feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/novelguide/Lord Jim/section_2_part_0.txt
feat_book_id: Lord Jim.chapters 3-5
feat_summary_id: chapters 3-5
feat_summary: {"name": "Chapters 3-5", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210215030710/https://www.novelguide.com/lord-jim/summaries/chapter3-5", "summary": "Four and Five . In Chapter Three, the calm of the waters and the array of the sleeping passengers are described. Jim does not see 'the shadow of the coming event'; the only shadow on the sea is that of the black smoke coming from the funnel. Jim thinks of how steady the ship goes and imagines 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.' . . The skipper comes over to him noiselessly in his pajamas and with his sleeping jacket flung open. The skipper looks over the charts sleepily and Jim responds with deference to a remark he makes, but this figure 'fixed itself in his memory forever as the incarnation of everything vile and base that lurks in the world we love.' The second engineer appears and complains about the heat below deck; he seems to be drunk. He has had a drink of the chief engineer's brandy. . . Jim has only ten minutes left of his watch and wants to go below deck. He thinks the skipper and second engineer 'did not belong to the world of heroic adventure', but they do not bother him as he thinks of himself as being different. As the second engineer explains he is not drunk, he tumbles and Jim and the skipper stagger too. The ship appears to rise a few inches throughout its whole length and then settles back to the smooth surface of the sea. The quivering stops and the faint noise of thunder ceases. . . Chapter Four begins a month or so later at an official inquiry. Jim tries to tell the truth and says the ship 'went over whatever it was  as easy as a snake crawling over a stick'. He then tells the assessor he checked to see if the ship was damaged, on the skipper's orders, and called to no one to avoid creating a panic. He explains how he opened the forepeak hatch and heard water splashing, so knew there was a big hole below the water line. The skipper then struck the engineer and told him to turn the engines off. Jim is anxious to make it clear that he wants to be precise and 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'. In the intervals between his answers, his eyes rest on a white man sitting apart from the others who occasionally looks at him as though he can see something past Jim's shoulder. Jim thinks he recognizes him, but they have never spoken to each other; Jim has spoken to nobody for days, 'like a wayfarer lost in the wilderness'. The man watching seems to be aware of Jim's 'hopeless difficulty'. The man, Marlow, shows himself willing to remember Jim, 'later on, many times, in distant parts of the world'. . . In Chapter Five, the focus moves to Marlow and how he thinks of himself as having a guardian angel and a familiar devil. It is the devil that lets him in for such things as going to the inquiry and is the cause of the effect he has of loosening men's tongues. He tells his dinner companions about the inquiry and how everybody connected with working on the sea was there as 'the affair had been notorious for days'. . . The narrative moves back in time again  as Marlow recounts standing outside the harbour offices one fine morning and sees four men walking towards him. He recognizes one as the skipper of the Patna. The skipper visits Captain Elliott and Marlow is able to hear the Captain shouting at him. Marlow sees the skipper come back outside and notes that one of the men  makes no movement and just stares into the sunshine. Marlow wonders if he is silly or callous. The skipper talks to Marlow about how the Captain has just called him a hound and has taken his certificate . Marlow looks at Jim again and notes his likeable appearance. He thinks of him as the sort of fellow one would leave in charge on deck. He should know this as he has 'turned out enough youngsters' to the craft of the sea. This thought of trusting him gives him the horrors, though, as this  would not be safe. . . The skipper hails a 'gharry'  and drives off. A clerk comes out for the men and the second engineer says he will not be bullied by 'a cocky half-bred little quill-driver' . A few days later, Marlow visits one of his men in the hospital and encounters the chief engineer there. Marlow sits by his bed in the hope of finding out 'some profound and redeeming cause' for what happened, but sees now he was hoping for the impossible. He wants to find the shadow of an excuse for the young man , but thinks this is looking for a miracle. The engineer asks Marlow what he can see under the bed. Marlow replies 'nothing', but the engineer says if he were to look he would see a million pink toads. He then begins screaming and says they are trampling on him. As Marlow leaves, he is told the engineer has delirium tremens of the worst kind and will not be able to attend the inquiry. .", "analysis": "Four and Five . Chapter Four recounts some of the events at the official inquiry as Jim is left to explain what has happened on the Patna. As well as shifting back and forth in time without any detailed exposition, Conrad also gives only small chunks of information as to the course of events that night on the Patna and the readers are teased into imagining disaster. In Chapter Five, for example, the readers are informed that Marlow wanted the 'miracle' of finding an excuse for Jim, as though he has committed an unforgiveable crime. This is made ambiguous, however, as it would be a miracle for the engineer to tell Marlow anything sensible considering the level of his delirium tremens."}
text: A marvellous stillness pervaded the world, and the stars, together with
  the serenity of their rays, seemed to shed upon the earth the assurance
  of everlasting security. The young moon recurved, and shining low in the
  west, was like a slender shaving thrown up from a bar of gold, and the
  Arabian Sea, smooth and cool to the eye like a sheet of ice, extended
  its perfect level to the perfect circle of a dark horizon. The propeller
  turned without a check, as though its beat had been part of the scheme
  of a safe universe; and on each side of the Patna two deep folds of
  water, permanent and sombre on the unwrinkled shimmer, enclosed within
  their straight and diverging ridges a few white swirls of foam bursting
  in a low hiss, a few wavelets, a few ripples, a few undulations that,
  left behind, agitated the surface of the sea for an instant after the
  passage of the ship, subsided splashing gently, calmed down at last
  into the circular stillness of water and sky with the black speck of the
  moving hull remaining everlastingly in its centre.
  
  Jim on the bridge was penetrated by the great certitude of unbounded
  safety and peace that could be read on the silent aspect of nature like
  the certitude of fostering love upon the placid tenderness of a mother's
  face. Below the roof of awnings, surrendered to the wisdom of white men
  and to their courage, trusting the power of their unbelief and the iron
  shell of their fire-ship, the pilgrims of an exacting faith slept
  on mats, on blankets, on bare planks, on every deck, in all the dark
  corners, wrapped in dyed cloths, muffled in soiled rags, with their
  heads resting on small bundles, with their faces pressed to bent
  forearms: the men, the women, the children; the old with the young, the
  decrepit with the lusty--all equal before sleep, death's brother.
  
  A draught of air, fanned from forward by the speed of the ship, passed
  steadily through the long gloom between the high bulwarks, swept over
  the rows of prone bodies; a few dim flames in globe-lamps were hung
  short here and there under the ridge-poles, and in the blurred circles
  of light thrown down and trembling slightly to the unceasing vibration
  of the ship appeared a chin upturned, two closed eyelids, a dark hand
  with silver rings, a meagre limb draped in a torn covering, a head bent
  back, a naked foot, a throat bared and stretched as if offering itself
  to the knife. The well-to-do had made for their families shelters with
  heavy boxes and dusty mats; the poor reposed side by side with all they
  had on earth tied up in a rag under their heads; the lone old men slept,
  with drawn-up legs, upon their prayer-carpets, with their hands over
  their ears and one elbow on each side of the face; a father, his
  shoulders up and his knees under his forehead, dozed dejectedly by a
  boy who slept on his back with tousled hair and one arm commandingly
  extended; a woman covered from head to foot, like a corpse, with a piece
  of white sheeting, had a naked child in the hollow of each arm; the
  Arab's belongings, piled right aft, made a heavy mound of broken
  outlines, with a cargo-lamp swung above, and a great confusion of
  vague forms behind: gleams of paunchy brass pots, the foot-rest of a
  deck-chair, blades of spears, the straight scabbard of an old sword
  leaning against a heap of pillows, the spout of a tin coffee-pot. The
  patent log on the taffrail periodically rang a single tinkling stroke
  for every mile traversed on an errand of faith. Above the mass of
  sleepers a faint and patient sigh at times floated, the exhalation of a
  troubled dream; and short metallic clangs bursting out suddenly in the
  depths of the ship, the harsh scrape of a shovel, the violent slam of a
  furnace-door, exploded brutally, as if the men handling the mysterious
  things below had their breasts full of fierce anger: while the slim high
  hull of the steamer went on evenly ahead, without a sway of her bare
  masts, cleaving continuously the great calm of the waters under the
  inaccessible serenity of the sky.
  
