________________________________________________
_ 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. _
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