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<h2> CHAPTER 2 </h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 ass, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>To Jim that gossiping crowd, viewed as seamen, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>They streamed aboard over three gangways, they streamed in urged by faith
and the hope of paradise, they streamed in with a continuous tramp 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 breasts, wrapped in loose ends of soiled head-cloths,
their sleeping babies, the unconscious pilgrims of an exacting belief.</p>
<p>‘Look at dese cattle,’ said the German skipper to his new chief mate.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The nights descended on her like a benediction.</p>
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