  Jim paced athwart, and his footsteps in the vast silence were loud to
  his own ears, as if echoed by the watchful stars: his eyes, roaming
  about the line of the horizon, seemed to gaze hungrily into the
  unattainable, and did not see the shadow of the coming event. The only
  shadow on the sea was the shadow of the black smoke pouring heavily from
  the funnel its immense streamer, whose end was constantly dissolving in
  the air. Two Malays, silent and almost motionless, steered, one on each
  side of the wheel, whose brass rim shone fragmentarily in the oval
  of light thrown out by the binnacle. Now and then a hand, with black
  fingers alternately letting go and catching hold of revolving spokes,
  appeared in the illumined part; the links of wheel-chains ground heavily
  in the grooves of the barrel. Jim would glance at the compass, would
  glance around the unattainable horizon, would stretch himself till his
  joints cracked, with a leisurely twist of the body, in the very excess
  of well-being; and, as if made audacious by the invincible aspect of the
  peace, he felt he cared for nothing that could happen to him to the end
  of his days. From time to time he glanced idly at a chart pegged
  out with four drawing-pins on a low three-legged table abaft the
  steering-gear case. The sheet of paper portraying the depths of the sea
  presented a shiny surface under the light of a bull's-eye lamp lashed to
  a stanchion, a surface as level and smooth as the glimmering surface of
  the waters. Parallel rulers with a pair of dividers reposed on it; the
  ship's position at last noon was marked with a small black cross, and
  the straight pencil-line drawn firmly as far as Perim figured the course
  of the ship--the path of souls towards the holy place, the promise of
  salvation, the reward of eternal life--while the pencil with its sharp
  end touching the Somali coast lay round and still like a naked ship's
  spar floating in the pool of a sheltered dock. 'How steady she goes,'
  thought Jim with wonder, with something like gratitude for this high
  peace of sea and sky. At such times his thoughts would be full of
  valorous deeds: he loved these dreams and the success of his imaginary
  achievements. They were the best parts of life, its secret truth, its
  hidden reality. They had a gorgeous virility, the charm of vagueness,
  they passed before him with an heroic tread; they carried his soul away
  with them and made it drunk with the divine philtre of an unbounded
  confidence in itself. There was nothing he could not face. He was so
  pleased with the idea that he smiled, keeping perfunctorily his eyes
  ahead; and when he happened to glance back he saw the white streak of
  the wake drawn as straight by the ship's keel upon the sea as the black
  line drawn by the pencil upon the chart.
  
  The ash-buckets racketed, clanking up and down the stoke-hold
  ventilators, and this tin-pot clatter warned him the end of his watch
  was near. He sighed with content, with regret as well at having to
  part from that serenity which fostered the adventurous freedom of his
  thoughts. He was a little sleepy too, and felt a pleasurable languor
  running through every limb as though all the blood in his body had
  turned to warm milk. His skipper had come up noiselessly, in pyjamas and
  with his sleeping-jacket flung wide open. Red of face, only half awake,
  the left eye partly closed, the right staring stupid and glassy, he hung
  his big head over the chart and scratched his ribs sleepily. There was
  something obscene in the sight of his naked flesh. His bared breast
  glistened soft and greasy as though he had sweated out his fat in his
  sleep. He pronounced a professional remark in a voice harsh and dead,
  resembling the rasping sound of a wood-file on the edge of a plank; the
  fold of his double chin hung like a bag triced up close under the hinge
  of his jaw. Jim started, and his answer was full of deference; but
  the odious and fleshy figure, as though seen for the first time in a
  revealing moment, fixed itself in his memory for ever as the incarnation
  of everything vile and base that lurks in the world we love: in our own
  hearts we trust for our salvation, in the men that surround us, in the
  sights that fill our eyes, in the sounds that fill our ears, and in the
  air that fills our lungs.
  
  The thin gold shaving of the moon floating slowly downwards had lost
  itself on the darkened surface of the waters, and the eternity beyond
  the sky seemed to come down nearer to the earth, with the augmented
  glitter of the stars, with the more profound sombreness in the lustre of
  the half-transparent dome covering the flat disc of an opaque sea. The
  ship moved so smoothly that her onward motion was imperceptible to the
  senses of men, as though she had been a crowded planet speeding through
  the dark spaces of ether behind the swarm of suns, in the appalling and
  calm solitudes awaiting the breath of future creations. 'Hot is no name
  for it down below,' said a voice.
  
  Jim smiled without looking round. The skipper presented an unmoved
  breadth of back: it was the renegade's trick to appear pointedly unaware
  of your existence unless it suited his purpose to turn at you with a
  devouring glare before he let loose a torrent of foamy, abusive jargon
  that came like a gush from a sewer. Now he emitted only a sulky grunt;
  the second engineer at the head of the bridge-ladder, kneading with
  damp palms a dirty sweat-rag, unabashed, continued the tale of his
  complaints. The sailors had a good time of it up here, and what was the
  use of them in the world he would be blowed if he could see. The poor
  devils of engineers had to get the ship along anyhow, and they could
  very well do the rest too; by gosh they--'Shut up!' growled the German
  stolidly. 'Oh yes! Shut up--and when anything goes wrong you fly to
  us, don't you?' went on the other. He was more than half cooked, he
  expected; but anyway, now, he did not mind how much he sinned, because
  these last three days he had passed through a fine course of training
  for the place where the bad boys go when they die--b'gosh, he
  had--besides being made jolly well deaf by the blasted racket below.
  The durned, compound, surface-condensing, rotten scrap-heap rattled and
  banged down there like an old deck-winch, only more so; and what made
  him risk his life every night and day that God made amongst the refuse
  of a breaking-up yard flying round at fifty-seven revolutions, was more
  than _he_ could tell. He must have been born reckless, b'gosh.
  He . . . 'Where did you get drink?' inquired the German, very savage; but
  motionless in the light of the binnacle, like a clumsy effigy of a
  man cut out of a block of fat. Jim went on smiling at the retreating
  horizon; his heart was full of generous impulses, and his thought was
  contemplating his own superiority. 'Drink!' repeated the engineer with
  amiable scorn: he was hanging on with both hands to the rail, a shadowy
  figure with flexible legs. 'Not from you, captain. You're far too mean,
  b'gosh. You would let a good man die sooner than give him a drop of
  schnapps. That's what you Germans call economy. Penny wise, pound
  foolish.' He became sentimental. The chief had given him a four-finger
  nip about ten o'clock--'only one, s'elp me!'--good old chief; but as to
  getting the old fraud out of his bunk--a five-ton crane couldn't do
  it. Not it. Not to-night anyhow. He was sleeping sweetly like a little
  child, with a bottle of prime brandy under his pillow. From the thick
  throat of the commander of the Patna came a low rumble, on which the
  sound of the word schwein fluttered high and low like a capricious
  feather in a faint stir of air. He and the chief engineer had been
  cronies for a good few years--serving the same jovial, crafty, old
  Chinaman, with horn-rimmed goggles and strings of red silk plaited into
  the venerable grey hairs of his pigtail. The quay-side opinion in the
  Patna's home-port was that these two in the way of brazen peculation
  'had done together pretty well everything you can think of.' Outwardly
  they were badly matched: one dull-eyed, malevolent, and of soft fleshy
  curves; the other lean, all hollows, with a head long and bony like the
  head of an old horse, with sunken cheeks, with sunken temples, with an
  indifferent glazed glance of sunken eyes. He had been stranded out East
  somewhere--in Canton, in Shanghai, or perhaps in Yokohama; he probably
  did not care to remember himself the exact locality, nor yet the cause
  of his shipwreck. He had been, in mercy to his youth, kicked quietly
  out of his ship twenty years ago or more, and it might have been so much
  worse for him that the memory of the episode had in it hardly a trace
  of misfortune. Then, steam navigation expanding in these seas and men
  of his craft being scarce at first, he had 'got on' after a sort. He
  was eager to let strangers know in a dismal mumble that he was 'an old
  stager out here.' When he moved, a skeleton seemed to sway loose in his
  clothes; his walk was mere wandering, and he was given to wander thus
  around the engine-room skylight, smoking, without relish, doctored
  tobacco in a brass bowl at the end of a cherrywood stem four feet long,
  with the imbecile gravity of a thinker evolving a system of philosophy
  from the hazy glimpse of a truth. He was usually anything but free with
  his private store of liquor; but on that night he had departed from his
  principles, so that his second, a weak-headed child of Wapping, what
  with the unexpectedness of the treat and the strength of the stuff,
  had become very happy, cheeky, and talkative. The fury of the New South
  Wales German was extreme; he puffed like an exhaust-pipe, and Jim,
  faintly amused by the scene, was impatient for the time when he could
  get below: the last ten minutes of the watch were irritating like a
  gun that hangs fire; those men did not belong to the world of heroic
  adventure; they weren't bad chaps though. Even the skipper himself . . .
  His gorge rose at the mass of panting flesh from which issued
  gurgling mutters, a cloudy trickle of filthy expressions; but he was
  too pleasurably languid to dislike actively this or any other thing. The
  quality of these men did not matter; he rubbed shoulders with them, but
  they could not touch him; he shared the air they breathed, but he was
  different. . . . Would the skipper go for the engineer? . . . The life
  was easy and he was too sure of himself--too sure of himself to . . .
  The line dividing his meditation from a surreptitious doze on his feet
  was thinner than a thread in a spider's web.
  
