
and settled down again rigidly to its work of cleaving the smooth
surface of the sea. Its quivering stopped, and the faint noise of
thunder ceased all at once, as though the ship had steamed across
a narrow belt of vibrating water and of humming air.

                        CHAPTER 4

  A month or so afterwards, when Jim, in answer to pointed ques-
tions, tried to tell honestly the truth of this experience, he said,
speaking of the ship: 'She went over whatever it was as easy as a
snake crawling over a stick.' The illustration was good: the ques-
tions were aiming at facts, and the official Inquiry was being held
in the police court of an Eastern port. He stood elevated in the
witness-box, with burning cheeks in a cool lofty room: the big
framework of punkahs moved gently to and fro high above his head,
and from below many eyes were looking at him out of dark faces, out
of white faces, out of red faces, out of faces attentive, spellbound, as
if all these people sitting in orderly rows upon narrow benches had
been enslaved by the fascination of his voice. It was very loud, it
rang startling in his own ears, it was the only sound audible in the
world, for the terribly distinct questions that extorted his answers
seemed to shape themselves in anguish and pain within his breast, --
came to him poignant and silent like the terrible questioning of
one's conscience. Outside the court the sun blazed -- within was the
wind of great punkahs that made you shiver, the shame that made
you burn, the attentive eyes whose glance stabbed. The face of the
presiding magistrate, clean shaved and impassible, looked at him
deadly pale between the red faces of the two nautical assessors. The
light of a broad window under the ceiling fell from above on the
heads and shoulders of the three men, and they were fiercely distinct
in the half-light of the big court-room where the audience seemed
composed of staring shadows. They wanted facts. Facts! They
demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!
  'After you had concluded you had collided with something float-
ing awash, say a water-logged wreck, you were ordered by your
captain to go forward and ascertain if there was any damage done.
Did you think it likely from the force of the blow?' asked the
assessor sitting to the left. He had a thin horseshoe beard, salient
cheek-bones, and with both elbows on the desk clasped his rugged
hands before his face, looking at Jim with thoughtful blue eyes; the
other, a heavy, scornful man, thrown back in his seat, his left arm
extended full length, drummed delicately with his finger-tips on a
blotting-pad: in the middle the magistrate upright in the roomy
arm-chair, his head inclined slightly on the shoulder, had his arms
crossed on his breast and a few flowers in a glass vase by the side of
his inkstand.
  'I did not,' said Jim. 'I was told to call no one and to make no noise
for fear of creating a panic. I thought the precaution reasonable. I
took one of the lamps that were hung under the awnings and went
forward. After opening the forepeak hatch I heard splashing in
there. I lowered then the lamp the whole drift of its lanyard, and
saw that the forepeak was more than half full of water already.
I knew then there must be a big hole below the water-line.' He
paused.
  'Yes,' said the big assessor, with a dreamy smile at the blotting-
pad; his fingers played incessantly, touching the paper without
noise.
  'I did not think of danger just then. I might have been a little
startled: all this happened in such a quiet way and so very suddenly.
I knew there was no other bulkhead in the ship but the collision
bulkhead separating the forepeak from the forehold. I went back
to tell the captain. I came upon the second engineer getting up at
the foot of the bridge-ladder: he seemed dazed, and told me he
thought his left arm was broken; he had slipped on the top step
when getting down while I was forward. He exclaimed, "My God!
That rotten bulkhead'll give way in a minute, and the damned thing
will go down under us like a lump of lead." He pushed me away
with his right arm and ran before me up the ladder, shouting as he
climbed. His left arm hung by his side. I followed up in time to see
the captain rush at him and knock him down flat on his back. He
did not strike him again: he stood bending over him and speaking
angrily but quite low. I fancy he was asking him why the devil he
didn't go and stop the engines, instead of making a row about it on
deck. I heard him say, "Get up! Run! fly!" He swore also. The
engineer slid down the starboard ladder and bolted round the sky-
light to the engine-room companion which was on the port side. He
moaned as he ran....'
  He spoke slowly; he remembered swiftly and with extreme vivid-
ness; he could have reproduced like an echo the moaning of the
engineer for the better information of these men who wanted facts.
