feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/gradesaver/Lord Jim/section_2_part_0.txt
feat_book_id: Lord Jim.chapters 6-7
feat_summary_id: chapters 6-7
feat_summary: {"name": "Chapters 6-7", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210422054542/https://www.gradesaver.com/lord-jim/study-guide/summary-chapters-6-7", "summary": "Turning to the official Inquiry, Marlow describes the magistrate as \"patient\" and then dives into great detail about the assessor Brierly or \"Big Brierly.\" Brierly seems bored with the entire affair since he, Marlow conjectures, had never made such a mistake in his life. Brierly is 32 years old, a success, and the commander of the Ossa, the crack ship of the Blue Star line. The mysterious thing, of course, is that Brierly later commits suicide, a fact that Marlow overlays as he tells of Jim at the Inquiry. Brierly looks contemptuously at Jim, so Marlow guesses that perhaps there has been some sort of parallel inquiry into the depths of Brierly's own heart--and the discovery of some guilt. Marlow adds that Jones, Brierly's first mate and witness to Brierly's death-leap into the sea, had told Marlow that the last words on Brierly's lips had been for the safety of his dog Rover. Marlow then moves toward the telling of his own final conversation with Brierly, tinged now in his memory with this known end. He remembers that they were talking about the Patna and that Brierly had been furious. He had judged it all a shame and a disgrace. The discussion of Brierly is immediately followed by an account of Marlow's first personal encounter with Jim. There is an insult in the air, and Jim mistakes Marlow as the source; this misjudgment becomes the basis of their meeting. Jim is on the defensive, and yet, again, he seems \"strangely passive\" . He asks Marlow why Marlow was staring at him so particularly during the proceedings, and Jim's general sense of humiliation and disappointment is palpable. Marlow, apparently fascinated by his upfront view of the man, invites Jim to the Malabar House for dinner. The dining hall of the hotel teems, and Marlow studies Jim further, noting \"his frank aspect, the artless smile, the youthful seriousness.\" He concludes, as he will conclude time and again, that \"he was one of us,\" meaning \"of the right sort\" . The reader now is afforded a more intimate view of Jim during this meeting. His father, Jim confides, must have seen it all in the home papers by then. Jim says he will never again be able to face him and, as if Marlow's own age and wisdom can stand in for the figure Jim feels he has lost, Jim now attempts to justify all of his fears--how he had not been thinking of himself in the boat incident, but of the pilgrims. There had only been seven boats.", "analysis": "As Marlow observes the progression of the official inquiry, he comments that, with regard to the proceedings, \"Its object was not the fundamental why, but the superficial how, of this affair\" .  In other words, the \"how\" indicates an attention to facts and details regarding the occurrence, while the \"why\" requires a deeper meditation upon the event in question.  While the \"how\" limits itself to an outside objective view of the facts and visible actions, the \"why\" requires an exploration of the state of a man's soul: why did he act in such a manner?  Why did he not act otherwise?  This distinction refigures Jim's discomfort with discussing only the facts of the event, while his own inner life is a whorl of confusion.  However, the nature of official legal proceedings and judgments is often, if only for the sake of efficiency and objectivity, strictly geared toward collecting the undisputed facts.  The deeper and more subtle details of a story require just that: a story.  Hence, the novel undertakes the task of the \"why,\" which the Inquiry fails to address. The significant minor character Brierly is an assessor of the proceedings involving Jim and the Patna incident.  According to Marlow--though he is not at all certain, because he does not know Brierly's inner life at all--Brierly may have begun an inquiry into his own soul during the proceedings.  What he might have found there is later suggested as quite disturbing, given his suicide leap into the sea.  So, with Brierly, the reader is offered an objective view of the facts, a little conjecture, and the actions of a man, which again introduce the question \"Why?\" When Marlow tells of how he and Jim first met, noting that the encounter is caused by a misjudgment on Jim's part, the incident shows how Jim continually misjudges or misreads a situation.  It is also important in that Marlow, in the end, by telling Jim's story, arrives at a more complete picture and a profound and forgiving view of Jim's character. Marlow notes that Jim \"was one of us,\" and the statement assumes a variety of connotations throughout the novel.  The root of the statement is the comment God makes in Genesis after Adam has eaten the forbidden fruit: \"Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.\"  The implication, perhaps, is that Jim is the one carrying a heightened self-awareness regarding his qualities, his shortcomings, and his potential, even though he perhaps has not been the best judge of his situation.  In any event, his character assumes more depth and detail at this point.  We learn that he was adamant to see the proceeding through, despite the humiliating gossip that would follow him afterwards.  Through this awareness, and plagued by feelings of grief, Jim is \"an individual trying to save from the fire his idea of what his moral identity should be\" . In another sense, the assertion that \"he was one of us\" binds Marlow more closely to Jim.  Their joint presence in this novel, indicative of the level of common experience that binds humankind, may also hint that Marlow sees in Jim something of his own beginnings and youth--the same illusions, the same romantic ideals.  The questions then become: how will Jim mature?  What will Jim make of it all?  What kind of man will he become?"}
text: 'The authorities were evidently of the same opinion. The inquiry was not
  adjourned. It was held on the appointed day to satisfy the law, and it
  was well attended because of its human interest, no doubt. There was no
  incertitude as to facts--as to the one material fact, I mean. How the
  Patna came by her hurt it was impossible to find out; the court did not
  expect to find out; and in the whole audience there was not a man who
  cared. Yet, as I've told you, all the sailors in the port attended, and
  the waterside business was fully represented. Whether they knew it or
  not, the interest that drew them here was purely psychological--the
  expectation of some essential disclosure as to the strength, the power,
  the horror, of human emotions. Naturally nothing of the kind could be
  disclosed. The examination of the only man able and willing to face
  it was beating futilely round the well-known fact, and the play of
  questions upon it was as instructive as the tapping with a hammer on
  an iron box, were the object to find out what's inside. However, an
  official inquiry could not be any other thing. Its object was not the
  fundamental why, but the superficial how, of this affair.
  
  'The young chap could have told them, and, though that very thing
  was the thing that interested the audience, the questions put to him
  necessarily led him away from what to me, for instance, would have
  been the only truth worth knowing. You can't expect the constituted
  authorities to inquire into the state of a man's soul--or is it only of
  his liver? Their business was to come down upon the consequences, and
  frankly, a casual police magistrate and two nautical assessors are not
  much good for anything else. I don't mean to imply these fellows were
  stupid. The magistrate was very patient. One of the assessors was a
  sailing-ship skipper with a reddish beard, and of a pious disposition.
  Brierly was the other. Big Brierly. Some of you must have heard of Big
  Brierly--the captain of the crack ship of the Blue Star line. That's the
  man.
  