  The second engineer was coming by easy transitions to the consideration
  of his finances and of his courage.
  
  'Who's drunk? I? No, no, captain! That won't do. You ought to know by
  this time the chief ain't free-hearted enough to make a sparrow drunk,
  b'gosh. I've never been the worse for liquor in my life; the stuff ain't
  made yet that would make _me_ drunk. I could drink liquid fire against
  your whisky peg for peg, b'gosh, and keep as cool as a cucumber. If I
  thought I was drunk I would jump overboard--do away with myself, b'gosh.
  I would! Straight! And I won't go off the bridge. Where do you expect
  me to take the air on a night like this, eh? On deck amongst that vermin
  down there? Likely--ain't it! And I am not afraid of anything you can
  do.'
  
  The German lifted two heavy fists to heaven and shook them a little
  without a word.
  
  'I don't know what fear is,' pursued the engineer, with the enthusiasm
  of sincere conviction. 'I am not afraid of doing all the bloomin' work
  in this rotten hooker, b'gosh! And a jolly good thing for you that there
  are some of us about the world that aren't afraid of their lives, or
  where would you be--you and this old thing here with her plates like
  brown paper--brown paper, s'elp me? It's all very fine for you--you
  get a power of pieces out of her one way and another; but what about
  me--what do I get? A measly hundred and fifty dollars a month and
  find yourself. I wish to ask you respectfully--respectfully, mind--who
  wouldn't chuck a dratted job like this? 'Tain't safe, s'elp me, it
  ain't! Only I am one of them fearless fellows . . .'
  
  He let go the rail and made ample gestures as if demonstrating in
  the air the shape and extent of his valour; his thin voice darted in
  prolonged squeaks upon the sea, he tiptoed back and forth for the better
  emphasis of utterance, and suddenly pitched down head-first as though he
  had been clubbed from behind. He said 'Damn!' as he tumbled; an instant
  of silence followed upon his screeching: Jim and the skipper staggered
  forward by common accord, and catching themselves up, stood very stiff
  and still gazing, amazed, at the undisturbed level of the sea. Then they
  looked upwards at the stars.
  
  What had happened? The wheezy thump of the engines went on. Had the
  earth been checked in her course? They could not understand; and
  suddenly the calm sea, the sky without a cloud, appeared formidably
  insecure in their immobility, as if poised on the brow of yawning
  destruction. The engineer rebounded vertically full length and collapsed
  again into a vague heap. This heap said 'What's that?' in the muffled
  accents of profound grief. A faint noise as of thunder, of thunder
  infinitely remote, less than a sound, hardly more than a vibration,
  passed slowly, and the ship quivered in response, as if the thunder had
  growled deep down in the water. The eyes of the two Malays at the wheel
  glittered towards the white men, but their dark hands remained closed
  on the spokes. The sharp hull driving on its way seemed to rise a few
  inches in succession through its whole length, as though it had become
  pliable, and settled down again rigidly to its work of cleaving the
  smooth surface of the sea. Its quivering stopped, and the faint noise
  of thunder ceased all at once, as though the ship had steamed across a
  narrow belt of vibrating water and of humming air.
  
  A month or so afterwards, when Jim, in answer to pointed questions,
  tried to tell honestly the truth of this experience, he said, speaking
  of the ship: 'She went over whatever it was as easy as a snake crawling
  over a stick.' The illustration was good: the questions were aiming at
  facts, and the official Inquiry was being held in the police court of an
  Eastern port. He stood elevated in the witness-box, with burning cheeks
  in a cool lofty room: the big framework of punkahs moved gently to and
  fro high above his head, and from below many eyes were looking at him
  out of dark faces, out of white faces, out of red faces, out of faces
  attentive, spellbound, as if all these people sitting in orderly rows
  upon narrow benches had been enslaved by the fascination of his voice.
  It was very loud, it rang startling in his own ears, it was the only
  sound audible in the world, for the terribly distinct questions that
  extorted his answers seemed to shape themselves in anguish and pain
  within his breast,--came to him poignant and silent like the
  terrible questioning of one's conscience. Outside the court the sun
  blazed--within was the wind of great punkahs that made you shiver, the
  shame that made you burn, the attentive eyes whose glance stabbed. The
  face of the presiding magistrate, clean shaved and impassible, looked at
  him deadly pale between the red faces of the two nautical assessors. The
  light of a broad window under the ceiling fell from above on the heads
  and shoulders of the three men, and they were fiercely distinct in the
  half-light of the big court-room where the audience seemed composed of
  staring shadows. They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him,
  as if facts could explain anything!
  
  'After you had concluded you had collided with something floating awash,
  say a water-logged wreck, you were ordered by your captain to go forward
  and ascertain if there was any damage done. Did you think it likely from
  the force of the blow?' asked the assessor sitting to the left. He had
  a thin horseshoe beard, salient cheek-bones, and with both elbows on
  the desk clasped his rugged hands before his face, looking at Jim with
  thoughtful blue eyes; the other, a heavy, scornful man, thrown back in
  his seat, his left arm extended full length, drummed delicately with his
  finger-tips on a blotting-pad: in the middle the magistrate upright in
  the roomy arm-chair, his head inclined slightly on the shoulder, had his
  arms crossed on his breast and a few flowers in a glass vase by the side
  of his inkstand.
  
  'I did not,' said Jim. 'I was told to call no one and to make no noise
  for fear of creating a panic. I thought the precaution reasonable. I
  took one of the lamps that were hung under the awnings and went forward.
  After opening the forepeak hatch I heard splashing in there. I lowered
  then the lamp the whole drift of its lanyard, and saw that the forepeak
  was more than half full of water already. I knew then there must be a
  big hole below the water-line.' He paused.
  
  'Yes,' said the big assessor, with a dreamy smile at the blotting-pad;
  his fingers played incessantly, touching the paper without noise.
  
  'I did not think of danger just then. I might have been a little
  startled: all this happened in such a quiet way and so very suddenly. I
  knew there was no other bulkhead in the ship but the collision bulkhead
  separating the forepeak from the forehold. I went back to tell the
  captain. I came upon the second engineer getting up at the foot of the
  bridge-ladder: he seemed dazed, and told me he thought his left arm was
  broken; he had slipped on the top step when getting down while I was
  forward. He exclaimed, "My God! That rotten bulkhead'll give way in a
  minute, and the damned thing will go down under us like a lump of lead."
  He pushed me away with his right arm and ran before me up the ladder,
  shouting as he climbed. His left arm hung by his side. I followed up in
  time to see the captain rush at him and knock him down flat on his back.
  He did not strike him again: he stood bending over him and speaking
  angrily but quite low. I fancy he was asking him why the devil he didn't
  go and stop the engines, instead of making a row about it on deck. I
  heard him say, "Get up! Run! fly!" He swore also. The engineer slid down
  the starboard ladder and bolted round the skylight to the engine-room
  companion which was on the port side. He moaned as he ran. . . .'
  
  He spoke slowly; he remembered swiftly and with extreme vividness; he
  could have reproduced like an echo the moaning of the engineer for
  the better information of these men who wanted facts. After his first
  feeling of revolt he had come round to the view that only a meticulous
  precision of statement would bring out the true horror behind the
  appalling face of things. The facts those men were so eager to know had
  been visible, tangible, open to the senses, occupying their place in
  space and time, requiring for their existence a fourteen-hundred-ton
  steamer and twenty-seven minutes by the watch; they made a whole that
  had features, shades of expression, a complicated aspect that could be
  remembered by the eye, and something else besides, something invisible,
  a directing spirit of perdition that dwelt within, like a malevolent
  soul in a detestable body. He was anxious to make this clear. This
  had not been a common affair, everything in it had been of the utmost
  importance, and fortunately he remembered everything. He wanted to go on
  talking for truth's sake, perhaps for his own sake also; and while his
  utterance was deliberate, his mind positively flew round and round the
  serried circle of facts that had surged up all about him to cut him off
  from the rest of his kind: it was like a creature that, finding itself
  imprisoned within an enclosure of high stakes, dashes round and round,
  distracted in the night, trying to find a weak spot, a crevice, a place
  to scale, some opening through which it may squeeze itself and escape.
  This awful activity of mind made him hesitate at times in his
  speech. . . .
  