After his first feeling of revolt he had come round to the view that
only a meticulous precision of statement would bring out the true
horror behind the appalling face of things. The facts those men
were so eager to know had been visible, tangible, open to the senses,
occupying their place in space and time, requiring for their exist-
ence a fourteen-hundred-ton steamer and twenty-seven minutes by
the watch; they made a whole that had features, shades of
expression, a complicated aspect that could be remembered by the
eye, and something else besides, something invisible, a directing
spirit of perdition that dwelt within, like a malevolent soul in a
detestable body. He was anxious to make this clear. This had not
been a common affair, everything in it had been of the utmost
importance, and fortunately he remembered everything. He wanted
to go on talking for truth's sake, perhaps for his own sake also; and
while his utterance was deliberate, his mind positively flew round
and round the serried circle of facts that had surged up all about
him to cut him off from the rest of his kind: it was like a creature
that, finding itself imprisoned within an enclosure of high stakes,
dashes round and round, distracted in the night, trying to find a
weak spot, a crevice, a place to scale, some opening through which
it may squeeze itself and escape. This awful activity of mind made
him hesitate at times in his speech....
  'The captain kept on moving here and there on the bridge; he
seemed calm enough, only he stumbled several times; and once as
I stood speaking to him he walked right into me as though he had
been stone-blind. He made no definite answer to what I had to tell.
He mumbled to himself; all I heard of it were a few words that
sounded like "confounded steam!" and "infernal steam!" -- some-
thing about steam. I thought . . .'
  He was becoming irrelevant; a question to the point cut short his
speech, like a pang of pain, and he felt extremely discouraged and
weary. He was coming to that, he was coming to that -- and now,
checked brutally, he had to answer by yes or no. He answered
truthfully by a curt 'Yes, I did'; and fair of face, big of frame, with
young, gloomy eyes, he held his shoulders upright above the box
while his soul writhed within him. He was made to answer another
question so much to the point and so useless, then waited again.
His mouth was tastelessly dry, as though he had been eating dust,
then salt and bitter as after a drink of sea-water. He wiped his damp
forehead, passed his tongue over parched lips, felt a shiver run
down his back. The big assessor had dropped his eyelids, and
drummed on without a sound, careless and mournful; the eyes of
the other above the sunburnt, clasped fingers seemed to glow with
kindliness; the magistrate had swayed forward; his pale face
hovered near the flowers, and then dropping sideways over the arm
of his chair, he rested his temple in the palm of his hand. The wind
of the punkahs eddied down on the heads, on the dark-faced natives
wound about in voluminous draperies, on the Europeans sitting
together very hot and in drill suits that seemed to fit them as close
as their skins, and holding their round pith hats on their knees;
while gliding along the walls the court peons, buttoned tight in long
white coats, flitted rapidly to and fro, running on bare toes, red-
sashed, red turban on head, as noiseless as ghosts, and on the alert
like so many retrievers.
  Jim's eyes, wandering in the intervals of his answers, rested upon
a white man who sat apart from the others, with his face worn and
clouded, but with quiet eyes that glanced straight, interested and
clear. Jim answered another question and was tempted to cry out,
'What's the good of this! what's the good!' He tapped with his foot
slightly, bit his lip, and looked away over the heads. He met the
eyes of the white man. The glance directed at him was not the
fascinated stare of the others. It was an act of intelligent volition.
Jim between two questions forgot himself so far as to find leisure
for a thought. This fellow -- ran the thought -- looks at me as though
he could see somebody or something past my shoulder. He had
come across that man before -- in the street perhaps. He was positive
he had never spoken to him. For days, for many days, he had
spoken to no one, but had held silent, incoherent, and endless
converse with himself, like a prisoner alone in his cell or like a
wayfarer lost in a wilderness. At present he was answering questions
that did not matter though they had a purpose, but he doubted
whether he would ever again speak out as long as he lived. The
sound of his own truthful statements confirmed his deliberate
opinion that speech was of no use to him any longer. That man
there seemed to be aware of his hopeless difficulty. Jim looked at
him, then turned away resolutely, as after a final parting.
  And later on, many times, in distant parts of the world, Marlow
showed himself willing to remember Jim, to remember him at
length, in detail and audibly.
