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-CHAPTER 2
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 ***, 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 ***, 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 *** 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 ***, 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.