Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (motivational novels for students TXT) š
- Author: Joseph Conrad
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āOf course he could not know at the time the man was dead. The next minuteāhis last on boardāwas crowded with a tumult of events and sensations which beat about him like the sea upon a rock. I use the simile advisedly, because from his relation I am forced to believe he had preserved through it all a strange illusion of passiveness, as though he had not acted but had suffered himself to be handled by the infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of their practical joke. The first thing that came to him was the grinding surge of the heavy davits swinging out at lastāa jar which seemed to enter his body from the deck through the soles of his feet, and travel up his spine to the crown of his head. Then, the squall being very near now, another and a heavier swell lifted the passive hull in a threatening heave that checked his breath, while his brain and his heart together were pierced as with daggers by panic-stricken screams. āLet go! For Godās sake, let go! Let go!
Sheās going.ā Following upon that the boat-falls ripped through the blocks, and a lot of men began to talk in startled tones under the awnings. āWhen these beggars did break out, their yelps were enough to wake the dead,ā he said. Next, after the splashing shock of the boat literally dropped in the water, came the hollow noises of stamping and tumbling in her, mingled with confused shouts: āUnhook! Unhook! Shove! Unhook! Shove for your life! Hereās the squall down on usā¦ .ā He heard, high above his head, the faint muttering of the wind; he heard below his feet a cry of pain.
A lost voice alongside started cursing a swivel hook. The ship began to buzz fore and aft like a disturbed hive, and, as quietly as he was telling me of all thisābecause just then he was very quiet in attitude, in face, in voiceāhe went on to say without the slightest warning as it were, āI stumbled over his legs.ā
āThis was the first I heard of his having moved at all. I could not restrain a grunt of surprise. Something had started him off at last, but of the exact moment, of the cause that tore him out of his immobility, he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it low. All this had come to him: the sounds, the sights, the legs of the dead manāby Jove! The infernal joke was being crammed devilishly down his throat, butālook youāhe was not going to admit of any sort of swallowing motion in his gullet.
Itās extraordinary how he could cast upon you the spirit of his illusion. I listened as if to a tale of black magic at work upon a corpse.
ā āHe went over sideways, very gently, and this is the last thing I remember seeing on board,ā he continued. āI did not care what he did. It looked as though he were picking himself up: I thought he was picking himself up, of course: I expected him to bolt past me over the rail and drop into the boat after the others. I could hear them knocking about down there, and a voice as if crying up a shaft called out āGeorge!ā Then three voices together raised a yell. They came to me separately: one bleated, another screamed, one howled.
Ough!ā
āHe shivered a little, and I beheld him rise slowly as if a steady hand from above had been pulling him out of the chair by his hair.
Up, slowlyāto his full height, and when his knees had locked stiff the hand let him go, and he swayed a little on his feet. There was a suggestion of awful stillness in his face, in his movements, in his very voice when he said āThey shoutedāāand involuntarily I pricked up my ears for the ghost of that shout that would be heard directly through the false effect of silence. āThere were eight hundred people in that ship,ā he said, impaling me to the back of my seat with an awful blank stare. āEight hundred living people, and they were yelling after the one dead man to come down and be saved. āJump, George! Jump! Oh, jump!ā I stood by with my hand on the davit. I was very quiet. It had come over pitch dark. You could see neither sky nor sea. I heard the boat alongside go bump, bump, and not another sound down there for a while, but the ship under me was full of talking noises. Suddenly the skipper howled āMein Gott! The squall! The squall! Shove off!ā With the first hiss of rain, and the first gust of wind, they screamed, āJump, George!
Weāll catch you! Jump!ā The ship began a slow plunge; the rain swept over her like a broken sea; my cap flew off my head; my breath was driven back into my throat. I heard as if I had been on the top of a tower another wild screech, āGeo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!ā
She was going down, down, head first under meā¦ .ā
āHe raised his hand deliberately to his face, and made picking motions with his fingers as though he had been bothered with cobwebs, and afterwards he looked into the open palm for quite half a second before he blurted outā
ā āI had jumped ā¦ā He checked himself, averted his gazeā¦ .
āIt seems,ā he added.
āHis clear blue eyes turned to me with a piteous stare, and looking at him standing before me, dumfounded and hurt, I was oppressed by a sad sense of resigned wisdom, mingled with the amused and profound pity of an old man helpless before a childish disaster.