  Perhaps it would be after dinner, on a verandah draped in motion-
less foliage and crowned with flowers, in the deep dusk speckled by
fiery cigar-ends. The elongated bulk of each cane-chair harboured
a silent listener. Now and then a small red glow would move
abruptly, and expanding light up the fingers of a languid hand, part
of a face in profound repose, or flash a crimson gleam into a pair of
pensive eyes overshadowed by a fragment of an unruffled forehead;
and with the very first word uttered Marlow's body, extended at
rest in the seat, would become very still, as though his spirit had
winged its way back into the lapse of time and were speaking
through his lips from the past.

                        CHAPTER 5

  'Oh yes. I attended the inquiry,' he would say, 'and to this day I
haven't left off wondering why I went. I am willing to believe each
of us has a guardian angel, if you fellows will concede to me that
each of us has a familiar devil as well. I want you to own up, because
I don't like to feel exceptional in any way, and I know I have him --
the devil, I mean. I haven't seen him, of course, but I go upon
circumstantial evidence. He is there right enough, and, being
malicious, he lets me in for that kind of thing. What kind of thing,
you ask? Why, the inquiry thing, the yellow-dog thing -- you
wouldn't think a mangy, native tyke would be allowed to trip up
people in the verandah of a magistrate's court, would you? -- the
kind of thing that by devious, unexpected, truly diabolical ways
causes me to run up against men with soft spots, with hard spots,
with hidden plague spots, by Jove! and loosens their tongues at the
sight of me for their infernal confidences; as though, forsooth, I
had no confidences to make to myself, as though -- God help me! --
I didn't have enough confidential information about myself to har-
row my own soul till the end of my appointed time. And what I
have done to be thus favoured I want to know. I declare I am as full
of my own concerns as the next man, and I have as much memory
as the average pilgrim in this valley, so you see I am not particularly
fit to be a receptacle of confessions. Then why? Can't tell -- unless
it be to make time pass away after dinner. Charley, my dear chap,
your dinner was extremely good, and in consequence these men
here look upon a quiet rubber as a tumultuous occupation. They
wallow in your good chairs and think to themselves, "Hang exer-
tion. Let that Marlow talk."
  'Talk! So be it. And it's easy enough to talk of Master Jim, after
a good spread, two hundred feet above the sea-level, with a box of
decent cigars handy, on a blessed evening of freshness and starlight
that would make the best of us forget we are only on sufferance here
and got to pick our way in cross lights, watching every precious
minute and every irremediable step, trusting we shall manage yet
to go out decently in the end -- but not so sure of it after all -- and
with dashed little help to expect from those we touch elbows with
right and left. Of course there are men here and there to whom the
whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant,
empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten
before the end is told -- before the end is told -- even if there happens
to be any end to it.
  'My eyes met his for the first time at that inquiry. You must know
that everybody connected in any way with the sea was there, because
the affair had been notorious for days, ever since that mysterious
cable message came from Aden to start us all cackling. I say mysteri-
ous, because it was so in a sense though it contained a naked fact,
about as naked and ugly as a fact can well be. The whole waterside
talked of nothing else. First thing in the morning as I was dressing
in my state-room, I would hear through the bulkhead my Parsee
Dubash jabbering about the Patna with the steward, while he drank
a cup of tea, by favour, in the pantry. No sooner on shore I would
meet some acquaintance, and the first remark would be, "Did you
ever hear of anything to beat this?" and according to his kind the
man would smile cynically, or look sad, or let out a swear or two.
Complete strangers would accost each other familiarly, just for the
sake of easing their minds on the subject: every confounded loafer
in the town came in for a harvest of drinks over this affair: you
heard of it in the harbour office, at every ship-broker's, at your
agent's, from whites, from natives, from half-castes, from the very
boatmen squatting half naked on the stone steps as you went up --
by Jove! There was some indignation, not a few jokes, and no end
of discussions as to what had become of them, you know. This went
on for a couple of weeks or more, and the opinion that whatever
was mysterious in this affair would turn out to be tragic as well,
began to prevail, when one fine morning, as I was standing in the
shade by the steps of the harbour office, I perceived four men
walking towards me along the quay. I wondered for a while where
that queer lot had sprung from, and suddenly, I may say, I shouted
to myself, "Here they are!"
