Lord Jim | Page 2

not like the book. I regretted that, of course, but what surprised me
was the ground of her dislike. 'You know,' she said, 'it is all so morbid.'
The pronouncement gave me food for an hour's anxious thought.
Finally I arrived at the conclusion that, making due allowances for the
subject itself being rather foreign to women's normal sensibilities, the
lady could not have been an Italian. I wonder whether she was
European at all? In any case, no Latin temperament would have
perceived anything morbid in the acute consciousness of lost honour.
Such a consciousness may be wrong, or it may be right, or it may be
condemned as artificial; and, perhaps, my Jim is not a type of wide
commonness. But I can safely assure my readers that he is not the
product of coldly perverted thinking. He's not a figure of Northern
Mists either. One sunny morning, in the commonplace surroundings of
an Eastern roadstead, I saw his form pass
by--appealing--significant--under a cloud--perfectly silent. Which is as
it should be. It was for me, with all the sympathy of which I was
capable, to seek fit words for his meaning. He was 'one of us'.
J.C.
1917.
LORD JIM


CHAPTER 1
He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he
advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head
forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a
charging bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a
kind of dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It
seemed a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at himself
as at anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, apparelled in immaculate

white from shoes to hat, and in the various Eastern ports where he got
his living as ship-chandler's water-clerk he was very popular.
A water-clerk need not pass an examination in anything under the sun,
but he must have Ability in the abstract and demonstrate it practically.
His work consists in racing under sail, steam, or oars against other
water-clerks for any ship about to anchor, greeting her captain cheerily,
forcing upon him a card--the business card of the ship-chandler--and on
his first visit on shore piloting him firmly but without ostentation to a
vast, cavern-like shop which is full of things that are eaten and drunk
on board ship; where you can get everything to make her seaworthy
and beautiful, from a set of chain-hooks for her cable to a book of
gold-leaf for the carvings of her stern; and where her commander is
received like a brother by a ship-chandler he has never seen before.
There is a cool parlour, easy-chairs, bottles, cigars, writing implements,
a copy of harbour regulations, and a warmth of welcome that melts the
salt of a three months' passage out of a seaman's heart. The connection
thus begun is kept up, as long as the ship remains in harbour, by the
daily visits of the water-clerk. To the captain he is faithful like a friend
and attentive like a son, with the patience of Job, the unselfish devotion
of a woman, and the jollity of a boon companion. Later on the bill is
sent in. It is a beautiful and humane occupation. Therefore good
water-clerks are scarce. When a water-clerk who possesses Ability in
the abstract has also the advantage of having been brought up to the sea,
he is worth to his employer a lot of money and some humouring. Jim
had always good wages and as much humouring as would have bought
the fidelity of a fiend. Nevertheless, with black ingratitude he would
throw up the job suddenly and depart. To his employers the reasons he
gave were obviously inadequate. They said 'Confounded fool!' as soon
as his back was turned. This was their criticism on his exquisite
sensibility.
To the white men in the waterside business and to the captains of ships
he was just Jim--nothing more. He had, of course, another name, but he
was anxious that it should not be pronounced. His incognito, which had
as many holes as a sieve, was not meant to hide a personality but a fact.
When the fact broke through the incognito he would leave suddenly the

seaport where he happened to be at the time and go to
another--generally farther east. He kept to seaports because he was a
seaman in exile from the sea, and had Ability in the abstract, which is
good for no other work but that of a water-clerk. He retreated in good
order towards the rising sun, and the fact followed him casually but
inevitably. Thus in the course of years he was known successively in
Bombay, in Calcutta, in Rangoon, in Penang, in Batavia--and in each of
these