  'He seemed consumedly bored by the honour thrust upon him. He had never
  in his life made a mistake, never had an accident, never a mishap,
  never a check in his steady rise, and he seemed to be one of those lucky
  fellows who know nothing of indecision, much less of self-mistrust.
  At thirty-two he had one of the best commands going in the Eastern
  trade--and, what's more, he thought a lot of what he had. There was
  nothing like it in the world, and I suppose if you had asked him
  point-blank he would have confessed that in his opinion there was not
  such another commander. The choice had fallen upon the right man. The
  rest of mankind that did not command the sixteen-knot steel steamer Ossa
  were rather poor creatures. He had saved lives at sea, had rescued
  ships in distress, had a gold chronometer presented to him by the
  underwriters, and a pair of binoculars with a suitable inscription from
  some foreign Government, in commemoration of these services. He was
  acutely aware of his merits and of his rewards. I liked him well enough,
  though some I know--meek, friendly men at that--couldn't stand him at
  any price. I haven't the slightest doubt he considered himself vastly my
  superior--indeed, had you been Emperor of East and West, you could not
  have ignored your inferiority in his presence--but I couldn't get up any
  real sentiment of offence. He did not despise me for anything I could
  help, for anything I was--don't you know? I was a negligible quantity
  simply because I was not _the_ fortunate man of the earth, not Montague
  Brierly in command of the Ossa, not the owner of an inscribed gold
  chronometer and of silver-mounted binoculars testifying to the
  excellence of my seamanship and to my indomitable pluck; not possessed
  of an acute sense of my merits and of my rewards, besides the love and
  worship of a black retriever, the most wonderful of its kind--for never
  was such a man loved thus by such a dog. No doubt, to have all this
  forced upon you was exasperating enough; but when I reflected that I was
  associated in these fatal disadvantages with twelve hundred millions of
  other more or less human beings, I found I could bear my share of his
  good-natured and contemptuous pity for the sake of something indefinite
  and attractive in the man. I have never defined to myself this
  attraction, but there were moments when I envied him. The sting of life
  could do no more to his complacent soul than the scratch of a pin to the
  smooth face of a rock. This was enviable. As I looked at him, flanking
  on one side the unassuming pale-faced magistrate who presided at the
  inquiry, his self-satisfaction presented to me and to the world a
  surface as hard as granite. He committed suicide very soon after.
  
  'No wonder Jim's case bored him, and while I thought with something
  akin to fear of the immensity of his contempt for the young man under
  examination, he was probably holding silent inquiry into his own case.
  The verdict must have been of unmitigated guilt, and he took the secret
  of the evidence with him in that leap into the sea. If I understand
  anything of men, the matter was no doubt of the gravest import, one of
  those trifles that awaken ideas--start into life some thought with which
  a man unused to such a companionship finds it impossible to live. I am
  in a position to know that it wasn't money, and it wasn't drink, and it
  wasn't woman. He jumped overboard at sea barely a week after the end of
  the inquiry, and less than three days after leaving port on his outward
  passage; as though on that exact spot in the midst of waters he had
  suddenly perceived the gates of the other world flung open wide for his
  reception.
  
  'Yet it was not a sudden impulse. His grey-headed mate, a first-rate
  sailor and a nice old chap with strangers, but in his relations with
  his commander the surliest chief officer I've ever seen, would tell the
  story with tears in his eyes. It appears that when he came on deck in
  the morning Brierly had been writing in the chart-room. "It was ten
  minutes to four," he said, "and the middle watch was not relieved yet of
  course. He heard my voice on the bridge speaking to the second mate, and
  called me in. I was loth to go, and that's the truth, Captain Marlow--I
  couldn't stand poor Captain Brierly, I tell you with shame; we never
  know what a man is made of. He had been promoted over too many heads,
  not counting my own, and he had a damnable trick of making you feel
  small, nothing but by the way he said 'Good morning.' I never addressed
  him, sir, but on matters of duty, and then it was as much as I could do
  to keep a civil tongue in my head." (He flattered himself there. I often
  wondered how Brierly could put up with his manners for more than half
  a voyage.) "I've a wife and children," he went on, "and I had been ten
  years in the Company, always expecting the next command--more fool I.
  Says he, just like this: 'Come in here, Mr. Jones,' in that swagger
  voice of his--'Come in here, Mr. Jones.' In I went. 'We'll lay down her
  position,' says he, stooping over the chart, a pair of dividers in hand.
  By the standing orders, the officer going off duty would have done that
  at the end of his watch. However, I said nothing, and looked on while he
  marked off the ship's position with a tiny cross and wrote the date and
  the time. I can see him this moment writing his neat figures: seventeen,
  eight, four A.M. The year would be written in red ink at the top of
  the chart. He never used his charts more than a year, Captain Brierly
  didn't. I've the chart now. When he had done he stands looking down
  at the mark he had made and smiling to himself, then looks up at me.
  'Thirty-two miles more as she goes,' says he, 'and then we shall be
  clear, and you may alter the course twenty degrees to the southward.'
  
  '"We were passing to the north of the Hector Bank that voyage. I said,
  'All right, sir,' wondering what he was fussing about, since I had to
  call him before altering the course anyhow. Just then eight bells were
  struck: we came out on the bridge, and the second mate before going off
  mentions in the usual way--'Seventy-one on the log.' Captain Brierly
  looks at the compass and then all round. It was dark and clear, and
  all the stars were out as plain as on a frosty night in high latitudes.
  Suddenly he says with a sort of a little sigh: 'I am going aft, and
  shall set the log at zero for you myself, so that there can be no
  mistake. Thirty-two miles more on this course and then you are safe.
  Let's see--the correction on the log is six per cent. additive; say,
  then, thirty by the dial to run, and you may come twenty degrees to
  starboard at once. No use losing any distance--is there?' I had never
  heard him talk so much at a stretch, and to no purpose as it seemed
  to me. I said nothing. He went down the ladder, and the dog, that was
  always at his heels whenever he moved, night or day, followed,
  sliding nose first, after him. I heard his boot-heels tap, tap on the
  after-deck, then he stopped and spoke to the dog--'Go back, Rover. On
  the bridge, boy! Go on--get.' Then he calls out to me from the dark,
  'Shut that dog up in the chart-room, Mr. Jones--will you?'
  
  '"This was the last time I heard his voice, Captain Marlow. These are
  the last words he spoke in the hearing of any living human being, sir."
  At this point the old chap's voice got quite unsteady. "He was afraid
  the poor brute would jump after him, don't you see?" he pursued with
  a quaver. "Yes, Captain Marlow. He set the log for me; he--would you
  believe it?--he put a drop of oil in it too. There was the oil-feeder
  where he left it near by. The boat-swain's mate got the hose along aft
  to wash down at half-past five; by-and-by he knocks off and runs up on
  the bridge--'Will you please come aft, Mr. Jones,' he says. 'There's a
  funny thing. I don't like to touch it.' It was Captain Brierly's gold
  chronometer watch carefully hung under the rail by its chain.
  