  'The captain kept on moving here and there on the bridge; he seemed calm
  enough, only he stumbled several times; and once as I stood speaking to
  him he walked right into me as though he had been stone-blind. He made
  no definite answer to what I had to tell. He mumbled to himself; all I
  heard of it were a few words that sounded like "confounded steam!" and
  "infernal steam!"--something about steam. I thought . . .'
  
  He was becoming irrelevant; a question to the point cut short his
  speech, like a pang of pain, and he felt extremely discouraged and
  weary. He was coming to that, he was coming to that--and now, checked
  brutally, he had to answer by yes or no. He answered truthfully by a
  curt 'Yes, I did'; and fair of face, big of frame, with young, gloomy
  eyes, he held his shoulders upright above the box while his soul writhed
  within him. He was made to answer another question so much to the point
  and so useless, then waited again. His mouth was tastelessly dry, as
  though he had been eating dust, then salt and bitter as after a drink
  of sea-water. He wiped his damp forehead, passed his tongue over parched
  lips, felt a shiver run down his back. The big assessor had dropped his
  eyelids, and drummed on without a sound, careless and mournful; the eyes
  of the other above the sunburnt, clasped fingers seemed to glow with
  kindliness; the magistrate had swayed forward; his pale face hovered
  near the flowers, and then dropping sideways over the arm of his chair,
  he rested his temple in the palm of his hand. The wind of the punkahs
  eddied down on the heads, on the dark-faced natives wound about in
  voluminous draperies, on the Europeans sitting together very hot and in
  drill suits that seemed to fit them as close as their skins, and holding
  their round pith hats on their knees; while gliding along the walls the
  court peons, buttoned tight in long white coats, flitted rapidly to and
  fro, running on bare toes, red-sashed, red turban on head, as noiseless
  as ghosts, and on the alert like so many retrievers.
  
  Jim's eyes, wandering in the intervals of his answers, rested upon a
  white man who sat apart from the others, with his face worn and clouded,
  but with quiet eyes that glanced straight, interested and clear. Jim
  answered another question and was tempted to cry out, 'What's the good
  of this! what's the good!' He tapped with his foot slightly, bit his
  lip, and looked away over the heads. He met the eyes of the white man.
  The glance directed at him was not the fascinated stare of the others.
  It was an act of intelligent volition. Jim between two questions forgot
  himself so far as to find leisure for a thought. This fellow--ran the
  thought--looks at me as though he could see somebody or something past
  my shoulder. He had come across that man before--in the street perhaps.
  He was positive he had never spoken to him. For days, for many days,
  he had spoken to no one, but had held silent, incoherent, and endless
  converse with himself, like a prisoner alone in his cell or like a
  wayfarer lost in a wilderness. At present he was answering questions
  that did not matter though they had a purpose, but he doubted whether
  he would ever again speak out as long as he lived. The sound of his own
  truthful statements confirmed his deliberate opinion that speech was
  of no use to him any longer. That man there seemed to be aware of his
  hopeless difficulty. Jim looked at him, then turned away resolutely, as
  after a final parting.
  
  And later on, many times, in distant parts of the world, Marlow showed
  himself willing to remember Jim, to remember him at length, in detail
  and audibly.
  
  Perhaps it would be after dinner, on a verandah draped in motionless
  foliage and crowned with flowers, in the deep dusk speckled by fiery
  cigar-ends. The elongated bulk of each cane-chair harboured a silent
  listener. Now and then a small red glow would move abruptly, and
  expanding light up the fingers of a languid hand, part of a face in
  profound repose, or flash a crimson gleam into a pair of pensive eyes
  overshadowed by a fragment of an unruffled forehead; and with the very
  first word uttered Marlow's body, extended at rest in the seat, would
  become very still, as though his spirit had winged its way back into the
  lapse of time and were speaking through his lips from the past.
  
  
  
  'Oh yes. I attended the inquiry,' he would say, 'and to this day I
  haven't left off wondering why I went. I am willing to believe each of
  us has a guardian angel, if you fellows will concede to me that each of
  us has a familiar devil as well. I want you to own up, because I don't
  like to feel exceptional in any way, and I know I have him--the devil,
  I mean. I haven't seen him, of course, but I go upon circumstantial
  evidence. He is there right enough, and, being malicious, he lets me in
  for that kind of thing. What kind of thing, you ask? Why, the inquiry
  thing, the yellow-dog thing--you wouldn't think a mangy, native tyke
  would be allowed to trip up people in the verandah of a magistrate's
  court, would you?--the kind of thing that by devious, unexpected, truly
  diabolical ways causes me to run up against men with soft spots, with
  hard spots, with hidden plague spots, by Jove! and loosens their tongues
  at the sight of me for their infernal confidences; as though, forsooth,
  I had no confidences to make to myself, as though--God help me!--I
  didn't have enough confidential information about myself to harrow my
  own soul till the end of my appointed time. And what I have done to be
  thus favoured I want to know. I declare I am as full of my own concerns
  as the next man, and I have as much memory as the average pilgrim in
  this valley, so you see I am not particularly fit to be a receptacle of
  confessions. Then why? Can't tell--unless it be to make time pass away
  after dinner. Charley, my dear chap, your dinner was extremely good, and
  in consequence these men here look upon a quiet rubber as a tumultuous
  occupation. They wallow in your good chairs and think to themselves,
  "Hang exertion. Let that Marlow talk."
  
  'Talk? So be it. And it's easy enough to talk of Master Jim, after a
  good spread, two hundred feet above the sea-level, with a box of decent
  cigars handy, on a blessed evening of freshness and starlight that would
  make the best of us forget we are only on sufferance here and got to
  pick our way in cross lights, watching every precious minute and every
  irremediable step, trusting we shall manage yet to go out decently in
  the end--but not so sure of it after all--and with dashed little help to
  expect from those we touch elbows with right and left. Of course there
  are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner
  hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some
  fable of strife to be forgotten before the end is told--before the end
  is told--even if there happens to be any end to it.
  
  'My eyes met his for the first time at that inquiry. You must know
  that everybody connected in any way with the sea was there, because the
  affair had been notorious for days, ever since that mysterious cable
  message came from Aden to start us all cackling. I say mysterious,
  because it was so in a sense though it contained a naked fact, about
  as naked and ugly as a fact can well be. The whole waterside talked
  of nothing else. First thing in the morning as I was dressing in my
  state-room, I would hear through the bulkhead my Parsee Dubash jabbering
  about the Patna with the steward, while he drank a cup of tea,
  by favour, in the pantry. No sooner on shore I would meet some
  acquaintance, and the first remark would be, "Did you ever hear of
  anything to beat this?" and according to his kind the man would smile
  cynically, or look sad, or let out a swear or two. Complete strangers
  would accost each other familiarly, just for the sake of easing their
  minds on the subject: every confounded loafer in the town came in for
  a harvest of drinks over this affair: you heard of it in the harbour
  office, at every ship-broker's, at your agent's, from whites, from
  natives, from half-castes, from the very boatmen squatting half naked on
  the stone steps as you went up--by Jove! There was some indignation, not
  a few jokes, and no end of discussions as to what had become of them,
  you know. This went on for a couple of weeks or more, and the opinion
  that whatever was mysterious in this affair would turn out to be tragic
  as well, began to prevail, when one fine morning, as I was standing
  in the shade by the steps of the harbour office, I perceived four men
  walking towards me along the quay. I wondered for a while where that
  queer lot had sprung from, and suddenly, I may say, I shouted to myself,
  "Here they are!"
  
  'There they were, sure enough, three of them as large as life, and one
  much larger of girth than any living man has a right to be, just landed
  with a good breakfast inside of them from an outward-bound Dale Line
  steamer that had come in about an hour after sunrise. There could be no
  mistake; I spotted the jolly skipper of the Patna at the first glance:
  the fattest man in the whole blessed tropical belt clear round that good
  old earth of ours. Moreover, nine months or so before, I had come
  across him in Samarang. His steamer was loading in the Roads, and he was
  abusing the tyrannical institutions of the German empire, and soaking
  himself in beer all day long and day after day in De Jongh's back-shop,
  till De Jongh, who charged a guilder for every bottle without as much
  as the quiver of an eyelid, would beckon me aside, and, with his little
  leathery face all puckered up, declare confidentially, "Business is
  business, but this man, captain, he make me very sick. Tfui!"
  