ā āLooks like it,ā I muttered.
ā āI knew nothing about it till I looked up,ā he explained hastily.
And thatās possible, too. You had to listen to him as you would to a small boy in trouble. He didnāt know. It had happened somehow.
It would never happen again. He had landed partly on somebody and fallen across a thwart. He felt as though all his ribs on his left side must be broken; then he rolled over, and saw vaguely the ship he had deserted uprising above him, with the red side-light glowing large in the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen through a mist.
āShe seemed higher than a wall; she loomed like a cliff over the boat ā¦ I wished I could die,ā he cried. āThere was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a wellāinto an everlasting deep holeā¦ .ā ā
āHe locked his fingers together and tore them apart. Nothing could be more true: he had indeed jumped into an everlasting deep hole. He had tumbled from a height he could never scale again. By that time the boat had gone driving forward past the bows. It was too dark just then for them to see each other, and, moreover, they were blinded and half drowned with rain. He told me it was like being swept by a flood through a cavern. They turned their backs to the squall; the skipper, it seems, got an oar over the stern to keep the boat before it, and for two or three minutes the end of the world had come through a deluge in a pitchy blackness. The sea hissed ālike twenty thousand kettles.ā Thatās his simile, not mine. I fancy there was not much wind after the first gust; and he himself had admitted at the inquiry that the sea never got up that night to any extent. He crouched down in the bows and stole a furtive glance back. He saw just one yellow gleam of the mast-head light high up and blurred like a last star ready to dissolve. āIt terrified me to see it still there,ā he said. Thatās what he said. What terrified him was the thought that the drowning was not over yet. No doubt he wanted to be done with that abomination as quickly as possible. Nobody in the boat made a sound. In the dark she seemed to fly, but of course she could not have had much way. Then the shower swept ahead, and the great, distracting, hissing noise followed the rain into distance and died out. There was nothing to be heard then but the slight wash about the boatās sides. Somebodyās teeth were chattering violently. A hand touched his back. A faint voice said, āYou there?ā Another cried out shakily, āSheās gone!ā and they all stood up together to look astern. They saw no lights. All was black. A thin cold drizzle was driving into their faces. The boat lurched slightly. The teeth chattered faster, stopped, and began again twice before the man could master his shiver sufficiently to say, āJu-ju-st in ti-ti-meā¦ . Brrrr.ā He recognised the voice of the chief engineer saying surlily, āI saw her go down. I happened to turn my head.ā The wind had dropped almost completely.
āThey watched in the dark with their heads half turned to windward as if expecting to hear cries. At first he was thankful the night had covered up the scene before his eyes, and then to know of it and yet to have seen and heard nothing appeared somehow the culminating point of an awful misfortune. āStrange, isnāt it?ā he murmured, interrupting himself in his disjointed narrative.
āIt did not seem so strange to me. He must have had an unconscious conviction that the reality could not be half as bad, not half as anguishing, appalling, and vengeful as the created terror of his imagination. I believe that, in this first moment, his heart was wrung with all the suffering, that his soul knew the accumulated savour of all the fear, all the horror, all the despair of eight hundred human beings pounced upon in the night by a sudden and violent death, else why should he have said, āIt seemed to me that I must jump out of that accursed boat and swim back to seeāhalf a mileāmore āany distanceāto the very spot ā¦ā? Why this impulse?
Do you see the significance? Why back to the very spot? Why not drown alongsideāif he meant drowning? Why back to the very spot, to seeāas if his imagination had to be soothed by the assurance that all was over before death could bring relief? I defy any one of you to offer another explanation. It was one of those bizarre and exciting glimpses through the fog. It was an extraordinary disclosure.
He let it out as the most natural thing one could say. He fought down that impulse and then he became conscious of the silence. He mentioned this to me. A silence of the sea, of the sky, merged into one indefinite immensity still as death around these saved, palpitating lives. āYou might have heard a pin drop in the boat,ā he said with a queer contraction of his lips, like a man trying to master his sensibilities while relating some extremely moving fact. A silence! God alone, who had willed him as he was, knows what he made of it in his heart. āI didnāt think any spot on earth could be so still,ā he said. āYou couldnāt distinguish the sea from the sky; there was nothing to see and nothing to hear. Not a glimmer, not a
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