  '"As soon as my eyes fell on it something struck me, and I knew, sir. My
  legs got soft under me. It was as if I had seen him go over; and I could
  tell how far behind he was left too. The taffrail-log marked eighteen
  miles and three-quarters, and four iron belaying-pins were missing round
  the mainmast. Put them in his pockets to help him down, I suppose; but,
  Lord! what's four iron pins to a powerful man like Captain Brierly.
  Maybe his confidence in himself was just shook a bit at the last. That's
  the only sign of fluster he gave in his whole life, I should think; but
  I am ready to answer for him, that once over he did not try to swim a
  stroke, the same as he would have had pluck enough to keep up all day
  long on the bare chance had he fallen overboard accidentally. Yes, sir.
  He was second to none--if he said so himself, as I heard him once. He
  had written two letters in the middle watch, one to the Company and the
  other to me. He gave me a lot of instructions as to the passage--I had
  been in the trade before he was out of his time--and no end of hints
  as to my conduct with our people in Shanghai, so that I should keep the
  command of the Ossa. He wrote like a father would to a favourite son,
  Captain Marlow, and I was five-and-twenty years his senior and had
  tasted salt water before he was fairly breeched. In his letter to the
  owners--it was left open for me to see--he said that he had always done
  his duty by them--up to that moment--and even now he was not betraying
  their confidence, since he was leaving the ship to as competent a seaman
  as could be found--meaning me, sir, meaning me! He told them that if
  the last act of his life didn't take away all his credit with them, they
  would give weight to my faithful service and to his warm recommendation,
  when about to fill the vacancy made by his death. And much more like
  this, sir. I couldn't believe my eyes. It made me feel queer all over,"
  went on the old chap, in great perturbation, and squashing something
  in the corner of his eye with the end of a thumb as broad as a spatula.
  "You would think, sir, he had jumped overboard only to give an unlucky
  man a last show to get on. What with the shock of him going in this
  awful rash way, and thinking myself a made man by that chance, I was
  nearly off my chump for a week. But no fear. The captain of the Pelion
  was shifted into the Ossa--came aboard in Shanghai--a little popinjay,
  sir, in a grey check suit, with his hair parted in the middle. 'Aw--I
  am--aw--your new captain, Mister--Mister--aw--Jones.' He was drowned in
  scent--fairly stunk with it, Captain Marlow. I dare say it was the look
  I gave him that made him stammer. He mumbled something about my natural
  disappointment--I had better know at once that his chief officer got
  the promotion to the Pelion--he had nothing to do with it, of
  course--supposed the office knew best--sorry. . . . Says I, 'Don't
  you mind old Jones, sir; dam' his soul, he's used to it.' I could see
  directly I had shocked his delicate ear, and while we sat at our first
  tiffin together he began to find fault in a nasty manner with this and
  that in the ship. I never heard such a voice out of a Punch and Judy
  show. I set my teeth hard, and glued my eyes to my plate, and held my
  peace as long as I could; but at last I had to say something. Up
  he jumps tiptoeing, ruffling all his pretty plumes, like a little
  fighting-cock. 'You'll find you have a different person to deal with
  than the late Captain Brierly.' 'I've found it,' says I, very glum, but
  pretending to be mighty busy with my steak. 'You are an old ruffian,
  Mister--aw--Jones; and what's more, you are known for an old ruffian
  in the employ,' he squeaks at me. The damned bottle-washers stood about
  listening with their mouths stretched from ear to ear. 'I may be a hard
  case,' answers I, 'but I ain't so far gone as to put up with the sight
  of you sitting in Captain Brierly's chair.' With that I lay down my
  knife and fork. 'You would like to sit in it yourself--that's where the
  shoe pinches,' he sneers. I left the saloon, got my rags together, and
  was on the quay with all my dunnage about my feet before the
  stevedores had turned to again. Yes. Adrift--on shore--after ten years'
  service--and with a poor woman and four children six thousand miles
  off depending on my half-pay for every mouthful they ate. Yes, sir!
  I chucked it rather than hear Captain Brierly abused. He left me his
  night-glasses--here they are; and he wished me to take care of the
  dog--here he is. Hallo, Rover, poor boy. Where's the captain, Rover?"
  The dog looked up at us with mournful yellow eyes, gave one desolate
  bark, and crept under the table.
  
  'All this was taking place, more than two years afterwards, on board
  that nautical ruin the Fire-Queen this Jones had got charge of--quite
  by a funny accident, too--from Matherson--mad Matherson they generally
  called him--the same who used to hang out in Hai-phong, you know, before
  the occupation days. The old chap snuffled on--
  
  '"Ay, sir, Captain Brierly will be remembered here, if there's no other
  place on earth. I wrote fully to his father and did not get a word in
  reply--neither Thank you, nor Go to the devil!--nothing! Perhaps they
  did not want to know."
  
  'The sight of that watery-eyed old Jones mopping his bald head with a
  red cotton handkerchief, the sorrowing yelp of the dog, the squalor of
  that fly-blown cuddy which was the only shrine of his memory, threw a
  veil of inexpressibly mean pathos over Brierly's remembered figure, the
  posthumous revenge of fate for that belief in his own splendour which
  had almost cheated his life of its legitimate terrors. Almost! Perhaps
  wholly. Who can tell what flattering view he had induced himself to take
  of his own suicide?
  
  '"Why did he commit the rash act, Captain Marlow--can you think?" asked
  Jones, pressing his palms together. "Why? It beats me! Why?" He slapped
  his low and wrinkled forehead. "If he had been poor and old and in
  debt--and never a show--or else mad. But he wasn't of the kind that
  goes mad, not he. You trust me. What a mate don't know about his skipper
  isn't worth knowing. Young, healthy, well off, no cares. . . . I sit
  here sometimes thinking, thinking, till my head fairly begins to buzz.
  There was some reason."
  
  '"You may depend on it, Captain Jones," said I, "it wasn't anything that
  would have disturbed much either of us two," I said; and then, as if
  a light had been flashed into the muddle of his brain, poor old Jones
  found a last word of amazing profundity. He blew his nose, nodding at me
  dolefully: "Ay, ay! neither you nor I, sir, had ever thought so much of
  ourselves."
  
  'Of course the recollection of my last conversation with Brierly is
  tinged with the knowledge of his end that followed so close upon it. I
  spoke with him for the last time during the progress of the inquiry. It
  was after the first adjournment, and he came up with me in the street.
  He was in a state of irritation, which I noticed with surprise, his
  usual behaviour when he condescended to converse being perfectly
  cool, with a trace of amused tolerance, as if the existence of his
  interlocutor had been a rather good joke. "They caught me for that
  inquiry, you see," he began, and for a while enlarged complainingly upon
  the inconveniences of daily attendance in court. "And goodness knows how
  long it will last. Three days, I suppose." I heard him out in silence;
  in my then opinion it was a way as good as another of putting on side.
  "What's the use of it? It is the stupidest set-out you can imagine," he
  pursued hotly. I remarked that there was no option. He interrupted me
  with a sort of pent-up violence. "I feel like a fool all the time." I
  looked up at him. This was going very far--for Brierly--when talking of
  Brierly. He stopped short, and seizing the lapel of my coat, gave it
  a slight tug. "Why are we tormenting that young chap?" he asked. This
  question chimed in so well to the tolling of a certain thought of mine
  that, with the image of the absconding renegade in my eye, I answered
  at once, "Hanged if I know, unless it be that he lets you." I was
  astonished to see him fall into line, so to speak, with that utterance,
  which ought to have been tolerably cryptic. He said angrily, "Why, yes.
  Can't he see that wretched skipper of his has cleared out? What does he
  expect to happen? Nothing can save him. He's done for." We walked on
  in silence a few steps. "Why eat all that dirt?" he exclaimed, with an
  oriental energy of expression--about the only sort of energy you can
  find a trace of east of the fiftieth meridian. I wondered greatly at the
  direction of his thoughts, but now I strongly suspect it was strictly in
  character: at bottom poor Brierly must have been thinking of himself.
  I pointed out to him that the skipper of the Patna was known to have
  feathered his nest pretty well, and could procure almost anywhere the
  means of getting away. With Jim it was otherwise: the Government was
  keeping him in the Sailors' Home for the time being, and probably he
  hadn't a penny in his pocket to bless himself with. It costs some money
  to run away. "Does it? Not always," he said, with a bitter laugh, and
  to some further remark of mine--"Well, then, let him creep twenty feet
  underground and stay there! By heavens! _I_ would." I don't know why his
  tone provoked me, and I said, "There is a kind of courage in facing
  it out as he does, knowing very well that if he went away nobody would
  trouble to run after him." "Courage be hanged!" growled Brierly. "That
  sort of courage is of no use to keep a man straight, and I don't care
  a snap for such courage. If you were to say it was a kind of cowardice
  now--of softness. I tell you what, I will put up two hundred rupees if
  you put up another hundred and undertake to make the beggar clear out
  early to-morrow morning. The fellow's a gentleman if he ain't fit to
  be touched--he will understand. He must! This infernal publicity is too
  shocking: there he sits while all these confounded natives, serangs,
  lascars, quartermasters, are giving evidence that's enough to burn a man
  to ashes with shame. This is abominable. Why, Marlow, don't you think,
  don't you feel, that this is abominable; don't you now--come--as a
  seaman? If he went away all this would stop at once." Brierly said these
  words with a most unusual animation, and made as if to reach after his
  pocket-book. I restrained him, and declared coldly that the cowardice
  of these four men did not seem to me a matter of such great importance.
  "And you call yourself a seaman, I suppose," he pronounced angrily. I
  said that's what I called myself, and I hoped I was too. He heard me
  out, and made a gesture with his big arm that seemed to deprive me of
  my individuality, to push me away into the crowd. "The worst of it," he
  said, "is that all you fellows have no sense of dignity; you don't think
  enough of what you are supposed to be."
  
