บทที่ บทที่ 2 · After two years of training he went to sea, and entering the regions so

. 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.