feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/shmoop/Lord Jim/section_1_part_0.txt
feat_book_id: Lord Jim.chapter 2
feat_summary_id: chapter 2
feat_summary: {"name": "Chapter 2", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210118112654/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/lord-jim/summary/chapter-2", "summary": "A few years later we catch up with Jim who is now serving as a mate aboard a nice ship. During rough weather, Jim gets whacked by a falling spear. Ouch. The injured Jim has to go to the hospital and gets left behind by his ship. Not cool, mates. After his stint at the hospital, Jim takes an easier job aboard the Patna, \" a local steamer as old as the hills, lean like a greyhound, and eaten up with rust worse than a condemned water-tank.\" . Sounds charming. Appearances aside, life on the Patna is pretty easy for Jim. The crew is an international hodgepodge of dudes who don't care to work all that hard, so there's no need to impress. The Patna is ferrying a large group of Muslim pilgrims to Mecca, in nice, warm weather. All is well.", "analysis": ""}
text: 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.
feat_summary_name: Chapter 2
target: A few years later we catch up with Jim who is now serving as a mate aboard a nice ship. During rough weather, Jim gets whacked by a falling spear. Ouch. The injured Jim has to go to the hospital and gets left behind by his ship. Not cool, mates. After his stint at the hospital, Jim takes an easier job aboard the Patna, " a local steamer as old as the hills, lean like a greyhound, and eaten up with rust worse than a condemned water-tank." . Sounds charming. Appearances aside, life on the Patna is pretty easy for Jim. The crew is an international hodgepodge of dudes who don't care to work all that hard, so there's no need to impress. The Patna is ferrying a large group of Muslim pilgrims to Mecca, in nice, warm weather. All is well.