  'We had been walking slowly meantime, and now stopped opposite the
  harbour office, in sight of the very spot from which the immense captain
  of the Patna had vanished as utterly as a tiny feather blown away in a
  hurricane. I smiled. Brierly went on: "This is a disgrace. We've got all
  kinds amongst us--some anointed scoundrels in the lot; but, hang it, we
  must preserve professional decency or we become no better than so many
  tinkers going about loose. We are trusted. Do you understand?--trusted!
  Frankly, I don't care a snap for all the pilgrims that ever came out of
  Asia, but a decent man would not have behaved like this to a full cargo
  of old rags in bales. We aren't an organised body of men, and the only
  thing that holds us together is just the name for that kind of decency.
  Such an affair destroys one's confidence. A man may go pretty near
  through his whole sea-life without any call to show a stiff upper lip.
  But when the call comes . . . Aha! . . . If I . . ."
  
  'He broke off, and in a changed tone, "I'll give you two hundred rupees
  now, Marlow, and you just talk to that chap. Confound him! I wish he had
  never come out here. Fact is, I rather think some of my people know his.
  The old man's a parson, and I remember now I met him once when staying
  with my cousin in Essex last year. If I am not mistaken, the old
  chap seemed rather to fancy his sailor son. Horrible. I can't do it
  myself--but you . . ."
  
  'Thus, apropos of Jim, I had a glimpse of the real Brierly a few days
  before he committed his reality and his sham together to the keeping of
  the sea. Of course I declined to meddle. The tone of this last "but
  you" (poor Brierly couldn't help it), that seemed to imply I was no
  more noticeable than an insect, caused me to look at the proposal with
  indignation, and on account of that provocation, or for some other
  reason, I became positive in my mind that the inquiry was a severe
  punishment to that Jim, and that his facing it--practically of his own
  free will--was a redeeming feature in his abominable case. I hadn't been
  so sure of it before. Brierly went off in a huff. At the time his state
  of mind was more of a mystery to me than it is now.
  
  'Next day, coming into court late, I sat by myself. Of course I could
  not forget the conversation I had with Brierly, and now I had them both
  under my eyes. The demeanour of one suggested gloomy impudence and of
  the other a contemptuous boredom; yet one attitude might not have been
  truer than the other, and I was aware that one was not true. Brierly was
  not bored--he was exasperated; and if so, then Jim might not have been
  impudent. According to my theory he was not. I imagined he was hopeless.
  Then it was that our glances met. They met, and the look he gave me was
  discouraging of any intention I might have had to speak to him. Upon
  either hypothesis--insolence or despair--I felt I could be of no use to
  him. This was the second day of the proceedings. Very soon after that
  exchange of glances the inquiry was adjourned again to the next day. The
  white men began to troop out at once. Jim had been told to stand down
  some time before, and was able to leave amongst the first. I saw his
  broad shoulders and his head outlined in the light of the door, and
  while I made my way slowly out talking with some one--some stranger who
  had addressed me casually--I could see him from within the court-room
  resting both elbows on the balustrade of the verandah and turning his
  back on the small stream of people trickling down the few steps. There
  was a murmur of voices and a shuffle of boots.
  
  'The next case was that of assault and battery committed upon a
  money-lender, I believe; and the defendant--a venerable villager with a
  straight white beard--sat on a mat just outside the door with his sons,
  daughters, sons-in-law, their wives, and, I should think, half the
  population of his village besides, squatting or standing around him. A
  slim dark woman, with part of her back and one black shoulder bared,
  and with a thin gold ring in her nose, suddenly began to talk in a
  high-pitched, shrewish tone. The man with me instinctively looked up
  at her. We were then just through the door, passing behind Jim's burly
  back.
  
  'Whether those villagers had brought the yellow dog with them, I don't
  know. Anyhow, a dog was there, weaving himself in and out amongst
  people's legs in that mute stealthy way native dogs have, and my
  companion stumbled over him. The dog leaped away without a sound; the
  man, raising his voice a little, said with a slow laugh, "Look at that
  wretched cur," and directly afterwards we became separated by a lot of
  people pushing in. I stood back for a moment against the wall while the
  stranger managed to get down the steps and disappeared. I saw Jim spin
  round. He made a step forward and barred my way. We were alone; he
  glared at me with an air of stubborn resolution. I became aware I was
  being held up, so to speak, as if in a wood. The verandah was empty by
  then, the noise and movement in court had ceased: a great silence fell
  upon the building, in which, somewhere far within, an oriental voice
  began to whine abjectly. The dog, in the very act of trying to sneak in
  at the door, sat down hurriedly to hunt for fleas.
  
  '"Did you speak to me?" asked Jim very low, and bending forward, not so
  much towards me but at me, if you know what I mean. I said "No" at once.
  Something in the sound of that quiet tone of his warned me to be on my
  defence. I watched him. It was very much like a meeting in a wood, only
  more uncertain in its issue, since he could possibly want neither my
  money nor my life--nothing that I could simply give up or defend with
  a clear conscience. "You say you didn't," he said, very sombre. "But I
  heard." "Some mistake," I protested, utterly at a loss, and never taking
  my eyes off him. To watch his face was like watching a darkening sky
  before a clap of thunder, shade upon shade imperceptibly coming on, the
  doom growing mysteriously intense in the calm of maturing violence.
  
  '"As far as I know, I haven't opened my lips in your hearing," I
  affirmed with perfect truth. I was getting a little angry, too, at the
  absurdity of this encounter. It strikes me now I have never in my life
  been so near a beating--I mean it literally; a beating with fists. I
  suppose I had some hazy prescience of that eventuality being in the
  air. Not that he was actively threatening me. On the contrary, he was
  strangely passive--don't you know? but he was lowering, and, though not
  exceptionally big, he looked generally fit to demolish a wall. The
  most reassuring symptom I noticed was a kind of slow and ponderous
  hesitation, which I took as a tribute to the evident sincerity of my
  manner and of my tone. We faced each other. In the court the assault
  case was proceeding. I caught the words: "Well--buffalo--stick--in the
  greatness of my fear. . . ."
  