  'I was looking at him from the shade. He was hurrying on a little in
  advance, and the sunlight beating on him brought out his bulk in a
  startling way. He made me think of a trained baby elephant walking
  on hind-legs. He was extravagantly gorgeous too--got up in a soiled
  sleeping-suit, bright green and deep orange vertical stripes, with a
  pair of ragged straw slippers on his bare feet, and somebody's cast-off
  pith hat, very dirty and two sizes too small for him, tied up with a
  manilla rope-yarn on the top of his big head. You understand a man like
  that hasn't the ghost of a chance when it comes to borrowing clothes.
  Very well. On he came in hot haste, without a look right or left, passed
  within three feet of me, and in the innocence of his heart went on
  pelting upstairs into the harbour office to make his deposition, or
  report, or whatever you like to call it.
  
  'It appears he addressed himself in the first instance to the principal
  shipping-master. Archie Ruthvel had just come in, and, as his story
  goes, was about to begin his arduous day by giving a dressing-down to
  his chief clerk. Some of you might have known him--an obliging little
  Portuguese half-caste with a miserably skinny neck, and always on the
  hop to get something from the shipmasters in the way of eatables--a
  piece of salt pork, a bag of biscuits, a few potatoes, or what not. One
  voyage, I recollect, I tipped him a live sheep out of the remnant of my
  sea-stock: not that I wanted him to do anything for me--he couldn't,
  you know--but because his childlike belief in the sacred right to
  perquisites quite touched my heart. It was so strong as to be almost
  beautiful. The race--the two races rather--and the climate . . .
  However, never mind. I know where I have a friend for life.
  
  'Well, Ruthvel says he was giving him a severe lecture--on official
  morality, I suppose--when he heard a kind of subdued commotion at his
  back, and turning his head he saw, in his own words, something round and
  enormous, resembling a sixteen-hundred-weight sugar-hogshead wrapped in
  striped flannelette, up-ended in the middle of the large floor space
  in the office. He declares he was so taken aback that for quite an
  appreciable time he did not realise the thing was alive, and sat still
  wondering for what purpose and by what means that object had been
  transported in front of his desk. The archway from the ante-room was
  crowded with punkah-pullers, sweepers, police peons, the coxswain and
  crew of the harbour steam-launch, all craning their necks and almost
  climbing on each other's backs. Quite a riot. By that time the fellow
  had managed to tug and jerk his hat clear of his head, and advanced with
  slight bows at Ruthvel, who told me the sight was so discomposing that
  for some time he listened, quite unable to make out what that apparition
  wanted. It spoke in a voice harsh and lugubrious but intrepid, and
  little by little it dawned upon Archie that this was a development of
  the Patna case. He says that as soon as he understood who it was before
  him he felt quite unwell--Archie is so sympathetic and easily upset--but
  pulled himself together and shouted "Stop! I can't listen to you. You
  must go to the Master Attendant. I can't possibly listen to you. Captain
  Elliot is the man you want to see. This way, this way." He jumped
  up, ran round that long counter, pulled, shoved: the other let him,
  surprised but obedient at first, and only at the door of the private
  office some sort of animal instinct made him hang back and snort like
  a frightened bullock. "Look here! what's up? Let go! Look here!" Archie
  flung open the door without knocking. "The master of the Patna, sir,"
  he shouts. "Go in, captain." He saw the old man lift his head from some
  writing so sharp that his nose-nippers fell off, banged the door to, and
  fled to his desk, where he had some papers waiting for his signature:
  but he says the row that burst out in there was so awful that he
  couldn't collect his senses sufficiently to remember the spelling of
  his own name. Archie's the most sensitive shipping-master in the two
  hemispheres. He declares he felt as though he had thrown a man to a
  hungry lion. No doubt the noise was great. I heard it down below, and I
  have every reason to believe it was heard clear across the Esplanade as
  far as the band-stand. Old father Elliot had a great stock of words and
  could shout--and didn't mind who he shouted at either. He would have
  shouted at the Viceroy himself. As he used to tell me: "I am as high as
  I can get; my pension is safe. I've a few pounds laid by, and if they
  don't like my notions of duty I would just as soon go home as not. I am
  an old man, and I have always spoken my mind. All I care for now is to
  see my girls married before I die." He was a little crazy on that
  point. His three daughters were awfully nice, though they resembled him
  amazingly, and on the mornings he woke up with a gloomy view of their
  matrimonial prospects the office would read it in his eye and tremble,
  because, they said, he was sure to have somebody for breakfast. However,
  that morning he did not eat the renegade, but, if I may be allowed to
  carry on the metaphor, chewed him up very small, so to speak, and--ah!
  ejected him again.
  
  'Thus in a very few moments I saw his monstrous bulk descend in haste
  and stand still on the outer steps. He had stopped close to me for the
  purpose of profound meditation: his large purple cheeks quivered. He
  was biting his thumb, and after a while noticed me with a sidelong vexed
  look. The other three chaps that had landed with him made a little group
  waiting at some distance. There was a sallow-faced, mean little chap
  with his arm in a sling, and a long individual in a blue flannel coat,
  as dry as a chip and no stouter than a broomstick, with drooping grey
  moustaches, who looked about him with an air of jaunty imbecility. The
  third was an upstanding, broad-shouldered youth, with his hands in his
  pockets, turning his back on the other two who appeared to be talking
  together earnestly. He stared across the empty Esplanade. A ramshackle
  gharry, all dust and venetian blinds, pulled up short opposite the
  group, and the driver, throwing up his right foot over his knee, gave
  himself up to the critical examination of his toes. The young chap,
  making no movement, not even stirring his head, just stared into the
  sunshine. This was my first view of Jim. He looked as unconcerned and
  unapproachable as only the young can look. There he stood, clean-limbed,
  clean-faced, firm on his feet, as promising a boy as the sun ever shone
  on; and, looking at him, knowing all he knew and a little more too, I
  was as angry as though I had detected him trying to get something out of
  me by false pretences. He had no business to look so sound. I thought
  to myself--well, if this sort can go wrong like that . . . and I felt
  as though I could fling down my hat and dance on it from sheer
  mortification, as I once saw the skipper of an Italian barque do because
  his duffer of a mate got into a mess with his anchors when making a
  flying moor in a roadstead full of ships. I asked myself, seeing him
  there apparently so much at ease--is he silly? is he callous? He seemed
  ready to start whistling a tune. And note, I did not care a rap about
  the behaviour of the other two. Their persons somehow fitted the tale
  that was public property, and was going to be the subject of an official
  inquiry. "That old mad rogue upstairs called me a hound," said the
  captain of the Patna. I can't tell whether he recognised me--I rather
  think he did; but at any rate our glances met. He glared--I smiled;
  hound was the very mildest epithet that had reached me through the open
  window. "Did he?" I said from some strange inability to hold my tongue.
  He nodded, bit his thumb again, swore under his breath: then lifting his
  head and looking at me with sullen and passionate impudence--"Bah! the
  Pacific is big, my friendt. You damned Englishmen can do your worst; I
  know where there's plenty room for a man like me: I am well aguaindt
  in Apia, in Honolulu, in . . ." He paused reflectively, while without
  effort I could depict to myself the sort of people he was "aguaindt"
  with in those places. I won't make a secret of it that I had been
  "aguaindt" with not a few of that sort myself. There are times when
  a man must act as though life were equally sweet in any company. I've
  known such a time, and, what's more, I shan't now pretend to pull a long
  face over my necessity, because a good many of that bad company from
  want of moral--moral--what shall I say?--posture, or from some other
  equally profound cause, were twice as instructive and twenty times more
  amusing than the usual respectable thief of commerce you fellows ask
  to sit at your table without any real necessity--from habit, from
  cowardice, from good-nature, from a hundred sneaking and inadequate
  reasons.
  
