Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad [world of reading TXT] 📗

to travel upon a sea of lead. There was no life in that stir. It managed, though, to knock over something in my head. What would you have done? You are sure of yourself⁠—aren’t you? What would you do if you felt now⁠—this minute⁠—the house here move, just move a little under your chair. Leap! By heavens! you would take one spring from where you sit and land in that clump of bushes yonder.’

“He flung his arm out at the night beyond the stone balustrade. I held my peace. He looked at me very steadily, very severe. There could be no mistake: I was being bullied now, and it behoved me to make no sign lest by a gesture or a word I should be drawn into a fatal admission about myself which would have had some bearing on the case. I was not disposed to take any risk of that sort. Don’t forget I had him before me, and really he was too much like one of us not to be dangerous. But if you want to know I don’t mind telling you that I did, with a rapid glance, estimate the distance to the mass of denser blackness in the middle of the grassplot before the verandah. He exaggerated. I would have landed short by several feet⁠—and that’s the only thing of which I am fairly certain.

“The last moment had come, as he thought, and he did not move. His feet remained glued to the planks if his thoughts were knocking about loose in his head. It was at this moment too that he saw one of the men around the boat step backwards suddenly, clutch at the air with raised arms, totter and collapse. He didn’t exactly fall, he only slid gently into a sitting posture, all hunched up, and with his shoulders propped against the side of the engine-room skylight. ‘That was the donkey-man. A haggard, white-faced chap with a ragged moustache. Acted third engineer,’ he explained.

“ ‘Dead,’ I said. We had heard something of that in court.

“ ‘So they say,’ he pronounced with sombre indifference. ‘Of course I never knew. Weak heart. The man had been complaining of being out of sorts for some time before. Excitement. Overexertion. Devil only knows. Ha! ha! ha! It was easy to see he did not want to die either. Droll, isn’t it? May I be shot if he hadn’t been fooled into killing himself! Fooled⁠—neither more nor less. Fooled into it, by heavens! just as I⁠ ⁠… Ah! If he had only kept still; if he had only told them to go to the devil when they came to rush him out of his bunk because the ship was sinking! If he had only stood by with his hands in his pockets and called them names!’

“He got up, shook his fist, glared at me, and sat down.

“ ‘A chance missed, eh?’ I murmured.

“ ‘Why don’t you laugh?’ he said. ‘A joke hatched in hell. Weak heart!⁠ ⁠… I wish sometimes mine had been.’

“This irritated me. ‘Do you?’ I exclaimed with deep-rooted irony. ‘Yes! Can’t you understand?’ he cried. ‘I don’t know what more you could wish for,’ I said angrily. He gave me an utterly uncomprehending glance. This shaft had also gone wide of the mark, and he was not the man to bother about stray arrows. Upon my word, he was too unsuspecting; he was not fair game. I was glad that my missile had been thrown away⁠—that he had not even heard the twang of the bow.

“Of course he could not know at the time the man was dead. The next minute⁠—his last on board⁠—was 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 last⁠—a 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. ‘Let go! For God’s sake, let go! Let go! She’s going.’ Following upon that the boat-falls ripped through the blocks, and a lot of men began to talk in startled tones under the awnings. ‘When these beggars did break out, their yelps were enough to wake the dead,’ 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: ‘Unhook! Unhook! Shove! Unhook! Shove for your life! Here’s the squall down on us.⁠ ⁠…’ 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 this⁠—because just then he was very quiet in attitude, in face, in voice⁠—he went on to say without the slightest warning as it were, ‘I stumbled over his legs.’

“This 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