  '"What did you mean by staring at me all the morning?" said Jim at last.
  He looked up and looked down again. "Did you expect us all to sit with
  downcast eyes out of regard for your susceptibilities?" I retorted
  sharply. I was not going to submit meekly to any of his nonsense. He
  raised his eyes again, and this time continued to look me straight
  in the face. "No. That's all right," he pronounced with an air of
  deliberating with himself upon the truth of this statement--"that's all
  right. I am going through with that. Only"--and there he spoke a little
  faster--"I won't let any man call me names outside this court. There was
  a fellow with you. You spoke to him--oh yes--I know; 'tis all very fine.
  You spoke to him, but you meant me to hear. . . ."
  
  'I assured him he was under some extraordinary delusion. I had no
  conception how it came about. "You thought I would be afraid to resent
  this," he said, with just a faint tinge of bitterness. I was interested
  enough to discern the slightest shades of expression, but I was not in
  the least enlightened; yet I don't know what in these words, or perhaps
  just the intonation of that phrase, induced me suddenly to make all
  possible allowances for him. I ceased to be annoyed at my unexpected
  predicament. It was some mistake on his part; he was blundering, and I
  had an intuition that the blunder was of an odious, of an unfortunate
  nature. I was anxious to end this scene on grounds of decency, just as
  one is anxious to cut short some unprovoked and abominable confidence.
  The funniest part was, that in the midst of all these considerations
  of the higher order I was conscious of a certain trepidation as to
  the possibility--nay, likelihood--of this encounter ending in some
  disreputable brawl which could not possibly be explained, and would make
  me ridiculous. I did not hanker after a three days' celebrity as the man
  who got a black eye or something of the sort from the mate of the Patna.
  He, in all probability, did not care what he did, or at any rate would
  be fully justified in his own eyes. It took no magician to see he was
  amazingly angry about something, for all his quiet and even torpid
  demeanour. I don't deny I was extremely desirous to pacify him at all
  costs, had I only known what to do. But I didn't know, as you may well
  imagine. It was a blackness without a single gleam. We confronted each
  other in silence. He hung fire for about fifteen seconds, then made a
  step nearer, and I made ready to ward off a blow, though I don't think I
  moved a muscle. "If you were as big as two men and as strong as six,"
  he said very softly, "I would tell you what I think of you. You . . ."
  "Stop!" I exclaimed. This checked him for a second. "Before you tell me
  what you think of me," I went on quickly, "will you kindly tell me what
  it is I've said or done?" During the pause that ensued he surveyed me
  with indignation, while I made supernatural efforts of memory, in which
  I was hindered by the oriental voice within the court-room expostulating
  with impassioned volubility against a charge of falsehood. Then we spoke
  almost together. "I will soon show you I am not," he said, in a tone
  suggestive of a crisis. "I declare I don't know," I protested earnestly
  at the same time. He tried to crush me by the scorn of his glance.
  "Now that you see I am not afraid you try to crawl out of it," he said.
  "Who's a cur now--hey?" Then, at last, I understood.
  
  'He had been scanning my features as though looking for a place where
  he would plant his fist. "I will allow no man," . . . he mumbled
  threateningly. It was, indeed, a hideous mistake; he had given himself
  away utterly. I can't give you an idea how shocked I was. I suppose he
  saw some reflection of my feelings in my face, because his expression
  changed just a little. "Good God!" I stammered, "you don't think
  I . . ." "But I am sure I've heard," he persisted, raising his voice for
  the first time since the beginning of this deplorable scene. Then with a
  shade of disdain he added, "It wasn't you, then? Very well; I'll find
  the other." "Don't be a fool," I cried in exasperation; "it wasn't that
  at all." "I've heard," he said again with an unshaken and sombre
  perseverance.
  
  'There may be those who could have laughed at his pertinacity; I didn't.
  Oh, I didn't! There had never been a man so mercilessly shown up by
  his own natural impulse. A single word had stripped him of his
  discretion--of that discretion which is more necessary to the decencies
  of our inner being than clothing is to the decorum of our body. "Don't
  be a fool," I repeated. "But the other man said it, you don't deny
  that?" he pronounced distinctly, and looking in my face without
  flinching. "No, I don't deny," said I, returning his gaze. At last his
  eyes followed downwards the direction of my pointing finger. He appeared
  at first uncomprehending, then confounded, and at last amazed and scared
  as though a dog had been a monster and he had never seen a dog before.
  "Nobody dreamt of insulting you," I said.
  
  'He contemplated the wretched animal, that moved no more than an effigy:
  it sat with ears pricked and its sharp muzzle pointed into the doorway,
  and suddenly snapped at a fly like a piece of mechanism.
  
  'I looked at him. The red of his fair sunburnt complexion deepened
  suddenly under the down of his cheeks, invaded his forehead, spread to
  the roots of his curly hair. His ears became intensely crimson, and even
  the clear blue of his eyes was darkened many shades by the rush of blood
  to his head. His lips pouted a little, trembling as though he had been
  on the point of bursting into tears. I perceived he was incapable
  of pronouncing a word from the excess of his humiliation. From
  disappointment too--who knows? Perhaps he looked forward to that
  hammering he was going to give me for rehabilitation, for appeasement?
  Who can tell what relief he expected from this chance of a row? He
  was naive enough to expect anything; but he had given himself away for
  nothing in this case. He had been frank with himself--let alone
  with me--in the wild hope of arriving in that way at some effective
  refutation, and the stars had been ironically unpropitious. He made an
  inarticulate noise in his throat like a man imperfectly stunned by a
  blow on the head. It was pitiful.
  
  'I didn't catch up again with him till well outside the gate. I had even
  to trot a bit at the last, but when, out of breath at his elbow, I taxed
  him with running away, he said, "Never!" and at once turned at bay. I
  explained I never meant to say he was running away from _me_. "From no
  man--from not a single man on earth," he affirmed with a stubborn mien.
  I forbore to point out the one obvious exception which would hold good
  for the bravest of us; I thought he would find out by himself very soon.
  He looked at me patiently while I was thinking of something to say, but
  I could find nothing on the spur of the moment, and he began to walk on.
  I kept up, and anxious not to lose him, I said hurriedly that I couldn't
  think of leaving him under a false impression of my--of my--I stammered.
  The stupidity of the phrase appalled me while I was trying to finish
  it, but the power of sentences has nothing to do with their sense or the
  logic of their construction. My idiotic mumble seemed to please him. He
  cut it short by saying, with courteous placidity that argued an
  immense power of self-control or else a wonderful elasticity of
  spirits--"Altogether my mistake." I marvelled greatly at this
  expression: he might have been alluding to some trifling occurrence.
  Hadn't he understood its deplorable meaning? "You may well forgive me,"
  he continued, and went on a little moodily, "All these staring people in
  court seemed such fools that--that it might have been as I supposed."
  
  'This opened suddenly a new view of him to my wonder. I looked at him
  curiously and met his unabashed and impenetrable eyes. "I can't put up
  with this kind of thing," he said, very simply, "and I don't mean to. In
  court it's different; I've got to stand that--and I can do it too."
  