  '"You Englishmen are all rogues," went on my patriotic Flensborg or
  Stettin Australian. I really don't recollect now what decent little
  port on the shores of the Baltic was defiled by being the nest of that
  precious bird. "What are you to shout? Eh? You tell me? You no better
  than other people, and that old rogue he make Gottam fuss with me." His
  thick carcass trembled on its legs that were like a pair of pillars; it
  trembled from head to foot. "That's what you English always make--make
  a tam' fuss--for any little thing, because I was not born in your
  tam' country. Take away my certificate. Take it. I don't want the
  certificate. A man like me don't want your verfluchte certificate. I
  shpit on it." He spat. "I vill an Amerigan citizen begome," he cried,
  fretting and fuming and shuffling his feet as if to free his ankles from
  some invisible and mysterious grasp that would not let him get away
  from that spot. He made himself so warm that the top of his bullet head
  positively smoked. Nothing mysterious prevented me from going away:
  curiosity is the most obvious of sentiments, and it held me there to see
  the effect of a full information upon that young fellow who, hands
  in pockets, and turning his back upon the sidewalk, gazed across the
  grass-plots of the Esplanade at the yellow portico of the Malabar Hotel
  with the air of a man about to go for a walk as soon as his friend is
  ready. That's how he looked, and it was odious. I waited to see him
  overwhelmed, confounded, pierced through and through, squirming like an
  impaled beetle--and I was half afraid to see it too--if you understand
  what I mean. Nothing more awful than to watch a man who has been found
  out, not in a crime but in a more than criminal weakness. The commonest
  sort of fortitude prevents us from becoming criminals in a legal sense;
  it is from weakness unknown, but perhaps suspected, as in some parts of
  the world you suspect a deadly snake in every bush--from weakness
  that may lie hidden, watched or unwatched, prayed against or manfully
  scorned, repressed or maybe ignored more than half a lifetime, not one
  of us is safe. We are snared into doing things for which we get called
  names, and things for which we get hanged, and yet the spirit may well
  survive--survive the condemnation, survive the halter, by Jove! And
  there are things--they look small enough sometimes too--by which some of
  us are totally and completely undone. I watched the youngster there.
  I liked his appearance; I knew his appearance; he came from the right
  place; he was one of us. He stood there for all the parentage of his
  kind, for men and women by no means clever or amusing, but whose very
  existence is based upon honest faith, and upon the instinct of courage.
  I don't mean military courage, or civil courage, or any special kind of
  courage. I mean just that inborn ability to look temptations straight in
  the face--a readiness unintellectual enough, goodness knows, but without
  pose--a power of resistance, don't you see, ungracious if you like, but
  priceless--an unthinking and blessed stiffness before the outward and
  inward terrors, before the might of nature and the seductive corruption
  of men--backed by a faith invulnerable to the strength of facts, to the
  contagion of example, to the solicitation of ideas. Hang ideas! They are
  tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking
  a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief
  in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently
  and would like to die easy!
  
  'This has nothing to do with Jim, directly; only he was outwardly so
  typical of that good, stupid kind we like to feel marching right and
  left of us in life, of the kind that is not disturbed by the vagaries of
  intelligence and the perversions of--of nerves, let us say. He was the
  kind of fellow you would, on the strength of his looks, leave in charge
  of the deck--figuratively and professionally speaking. I say I would,
  and I ought to know. Haven't I turned out youngsters enough in my time,
  for the service of the Red Rag, to the craft of the sea, to the craft
  whose whole secret could be expressed in one short sentence, and yet
  must be driven afresh every day into young heads till it becomes the
  component part of every waking thought--till it is present in every
  dream of their young sleep! The sea has been good to me, but when I
  remember all these boys that passed through my hands, some grown up now
  and some drowned by this time, but all good stuff for the sea, I don't
  think I have done badly by it either. Were I to go home to-morrow, I bet
  that before two days passed over my head some sunburnt young chief mate
  would overtake me at some dock gateway or other, and a fresh deep voice
  speaking above my hat would ask: "Don't you remember me, sir? Why!
  little So-and-so. Such and such a ship. It was my first voyage." And I
  would remember a bewildered little shaver, no higher than the back of
  this chair, with a mother and perhaps a big sister on the quay, very
  quiet but too upset to wave their handkerchiefs at the ship that glides
  out gently between the pier-heads; or perhaps some decent middle-aged
  father who had come early with his boy to see him off, and stays all the
  morning, because he is interested in the windlass apparently, and stays
  too long, and has got to scramble ashore at last with no time at all
  to say good-bye. The mud pilot on the poop sings out to me in a drawl,
  "Hold her with the check line for a moment, Mister Mate. There's a
  gentleman wants to get ashore. . . . Up with you, sir. Nearly got
  carried off to Talcahuano, didn't you? Now's your time; easy does
  it. . . . All right. Slack away again forward there." The tugs, smoking
  like the pit of perdition, get hold and churn the old river into fury;
  the gentleman ashore is dusting his knees--the benevolent steward has
  shied his umbrella after him. All very proper. He has offered his bit of
  sacrifice to the sea, and now he may go home pretending he thinks
  nothing of it; and the little willing victim shall be very sea-sick
  before next morning. By-and-by, when he has learned all the little
  mysteries and the one great secret of the craft, he shall be fit to live
  or die as the sea may decree; and the man who had taken a hand in this
  fool game, in which the sea wins every toss, will be pleased to have his
  back slapped by a heavy young hand, and to hear a cheery sea-puppy
  voice: "Do you remember me, sir? The little So-and-so."
  
  'I tell you this is good; it tells you that once in your life at least
  you had gone the right way to work. I have been thus slapped, and I have
  winced, for the slap was heavy, and I have glowed all day long and gone
  to bed feeling less lonely in the world by virtue of that hearty thump.
  Don't I remember the little So-and-so's! I tell you I ought to know the
  right kind of looks. I would have trusted the deck to that youngster on
  the strength of a single glance, and gone to sleep with both eyes--and,
  by Jove! it wouldn't have been safe. There are depths of horror in that
  thought. He looked as genuine as a new sovereign, but there was some
  infernal alloy in his metal. How much? The least thing--the least
  drop of something rare and accursed; the least drop!--but he made
  you--standing there with his don't-care-hang air--he made you wonder
  whether perchance he were nothing more rare than brass.
  
  'I couldn't believe it. I tell you I wanted to see him squirm for
  the honour of the craft. The other two no-account chaps spotted their
  captain, and began to move slowly towards us. They chatted together as
  they strolled, and I did not care any more than if they had not been
  visible to the naked eye. They grinned at each other--might have been
  exchanging jokes, for all I know. I saw that with one of them it was a
  case of a broken arm; and as to the long individual with grey moustaches
  he was the chief engineer, and in various ways a pretty notorious
  personality. They were nobodies. They approached. The skipper gazed
  in an inanimate way between his feet: he seemed to be swollen to an
  unnatural size by some awful disease, by the mysterious action of an
  unknown poison. He lifted his head, saw the two before him waiting,
  opened his mouth with an extraordinary, sneering contortion of his
  puffed face--to speak to them, I suppose--and then a thought seemed to
  strike him. His thick, purplish lips came together without a sound, he
  went off in a resolute waddle to the gharry and began to jerk at the
  door-handle with such a blind brutality of impatience that I expected to
  see the whole concern overturned on its side, pony and all. The driver,
  shaken out of his meditation over the sole of his foot, displayed at
  once all the signs of intense terror, and held with both hands, looking
  round from his box at this vast carcass forcing its way into his
  conveyance. The little machine shook and rocked tumultuously, and the
  crimson nape of that lowered neck, the size of those straining thighs,
  the immense heaving of that dingy, striped green-and-orange back, the
  whole burrowing effort of that gaudy and sordid mass, troubled one's
  sense of probability with a droll and fearsome effect, like one of those
  grotesque and distinct visions that scare and fascinate one in a fever.
  He disappeared. I half expected the roof to split in two, the little box
  on wheels to burst open in the manner of a ripe cotton-pod--but it only
  sank with a click of flattened springs, and suddenly one venetian blind
  rattled down. His shoulders reappeared, jammed in the small opening; his
  head hung out, distended and tossing like a captive balloon, perspiring,
  furious, spluttering. He reached for the gharry-wallah with vicious
  flourishes of a fist as dumpy and red as a lump of raw meat. He roared
  at him to be off, to go on. Where? Into the Pacific, perhaps. The driver
  lashed; the pony snorted, reared once, and darted off at a gallop.
  Where? To Apia? To Honolulu? He had 6000 miles of tropical belt to
  disport himself in, and I did not hear the precise address. A snorting
  pony snatched him into "Ewigkeit" in the twinkling of an eye, and I
  never saw him again; and, what's more, I don't know of anybody that ever
  had a glimpse of him after he departed from my knowledge sitting inside
  a ramshackle little gharry that fled round the corner in a white smother
  of dust. He departed, disappeared, vanished, absconded; and absurdly
  enough it looked as though he had taken that gharry with him, for
  never again did I come across a sorrel pony with a slit ear and a
  lackadaisical Tamil driver afflicted by a sore foot. The Pacific is
  indeed big; but whether he found a place for a display of his talents
  in it or not, the fact remains he had flown into space like a witch on a
  broomstick. The little chap with his arm in a sling started to run after
  the carriage, bleating, "Captain! I say, Captain! I sa-a-ay!"--but after
  a few steps stopped short, hung his head, and walked back slowly. At the
  sharp rattle of the wheels the young fellow spun round where he stood.
  He made no other movement, no gesture, no sign, and remained facing in
  the new direction after the gharry had swung out of sight.
  
