feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/shmoop/Lord Jim/section_3_part_0.txt
feat_book_id: Lord Jim.chapter 4
feat_summary_id: chapter 4
feat_summary: {"name": "Chapter 4", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210118112654/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/lord-jim/summary/chapter-4", "summary": "Let's fastforward folks. Sometime later, we find Jim in a courtroom at an inquest, or trial. Our man is on the stand, and he's testifying about what happened the night the Patna hit whatever it was that it hit in Chapter 3. He explains that he examined the ship after impact and found a hole. That doesn't sound promising. The poor Jim starts to ramble, so the judges have to cut him off. Answer \"yes\" or \"no,\" they tell him. An embarrassed Jim shuts up right quick. That's when he notices a white man in the courtroom who keeps watching him. Who is this guy? And why does he keep showing up? As it turns out, this dude is Marlow, who will be taking over the storytelling shortly.", "analysis": ""}
text: 
  A month or so afterwards, when Jim, in answer to pointed questions,
  tried to tell honestly the truth of this experience, he said, speaking
  of the ship: 'She went over whatever it was as easy as a snake crawling
  over a stick.' The illustration was good: the questions were aiming at
  facts, and the official Inquiry was being held in the police court of an
  Eastern port. He stood elevated in the witness-box, with burning cheeks
  in a cool lofty room: the big framework of punkahs moved gently to and
  fro high above his head, and from below many eyes were looking at him
  out of dark faces, out of white faces, out of red faces, out of faces
  attentive, spellbound, as if all these people sitting in orderly rows
  upon narrow benches had been enslaved by the fascination of his voice.
  It was very loud, it rang startling in his own ears, it was the only
  sound audible in the world, for the terribly distinct questions that
  extorted his answers seemed to shape themselves in anguish and pain
  within his breast,--came to him poignant and silent like the
  terrible questioning of one's conscience. Outside the court the sun
  blazed--within was the wind of great punkahs that made you shiver, the
  shame that made you burn, the attentive eyes whose glance stabbed. The
  face of the presiding magistrate, clean shaved and impassible, looked at
  him deadly pale between the red faces of the two nautical assessors. The
  light of a broad window under the ceiling fell from above on the heads
  and shoulders of the three men, and they were fiercely distinct in the
  half-light of the big court-room where the audience seemed composed of
  staring shadows. They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him,
  as if facts could explain anything!
  
  'After you had concluded you had collided with something floating awash,
  say a water-logged wreck, you were ordered by your captain to go forward
  and ascertain if there was any damage done. Did you think it likely from
  the force of the blow?' asked the assessor sitting to the left. He had
  a thin horseshoe beard, salient cheek-bones, and with both elbows on
  the desk clasped his rugged hands before his face, looking at Jim with
  thoughtful blue eyes; the other, a heavy, scornful man, thrown back in
  his seat, his left arm extended full length, drummed delicately with his
  finger-tips on a blotting-pad: in the middle the magistrate upright in
  the roomy arm-chair, his head inclined slightly on the shoulder, had his
  arms crossed on his breast and a few flowers in a glass vase by the side
  of his inkstand.
  
  'I did not,' said Jim. 'I was told to call no one and to make no noise
  for fear of creating a panic. I thought the precaution reasonable. I
  took one of the lamps that were hung under the awnings and went forward.
  After opening the forepeak hatch I heard splashing in there. I lowered
  then the lamp the whole drift of its lanyard, and saw that the forepeak
  was more than half full of water already. I knew then there must be a
  big hole below the water-line.' He paused.
  
  'Yes,' said the big assessor, with a dreamy smile at the blotting-pad;
  his fingers played incessantly, touching the paper without noise.
  
  'I did not think of danger just then. I might have been a little
  startled: all this happened in such a quiet way and so very suddenly. I
  knew there was no other bulkhead in the ship but the collision bulkhead
  separating the forepeak from the forehold. I went back to tell the
  captain. I came upon the second engineer getting up at the foot of the
  bridge-ladder: he seemed dazed, and told me he thought his left arm was
  broken; he had slipped on the top step when getting down while I was
  forward. He exclaimed, "My God! That rotten bulkhead'll give way in a
  minute, and the damned thing will go down under us like a lump of lead."
  He pushed me away with his right arm and ran before me up the ladder,
  shouting as he climbed. His left arm hung by his side. I followed up in
  time to see the captain rush at him and knock him down flat on his back.
  He did not strike him again: he stood bending over him and speaking
  angrily but quite low. I fancy he was asking him why the devil he didn't
  go and stop the engines, instead of making a row about it on deck. I
  heard him say, "Get up! Run! fly!" He swore also. The engineer slid down
  the starboard ladder and bolted round the skylight to the engine-room
  companion which was on the port side. He moaned as he ran. . . .'
  