  'I don't pretend I understood him. The views he let me have of himself
  were like those glimpses through the shifting rents in a thick fog--bits
  of vivid and vanishing detail, giving no connected idea of the general
  aspect of a country. They fed one's curiosity without satisfying it;
  they were no good for purposes of orientation. Upon the whole he was
  misleading. That's how I summed him up to myself after he left me late
  in the evening. I had been staying at the Malabar House for a few days,
  and on my pressing invitation he dined with me there.''An outward-bound mail-boat had come in that afternoon, and the
  big dining-room of the hotel was more than half full of people with
  a-hundred-pounds-round-the-world tickets in their pockets. There were
  married couples looking domesticated and bored with each other in the
  midst of their travels; there were small parties and large parties,
  and lone individuals dining solemnly or feasting boisterously, but all
  thinking, conversing, joking, or scowling as was their wont at home;
  and just as intelligently receptive of new impressions as their trunks
  upstairs. Henceforth they would be labelled as having passed through
  this and that place, and so would be their luggage. They would cherish
  this distinction of their persons, and preserve the gummed tickets on
  their portmanteaus as documentary evidence, as the only permanent trace
  of their improving enterprise. The dark-faced servants tripped without
  noise over the vast and polished floor; now and then a girl's laugh
  would be heard, as innocent and empty as her mind, or, in a sudden hush
  of crockery, a few words in an affected drawl from some wit embroidering
  for the benefit of a grinning tableful the last funny story of shipboard
  scandal. Two nomadic old maids, dressed up to kill, worked acrimoniously
  through the bill of fare, whispering to each other with faded lips,
  wooden-faced and bizarre, like two sumptuous scarecrows. A little wine
  opened Jim's heart and loosened his tongue. His appetite was good, too,
  I noticed. He seemed to have buried somewhere the opening episode of
  our acquaintance. It was like a thing of which there would be no more
  question in this world. And all the time I had before me these blue,
  boyish eyes looking straight into mine, this young face, these capable
  shoulders, the open bronzed forehead with a white line under the roots
  of clustering fair hair, this appearance appealing at sight to all
  my sympathies: this frank aspect, the artless smile, the youthful
  seriousness. He was of the right sort; he was one of us. He talked
  soberly, with a sort of composed unreserve, and with a quiet bearing
  that might have been the outcome of manly self-control, of impudence, of
  callousness, of a colossal unconsciousness, of a gigantic deception. Who
  can tell! From our tone we might have been discussing a third person,
  a football match, last year's weather. My mind floated in a sea of
  conjectures till the turn of the conversation enabled me, without being
  offensive, to remark that, upon the whole, this inquiry must have been
  pretty trying to him. He darted his arm across the tablecloth, and
  clutching my hand by the side of my plate, glared fixedly. I was
  startled. "It must be awfully hard," I stammered, confused by this
  display of speechless feeling. "It is--hell," he burst out in a muffled
  voice.
  
  'This movement and these words caused two well-groomed male
  globe-trotters at a neighbouring table to look up in alarm from their
  iced pudding. I rose, and we passed into the front gallery for coffee
  and cigars.
  
  'On little octagon tables candles burned in glass globes; clumps of
  stiff-leaved plants separated sets of cosy wicker chairs; and between
  the pairs of columns, whose reddish shafts caught in a long row the
  sheen from the tall windows, the night, glittering and sombre, seemed
  to hang like a splendid drapery. The riding lights of ships winked afar
  like setting stars, and the hills across the roadstead resembled rounded
  black masses of arrested thunder-clouds.
  
  '"I couldn't clear out," Jim began. "The skipper did--that's all very
  well for him. I couldn't, and I wouldn't. They all got out of it in one
  way or another, but it wouldn't do for me."
  
  'I listened with concentrated attention, not daring to stir in my chair;
  I wanted to know--and to this day I don't know, I can only guess. He
  would be confident and depressed all in the same breath, as if some
  conviction of innate blamelessness had checked the truth writhing within
  him at every turn. He began by saying, in the tone in which a man would
  admit his inability to jump a twenty-foot wall, that he could never
  go home now; and this declaration recalled to my mind what Brierly had
  said, "that the old parson in Essex seemed to fancy his sailor son not a
  little."
  
  'I can't tell you whether Jim knew he was especially "fancied," but the
  tone of his references to "my Dad" was calculated to give me a notion
  that the good old rural dean was about the finest man that ever had been
  worried by the cares of a large family since the beginning of the world.
  This, though never stated, was implied with an anxiety that there should
  be no mistake about it, which was really very true and charming, but
  added a poignant sense of lives far off to the other elements of the
  story. "He has seen it all in the home papers by this time," said Jim.
  "I can never face the poor old chap." I did not dare to lift my eyes
  at this till I heard him add, "I could never explain. He wouldn't
  understand." Then I looked up. He was smoking reflectively, and after
  a moment, rousing himself, began to talk again. He discovered at once
  a desire that I should not confound him with his partners in--in crime,
  let us call it. He was not one of them; he was altogether of another
  sort. I gave no sign of dissent. I had no intention, for the sake of
  barren truth, to rob him of the smallest particle of any saving grace
  that would come in his way. I didn't know how much of it he believed
  himself. I didn't know what he was playing up to--if he was playing up
  to anything at all--and I suspect he did not know either; for it is my
  belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape
  from the grim shadow of self-knowledge. I made no sound all the time
  he was wondering what he had better do after "that stupid inquiry was
  over."
  
  'Apparently he shared Brierly's contemptuous opinion of these
  proceedings ordained by law. He would not know where to turn, he
  confessed, clearly thinking aloud rather than talking to me. Certificate
  gone, career broken, no money to get away, no work that he could obtain
  as far as he could see. At home he could perhaps get something; but it
  meant going to his people for help, and that he would not do. He
  saw nothing for it but ship before the mast--could get perhaps a
  quartermaster's billet in some steamer. Would do for a quartermaster.
  . . . "Do you think you would?" I asked pitilessly. He jumped up, and
  going to the stone balustrade looked out into the night. In a moment he
  was back, towering above my chair with his youthful face clouded yet by
  the pain of a conquered emotion. He had understood very well I did not
  doubt his ability to steer a ship. In a voice that quavered a bit he
  asked me why did I say that? I had been "no end kind" to him. I had not
  even laughed at him when--here he began to mumble--"that mistake, you
  know--made a confounded ass of myself." I broke in by saying rather
  warmly that for me such a mistake was not a matter to laugh at. He sat
  down and drank deliberately some coffee, emptying the small cup to the
  last drop. "That does not mean I admit for a moment the cap fitted,"
  he declared distinctly. "No?" I said. "No," he affirmed with quiet
  decision. "Do you know what _you_ would have done? Do you? And you
  don't think yourself" . . . he gulped something . . . "you don't think
  yourself a--a--cur?"
  
  'And with this--upon my honour!--he looked up at me inquisitively. It
  was a question it appears--a bona fide question! However, he didn't wait
  for an answer. Before I could recover he went on, with his eyes straight
  before him, as if reading off something written on the body of the
  night. "It is all in being ready. I wasn't; not--not then. I don't want
  to excuse myself; but I would like to explain--I would like somebody to
  understand--somebody--one person at least! You! Why not you?"
  
  'It was solemn, and a little ridiculous too, as they always are, those
  struggles of an individual trying to save from the fire his idea of what
  his moral identity should be, this precious notion of a convention, only
  one of the rules of the game, nothing more, but all the same so terribly
  effective by its assumption of unlimited power over natural instincts,
  by the awful penalties of its failure. He began his story quietly
  enough. On board that Dale Line steamer that had picked up these four
  floating in a boat upon the discreet sunset glow of the sea, they had
  been after the first day looked askance upon. The fat skipper told some
  story, the others had been silent, and at first it had been accepted.
  You don't cross-examine poor castaways you had the good luck to save,
  if not from cruel death, then at least from cruel suffering. Afterwards,
  with time to think it over, it might have struck the officers of the
  Avondale that there was "something fishy" in the affair; but of course
  they would keep their doubts to themselves. They had picked up the
  captain, the mate, and two engineers of the steamer Patna sunk at sea,
  and that, very properly, was enough for them. I did not ask Jim about
  the nature of his feelings during the ten days he spent on board. From
  the way he narrated that part I was at liberty to infer he was partly
  stunned by the discovery he had made--the discovery about himself--and
  no doubt was at work trying to explain it away to the only man who
  was capable of appreciating all its tremendous magnitude. You must
  understand he did not try to minimise its importance. Of that I am sure;
  and therein lies his distinction. As to what sensations he experienced
  when he got ashore and heard the unforeseen conclusion of the tale in
  which he had taken such a pitiful part, he told me nothing of them, and
  it is difficult to imagine.
  
