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-CHAPTER 4
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.