Lord Jim | Page 9

running

through every limb as though all the blood in his body had turned to
warm milk. His skipper had come up noiselessly, in pyjamas and with
his sleeping-jacket flung wide open. Red of face, only half awake, the
left eye partly closed, the right staring stupid and glassy, he hung his
big head over the chart and scratched his ribs sleepily. There was
something obscene in the sight of his naked flesh. His bared breast
glistened soft and greasy as though he had sweated out his fat in his
sleep. He pronounced a professional remark in a voice harsh and dead,
resembling the rasping sound of a wood-file on the edge of a plank; the
fold of his double chin hung like a bag triced up close under the hinge
of his jaw. Jim started, and his answer was full of deference; but the
odious and fleshy figure, as though seen for the first time in a revealing
moment, fixed itself in his memory for ever as the incarnation of
everything vile and base that lurks in the world we love: in our own
hearts we trust for our salvation, in the men that surround us, in the
sights that fill our eyes, in the sounds that fill our ears, and in the air
that fills our lungs.
The thin gold shaving of the moon floating slowly downwards had lost
itself on the darkened surface of the waters, and the eternity beyond the
sky seemed to come down nearer to the earth, with the augmented
glitter of the stars, with the more profound sombreness in the lustre of
the half-transparent dome covering the flat disc of an opaque sea. The
ship moved so smoothly that her onward motion was imperceptible to
the senses of men, as though she had been a crowded planet speeding
through the dark spaces of ether behind the swarm of suns, in the
appalling and calm solitudes awaiting the breath of future creations.
'Hot is no name for it down below,' said a voice.
Jim smiled without looking round. The skipper presented an unmoved
breadth of back: it was the renegade's trick to appear pointedly unaware
of your existence unless it suited his purpose to turn at you with a
devouring glare before he let loose a torrent of foamy, abusive jargon
that came like a gush from a sewer. Now he emitted only a sulky grunt;
the second engineer at the head of the bridge-ladder, kneading with
damp palms a dirty sweat-rag, unabashed, continued the tale of his
complaints. The sailors had a good time of it up here, and what was the

use of them in the world he would be blowed if he could see. The poor
devils of engineers had to get the ship along anyhow, and they could
very well do the rest too; by gosh they--'Shut up!' growled the German
stolidly. 'Oh yes! Shut up--and when anything goes wrong you fly to us,
don't you?' went on the other. He was more than half cooked, he
expected; but anyway, now, he did not mind how much he sinned,
because these last three days he had passed through a fine course of
training for the place where the bad boys go when they die--b'gosh, he
had--besides being made jolly well deaf by the blasted racket below.
The durned, compound, surface-condensing, rotten scrap-heap rattled
and banged down there like an old deck-winch, only more so; and what
made him risk his life every night and day that God made amongst the
refuse of a breaking-up yard flying round at fifty-seven revolutions,
was more than he could tell. He must have been born reckless, b'gosh.
He . . . 'Where did you get drink?' inquired the German, very savage;
but motionless in the light of the binnacle, like a clumsy effigy of a
man cut out of a block of fat. Jim went on smiling at the retreating
horizon; his heart was full of generous impulses, and his thought was
contemplating his own superiority. 'Drink!' repeated the engineer with
amiable scorn: he was hanging on with both hands to the rail, a
shadowy figure with flexible legs. 'Not from you, captain. You're far
too mean, b'gosh. You would let a good man die sooner than give him a
drop of schnapps. That's what you Germans call economy. Penny wise,
pound foolish.' He became sentimental. The chief had given him a
four-finger nip about ten o'clock--'only one, s'elp me!'--good old chief;
but as to getting the old fraud out of his bunk--a five-ton crane couldn't
do it. Not it. Not to-night anyhow. He was sleeping sweetly like a little
child, with a bottle of prime brandy under his pillow. From the thick
throat of the commander of the Patna came a low rumble, on which