  'All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since I am
  trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of
  visual impressions. Next moment the half-caste clerk, sent by Archie
  to look a little after the poor castaways of the Patna, came upon the
  scene. He ran out eager and bareheaded, looking right and left, and
  very full of his mission. It was doomed to be a failure as far as the
  principal person was concerned, but he approached the others with fussy
  importance, and, almost immediately, found himself involved in a violent
  altercation with the chap that carried his arm in a sling, and who
  turned out to be extremely anxious for a row. He wasn't going to be
  ordered about--"not he, b'gosh." He wouldn't be terrified with a pack
  of lies by a cocky half-bred little quill-driver. He was not going to be
  bullied by "no object of that sort," if the story were true "ever so"!
  He bawled his wish, his desire, his determination to go to bed. "If you
  weren't a God-forsaken Portuguee," I heard him yell, "you would know
  that the hospital is the right place for me." He pushed the fist of
  his sound arm under the other's nose; a crowd began to collect; the
  half-caste, flustered, but doing his best to appear dignified, tried to
  explain his intentions. I went away without waiting to see the end.
  
  'But it so happened that I had a man in the hospital at the time, and
  going there to see about him the day before the opening of the Inquiry,
  I saw in the white men's ward that little chap tossing on his back, with
  his arm in splints, and quite light-headed. To my great surprise the
  other one, the long individual with drooping white moustache, had also
  found his way there. I remembered I had seen him slinking away during
  the quarrel, in a half prance, half shuffle, and trying very hard not
  to look scared. He was no stranger to the port, it seems, and in his
  distress was able to make tracks straight for Mariani's billiard-room
  and grog-shop near the bazaar. That unspeakable vagabond, Mariani, who
  had known the man and had ministered to his vices in one or two other
  places, kissed the ground, in a manner of speaking, before him, and
  shut him up with a supply of bottles in an upstairs room of his infamous
  hovel. It appears he was under some hazy apprehension as to his personal
  safety, and wished to be concealed. However, Mariani told me a long time
  after (when he came on board one day to dun my steward for the price
  of some cigars) that he would have done more for him without asking
  any questions, from gratitude for some unholy favour received very
  many years ago--as far as I could make out. He thumped twice his brawny
  chest, rolled enormous black-and-white eyes glistening with tears:
  "Antonio never forget--Antonio never forget!" What was the precise
  nature of the immoral obligation I never learned, but be it what it may,
  he had every facility given him to remain under lock and key, with a
  chair, a table, a mattress in a corner, and a litter of fallen plaster
  on the floor, in an irrational state of funk, and keeping up his pecker
  with such tonics as Mariani dispensed. This lasted till the evening of
  the third day, when, after letting out a few horrible screams, he found
  himself compelled to seek safety in flight from a legion of centipedes.
  He burst the door open, made one leap for dear life down the crazy
  little stairway, landed bodily on Mariani's stomach, picked himself up,
  and bolted like a rabbit into the streets. The police plucked him off
  a garbage-heap in the early morning. At first he had a notion they were
  carrying him off to be hanged, and fought for liberty like a hero, but
  when I sat down by his bed he had been very quiet for two days. His lean
  bronzed head, with white moustaches, looked fine and calm on the pillow,
  like the head of a war-worn soldier with a child-like soul, had it not
  been for a hint of spectral alarm that lurked in the blank glitter of
  his glance, resembling a nondescript form of a terror crouching silently
  behind a pane of glass. He was so extremely calm, that I began to
  indulge in the eccentric hope of hearing something explanatory of the
  famous affair from his point of view. Why I longed to go grubbing into
  the deplorable details of an occurrence which, after all, concerned me
  no more than as a member of an obscure body of men held together by a
  community of inglorious toil and by fidelity to a certain standard of
  conduct, I can't explain. You may call it an unhealthy curiosity if you
  like; but I have a distinct notion I wished to find something. Perhaps,
  unconsciously, I hoped I would find that something, some profound and
  redeeming cause, some merciful explanation, some convincing shadow of an
  excuse. I see well enough now that I hoped for the impossible--for the
  laying of what is the most obstinate ghost of man's creation, of the
  uneasy doubt uprising like a mist, secret and gnawing like a worm, and
  more chilling than the certitude of death--the doubt of the sovereign
  power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct. It is the hardest thing
  to stumble against; it is the thing that breeds yelling panics and good
  little quiet villainies; it's the true shadow of calamity. Did I believe
  in a miracle? and why did I desire it so ardently? Was it for my own
  sake that I wished to find some shadow of an excuse for that young
  fellow whom I had never seen before, but whose appearance alone added a
  touch of personal concern to the thoughts suggested by the knowledge of
  his weakness--made it a thing of mystery and terror--like a hint of a
  destructive fate ready for us all whose youth--in its day--had resembled
  his youth? I fear that such was the secret motive of my prying. I was,
  and no mistake, looking for a miracle. The only thing that at
  this distance of time strikes me as miraculous is the extent of my
  imbecility. I positively hoped to obtain from that battered and shady
  invalid some exorcism against the ghost of doubt. I must have been
  pretty desperate too, for, without loss of time, after a few indifferent
  and friendly sentences which he answered with languid readiness, just as
  any decent sick man would do, I produced the word Patna wrapped up in a
  delicate question as in a wisp of floss silk. I was delicate selfishly;
  I did not want to startle him; I had no solicitude for him; I was not
  furious with him and sorry for him: his experience was of no importance,
  his redemption would have had no point for me. He had grown old in minor
  iniquities, and could no longer inspire aversion or pity. He repeated
  Patna? interrogatively, seemed to make a short effort of memory, and
  said: "Quite right. I am an old stager out here. I saw her go down." I
  made ready to vent my indignation at such a stupid lie, when he added
  smoothly, "She was full of reptiles."
  
  'This made me pause. What did he mean? The unsteady phantom of terror
  behind his glassy eyes seemed to stand still and look into mine
  wistfully. "They turned me out of my bunk in the middle watch to look
  at her sinking," he pursued in a reflective tone. His voice sounded
  alarmingly strong all at once. I was sorry for my folly. There was
  no snowy-winged coif of a nursing sister to be seen flitting in the
  perspective of the ward; but away in the middle of a long row of empty
  iron bedsteads an accident case from some ship in the Roads sat up brown
  and gaunt with a white bandage set rakishly on the forehead. Suddenly my
  interesting invalid shot out an arm thin like a tentacle and clawed
  my shoulder. "Only my eyes were good enough to see. I am famous for my
  eyesight. That's why they called me, I expect. None of them was quick
  enough to see her go, but they saw that she was gone right enough, and
  sang out together--like this." . . . A wolfish howl searched the very
  recesses of my soul. "Oh! make 'im dry up," whined the accident case
  irritably. "You don't believe me, I suppose," went on the other, with
  an air of ineffable conceit. "I tell you there are no such eyes as mine
  this side of the Persian Gulf. Look under the bed."
  