  'There they were, sure enough, three of them as large as life, and
one much larger of girth than any living man has a right to be, just
landed with a good breakfast inside of them from an outward-bound
Dale Line steamer that had come in about an hour after sunrise.
There could be no mistake; I spotted the jolly skipper of the Patna
at the first glance: the fattest man in the whole blessed tropical belt
clear round that good old earth of ours. Moreover, nine months or
so before, I had come across him in Samarang. His steamer was
loading in the Roads, and he was abusing the tyrannical institutions
of the German empire, and soaking himself in beer all day long and
day after day in De Jongh's back-shop, till De Jongh, who charged
a guilder for every bottle without as much as the quiver of an eyelid,
would beckon me aside, and, with his little leathery face all puck-
ered up, declare confidentially, "Business is business, but this man,
captain, he make me very sick. Tfui!"
  'I was looking at him from the shade. He was hurrying on a little
in advance, and the sunlight beating on him brought out his bulk
in a startling way. He made me think of a trained baby elephant
walking on hind-legs. He was extravagantly gorgeous too -- got
up in a soiled sleeping-suit, bright green and deep orange vertical
stripes, with a pair of ragged straw slippers on his bare feet, and
somebody's cast-off pith hat, very dirty and two sizes too small for
him, tied up with a manilla rope-yarn on the top of his big head.
You understand a man like that hasn't the ghost of a chance when
it comes to borrowing clothes. Very well. On he came in hot haste,
without a look right or left, passed within three feet of me, and in
the innocence of his heart went on pelting upstairs into the harbour
office to make his deposition, or report, or whatever you like to call
it.
  'It appears he addressed himself in the first instance to the princi-
pal shipping-master. Archie Ruthvel had just come in, and, as his
story goes, was about to begin his arduous day by giving a dressing-
down to his chief clerk. Some of you might have known him -- an
obliging little Portuguese half-caste with a miserably skinny neck,
and always on the hop to get something from the shipmasters in the
way of eatables -- a piece of salt pork, a bag of biscuits, a few
potatoes, or what not. One voyage, I recollect, I tipped him a live
sheep out of the remnant of my sea-stock: not that I wanted him to
do anything for me -- he couldn't, you know -- but because his child-
like belief in the sacred right to perquisites quite touched my heart.
It was so strong as to be almost beautiful. The race -- the two races
rather -- and the climate . . . However, never mind. I know where
I have a friend for life.
  'Well, Ruthvel says he was giving him a severe lecture -- on official
morality, I suppose -- when he heard a kind of subdued commotion
at his back, and turning his head he saw, in his own words, some-
thing round and enormous, resembling a sixteen-hundred-weight
sugar-hogshead wrapped in striped flannelette, up-ended in the
middle of the large floor space in the office. He declares he was so
taken aback that for quite an appreciable time he did not realise the
thing was alive, and sat still wondering for what purpose and by
what means that object had been transported in front of his desk.
The archway from the ante-room was crowded with punkah-pul-
lers, sweepers, police peons, the coxswain and crew of the harbour
steam-launch, all craning their necks and almost climbing on each
other's backs. Quite a riot. By that time the fellow had managed to
tug and jerk his hat clear of his head, and advanced with slight bows
at Ruthvel, who told me the sight was so discomposing that for
some time he listened, quite unable to make out what that appar-
ition wanted. It spoke in a voice harsh and lugubrious but intrepid,
and little by little it dawned upon Archie that this was a develop-
ment of the Patna case. He says that as soon as he understood who
it was before him he felt quite unwell -- Archie is so sympathetic
and easily upset -- but pulled himself together and shouted "Stop!
I can't listen to you. You must go to the Master Attendant. I can't
possibly listen to you. Captain Elliot is the man you want to see.
This way, this way." He jumped up, ran round that long counter,
pulled, shoved: the other let him, surprised but obedient at first,
and only at the door of the private office some sort of animal instinct
made him hang back and snort like a frightened bullock. "Look
here! what's up? Let go! Look here!" Archie flung open the door