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