  'I wonder whether he felt the ground cut from under his feet? I wonder?
  But no doubt he managed to get a fresh foothold very soon. He was ashore
  a whole fortnight waiting in the Sailors' Home, and as there were six or
  seven men staying there at the time, I had heard of him a little.
  Their languid opinion seemed to be that, in addition to his other
  shortcomings, he was a sulky brute. He had passed these days on the
  verandah, buried in a long chair, and coming out of his place of
  sepulture only at meal-times or late at night, when he wandered on the
  quays all by himself, detached from his surroundings, irresolute and
  silent, like a ghost without a home to haunt. "I don't think I've spoken
  three words to a living soul in all that time," he said, making me very
  sorry for him; and directly he added, "One of these fellows would have
  been sure to blurt out something I had made up my mind not to put up
  with, and I didn't want a row. No! Not then. I was too--too . . . I
  had no heart for it." "So that bulkhead held out after all," I remarked
  cheerfully. "Yes," he murmured, "it held. And yet I swear to you I felt
  it bulge under my hand." "It's extraordinary what strains old iron will
  stand sometimes," I said. Thrown back in his seat, his legs stiffly out
  and arms hanging down, he nodded slightly several times. You could not
  conceive a sadder spectacle. Suddenly he lifted his head; he sat up;
  he slapped his thigh. "Ah! what a chance missed! My God! what a chance
  missed!" he blazed out, but the ring of the last "missed" resembled a
  cry wrung out by pain.
  
  'He was silent again with a still, far-away look of fierce yearning
  after that missed distinction, with his nostrils for an instant dilated,
  sniffing the intoxicating breath of that wasted opportunity. If you
  think I was either surprised or shocked you do me an injustice in more
  ways than one! Ah, he was an imaginative beggar! He would give himself
  away; he would give himself up. I could see in his glance darted into
  the night all his inner being carried on, projected headlong into the
  fanciful realm of recklessly heroic aspirations. He had no leisure to
  regret what he had lost, he was so wholly and naturally concerned for
  what he had failed to obtain. He was very far away from me who watched
  him across three feet of space. With every instant he was penetrating
  deeper into the impossible world of romantic achievements. He got to
  the heart of it at last! A strange look of beatitude overspread his
  features, his eyes sparkled in the light of the candle burning between
  us; he positively smiled! He had penetrated to the very heart--to
  the very heart. It was an ecstatic smile that your faces--or mine
  either--will never wear, my dear boys. I whisked him back by saying, "If
  you had stuck to the ship, you mean!"
  
  'He turned upon me, his eyes suddenly amazed and full of pain, with a
  bewildered, startled, suffering face, as though he had tumbled down
  from a star. Neither you nor I will ever look like this on any man. He
  shuddered profoundly, as if a cold finger-tip had touched his heart.
  Last of all he sighed.
  
  'I was not in a merciful mood. He provoked one by his contradictory
  indiscretions. "It is unfortunate you didn't know beforehand!" I
  said with every unkind intention; but the perfidious shaft fell
  harmless--dropped at his feet like a spent arrow, as it were, and he did
  not think of picking it up. Perhaps he had not even seen it. Presently,
  lolling at ease, he said, "Dash it all! I tell you it bulged. I was
  holding up my lamp along the angle-iron in the lower deck when a
  flake of rust as big as the palm of my hand fell off the plate, all of
  itself." He passed his hand over his forehead. "The thing stirred and
  jumped off like something alive while I was looking at it." "That made
  you feel pretty bad," I observed casually. "Do you suppose," he said,
  "that I was thinking of myself, with a hundred and sixty people at my
  back, all fast asleep in that fore-'tween-deck alone--and more of them
  aft; more on the deck--sleeping--knowing nothing about it--three times
  as many as there were boats for, even if there had been time? I expected
  to see the iron open out as I stood there and the rush of water going
  over them as they lay. . . . What could I do--what?"
  
  'I can easily picture him to myself in the peopled gloom of the
  cavernous place, with the light of the globe-lamp falling on a small
  portion of the bulkhead that had the weight of the ocean on the other
  side, and the breathing of unconscious sleepers in his ears. I can see
  him glaring at the iron, startled by the falling rust, overburdened by
  the knowledge of an imminent death. This, I gathered, was the second
  time he had been sent forward by that skipper of his, who, I rather
  think, wanted to keep him away from the bridge. He told me that his
  first impulse was to shout and straightway make all those people
  leap out of sleep into terror; but such an overwhelming sense of his
  helplessness came over him that he was not able to produce a sound. This
  is, I suppose, what people mean by the tongue cleaving to the roof of
  the mouth. "Too dry," was the concise expression he used in reference to
  this state. Without a sound, then, he scrambled out on deck through
  the number one hatch. A windsail rigged down there swung against him
  accidentally, and he remembered that the light touch of the canvas on
  his face nearly knocked him off the hatchway ladder.
  
  'He confessed that his knees wobbled a good deal as he stood on the
  foredeck looking at another sleeping crowd. The engines having been
  stopped by that time, the steam was blowing off. Its deep rumble made
  the whole night vibrate like a bass string. The ship trembled to it.
  
  'He saw here and there a head lifted off a mat, a vague form uprise in
  sitting posture, listen sleepily for a moment, sink down again into the
  billowy confusion of boxes, steam-winches, ventilators. He was aware
  all these people did not know enough to take intelligent notice of
  that strange noise. The ship of iron, the men with white faces, all the
  sights, all the sounds, everything on board to that ignorant and pious
  multitude was strange alike, and as trustworthy as it would for ever
  remain incomprehensible. It occurred to him that the fact was fortunate.
  The idea of it was simply terrible.
  
  'You must remember he believed, as any other man would have done in
  his place, that the ship would go down at any moment; the bulging,
  rust-eaten plates that kept back the ocean, fatally must give way, all
  at once like an undermined dam, and let in a sudden and overwhelming
  flood. He stood still looking at these recumbent bodies, a doomed man
  aware of his fate, surveying the silent company of the dead. They _were_
  dead! Nothing could save them! There were boats enough for half of them
  perhaps, but there was no time. No time! No time! It did not seem worth
  while to open his lips, to stir hand or foot. Before he could shout
  three words, or make three steps, he would be floundering in a sea
  whitened awfully by the desperate struggles of human beings, clamorous
  with the distress of cries for help. There was no help. He imagined
  what would happen perfectly; he went through it all motionless by the
  hatchway with the lamp in his hand--he went through it to the very last
  harrowing detail. I think he went through it again while he was telling
  me these things he could not tell the court.
  
  '"I saw as clearly as I see you now that there was nothing I could do.
  It seemed to take all life out of my limbs. I thought I might just as
  well stand where I was and wait. I did not think I had many
  seconds. . . ." Suddenly the steam ceased blowing off. The noise, he
  remarked, had been distracting, but the silence at once became
  intolerably oppressive.
  
