Bab Bab 4 · A month or so afterwards, when Jim, in answer to pointed questions,

. 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.