  He spoke slowly; he remembered swiftly and with extreme vividness; he
  could have reproduced like an echo the moaning of the engineer for
  the better information of these men who wanted facts. After his first
  feeling of revolt he had come round to the view that only a meticulous
  precision of statement would bring out the true horror behind the
  appalling face of things. The facts those men were so eager to know had
  been visible, tangible, open to the senses, occupying their place in
  space and time, requiring for their existence a fourteen-hundred-ton
  steamer and twenty-seven minutes by the watch; they made a whole that
  had features, shades of expression, a complicated aspect that could be
  remembered by the eye, and something else besides, something invisible,
  a directing spirit of perdition that dwelt within, like a malevolent
  soul in a detestable body. He was anxious to make this clear. This
  had not been a common affair, everything in it had been of the utmost
  importance, and fortunately he remembered everything. He wanted to go on
  talking for truth's sake, perhaps for his own sake also; and while his
  utterance was deliberate, his mind positively flew round and round the
  serried circle of facts that had surged up all about him to cut him off
  from the rest of his kind: it was like a creature that, finding itself
  imprisoned within an enclosure of high stakes, dashes round and round,
  distracted in the night, trying to find a weak spot, a crevice, a place
  to scale, some opening through which it may squeeze itself and escape.
  This awful activity of mind made him hesitate at times in his
  speech. . . .
  
  'The captain kept on moving here and there on the bridge; he seemed calm
  enough, only he stumbled several times; and once as I stood speaking to
  him he walked right into me as though he had been stone-blind. He made
  no definite answer to what I had to tell. He mumbled to himself; all I
  heard of it were a few words that sounded like "confounded steam!" and
  "infernal steam!"--something about steam. I thought . . .'
  
  He was becoming irrelevant; a question to the point cut short his
  speech, like a pang of pain, and he felt extremely discouraged and
  weary. He was coming to that, he was coming to that--and now, checked
  brutally, he had to answer by yes or no. He answered truthfully by a
  curt 'Yes, I did'; and fair of face, big of frame, with young, gloomy
  eyes, he held his shoulders upright above the box while his soul writhed
  within him. He was made to answer another question so much to the point
  and so useless, then waited again. His mouth was tastelessly dry, as
  though he had been eating dust, then salt and bitter as after a drink
  of sea-water. He wiped his damp forehead, passed his tongue over parched
  lips, felt a shiver run down his back. The big assessor had dropped his
  eyelids, and drummed on without a sound, careless and mournful; the eyes
  of the other above the sunburnt, clasped fingers seemed to glow with
  kindliness; the magistrate had swayed forward; his pale face hovered
  near the flowers, and then dropping sideways over the arm of his chair,
  he rested his temple in the palm of his hand. The wind of the punkahs
  eddied down on the heads, on the dark-faced natives wound about in
  voluminous draperies, on the Europeans sitting together very hot and in
  drill suits that seemed to fit them as close as their skins, and holding
  their round pith hats on their knees; while gliding along the walls the
  court peons, buttoned tight in long white coats, flitted rapidly to and
  fro, running on bare toes, red-sashed, red turban on head, as noiseless
  as ghosts, and on the alert like so many retrievers.
  
  Jim's eyes, wandering in the intervals of his answers, rested upon a
  white man who sat apart from the others, with his face worn and clouded,
  but with quiet eyes that glanced straight, interested and clear. Jim
  answered another question and was tempted to cry out, 'What's the good
  of this! what's the good!' He tapped with his foot slightly, bit his
  lip, and looked away over the heads. He met the eyes of the white man.
  The glance directed at him was not the fascinated stare of the others.
  It was an act of intelligent volition. Jim between two questions forgot
  himself so far as to find leisure for a thought. This fellow--ran the
  thought--looks at me as though he could see somebody or something past
  my shoulder. He had come across that man before--in the street perhaps.
  He was positive he had never spoken to him. For days, for many days,
  he had spoken to no one, but had held silent, incoherent, and endless
  converse with himself, like a prisoner alone in his cell or like a
  wayfarer lost in a wilderness. At present he was answering questions
  that did not matter though they had a purpose, but he doubted whether
  he would ever again speak out as long as he lived. The sound of his own
  truthful statements confirmed his deliberate opinion that speech was
  of no use to him any longer. That man there seemed to be aware of his
  hopeless difficulty. Jim looked at him, then turned away resolutely, as
  after a final parting.
  
  And later on, many times, in distant parts of the world, Marlow showed
  himself willing to remember Jim, to remember him at length, in detail
  and audibly.
  
  Perhaps it would be after dinner, on a verandah draped in motionless
  foliage and crowned with flowers, in the deep dusk speckled by fiery
  cigar-ends. The elongated bulk of each cane-chair harboured a silent
  listener. Now and then a small red glow would move abruptly, and
  expanding light up the fingers of a languid hand, part of a face in
  profound repose, or flash a crimson gleam into a pair of pensive eyes
  overshadowed by a fragment of an unruffled forehead; and with the very
  first word uttered Marlow's body, extended at rest in the seat, would
  become very still, as though his spirit had winged its way back into the
  lapse of time and were speaking through his lips from the past.
  
  
  
feat_summary_name: Chapter 4
target: Let's fastforward folks. Sometime later, we find Jim in a courtroom at an inquest, or trial. Our man is on the stand, and he's testifying about what happened the night the Patna hit whatever it was that it hit in Chapter 3. He explains that he examined the ship after impact and found a hole. That doesn't sound promising. The poor Jim starts to ramble, so the judges have to cut him off. Answer "yes" or "no," they tell him. An embarrassed Jim shuts up right quick. That's when he notices a white man in the courtroom who keeps watching him. Who is this guy? And why does he keep showing up? As it turns out, this dude is Marlow, who will be taking over the storytelling shortly.