  '"I thought I would choke before I got drowned," he said.
  
  'He protested he did not think of saving himself. The only distinct
  thought formed, vanishing, and re-forming in his brain, was: eight
  hundred people and seven boats; eight hundred people and seven boats.
  
  '"Somebody was speaking aloud inside my head," he said a little wildly.
  "Eight hundred people and seven boats--and no time! Just think of it."
  He leaned towards me across the little table, and I tried to avoid his
  stare. "Do you think I was afraid of death?" he asked in a voice very
  fierce and low. He brought down his open hand with a bang that made the
  coffee-cups dance. "I am ready to swear I was not--I was not. . . . By
  God--no!" He hitched himself upright and crossed his arms; his chin fell
  on his breast.
  
  'The soft clashes of crockery reached us faintly through the high
  windows. There was a burst of voices, and several men came out in high
  good-humour into the gallery. They were exchanging jocular reminiscences
  of the donkeys in Cairo. A pale anxious youth stepping softly on long
  legs was being chaffed by a strutting and rubicund globe-trotter about
  his purchases in the bazaar. "No, really--do you think I've been done
  to that extent?" he inquired very earnest and deliberate. The band moved
  away, dropping into chairs as they went; matches flared, illuminating
  for a second faces without the ghost of an expression and the flat glaze
  of white shirt-fronts; the hum of many conversations animated with the
  ardour of feasting sounded to me absurd and infinitely remote.
  
  '"Some of the crew were sleeping on the number one hatch within reach of
  my arm," began Jim again.
  
  'You must know they kept Kalashee watch in that ship, all hands sleeping
  through the night, and only the reliefs of quartermasters and look-out
  men being called. He was tempted to grip and shake the shoulder of the
  nearest lascar, but he didn't. Something held his arms down along his
  sides. He was not afraid--oh no! only he just couldn't--that's all. He
  was not afraid of death perhaps, but I'll tell you what, he was afraid
  of the emergency. His confounded imagination had evoked for him all
  the horrors of panic, the trampling rush, the pitiful screams, boats
  swamped--all the appalling incidents of a disaster at sea he had ever
  heard of. He might have been resigned to die but I suspect he wanted
  to die without added terrors, quietly, in a sort of peaceful trance. A
  certain readiness to perish is not so very rare, but it is seldom
  that you meet men whose souls, steeled in the impenetrable armour of
  resolution, are ready to fight a losing battle to the last; the desire
  of peace waxes stronger as hope declines, till at last it conquers the
  very desire of life. Which of us here has not observed this, or maybe
  experienced something of that feeling in his own person--this extreme
  weariness of emotions, the vanity of effort, the yearning for rest?
  Those striving with unreasonable forces know it well,--the shipwrecked
  castaways in boats, wanderers lost in a desert, men battling against the
  unthinking might of nature, or the stupid brutality of crowds.'
  
  
feat_summary_name: Chapters 6-7
target: Turning to the official Inquiry, Marlow describes the magistrate as "patient" and then dives into great detail about the assessor Brierly or "Big Brierly." Brierly seems bored with the entire affair since he, Marlow conjectures, had never made such a mistake in his life. Brierly is 32 years old, a success, and the commander of the Ossa, the crack ship of the Blue Star line. The mysterious thing, of course, is that Brierly later commits suicide, a fact that Marlow overlays as he tells of Jim at the Inquiry. Brierly looks contemptuously at Jim, so Marlow guesses that perhaps there has been some sort of parallel inquiry into the depths of Brierly's own heart--and the discovery of some guilt. Marlow adds that Jones, Brierly's first mate and witness to Brierly's death-leap into the sea, had told Marlow that the last words on Brierly's lips had been for the safety of his dog Rover. Marlow then moves toward the telling of his own final conversation with Brierly, tinged now in his memory with this known end. He remembers that they were talking about the Patna and that Brierly had been furious. He had judged it all a shame and a disgrace. The discussion of Brierly is immediately followed by an account of Marlow's first personal encounter with Jim. There is an insult in the air, and Jim mistakes Marlow as the source; this misjudgment becomes the basis of their meeting. Jim is on the defensive, and yet, again, he seems "strangely passive" . He asks Marlow why Marlow was staring at him so particularly during the proceedings, and Jim's general sense of humiliation and disappointment is palpable. Marlow, apparently fascinated by his upfront view of the man, invites Jim to the Malabar House for dinner. The dining hall of the hotel teems, and Marlow studies Jim further, noting "his frank aspect, the artless smile, the youthful seriousness." He concludes, as he will conclude time and again, that "he was one of us," meaning "of the right sort" . The reader now is afforded a more intimate view of Jim during this meeting. His father, Jim confides, must have seen it all in the home papers by then. Jim says he will never again be able to face him and, as if Marlow's own age and wisdom can stand in for the figure Jim feels he has lost, Jim now attempts to justify all of his fears--how he had not been thinking of himself in the boat incident, but of the pilgrims. There had only been seven boats.
feat_summary_analysis: As Marlow observes the progression of the official inquiry, he comments that, with regard to the proceedings, "Its object was not the fundamental why, but the superficial how, of this affair" .  In other words, the "how" indicates an attention to facts and details regarding the occurrence, while the "why" requires a deeper meditation upon the event in question.  While the "how" limits itself to an outside objective view of the facts and visible actions, the "why" requires an exploration of the state of a man's soul: why did he act in such a manner?  Why did he not act otherwise?  This distinction refigures Jim's discomfort with discussing only the facts of the event, while his own inner life is a whorl of confusion.  However, the nature of official legal proceedings and judgments is often, if only for the sake of efficiency and objectivity, strictly geared toward collecting the undisputed facts.  The deeper and more subtle details of a story require just that: a story.  Hence, the novel undertakes the task of the "why," which the Inquiry fails to address. The significant minor character Brierly is an assessor of the proceedings involving Jim and the Patna incident.  According to Marlow--though he is not at all certain, because he does not know Brierly's inner life at all--Brierly may have begun an inquiry into his own soul during the proceedings.  What he might have found there is later suggested as quite disturbing, given his suicide leap into the sea.  So, with Brierly, the reader is offered an objective view of the facts, a little conjecture, and the actions of a man, which again introduce the question "Why?" When Marlow tells of how he and Jim first met, noting that the encounter is caused by a misjudgment on Jim's part, the incident shows how Jim continually misjudges or misreads a situation.  It is also important in that Marlow, in the end, by telling Jim's story, arrives at a more complete picture and a profound and forgiving view of Jim's character. Marlow notes that Jim "was one of us," and the statement assumes a variety of connotations throughout the novel.  The root of the statement is the comment God makes in Genesis after Adam has eaten the forbidden fruit: "Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil."  The implication, perhaps, is that Jim is the one carrying a heightened self-awareness regarding his qualities, his shortcomings, and his potential, even though he perhaps has not been the best judge of his situation.  In any event, his character assumes more depth and detail at this point.  We learn that he was adamant to see the proceeding through, despite the humiliating gossip that would follow him afterwards.  Through this awareness, and plagued by feelings of grief, Jim is "an individual trying to save from the fire his idea of what his moral identity should be" . In another sense, the assertion that "he was one of us" binds Marlow more closely to Jim.  Their joint presence in this novel, indicative of the level of common experience that binds humankind, may also hint that Marlow sees in Jim something of his own beginnings and youth--the same illusions, the same romantic ideals.  The questions then become: how will Jim mature?  What will Jim make of it all?  What kind of man will he become?