memory for ever as the incarnation of everything vile and The ashbuckets racketed, clanking up and down the stokebase that lurks in the world we love: in our own hearts we hold ventilators, and this tin-pot clatter warned him the end trust for our salvation, in the men that surround us, in the of his watch was near. He sighed with content, with regret as sights that fil our eyes, in the sounds that fil our ears, and wel at having to part from that serenity which fostered the in the air that fil s our lungs. adventurous freedom of his thoughts. He was a little sleepy The thin gold shaving of the moon floating slowly downtoo, and felt a pleasurable languor running through every wards had lost itself on the darkened surface of the waters, limb as though al the blood in his body had turned to warm and the eternity beyond the sky seemed to come down nearer milk. His skipper had come up noiselessly, in pyjamas and to the earth, with the augmented glitter of the stars, with the with his sleeping-jacket flung wide open. Red of face, only more profound sombreness in the lustre of the half-transhalf awake, the left eye partly closed, the right staring stupid parent dome covering the flat disc of an opaque sea. The and glassy, he hung his big head over the chart and scratched ship moved so smoothly that her onward motion was imper18

Joseph Conrad

ceptible to the senses of men, as though she had been a mind how much he sinned, because these last three days he crowded planet speeding through the dark spaces of ether had passed through a fine course of training for the place behind the swarm of suns, in the appal ing and calm soliwhere the bad boys go when they die—b’gosh, he had—

tudes awaiting the breath of future creations. ‘Hot is no name besides being made jol y wel deaf by the blasted racket befor it down below,’ said a voice. low. The durned, compound, surface-condensing, rotten Jim smiled without looking round. The skipper presented scrap-heap rattled and banged down there like an old deckan unmoved breadth of back: it was the renegade’s trick to winch, only more so; and what made him risk his life every appear pointedly unaware of your existence unless it suited night and day that God made amongst the refuse of a breakhis purpose to turn at you with a devouring glare before he ing-up yard flying round at fifty-seven revolutions, was more let loose a torrent of foamy, abusive jargon that came like a than he could tel . He must have been born reckless, b’gosh. gush from a sewer. Now he emitted only a sulky grunt; the He … ‘Where did you get drink?’ inquired the German, second engineer at the head of the bridge-ladder, kneading very savage; but motionless in the light of the binnacle, like with damp palms a dirty sweat-rag, unabashed, continued a clumsy effigy of a man cut out of a block of fat. Jim went the tale of his complaints. The sailors had a good time of it on smiling at the retreating horizon; his heart was ful of up here, and what was the use of them in the world he would generous impulses, and his thought was contemplating his be blowed if he could see. The poor devils of engineers had own superiority. ‘Drink!’

repeated the engineer with amiable to get the ship along anyhow, and they could very wel do scorn: he was hanging on with both hands to the rail, a shadthe rest too; by gosh they—‘Shut up!’ growled the German owy figure with flexible legs. ‘Not from you, captain. You’re stolidly. ‘Oh yes! Shut up—and when anything goes wrong far too mean, b’gosh. You would let a good man die sooner you fly to us, don’t you?’ went on the other. He was more than give him a drop of schnapps. That’s what you Germans than half cooked, he expected; but anyway, now, he did not cal economy. Penny wise, pound foolish.’ He became senti19

Lord Jim

mental. The chief had given him a four-finger nip about ten ber himself the exact locality, nor yet the cause of his shipo’clock—‘only one, s’elp me!’—good old chief; but as to getwreck. He had been, in mercy to his youth, kicked quietly ting the old fraud out of his bunk—a five-ton crane couldn’t out of his ship twenty years ago or more, and it might have do it. Not it. Not to-night anyhow. He was sleeping sweetly been so much worse for him that the memory of the episode like a little child, with a bottle of prime brandy under his had in it hardly a trace of misfortune.