  'Of course I stooped instantly. I defy anybody not to have done so.
  "What can you see?" he asked. "Nothing," I said, feeling awfully ashamed
  of myself. He scrutinised my face with wild and withering contempt.
  "Just so," he said, "but if I were to look I could see--there's no eyes
  like mine, I tell you." Again he clawed, pulling at me downwards in his
  eagerness to relieve himself by a confidential communication. "Millions
  of pink toads. There's no eyes like mine. Millions of pink toads. It's
  worse than seeing a ship sink. I could look at sinking ships and smoke
  my pipe all day long. Why don't they give me back my pipe? I would get
  a smoke while I watched these toads. The ship was full of them. They've
  got to be watched, you know." He winked facetiously. The perspiration
  dripped on him off my head, my drill coat clung to my wet back: the
  afternoon breeze swept impetuously over the row of bedsteads, the stiff
  folds of curtains stirred perpendicularly, rattling on brass rods, the
  covers of empty beds blew about noiselessly near the bare floor all
  along the line, and I shivered to the very marrow. The soft wind of the
  tropics played in that naked ward as bleak as a winter's gale in an old
  barn at home. "Don't you let him start his hollering, mister," hailed
  from afar the accident case in a distressed angry shout that came
  ringing between the walls like a quavering call down a tunnel. The
  clawing hand hauled at my shoulder; he leered at me knowingly. "The ship
  was full of them, you know, and we had to clear out on the strict Q.T.,"
  he whispered with extreme rapidity. "All pink. All pink--as big as
  mastiffs, with an eye on the top of the head and claws all round their
  ugly mouths. Ough! Ough!" Quick jerks as of galvanic shocks disclosed
  under the flat coverlet the outlines of meagre and agitated legs; he let
  go my shoulder and reached after something in the air; his body trembled
  tensely like a released harp-string; and while I looked down, the
  spectral horror in him broke through his glassy gaze. Instantly his face
  of an old soldier, with its noble and calm outlines, became decomposed
  before my eyes by the corruption of stealthy cunning, of an abominable
  caution and of desperate fear. He restrained a cry--"Ssh! what are they
  doing now down there?" he asked, pointing to the floor with fantastic
  precautions of voice and gesture, whose meaning, borne upon my mind in a
  lurid flash, made me very sick of my cleverness. "They are all asleep,"
  I answered, watching him narrowly. That was it. That's what he wanted
  to hear; these were the exact words that could calm him. He drew a long
  breath. "Ssh! Quiet, steady. I am an old stager out here. I know them
  brutes. Bash in the head of the first that stirs. There's too many of
  them, and she won't swim more than ten minutes." He panted again. "Hurry
  up," he yelled suddenly, and went on in a steady scream: "They are all
  awake--millions of them. They are trampling on me! Wait! Oh, wait!
  I'll smash them in heaps like flies. Wait for me! Help! H-e-elp!" An
  interminable and sustained howl completed my discomfiture. I saw in
  the distance the accident case raise deplorably both his hands to his
  bandaged head; a dresser, aproned to the chin showed himself in the
  vista of the ward, as if seen in the small end of a telescope. I
  confessed myself fairly routed, and without more ado, stepping out
  through one of the long windows, escaped into the outside gallery. The
  howl pursued me like a vengeance. I turned into a deserted landing, and
  suddenly all became very still and quiet around me, and I descended
  the bare and shiny staircase in a silence that enabled me to compose my
  distracted thoughts. Down below I met one of the resident surgeons
  who was crossing the courtyard and stopped me. "Been to see your man,
  Captain? I think we may let him go to-morrow. These fools have no
  notion of taking care of themselves, though. I say, we've got the chief
  engineer of that pilgrim ship here. A curious case. D.T.'s of the worst
  kind. He has been drinking hard in that Greek's or Italian's grog-shop
  for three days. What can you expect? Four bottles of that kind of brandy
  a day, I am told. Wonderful, if true. Sheeted with boiler-iron inside I
  should think. The head, ah! the head, of course, gone, but the curious
  part is there's some sort of method in his raving. I am trying to
  find out. Most unusual--that thread of logic in such a delirium.
  Traditionally he ought to see snakes, but he doesn't. Good old
  tradition's at a discount nowadays. Eh! His--er--visions are batrachian.
  Ha! ha! No, seriously, I never remember being so interested in a case
  of jim-jams before. He ought to be dead, don't you know, after such a
  festive experiment. Oh! he is a tough object. Four-and-twenty years of
  the tropics too. You ought really to take a peep at him. Noble-looking
  old boozer. Most extraordinary man I ever met--medically, of course.
  Won't you?"
  
  'I have been all along exhibiting the usual polite signs of interest,
  but now assuming an air of regret I murmured of want of time, and shook
  hands in a hurry. "I say," he cried after me; "he can't attend that
  inquiry. Is his evidence material, you think?"
  
  '"Not in the least," I called back from the gateway.'
feat_summary_name: Chapters 3-5
target: Four and Five . In Chapter Three, the calm of the waters and the array of the sleeping passengers are described. Jim does not see 'the shadow of the coming event'; the only shadow on the sea is that of the black smoke coming from the funnel. Jim thinks of how steady the ship goes and imagines 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.' . . The skipper comes over to him noiselessly in his pajamas and with his sleeping jacket flung open. The skipper looks over the charts sleepily and Jim responds with deference to a remark he makes, but this figure 'fixed itself in his memory forever as the incarnation of everything vile and base that lurks in the world we love.' The second engineer appears and complains about the heat below deck; he seems to be drunk. He has had a drink of the chief engineer's brandy. . . Jim has only ten minutes left of his watch and wants to go below deck. He thinks the skipper and second engineer 'did not belong to the world of heroic adventure', but they do not bother him as he thinks of himself as being different. As the second engineer explains he is not drunk, he tumbles and Jim and the skipper stagger too. The ship appears to rise a few inches throughout its whole length and then settles back to the smooth surface of the sea. The quivering stops and the faint noise of thunder ceases. . . Chapter Four begins a month or so later at an official inquiry. Jim tries to tell the truth and says the ship 'went over whatever it was  as easy as a snake crawling over a stick'. He then tells the assessor he checked to see if the ship was damaged, on the skipper's orders, and called to no one to avoid creating a panic. He explains how he opened the forepeak hatch and heard water splashing, so knew there was a big hole below the water line. The skipper then struck the engineer and told him to turn the engines off. Jim is anxious to make it clear that he wants to be precise and 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'. In the intervals between his answers, his eyes rest on a white man sitting apart from the others who occasionally looks at him as though he can see something past Jim's shoulder. Jim thinks he recognizes him, but they have never spoken to each other; Jim has spoken to nobody for days, 'like a wayfarer lost in the wilderness'. The man watching seems to be aware of Jim's 'hopeless difficulty'. The man, Marlow, shows himself willing to remember Jim, 'later on, many times, in distant parts of the world'. . . In Chapter Five, the focus moves to Marlow and how he thinks of himself as having a guardian angel and a familiar devil. It is the devil that lets him in for such things as going to the inquiry and is the cause of the effect he has of loosening men's tongues. He tells his dinner companions about the inquiry and how everybody connected with working on the sea was there as 'the affair had been notorious for days'. . . The narrative moves back in time again  as Marlow recounts standing outside the harbour offices one fine morning and sees four men walking towards him. He recognizes one as the skipper of the Patna. The skipper visits Captain Elliott and Marlow is able to hear the Captain shouting at him. Marlow sees the skipper come back outside and notes that one of the men  makes no movement and just stares into the sunshine. Marlow wonders if he is silly or callous. The skipper talks to Marlow about how the Captain has just called him a hound and has taken his certificate . Marlow looks at Jim again and notes his likeable appearance. He thinks of him as the sort of fellow one would leave in charge on deck. He should know this as he has 'turned out enough youngsters' to the craft of the sea. This thought of trusting him gives him the horrors, though, as this  would not be safe. . . The skipper hails a 'gharry'  and drives off. A clerk comes out for the men and the second engineer says he will not be bullied by 'a cocky half-bred little quill-driver' . A few days later, Marlow visits one of his men in the hospital and encounters the chief engineer there. Marlow sits by his bed in the hope of finding out 'some profound and redeeming cause' for what happened, but sees now he was hoping for the impossible. He wants to find the shadow of an excuse for the young man , but thinks this is looking for a miracle. The engineer asks Marlow what he can see under the bed. Marlow replies 'nothing', but the engineer says if he were to look he would see a million pink toads. He then begins screaming and says they are trampling on him. As Marlow leaves, he is told the engineer has delirium tremens of the worst kind and will not be able to attend the inquiry. .
feat_summary_analysis: Four and Five . Chapter Four recounts some of the events at the official inquiry as Jim is left to explain what has happened on the Patna. As well as shifting back and forth in time without any detailed exposition, Conrad also gives only small chunks of information as to the course of events that night on the Patna and the readers are teased into imagining disaster. In Chapter Five, for example, the readers are informed that Marlow wanted the 'miracle' of finding an excuse for Jim, as though he has committed an unforgiveable crime. This is made ambiguous, however, as it would be a miracle for the engineer to tell Marlow anything sensible considering the level of his delirium tremens.