________________________________________________
_ '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.' _
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