His incognito, which had as many holes as a welcome that melts the salt of a three months’ passage out of sieve, was not meant to hide a personality but a fact. When a seaman’s heart. The connection thus begun is kept up, as the fact broke through the incognito he would leave sudlong as the ship remains in harbour, by the daily visits of the denly the seaport where he happened to be at the time and water-clerk. To the captain he is faithful like a friend and go to another—general y farther east. He kept to seaports attentive like a son, with the patience of Job, the unselfish because he was a seaman in exile from the sea, and had Abildevotion of a woman, and the jol ity of a boon companion. ity in the abstract, which is good for no other work but that Later on the bil is sent in. It is a beautiful and humane ocof a water-clerk. He retreated in good order towards the riscupation. Therefore good water-clerks are scarce. When a ing sun, and the fact fol owed him casual y but inevitably. water-clerk who possesses Ability in the abstract has also the Thus in the course of years he was known successively in advantage of having been brought up to the sea, he is worth Bombay, in Calcutta, in Rangoon, in Penang, in Batavia—

to his employer a lot of money and some humouring. Jim and in each of these haltingplaces was just Jim the water6

Joseph Conrad

clerk. Afterwards, when his keen perception of the Intolerof light holiday literature his vocation for the sea had deable drove him away for good from seaports and white men, clared itself, he was sent at once to a ‘training-ship for officeven into the virgin forest, the Malays of the jungle vil age, ers of the mercantile marine.’

where he had elected to conceal his deplorable faculty, added He learned there a little trigonometry and how to cross a word to the monosyl able of his incognito. They cal ed top-gal ant yards. He was general y liked. He had the third him Tuan Jim: as one might say—Lord Jim. place in navigation and pul ed stroke in the first cutter. HavOriginal y he came from a parsonage. Many commanders ing a steady head with an excel ent physique, he was very of fine merchant-ships come from these abodes of piety and smart aloft. His station was in the fore-top, and often from peace. Jim’s father possessed such certain knowledge of the there he looked down, with the contempt of a man destined Unknowable as made for the righteousness of people in cotto shine in the midst of dangers, at the peaceful multitude of tages without disturbing the ease of mind of those whom an roofs cut in two by the brown tide of the stream, while scatunerring Providence enables to live in mansions. The little tered on the outskirts of the surrounding plain the factory church on a hil had the mossy greyness of a rock seen through chimneys rose perpendicular against a grimy sky, each slena ragged screen of leaves. It had stood there for centuries, der like a pencil, and belching out smoke like a volcano. He but the trees around probably remembered the laying of the could see the big ships departing, the broad-beamed ferries first stone. Below, the red front of the rectory gleamed with constantly on the move, the little boats floating far below his a warm tint in the midst of grass-plots, flower-beds, and firfeet, with the hazy splendour of the sea in the distance, and trees, with an orchard at the back, a paved stable-yard to the the hope of a stirring life in the world of adventure. left, and the sloping glass of greenhouses tacked along a wal On the lower deck in the babel of two hundred voices he of bricks. The living had belonged to the family for generawould forget himself, and beforehand live in his mind the tions; but Jim was one of five sons, and when after a course sea-life of light literature. He saw himself saving people from 7

Lord Jim

sinking ships, cutting away masts in a hurricane, swimming boats pitching ponderously at anchor, the vast landing-stages through a surf with a line; or as a lonely castaway, barefooted heaving up and down and smothered in sprays. The next and half naked, walking on uncovered reefs in search of shel gust seemed to blow al this away. The air was ful of flying fish to stave off starvation.